The bookstore at this year's Technology Entertainment Design conference is going virtual.
For the ninth installment of the annual A-list schmooze-a-thon -- to be held in Monterey, California, next month -- TED organizer Richard Saul Wurman has decided to replace the on-site bookstalls with a battery of new iMacs, Aptivas, and Sony VAIOs.
The array will be jacked into a barnesandnoble.com franchise set up for the event, with a sleek front end created by Silicon Alley design firm Funny Garbage, complete with streaming video and animations of previous years' speakers. Barnesandnoble.com will not charge for the shipping of the books in exchange for landing enviable product placement before an affluent and influential clientele.
In an era when many online sales sites attempt to please everyone and cast a wide net, the idea behind the TED site, says Funny Garbage founder Peter Girardi, is tightly targeted, event-specific e-commerce.
"It's really stripped down," he says. "It's not for browsing -- it's for people who know what they want."
It may seem like a no-brainer: bleeding-edge book sales for the most chic high-tech conference of the year, with a speaker schedule that reads like a roster of MacArthur Foundation grant recipients, from choreographer Twyla Tharp to Futurama and The Simpsons creator Matt Groening to RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser.
"It's a cool experiment," says TED program director David Sume. "I like the [Funny Garbage] interface better than barnesandnoble.com or Amazon.com."
Funny Garbage senior producer Rosemary Flannery says that because TED "is a very exclusive, very prestigious conference," it makes sense to take book sales at the event "up to the next step and implement an online bookstore."
One group that is regarding the experiment with a more critical eye is A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, the San Francisco-based vendor that has run TED's on-site bookshop for the last eight conferences. Purchases at TED alone have accounted for a quarter of the company's annual out-of-store sales. In the last few years, the firm has felt the pinch from massive mega-chains like Borders and from online book sales. Suburban branches in Larkspur and Cupertino have closed their doors, leaving only the flagship store in San Francisco.
A Clean Well-Lighted Place events coordinator Polly Reiheld questions whether or not the new scheme will provide conference attendees with the same level of service as the over-the-counter sales. Attendees will not be able to brush up on an author's work before attending an event, she notes.
And they won't be able to have co-author Nathan Myhrvold inscribe his name on the frontispiece of Bill Gates' The Road Ahead.
"People would wander into the bookshop between presentations and find an author sitting there, signing stock," Reiheld says.
In previous years, besides the event-specific titles, the shelves at TED were lined with books that appealed to the attendees' cosmopolitan range of interests, including art books, best sellers, and children's books.
"People would wait all year for our bookstore," Reiheld recalls. "It provided a welcome break from the routine at the conference."
The online bookstore, says Sume, will feature works by presenters like MIT's Nicholas Negroponte and naturalist Jim Fowler, CD-ROMs of previous conferences, and CDs by musicians at TED, such as jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton, the Firesign Theater dada comedy troupe, and legendary composer and producer Quincy Jones.
Though the site's high-bandwidth animations and videos will be served locally, only 15 of the 40 open machines at TED will be exclusively locked into the bookstore. The rest will be available for attendees to surf the Web at large.
"So if Steve Jobs wants to show [documentary filmmaker] Ric Burns his Web site, he can," says Flannery.
