Remember this term: Peer39 explained semantic search, which improves search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the context within which search terms appear.

The 3 million iPads sold as of June were a major topic of discussion at two conferences this month: The Big Money’s Untethered 2010: Profitable Media in the Tablet Era, and the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference. Untethered was aimed more directly at book publishers, and its “Future of Book Publishing” panel included publishing head honchos like Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, and Perseus CEO David Steinberger. But the session covered no new ground, and perhaps its only real surprise was Murray’s estimate that 40–50% of HarperCollins’s business will be digital within the next five years. Meanwhile, DPAC’s audience and panels contained few familiar faces, and its sessions moved beyond piracy and e-book pricing to provide some refreshingly new takeaways for book publishers.

Just got around to creating a page for your company on Facebook? Sorry: Fan pages are “very 2009,” said Lisa Marino, CRO of RockYou. Facebook now has over 400 million users sharing over 25 billion pieces of content every month, and publishers must be on top of the really new trends. First, recognize the importance of social gaming—playing games within Facebook. The three most popular games are all made by Zynga: Farmville has over 18 million daily active users, followed by Texas Hold’em Poker (5.5 million daily active users) and Treasure Isle (5.1 million daily active users). Facebook has made a “huge commitment” to social gaming—outsourcing gaming on the platform but aggressively growing it. 17 of the top 20 games are dominated by women. 76% of women play electronic games and most of them are within the “mom demo,” 35–50-year-old women who just happen to control the household pocketbook (and have always been the group that reads and buys the most books). This demographic plays games between two and three times a day, spending up to 20 minutes playing, and is a “captive audience” that brands can work with, Marino said. Furthermore, the affluent and urban are more likely to be on social networks, and the time they spend there is up 82% year on year.

Gamers are willing to engage with brands inside social games, in order to earn the “virtual currency” that allows them to advance. Users can also advance by spending real money—but 97% of social gaming women would rather earn virtual currency. To get it, they accept branded offers (like taking a survey—the most popular option, preferred by 34% of women—watching a video, or downloading a coupon). A 2009 survey from Q Interactive showed that nearly 80% of women playing social games have signed up for offers in exchange for more virtual currency, and 67% of those said they found the offers useful. Marino said the Facebook video ads resulted in a click-through rate in the 0.08-to-0.1% range, a marked improvement over traditional banner ads, which usually have a click-through rate of 0.05% or less.

Facebook has rolled out a “Facebook Credits” pilot program over the last 90 days and is “spending a tremendous amount of effort getting users to be comfortable using virtual currency on the platform” and accustoming them to earn credits by completing tasks like those mentioned above. Brands shouldn’t just think of these credits as in-game virtual currency: Starting in 2011, users will be able to exchange Facebook credits for real products, like shoes, as the Facebook platform will allow inventory uploads. “Getting involved in Facebook credits now will pay off as a strategy down the road,” Marino said.

Companies can engage with the games in other, “non-incentivized” ways as well. RockYou worked on a campaign for Coke inside of the Zoo World game, where users could buy a Coke vending machine for their zoo. Over 2 million vending machines were bought in the first five days of the campaign, and “impression counts for advertisers continue well beyond the flight of the campaign as users keep them in their games,” Marino noted. How about selling a virtual version of a hot new bestseller?

In a panel called “How Do You Make Real Money on Digital Content?” David Mason, SVP, AOL Content Platform, recommended changing the cost structure of content creation. AOL relies on over 40,000 professional freelance writers, photographers, and videographers to create content at a significantly lower cost than if the same were done in-house (plus, as Mason helpfully pointed out, you couldn’t fit 40,000 people in a single office building). But the panel was quickly taken over by discussion of the iPad, a seemingly unavoidable topic these days. Moderator Dave Hendricks, COO of LiveIntent (a company that helps publishers develop engaged audiences on social media platforms), asked panelist Ernie Cormier, CEO of mobile advertising solutions company Nexage, whether Apple or Amazon’s business model is “smarter.” “If you want to take who is on the defense versus who is on the offense as a sign of who’s smarter, Amazon is on the defensive,” said Cormier, pointing to the Kindle’s recent price drop.

Apple is also leading the new transition from content creation for standard broadband internet to content creation for mobile devices, including the iPad (the transition from print to digital is so yesterday). Wired magazine’s iPad edition sold almost exactly the same number of copies in its first month as the print edition. “Does it make sense for businesses to invest in device-specific versions of technology in order to get alternate spending from customers?” Hendricks wondered. Yes, Mason said: “What Wired is doing is the perfect thing to do.”

Mark Weinberg, VP Programming and Product Strategy for Hearst, was crankier. “What Wired did is insane,” he said, calling their app “overly featured and overly expensive” and the iPad itself “a $700 toy.” “Just because people bought [the Wired app] tells you nothing about what the future of that business is going to be. Turning your subscription data over to Apple is not a great model.” What he didn’t mention was that the people buying the Wired app were not necessarily the same people who subscribe to the magazine—and that’s important for book publishers to remember. Creating an app can open up your product to an entirely new audience.

Don’t limit yourself to the iPad, though, cautioned Cormier, who said that publishers could spend the money they’d spend on a single iPad app to reach many other kinds of mobile devices. Within the next year or two, he said, smartphone sales will exceed desktop PC sales, and eventually the total smartphone base will exceed the total computer base. “Make sure your lens is broad enough to take in that whole world out there.” (For more on publishers’ efforts to create mobile content, click here.)

“The Next-Generation Digital Content Platforms: Can You Use Just One?” might have been the only session of the day that was primarily about “traditional” (nostalgically referred to as “legacy”) media—i.e., content created primarily for an existing tactile surface. It helped that the panelists were all passionate about their respective media—Doug Carlson, Managing Director of Zinio, about magazines; VP Michael Tamblyn about Kobo; and Barnes & Noble‘s Anthony Astarita about the Nook. Catherine Balsam-Schwaber said iVillage users claim to interact with five separate devices in one day, so it is critical for them to be able to port their content around. “Content should be device-agnostic,” she said. Tamblyn agreed that “your books should be able to follow you.” Carlson noted that Zinio and similar apps allow instant global availability of content. A colleague who runs several ski magazines told Carlson that, while he used to mail those to his subscribers around the world (only 20% of skiers live in the U.S.), now he saves air freight costs—and those subs are receiving their magazine in a timely manner. “You start thinking about a golden age” of publishing, he said.

Tamblyn was interested to see what we would learn about how each device opens up a different book buying audience and how purchase frequency differs between devices and platforms. Balsam-Schwaber mentioned that iVillage is negotiating with publishers on interesting share models that would allow books to be published in the iVillage environment, regardless of device. Nevertheless, Tamblyn noted that content has to be appropriate: “I’m not certain Moby Dick would be better if you put whale sounds in it.”

Since part of the mission of museum publishing is to produce great, big, beautiful books, June’s D.C.–based National Museum Publishing Seminar, “Print and the Digital Network,” offered anachronisms and anomalies galore. Most of the seminar’s sponsors are high-end European and Far Eastern printers like Mondadori and CS Graphics. They declared that the illustrated, printed exhibition catalogue will be around for a long time.

Nevertheless, the museum publishing business has been greatly affected by advances in web technology. Museum-owned material that was once rarely viewed by the public is now accessible via the web. Therein lie many problems. Since the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1960s, which meant government dollars for the arts and led to the “invention” of the blockbuster exhibition, print publications have literally grown exponentially. With advances in printing and the decline of the costs of color reproduction, documenting and cataloging of museums’ own collections has become a mega printing industry, with books getting larger and larger (and heavier and heavier). The seminar focused on how to move print to the web (in books, marketing, and sales); how to get visitors to museums’ websites—and then to the museums themselves; and how to facilitate digital workflows and web design.

A project originated and partially funded by the Getty Foundation, the Getty Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, allows participating museums (ten at last count) to build a highly developed scholarly infrastructure and searchable database sample materials (a Rauschenberg painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; an out-of-print book on 17th-century Dutch painting at the National Gallery of Art).

As e-reading devices become more sophisticated (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is already optimizing its web pages for the iPad), questions arise surrounding the conversion of materials. Should there be a POD component? How to clear rights and reproductions for electronic uses when works are not part of a museum’s permanent collection? And then there’s the single greatest rights hurdle—artworks by a living artist, including film and performance art. In addition, curatorial involvement and the role of the museum director in the publishing process remain a constant issue.

The Met’s ten-year-old Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (TOAH), presented by founding project manager Teresa Lai, represents how huge these projects can be. The Met has a collection of 2 million objects, but so far curators have selected only 6,500 to appear in the TOAH, along with 900 separate thematic essays. The TOAH is a major resource, receiving over 11 million hits a year and 150,000 cut-and-pastes each week, but it is not currently connected to the Met’s content management update system (though it will be in a few months) and most visitors find it via Google or Wikipedia, not directly from the Met’s website.

Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian, quoted a web consultant who warned, “You’ve got about three years before you become a room full of stuff on the mall” if you don’t do something to open up your museum to the new. It is possible for TOAH to become interactive, though the system is currently closed. But as a two-way conversation means giving up curatorial authority, the curators must be in agreement. At many levels, we are not there yet.

Cloud computing and web security were briefly touched on, along with the costs of digitizing material and the prospect of changing digital standards. The Library of Congress’s Director of Publications, Ralph Eubanks, explained that due to these changing standards, the LOC had to rescan a large number of images for downloading, use in books and brochures etc. The LOC does not store all of its material in the cloud, because it does not consider the security sufficient.

The New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan and Modern Art Notes blogger Tyler Green urged their audience to stop “lurking” and interact and participate, “make an intervention and make a contribution” to grasp the spirit of the internet. Museums must actively engage in drawing the public to their websites, and should also make a greater push to syndicate their content on websites like Yahoo!, Green said. Think a daily Twitter feed, “why this work of art is important today” in no more than 140 characters. And don’t underestimate the audience for art. When writing for the web, “don’t dumb down, just realize who the audience is and say what needs to be said in precisely the number of words required,” recommended Mike Spiegel, a freelance creative director who recently gave the National Geographic website its first redesign in twelve years.

PT thanks marketing consultant and science enthusiast Rich Kelley for this piece.

Considering the star power of the participating scientist/authors—Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Sacks, among many others—what was perhaps most surprising about the 2010 World Science Festival was how few opportunities attendees had to purchase books by the minds they came clamoring to hear. Now in its third year, the festival once again demonstrated the public’s near insatiable appetite for science. With its budget nearing $5 million, WSF presented more than 40 events at 17 venues around the city over five days in early June. Many of the events cost $25, but 25 of them sold out and the “unofficial” estimate is that 170,000 science enthusiasts of all ages attended.

WSF is the nonprofit brainchild of bestselling author and physicist Brian Greene and his wife, TV producer Tracy Day, and aims to explore “the unfolding of the greatest and grandest of all mystery stories as our species seeks to grasp itself, the world, and the larger universe.” While the number of new sponsors and partners increases every year, the only media companies participating this year were Scientific American, New Scientist, The Week, and ABC News. Where were the publishers and booksellers? Even Bantam Dell’s announcement of Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, missed the festival, but the book’s pub date isn’t until September.

However, some scientist-authors were not shy about promoting their work. In one spirited exchange during “The Limits of Understanding” panel, AI expert Marvin Minsky seemingly grew exasperated with philosopher/novelist Rebecca Goldstein over why science cannot explain consciousness. “There are 26 different meanings for the word ‘consciousness.’ See chapter 4 of The Emotion Machine. We need to treat each meaning as a separate problem to solve.”

WSF makes a point of celebrating science’s long-standing, if not always reciprocal, relationship to art. As physicist Lawrence Krauss put it: “Artists are inspired by physics even when they get it wrong.”

The most difficult aspect of the WSF was choosing what to see. On Thursday, for instance, attendees had to choose between sessions on scientific innovation (“Modern MacGyvers”), science and art, the human genome, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the science of sound, black holes or brutality and the brain. The first event to sell out every year is Nobelist William Phillips’s Saturday afternoon science talk, this year called “Einstein, Time, and the Explorer’s Clock.” Phillips related clock making to the calculation of longitude to why you need four satellites for a GPS system. Discussing how we might slow down cesium in an atomic clock led to live demonstrations of what liquid nitrogen does to flowers, rubber balls, balloons, and even marble stairs. Young scientists scrambled to catch the prize frozen balloons Phillips flung into the audience.

Only slightly less popular was “Astronaut Diary,” where astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson spoke to children live from the International Space Station about life in space. Space Station astronauts Leland Melvin and Sandra Magnus were at the Kimmel Center live to answer dozens of questions, including the most asked one: how do you go to the bathroom in space? (Answer: air suction replaces gravity and astronauts use video cameras during training so they can learn perfect positioning.)

On the last day of the festival, booths ringed Washington Square Park offering science-related merchandise and activities aimed at “children of all ages.” Authors of science-related children’s books filled most of the schedule at “Author’s Alley” on the eighth floor of the Kimmel Center, where talks and book signings occurred. The NYU Bookstore’s selection of titles here was the only festival-related venue for book buying.