The following post is a collaboration with my friend Joe Esposito, the CEO of GiantChair. The post was Joe’s idea, but I contributed enough to its completion to justify a claim of shared authorship. Joe has kindly agreed to allow this received wisdom to be delivered to the world through The Shatzkin Files. As thunder […]
A brilliant Conference Council helps make a great Digital Book World
We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put […]
Metadata is the new most important thing to know about
Several very recent conversations have come together for me. 1. Joe Esposito, the new CEO of GiantChair, says metadata is the key to publishing in the future; he describes metadata as the modern equivalent of Allen Lane’s discovery that cheaper paperback books sold in mass merchant locations could boost book sales. Of course, Giant Chair […]
Practical and ethical challenges posed by digital content delivery
The New York Times published two apparently unrelated articles over the weekend which address questions raised by the rise of digital content creation and distribution. One was an op-ed piece in the Saturday paper by author Mark Aronson about the challenge of collecting the permissions necessary to include copyrighted material in enhanced ebooks. On Sunday, the […]
A technology that could unlock a door to the future
Michael Cairns blogged yesterday about a deal SharedBook has just made with ourenergypolicy.org to use an annotation technology SharedBook has. SharedBook is a client and I spent some time this morning getting updated by CEO Caroline Vanderlip about this new technology. This is wikipedia-type capability with a spin that publishers and authors will really like. […]