We reported on Copia when it was unveiled at CES. As we said then, what’s novel about Copia is the combination of eCommerce, eReaders, and social networking it offers. Consumers can buy eBooks, interact with friends, and manage content across various devices through the same platform. Plus, Copia is introducing six (six!) new eReaders to the market, which would be the last thing we need, if not for the interesting fact that all the social networking aspects are also accessible through the eReaders. Plus the Copia platform will be accessible through other devices, including iPad, iPhone, and as-yet-unannounced devices that will be exclusively powered by Copia.

We had a chance to sit down with a couple of folks from Copia and from DMC Worldwide, the 50 year old enterprise and consumer tech firm that’s backing Copia to talk about the platform. Here’s a quick summary of some of the interesting things they had to say.

First, expect the Copia Website to debut just before the June “dads and grads” season, with the six eReaders coming out just after that. While Copia has partnerships with major publishers and its catalog of available trade books won’t look terribly different from, say, Amazon’s, Copia will put a lot of energy into the academic space, where the platform’s interactivity with be a strong asset.

In terms of the social networking, as you’d expect there are recommendation engines and the ability–sort of Netflix-style–to view your friends libraries and recommendations. What’s ever cooler, though, is the ability to publish and syndicate the notes you take on your books, which become part of the Copia social network (though you can, of course, control your preferences in terms of who sees what). In academia, this is especially cool–it enables online study groups based on textbooks. Presumably, Copia is working to make strong ties with textbook publishers. And since nobody needs another social network to manage, Copia hooks into your exiting Facebook or Twitter networks if you want.

Copia could seem like just another unremarkable player in what is fast becoming a very overcrowded field if not for the integration of its social networking tools and the fact that it works across many devices. Also, the company plans to expand the platform to other kinds of media, including music and movies, which could give it a stronger hold amongst various kinds of media consumers. But we’ll have to see, once it launches, whether or not Copia will stand out.

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At the TOC conference this year, the conversation is not longer about explaining eBook basicis–now panelists are talking about interoperability between dozens of devices, reading on the cloud, and how not to piss off consumers, who suddenly have a lot of devices and stores to choose between. “e-Ink devices now look a thousand years old,” said Liza Daly, at the outset of her panel on eReaders. Keith Fahlgren during the same panel, called the Kindle 2 a “monochromatic chunk of plastic.”

Daly and Fahlgren are the team behind the Ibis reader system, a browser-based eBook system. They presented a short talk on the state of eReaders, during which they differentiated between “landlocked” devices (eReaders without wireless or other means of communication) and mobile devices. Their talk emphasized that the world of eReaders is totally different now than it was a year ago. “It’s quite clear now that if you have to plug your thing into your computer,” said Fahlgren, “you’re not going to get any of the benefits that we’re about to talk about.”

The talk also focused the problem of interoperability–that the big players in the eReader world are still making the eBooks they sell for their devices incompatible with other devices. In the world Fahlberg imagines, “Consumers should never really have to care about things like formats again,” because eBooks are interoperable.

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Looking for something to do next Wednesday at next week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York–where both this blogger and Jason Boog of our sibling blog GalleyCat will be in attendance? Or, more specifically, do you want to hear a couple of experienced folks talk about digital marketing? Reps from LibreDigital and Harlequin–two companies that have had huge success with various kinds of digital sales and marketing–will be leading two panels a week from tomorrow to give you an earful.

Bob Carlton, LibreDigital’s VP of marketing will be giving a talk at 8:30am next Wednesday called “The Digital Marketing Wave: Handselling in a Networked World” Later, at 10:30, Carlton will be joined by Malle Vallik, Director of Digital Content & Social Media at Harlequin, for a talk called “So an Author, a Publisher, and a Reader Walk into a Bar…” about recent successes with social Web marketing.

As the countdown to TOC gets going, we’ll have more info on what you can expect.

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