Sessions at TOC New York 2012 on Tuesday 14th February

Real life case study of modern publisher Kogan Page, and how they have used complimentary third-party services of Ingram Content Group and VirtuSales to effectively publish, promote and sell books. In this session, hear from industry leaders about the collaborative and innovative approach that has enabled Kogan Page to take a book from concept to consumer, including production management, metadata management and e-book distribution to a comprehensive global market.

For many organizations, the analysis to determine whether there are opportunities in utilizing both private and public cloud has been satisfied. But for most, the hard work begins after the decision has been made. The toughest activities ahead includes prioritizing the migration, managing change, retooling, and security. In this session, Dr. Jonathan Reichental will summarize some best practices in managing the execution of your cloud strategy.

Search is a complex process, but the Search function in eReaders is still fairly primitive. Studies of readers performing research show that the goal can change several times as the reader thinks through their question. It may be a quick search for an idea they know is in a book. Or it can be multi-faceted process where the reader learns more, broadens their interest, decides to use a different term instead, finds out new information or terms to try, or narrows to focus on a facet. We don’t know what mode a reader is in when they open an eBook, but students who are confined to just an eBook often wind up borrowing or buying the print version.

Indexes can provide the reader with pre-analysis of a text, but they are not being implemented well (or at all) in eBooks and eContent. This means the reader loses a navigation tool that could help at several stages of research, and the eBook loses potentially-useful semantic metadata that could be implemented and used in coming versions of ePub and more powerful readers. In this session, we’ll review what happens in the process of searching, and three methods of offering readers additional tools to help them navigate content and aboutness. A prototype of Search + Index will be described, and we will be asking for feedback about how it could be implemented, improved, or adopted.

What to read next is an age old question. From library catalogs to best seller lists to search engines to modern recommendation systems, this session will take you through a tour of the history of recommendations with a sharp focus on the past 20 years: why did recommendation systems pop up now and what has changed in the past few years.

In the publishing world, the need for a powerful and intelligent identity system is clear – incorporating easy commerce methods directly into the real identity of their user base can provide easy registration, checkout and user authentication.

The problem is that current open identity systems are not commerce based, and traditionally leverage off of social channels. Even at their best, current implementations of OpenID or Mozilla’s new BrowserID do scarcely more than provide a “yes, this person has an account” answer to “who is this user?”. Even at their best, when identifying profile information is made available, it is based completely off of either anonymous social account details or a perceived real identity – not the true identity of a user.

This traditional social identity approach can be a major hindrance for publishers when attempting to build an identity system to not only identify their users, but also to enhance the entire product discovery and buying experience.

This is where the new PayPal Access identity system comes in. Building an identity foundation in commerce, around the 100 million plus verified PayPal consumers, we are allowing publishers and merchants the ability to create powerful, smart direct identity channels that are based in the true identity of that consumer base.

Besides the foundation of true user identity, publishers will also gain the value behind the 45 million events PayPal processes per day. Historical buying history of users allows us to be able to present buying categories for users (how likely they are to buy a particular product), or trust ratings (much like an identity credit score), all bundled directly into the user identity.

Taking this a step further, having payment and identity tied together means that you can skip steps in the checkout process, decreasing user drop-off by being able to skip the login stage, prefilling shipping and receiving information, user details, and much more.

PayPal Access is truly tied to the needs of publishers, allowing them to build an intelligent open identity system directly into their markets. Through this commerce based identity approach, publishers can generate increased sales, build richer user profiles and enhance the buying experiences of their users.

Whither the cookbook? It’s a question that publishers, authors, agents, just about anyone in the industry is asking these days. Questions around enhanced content, monetization/licensing opportunities, and new media opportunities with bloggers all have prompted great rethinking of the processes by which cookbooks come to market. But what does that mean for traditional workflows? And do content creation methods change when user-generated content is becoming more prevalent every day?

This panel is meant to explore some of these issues in depth, by looking at what publishers are trying to do today and in the future. What are some of the upcoming content monetization channels? How can publishers become more flexible in their approach to content, both in-print and online? And where do publishers, authors and other cookbook constituents fit in the conversation happening online with consumers?

The idea of the “cookbook” is changing rapidly and will only continue to do so. The purpose of this panel is to explore what the future of this niche industry is and how it will evolve over time, realizing that our idea of a cookbook today may just mean recipe content in all of its forms tomorrow.

All publishers have legacy print products that could be made into viable new products in the digital marketplace. Opportunities are lost because great content is trapped in files that are unsuitable for digital publishing. How hard is it to go from print to digital? How do you go about converting old files? What if you can’t even find all the files? How can you apply the structure and formatting you need for a digital product? How do you deal with complex layouts? What color issues may arise? What about rights and permissions for fonts and artwork? How can you enrich old assets with new media and interactivity? How can you deal with all this in an efficient, cost-effective manner? This session will seek to answer each of these questions.

Expanding the reach of content to new markets through a network of selected book manufacturing and distribution partners is a game changer for the book industry. Ingram’s Global Connect is more than a printer network. Using Global Connect, publishers are printing locally around the world, getting titles to new markets and retailers, and having a direct link to local consumer demand. What differentiates Ingram’s Global Connect program from other printer network solutions is the unique combination of print on demand partners with established local retail channel relationships. Publishers are gaining access to new sales channels without the worry of inventory in market, importation and customs issues, and shipping and warehousing costs. No matter where their readers are, publishers are reaching them and never missing a sale.

If it Bends, it’s Funny

“If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it isn’t.”

That’s Alan Alda as Lester, in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.

It’s also what happens when you use industry standards—like ONIX, and ePUB—to move book discovery in a different direction. One closer to how the reader thinks of discovery, and further from how the standards present themselves.

The reality is, when you start using ONIX and ePUB to enable new forms of discovery, you have a honeymoon period where, for the most part, it’s funny. Conventions and ways of doing things locked in these standards that you can bend, you can twist, to get to where you need to go. You can laugh it off as you wonder, wouldn’t it be better if things weren’t done this way?

The honeymoon ends quickly when you realize, to really get to that new place—a scalable way of discovering and connecting creative works that starts with simple models of user behavior first, and works backward from that—you have to break the standards.

At Small Demons, we’ve been bending ONIX and ePub for some time now, and we’ve built a set of hacks around their limitations. This talk will share learnings from the past year of adapting standards meant to do some things well to a whole new set of tasks, for which they aren’t really suited, but where they’re still the only game in town. The audience will see new uses for familiar data, a number of use cases where the data bends, those where it breaks, and suggestions on how we can move forward with a set of practices that meet the needs of “reader first” discovery.

The ‘digital’ strategy no longer confines itself to only delivering books in e-formats but empowers the publishers to embrace the paradigm shift that is taking place in the publishing industry.

This presentation will cover the following four trends that are driving change within publishers’ strategies:

How publishers are connecting far and wide with their readers through mobile Apps
How retail sale is altering the reading and consumption patterns of books
How publishers are making use of Data Analytics and reports to establish direct relationships with their readers * How they are adding to their sales figures by adopting revenue streams like Institutional Sales

HTML5’s impact on publishing continues to expand. Many publishers are struggling with legacy FLASH content that needs to be migrated to HTML5. See how SPi Global has developed tools, processes and procedures that provide a roadmap for converting existing assets to HTML5.

Cloud-based annotation offers more than just sharing comments and quips. Having used its uniquely social eReader software to turn the margins of the eBook into a meeting place and pull the footnote into the 21st Century, Copia readies a second act. Joe Wikert discusses the future of collaborative study, author’s cuts, reader-sourced special editions, fan fiction and how to make old books new again with Copia Merchandising VP Seth Kaufman.

Writers need to be able to make money writing so writing does not become an elite activity for only those who can afford to do it. In order to be paid, they need to hone their craft and get their work in front of early readers who care. Traditional publishing and self publishing need to feed off of one another and support this mission for the benefit of our culture, entertainment, and society as a whole. How do we address this with technology? Can we create a better model so that an ever broader demographic of people from all over the world can write and sell great books? Let’s go on a tour of Book Country to explore one brave new way forward.

The balance between internet standards and innovation has always been a tenuous one. Browser or ereader manufacturers want to showcase their product and the special things it can do and don’t necessarily want to embrace or restrict themselves to a list of features that others can replicate. But designers and publishers don’t want to have to create—or finance and keep track of—separate versions of a book for what the public imagines should be very similar containers.

In this session, we’re going to look at the cool new stuff that works in EPUB—things like audio, video, multimedia in general, javascript, interactivity, read aloud, soundtracks, and more—in ereaders already on the market, right now. Some of these features blatantly spit in the eye of standards, and others skate right up to the edge of what’s allowed.

We’ll also point out some features from the EPUB3 spec that are not yet supported (and may never be) and talk about the fact that what a standards body says should work in compliant readers and what actually works, or their method of implementation, is often quite different.

In conclusion we’ll give some strategies for deciding when to rely on standards, when it’s worthwhile to stray from them, in order to find the balance between taking advantage of the most interesting innovations without drowning in the work necessary to reproduce them on several different platforms.

Over the last decades Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) has gradually lost the youth audience on all its platforms. With a rapidly developing media landscape and dramatically changing media habits especially among youths, DR feared missing its appeal to an entire generation for good.

This called for a radical approach to media development for this difficult segment. So DR decided to turn the editorial process inside-out and start with a thorough understanding of the youth generation and define a strategy before unleashing its creative development.

Working with media and anthropology experts at ReD Associates, DR identified five main drivers of youth identity in Denmark, based on deep anthropological insights into everyday life, youth culture and media behaviors. The identity drivers was then translated into one brand platform, directions for creative content development and style/communication guides.

The identity drivers are labelled “Feeling left over”, “Being in opposition”, “Going to the limit – and beyond”, “Seeing yourselves as Masters of the Universe” and finally “Very fickle”.

The resulting brand, “DR Mama”, is launched gradually in September 2011 and full-scale in January 2012. The presentation will show methods in media anthropology, insights in youth culture and media behavior/needs – and the final product illustrated by original program formats and marketing initiatives.

Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) was founded in 1925 as a public service institution. Today, DR comprises tv channels, radio, web and publishing of books, CD-ROMs a.o.

Semantics have emerged as a strategic growth platform for Publishers, enabling product innovation, advanced information access, analytics and discovery on online portals, and massive productivity gains. This session investigates key semantic applications for Publishers and underscores underlying trends shaping how we will package and consume information in the future.

In the fast-changing landscape of publishing, the future is no longer about looking at linear text – both digital and print platforms are actively taking advantage of new and improved technologies for enriching reader experience. With e-readers and other digital devices, this is easy to do. Everything you need to connect text with videos, links, sounds, etc. is on one screen. But for the old-fashioned standby – the printed book – connecting the offline of the text to the online of the enriched reader experience does not have as simple or obvious a solution.

In this session, publisher and founder of Atria Books, Judith Curr will address the innovative ways that Atria solved this problem and integrated new content into books for an expanded experience. She will also explore new digital possibilities around promotional material that is laser-focused for specific target audiences. She will highlight case studies examples of various publications that are connecting books to readers’ mobile devices and other screens and how this is resonating with today’s multitasking audience. Judith will describe the unique ways in which Atria is improving customer experience and also stepping up its marketing game, by citing the following examples:

Full Black by Brad Thor, for which Atria added 2D barcode tags on the book jacket that linked to videos about the book, as well as implemented both outdoor and print ads that linked to chapter excerpts and author videos.
Eva Scrivo on Beauty, which offers tags throughout the pages linking to videos that demonstrate Scrivo’s techniques and tools as described in the text.
True Spirit by Jessica Watson, with videos that the teenage author created during her cross-globe sailing voyage linked through tags throughout.
Roam, a soon-to-be-released work of fiction by Alan Lazar, who, as a composer, created new music to accompany each chapter. The printed work will contain tags linking readers to those songs in a format designed to be compatible with all mobile devices.

Good workflow equals good metadata. In an agile publishing environment, good workflow relies on a single source of truth – a repository of information that is added, updated and managed by the people who know most about the products…at the time they know it. When PDLC techniques come to book publishing, the result is product descriptions, tags, and taxonomies that arise organically from agile workflow. Laura Dawson will walk through the publishing process from acquisition to final sale, demonstrating the output of metadata at each stage of the agile process. While many publishers are instituting “metadata czars”, it’s critical to see that everyone in the organization is responsible for the kind of product information that allows readers to find the books they want.

Brian Rich, managing partner and co-founder of New York-based Catalyst Investors growth private equity firm, moderates this panel of investors, start-ups and established publishers discussing what’s hot, and what trends may be on the way out in the publishing investment ecosystem.

“Data is a vital raw material of the information economy, much as coal and iron ore were in the Industrial Revolution.” New York Times

“Publishing does not know how to market e-books yet.” Evan Schnittman

“We will need to develop new skills in data analytics, to listen to our readers and understand what they want and what they will pay for.” John Makinson

“When it comes to the really important decisions, data trumps intuition every time.” Jeff Bezos

We will be launching Bookseer around ToC on both sides of the atlantic; this won’t be a sales pitch but it will be a “myth-busting” presentation of some key findings and surprises from our beta period. This will include case studies from (trade) titles on both sides of the Atlantic such as The Filter Bubble; David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King; and campaigns from TV tie-ins to supermarket promotions and the Booker Prize.

We will open the lid on questions such as:

- Is all media coverage good coverage? – The relationship between sales and social media: which one drives the other (if at all) – What we can learn about paid-for marketing effectiveness – What impact does price reduction have on different titles