CONCEPT

EBook2.0 Forum Concept

EBook2.0 Forum is a portal site to follow global developments in the digital publishing so that the new paradigm of human communication to be made creative and progressive. Key topics include:

• Applications: Education, Gaming, Enterprise publishing, etc.
• Content Business: Publishing, News media, Entertainment, etc.
• Technologies: Reading device, UI Design, Information management, etc.
• Related Industries: Advertising, Electronics, Web, Telecom, etc.
• Copyright and IPR

It is also intended to provide a global forum to discuss a roadmap of publishing, now experiencing historical change since Gutenberg, by sharing information, intelligence and interdisciplinary views from different domains and platform technologies.

It is an e-book in itself, i.e. a set of structured and interrelated hyper documents, about e-book and digital publishing. It could also provide an experimental environment of intellectual communication through intelligent and dynamic e-book supported by latest information technologies.

It was originally planned to be multilingual and inter-regional because the digital publishing in inherently global and the industry is growing as such. Digital Europe is the first attempt.

The Forum was launched November 2009 in Tokyo in Japanese by Hiroki Kamata who had varied experiences in publishing, marketing, advertising, education, policy research, as well as IT.

Besides the Forum itself, it is also a project consisting of seminars/conferences, publishing, research & development, and consulting, provided through collaboration of professionals of different backgrounds and countries.
EBook 2 Magazine, a membership weekly newsletter started September 2010, is a satellite media to provide market/technology intelligence as expert analysis and news with comments. Many of the news posts are provided for free. So, the news section of the J-Forum was transferred to the Magazine.

E-Book 2.0

E-Book 2.0 is defined as a virtual environment crossing different content and apps, i.e. technologies and services to enhance efficiency and effectivity of human communication in the 21^st century and later. Key focuses and related activities of the forum are explained in the page sections.

Business Model: Publishing is a business and digital publishing means major reorganizations of the technology base not only of the publishing industry, but of entire media industries in every value-chain, i.e. production, distribution, and retail. It will inevitably affect existing business ecosystem which was built around the old base of physical books and existed in separate from cinema, music, TV, newspaper, etc. We need to know what will come about and how.

New Technologies: Publishing is also a set of technologies to produce, duplicate, publish information to be available in efficient and effective way, to deliver some value to the authors/publishers and readers. The basis of modern publishing is digital document technology developed decades ago and now being made available ubiquitously. We can and must handle the entire process of publishing to maximize value of information to the users.

UI/UX Design: User Interface and User eXperience design are technologies and sets of engineering practices to make information meaningful. It’s far beyond content/ applications and platform/devices to provide. Digital publishing is removing boundaries between different media and so requires series of UI/UX design serving individual need for the communication. One such example is transmedia storytelling.

Social Context: The human is created social and the publishing as means of intellectual communication makes sense in the social content. Since the base human communication is changing with the web technology, publishing has no choice but to use digital technology to enhance the power of books to communicate people. Publishers need social networking capability to maximize value of the content.

Why Now?: Digital technologies unleash the publishing industry from physical constraints, i.e. ink on paper, transportation, and shelves at bookstores and it means that we have to redefine the publishing and to know how to re-design and rebuild the business models to better serve the world. Book has been a primary media for the people to understand and think of the world and it has a power to impact on the world for better or for worse.

Study 2.0: Information and registration page for the E-Book 2.0 Project Seminars held monthly by the Forum.

Publication: Registration page for Forum Monthly, Weekly Magazine and other publications.

 

J- Forum Category Structure

Application

• Enterprise publishing
• Education & Researc
• Social Media
• Gaming

Content Business

• Book Industry: covers publishing, distribution, retail
• Entertainment: Cinema, Video, Music as digital publishing
• Frankfurt Book Fair Information
• Newsmedia: newspapers, magazines, journalism

Docs & Links

Forthcoming Events

Government policies

IPR/Copyright

• Legal issues
• Market and politics
• Piracy and DRM

Log Book:

• Editorial
• Editorial Notes
• Concept sheet
• Discussion: with the guests

Technologies:

• Reading device
• UI Design
• Information Management, etc.

Related Industries:

• Advertising
• Electronics
• Web and IT
• Telecom

Read this article in: Japanese