Keith Fahlgren is the Publishing Technology Engineer at O'Reilly Media. He's been involved in extending O'Reilly's use of DocBook and the DocBook-XSL stylesheets, building an Atom Publishing Protocol infrastructure, and contributing generally trying to keep O'Reilly's content as flexible and re-usable as possible. Keith is the secretary of the OASIS DocBook SubCommittee for Publishers. More recently, Keith has been heavily involved with Ebooks, encouraging the adoption of the IDPF ePub standard and contributing the ePub output for the DocBook-XSL stylesheets. Note from the Presenter: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/ is the site for the title which received all of the comments. The author that designed the commenting system is using it for another book: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/. He has open-sourced the code for the commenting system, based on Django & DocBook, here: http://hg.serpentine.com/mercurial/book.

1. Beyond the
Book
Keith Fahlgren
O'Reilly Media
keith@oreilly.com

2. or

3. Chasing
Goals
Via trends or technology

5. Take the long view

6. Beyond

7. The consumers and the
audience became the
users, the keyboard-
clicking participants, the
people formerly known as
the audience.
Bruce Sterling in ACM interactions
http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1244

8. Connected
reading
a world in which readers communicate
constantly with other readers but also
with authors

9. You'll read a puzzling passage
from a novel and then instantly
browse through dozens of
comments from readers around
the world, annotating,
explaining or debating the
passage's true meaning.
Steven Johnson in the WSJ
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

10. Unexpected
Annotation

11. Cory Doctorow's
Flashbake
Every 15 minutes it records:
• any changes
• the current timezone
• the weather
• the last three headlines with your by-line
in your blog
quot;Where am I, what's it like there, and
what am I thinking about?quot;

12. A non-
narrative
world?

13. The online world is:
designed to be a world of
clutter - of distractions and
interruptions, of attention doled
out by the thimbleful, of little
loosely connected bits whirling
Nick Carr

15. Curators

16. photo: jypsygen on flickr

17. Goals

18. Where am I and
where do I want
to end up?

19. Find more
authors

20. Speakers into writers

21. Create
Conversation

22. written discourse is
becoming less like
oration and more
like conversation
Tim Bray
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/04/25/Long-and-Short-Forms

23. Sustain
Contact

24. Feed
Impulses

25. What will your
readers buy
on impulse?

26. Ease
consumption

27. Choices

28. Simplify
Discovery

29. Increase
Accessibility

30. Accessible
Content
• 4.4% of adults have some sort of
cognitive, reading, or learning disability
• 2.5 million can't quot;grasp or handle small
objectsquot;
• 14.1 million people with quot;vision
troublequot;

31. Get
Cheaper

32. Harness
Beauty

33. Technology
Toward
Goals

34. Find more
authors

36. Create
Conversation

37. bookglutton.com

38. http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

39. http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

40. Sustain
Contact

41. Involvement
• 7500 comments during book
development, 2000 more since
publication
• Only 10% were anonymous
• 21 people left at least 75 comments

42. Feed
Impulses

43. Old content

44. Ease
consumption

45. Shortcovers
• Chapter-level purchases
• Backed by Canada's largest bookseller

46. Simplify
Discovery

47. OPDS
Open Publication Distribution System
• Machine-readable catalogs
• Easy to create
• Easy to aggregate
• Searchable

48. Increase
Accessibility

49. ePub
Made up of either:
• XHTML
• DTBook

50. Get
Cheaper

51. Aggregating quot;Small Dollarsquot;
photo: kevineddy on flickr

52. • Linux Network Adminstrator’s Guide: $3M
• Writing Linux Device Drivers: $1.6M
• Using Samba: $1.3M
• Asterisk: The Definitive Guide: $500K
• Version Control with Subversion: $300K
• Real World Haskell: $158K (in first 5 months)

53. Harness
Beauty

54. Color
no, really

56. TOC 2010
22-24 February
Marriott Marquis Times Square
New York City

57. ?