O'Reilly MediaEarlier today, O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly announced in a blog post that after seven years of hosting the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, a digital publishing event attended annually by many of the biggest names and most important members of the industry, the conference is being officially retired.

Also folding along with the conference is the popular TOC blog, which, like its namesake series of events, is considered a crucial portion of most every digital publishing professional’s media diet.

The rationale behind the cancellation of Tools of Change seems largely to be one of financial priority. In the aforementioned blog post, O’Reilly alludes briefly to a digital publishing platform with the code name “Atlas” that O’Reilly Media has apparently been developing for a few years now. “Bringing [Atlas] to fruition is central to our future plans,” O’Reilly writes. “We believe it takes a big step towards fulfilling the promise of digital publishing. You’ll be hearing much more about Atlas in the coming months.”

To our knowledge, O’Reilly hasn’t yet made public the specific date on which the TOC blog will be shuttered, although he does suggest that readers “can continue to follow our thoughts about publishing on the O’Reilly Radar and on the Safari tech blog.”

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