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Tools of Change for Publishing TRANSFORMING PUBLISHING Twitter YouTube SlideShare Facebook Subscribe to TOC Popular topics: HTML5 EPUB Ebooks JavaScript CSS Piracy Visit oreilly.com All Posts Events Podcasts Videos Webcasts Ending the TOC Conference, But Still Pushing Tools of Change for Publishing by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | +Tim O'Reilly | May 2, 2013 O’Reilly has been publishing books since 1986, but I’ve often said that we consider ourselves more of a technology transfer company than a typical publisher. Twenty years after our first book, Unix in a Nutshell, we realized that the insights and connections we’d garnered through our unique position at the intersection of computer technology and publishing could be useful to other publishers, and we launched TOC, the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. Now, after seven years of convening the industry, we are retiring both the TOC conference and the TOC blog. The decision to discontinue a popular conference was not one we made lightly. But after TOC 2013, we realized that a conference was no longer the best vehicle for us to contribute to publishing’s forward movement. When we first announced TOC, I said: “Publishing isn’t about putting ink on paper, and moving blocks of said paper through warehouses to readers. It’s about knowledge dissemination, learning, entertainment, codification of subject authority — the real jobs that authors and publishers do for readers… Our goal is to bring together people who are pushing the boundaries of publishing and those who want to learn from them, and to provide a table of contents (TOC), so to speak, on what modern publishers need to know.” Seven years on, “digital publishing” is well on its way to simply being “publishing,” and options for both publishers and readers continue to evolve and expand. Publishers are significantly more change-hardy than they were in 2006. And there are plenty of other events that are helping publishers keep up with new technology offerings in the space. This doesn’t mean that O’Reilly is no longer committed to pushing forward the reinvention of the publishing industry. But we’re shifting the focus of our publishing tools group from hosting the conversation about publishing technology to bringing our own tools to market. We’ve been developers of publishing technology since the days we first started publishing. In the “scratch your own itch” spirit of the open source movement, we co-created DocBook in the early ’90s, published the first commercial web magazine, GNN (initially developed as a demo to help bookstores grok the Internet!) in 1993, and launched Safari Books Online in 2000. And we’ve used the internal production toolchain we built over the years to create a digital distribution business that now provides DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats not only from O’Reilly but also from Microsoft Press, Wiley, Elsevier, No Starch, and many other technical publishers. For the past few years, we’ve been focusing on development of a platform code-named Atlas, and bringing that to fruition is central to our future plans. Atlas is a tool for collaborative writing (currently being used by authors of about two-thirds of the books in our pipeline), one-touch publishing in all formats (including print-on-demand), and an interactive online reading platform that takes full advantage of the digital realm. We believe it takes a big step towards fulfilling the promise of digital publishing. You’ll be hearing much more about Atlas in the coming months. You can continue to follow our thoughts about publishing on the O’Reilly Radar and on the Safari tech blog . TOC was a great ride, and we’ll miss many things about that annual gathering of the future-positive publishing community. Ideas and connections from TOC will continue to inform our work and, we hope, yours. I especially want to thank TOC program chairs Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert for the passion, creativity, and commitment they brought to their work. I wish them well, and am confident that they’ll continue to help shape the publishing industry’s future. | -- Cultural capital goes commercial Mobile retail access is a vital part of an overarching brand experience by Julia Errens | May 2, 2013 It wasn’t one of my proudest moments when, a week before Christmas last year, I was hunched over my smartphone towards the back of the famous Hamley’s Toy Store on London’s Regent Street, composure tethered to an elusive bar of 3G network. The thing was, that bar had been easier to find in-store than the toy I planned on presenting my nephew with for Christmas. When I placed my order on Amazon with a plethora of merchandise within arm’s length, a nagging sense of irony did not escape me – nor did a whole new understanding of retail pain points. To be fair, Christmas shopping in a metropolitan area probably blasts through higher-than-average pain thresholds. Read more… | -- Why ebooks & why green e-publishing? The publishing industry is like a doctor who ignores their own advice by Deborah Emin | May 2, 2013 Perhaps you’ve also wondered why the publishing industry produces and distributes all the major climate science information available but doesn’t read it. If it did, publishing could become the standard bearer for global reduction of carbon footprints. This business challenge and its opportunities for growth would benefit everyone. Publishing, even in its unique position of having catalogues of books and journals detailing the dangers as well as the solutions of climate change, seems impervious to what it produces. As to why, we can ignore that question for now. The world can’t wait for our soul searching. But simply stated, how we produce all books has been separated from what we produce. Therefore we’re not prepared to take our own advice. Read more… | -- Earned Attention: More than a stack of paper Attention is the ultimate currency and the only commodity that matters by Joe Wikert | @jwikert | +Joe Wikert | May 1, 2013 As an industry I think we’re getting weary of all the various “rich content” experiments and products floating around these days. I have to admit that most make me want to yawn and move on to the next item in my email inbox. Too many of them feel like a Frankenstein project where elements are grafted onto a traditional book and there’s a giant bolt sticking out of the neck. Read more… | -- Numbers never lie…unless you’re talking social media Measuring results in our rush to be followed, liked, and shared by Rob Eagar | @robeagar | April 30, 2013 Back in college, I took a class on statistics and never forgot the first lesson my professor taught us, which was, “Anyone can manipulate numbers to make them mean whatever they want.” I see this point magnified today by the mass adoption of Twitter and Fakebook, err – I mean Facebook. We’re at a period in time where numbers can mean so much and simultaneously mean so little. Read more… | -- LinkedIn as publisher It's the ideal spot for lifelong-learner content by Joe Wikert | @jwikert | +Joe Wikert | April 29, 2013 I’m drawn to LinkedIn now more than ever before. The rate of connection requests I’ve been receiving there has also been accelerating over the past few months. Maybe it’s due to all the uncertainty of the publishing industry but I think there’s more to it than anxious job seekers. There are all sorts of terrific publishing groups on LinkedIn where opinions are shared and discussed. A good example is our TOC LinkedIn group ; check out the stats here . We’re rapidly approaching 20K members. If you’re not a member you’re missing a great deal of terrific industry banter. You may have heard of LinkedIn’s recent acquisition of Pulse . Although Pulse isn’t my favorite news platform it’s probably in my top five. It’s the combination of LinkedIn and Pulse that intrigues me though. Read more… | -- German digital publishing – the Berlin way Will the ebook transition span an entire generation? by Ruediger Wischenbart | April 29, 2013 My...