"I have heard an angel speak" reference for Nick Bilton

Reasons to be excited:

Will O'reilly withhold books from the Kindle because of the DRM? They release it in lots of formats

Starts by talking about the financial crises, somethign TED did not do at their conference

The G bible era was not a good time War of the Roses,

Then Constantinople fell

Lament for a passing of the Cathedral (Victor Hugo)

instead society built 'Cathedrals of learning'

• "It's as if we had a supercomputer and billions of pur processors had been offline" Tabarrok, Alex at TED
• Billions of people are dealing with ideas instead of daily bread
• Maps of the internet are increasingly looking like maps of neurons
• Guttenberg did not imagine Jane Austen let alone James Joyce - we cannot imagine where the interntet is going to take us
• 100 million books >500 pages in Google book search. The web has already generated 1 trillion web pages
• Stimulus Watch site popped up a week ago. Put together in a matter of days can drill down to line items
• Phones are everywhere ( this has come up a lot here at TOC =Africans with cell phones)
• Have to Imagine a world where information is everywhere
• Sensors coming into our daily lives changing the way we get information: Pizza and phone example -

 People are reading a lot

• Web pages are still a lot of text
• Compete.com for analytics compare Good reads, Shelfari, Librarythings (1million uniques readers on Good Reads)
• Twitterholic shows Stephen Fry as most popular on twitter : he is an author!
• Have to do more for authors than used to

Curation still matters

• Clay Shirky Power Laws weblogs, and Inequaltiy (graph)
• Every new media always has a head and confers status all the way down
• Twitter evangelism from Tim O'Reilly - main reason to get in is to get in the head of new media and bestow status

Using Social Medai

• Reflect and amplify - talk about the issues that matter to you.

 People are paying for access to information

• It isn't just advertising
• internet access fees 25.8 billion
• Music 2.3 billion
• Games 1.8 billion
• People are paying for basic cable

Content Ubiquity

• Make your content avalialble wherever your readers are
• DRM is bad
• Share what you learn so we can all get better faster together

Sales ratio of downloadable electronic formats on oreilly.com

• PDF/mobi/epub bundles:
• PDF is biggest chunk
• epub next
• then Mobi

Predicts 2011 will show ebooks as 50% of revenue

Safari is 2nd biggest channel next to Amazon and yet market share is same for print copies

Participation Drives Revenue

• Books from Rough Cuts doubles the sales for finished book in Safari
• Collaborate!

Mobile reading taking off

• iPhone App outsold print -but print book still the category bestseller
• it is additive - margin is same
• Doubled price to 9.99 and sales dropped by 4x -w went back to lower price
• Googles Algorythmic pricing is exciting

"best way to predict the future is to invent it"

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Presenter: Neelan Choksi COO of lexcycle

e-books inflection point hit in 2008

IDPF talks about 44 million as the wholesale number but there is a lot of confusion/ignorance regarding the numbers for the whole market

Indicator of mainstream:

The Oprah effect: Stanza downloads went through the roof when Oprah mentioned ebooks

iPhone distinctions

• International reach
• color display
• multi-funtion device
• Built-in wireless
• No external light required
• App Store

Primary Usage (%)

• In bed 31
• Commuting on bus/train 29
• In waiting areas 13 (parenting note: read to your kid to help prevent them from seeing the candy aisle)
• At home 12
• At work 5
• At a bar or cafe 5
• On an airplane 5
• 2 write-ins mentioned In the bathroom

Since launch of Fictionwise store:

Average title price point 10.25

Promotions

• Pan Macmillan Excerpts

first to notice Stanza

• Random House Free Titles

Back list of certain authors
excerpts from forthcoming boks

• Harlequin

4 free minis

Oreilly experiment

The missing Manual = 200 images that render beautifully

Lessons learned:

• Its all about the people who are reading
• Quality matters: you get noticed when you're the top dog
• Every reader is unique give them lots of options to cutsmize their reading
• every device is unique things that work for one device may not work on another device
• listen to the user they are happy to tell you what you are doing worng
• give your readers a voice

too much friction in purchase registration - every tme you remove friction sales go up

Publisher Lessons

• calls to action need to be clear and contextual
• KISS
• Hold yur technology providers conversion houses
• Keep experimenting
• Have a budget for marketing e-books
• Support EPUB
• Support DRM-free

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How Progess Happens

Presented by Scott Berkun (Berkun Consulting). Talking about change is easy - making change happen in most organizations is ridiculously hard. But there are things we can learn from the history of technology, political revolution and change, and there is a playbook we can reuse to help us avoid easy mistakes and seemingly popular, but actually self-defeating approaches.


* american revolution example: no new tools to bring about change

* there is no change possible until someone stakes their reputation on doing something different.

* You can not make change without power

• Change creates work
• It requires thinking
• we have to talk and listen to each other
• it raises questions we'd prefer to avoid
• it puts us at risk of embarrassment/death

Maslow and heirarchies of needs


Traditions protect against change

Idea Killers (see more at Scott's blog)

• we've tried that before
• we've never done that before
• that's not how we do things here
• how can you justify the costs
• how will this become profitable
• our existing custumers will not like this

suggested reading: Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Thomas Kuhn

-paradigm shift-

Revolution is a bad word
people who are clear about the change they want state what the problem is that they are trying to solve

Power
committees prevent change because they average out decision making = mediocrity

Tactics

1. Power
2. Persuasion: whose support can you earn
3. Intuition: What can you anticipate

Case Study Chester Carlson & XEROX


Playbook for Indivduals:

• Pilot
• show Succcess
• find allies
• ask for more resources(stake reputation)
• repeat
• coup

Entrepreneurship is a similiar process

Playbook for managers

• Palov lives (we do what we're rewarded for
• Hire for change (Age & Psychology)
• Accept some ideas you do not like
• Encourage interesting failures
• Only you can provide cover fire

Question: How do you get the power you need to create the change you want:

unethical book: 48 laws of power

ideally find your allies.

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Yesterday I sat in on about four workshops at the Tools of Change conference (#toc). Before I got to the conference I tried to think about what would have most value for me and the industry. Anyway to make a long story short I decided to do the XML track of workshops. Needless to say it was a mistake. The intro workshop turned out to be for people who had never even heard of XML never mind used it in web apps. But I couldn't be rude and just get up and leave. I would hear it out a bit, meanwhile I opened tweetdeck and started following the #toc twitter feed. I was astounded that toc had started to trend fifth and sixth in popularity on twopular.com. What I especially notice was a lot of noise coming out of the Blogging and Social Media workshop. No one was tweeting in the XML workshop. I tweeted how boring the workshop was and someone replied from the Brogan workshop that there were lots of seats there and I should come over. I did.

Here was my realization when I got to that workshop. Chris Brogan was driving the rating on twopular or at least the workshop was. Everyone in this workshop was live blogging and tweeting away. The audience was responding back to Chris as the presentation went on. I had seen this phenomenon with Chris when I did an O'Reilly webinar with him a couple weeks back. At that time I was blown away by the chatter that was going on in the discussion. It was non-stop. I've done a lot of webinars but have never seen anything like it. The amazing thing was Chris was keeping his focus and interacting with those comments at the same time.

Now Chris is not saying anything revolutionary. He is talking about blogging, using twitter, engaging the audience, using the crowd for insight. But this message continues to burn through the publishing world like a bush fire. Forget XML and ebooks, Chris is pushing the envelope to integrate all content and do mashups using the simple tools of social networking. Of course you need the technical frameworks and environments for all of this stuff to work but for it to really work the technology has to become invisible. Technical experts don't really like to make their technology invisible and so I think sometimes they don't "get" what is happening in the social networking world.  What is more important to publishing? Standards, XML, ebooks, all of that. But what gets people engaged? Twitter, blogging - the platforms for the individual to broadcast their message, even if that is only retweeting someone.

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Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler (more commonly known as Lemony Snicket) talks about his collaboration with composer Nathaniel Stookey on The Composer Is Dead, a musical "whodunit" commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, and introduces a few of this musical murder mystery's prime suspects.

Interview here

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Dawn Matheson lives in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Her latest project is called Project: Snowman. She is collecting snowman stories for the project at her blog: http://www.pigeon28.com/blog/

Here is a link to a story in the Guelph Tribune about the project: http://www.guelphtribune.ca/news/article/155895

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Where have you gone oh snowman? Did you drown?

         

Click here to download:

Dear_Snowman.zip (9639 KB)

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We are the snow men. Leaning together. Headpiece filled with snow.

             

Click here to download:

Snowmen.zip (186 KB)

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13 Havelock St Toronto, Ontario - group sale and show next Saturday, December 13 from 11am to 5pm!

 

Please spread the word and drop by for some delicious treats, a glass of wine, and some holiday cheer. Creative works include jewellery, paintings, hats, textiles, upcycled wool and cashmere, and hand made soaps.

 

Come to shop or just to be inspired by the beautiful creations!

 

 

 

 

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Details from the evening after 10:00 p.m.

                   

Click here to download:

The_party_carries_on_without_y.zip (15250 KB)

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