Friday I attended Giving It Away: Books, Business and the Culture of Free held at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. The goal of the conference was to examine the impact of free culture on writing and publishing.

Now deeply into the digital age, we find ourselves thrust into a new universe of textual media, provoking some unexpected questions. Giving It Away will confront these issues of access, diversity and democracy. Increasingly, the pressure is on the publishing industry to “give it away.” It has happened in the music business and it is starting to happen in the newspaper industry. Is book publishing next? Will it go beyond sampling and current marketing methods to the very core of what we do?

The first session was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Give It Away for Free with keynote speaker Rives, “the first 2.0 poet”. Along with performing his poems, Rives discussed his pop-up books, his grandmother’s fascination with his first patent, how he ended up writing commercials and almost marrying a supermodel and the wonderful story of his hero and earphones girl. I feel that the audience were expecting some structured advice but the presentation did an excellent job demonstrating the complexities of producing online content, what happens when you give it away and how it can impact your offline existence, without attempting to lay out an approach that would be redundant three months from now. I only wish we had more sessions like this at library conferences.

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I attended the first BookCamp Toronto unconference over the weekend and left the iSchool with plenty to think about. I enjoyed it immensely and hope it will become an annual event. It was attended by small to large publishers, marketing people, authors, journalists and other interested parties and I found that the mix was a good one, with enough diversity of opinion to make the discussions interesting. I’ve included a list of the presentations I attended below, and I encourage you to go to the conference website and spend some time reading and following the links. You won’t be disappointed.

• Artefatica: an open publishing experiment. Christine Prefontaine (Artefatica)

• Relating better. Ghazaleh Etezal (InternetOfLife.com)

• At the intersection of video game & narrative. Erin Robinson (Wadjet Eye Games)

• Stories from the trenches of online bookish communities. Hugh McGuire (Book Oven/LibriVox)

• Toward the sBook: simple, searchable, smart, social, sustainable, scalable. Greg Van Alstyne, Bob Logan (Strategic Innovation Lab) Peter Jones (Redesign Research)

• Putting print in its place: the importance of the local in a world of globalized words. Amy Lavender Harris (Imagining Toronto)

Londoners Alfie Boyd and Claire Wilson have set up a system to hand out free paperbacks every month at various London tube stations as an alternative to free newspapers.

So, when is this coming to the TTC?

Has the phone ever rung when you’ve been reading a book over breakfast and, looking around for a convenient bookmark, you picked up a piece of bacon from your plate and slipped it between the pages? No? Well someone did…

Abebooks has an interesting article about all the valuable, interesting and weird things that people have found in second-hand books.

(Thanks to Kimbootu)