Books In Browsers - 2010

I spent all day yesterday tuning in to the the Internet Archive's #BIB10 Summit, which was held to examine the rapid transition towards books on the web.  Unfortunately, it was held in San Francisco and I was stuck  at my desk in Indiana.  Even though there was no live audio or video feed, the constant tweets and pics flowing from the 2 day conference we're very informative and helped to placate my desire to know what it was that I was missing about the future of the publishing industry as we know it.  I hope that they make the slides public, in fact Bill McCoy from Webpaper already graciously has.  It's amazing to see how har we've come in a year and ePUB3! sounds very exciting for the evolution of vending and lending ebooks. If you're interested, here's a list of attendees HERE.  (Thanks Blaine!)

Also, last night there were showcase demonstrations of the vending and lending of books in web browsers on a variety of different platforms.

Demonstrations included:

      - Browser-based ereaders and reading applications

      - Discovery via BookServer, search engines, Open Library
   
      - Publisher mechanisms for selling books in browsers
   
      - Libraries mechanisms for lending books in browsers

 

Quote of the Day:

"We're all gonna die one day anyway and we'll lose all our stuff. So don't worry too much about it. Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that. Because what's going to happen is people who are lit up by the future are going to be pursuing that future, and the people who hold onto the past are going to hold on too long." - Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media