Themes

Theme 1: Writers’ Ways with Words: Past, Present, Future

  • Narratives and their representation: past, present and future.
  • Academic publishing at the crossroads: journals, monographs and eprints.
  • Professional and technical writing: new media and new messages.
  • Creative writing: so what’s creativity, and how is it taught?
  • Writing for children in an era of competing pleasures.
  • Language and cultural revival: new authors finding old voices.
  • Word processing, html and the digital tools of the contemporary author’s trade.

Theme 2: Editors’, Designers’ and Typesetters’ Ways with Words and Images: Past, Present, Future

  • Perspectives on the history of book production, printing and typography.
  • Fonts and typography: the challenge of open source.
  • The changing role of the designer.
  • Unicode and typesetting in an era of multilingual internationalism.
  • Multilingual publishing processes, human translation and machine translation.
  • Printers adopt electronic standards: the Job Definition Format.
  • Print-on-demand and digital print: new ways of making the old product.

Theme 3: Publishers’ Ways with Books: Past, Present, Future

  • The long and short of publishing: mass markets versus niche markets; long run versus short-run publishing.
  • The work of the editor: past traditions and new roles.
  • Marketing the book: meeting the consumer amidst an overload of retail commodities.
  • Publishing ebooks.
  • Small presses and specialist presses: prospects and opportunities.
  • Digital rights management: The electronic future of copyright.
  • Publishing as a tool of knowledge management.
  • Publishing as a means of capacity development.
  • Managing the content workflow: from desktop publishing to open standards.
  • The history and sociology of publishing.

Theme 4: Book Printing and Manufacturing: What’s New, What’s Next?

  • Changing technologies of book printing and binding.
  • Repurposing content and multipurpose publishing.
  • Digital supply chain management—the journey of the cultural content, from the creator to the consumer.
  • Electronic reading devices: what works and what doesn’t.
  • Reading the phone: content delivery on 3G devices.
  • Standards for digital rights management.
  • Barriers and possibilities for disability access to electronic and other published material.

Theme 5: Librarians’ and Archivists’ Ways with Words and Images: Past, Present, Future

  • Librarians’ work today.
  • eBooks in libraries.
  • MARC and MODS and METS—and other electronic cataloguing acronyms.
  • Metadata and resource discovery.
  • Indexing and cataloguing in the electronic age.

Theme 6: Booksellers’ and Distributors’ Ways with Books

  • Retailing realities—the bookstore of the past meets the bookstore of the future.
  • Bookstores online: creating new local and global markets.
  • B-2-B ecommerce: the rise and rise of the ONIX standard.
  • Book data: expanding access.

Theme 7: Learners’ Ways with Words and Images: Past, Present, Future

  • The textbook as a medium of instruction.
  • ‘Learning objects’ and elearning.
  • Print-on-demand in the new learning environment.
  • Distance learning: old challenges and new opportunities.
  • The place of text in a multimedia learning environment.
  • Educational electronic publishing standards: IMS, SCORM and others.

Theme 8: Readers’, Viewers’ and Listeners’ Ways with Words and Images: Past, Present, Future

  • The past, present and future of reading.
  • Print literacy in an era of multimodal communications.
  • Readers’ experiences of electronic reading devices.
  • From reader to user: how does the screen change the role of the reader?