Whether your primary publishing medium is paper or the Web, you have a direct stake in how your audience values your online content – and how you’ll be paid to provide it to them. Do you charge for access? Or sell sponsorships? Or underwrite it yourself as a means of marketing your print-based products and services? Within the publishing community, there are as many strongly held opinions about the distribution of content on the Web as there are executives and investors in the dialogue. But what do our audiences tell us? How do they value the information they consume?

In this thought-provoking session, Jeff Patterson shares research conducted among the very people who work at the leading edge of information consumption: the IT professionals whose attitudes and behaviors are an early indicator of the preferences and behavior of the general population.

Patterson has spent more than 25 years as a publisher, sponsor, and consumer of professional media. As CEO, he oversees the strategy and operations of Safari Books Online, a joint venture of O’Reilly Media, Inc. and Pearson Technology Group. Safari’s flagship service, Safari Library, is the premier electronic reference library for programmers, IT professionals, and web designers. Unlike an online bookstore, Safari is a fully searchable database of the electronic versions of books from O’Reilly and Pearson’s many imprints: Addison-Wesley Professional, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, New Riders, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall Professional, Sun Microsystems Press, Que, and Sams. Safari’s portfolio includes additional electronic reference libraries: Safari HelpDesk Online for enterprise knowledge workers, Safari Business Books Online for business professionals, and Safari Enterprise Library for enterprise licenses.