Morning Highlights From Books in Browsers (Day One): "The Web Browser and the Future of Publishing"

Two Highlights from the Opening Sessions of BiB 2011 in a brief article by Jenn Webb that appears on O’Reilly Radar and Forbes.com:

• Bill McCoy (@billmccoy), executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum, talked about some fundamental business issues of EPUB3. He said there’s no intrinsic value to standards — their only purpose is to improve the efficiency of the solutions that use them; they’re a way to make things faster, cheaper, better — the value lies in the application of the standards. McCoy highlighted several ways that EPUB3 addresses these efficiencies and solutions and how the EPUB3 publishing standard is a strategic weapon for publishers.

• Freelance programmer Blaine Cook (@blaine) and author Maureen Evans (@maureen) talked about projects on the leading edge of the digital change. Evans’ book Eat Tweet, for instance, started as a twitter stream: @cookbook. Cook talked about the fluid process and the dynamic publishing environment of Newspaper Club and said the people who are building the cool new things in publishing are actually web developers. He talked about writing collaboratively with GIT and used the SXSW fieldguide he developed as a forkable guidebook on GIT Hub as an example how coding books in HTML is a much more open, accessible format.

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