Entries tagged with “toc” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Text and XML of All #TOC 2009 Tweets

Andrew Savikas
February 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

I was planning to do some crunching last night and early today, but between an unexpected flight delay coming back from New York, and the pleasant surprise of getting Slashdotted about Bookworm, the day is quickly slipping away. I'll give it a go over the weekend, but if anyone else is eager to play, here's a super-raw text dump (the best I could do for getting around the API limit). Update: to be explicit, this covers roughly mid-afternoon Sunday 2/8 through late morning Thursday 2/12, so includes the entire event, but not every #toc tweet.

Update #2: Using the raw text as a starting point, I've generated an XML file listing all of the people who tweeted with hashtag #toc during the conference, and listed each of their tweets. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader :) to sort by time, or otherwise slice/dice (best visualization among those submitted in the comments by 2/24 at midnight EST gets a free pass to TOC 2010 -- winner chosen by the TOC program committee, and announced 2/26).

Update #3: Unfortunately, the Twitter Search API appears to only have returned the first ~15 or so of each user's #toc tweets (nowhere near enough to include all of the 200+ tweets from the top tweeter, @thewritermama, so that XML doesn't contain all of the tweets in the plain text. I've posted the intermediate XML I used, which contains less data about each tweet and tweeter, but does contain all of the tweets.

Update #4: Anyone interested in the gory details of where the XML came from, I've posted some background over at O'Reilly Labs.

Photos from New York Times R&D Lab

Andrew Savikas
February 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Nick Bilton was a hit yesterday at the TOC Conference, and during his keynote he talked about what they're working on with content at the NYT R&D Lab. Nick was kind enough to give a few of us a private tour earlier this week, and here's some photos from the trip:

At TOC: Best of TOC Writing

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

One of my favorite books of 2007 was The Best of Technology Writing, edited by Steven Levy. We decided to try something similar for this year's TOC Conference, and over at the O'Reilly booth we have (hot off the Espresso Book Machine) the Best of TOC, a collection of writing from on publishing from around the Web:

It includes writing from TOC speakers:

• Bob Stein
• Kate Eltham
• Kassia Krozser
• Peter Brantley

... and more from around the Web, like John Siracusa.

Because all of the writing in here was born on the Web, it's full of hyperlinks, which we've presented in the print version as footnotes (done automatically, BTW). The shear number of links (there are more than 600 in 126 pages) illustrates how differently we write when it's for the web. Now that all writing is really writing for the web, it's important to both incorporate more links within the content you create, and be sure your print designs and workflow can easily accommodate those links in print (footnotes is one way, but not the only way).

For the digital/production geeks among you, we used DocBook XML and a customization layer of the open-source DocBook XSL Stylesheets. That means we can use the same source to get print, web-friendly PDF, and EPUB, here's a snippet of the source XML:

As soon as we can, we'll also make this available for free download, so don't worry if you don't get a copy from the booth. Thanks to all the writers who agreed to let us share their work.

Open XML API for O'Reilly Metadata

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In addition to Bookworm, O'Reilly Labs now includes an RDF-based API into all of O'Reilly's books:

Most publishers are familiar with the ONIX standard for exchanging metadata about books among trading partners. Anyone who's actually spent time working with ONIX knows that its syntax is abstruse at best. While ONIX does use XML, there are more modern, more general, and more immediately comprehensible standards out there, particularly for the basic details like "author," "title," and "edition." One of those standards is RDF, or "Resource Description Framework." This experimental O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface (OPMI) exposes RDF for all of O'Reilly's titles, organized by ISBN.

If anyone onsite (or otherwise) puts anything interesting together with the data, we'll be happy to feature it here on the TOC Blog, just let us know in the comments.

At TOC: Video from Yesterday's Kindle Announcement

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Courtesy of Phil Torrone at makezine.com, here's video from yesterday's Kindle announcement:

At TOC: Bookworm Online EPUB Reader Now Part of O'Reilly Labs

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (17) | Listen

Update: There are now 400+ shiny DRM-free EPUB books from O'Reilly if you want to give Bookworm a test drive. Much of what's on our complete list with a green "E" next to it is available in EPUB and is Bookworm-friendly (the rest is just PDF for now, but you'll get the EPUB as a free update when it's available). (And get an extra 20% off through Feb. 20 with code EBKDSC, which is 40% off the print price.) More about our ebook bundles (free lifetime updates! No DRM! Kindle-compatible!) over here.

Regular readers know we're big fans of the Bookworm online EPUB reader. With Bookworm, you upload and organize your ebooks, and can read them online as well as a variety of mobile devices (iPhone shown below). It's open source, and built on top of well-documented and supported frameworks and standards:

You can even pick up where you left off reading as you move across devices.

As more content becomes available in EPUB format, tools like Bookworm encourage standards compliance (by rejecting invalid EPUB), and offer an alternative to proprietary ebook management reading/management systems like Digital Editions or Sony's eBook Library Software. (There's also Calibre, an open-source desktop ebook management system, which like Bookworm is built with Python.)

We liked Bookworm so much that we invited principal developer (and TOC speaker) Liza Daly to bring it into O'Reilly Labs, the R&D space that we're re-launching at this year's TOC Conference. From her post on the Labs blog:

From the beginning, O'Reilly has been an enthusiastic supporter of the project. Uniting the two under the Labs banner is a natural fit.

What does this mean for Bookworm's future?

Most importantly, core Bookworm code will remain open-source. If you would like to use Bookworm code, even commercially, you're encouraged to do so.

As part of the Labs project, we may add some features that won't be part of the core open-source package. Most other changes will be free and BSD-licensed. We're just beginning to think about where we can take this project.

I'll remain as the primary developer of Bookworm, but I hope that the added exposure O'Reilly brings to the project will encourage wider participation, not just of code but of ideas. I'm looking forward to taking ebook innovation to new places in 2009.

In addition to Bookworm, we've also opened up an RDF-based view of the public metadata for our books. Nearly all of this data was already available in a scattershot way from our catalog pages, the book's copyright page, Safari Books Online, and other sources -- our new "O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface" brings it all together in a standard, computer-friendly format.

This is just the beginning of a variety of experiments and pilot projects we have planned for the months ahead.

At TOC: Drawing for Pre-loaded Sony Reader Signed by Tim O'Reilly

Andrew Savikas
February 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Though much of the ebook buzz today has been around Kindle and Plastic Logic, the Sony Reader has a real following, and the company's new touch-screen version is by far the most elegant-looking reader I've come across (check out this session on Wednesday for a look at the device landscape). Because Sony (wisely) supports EPUB natively, it's a great fit with our ebook bundles.

Sony has kindly donated a PRS-700 for the TOC Conference, and to celebrate crossing the 400-title milestone for titles available as ebook bundles today, we're giving it away, pre-loaded with as many of them as I can fit on an 8GB SD card in EPUB format, and signed by Tim O'Reilly. Here's a photo of the reader:

That's more than $12,000 in ebooks! All paid TOC attendees (sorry speakers, press, and staff) are eligible, and we'll announce the winner on Wednesday (you must be present to win).

Safari Books Online Goes Mobile

Allen Noren
February 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Like much of the publishing world, I'm eager to hear about Amazon's latest version of the Kindle. But that's not the only news today. I'm sitting here at TOC and talking to John Chodacki from Safari Books Online and, with a smile on his face, he's showing me beta version of m.safaribooksonline.com. (In full disclosure, Safari is a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson.)

The smile is well deserved. It looks great, it's fast, and I love the stripped-down navigation and lack of clutter. It's got a couple of bugs, and I don't like that I can't read our highly designed Head First books, but it's a Beta.

The mobile version will be released on 23 February, and if you're a Safari subscriber and have feedback, send it to safarimobile AT safaribooksonline DOT com. If you're not already a subscriber, you can get a free trial.

TOC 2009 (Almost) Sold Out!

Andrew Savikas
February 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

The 2009 TOC Conference, starting tomorrow in New York, is now Sold Out almost sold out. We rearranged some of the seating to make room for a few more. Get in before we really sell out. It's encouraging to see so much excitement about the future, despite the challenges of the present.

Stay tuned to this blog throughout the week for updates from the show, or for realtime coverage, follow hashtag "#toc" on Twitter. We'll also have coverage (including video if all goes well) of tomorrow's Amazon announcement.