Here's all our daily coverage of the 2011 Digital Book World conference.
Digital Book World: Publishing CEOs Optimistic About the Future
The five publishing executives who took part on Digital Book World’s CEO panel Tuesday morning all agreed that while the industry is undergoing unprecedented changes, their companies are moving to adapt to new realities.
On the same day that the president delivered his state of the union speech, Digital Book World offered its own look at the state of the e-book, be it enhanced, amplified or what have you. The afternoon session, Delivering Enhanced e-books, offered a look at a variety of successful multimedia-driven e-book products including presentations by Hachette (Ansel Adams app), Penguin (Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth) and S&S (Nixonland).
Among the tidbits offered by Google Books product manager Abraham Murray at Digital Book World yesterday: the free Google eBooks app was installed over a million times in the first few weeks, and Google eBook readers are reading what everyone else is reading, like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points.
There is probably no better example of the changes looming over publishing than the rise of the app and the transformation of children's publishing from static picture and prose print works into dynamic, interactive multimedia content. The final day of Digital Book World brought together four publishers at the forefront of combining technology and content to create a new form of “book” that combines video, animation, audio and text in a software package that can be continually updated with new features even as it generates data about how it’s being used.
In what has become a crowded digital conference circuit, Digital Book World seems to have solidified its importance to the industry with an impressive turnout.
In today's connected, social media world, kids are increasingly becoming empowered consumers. So how are publishers looking to connect with kids in the digital age--and what works? A Digital Book World panel moderated by Kristen McLean, founder and CEO of Bookigee.com, assembled a slate of heavy hitters to discuss a critical question: what are the challenges and opportunities as technology begins to change the way publishers and kids connect?
