Tired of vague talk about how digital books are gonna do things that aren’t possible in print? Pull up your chair and listen to 10 specific, ready-to-implement, digital book-enhancing features for publishers of all stripes. From “Cross Reference Previews” to “Visual TOCs”, from “Bento Box Books” to “MoodCubes”, learn about all kinds of reader-pleasing, author-inspiring, price-boosting ideas.
Too often we hear future-of-the-book horizon-gazers talk about multimedia and interactivity as if they were pixie dust magic, ready to sprinkle on text and make it – voila! – worthy of our digital publishing future. With the arrival of the iPad and other touchscreen color displays now’s the time to get specific. By focusing on features that improve the reading experience this session will load your brain and your notebook with ready-to-use ideas about how your digital books – both existing and those not-yet-published – can deliver experiences that no print book will ever match.
Peter Meyers has worked at the intersection of writing and technology for more than two decades. He’s currently writing “A New Kind of Book”. Part how-to guide, part inspirational call-to-action, it seeks to answer the basic question: what can digital books do that can’t be done in print? The heart of the book is a “catalog of ideas”: a collection of dozens of ready-to-use digital book features, most of which Peter designed himself, supplemented by a best-practices tour of other innovators’ work.
Previously he co-founded one of the first multimedia textbook publishers (Digital Learning Interactive, sold in 2004 to Thomson Learning). Peter has written extensively about the strange and wonderful effects of computers on mainstream culture for many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Salon, and the Village Voice. Some of his very favorite pieces include a profile of Norwegian programmers who used pigeons to transmit information between computers http://bit.ly/bXtkAi, the evangelism of Edward Tufte’s information design seminars http://bit.ly/cwPvvJ, and one of the earliest articles on Wikipedia http://bit.ly/aXq3Vj. He also did a tour of duty at O’Reilly Media, where he served five very happy years in the Missing Manual group, most recently as associate publisher.
Peter’s undergraduate degree is from Harvard, where he studied American history and literature, and he has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives with his wife and daughter in “upstate Manhattan” (aka Washington Heights).
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Looking forward to the book, er… ebook.