Tools of Change Round-up Day 1
In the morning, I attended Practical Ebook Formatting: Limitations and Optimizations by Joshua Tallent (eBook Architects) and Phil Frank (Hendrickson Publishers). The overall message I got from this session was that when it comes to ebook formatting, we’re in something like the “browser wars” of the ’90s, with eReaders like the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, iPad, etc standing in for Netscape and Explorer. Every device has its limitations and quirks, so you have to choose between tweaking and massaging content (and creating separate versions of it) for each device, or simply target which devices you’re willing to spend the time and effort developing content for and ignore the others.
Another recurring theme was in order to get content to render consistently without heinous errors, you may need to “dumb it down” considerably. Techniques that you never think of doing for print, like saving part of a page (including text) as a JPEG, and replacing em dashes with two hyphens, and curly quotes with straight quotes, may be the safest choice.
Joshua has created a substantial page of resources on his website, where you can follow links to more information on EPUB, Adobe Digital Editions, SVG, Kindle, etc. Of particular interest (at least to me) was a link to a video from last year’s Adobe MAX session by Colin Fleming on Creating ebooks from InDesign for Kindle, Sony Reader and iPhone.
My favorite afternoon workshop was Twitter Scorecard for Publishers by Mike Hendrickson (O’Reilly Media). Mike showed several tools and methods for measuring how effectively you’re using Twitter. Chief among these was the Twitter analytics site, Klout.com. Klout measures a user’s influence on Twitter by calculating a Klout score, taking into account several factors, like the size of your engaged audience, your ability to generate retweets, how influential the people who re-tweet you are, etc. Klout thinks I’m just a “casual” Twitter user, but David and Fritz are “connectors.” Anne Marie is quite the “Persona.” Next time I see her, I’m going to ask Her Geekness for an autograph! 
Mike also used Wordle word clouds to analyze the character of Twitter feeds and suggested people check out resources like Twinfluence.com and InterTwitter.com.
I like your reference to the browser wars of the 90s. It’s because of the many formatting controls each ebook reader has that has kept me from buying a new one or even using my old one. I want to be able to buy any ebook regardless of reader. If the railroad companies could work it out, the ebook people can.
Concetor? I always thought of myself as a lego (brightly colored and painful if you step on me barefoot)
Thanks for the day 1 update, Mike!
The state of the ebook market is very frustrating. When people gush about the Kindle, I just think about how the Kindle 1 can’t handle tables and Amazon suggests turning them into images. That’s, um, insane. Kindle 2/DX can handle tables, but Amazon already made the mistake up front, so publishers are stuck.
It’s interesting that people haven’t pushed reflowable PDF more as an ebook option. But it’s up to the hardware creators to support it, and so far they seem to be focusing on the lowest common denominator.
Well of course I have a good klout score, I’m from Chicago, where we invented the word …
I heard this presentation and thought Phil Frank did a bang-up job of explaining the tough decisions small publishers have to make when turning paper books into e-books of all sorts.
I was just reading an ebook with tables on my Kindle and it was awful. Couldn’t make any sense of them because the rag was gone. Even bulleted lists look horrible. Have to go follow Anne-Marie on twitter now . . .
As someone who was running a web dev company in the late ’90s and is now doing the same for an eBook conversion company I think the comparison is pretty spot on, and a little scary
Be interesting to see how it pans out…