Blog

On Saturday May 15^th I went back to school and attended BookCampTO held at the iSchool at UofT. As I walked through the familiar doors I wondered what new information my old classrooms would hold. The outline for the day looked promising: it began with coffee and ended with drinks. With bookends like those the topics in between must be worth attention. While the unconference had a clear beginning and end it soon became clear that the point of the day was that books do not have such limits. With the topics ranging from “Launching a Digital Business” to “ebooks In Education and Academia” the discussions of the day were sure to burst books out of their bindings.

With the welcome session out of the way and coffee in hand, I headed the “Literate Video Games” lead by Tim Maly (founder, Capybara Games). I loved this session: it was game-geek-tastic! At times the game talk was a little over my head, but I think I came away with the main idea: games explore, books tour. Going forward the challenge is this: how can we integrate those roles to make better books and better games?

After a coffee refill I headed to “Reading Everywhere” with Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn. Little did I know that I was on my way to replacing one buzz with another. Tamblyn’s session included a tour of summer wines; 3 rounds of vino tasting integrated with discussion of ereading devices, mobility, access, and reader habits. It was a fun session and an unexpected treat for 10:30am. It felt a bit pitchy, but I left happy with the knowledge that the Kobo ereader residing in my purse had a bright future.

Other highlights of my day included learning about the writing habits of teenage girls in “Writing, Editing and Distribution is for Everyone” lead by Allen Lau of Wattpad, (yes, vampires are still ‘in’), and a great session on “Leaping Off the Page: Transmedia Storytelling” lead by Mark Leslie Lefebvre (Titles Bookstore) and Jill Golick (producer). I loved the ideas shared around the table in this session and I am excited about the many new avenues that storytelling can and will take. Combinations of twitter, blogs, TV, webisodes, comic books, games, reader driven content, and standard text are sure to keep content on its toes for a few years.

Overall the day was good for gathering ideas about the future of books/ebooks. By nature of the free flowing discussions, the day left me with more questions than answers. But I supposed that is the way learning is meant to go: it is meant to open more books than it closes. The clear concept I left with was that the challenge for the future of publishing will lie in developing new ways to take content beyond the book, beyond the text even, and into the world.