Nice historical analysis of how Gutenberg’s press brought evolution more than revolution. And much more great nuggetage to be found; the best historical overview I’ve seen in a while. I’d like to copy the whole thing here, but perhaps best for you to visit the site, The first printed books came with a question: What [...]
Seth Godin announced to great fanfare and hubub in the blog world that he will no longer publish his books through a traditional publisher.
Some see this as a big author shaking off the shackles of evil publishers; some publishers see this as Godin taking advantage of the investment traditional publishing made on his behalf, by [...]
Today, LibriVox celebrates five years of free public domain audiobooks.
The Montreal/Texas band Arcade Fire has just released a new album, Suburbs. Arcade Fire is about as big as indie bands get, and their plan is to stay indie – as far as I know.
You can buy the new album here:
http://www.arcadefire.com/ …
And some interesting notes about how you can buy:
* Premium digital ($7.99)
* CD + [...]
In the publishing industry there are any number of bugbears people point to to explain the collapse of the universe. Amazon gets it’s share of blame. But Amazon does what every business ought to do: it identifies needs/desires among customers and tries to answer those needs/desires with as little friction as possible.
Here’s what Jeff Bezos [...]
From the inbox:
Good afternoon,
Earlier today, the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, announced a review of the Government of Canada’s foreign investment policy for the book industry.
The Revised Foreign Investment Policy in Book Publishing and Distribution, working in conjunction with the Investment Canada Act, sets conditions for foreign investment in the [...]
I posted a new thing over at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Sifting through all these books, here’s the first bit:
The latest numbers from Bowker are extraordinary: In 2002 there were 215,000 books published in the USA, and a further 32,693 print-on-demand title (short-runs, self-published etc).
In 2008, traditional publishers put out 275,000 books; but there [...]
I was invited to do a panel on Social Media for Authors at the Writers’ Union of Canada AGM. Writer Nichole McGill was the moderator, and I was joined by the wonderful Jenny Bullough, of the visionary publishing house Harlequin. (Harlequin is the most clued-in about digital of all the publishers I know of, along [...]
I’m doing a little informal survey. I’d like to know what you think are the three most important books about the web, the digital, and its cultural implications. These could be books about technology, about sociology, about philosophy; but generally books that have helped, and will continue to help us navigate the future as it [...]
Ever since Book Oven shifted focus in November 2009 to Bite-Size Edits, I have been wanting to write about one of the major reasons for the shift: my realization that:
a) the world needs an open book-publishing platform
b) rather than building from scratch at Book Oven, we should have started with Wordpress, and built atop it.
I [...]
