BookCampTO 2010

By , on May 19th, 2010

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 [...]

Filed under: Bookish Technology, Newsy | Tags: , , , , , , , | One comment

BookCampTO

By , on June 8th, 2009

This Saturday, Cheese and I (along with my friend Kevin) attended BookCampTO, a grassroots “unconference,” whose mandate was to have “A conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.”

So, while I didn’t bring my laptop and tweet throughout the day, here are a few summaries, observations and memorable quotations for the day:

7:15 – Alarm goes off. Linger in bed out of resentment to be getting up at work time on a Saturday.

8:00 – Cheese arrives grumbling. Make her coffee and toast with nutella, and she is temporarily placated (the girl will do almost anything for nutella).

8:10 – My friend Kevin arrives. He is a brave soul who is not in publishing but is interested in books, digital media and pop culture in general, and who comes with non-nutella-induced enthusiasm.

8:52 – Arrive at the iSchool for registration, which runs as smoothly and quickly as at most regular conferences. Well done, BCTO team.

9:03 – Very quick opening remarks from Hugh McGuire. His vision of BookCampTO? Making the one-to-one hallway conversations from a regular conference the focus of this one.

9:15 – First session on DRM ends up being a throwdown by some of [...]

Filed under: Bookish Technology, Newsy | Tags: , , , | 5 comments

From the focus on books to "Focus & Books"?

By , on January 11th, 2009

On Dec. 20th we had to say a sad goodbye to the stand-alone Books section of the Globe and Mail, something that was widely seen as a cause for anxiety and a sign of decreasing support of literature by the mainstream media. The Globe insisted that by amalgamating the Books and the Focus section, readership would increase, and that they would compensate for the loss of paper coverage with brand new online book coverage.

And so yesterday, with the relaunch of the books section, a comparison could finally be made. I’ll admit to being  little deflated at the 7 pages tacked on to the end of the Focus section. Gone was the intimacy of the small page, the prestige of a having a NY Times-style stand-alone section. It must be admitted it’s still longer than the 4 pages books get in the Ideas section of the Star on Sundays, but it seems like it would be all too easy for this half of the Focus section to shrivel inconspiculously, as the advertising revenue still fails to roll in.

As for the website expansion, I’ll admit, the initial showing is impressive. I’ll be following Marin Levin’s blog as well as In Other Words [...]

Related Posts with Thumbnails
Filed under: Newsy | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment
 
  Older Entries »