The Tools They Are a Changin’: The Ins and Outs of TOC NYC

By Edward Nawotka

NEW YORK: New York City Fashion Week competed with O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference for attention, space and buzz. The theme of this year’s TOC NYC was “Change/Forward/Fast” — a snappy tagline, to be sure — but one that raised the question of whether things really are changing in publishing all that fast? The answer is: perhaps not, or not as fast as in previous years. What does change is what’s buzzy. Or in the words of fashion model Heidi Klum, host of Project Runway: “In fashion, one day you’re in, the next day…you’re out.” So, in that spirit, we offer a sampling of what was in and what was out at this year’s TOC.

In: Little Data, Big Data

If one thing was clear from this year’s TOC it’s that the publishing business is finally getting serious about data and analytics. This can mean looking at the granularity of day-to-day marketing strategies — such as when to send out a tweet to get maximum re-tweets on your social network (there’s an app for that), making quantitative assessments of the number of books a “library power patron” will buy based on their reading habits (one bought for every two borrowed), or the likelihood of a German to feel bad about downloading a pirated e-book from BitTorrent (not so much)...

Out: Social Reading

Social reading already seems to be a thing of the past — or perhaps it still remains a thing of the future. While this time last year “social reading” was on everyone’s lips, in 2012 it seems to be have been met with something of a shrug. You don’t hear the giants talking up the social experience of their platforms as a USP — Amazon, Apple, B&N, Google. It’s the challengers, such as Kobo and Copia who hope to leverage their superior social reading tools to their advantage...

In: CDO or Content Discovery Optimization

Yes, y’all, it’s all about CDO now — as in Content Discovery Optimization — or so says Jesse McDougall of Catalyst Webworks. The notion of SEO is antiquated, especially now that Google has tweaked the algorithms it uses to crawl web sites. The latest strategy is to learn to work social media sites — where much of the traffic is originating — to the best of your advantage...

Out: Hate as a Business Strategy

In: Diversity

http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/02/the-tools-they-are-a-changin-the-ins-and-outs-of-toc-nyc/