About 150 people attended the Book^2 Camp event Sunday in New York. The un-conference broke out into several sessions throughout the afternoon, and included discussions about creating blogger buzz, the state of academic publishing, how authors can make use of websites for their books, enhanced ebook workflows, and understanding piracy. There also were tech sessions that discussed book design, APIs and programming.
During the afternoon, camp goers documented the sessions on Twitter. Some highlights include:
The entire Book^2 Camp tweet stream can be viewed here or by searching Twitter for #book2.
The book blogger buzz session had a large audience (pictured right). Author and poet Margaret Atwood had this to say after the session:
The biggest thing I took away from this session is that people [book bloggers] still do not quite know the effect of what they’re doing — they don’t have a way of really tracking the effect. In a way, I think they kind of don’t care because they’re not publishers. The bloggers do it out of love, one can only suppose, because they’re not making any money out of it. That was one thing that interested me; the other thing was the sheer variety of all of these different kinds of blogs.
You can see more of Atwood’s insights on Book^2 Camp here.
Attendees tended to agree that the cross pollination of the event — to use Ann Kingman’s description — was particularly important. Here’s how Brett Sandusky, director of product innovation at Kaplan Publishing, summed it up:
Overall, I think Book Camp is incredibly useful and important for us because in the publishing world we are often challenged with talking amongst each other and sharing experiences, data and lessons learned. Most companies tend to prefer to be proprietary about the things they are learning, and on an ideological level I think it’s really important that we share those things so that as a collective we understand really what’s going in the transition we’re in and also what the future holds for us. These open forums allow us to talk about these larger issues in a way that we don’t on a day-to-day basis.
For more on Book^2Camp, see Kevin Shockey’s post here.