eBook Summit 2010
Did you attend or present at Mediabistro's eBook Summit? Do you wish you had? Check out the digital artifacts I've aggregated and curated from this future-of-publishing-is-now (or yesterday?) event held in NYC on December 15, 2010 at The New Yorker Hotel.
- Thanks for visiting my digital scrapbook of Wednesday's eBook Summit. Please contact me via Twitter (@virtualDavis) or Facebook (facebook.com/virtualDavis) if you'd like to recommend additions, revisions, etc. Please note that I've drawn heavily on several resources that you may wish to visit directly:
MediaBistro's eBook Summit website
eBook Summit Flickr set posted by mediabistro.com
Hit and Miss and More: MediaBistro’s eBook Summit Returns
And many/most of the quotations are pulled directly from Twitter where attendees live tweeting the event using the #ebooksummit hashtag which you may also want to visit for a meta-overview. You may also want to view slides from the eBook Summit which are available at slideshare.
Finally, please note that I haven't reviewed the program in its entirety. I've limited my scope to the speakers and comments that appealed most to me. In other words, beware of bias. You'll find plenty. I'm unabashedly optimistic about the future of publishing. I am easily enthused by tools that dilate/amplify the storyteller's toolbox. And I'm driven by a narrow and specific ambition: discern the most effective and most complementary platforms for sharing my stories... Curatorial belly button gazing? Perhaps! 
Publishing hasn't seen this much change in its 800-year history. New technologies bring a wave of opportunities as they disrupt regular print cycles and business models. Books are consumed digitally on portable devices, a new opportunity for authors and publishers to produce multimedia content. Authors can self-publish without the support of a major publishing house and find an audience through social media. As major publishers shift their businesses, new upstarts launch ideas for sharing digita- Event moderators Manoush Zomorodi (Mediabistro instructor) and Jason Boog (Mediabistro Publishing, Editor) welcomed everyone and made introductions...
- Brendan Cahill (VP and Publisher of Open Road Media)
- Open Road Integrated MediaOpen Road Integrated Media is a content marketing company that places the e-book in the center of a multi-platform universe, which includes film, video and other forms of digital entertainment...
- A year after Jane Friedman sketched the broad strokes at the first summit, Cahill was there to offer, as one observer noted, something of an Open Road annual report. He showed a video, and noted that the company hopes to have 2,000 titles available soon, including more e-riginals—original e-books—which he said were a small part of the company's business, but were critical to its identity.
- Cahill spoke about how Open Road Media uses the Internet to connect their readers to authors. The digital publisher creates author pages with videos and photos, as well as social media accounts to help build a platform for the write online. “We follow the marketing process to empower the author to connect with readers,” he said.
#ebooksummit Brendan Cahill talking about video trailers. Definitely slick stuff, but this stuff doesn't go viral by itself.- HD Videos: “one of the core offerings that we create…” ~ Brendan Cahill #ebooksummit
- “Metadata is our sales force…. We concentrate on marketing.” ~ Brendan Cahill #ebooksummit
But I like our sales force. Dilemma. RT @seanconcannon: "Matadata is our sales force": Brendan Cahill, Open Road Media at #ebooksummit- Cahill was followed by Dale Peck (@MandMBooks) who is the co-founder of Mischief and Mayhem and the author or ten books. He started out by explaining, "Fundamentally I’m an imposter up here. I started out as a novelist…"
- Peck, meanwhile, talked about his sort of anti-book business, the direct to consumer Mischief and Mayhem bookselling venture, which he said arose out of a desire to offer an alternative to a broken bookselling model in the age of the superstore in which writers take home too little money. "For a $25 hardcover book," he noted, "publishers are lucky to see a dollar."
- Ryan Chapman (@chapmanchapman), the Online Marketing Manager at Farrar, Straus & Giroux shared initiatives to maintain traction as the publishing market shifts into the digital age.
