Links to All Articles/Posts from Best of TOC eBook

Andrew Savikas
February 15, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Some of you interested in the "Best of TOC" ebook have objected to having to go through the O'Reilly shopping cart process to get the free ebook. Point taken, and thank you for the feedback. Other readers are looking for a place to comment on the pieces; because these were all published blog posts, many already have rich comment threads of conversation. To address both concerns, here's a full linked list of all the pieces we included in the Best of TOC ebook:

1. Digital Rights Management Versus Enforcement
2. Amazon Ups the Ante on Platform Lock-In
   
3. Ebook Format Primer
   
4. Ergonomics and Ebook Success
   
5. Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns About File Sharing and “Piracy”
   
6. It’s Time to Accept an Ambiguous Digital Fate
7. Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games
   
8. Content Owners and Consumers Need Digital Quid Pro Quo
   
9. The Pitfalls of Publishing’s E-Reader Guessing Game
   
10. Treating Ebooks Like Software
    
11. On Publishers and Software Development
    
12. Ebooks and Print Books Are Not Mutually Exclusive
    
13. POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization
    
14. Web Community Management Tips
    
15. Reinventing the Book and Killing It are Separate Things
    
16. Q&A with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
17. Terry Goodkind Follows The Money
18. Web Analytics Primer for Publishers
    
19. A Unified Field Theory of Publishing in the Networked Era
    
20. How Many Publishing CEOs Know What an API Is?
    
21. Why You Should Care About XML
    
22. Publisher as Brand?
    
23. Regulating the Google Settlement
    
24. Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM
    
25. Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution
    
26. Interstitial Publishing: A New Market from Wasted Time
    
27. The Once and Future Ebook: On Reading in the Digital Age
    

According to our ecommerce data, several hundred of you have "purchased" the free ebook. I'm thrilled there's so much interest -- this is definitely something we'll be looking to do again with this and other conferences.

Best of TOC Collection Now Available as Free Ebook Bundle

Andrew Savikas
February 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (20) | Listen

Hit a glitch with the cover image, but the full ebook bundle (PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) is now posted for the Best of TOC collection (details on the content here). They're also shutting the Espresso machine down within the hour, so you can still try to grab a print one while/if they're available (no promises, sorry).

At TOC: Best of TOC Writing

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

One of my favorite books of 2007 was The Best of Technology Writing, edited by Steven Levy. We decided to try something similar for this year's TOC Conference, and over at the O'Reilly booth we have (hot off the Espresso Book Machine) the Best of TOC, a collection of writing from on publishing from around the Web:

It includes writing from TOC speakers:

• Bob Stein
• Kate Eltham
• Kassia Krozser
• Peter Brantley

... and more from around the Web, like John Siracusa.

Because all of the writing in here was born on the Web, it's full of hyperlinks, which we've presented in the print version as footnotes (done automatically, BTW). The shear number of links (there are more than 600 in 126 pages) illustrates how differently we write when it's for the web. Now that all writing is really writing for the web, it's important to both incorporate more links within the content you create, and be sure your print designs and workflow can easily accommodate those links in print (footnotes is one way, but not the only way).

For the digital/production geeks among you, we used DocBook XML and a customization layer of the open-source DocBook XSL Stylesheets. That means we can use the same source to get print, web-friendly PDF, and EPUB, here's a snippet of the source XML:

As soon as we can, we'll also make this available for free download, so don't worry if you don't get a copy from the booth. Thanks to all the writers who agreed to let us share their work.