Back by popular demand, this tutorial discusses how XML is central to many exciting publishing initiatives, especially bringing existing content to new media and devices. For nearly all publishers, forging into the future will involve XML. High-level and business-oriented, this session will peek under the hood to see what’s happening without dwelling on technical details. Read more.

You're worried about cost, control, and being consumed by the effort that blogging and social media seems to take. Or maybe you've heard that this is what you should do but don't have actionable first steps. Come to this session a novice and leave a knowledgeable implementer of social media strategies and tools. Read more.

Get a comprehensive overview of the basics of eBooks including business issues driving ePublishing, business characteristics, business models, areas of experimentation, challenges and trends. In association with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), we’ll consider each of these aspects across Trade, Higher Education, Reference and STM Publishing. Read more.

Produced specifically for the publishing community, this tutorialfocuses on the basics of U.S. copyright law, including a copyright holder's privileges and obligations, and when permission may be required. The session will include topic overviews, examples, and opportunities for discussion. Read more.

This tutorial will demonstrate practical solutions for producing content in formats that are friendly to a wide audience while still maintaining quality. Focusing on different models of "book" presentation, we'll explore everything from eBook and audio book production to DAISY, SVG, and even VoiceML generation, demonstrating how all of these advances in publishing tie into XML accessibility. Read more.

Original content is an excellent catalyst for web community development, which means publishers are uniquely positioned to build relationships with established communities, and perhaps even grow their own. In this session, we'll look at ways content can form the foundation of a web community effort. Read more.

The second of our two-part series on eBooks, this tutorial is all about implementation. We'll show you how to make your books into digital masterpieces; cover the ePub format, discussing its special features and unfortunate pitfalls; and we'll take a look at the capabilities of the current ePub readers and how you can make them work for your particular eBooks. Read more.

Print on demand (POD) can counter rising costs and inefficiencies, but publishers shouldn't view it as the cure to all their ills. In this session we'll take a realistic look at POD technology, business models, strengths and weaknesses, and innovative uses. Read more.

Learn how to optimize the online reach and cost-effectiveness of your book marketing campaigns. Verso's vertical ad network targets and engages the consumers you want to capture, utilizing the latest in contextual, demographic, behavioral and retargeting technology and more than 4,300 specialty content websites with over 110 million monthly unique visitors. Read more.

Google is trying to make every book in the world findable on the web, and so far has digitized seven million of them. In this talk, I'll describe some of the features we provide for publishers, and give a sneak peek at some upcoming developments. Read more.

We know now that many books, especially timely non-fiction, can become major elements of intellectual ecosystems -- including blogs, websites, magazine excerpts, speaking gigs, consulting and more. In the future those various activities could become part of a business ecosystem as well, where all work to the benefit of each other in more direct financial ways Read more.

RIT's Open Publishing Lab will present a suite of open-source applications, currently under development, that enhance and extend current publishing platforms, including a tool to automatically convert wikis and blogs into ready-to-print books, Drupal extensions that allow near-instantaneous news gathering and publishing across multiple media, and a game that uses print to enable social networking. Read more.

How should authors approach their task, given that what they produce may or may not appear in printed form, may or may not have color available, may or may not be able to display dynamic content, may or may not have Internet access available, and may be viewed on devices ranging from widescreen monitors to cell phones -- unless it's consumed as audio? Read more.

Interactive Data deployed hundreds of intelligent software Agents to address the recurring manual processes of data monitoring, collection, alerting and file download. Connotate’s Agents increased overall quality and timeliness of data while reducing staff hours required for daily processing. Acting as productivity amplifiers, Agents deliver strong ROI by enabling a “Work Smarter” culture. Read more.

Electronic publishing is the future. Publishers are stepping up efforts to implement their online strategies to gain visibility, understand their customer and establish a direct relationship with them. Publishers are looking for a solution that removes high costs and time barriers and offers a way to experiment with different online business models. Read more.

Remember the book party? It’s the one-night only, martini-fueled marketing tool publishers have used for decades as a platform for building buzz around a fresh new book. They’re seen as the lavish French kiss publishers give their authors before the long road of big book sales. There’s just one problem- they don’t work. Read more.

Developing a digital reading interface raises social, aesthetic and technical challenges. Panelists in this session will talk about interface development (web-based vs. client-based), technical decisions, community requirements and intellectual property issues. Read more.

Talking about change is easy - making change happen in most organizations is ridiculously hard. But there are things we can learn from the history of technology, political revolution and change, and there is a playbook we can reuse to help us avoid easy mistakes and seemingly popular, but actually self-defeating approaches. Read more.

Publishers, authors, and retailers all want to know: Do eBooks require a different cost structure? Using examples from actual projects, this session will look at the affect eBooks have on profit and loss development, business models, and costs. Read more.

The recent landmark settlement between Google and book publishers has the potential to revolutionize online publishing; it sets the stage for a vast array of new business models. Will you be ready to reap the rewards? Will you be able to organize and deliver your content in the way that Google – and other online services – can use it to increase your revenue and exposure? Read more.

This session will present Adobe’s open, cross-platform digital publishing solution, demonstrating content creation tools for PDF and EPUB, servers, Rich Internet Applications for downloadable distribution as well as new mobile support for EPUB and PDF distribution. The focus will be on Adobe’s vision for the future of digital texts beyond “print page replica” models and traditional eBooks, Read more.

eBooks, written off just a few years ago as a massive failure, are on the rise again. According to the latest industry data, ebooks are the fastest growing segment in an otherwise stagnant trade book industry. This panel discussion, moderated by Mark Coker, will cover the latest trends in the ebook business and provide publishers with actionable strategies to profit from the rise of ebooks. Read more.

Digital publishing creates opportunities for ancillary products, customization, sharing within online communities and mashups to name a few, but it also opens the door to new rights, licensing and copyright questions. Read more.

Author Storefronts, Widgets and Social Networking Apps, Oh My! "This panel discussion will feature Krishna Motukuri, SVP at Lulu.com,and weRead founder discussing how POD advances made self-publishing a viable alternative to the traditional publishing model – giving authors more control over their book's future. Read more.

This talk will consider the collision of the born-digital and traditional belles-lettres. What happens to authors' original "manuscripts" when they're written electronically? Who saves multiple drafts and revisions of the files? Are writers beginning to turn over their computers to archives as part of their "papers?" What will happen when scholars work with this material years down the road? Read more.

The digital revolution has often provoked more questions than answers. That’s because content owners have always needed to balance a desirable breadth of distribution options with the need to exercise control over copyrights and a profound and correct perspective on where proprietary content has been distributed. Read more.

Technological innovation⎯digitization, XML, POD⎯together with a growing legion of baby boomers, have opened the doors and created demand for accessible publishing. New technologies enable publishers to offer books in any way readers want to read them. Ebooks, large print, super large print, braille, DAISY & audio formats are the future of publishing Read more.

More than half the world's population now has a mobile phone. What are the benefits of integrating a mobile content strategy into your publishing process? Can you afford to ignore it, or push it to the edges of your business? Read more.

While the publishing industry waits for ebooks to become the next big thing, a thriving ebook market targeted largely toward women has developed a loyal reader base, moved into territory traditionally occupied by mainstream publishers, and changed the rules when it comes to pricing books and compensating authors for their work. Discover how you can learn from these success stories. Read more.

Based on the results of six months of research, surveys, interviews, and analysis, the StartwithXML project offered a clear argument for developing intellectual property as XML documents from the outset. Read more.

Is $9.99 the new "normal" for ebook pricing? Or is the sweet spot closer to $3.99, or $1.99, through the iTunes store? As the age of ebooks dawns, publishers are struggling to find pricing that works for their customers and their business models. Read more.

Due in large part to the proliferation of communication channels – print, Web, email, mobile - today’s publishers face dramatically evolving requirements for the creation, production, and distribution of content. Dynamic publishing offers benefits across the publishing value chain to help organizations meet these market pressures. Read more.

Come join us as we examine and debate elements of Sara Lloyd's "A Book Publisher's Manifesto for the 21st Century." Read more.

What are basic elements of an author's platform that need to be in place prior to a book's launch? Based on her book, GET KNOWN BEFORE THE BOOK DEAL, Christina Katz will cover the steps every author must take in order to lay a solid platform foundation and then open up the discussion to address challenges, strategies, and how publishers and technology can help. Read more.

The hardest part of implementing a publishing system is not the technology. It’s the people! Explore a holistic approach to managing change in a publishing environment. Discuss how to identify and overcome change resistance regardless of its source. Consider how to manage the competing needs of different departments. Learn from others’ experiences, both the triumphs and the failures. Read more.

Standards impact publishing in a variety of ways, from content formats such as .epub, NLM DTD, and other XML styles; to identifiers for content and subscribers, to interoperability, metadata, search and authentication. There is a variety of ongoing work at the national and international levels that will impact-hopefully improve-the publishing community. This roundtable will explore these projects. Read more.

A companion to Scott Meyers' talk of the same name, this roundtable is for people interested in the challenges authors face in writing manuscripts designed for publication in print, electronic, and in audio forms. Topics aren't limited to those in Scott's talk, and everyone is welcome, regardless of whether they attended Scott's presentation. Read more.

The web is vast. Are you leveraging the distributed nature of the web to drive more sales? Traditionally, online book communities have been viewed as tools to market and promote books. This roundtable will explore a few case-studies on how to turn these distributed communities into direct sales channels, driving book sales. Read more.

With a mandate to implement XML, and content management across your organization, how do you develop a strategies for a successful initiative? And what are the pitfalls that detract from success? Read more.

As the Internet permeates the publishing industry, the traditional publishing model has been turned on its side. This roundtable provides a platform for discussion on challenges faced by publishers in digital publishing and the evolving trends and business models. Read more.

This roundtable will be focused on reviewing what companies are doing today with regard to digital asset management, web content management, XML repositories, natural language processing tools, and multi-channel/mashup applications. The hope with this session will be to cut past the hypothetical and get more into the real-life scenarios for implementing a next-generation content platform. Read more.

Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that provides one integrated source for over 7300 expert reference and learning materials from leading publishers. This session will provide actual interaction with the site, which includes exclusive access to the collections of O’Reilly Media, Peachpit Press, Cisco Press, Addison-Wesley, Read more.

The goal of this session is to talk about the evolving landscape of publishing and how the worlds of traditional publishers and self-publishers are converging. Author platform is more important than ever before. How do both types of publishers leverage this? What are each doing to help authors build their platforms? Read more.

The digital landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years and Wiley, like many other publishers has worked tirelessly to stay ahead of the curve by anticipating trends in technology and consumer behavior while managing costs and workflows. It is at once an extremely exciting time and a difficult time as seemingly every day brings a new eReader or proprietary format to the fray. Read more.

We are in a transitional period: basic reading and distribution patterns are carrying over from traditional models, but these methods are also being shaped by new habits and systems that are only beginning to emerge. This panel will discuss the implications of this reading/distribution transition, the new economics at play, and the impact technology will have on future reading. Read more.

What's it like to read your books on a Kindle? Can consumers put your content on their Sony Reader? Could you stand to read War and Peace on an iPod Touch? In this session, we'll review the current set of popular e-readers with a focus on the reading experience: ease of use and purchase, navigation, fonts and layout. Read more.

Gone are the days when a book was simply a physical assembly of folded and gather pages, bound as a series of chapters in a case or paperback perfect binding. Gone are the days when the only formats publishers had to concern themselves with were hard cover, trade paperback or mass market paperback. In today’s world a book can be a file format; Read more.

Publishers are increasingly faced with decisions about where to make the investments to maximize their opportunities. Consumers are demanding more flexibility and speed in the ways that they purchase content. Digital options continue to emerge, while print is very much with us. Developing the right balance is difficult. Read more.

Working the long tail of sales is an excellent plan in these leaner times. The other pieces are falling into place, ebooks and on demand printing, but how can you find out what is happening inside the long tail. Social networks are an effective means of interacting with your community. This talk will explain the what, why, and how of creating a successful community and how to make better books. Read more.

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. Read more.

Learn how Crossway Books managed a simultaneous print and web launch of a new reference book. We'll focus on how integrating digital planning into our workflow resulted in a better product at lower cost, and why other publishers should consider doing something similar to gain digital expertise. Read more.

Publishers historically have had little information on the end consumer (the reader) of their products (books). The times as well as the tools have changed that are now available to inform strategic decisions. Come and listen to interesting stats on consumer book buyer behavior and how publishers are using this data to inform decisions about how to best target their audience online and offline. Read more.

It is a misconception that automated publishing inherently means bland or apparent cookie-cutter design. By creating a standard taxonomy, leveraging industry-standards such as XML, Word and InDesign, it is possible to create highly-designed products that are capable of easily changing based on market demands. Read more.

For years, eBook sales have failed to match the lofty visions of industry observers. But now, as sales of eBooks are expected to continue growing in 2009 and beyond, many leading media, e-commerce and publishing companies are making plans to take advantage of this market’s potential. Read more.

If we accept that media will never return to its pre-Internet form, what lies ahead for news? How will we use current and future digital tools to craft and disseminate information? What lessons can publishers of all types learn from the news industry's digital transition? A panel of media experts will discuss these topics and others in this forward-looking session. Read more.

The book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" teaches readers how to edit online Wikipedia articles. O'Reilly Media, the publisher, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the owner of Wikipedia, agreed to post this book online, on the Wikipedia website, as fully editable content. This talk discusses the challenges of getting a book into wiki format, to be editable, and what happened after the book went online. Read more.

Making change, like implementing XML in a publishing environment, is never easy but how change is introduced can have a big impact on its success. This talk will tell the story of the human challenges Cengage Learning faced when it used a top-down model to implement XML-based workflows. It will also discuss how using Agile principles to relaunch XML has turned users into change agents. Read more.

As more and more of the publishing process is automated, how does a publisher insure the kind of quality that can maintain or build a brand of excellence? Through real examples of challenges and solutions, publishers will be led step by step through the planning and development process of a small reprint publisher in its pursuit of business scale without loss of quality. Read more.

As publishers are increasingly moving to make investments in their digital strategy, there are questions about what are the technologies that will best support that strategy. Mr. Bachana will present how DAM, XML servers, Web content management systems, text mining engines and multi-channel technologies support the publishers' digital needs, which you need today and which are not as critical. Read more.

SamePage is web based, schedule-driven, and addresses the common publishing production management issues. SamePage tracks status, tasks, reporting, budgeting, talent sourcing, content management, and forecasting with a sane user experience. SamePage is built on a foundation of scalable, open source technologies, including the Apache web server, PostgreSQL RDBMS, and Python programming language. Read more.

A growing industry requires experimentation, and experimentation inevitably leads to stories of success and failure. In this frank discussion, panelists will recount their digital content wins, losses, and lessons learned. Read more.

This session will feature a round-table discussion with industry experts explaining the ways in which the book industry is responding to the mounting pressure to "green the presses." Read more.

Travel publishers have been particularly successful in leveraging their content in multiple formats, while continuing to maintain book sales. Why have travel publishers been successful and what can other publishers learn from them? A panel of experts will discuss how multiple platforms can strengthen brands and grow vibrant publishing businesses. Read more.

Increasingly the publicity and operations of the book business involve the movement of data as much as physical product. This talk discusses the use of universal technical standards for all stages of the publishing supply chain, particularly for publishing professionals who have no idea what universal standards are. Read more.

John Scalzi is the science fiction author whose personal blog, Whatever, has built up an audience of approximately 40,000 daily readers and won a Hugo for best fan writing. Patrick Nielsen Hayden is the editor at Tor who saw a novel Scalzi published online and saw a future "New York Times" bestseller in the making. Publishing industry observer Ron Hogan talks with them about how it all happened. Read more.

Youth are approaching digital self-expression and publishing from a more organic, collaborative angle than previous generations. They jump right in when the creative urge strikes, collaborating with others from around the globe, and "publishing" an ongoing stream of of-the-moment, mashed-up, throw-away media. Learn more about the research findings on youth and the future of creativity. Read more.

Veteran blogger Michael Hyatt shares the basics of blogging. He will share why he believes blogging is an important tool for businesses today and then introduce how to get started blogging. Read more.

The tag cloud featured on the Tools of Change for Publishing blog is an organic representation of the important topics, companies and themes that consistently bubble up in TOCcoverage: e-readers, ebooks, mobile devices, revenue streams (or lack thereof), and more. Read more.