Digital Rights Management and E-Piracy Panel Discussion

On Thursday, March 29, Bookbuilders and the Emerson College Publishing Club present a free panel discussion on Digital Rights Management and E-Piracy.

The forum takes place at the Emerson College Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont Street in Boston, from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm. We are excited to announce our three speakers, representing a diverse collection of publishing industry perspectives.

• Jake Furbush, Digital Publishing Manager at the MIT Press, is tasked with overseeing the production and distribution of digital content, as well as the maintenance of in-house initiatives like CISnet—an online collection of titles in the information and computer sciences—and the Press’s own ebook program. Jake began his career as a member of the sales department at Harvard University Press and is happy to be back in academic publishing. 
• Adam Witwer, Director of Content and Publishing Operations at O'Reilly Media, oversees the company's Publishing Services division. He manages print, ebook/digital development, video production, and manufacturing. Adam managed the O’Reilly production department’s transition to an XML-based workflow. In the process, he became an expert in the challenges of publishing to multiple sources and formats from a single source. He now focuses on ebook development at O'Reilly and thinking about the next generation of books.
• Skott Klebe, Information Security Manager at Copyright Clearance Center, has worked in copyright and licensing technology for more than fifteen years, leading the development of some of the largest licensing systems in the world. Skott was the architect of RightsLink, Copyright Clearance Center’s point-of-content licensing system, and is the inventor on several patents in the fields of content and licensing. He speaks regularly at publishing industry events on topics including copyright, technology, and disruption in the ebook marketplace.

The forum will include a robust Q&A session. We ask that you register in advance to attend at www.bbboston.org, and we look forward to seeing you!

March 22 Forum Continued: E-Problems

[This is a guest post by Victor Curran of Precision Graphics. The subject is the first presentation at Bookbuilders' March 22 Forum, "E-Problems: Old files, E-books, Ideas and Limitations" at Emerson College. Please see Jamie Carter's post below for the second and third presentations.]

Karen Greenleaf, head of Business Development at VPG Integrated Media, spoke about digital content in the K-12 and higher education markets (VPG's clientele is about 60% K-12 and 30% higher ed). She pointed out the resistance of college students to ebooks, because the ebook versions of college texts cost about as much as used copies of printed texts, and because their professors often require them to buy a license to a learning management system which includes the ebook content anyway.

VPG recommends a browser-based ebook model using Flash and HTML. This allows content to be optimized for whatever device the student chooses to view it on (laptop, e-reader, smartphone, tablet).

She pointed out the limitations of a mobile app to deliver educational content, but conceded its appeal to the market, saying "It's limited, but boy, it sure is slick!"

She gave the audience its biggest laugh of the evening by showing "The Electronic Publishing Bingo Card," the creation of author/critic/blogger John Scalzi, in which he lampoons the many wrongheaded ideas that publishers (and others) have about ebooks.

Opening Ceremonies, DBW 2011

Braving some cold temps, Bookbuilders of Boston was represented at Digital Book World's opening ceremonies in NYC tonight. The program included the conference's Publishing Innovation Awards, a 7x20x21 variety presentation, and Name that Audiobook (sponsored by Audible.Com). Some highlights:

The Innovation Awards was an inaugural event, with selections made in Fiction, Nonfiction, Children's, Reference, and Comics. One standout was the Children's winner, A Story Before Bed. More a concept than a particular title, A Story Before Bed works with publishers to make available select children's books with the ability for friends and family to read aloud to the recipient (both audio and video accompaniment). The company has given away over 75,000 stories to military parents spending time away from their children, a natural application of the technology that is also memorable.

The 7x20x21 presentation (7 speakers, 20 slides each, 21 seconds per slide) guaranteed diversity of thought, and speakers included authors, publishers, and readers. The first speaker was the most timely: Evan Ratliff from The Atavist, with iPhone and iPad apps launching Wednesday. This is a journalistic venture with a multi-platform app supporting long-form nonfiction at $2.99 per story.

The Atavist was striking to me in light of some recent personal reading--namely, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Carr develops the hypothesis that our ability to comprehend and retain information decreases as hyperlinks and supplemental related info are introduced in the main content stream. The Atavist app blows this concept up in some respects: though stories can be read "clean," the attraction of the experience is access to video, maps, music, etc. connected with the story, all linked at the contextually relevant moments (shown in markup at right). The idea of having access to more of the journalist's reference and fact-checking material is intriguing, though even Ratliff acknowledged the challenge in absorbing it all.

The evening ended with Name That Audiobook, a game-show themed contest featuring two very recognizable audiobook narrators. I don't know their names, but I'm certain they've ridden in my car many times! Attendees were also pretty jazzed to receive two free audiobook downloads from Audible.Com. Giveaways have become very scarce in recent years, so we appreciated this one.