Tools of Change 2013: Some Fun
Tools of Change always starts out with Book^2, an unconference founded by Chris Kubica, Ami Greko, and Kat Meyer. Stewart Cauley captured the very best moment:
Why, yes, that is my Scamp sitting next to me. She stayed throughout the entire event, despite the fact that she had two weeks’ allowance burning a hole in her pocket and we were in Soho. And she had quite a bit to say:
Scamp is of the opinion that book publishing is now unnecessarily complicated. #Book2
— ljndawson (@ljndawson) February 10, 2013
And this:
@pablod @ljndawson My fave President Scamp quote is ‘I can’t believe you people think talking about this stuff is fun.’ #book2
— Kate Pullinger (@katepullinger) February 10, 2013
Things really got kicking the next day in the W3C Ebook conference, which I will write about in a bit. What really struck me about W3C’s involvement is this: Whether book publishing plays along or not, the web wants books. I felt very heartened after leaving the sessions on Monday.
Tuesday was Author (R)evolution Day – Kristin McLean’s all-day workshop helping authors understand the traditional publishing landscape as well as some of the disruptions the landscape is experiencing. I was really struck by the incisiveness of the questions – it’s apparent to me that authors have been kept in the dark about how publishing works for far too long.
And Pablo Francisco Arrieta drew this picture of me as an alien, which I immediately made my Twitter avatar:
On Wednesday, I gave a presentation about marking up ebooks with semantic tags, just to introduce the idea to the book publishing community. Amazingly, Ivan Herman, who directs the W3C’s semantic web efforts, attended – both he and Tzviya Siegman of Wiley were phenomenally helpful. Last night, Tzviya sent me a TOC photo, which India Amos immediately turned into a LOLLaura:
Thursday, Pat Payton, Carl Kulo and I led an “Ask Me Anything” session, which was great fun and a new twist on Bowker’s traditional presentation methods.
It may be the weekend before I can digest all my takeaways from this conference, but it was phenomenal this year.
