Unlike some of the other digitally-focused conferences I’ve attended (such as TOC Frankfurt), this was less about “what’s possible” and more about “what this means.” Which was refreshing and very interesting.

The foundation did record all of the talks, and has made most (soon to be all?) available on (I personally love all the stills . . . We all look a bit over-enthused with our hand gestures and what not.)

All of the speeches were great, and to make this even easier, here are links and quick summaries to the speeches that are available:

of Pan Macmillan gave a great overview of where we are in terms of ebooks and the digital market.

talked about and the need to connect with your audience.

Richard Nash’s speech isn’t online (yet), but he talked about the coming Age of Abundance and how economic theory provides a basis for arguing that this abundance will force prices to zero.

talked about the impact of technology on human imagination from a philosophical perspective.

Harry Blom’s speech isn’t up yet either, but he talked about Springer and publishing edatabase versions of journals.

discussed his book/iPad app.

from Faber and Faber talked about this as well, but from a publisher’s perspective.

gave the funniest, most entertaining speech (Ramy’s a born public speaker of the best variety) about publishing in Arabic and his company

discussed the role of translators in this digital age.

Finally, reading and discovery in the Age of Screens. But I’ll talk more about that in a separate post . . . For now, I just want to encourage you to check out some of these videos. I think you’ll find them very interesting and enjoyable. (And we were all limited to 10 minutes, so they’re short.)

This is a pretty amazing opportunity—not just to see Amsterdam, but because this event is pretty hardcore. There are only each of whom is allowed to talk for 10 minutes maximum (even you, Richard Nash!), with the rest of each session dedicated to discussion. Presentations are supposed to be thoughtful, challenging, smart, provocative, etc. I’m still finishing up my speech (trying to do something a little bit different than usual and have been testing out various ideas on a bunch of people with varying degrees of success . . . little does my “Intro to Publishing” class know, but they’re going to be subjected to a lot of this today), but after the conference is over, I’ll post it here and write up the event as a whole. We are being videotaped, so you should be able to watch all the presentations on the website as well.

Anyway, you can see the whole line-up but it’s basically broken into three sections: What’s Now?, What’s Next?, and Digitally Crossing Borders.

Should be really interesting, and since Ed Nawotka will be there, I’m sure there will be some great coverage on

In addition to announcing the BTBA fiction longlist next Thursday, I’ll try and post a few additional blogs. Mostly about our summer catalog, but some other stuff as well . . .