The 2011 annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) will be held in Boston this year at the Westin Copley Place. The event runs from June 1-3, and the theme is “It’s What Counts: How Data Transforms Our World.” Several Bookbuilders members are also members of SSP, whose mission is “to advance scholarly publishing and communication and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking among individuals in the field.”
Conference highlights for book publishers include the following:
- Opening Keynote Address - "Approximating Omniscience," by Jon Orwant, Director of Engineering, Google Books, and co-author of Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.
- Plenary Address - "Who Needs Libraries and Publishers? The Future of Scholarly Communication," by John Palfrey, Professor of Law at Harvard University, and Co-Author of Born Digital, Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.
Other session topics include preserving and curating research data, data accessibility, usability testing, e-books, and single sign-on technology. There are six pre-meeting day sessions on June 1, networking opportunities, and an exhibitor’s marketplace.
Discounted early-bird registration ends this Friday, May 13. For more information or to register, visit the SSP site.
I had the honor of participating in this conference as a member of a panel titled "To Infinity and Beyond: Using Data to Create Next Generation eBooks." Here's a brief summary of my presentation:
ReplyDeleteWhen an educator sits down to write a textbook, his or her real objective is not to make a book. Authors’ real objective is to take the experience they have in the classroom with their students, and replicate that experience across thousands of classrooms. Until this century, the only way to do that was to write it down on paper and make it into a book. We all know the unique virtues of print: permanence, high resolution, uniform user experience. We’ve been immersed in that user experience for so long that in many people’s minds, the container and the contents seem to be one and the same.
The radical thinkers in education are setting the content free from its container. Without some kind of container, though, content won’t travel very far--about as far as the professor’s voice. Our mission is to merge educational content with the new generation of containers that are on college campuses and beyond: e-readers, smartphones, and tablets.
The real game-changer is how we can think about the content, and how students, instructors, researchers, and other professionals use the content. We take ideas and make them visual, to enhance their usefulness to the end user, and as we do this we’re engaging in instructional design. It isn’t just a matter of making things look good. It requires looking deeper into a concept the author is trying to teach, and asking, “What’s the best way to express this concept visually?”
Print gave publishers great control over the user experience; You knew exactly what people were going to do with a book. Mobile devices take some of that control away from publishers and share it with the reader, and even with the developer of the device platform. So when a publisher wants to deliver content via mobile devices, the first thing to ask is not “What content have you got?” It's “What will readers do with the content?” What we’re creating may look like a paper book, or an e-book, or a mobile app, but it’s none of those things. It’s a learning experience.
--Victor Curran