In Paris. Image – iStockphoto: Onickz Artworks
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
A Concentrated App for Participants
Opening today (June 1) and continuing through June 12, the Madrid-based Digital Publishing Summit + Readmagine online events features programming co-organized by Spain’s Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez and Federation of Distributors’ Associations (FANDE) and France’s European Digital Reading Lab (EDRLab).
The use of the Swapcard platform for the program may be of interest to those who are also working to stage digital events effectively during the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, as it brings together programming, user networking, and sponsor presentation in a format that includes matchmaking, interactive scheduling, statistics, branding capacity, and program widgets.
It may not be able to get around frumpy speakers talking from their bedrooms but one of the immediate benefits here is that a registered user arrives at a dedicated and mercifully streamlined landing page.
This may require too much restraint from program presenters who prefer to boggle users with full sites of flying graphics and dancing text, but for professionals who simply need to get into whatever session they’re supposed to see–while going on with 49 other things at their desks–this will be merciful.
From this one spot, you can land on the program or “Live Session” and find your event without having to get back out onto another platform or clicking through to video teasers instead of the actually events, which is irritating and time-wasting.
Discussions (chat room) and contact options with colleagues are all in one blissfully simple spot.
The programming approach is interesting, too, and should serve as another experiment to watch as world publishing tries to find a comfortable seat on the Internet for what normally would be its many, many in-person events. The sessions run mostly two per day, going dark on June 6 and 7. While it sounds quite endless when you hear “June 1 through 12,” the programmers are looking to see if a small number of events (one or two) per day over a longer stretch of time may not be more
For the most part, the organizers have been intelligently consistent in their start times, as well, which is another mercy for attendees, streaming at 11 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. CEST (Madrid) on most days. The app will display the times in your zone, of course, once you’re registered. Toward the June 12 close of the series, the timings break rank in a couple of cases, but for the most part, the daily schedule holds steady, very smart.
No one has solved the problem of time and distance. Live-event viewing means somebody getting up extremely early. The first session of each day is at 5 a.m. New York time, for example, and 2 a.m. Los Angeles.
But this is easily the most straightforward and user-friendly approach we’ve seen and for those who aren’t already fleeing from the room as soon as someone says “webinar,” the mechanics of this approach should be welcome.
It can’t match the elegant ambience of Madrid’s Casa del Lector and Foundation GSR setting, of course, but this is the cleanest approach yet, befitting a digitally oriented series of events.
At this writing, the 4:32 a.m. ET update (0832 GMT) of the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reports that Spain stands fifth in the world for caseloads, with 239,479 confirmed infections and 27,127 deaths. France holds eighth place internationally with 189,009 cases and 28,805 deaths.
Digital Publishing Summit / Readmagine 2020 Schedule
| Date and Time | Time | Event | Speaker |
| June 1 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Content Consumption and Consumer Trends Under the Coronavirus Effect | Olivia Valentine, GlobalWebIndex |
| June 1 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | Building a Better Publishing Workflow: Recommendations from BISG | Brian O’Leary, BISG |
| June 2 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Presentation of the Digital Consumer Book Barometer | Rüdiger Wischenbart, consultant |
| June 2 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | The Future of the EPUB Standard After the Survey Organized by the W3C | Daihei Shiohama, Media Do International; Liisa McCloy-Kelley, Penguin Random House; Alex Grover |
| June 3 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Consumer Trends Under the Coronavirus Effect and In-Home Consumption and Communities of Practice | Verónica Reyero, Antropologia 2.0 |
| June 4 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | The Future of the Brick-and-Mortar Bookshops After the Coronavirus Crisis: How Things Will Change | Michael Busch, Thalia Bücher GmbH |
| June 4 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | The Future of the Book Sector After the Coronavirus Crisis: How Things Will Change | Michael Tamblyn, Rakuten Kobo |
| June 5 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Situation and Challenges of the Subscription Model for Cultural and Entertainment Content | Alexandra Borg and Erik Wikberg, Stockholm School of Economics |
| June 5 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | Accessibility Certification: Why It’s Important | Cristina Mussinelli, Fondazione LIA |
| June 8 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Reading in the Cloud | Andrew Rhomberg, Jellybooks |
| June 8 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | The Attribution Ledger Project: Regain Control of Your Works in a Web 3.0 Environment | Roanie Levy, Access Copyright and Prescient, Canada |
| June 9 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Thorium Reader Evolves, Keeps Accessibility in Focus | Daniel Weck, EDRLab, DAISY, and Richard Orme, DAISY |
| June 9 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | Leveraging OPDS 2.0 and Its Ecosystem To Improve the Distribution of Ebooks and Audiobooks | Hadrien Gardeur, De Marque |
| June 10 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Accessibility Metadata: How To Ensure That Your Readers Discover That Your Digital Publications Have Great Accessibility Features | Avneesh Singh, DAISY Consortium |
| June 10 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | Seizing the Potential of Visual Narrations | Patrick Mueller, Studio Dacmine |
| June 11 | 10 a.m. CEST / 0800 GMT / 4 a.m. ET | Toward Automating Accessible Ebooks (and More) | Ella Caulfield, Bookalope |
| June 11 | 5:30 p.m. CEST / 1530 GMT / 11:30 a.m. ET | Accessibility of Schoolbooks | Marion Berthaut, Mobidys |
| June 12 | 11 a.m. CEST / 0900 GMT / 5 a.m. ET | Bookeen & LCP: building a user-friendly and interoperable ecosystem | Michael Dahan, Bookeen |
| June 12 | 6 p.m. CEST / 1600 GMT / 12 p.m. ET | Accessible Audiobooks | Farrah Littel and Danny Farris, NNELS |
The programming is free of charge once you’ve given up a bit of contact data for registration.
Organizers hold out hope that there can be a “boutique” physical edition of the program in Madrid in the autumn.
In Madrid. Image – iStockphoto: Juan Vicente Chulia
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