Book People Archive

California here I come...

I'm heading off tomorrow to California to attend Peter Brantley's
"Reading 2.0" meeting in San Francisco, and talk with the various
people and groups that are going out there.

This is a meeting where folks who are working with or producing
large collections of digital text can talk and see if there are
ways they can coordinate their activities, to do interesting
and useful things with all that text.   You can read more about it at
Peter's blog; the current agenda is at

    http://ono.cdlib.org/archives/shimenawa/2006/02.html

and various surrounding posts have more information.  (The
specific opinions in the posts surrounding should be taken as the
individual writer's opinions, and not necessarily those of
me or other attendees.  Though I think we have at least general
agreement on what we want to be talking *about*.)

I get 10 minutes on the schedule to give a short talk, as
do various other folks.  I'm still working out exactly
what I'm going to say, with few or no visual aids-- this
is to be a Powerpoint-free meeting-- but I'm basically
planning to focus on three main points, illustrated with
appropriate examples:

   -- Engaging communities that use and produce online texts
        (showing how sharing, division of labor, and openness
         have promoted useful production, use, and preservation
         of texts)
   -- Keeping interfaces and interactions simple
         (showing how appropriate, low-investment standards and
          conventions have provided solid foundations for
          lots of useful work that builds on them.  Quick aside
          if time on how DRM tends to put a severe damper on the forgoing.)
   -- Looking beyond the book
         (talking, as time permits, both on how the original concept of
          the book gets transformed and reused once it's online;
          and also in the great, largely-untapped potential of
          having lots of interesting serials online along with the books)

I hope to give a couple of examples for each of these that best
illustrates the points I'm trying to make.  (It'll have to be
just a couple, though, since I've only got 10 minutes.)

I'll be out on the west coast for the rest of the week,
but I do plan to check email when I can.  If you want to email
suggestions for the talk I'll be happy to consider them.  (I'm
looking especially for retrospective examples-- things that *have* been shown
to work-- as preferable to prospective examples-- as they'll probably
be more convincing than things that people propose *could* work.)  And people
can still make Book People submissions; I'm hoping that they'll still go out
within one business day or less, our usual standard, but the average delay
might be a bit longer than usual while I'm traveling.

I also hope to give a report of what happened to folks here after I come back.

Best to all,

   John