O'Reilly Tools For Change Publishing Conference 2009

O'Reilly Tools For Change Publishing Conference 2009

I will be attending the February 9 and 10, 2009 O'Reilly Tools For Change Publishing Conference. http://www.toccon.com/toc2009 . I have to thank Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog for telling me about this conference http://jwikert.typepad.com/. The conference looks tremendous.

It took me a while to get the paperwork together to get my job to cover meeting attendance for the conference. I had to provide a detailed agenda of what I was doing at the conference for them.

This is my agenda:

Contact and look at the booths for the following conference sponsors:

I will be visiting O'Reilly Media (we buy Missing Manuals Series as well as many other computer books for our library.) Oreilly has just made all 140 of their titles available as ebooks http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/12/oreilly-ebooks-130-top-titles-plus-iphone-app-and-head-first-pdfs.html).

I also intend to visit a variety of other vendors including Frommer's Custom Travel Guides (I think they might have a new online product for travel), Safari Books Online (They have an ebooks package for computer books for libraries.), Espresso Book Machines (a print on demand book system.), and The Book Industry Study Group.

I intend to bring back literature from the exhibitor floor for the library. The list is short enough that I won't need a floor map of exhibitors. Hopefully, I will be put on mailing lists for publisher information.

The conference sessions which I am attending are planned out as well:

1) Monday 8:00 a.m. Blogs and Social Media which is led by Chris Brogran of Cross Tech Media. The library I work at is redesigning their web page. Part of the web redesign will be a library blog. We have not chosen a platform or done anything with it yet. I think it could benefit from services like LinkedIn and Twitter.

2) Monday 1:30 p.m. Building Communities Around Content led by Francois Gossieaux (Beeline Labs & Society for New Communications Research.) I am hoping that I can find more about books and publishing communities. When we design a library blog it will have some different purposes than a personal blog. I am interested in how to structure announcements for events.

3) On Tuesday Cory Doctorow will be giving a keynote speech for half an hour. I really like his writing, especially the articles he has written for Locus Magazine. Cory Doctorow has numerous free books available on the internet including the essay Ebooks, Neither E nor Books for the 2004 O'Reilly conference http://manybooks.net/titles/doctorow11071107711077.html

I am also interested in the keynote speech by Peter Brantley from the Digital Library Federation. The presence of large collections of free ebooks is having a very interesting impact on the way people read. I sometimes look at Project Gutenberg to read books that our out of copyright.

4) Tuesday at 10:45 a.m. I am going to Google Book Search past, present, and future by Jon Orwant. Google has been in the news lately with its settlement with the publishing community. I think the session should be quite interesting. Library Journal wrote several articles on this subject.

5) Tuesday at 1:40 p.m. I am going to the session on The Rise of Ebooks with Joe Wikert and Mark Coker. I am interested in hearing about the changes taking place with ebooks. Sony ebooks sold over 300, 000 electronic ink readers last year. Kindle has not released its sales figures for ebooks. The Kindle has been endorsed by people like Oprah Winfrey.

6) On Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. I will be attending What Does The Future Look Like for Publishers. There has been a lot of consolidation in the publishing world, as well as the move of much of the news to online mediums. I prefer reading my news online, and my books in print.

This all may change depending on how things go at the conference. I am looking forward to a very diverse program and a chance to learn a lot about the changes that are happening in the publishing industry. These will all "trickle down" into the library world as well.

I am still looking at the website for the conference to find out a little bit more. I am going to be working on a new business card for the conference.