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Thoughts from the TOC conference

I just spent the last few days in "New" York, in my second straight year (a personal record!) at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference, which combines the worlds of publishing and tech. I also had a couple of great meals and my first pickleback (and, unfortunately, my second), but that's another story.

This year felt pretty long on theory and short on practical examples and takeaways, but much of the theory did end up being pretty inspiring. Here's a few quickshot thoughts on the conference:

The future of ebooks is...totally uncertain
It seemed that at least once every hour, someone pondered the future of the ebook. Yet no one really has a good answer for it. It's obvious that we're still in the early days (which I also felt last year), that standards are still being debated and grasped at, but that we're still a ways away from organized steps forward. This is my opinion, and it seemed something that no one else wanted to say, but it seems clear to me.

The dedicated readers are using dedicated reading devices.
And related, tablets are not catching on as much as expected. There were a number of survey results revealed at the conference, and they all showed that people reading on tablets were still a little uncertain and not entirely happy with the devices, whereas more serious readers gravitated to dedicated devices like the Kindle and Nook...and were happy with them.

HTML5 seems to be a very likely part of ebooks future
No one actually came out and said "HTML5 is what ebooks are moving to", but considering that HTML5 was given just as much mention as EPUB, it seems obvious that this is the technology that people are looking to as at least the engine behind ebooks, if not just taking the place of dedicated ebook file formats.

The flow of information is replacing the page
Kevin Kelly's presentation was one of my favorite of the conference. He presented a group of concepts of how he thinks information delivery is changing, and one of those was the concept of "flow": that information simply flows by us, Twitter style, and is only relevant for a short time.

Readers share things THEY are passionate about, not you
One of the great, most inspiring talks was by Kathy Sierra, who spoke about passionate followers. This is a favorite topic of mine and one I could go on at length about, but she put it absolutely perfectly. Boiled down, it's the point that getting people passionate is not about their interest in you or your product (book)...it's about what getting them interested in what their product can do for themselves. The main example was the reviews of a popular exercise book: the reviews didn't gush about how great the book was, but rather how that exercise changed their lives. They recommend books to their friends because they like their friends, not because they like the product. Amazing talk that I wish more people could have heard.

Future is in curation/filtering
There was a talk by Steve Rosenbaum that I wasn't really crazy about, except for the fact that it hit on a concept that I think is extremely important and one that was mentioned often at the conference: discoverability and curation, the idea that it's trusted people recommending things to us that lets us find things. As we find fewer books from browsing libraries and bookstores, we need more places that sift through the avalanche and recommend things to us.

Also...
I would highly recommend going to the Slides And Video page on the TOC site and watching the hilarious and charming presentation by Margaret Atwood. I guarantee there was not a person in the audience who wasn't looking at the stage like a crushed-out teenager by the end of her presentation. Absolutely lovely. And if they put up James Bridle's presentation at some point (it's not up yet), watch that one, too.

Until next year...

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