O'Reilly Media Tools of Change Conference

Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly takes a closer look at some of the things you think you know about the book business. She also raises the questions, "Why should we care about books any more?" and doesn't anyone read books for pleasure today? Topics range from what kinds of books we read, how the book industry advertise its products, the issue of piracy in today's electronic society, and why we are a long way from doing away with books completely.

John Ingram, Chairman of Ingram Book Group, discusses the challenges facing the publishing industry today. How do publishers decide how to divide investments between the physical printing of materials and digital publishing? What questions must be asked in order to effectively allocate resources toward these two goals? Is there a way to incorporate both goals into a cost efficient strategy?

Ken Brooks of Cengage Learning discusses the challenges of mixing digital and print media publishing together efficiently and economically. He also discusses how moving from a low scale craft process to a high scale impact process model improves not only productivity but profitability.

Kathy Sierra and Tim O'Reilly discuss the principles behind "creating passionate users" and how this energizes and increases consumers. They discuss how in today's competitive marketplace, every business is looking for an edge. This typically forces business leaders to face the challenge of making their products different. However, that can be more difficult than it sounds and the business landscape is littered with the carcasses of companies who failed to differentiate themselves or their products.

Bill Burger describes the social disruption happening in the publishing industry because of new technologies and business models for content distribution. He shares several examples of these disruptive new models for content publishing and gives advice to publishers on staying relevant in these changing times when people value the technology that brings them the content they want as much as the content itself.

Dictionaries may look like books, but they don't act like them. In this presentation of the O'Reilly Tools For Change conference, Erin McKean, Chief Consulting Editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, explains the characteristics of books, why the book isn't a good form for dictionaries to take, and how the information in dictionaries could better be disseminated.

Wouldn't it be amazing if you could hold a "book" in your hands which had hyperlinks? Why would that be amazing, you ask? Well, what if the hyperlink triggered a process that makes a nearby computer, for example, play an MP3 of animal sounds that match the story? In this keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, Manolis Kelaidis introduces blueBook, his prototype that merges the analog and digital worlds of books.

Dale Dougherty, General Manager of the Maker Media Division of O'Reilly Media tells why he looked past the web and chose a printed format as the most compelling one through which to communicate to tech-savvy builders. His ventures, Make and Craft magazines, then formed a springboard for blogs, the Make website, and annual Maker Faires. In this talk he "sings the praises of print", reminding us not to make the mistake of focusing on the new while ignoring old technology, which often gives us a far more compelling and immediate experience.

At the Tools of Change Conference 2007 Tim O'Reilly interviews Bruce Chizen, then CEO of Adobe Systems Inc., about the revolution in the publishing industry and Adobe's products. Through their publishing solutions, Adobe has a strong influence on both the print and online worlds. Listen to the story of the transition from Postscript and PDF to Adobe AIR and Digital Editions, which can be seen as the transition from print to electronic publishing.

With the web upending traditional distribution models, publishers need to understand how their content is valued by the audience. In this talk, Jeff Patterson, CEO of Safari Books Online, shares research on the information seeking habits of their client base of IT professionals. As users weigh the worth of information in exchange for their time, money and attention, publishers must grasp not just what is sold, but what is read, used and reused.