TOC: A Tipping Point for Books?
This article originally appeared in SLJ's Extra Helping. Sign up now!
Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 2/17/2009
Without a strong grasp of the way users engage information, publishers and librarians stand to lose their audience.That was the message driven home by presenters at the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC)—where publishers, new media professionals, and librarians, among others, converged in New York City to brainstorm about the best way to reach a technologically sophisticated audience—and that includes young people.
“Kids are growing up in a digital environment,” says Nishan Stepak, senior reference librarian for the Mount Vernon (NY) Public Library, who attended TOC, held at the Times Square Marriott Marquis February 9–11, 2009. “They’re not going to wait for something. They’re going to want it now.”
Conference goers examined print-on-demand systems—including an onsite demo of the Espresso Book Machine 2.0 (pictured), which generates bound copies in less than four minutes—and considered the current and future state of ebooks and digital readers (educators and parents have been hoping for cheaper devices to serve kids). Participants also discussed ways to harness social networking and community tools to reach readers. This especially applies to kids who are less likely to be perusing the stacks of a bookstore than they are to be trolling pages on MySpace or Facebook.
“One key word here has been community. The book as a place. The book as a conversation,” emailed Richard Nash, editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Of his fellow TOC attendees, he noted that “very, very few publishers are here, though there are plenty of librarians!”
Indeed, while some book publishers are changing the way they do things, others have dragged their heels. In this regard, “smaller publishers seem to have done a better job than bigger ones,” says Kat Meyer, president of social marketing firm Next Chapter Communications. “If they have a lot of people who need to approve something before making a decision, that can hold them back.” The absence of publishers at TOC, wrote Nash, "tells me that it will continue to be the general interest social networks—LiveJournal, Facebook, deviantART—and the libraries who will be hosting/enabling, not the publishers."
Even a relatively simple initiative such as launching a blog with a post or two a week can attract the attention of K–12 students, as some librarians are now just discovering. “If we are not familiar with the technology, we’re going to be left behind,” says Stepak, who is planning to start a blog. “And librarians are going to have a harder time getting people to come in our doors.”
