As digital content has become more available and more commonly distributed in book publishing, fears of piracy and lost sales have grown. The rise of peer-to-peer file sharing sites has likely amplified these fears. While the debate over the impact of “free” content has been at times heated, the discussions are more often than not characterized by a lack of hard data.
To address this data gap, O’Reilly Media began a project in 2008 to characterize the “free” universe, catalog and assess recent experiments, establish ways to measure the benefit or cost of free distribution and conduct some follow-on experiments of our own. O’Reilly is joined in this effort by Random House, which contributed data for several of its own tests.
Come to this session to hear an interim report on the initial phase of this ongoing study, including a preliminary model of where and when free distribution works as well as what’s worth continuing to track over time.
A publishing veteran with 25 years of consulting, management and operational experience, Mr. O’Leary is founder and principal of Magellan Consulting Partners, whose clients include major media firms as well as smaller and not-for-profit entities with significant publishing and media commitments.
The firm’s practice areas include operational improvement, revenue development, market analysis and business planning. Work done by the firm most often results in both immediate and mid-term changes in processes, structures and in some cases technologies used to produce client content. For Magellan clients, Mr. O’Leary has also written several business plans to guide start-up and growth opportunities.
Prior to starting Magellan Media, Mr. O’Leary served as senior VP and associate publisher with Hammond Inc., an internationally recognized geographic reference publisher. Responsible for editorial content, database development, production and operations, Mr. O’Leary restructured editorial operations to benefit from the firm’s prior technology investments. He also substantially increased the pace of the company’s new-product development efforts.
Before Hammond, Mr. O’Leary directed operations at several of Time Inc.’s weekly magazines and was part of the team that launched Entertainment Weekly. He joined the firm in 1983, after earning an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Mr. O’Leary also holds an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard College.
Mac Slocum is the Online Managing Editor for O’Reilly. He frequently writes about the intersection of publishing, technology and the digital transition. He’s worked as an online editor/producer/writer at a variety of outlets and he’s taught Web journalism and technology courses at Emerson College in Boston. His fascination with publishing and technology started in college when he put the student newspaper online (fortunately, that early effort has been expunged from the Internet record). Mac holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Richmond and a master’s in journalism from Emerson.
Chelsea Vaughn is director of business development for the Random House direct-to-consumer online marketing and sales group. She’s been at Random House since 2001; prior to her current role, she was director of corporate development and director of business operations for the Crown Publishing Group. Before business school, she worked in editorial roles at W. W. Norton & Company and Ten Speed Press. At Ten Speed, she edited two James Beard-award winning cookbooks. Chelsea earned an MBA in media marketing and finance from Wharton, and a BA in English from Yale.
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