Thanks to all the great speakers and to IntertechPira for a great conference

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Shawn Duffy from Woodwing

300+ apps in 36 Countries

Software that wraps around the publishing process. Time magazine with Steve Jobs on the iPad was one of their products.

Work with business partners. Hearst, Hachette, Time, Springer, Scholastic, Houghton Mifflin.

Efficient cross-media publishing using open, scalable technology. Quickly publish to all platforms. Content is King. Tablet is just another platform. Also work in print, social, web...

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Matthew Davis from Zinio

Matthew Davis from Zinio

[MY NOTE: Another Oregonian! Umpqua valley guy. Now in SFO.]

Magazine content for the iPad. #2 top grossing app for iPad right now (has been #1).

Tablet renaissance for magazines. Form around ideas and design. Web is lo-fi, not editied/curated. Print is not dead.

Magazines are about big beautiful images. Form factor perfect for magazines.

Tablet is perfect for publishers. Winter 2010 Zinio was approached by Apple to work on iPad app. The challenge was build app of 2400 magazines, 7 special interactive editions in 6 weeks.

GUI to TUI (graphical user interface to touch user interface!)

Idea of user being able to interact and customize magazine. Links to shop items reviewed. Listen to Rolling Stone top 100 songs from within Rolling Stone.
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Brad Benson from HP

R&D at HP [MY NOTE:From Corvallis! I had a great time chatting with him.]

Paper best reflective display 1900+ years old. Layered CMY colors on paper make color. Human color perception was quantified in the 1930s.

L* coding 100 is brightest white.

90 for magazines, 76% reflectivity

80 for color newsprint, 56% reflectivity

[Note: see Tom Koch PDF for detail]

Where is our full color ereader with magazine quality? Probably still 2-3 years out. Flexible? Likely 5 years out.

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Kurt Petersdorff of Samsung (Liquavista)

Turbulence in the market. Price erosion. Cost engineered to lower price point.

Ereaders are now greatly different from tablets.

Content is truly the most important asset. Only device manufacturers that have good control of content have survived.

B&N really successful in increasing subscriptions, up 150% from previous 12 months (magazines on nook color)

There will be a split of fit-for-purpose and multi-purpose devices.

Electrowetting. Hydrophobic surface. Apply voltage to cause liquid to be attracted or repelled. B&W would be an electrolyte and black oil. Contract or relax the oil.

Very light efficient. Also can be used in transflective.

Scalable size. No limits to size possible. Up to 16 million colors. Not bistable like eink (looses image with loss of power). Refresh rate can be scaled down for text, up for video. (Down to 1 hz)

90% compatible with manufacture of LCD (requires very little tool-up)

Can be manufactured on flexible substrate (prevents breakage especially in large size like 12" & 14")

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Cheryl Goodman from Qualcomm (Mirasol)

Cheryl Goodman from Qualcomm Mems (Mirasol)

Sr. Dir. Publisher Relations

Why displays? Display is the biggest power consuming device on mobiles.

Simple design. Mirasol reflects light. 2mW for color. 1600mW for typical LCD. Low power, color, motion, multimedia.

Hybrid device. Display component is the deciding factor. Window to content experience.

Color and motion have been the things most wanted.

People reading more digital content than they thought they would (Harrison Group). People with dedicated ereaders spending even more on books. Women more than men. Not entirely replacing trad print, but supplementing it.

Video did not kill tv. Tablets will not kill ereaders. Content is key and the publishers need to retrofit to the new medium. Truly a reading revolution, worldwide. Digital publishing is up all over; +60% in Korea.

Mirasol color shipping the end of this year. Several huge factories in Taiwan.
Multiple markets, multiple items. 5.7" so it can be pocketable. Lightweight, mimics size and weight of paperback.

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Vic Bhagat of Eink

Growth beats forecast. 2004 was the first eink Sony. [ME: I thought it was 2006]

Pearl eink raises the bar and increases contrast by over 50%.

Pew 12% own eink reader. Took less than a year to double. Now one in 6 own a reader. 8% own Tablet. 25-30 million enk devices sold this year.

Tablet users. Mainly for social networking, web browsing, gaming, light reading.

Ereaders with eink allow you to focus on the reading, not the destractions.
Single tasking.

In use in many other devices due to the low power consumption.

Eink color is already shipping in China "Triton".
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Tish Wagner from ebrary

Offer various loan models including patron initiated acquisitions, subscription, short-term.

4500 (primarily academic) customers. 19.2 Million end users.

71% of public libraries do not circulate devices.

Launching downloads. Will work across all reader types. Offering chapter and full-text downloads. Loan periods are up to individual libraries.

No immediate annotation features. iPod / iPad now. Apps coming soon. Patrons can use them online or offline. ADE compatible. Early returns OK.

25,000 titles available now.

Library sets up a profile and how much they want to spend out of 300,000 titles. Multnomah county and Lake Oswego just added the service.

[MY NOTE: We need to look at them again.]
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Daren Benzi from Plastic Logic

Large, light, thin, shatterproof display. Allows for a revolutionary form factor. 10 years spent in the field of plastic electronics.

[MY NOTE: He passed a sample around. Amazingly thin and light. Bendable. Cool!]

Started a pilot in Russia. Digitzing content and distributing readers to schoolage children.

Plastic Logic PL 100 - "carry less, do more, save time & money"

[MY NOTE: This would be a great "library ereader" due to solid build and screen size - 10.7 inch]
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Nikolay Malyarov from NewspaperDirect

Will newspapers survive? Paper - no. News - yes.

400 years of newspapers. Radio, TV, etc. Didn't kill them. Internet may not kill them but new information consumers may.

New news consumer: Generational, fragmented and promiscuous.

Newspapers slow to adapt to the new technology.

Mobile access will overcome desktop access in the near future.

75% of US pop have a mobile.

Currently 2000 publishers from 95 countries.

PressReader app

Newspapers are trying offering a discounted tablet if you pay for a subscription.
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Mike Robinson from Oxford University Press

Ebook marketing:
Who are the end users.
What are their needs.
Who are the customers and how are purchase decisions made. Offer content for many segments.

Retail - users want a narrative. They buy longform content from retailer. Eink serves these users well. Content over pub year. They produce all titles in epub, new and previously published. Some best sellers are from the 40s and 80s (in a specific subject area like Civil War "Battle Cry of Freedom still in Amazon top 5 Civil War)

Institutional - students and researchers. Need lots of resources for short amounts of content (average 6-12 pages). Customers are institutions not really individuals. They build online products and PDFs for these institutional products. Costs applied title by title, greatest cost is Intellectual Property rights. Institutional titles not sold to individuals so must be price accordingly. $9.99 might be right price, $6.99 for some items. Maybe even $75.00. New frontier is to conect to end users. More knowledge about end use will help them know what the user will need next. Statistical gathering is becoming increasingly effective and makes the full circle to the publisher and writer. Better decisions on future content can be made.

Paul Michelman from Harvard Business Review Group

[MY NOTE: Video shows roundtable of 3 presenters - Paul Michelman and the gentlemen before and after him in my notes...]

Success with enhanced content.

Utility & Engagement:
Book and article as tool. Reconceiving them. Linking to web content.

Book as living content. Embedding social elements. Annotation.

Evolving from books to products. Huge white space for new digital content. Not sticking with book.

Taking greater ownership entire publishing chain. Compelling need to have much more of a relationship with customers . [MY NOTE: Isn't this what libraries are trying to do with their customers through the social media revoluton?]

Ebooks are more disruptive than one might imagine. Ebooks add cost and time. We are caught between the scroll and the bound book. We need better tools to connect disperate types of content. Creates massive customer service and support issues.

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Ron Burns from Ebsco

Ron Burns from Ebsco

Econtent aggregator. Started with magazineindex, went to CD, then to the web. 2005 added medical content. Medical first major users of mobile. Old magazines with value added.

Ebscohost web, mobile sites, dedicated apps. Balancing user needs and DRM from publishers. Opportunity for end user interface to improve.

NetLibrary came on in 1998. User interface never made the grade. Many user complaints.

Key improvments were the UI and reader. Added tools such as annotation, printing options, discovery tools. ADE was used.

Paradigm of physical books. 1 book, 1 user. Offer other options like unlimited, leased. Patron driven acquisition. Libraries don't pay unless user requests it.

They are aiming to reach all devices. ADE or specialized apps.
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Conference room shot

Steve Mather presenting.
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Intro & Keynote

Geoff Walker from IMS research

His experience extended back to the early 1980s with GRID (early laptop maker) and early tablet development in 1989.

Doug Klein from Barnes & Noble

In Jan 1998 he spent some time with Jeff Bezos discussing a possible partnership
over ebooks. It didn't work out but eventually led to the Kindle.

B&N nook started Spring 2009. Done as a skunk-works product in Silicon Valley. Made up of ex Apple, HP, folks. 0-30% marketshare in 18 months.

1971 Project Gutenberg
1998 Rocket ebook
2007 Kindle
2009 nook
2010 nook color (beat Bezos to the color world)

2010 mass market awareness switches to mass market consumption.

2011 market splits to ereaders (long form text only) & Magazines, Movies & Web moving to mobile. Now B&N says 20% of their traffic now mobile. Prediction - 2012 Christmas we will see web traffic ruled by mobiles at approx 80%!

Content? How to increase the value of reading in the digital world? Social books, interactive books, etc.

Bits are heavy. Ebooks - tiny, magazines - Bigger, interactive applications - HUGE.

Rights? Intellectual property rights. Business has been built on goods. Now it is the ideas, mental content. The physical goods decay. What about digital? The idea of bit-rot comes to mind.

Experience. Discovery... Reading... Content Management... SOCIAL - talking, sharing, book clubs.

Ebooks now can do all of those things that took place in physical space.

The future: seamless blending of content discovery, consumption, management and social interaction. WOW!

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The Rain in Spain

I spoke with Sam Licciardi of semantix this morning. Sam's product offers an overlay to any text content that provides contextual word definitions from various sources (Wikipedia, Oxford, etc). He had examples using a Samsung tablet and this very neat little Spanish eink reader. I think it is made by Bookeen and features a touchscreen and hardware buttons. He said that in Spain it is actually offered by their national telecom. Now that would be a cool partnership. Could libraries partner with wireless service providers? Think pre-loaded apps on smartphones or tablets with instructions on how to get a library card!

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Amazon does it again!

Scary mechanical toy woman sez "Amazon did it again by releasing 4 new Kindles".
By their new $79 (ad supported) offering, Amazon has now undercut the low-end readers sold by all competitors. This just a day or so after B&N dropped the price of the nook classic to $89! The new Kindles include a touch model and the Kindle Fire aka "IPad killer". We will see!

SFO is warm and sunny. The scary mechanical toy woman is in this cool museum of playable mechanical toys on Fisherman's Wharf. Travel went well and the conf starts bright and early tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!
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"If you're going to San-Francisco..."

I'm headed to ereaders 2011! This looks like a great opportunity to be a "fly on the wall" of the ebook and ereader industry. I hope to get on the "inside track", meet people from all over and talk up what great e-boosters librarians can be. Viva la e!