Welcome to Publishing Frontier!

The goal of our site is to conduct provocative public discussion of the revolution that is happening in publishing and how it effects readers, society, economics, and fundamental values such as privacy.

This blog originated in a small gathering held in March 2006 at the W Hotel in San Francisco, that was organized by Peter Brantley (currently the Director of the Digital Library Federation), with the support of Tim O’Reilly, the Coalition of Networked Information, and the Digital Library Federation. The summit, called “Reading 2.0″ — not a name with impressive originality — brought together a small and diverse group of senior staff from organizations involved in book digitization, including search engines, universities, technology providers, and non-profit foundations. The hope, naive in retrospect, was that we could generate a common set of principles guiding book discovery across multiple repositories with a common syntax and regularized results - in other words, an API. This goal was naive primarily because there are few extant incentives for repositories, particularly ones run by for-profit enterprises, to facilitate inter-operation amongst themselves; although this might have helped to generate substantial economies supporting innovation, ease of information discovery is not always optimized by those who are in the business of providing it.

Nontheless, a dialogue was engendered among the conference participants, and after much delay, this forum is an awkward attempt to air some of the thoughts of those who are most unencumbered to speak wild and unruly thoughts.

We hope the conversations that take place on Publishing Frontier will be energetic, free-wheeling, and provocative. To make sure our discussions stay on-topic, the editors reserve the right to review posts for clarity, length, and relevance. Consequently, posts may not appear immediately, although we will work hard to publish them as quickly as possible. Our expectation is that we will publish nearly all of your contributions.

To help make this happen, please adhere to the following guidelines.

1. No selling of products or services.
2. No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.
3. No in-line multimedia. If you want us to know about outside sources, please point to them; don’t paste them into your comments.

We look forward to including your voices on the site!

Thank you!

– Peter Brantley & crew