This presentation was given June 27, 2007
at the User Group meeting of
The Media Services Group Ltd
in Boca Raton, Florida.
It may not be reproduced without permission.
Last update: 6/29/07
of Publishing As
We Know It?
A lively discussion ensued. Additional notes and references will appear shortly.
Special thanks to our hosts at Media Services Group LTD, and to all who participated.
Click to begin presentation
Notes and References:
Manolis Kelaidis's talk, given at the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference a couple of weeks ago, is commented on here.
E. B White's remarkable quote about bookshops, taken from One Man's Meat, is available, with context, in our Quotes page.
Jon Kremer's excellent publishing and marketing website contains an astonishing Hall of Fame for self-publishers.
Online books have been sold in chapters, for many years, by National Academies Press.
The University of North Carolina Press is leading The Caravan Books project, whose purpose is "help bring serious non-fiction, in traditional as well as a variety of digital formats, to the eyes and ears of discerning readers."
John Perry Barlow, whose story about The Grateful Dead (and its fans' bootleg concert tapes) helped me to characterize the current moment in publishing, keeps a biographical sketch on the website of The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
For the masochists in the crowd, here's a web page illustrating the marvellous eBooks of the Class of 1999.
For the optimists, a photo of Alan Kay's 1975 Dynabook is to be found on Wikipedia along with information about what Alan is doing now.
Finally, a look back: A farsighted academic, Roger Fidler, wrote this paper about eBooks and their ilk in 1999. Very much worth a read today.