Tim O’Reilly has decided to end the seven year old Tools of Change publishing conference.

GalleyCat has covered the event for many years, and we have many great memories from the conference. AppNewser has more details:

O’Reilly explained further that the company is shifting its focus “from hosting the conversation about publishing technology to bringing our own tools to market.” This includes a collaborative writing platform code-named Atlas. The organization will continue to share thoughts on the O’Reilly Radar and on the Safari tech blog. AppNewser has covered the show for the past few years. Here is a link to the most recent show coverage.

Between Amazon’s soon-to-be-divided Kindle “bestseller” list to debates about literary freemiums, the free eBook has been a controversial topic around the publishing Internets.

Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow, author of the new book For the Win–talking about online currency, book promotion, and if worker unions are feasible in digital culture. Doctorow (pictured via Joi Ito) discussed his controversial strategy of releasing a free eBook edition of his book alongside the print book.

Press play below to listen. Here’s an excerpt: “I make the books available as free downloads under a Creative Commons license that encourages my readers to share them and remix them, provided they are doing so non-commercially. That means one reader who loves the book who knows another reader who would love the book can put the book in that reader’s hands … Tim O’Reilly says: ‘The problem with writers isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.’ It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”

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Next week @DunkinDonuts and @WholeFoods will join @FlashlightWorthyBooks for an all-day workshop about the mysterious, rapidly-expanding world of Twitter–and now, GalleyCat readers can get a $100 discount on the workshop.

O’Reilly Media will give readers $100 off the admission price for Twitter Bootcamp on Monday, June 15, 2009. Just enter the discount code: “GALLEY” at checkout. GalleyCat will be there, reporting on the bits of 140-character wisdom.

As GalleyCat editor Ron Hogan reported last month: “Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein will be presenting their wisdom to a live audience in Manhattan, at “Twitter Boot Camp.” (Disclosure: mediabistro.com founder Laurel Touby is one of the scheduled presenters, and we’re looking forward to covering the event for GalleyCat.) ‘We’re thinking about this as a training day,’ Milstein told us, full of ‘useful, actionable information’ that should be of interest to corporate marketers, celebrities, authors, and any other public figures and institutions who want to stand out from the millions of other tweeters in the system.”

The online documents company Scribd announced the creation of Scribd Store today, a marketplace where content producers like Lonely Planet, O’Reilly Media, Berrett-Koehler, and World Bank Publications will sell digital works–with content producers earning 80 percent of revenues from all sales.

The San Francisco company counts 60 million readers for free content, and hopes that this massive reading base will tap Scribd Store. Sellers can pick prices, and current offerings include a $1 for a graphic novel and a $5,000 market research report about China.

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, praised the new service: “Scribd’s announcement is a sign that competition is alive and well in the eBook market … We’re seeing exciting new developments every day. Any publisher who isn’t paying attention will regret it!”

Tim O’Reilly has some interesting observations concerning Amazon.com‘s acquisition of Shelfari earlier this week—starting with the fact that the current playing field for book-themed social networking appears to be dominated by Goodreads.com, and he’s got a chart to prove it:

“Of course, that could change quickly if Amazon throws their muscle behind Shelfari and integrates it into their overall service,” O’Reilly notes, citing a trend where “companies with dominant share tend to get more dominant over time,” even when moving into new but related markets. “But here’s the counter,” he adds: “open and interoperable applications, including open social networks.” What if all the other social networks dedicated to books banded together and let their users communicate with each other over the fence, as it were?

O’Reilly doesn’t mention this, because his main emphasis is on the survival of the networks, but… the consequences of such a move for authors and publishers, who currently have to choose one bookish network upon which to focus their attention or else scramble to maintain some sort of presence on several of them, could be significant.

A crowd more than 300-strong gathered at the New York Public Library‘s Celeste Bartos Room for Google‘s all-day Unbound conference to be told, in no uncertain terms by an array of speakers, that if you’re not moving with the digital times, you’re just not a 21st century publisher. I paraphrase, of course, but that was certainly the vibe in the air what with Seth Godin comparing publishers to outlying planets, Cory Doctorow (on the fiction side) and Daniel Weiss (on the educational side) explaining why giving content away is a good thing, and Tim O’Reilly advocating for Google Book Search as a way of capturing the almost 75% of books that aren’t accounted for by not being in print or in the public domain.

Aside from Godin and Doctorow, Chris Anderson was on hand to give an abbreviated spiel of his bestselling THE LONG TAIL, Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics fame) talked about how the related website – now a blog with additional content features – brings in over 2 million page views a month, and J.A. Konrath stressed the importance of having “things to offer” instead of “things to sell” on an author website. But the big hit of the afternoon – at least, judging by applause – was Josh Kilmer-Purcell, who used Powerpoint in hilarious fashion to describe how MySpace hooked him up with fellow members of the Memoirist Collective. And for those who need help interpreting the slide, Kilmer-Purcell illustrated how his book, I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS, was published by HarperPerennial, which is part of HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns “half the world” – and when the Judith Regan graphic cued up, the room erupted in laughter…

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