The first day of the first Tools of Change for Publishing conference, organized by computer book publisher O'Reilly Media, was a festival of practical geekery, with in-depth sessions on everything from adding multimedia to e-books to making sure your books show up on Web search engines. Monday's sessions featured such publishing folk as Rebecca Goldthwaite, Thomson Learning's director of strategic partner relations; Niko Pfund, Oxford University Press v-p and academic and trade publisher; and Bill Rusin, W.W. Norton's director of trade sales and marketing.

But the Big Theme of the Day turned out to be the importance of XML—extensible markup language—a way to structure text that allows it to be reused in all manner of digital formats from e-books to Web sites to content for mobile devices. It seemed to come up in every other session. In a daylong lineup of three half-hour "tutorials" on such topics as digitizing the backlist, adding animation and video content to e-publications and print on demand publishing, presenters returned time and again to the flexibility of using XML to create content that was "future-proof" and able to be republished in a variety of digital formats. At the tutorial on using RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds, Andy Marquez of NewsGator discussed the utility of widgets—essentially XML-based RSS readers designed to offer specific marketing and promotional information on the book and author that, in the book industry, have been developed by Random House and HarperCollins. (An RSS reader provides access to a wide variety of Web-site content without visiting each site like a browser). And Jason Hunter of the XML-based developer Mark Logic gave a demonstration of Safari Books, a subscription site that uses a Mark Logic-designed, XML-based data retrieval infrastructure to provide online access to a library of tech titles.

But TOC day one also covered a fairly broad spread of how-to-do-it digital publishing information. At the "Digitizing Your Backlist" tutorial, Goldthwaite offered tips from her experience overseeing Thomson Learning's digital conversion of 1,300 backlist titles—offering advice on everything from budgeting the process to dealing with digital vendors in India ("remember, we have accents, too, so start with a nonbusiness chat so both sides are acclimated"). At the tutorial on "Search Engine Optimization," consultant Jamie Lowe detailed how to help search engines find books, directing publishers to search engine-supplied analytic tools, like Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo Site Explorer, that provide detailed data on how searchers use their Web sites.

At the print on demand tutorial, David Taylor, Lightning Source U.K. managing director, closed the first day of TOC with a droll history of POD publishing (including a long list of baffling acronyms for "out-of-print"), offering the last of many references throughout the day to Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail. Calling POD "the YouTube of book publishing," Taylor cited "the rising demand for the obscure" and pointed to a boom in POD publishing over the past five years (he estimates Lightning Source printed 41 million books in 2006), emphasizing that thousands of new U.S. publishing startups wouldn't exist without POD. And even larger publishers are embracing the concept of "sell, then print, rather than print and try to sell."

Speakers on tap for today: Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, HarperCollins group president Brian Murray and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.