Although this year's O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference may have lacked the keynote star power of last year's event, the conference's move from San Jose to Manhattan clearly reaped benefits. Attendance this year doubled, to about 900 participants, with a large walk-up registration on Monday morning. TOC general manager Andrew Savikas said the show, held at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, will return to New York City again next year, although the venue and dates have not been confirmed.
This year's show closed (although some technically oriented tutorial sessions continue today) with a keynote speech by O'Reilly CEO Tim O'Reilly called "Free Is More Complicated Than You Think," a meditation on a signature element of digital strategy: offer something free and figure out how to monetize the subsequent traffic. O'Reilly surveyed a variety of models that exploit "free" as a strategic tool, emphasizing strategies that worked as well as those that did not, including an effort by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams to publish cartoons and some prose writing online for free. Turns out that while fans loved the free stuff, it seems Adams did indeed cannibalize potential sales of a planned for-pay book. O'Reilly also surveyed the pros and cons of the advertising model (which requires massive numbers of page views) and the subscription model (used successful for O'Reilly's Make magazine and its Safari Online tech title library). And he cited the use of corporate sponsors and partners for events like the TOC. "Free helps build community, concept and brand," said O'Reilly. "Don't be afraid of free—figure out how to use it."
The show offered plenty of panels on aspects of reading on mobile devices, and yesterday was no different. A lively panel called "Are New Devices Breathing New Life into E-books?" wrangled over the usual issues involved in digital reading devices: proprietary formats, functionality, screen technology and pricing. Amazon's Kindle is clearly the new "it" device, and invoked both passionate advocacy and dismissals in equal measure. Publishing technology consultant Mike Shatzkin embraced the device: "I expect to never read a paperback book again," he said, citing the device's ease of use, dictionary functionality and adjustable font size, which he said was "very useful once you get past the age of 60." Electronic book publisher Tonya Engst, who specializes in creating media-rich e-books, was unconvinced, citing the dour black-and-white, mostly text Kindle interface. "It's like going back to the early days of the Web," Engst said. PW tech blogger David Rothman pointed to cellphones, the dominant device in the marketplace, but others on the panel noted that reading using a phone (even the iPhone) has its own problems, in particular screen size and battery life, which are not designed to support extensive reading.
Overall, this year's TOC seemed very effective at what it does best: offering a combination of strategic cheerleading for the new digital publishing paradigm, followed by hard-headed technical information from people actually doing the work. Nevertheless, there were a few quibbles to be made about this year's conference. While speakers like author Douglas Rushkoff and technology strategist Stephen Abram were effective and entertaining, last year's conference featured such digital luminaries as Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in addition to HarperCollins president Brian Murray. TOC's growth in attendance led to overcrowding; many sessions were held in very small rooms and there was often overflow, with knots of attendees peering in on sessions from the hallway. And it seems that much like traditional book publishing, which continues to grapple with issues of minority hiring and representation, the O'Reilly TOC could use a bit more ethnic diversity, and might benefit from partnering with programs like the Publishing Certificate program at CUNY to make sure it serves as broad a range of book-publishing professionals as possible.
The conference closed with a panel of New York—area teens in a session that examined the ways in which they consume media. They were all terrific: funny, thoughtful and charming, and they answered patiently when Stephen Abram and members of the audience poked and prodded them with questions about their lifestyles, school life, how they use their cellphones, what they read and more. But even here, a little diversity—and not just ethnic diversity—would have helped. The panel featured seven upper-middle-class girls (Abram said two boys didn't show up) and one 22-year-old college guy who was clearly drafted at the last minute to represent his entire gender—not a single minority teen or outer borough public-school kid. But no matter—the kids they chose were open and delightful, and at the end the session the audience gave them a rousing round of applause.
