Ebooks, Ereaders, and Digital Content Publishing, The First Digital Show and Tell. January 20, 2011 3:30-6:30 p.m.
This was an interesting event to go to. It was at Sotheby's Institute of Art on the sixth floor. The program was sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group and Sourcebooks. The space was very nice. It had a clean, professional comfortable feel to it. This was the first of a planned series by The Book Industry Study Group.
There were two sessions where presenters were doing a round robin going from table to table giving seven minute presentations. A round robin is where you move from person to person in a circle and give a short presentation.
Both the presenters and the daters were an interesting crowd. I sat next to Paul Biba from Teleread which was interesting. He was using a Mac Air book which was incredibly thin and light. Margaret Harrison who is an acquisitioins manager from Vook was also at the table.
It was interesting. The first presenter at our table was Autography LLC. Autography had a way for authors to autograph ebooks. It also allowed them to date and add other identifying marks to ebooks. They showed us some signed ebooks. Thomas Waters and Robert Barrett were the presensters. Http://www.autography.us.com Autography won one of the audience choice awards which was a free ticket to Book Expo America.
The next person was Wendy Bronfin, Directory of Product Management from Nook Color. She demonstrated the Nook Color. It was very interesting watching her scroll through magazines as well as show childrens books on the Nook. The color was the best part. Http://www.nook.com
Mike Violano VP of business development presented a bookstore application for the Iphone called the iFlow reader . It used a rotating slideshow presentation for the books both horizontally and vertically. I liked the look of the reader. https://www.iflowreader.com/app.aspx
Michael Edson, the Principal of the Deti Group gave a brief presentation. He was talking about how to integrated social applications with publishing sites. He showed a twitter screen flow that took up the right side of a screen, next to a publishing article. This reminds me that Twitter is an open API which allows developers to do unusual things with it. http://deti-group.com/
Jonathan Bertfield CEO of Peroozal talked about his new website. This is an author site where authors recommend their favorite books. It is a way to give a unique form of readers advisory. The main authors on the site were thriller authors. I can see how this would have an appeal. I even signed up to the site to look it over more. I think this could be very useful for publishers. Http://www.peroozal.com It won one of the audience choice awards.
Patricia Samara talked about Choice Book Interactive which makes multicultural childrens books. Their series is called Alphabet Kids http://www.alphabetkids.com/ They were there to make contacts so they could make both ebooks and book apps. Book apps are a fairly new innovation. I have not heard of any libraries lending Kindles with book applications.
There was a short break between presentations where we had a chance to wander and have a light refreshment. I took a diet coke. I found it kind of amusing that they had five ladies bathrooms and one mens bathroom.
The second round of presenters started with Bowker. Patricia Payton was presenting a tool for full content indexing for ebooks.. This tool allowed creation of metadata sets for books and magazine publishers. It identifies keywords, assigns relevancy scores to keywords, tags keyword by facet, classifies general subject, audience and reading levels, and identifies similar material. Http://www.bowker.com
Another presenter was Marc Jaffe, president of Cross-Platform Publishing Advisors. He showed an immersive version of Howard and the Purple Crayon for Ipad.
Aaron Travis and Miller Alber from Read Social presented their social book application that allowed people to share notes inside of ebooks. They are focusing on selling the application to developers in different segments of the book industry. This is a tool from Book Glutton. Http://www.bookglutton.com They won the audience prize.
Leah Hultenschmidt demoed a book application for The Fiske Interactive Guide to Colleges. It included video from the colleges, text, pictures of the campus and a variety of ratings. This is more than just a book. It allowed students to generate lists of schools and plan campus visits. I really liked how the application looked. http://www.fiskeguide.com/ They plan on releasing the application for Ipad later this year.
Vook is also an interesting book application. They combine books with video and audioclips. It was quite interesting to look at. One of the most popular items was a pilates exercise book which combined video on how to do the exercises, text, and pictures. It seemed like an excellent medium for how to books. Margaret Harris the Acquisitions Manager also had worked at Overdrive. They are planning on expanding their reach. This is something that I think would be of interest to public libraries. Http://www.vook.com
The final presenter was Andrew Malkin from Zinio. Zinio presents enhanced branding and applications for digital content. It was very pretty to look at. A lot of what they showed was fashion magazine material including catalogs for fashion. The main focus of Zinio is digital magazines.
I found the whole round robin presentation to be quite different. It was a chance to learn about new technologies and talk with people who used them. It was well worth going.
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