Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

On Sunday I’m flying to California to attend the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference, which is taking place in San Jose from Monday to Wednesday. This is a new conference, which has been established in order to “provide critically important analysis, hands-on workshops, and thought-provoking sessions for publishers looking to recognize and help shape the future of publishing.”

There are a number of great speakers, including Tim O’Reilly himself, as well as Wired editor and Long Tail author Chris Anderson. I’ll be chairing a panel on Wednesday entitled “Back to the Future: Major Publishers Revisit Digital Publishing. Joining me will be Matt Shatz from Random House, Claire Israel from Simon & Schuster, and Theresa Horner from Harper Collins. Here’s a description of our session:

“Six years ago every major New York publisher became involved with eBooks on some level, only to see them fizzle in a cloud of overheated expectations and foolhardy predictions. But now, more than half a decade later (after the rise of the iPod has shown that consumers are indeed interested in digital delivery and consumption of entertainment), publishers are getting back into digital publishing in a big way. Granted, the industry is still dealing with some of the same issues that felled eBooks last time around, such as price, DRM, and format/reader confusion, but we’ve also learned the harsh lessons of 1999-2000, which means that the publishers who apply those lessons to 2007 (and beyond) are the ones who are going to successfully segue into a profitable digital future.”

Should be a great session, so if you’re attending the conference, stop by a say hi.

O’Reilly Tools of Change website