Sessions at Books in Browsers 2011 on Friday 28th October

How can we apply the tenets of adaptive web design to the design of networked books, in order to ensure a highly-polished presentation in as many devices as possible? This is particularly important to explore when working with highly-designed books such as children’s books, cookbooks, etc., as well as comics and graphic narratives.

If we assume that the networked book is the book of the future, how are we to get there? Today’s publishing world is nothing at all like that – in fact, most writers and publishers are turning to ebooks as a next step. This talk will focus on a few necessary things we’ll need to have in place before we achieve our ideal of the networked book. I’ll also talk a little on what I’ve found to work (and not work) while pushing Pandamian.

Making a book should be no harder than making a website. What is a book, after all, but a special class of website that happens to have a history of being displayed in purpose-built, paper-based browsers?

Why do we expect frameworks for building websites to output websites that are compatible with multiple browsers, whereas building books … is still a giant shambles as soon as you need to satisfy interoperability with multiple paper and non-paper browsers.

It shouldn’t be any harder to make a standards compliant book that will work in paper and non paper browsers, and some solutions to this problem should be found in the success of web-based web building frameworks, and CMSs.

We’re acting as a broker between the author and a group of visual artist/readers to help make any book into enhanced ebooks through crowdsourcing at scale. We’ve created an automated process to turn any epub file into an IPad/smartphone app with social and interactive feature included. The core is based on HTML5/JS with PhoneGap as a framework to package any book into a native application.

I’ll offer comprehensive analytics on RedLemona.de the site, as well as on our sales data, and provide an overview of the responses to the site by users regular and casual, giving the BiB audience a picture of a new model publisher in action. The magic of books sometimes is very quotidian, just the day-to-day accretion of comments, purchases, submissions, of writing, of reading, of editing… However the changes in expectations brought about by these changes on the culture of publishing should prove to be very far reaching, the net effect over several years being quite transformative.

BiblioCrunch.com is a digital platform that empowers writers and publishers to create and market their own digital books and bookazines. We’re working on a crowdsourced model where anyone can create a book and get help from the community to create the best possible book. We recognize that good books not only need good content, but also superior editing, strong marketing, a well-designed and eye-catching cover, and an interested audience.

We are exploring the value of socializing the interaction between readers, bloggers, authors, students, writers, journalists, publishers, editors, and designers. We are also exploring the value of digital book clubs for a specific author, genre, publisher, or topic. The cloud is where the future of the books lie.

As books go digital and it becomes increasingly possible to capture detailed information about reader identity and habits, new reader privacy issues are emerging. This presentation will discuss the latest legal and policy issues and opportunities for book industry professionals, policymakers, and public interest groups to work together to create a climate for digital books that is good for business and good for reading.

Should an online reference work aspire to the ‘encyclopedic’ standards of printed volumes? How should reference text change when modern search is assumed as the primary interface? If opening the scope of a reference work to everything ‘true and useful’, what other constraints on contribution and exploration might prove necessary? Can a reference work that seeks to offer canonical information on many topics use the techniques of social news and social question-and-answer sites to encourage casual, incremental contributions?

Stories and books. Is their future the same or different? I can’t tell you what the future of the book will look like, but what I can tell you is what’s happening to stories as we move into the digital world.

We’re unlocking them. This is a world where stories, which have always openly influenced each other, now openly connect to each other. And where they reach outward into the world that created them; into the network of people, places and things that spur writers to write, and readers to read.

At Small Demons we call this network The Story Graph, and it’s a beautiful, distributed, coherent thing.

I am the publisher of Hol Art Books and I hate art books. Art books are expensive (not accessible), heavy (not mobile), and no one reads them (not social). Our reverence for them is misplaced. Today, a book shouldn’t be beautiful for the way it’s packaged and sold, it should be beautiful for what it says and for the encounters in creates. Encounters not only with other texts and ideas, but also with people, places and—for my field especially—objects in the real world. I hate art books, but I love art.

COmmunity Media Archive: COMA. Voyager’s departure to browser based eBook reading experience! After the 20 years of digital book voyage through its own file format for Japanese, dotbook and the viewer, T-Time, Voyager is now shifting to more open/web driven content experiences. Maintaining the integrity of “book”, integrating access to visual and music and other kinds of rich content to the “book” with social reading extensions.

Blurring the distinction between consumption and creation, SharedCanvas provides a distributed solution for creating, consuming and re-purposing digital works following the principles of Linked Open Data . Applying the canvas-painting paradigm of standards such as PDF, HTML5 and SVG, the solution proposes that a page be modeled as a blank canvas which is then “painted” by annotating resources on to it.

The use of annotations for the association of resources allows the canvas to never be dry and complete as further consumers might also paint resources as well as provide commentary. The Open Annotation Collaboration ontology allows for any media type to be annotated on to any other media type, rather than strictly textual commentary, enabling images, video, audio or any other web resource to be part of the representation of the page. The annotations can be filtered using social network based trust mechanisms in order to prevent undesirable graffiti and retain the work’s beauty and coherence.

Creating an in-house digital-first publisher is not enough. Building a transmedia production house means competing with the motion picture and gaming industries. And the needs and expectations of readers are evolving rapidly. How can publishers compete in an unpredictable world? By building a solid foundation to support the business of today *and* tomorrow while taking a hard look at what it means to be a publisher in a networked, connected, always-on world.

Using past experience from our first transmedia novel and insights into our upcoming novel, we would like to share our findings. Items to be discussed would be product placement, development of other ‘stand alone’ content, merchandise and alternative distribution methods to increase fan base and transmedia category awareness.

When we talk about beautiful books, I submit that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so perhaps our next transmedia experiment would be to allow such customization so that each reader got their very own experience, customized to them – by them. Customization is also one of the key ingredients for monetization.

Although business models have changed, publishers and their intermediaries continue to try to evolve their market roles in ways that typically follow the rules for “two-party, one-issue” negotiations. In an environment in which the negotiations are better framed using models for “many parties, many issues”, these more limited approaches have made the design of a flawed ecosystem even worse, shifting burdens onto valued intermediaries (libraries and booksellers, among others).

Content abundance, coupled with improvements in available technologies, gives us an opportunity to reshape the competitive framework. This talk will examine options to apply the principles of effective game design to create a set of new, targeted and evolving business models for content dissemination in an era of abundance.