The first article is a fun Publishing Perspectives post with our CEO, Rochelle Grayson, entitled BookRiff Promises Curated, Customized Content to Get Readers Rockin’. And, as Ed Nawotka, Editor-in-chief of PublishingPerspectives, tweeted:

Anyone who knows Rochelle Grayson knows that “rockin’” is not hyperbole.

The second article is a well-summarized overview of BookRiff  written by Jada Bradley from inReads. In her article, inTouch: BookRiff Allows You to Remix Books, Bradley aptly asks the question:

In this age of customization, why should books be left out?

We completely agree and see BookRiff as a way to allow this to happen!

Please stay tuned for our official launch announcement tomorrow, October 6th. We are very excited, encouraged (and also a bit anxious) about opening our doors!

We are currently scheduling meetings for the Frankfurt Book Fair from October 12-15, 2011 at our Booth, Hall 8, K952. We will also be showcased in a Frankfurt Book Fair SPARKS Presentation:

BookRiff: A New Business Model for Remixed Content
In this session, Rochelle Grayson will present  BookRiff’s platform, explain what curatorial publishing is, and describe how publishers can increase their digital and print revenues.

Date: October 13, 2011
Time: 3 – 3:45 PM
Venue:  SPARKS Exhibition Site, Hall 8, N988

To schedule a one-on-one appointment, please send us an email or feel free to visit us either at our Booth (Hall 8, K952) or at the presentation. We do look forward to seeing you in Frankfurt.

“BookRiff, yet another digital publishing platform, will soon go live. Yet while it is entering a crowded field, this one is worth a close look as it has the potential to take hold, and significant potential to disrupt.[...] What makes BookRiff unique is its focus on enabling the creation of new works by providing a seamless platform for supporting the necessary business rules.”

You can read Outsell’s full article at: Rip, Mix, Burn – BookRiff Aims To Do For Content What Apple Did For Music (subscription required). For a short excerpt, see BookRiff – a new digital publishing platform to go live this month. BookRiff was also featured in Publishers Weekly: Canadian Publishing 2011: BookRiff Set for Launch , as well as in BookRiff CEO, Rochelle Grayson’s earlier O’Reilly Media interview and webcast.

We are thrilled by the coverage we are receiving and the positive responses from publishers, consumers, and strategic partners. We will be sharing more exciting announcements in the coming weeks.

I still haven’t decided what’s most impressive about this project. To start, it’s worth mentioning that this group of graduate students: Vanessa Chan, Cari Ferguson, Kathleen Fraser, Cynara Geissler, Ann-Marie Metten, and Suzette Smith operating as Pressplay, an imprint of the CCSP, have literally “produced a book on a magazine schedule,” as they explained during the April 16 launch. And they’ve done so by using a WordPress blog as their publishing platform. In doing this, they’ve created a collaborative online editorial space that allows them to engage with their audience of publishing industry professionals by inviting them to become a part of the project. As the group explains in their documentation of the project objectives, “The Book of MPub was, in the best sense, crowd-sourced and community-powered, raised by a village of industry experts—and it shows.”

As a second aspect of the project, they conducted in-depth research into the tools available for producing the book in the various formats they wanted to offer it in, then used the best of those tools to turn their dynamic blog into a PDF, EPUB, and print book. Just as they were able to mold the existing tool set within WordPress to speed up the editorial process by opening it up to collaboration, they’ve cut production time by incorporating cutting-edge technology like the Espresso Book Machine at Oscar’s Art Books. But it’s not just a shortcut: they’ve made their publishing platform all the more flexible by taking this approach. As publishing technology advances and new tools become available, they are ready to plug in.

Currently, the Book of MPub is available in its entirety for purchase on BookRiff, or for adding to another book or set of notes in your own personal Riff. But as planned, the chapters (individual student essays) will also be available to add to Riffs separately. As more student work becomes available, Pressplay and the CCSP have the opportunity to use BookRiff as a way to let individuals create their own anthology of student work based on individual interests and needs.. and I do hope to see this happen.

For BookRiff, one of our goals from the beginning has been to create a site that’s not only innovative but that’s also fun to use and accessible to everyone. Because we are introducing a new way of working with print media, this means we’ve had to be extra cautious in the way we introduce ourselves to the world. We want folks to be intrigued, but not afraid. Also, because BookRiff is meant to be an open platform whose community will help define it through their own uses of the tools, we’re careful not to be so directive as to hamper creativity. This creates an additional challenge for us because we want people to know how to use the basic tools; we just don’t want them to stop there.

In other ways, it is easy to talk about BookRiff simply, because while there’s a complex set of machinery beneath the user interface that makes book-building possible, the basic idea is just this: build your own book. Choose your own chapters, order them, and add anything else into your Riff to make it yours.

Likewise, from a content provider’s point of view, BookRiff introduces an entirely new publishing business model, along with a new way of thinking about the value of book (and other print media) content,  but the process is easy. As a “Creator”, you choose how your content is split up and viewed, you choose its price, and we don’t touch your revenue.

Establishing a brand to present BookRiff as a simple, useful tool for both consumers and creators is really the icing on a larger effort to make those messages ring true through every aspect of BookRiff. From the business model, to the site navigation, to the printing and shipment of books…

It’s nice to hear that we’re doing an o.k. job so far, but we’ve got our work cut out for us in the coming months. Beta testers, send us your thoughts!

Even after watching the video, taking the Learn to Riff tour, and perusing the FAQ, until you can see it in action, it is difficult to pin down the concept of BookRiff. This is a factor of the nature of the site, and in some ways it is intended. BookRiff is an open platform. It is moldable by-design, and the hope is that it will take on the shape of the people who use it (…and the creative works they upload and the Riffs they build).

Given that the above is all true, it’s no surprise that BookRiff has been labeled everything from a self-publishing application to most recently by author Michael Turner in a Globe and Mail interview and then again in the Quillblog, “a print-on-demand content broker.” There’s nothing wrong with boiling something down to its essential elements. As someone who is generally in favor of cutting the crap, I must admit there’s nothing false about that definition, and I appreciate the critical thinking behind it. But to be fair, in a world where BookRiff is simply a content broker, authors are peddlers, publishers traders, and booksellers merely cash registers. As someone who is also a bit of a romantic, I can’t accept any of the above. The problem is that in an industry where creativity is the fundamental value, you can’t get rid of the fluff to find the truth. With BookRiff, just as with publishing, it is the fluff: the innovation behind the machine, that makes a difference.

Right now, even behind closed doors, BookRiff is a bare-bones framework of powerful made-from-scratch tools. We think it will evolve to become a way not only for individuals to create something unique, but for publishers, authors, and other content curators to reach new audiences, engage their readers, and branch out into new sales models that they control.

We absolutely can’t wait for that to happen, and more. But first, we have to build the tools, tinker with them, and invite a few people in to tinker some more. Want to be one of those people?

There were more than a few voices contributing to the dialogue throughout the day, as authors and readers drilled publishers on everything from DRM to e-book pricing; newspaper editors defended the continual need for print circulation in an industry full of free online news; new publishing models were presented; and marketing folks hashed out best practices for web marketing and social networking tools to help sell more books. Each session concluded with a group-think on key takeaway points. Looking back at the day as a whole, here are mine:

• Publishing is in a process of evolution. As new tools are emerging for readers, traditional ideas of books and reading are changing, influenced by a variety of players both inside and outside of the traditional publishing industry. Book publishers must find ways to adapt their current business models to accommodate for shifting audience demands, while still holding on to their distinguishing value: curated books.
• Bookselling and marketing is undergoing a similar shift, as communities of readers are shifting from geographic to interest-based, and social networking tools are allowing global interest-based communities to develop. The key is to interact with these communities on a personal level. As Emiko Morita said, “every copy of Margaret Atwood’s new book is sold individually, whether by a book marketer, bookseller, or twitter user.”
• Amidst all of the change, there are a lot of myths that need debunking. Most importantly, there is the myth that publishers are behind the times, unwilling  and afraid to change, clutching on to traditional models, charging exorbitant prices for books and grappling for all the royalties we can pocket. This couldn’t be less true: innovation is happening in every corner of publishing. BookRiff is just one example; there’s Vooks, podcasts, Enhanced Editions and all sorts of other enhanced e-books, not to mention more free online sampling than one could hope for. Publishers, please give yourselves a pat on the back…and let’s keep moving.

I didn’t make it to all of the sessions, so I’d encourage others who attended to comment with their own key points to add to this list. You may also want to check out the ongoing BookCamp Twitter buzz (courtesy of Raul Pacheco @hummingbird604 ), and a nice post-BookCamp blog post by Darren Barefoot.
I’d like to thank the organizing team of BookCamp Vancouver, including Sean Cranbury, Books on the Radio; Monique Trottier, Boxcar Marketing; Crissy Campbell, Boxcar Marketing; Morgan Cowie, BookNet Canada; Nick Bouton, Taunt Media, Protagonize.com; John Maxwell, SFU Masters of Publishing Program; and Suzanne Norman, SFU Summer Publishing Workshops for putting together this event, as well as all of the other moderators for the ideas presented.

Soon, public users will be able to purchase a copy of the 8×10 (collage version) on BookRiff’s Buy Riffs section, or create their own mix of the 64 chapters Doubleday Canada has put up for sale. Until then, you might be able to grab one of the 5 sample copies Michael will be carting to WOTS this Sunday.