This was going to be a short post. It’s turned into a manifesto of sorts! Ah, well …
I don’t like the term “self-publishing.”
Cloud-Publishing
In the emerging world of “cloud-publishing,” it’s meaningless, and does not reflect what’s coming, what we’re already seeing signs of. Cloud-publishing — what we’re doing at Book Oven — is providing a [...]
Book Oven Open for Cooking
We’ve been toiling away behind the scenes on the Book Oven for a few months. Now we’re ready to show you what we’ve been cooking. But there’s still work to do, and we want your help in building a new model for publishing.
Are you a writer? An editor? A proofreader? A [...]
Bernard Lunn has a good article out at ReadWriteWed, examining the creative destruction currently sweeping the book business. He sees three waves of chaos descending into the traditional structures:
1. Google Book Scanning project
2. Ebooks (& Kindle)
3. Print-on-demand
Well worth a read. And part 2 of the article should come out today.
Northshire Bookstore in Vermont is the first indie bookshop in the US with an Espresso Book Machine. It’s brisk business is in self-publishing authors:
Northshire took delivery of its unit last year. Other first-generation machines went to college bookstores, like the one at the University of Alberta, and libraries, including the Library of Alexandria in Egypt [...]
These slides are pretty slim without the commentary, but I promised to put them on Slideshare, so here they are … I might get some audio up there too.
Digital & the Changing Publishing Landscape
View more PDF documents from mackinaw.
The session description was:
Digital Debut Tool Time
An insider’s presentation of new and soon-to-be-mainstreamed web-based entities providing innovative [...]
I remember my university days, when engineering textbooks cost $75-125, with a “new edition” every two years, with new edition meaning the assignments at the end of the chapters were rearranged, so that if you wanted to do the right questions for your homework, you had to have access to the new book. It always [...]
James Bridle does neat things. One neat thing he’s done is make a hardcover of all of his twitter posts. Before you get all huffy about it:
Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who [...]
I like Bob Young, not least for his great Canadian accent and self-depreciating manner. I also love the idea behind Lulu, which is to serve a market that major publishing does not have an interest in; to tap a latent market.
Here he is giving a keynote at Tools of Change:
The Espresso Book Machine, from OnDemandBooks:
What Gutenberg’s press did for Europe in the 15th century digitization and the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow.
Library quality paperbacks at low cost, identical to factory made books, printed direct from digital files for the reader in minutes, serving a radically decentralized world-wide multilingual marketplace. In [...]
Kat explains:
My point was that there are a lot of blood and guts human beings who make their (usually quite modest – from a monetary standpoint) livings by being a part of what has been until recently, the way (for better or worse) book publishing worked.
My point, dear readers was that most of the people [...]
