I’ll be spending much of next week on the west coast, covering the O’Reilly TOC Conference on “tools of change for publishing.” The range of digital publishing issues they’ll be covering looks daunting, with presentations that take on big issues and technical details alike, but I’m really looking forward to immersing myself in the subject, and seeing what the publishing folks and the techies come up with in terms of moving the industry forward. “Publishers who are alarmed by competition from the internet need to remember that what they do isn’t putting ink on paper and books into bookstores,” Tim O’Reilly (right) writes in a pre-conference announcement:
“A reference publisher is in the business of helping people find the information they need when they need it. A fiction publisher is in the entertainment business. A textbook publisher is in the education business. And regardless of which job a publisher’s books do, there are core competencies that carry over well into the internet era.”
O’Reilly will also be giving a few presentations himself, including an interview with Google Book Search execs Daniel Clancy and Adam Smith. I’m looking forward to that, and a talk by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson on the economics of abundance, and a presentation by Oxford American dictionary editor Erin McKean on making “information-delivery products and other book-shaped objects” that satisfy consumer needs, and… well, you’ll read all about it next week, really.