On Saturday, December 4, I attended Book Camp NY in NYC. This turned out to be a great, fun way to spend an afternoon. Book Camp is an “unconference”. That is a conference whose agenda is ad hoc. Participants come with an idea for a meeting topic and then everyone posts their ideas in a grid and you attend what you want. Some people had pre-planned presentations with slides, etc. and others clearly had a last minute idea they wanted to talk about. As you can see from this shot of the schedule there was a plethora of stuff to discuss.
The most fun, though, was the conviviality. Everyone came in a good mood and wanting to have fun and learn something. Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly was there and wrote an article about the experience. You can find it here.
Here are my notes of the presentation by Peter Meyers, one of the most creative thinkers on digital media out there:
Wrote book on iPad apps for O’Reilly.
A lot of work to be done on books when it comes to the readers experience.
Navigating the book
Need to look at “what and where to tap” It needs to be clear and in many books it is not clear what to do. “Miss Spider” is a wonderful children’s book app that signals the reader very well.
Page browsing methods: hard to move the text in most books. Inkling has come up with some nice methods of doing this. Popular Mechanics has done a good job of doing a page browsing tool. Most tools that show pages at bottom don’t give reader any meaningful amount of information on what the pages are.
Panning the canvas: used to print where the page is the container. Itsy Bitsy Spider is a good example of making a canvas that can be navigatedf.
Search & discovery: iBird is a great app that uses parameterized searching and makes it easy to search for a bird. Poetry is an app that has a clever method of discovering new poetry (by mood and topic, for example). Aweditorium is a music discovery app that uses a compelling grid that draws you in to tap.
New kinds of content
Twitter Told Tales clever use of Twitter to tell a story
Gameification: combing stories and gaming, for example Bartelby’s Book of Buttons, The Jim & Frank Mysteries
Interactive graphics: helps to do things that are difficult to do with ink. Inkling has a clever use of graphics in a photography book where they demonstrate lighting. Project magazine has some great graphics in a kyaking article.
Transformative multimedia: for example the bird guide embeds the bird calls along with the bird description. Heart Pro is another good example.
Movable Media: has been overused and a lot of the time does not add to the reader experience.
Integrated Media: often time just use too much and can detract from the reading experience rather than improve it.
Typography: often detracts from the reading experience: full justification in magazine articles can make them hard to read.
