SirsiDynix VP Stephen Abram led this year's O'Reilly Tools of Change conference with a keynote on "Information 3.0," asking whether or not publishers will still matter in the market to come. "Information is a noun," he declared. "Nouns don't do anything. So what's social networking about? It's about the verbs."

Don't spout your negativity about the death of reading around Abram; he's having none of it. "If the book was at risk, sales would be down, library circulation would be down... none of that is true," he insisted. It was a fast, dense lecture; you should take a look at his presentation slides (PDF file) at some point and probably add his blog to your RSS feed.