PubWest 2010

I’ll be at the Publishers Association of the West conference in Santa Fe NM, later this week—and I’m stoked about that. November in Vancouver is dark and wet and gloomy, and New Mexico sounds like just the right antidote to that!

The conference theme this year is “Unleashing Your Publishing Potential” and I’ll be talking on the Thursday (and again on the closing panel Saturday) about unleashing the publishing potential of the Web. Which is a silly thing to say, really, because the publishing potential of the Web has been unleashed already, to staggering effect. Google indexes something like fifty trillion web pages, and they don’t claim that’s anywhere near the whole thing… So really, what I’ll be talking about at PubWest is “recognizing” the publishing potential of the Web, especially for trade book publishers.

A few recent items feed into this. First, of course, is our work here at SFU, developing tools to help integrate web and print workflows—both editorial and production-oriented. This approach is reflected in the large in a movement that Hugh McGuire at BookOven is spearheading, developing a set of Web-based tools to support book publishing. And it’s an idea that quite recently found voice at the Internet Archive’s Books in Browsers conference in October this year.

My talk thursday is part of the pre-conference tutorial “intensives.” I’ll be sharing the day with Anne-Marie Concepcion of Seneca Design and InDesign Secrets fame. Between us, we’ll cover going from print to e-books and from ebooks to print (though I’m obviously gunning for the latter option).

If you’re following from home, the hashtag for PubWest is (unsurprisingly) #pubwest — and you can check out my PubWest slides (still in revision, even after I deliver them, probably).