Publishing's tech and edit worlds converge

The Books in Browsers conference is underway.

BooksInBrowsersThe Books in Browsers conference got underway this morning. For those who aren’t able to attend, the event is being livestreamed. A couple of highlights from this morning’s opening speakers include:

  • Bill McCoy (@billmccoy), executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum, talked about some fundamental business issues of EPUB3. He said there’s no intrinsic value to standards — their only purpose is to improve the efficiency of the solutions that use them; they’re a way to make things faster, cheaper, better — the value lies in the application of the standards. McCoy highlighted several ways that EPUB3 addresses these efficiencies and solutions and how the EPUB3 publishing standard is a strategic weapon for publishers.
  • Freelance programmer Blaine Cook (@blaine) and author Maureen Evans (@maureen) talked about projects on the leading edge of the digital change. Evans’ book Eat Tweet, for instance, started as a twitter stream: @cookbook. Cook talked about the fluid process and the dynamic publishing environment of Newspaper Club and said the people who are building the cool new things in publishing are actually web developers. He talked about writing collaboratively with GIT and used the SXSW fieldguide he developed as a forkable guidebook on GIT Hub as an example how coding books in HTML is a much more open, accessible format.

This afternoon’s lineup includes sessions by author Peter Meyers (@petermeyers), Flipboard designer and publisher Craig Mod (@craigmod), and Threepress’s Liza Daly (@liza). The conference — and livestreaming — continues tomorrow and opens at 11:30 a.m. EDT with Wired’s Kevin Kelly speaking about networked books and networked reading.

Watch live streaming video from oreillyconfs at livestream.com
TOC NY 2012 — O’Reilly’s TOC Conference, being held Feb 13-15, 2012 in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they’ve learned and join together to navigate publishing’s ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

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