Allen Noren
Allen Noren is VP of Online at O'Reilly Media. He's been with the company since 1992 when one of his first jobs was to maintain the O'Reilly Gopher site. He was a founding member of the GNN team that built one of the first commercial web portals, and was part of the group that created Safari Books Online and SafariU. He is currently helping to drive O'Reilly's digital efforts.
Safari Books Online Goes Mobile
Like much of the publishing world, I’m eager to hear about Amazon’s latest version of the Kindle. But that’s not the only news today. I’m sitting here at TOC and talking to John Chodacki from Safari Books Online and, with a smile on his face, he’s showing me beta version of m.safaribooksonline.com. The smile is well deserved. It looks great, it’s fast, and I love the stripped-down navigation and lack of clutter.
Last chance – BISG survey on experimentation closes on Thursday
Michael Healy, Executive Director of the BISG, is offering publishers one last chance to take their Experimentation and Innovation Survey. I took it, and I can say it's not only worthwhile as a way of benchmarking where the industry is on this important topic, but it provides a context for thinking about innovation within your own organization. Here's the email…
Harlequin as Innovator
Did you know that Harlequin, the romance novel publisher, is one of the most innovative when it comes to embracing and developing Web 2.0 technologies? And did you know that their readers are driving early adoption of ebooks and social networking? Brent Lewis, Director, Internet & Digital for Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., is in the midst of discussing many of their…
The Future of the Book
Ben Vershbow's talk at today's TOC Conference titled Books as Conversations reminds me that I need to visit The Institute for the Future of the Book more often. Ben is going through some of the fascinating, and successful, experiments being conducted there, such as Gamer Theory, The Googlization of Everything, Without Gods, and several more. Most impressive is the visualization…
New Publishing Models
I spend a fair amount of my evening time searching for and studying new publishing models, most of which are unfortunately not being created by traditional publishers. Bill Burger of the Copyright Clearance Center talked about some excellent sites that we as publishers should be studying. They are: Wikitravel: Though there are a plethora of travel sites available, this one…
Will Publishers matter?
That's the title of Stephen Abram's keynote at TOC this morning. It's an important question as a number of studies and trends have made abundantly clear, including the NEA's overly pessimistic To Read or Not to Read study. So much of Stephen's rapid-fire message is both contrarian and hopeful, but in a working class, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work kind of way. As head…