This blog took a somewhat circuitous path toward conception. In March of 2006, with the assistance of Tim O’Reilly, the Digital Library Federation, and the Coalition of Networked Information, and with support from Google, Adobe, and the Mellon Foundation, I organized a small conference called “Reading 2.0” which brought together a small group of commercial and non-profit organizations engaged with digital books. The intention was to instigate the creation of a shared approach towards discovery and access for the growing number of digital book repositories. I imagined that the public would benefit from a seamless interface to online books, and that a rich secondary economy would emerge through small firms innovating in the development of services for readers and searchers.

The Reading 2.0 conference, held at the W San Francisco, sponsored an interesting set of conversations, but failed to come anywhere near to achieving its stated goals; essentially, it was naive to seek a goal in which commercial repositories agreed to a common set of APIs. On the other hand, many useful introductions were made, and I kept a conversation going through a private email list among the original participants that slowly, over the next year or so, grew incrementally yet retained its basic contours. At the same time, the landscape of publishing, scholarship, and reading became increasingly wrought with transformation, consumed by flux.

The problem with the email list, as Kevin Kelly observed early on, was that it really deserved to be a blog. And through the time that I failed to make that transition, in part because I was blessed with the distraction of guest blogging at the O’Reilly Radar site for half a year, a few things became achingly obvious:

1. The need to create a group blog to house the kind of arguments and engagements that erupted with irregularity among a subset of list participants continued to be compelling, because they deserved public airing;
2. Notably, the people who contributed most fervently and frequently, happened to be consultants or employed by non-profits and research institutes, and thus relatively free to speak their minds; and,
3. That group of us loves, in the best sense of the word, to engage (sometimes rather heatedly) in these debates because we believe the issues are important; they have profound impact on the formation of critical aspects of our societies and cultures; and they have increasing resonance with a growing population among publishers, librarians, technologists, and readers.

And so, finally, we have a blog.

Your being with us enriches our dialogue, encourages our efforts, and shapes our purpose. We appreciate that, and we hope to bring you cause to keep coming back.

Welcome.

Posted: 12|6|07 at 7:35 pm. Filed under: Admin. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Pinging is currently disabled.