Taking a cue from BookCamp London, a group of Canadians have organized an unconference in Toronto to bring together authors, publishers, and technologists to discuss the future of the book.  BookCampTO is a free one day event being held June 6th at the MaRS Centre already has a list of 45 session ideas that people have volunteered to lead, or that people want to hear discussed.

“The future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.”

Some of the 45 session ideas listed for BookCampTO include:

• Building community to build your book sales
• Kindle, Sony Book Reader and the future of paper
• Lesson learned from the music industry (or how to avoid the same pitfalls)
• Schools, Libraries and Educational Facilities – how does the Digital Age change the way we learn from books?

The session ideas cover a wide landscape of possible futures for books and publishing from how social media can grow the brand of books and authors online, to podcasting and delivering books through audio and video media, to changing the book experience by using all variety of screen mediums like ebook readers, as well as smaller screens like the iPhone and Nintendo DS.  Reading books on cell phones in Japan is already a hugely popular activity.

I asked Mark Bertils on his blog who should go to BookCampTO, wondering if there was a lot of publishing industry jargon that might make it confusing to the average book lover.  He told me that because of a large industry trade show getting canceled, BookCampTO has received a lot of that traffic coming directly from publishing companies, book focused websites, and bloggers.

Though if you have creative ideas on story telling or on hacking the book then you’ll find a good audience to share your ideas with at BookCampTO

The event limit is 150 people, and as of this morning 99 people have already signed up. If you’d like to attend there’s still time to register.

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• Google and Amazon to Put More Books on Cellphones (nytimes.com)
• Two major book events cancelled (thestar.com)
• Heads-Up on BookCamp Toronto (rj-anderson.livejournal.com)

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