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TOC: Lightning demos
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 — posted by Sarah
These are five-minute mini-presentations from assorted vendors.Starting them at 7:30 p.m. Pacific time seems a little cruel, but at least it's not 9 p.m. The Birds of the Feather sessions are scheduled to start at 9 p.m. and go until 11 p.m. (!!!!).
I'm clearly too old for this conference.
Mini-presentations are very hard to do.
I missed the first few. The presenter from LibreDigital is showing a social software platform for publishers.
Aha! I didn't miss Bill McCoy from Adobe, who should be talking about Adobe Digital Editions. He blogged about this earlier today.
Native PDF, but doesn't look like PDF. I looked at a beta of this earlier, which was pretty interesting. Early on, it was informally described as "iTunes for Documents."
Also supports ePub, an "open XML standard," which appears to live here.
InDesign CS3 already has support for direct export to Digital Editions.
Live, interactive content inside the document. He showed an animation of an equation (Hubble's Law) that's important in physics. I think.
"Digitization" is the wrong message. You're delivering content. In other words, move away from a book-centric thought.
Tad Staley is showing Buzzword, a web-based word processor. They like to call it "the first real word processor on the web."
Buzzword server stores the documents, so you can access them from any computer. Important for youth market, who use an average of four computers per day.
Three levels of access: author, reviewer, reader.
Sort by file name, author, page length.
Built on Flash.
All the usual bells and whistles for formatting.
Differentiators between Buzzword and other word processors? Word processor is WYSIWYG. Faithful rendering of your document from one computer and user to the next. Put a lot of time and effort into letter spacing and typography.
A couple of entertaining slams on things they do that Word doesn't.
Currently in "limited preview."
Adam Goldstein, booktour.com
"Where authors and audiences meet"
Why don't people show up for book events? They don't know about them. This product lets you enter your zip code or topics and see who is going to be around. Authors who register get their own, standard page and can then add tour dates. RSS feeds are available. Free widget to support fan sites and the like. Can send email updates. A calendar feed is available.
Basically, aggregating book tour information. This is sort of interesting, but I'm not sure it's compelling. Maybe I'm not the right audience for this.
Jason Hunter, Principal Technologist from Mark Logic
Mark Logic makes an XML content server. I spoke with them at their booth earlier today. Essentially, they are to publishing what content management systems are to authoring. Their system lets you control publishing and distribution of content (whereas content management lets you control authoring and reuse). Of course, it's not that simple, but you get the idea.
Demos:
Code search across all O'Reilly books. This is public site, so try it for yourself. It searches only code content inside O'Reilly books.
BCKS: Battle Command Knowledge System built for the Army
Really excellent presentation in a tiny amount of time. Just enough to whet the appetite.
Whew. Done. Finally. (no offense to the presenters)
Labels: toc2007
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