This Saturday I rose earlier than for work hours (!!!) and gritted my teeth for a weekend dose of the TTC for good reason: BookCampTO. What’s a BookCamp? Basically it’s an excuse for people involved in the book industry to leave our computers at home (and show off our iPads and iPhones) and gather to match names to twitter handles, faces to facebooks, and discuss the future of the publishing industry and the book itself. Sessions are fairly free-form and covered a wide range of topics all related to books in the hopes of sharing experiences, solving problems and speculating on the future.
Here’s a few notes from the sessions I attended:
9:30 Launching a Digital Business from Inside a Print Business (Sulemaan Ahmed & Jenny Bullough, Harlequin)
The focus of this session was, as the title indicates, about launching your digital business. The talk was well-attended because most people know that Harlequin’s worth listening to on all things digital, but it seems that the presenters should have picked a topic that was a little more advanced. Most people in the room already HAD a digital business, and something more focused on promotion, sales, distribution etc. of that title would likely [...]
By Sarah, on May 7th, 2010 Last week the ebook stork made a special delivery to ACP HQ in the form of a brand new Kobo reader, which we immediately adopted and named Michael. I happily took the first babysitting shift and brought the reader home for a test run over the weekend. Overall, I was quite impressed. Even the packaging highlights the ease of use of this device – the box opens up like a book and the signature four-language instructional encyclopedia that comes with most electronic toys is replaced with an invitation to simply plug in and start reading one of the 100 free books already loaded onto the reader. The menus are intuitive and the library is easy to navigate – albeit there’s not that much to find your way around – and I appreciated the display options. The online store is also easy to use (though a ‘search by publisher’ option would be cool) and, while the ‘books for dudes’ and ‘reads for gals’ sections made me a little queasy, the recommended reading categorization was actually pretty cool. I did find it a little surprising that Canadian books are not more easily searchable from the main menu, but I was willing to [...]
By Sarah, on March 26th, 2010 Once again the masterminds at BookNet Canada kept it seriously real at their annual conference, BNC Tech Forum. Overall, the team really got it right this year; the event boasted great speakers, timely information, new, sustainable business models and a general rethinking of the shape of the book business. The theme of the day was ‘calculated risk,’ and the speakers covered both sides of that coin, candidly discussing both the failures and successes related to taking risks in publishing. The highlight of the day, for me at least, was imagining the simultaneous chest-heave of the publishers in the room when, after being asked whether community building was a marketing strategy or a publishing strategy, Richard Nash responded with “brand owners will use publishing as a marketing strategy.” I know it’s scary guys, but it will be ok.
1) Can this business be saved? Bob Miller, Workman Publishing
Bob gave a general discussion about his experience working with HarperStudio, focusing on the risks the firm took to move publishing into a new, return-free direction. He made a lot of really interesting points, but I’m not sure how much independent publishers will be able to take home; I’m not sure how applicable HarperStudio’s profit-sharing [...]
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