Coming Next Month: “Wake the Ebooks Festival” at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library
UPDATE: Good News! We just learned that festival will be webcast and will share the link on infoDOCKET when it becomes available.
An very impressive line-up of events and speakers put together by William Kane, Jeff Eller, and the Digital Publishing @ Wake team.
The Wake the Ebooks Festival is scheduled to take place on April 23-24, 2015 at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The two-day festival is organized into three events all with very memorable names (Bookfeast, Rock Opera, and Freakout). Smart move.
With so many special events going on all over the place the organizers of Wake the Ebooks Festival (an excellent name too) were smart to realize that planning a great conference (as they’ve done) is one thing but getting people to attend is not guaranteed so create events that people will remember using names unlike those seen at other conferences and that potential attendees will want to learn more about and hopefully attend. Bookfeast, Freakout and Rock Opera do this.
In other words, make yourself different (separate yourself), in how you alert people to your event, location (like a library), or new product (like a new book or new web site).
Of course, William Kane and ZSR have a great track record of doing this. Here’s an example from 2014.
Now, some details about the festival.
Wake the Ebooks Festival
Bookfeast
The Festiva
l’s first half-day will feature the so-called Bookfeast, during which a new digital imprint, the Library Partners Press, will be officially “launched.” Throughout the Bookfeast, newly published
independent authors will be reading from their selected works. Any and all interested book-lovers are invited to attend this (first ever) Bookfeast, to learn
about the Library Partners Press, to hear some uniquely talented voices, and to discover (and maybe feast upon) some newly published books.
Rock Opera
Next up, a (mock) Rock Opera is planned for that Thursday evening, with the festival moving to a downtown venue and offering a comparatively revelatory reception atmosphere, including another too-rare chance to re-consider ebooks, this time via distinctly musical interpretations — where else will you get the chance to sing along to Woody Guthrie’s These Books Are Your Books? (Don’t answer that…)
Freakout
Then on Friday, and back at the library, the long-playing work (stay with us) of the conference continues with the so-called Freakout, short for “Saving Born Digital eBooks in Libraries,” and featuring traditional panels, presentations, discussions, breakouts, and important keynotes from regionally- and nationally-recognized ebook innovators, including:
- Katherine Skinner, of Educopia, who will address how “…for centuries, memory organizations have dependably acquired, provided access to and preserved print books for future researchers, but now that books have transitioned from print-only to multimedia, many of those preservation relationships and workflows need to be re-assessed”; and
- Mitchell Davis, of Bibliolabs, who will discuss how “…there are always consequences to every technology, and in the case of publishing, the consequence has been a flood of new books that no one can keep up with.” Mitchell will describe and demonstrate Library Journal’s Self-E publishing program, designed to enable authors the chance to shift their risk profile when independently e-publishing ebooks; and
- Steve Kelley, of WFU and NASIG fame, who will describe how, if you think about it, e-serials and ebooks were very likely separated at birth (at least insofar as the handling and management of their (formerly print) format is concerned) — or something like that.
Direct to Complete Conference Program
Direct to Conference Web Site
Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Preservation, Publishing

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.