The Future of Publishing

Reading is a funny thing. If you can do it (and, sadly, not everyone can, but that’s another post for another day), you do it without thinking. All day long, you take in letters forming words forming paragraphs forming stories. When you’re reading, you’re at the car wash, the dentist, work, home, on the subway, standing in line at the grocery store. You pick up a book, glance at the newspaper, visit a website, read a sign. It’s all reading, it’s about context, and there’s no kind of reading that is superior to the other. Sometimes you, the reader, are […]

As we all know, it is BS policy to right wrongs, protect truth, justice, and whatnot, and set people straight when they are confused. Our tasks are humble, but we perform them with dignity. Thus we find ourselves delving deep into the comment section of a recent post by the Publishing Contrarian*. We have, over time, written much about the various Google book initiatives (sample here; there’s more, we promise). First things first, Google is a commercial entity. There is no way that they are undertaking a massive and expensive book scanning project without an eye toward making money. Shareholders

As our faithful readers know, we have been strong supporters of Project Gutenberg — Gutenberg’s mission is to digitize public domain books and make them available for general usage. This volunteer-driven effort still seems to fly under most radars, but we will happily admit to utilizing this service frequently. From July 4 through August 4, 2006, the World eBook Fair will be held, providing access to approximately 300,000 free ebooks. The vast majority of these works are books currently in the public domain; the remainder, in-copyright works, have been included with permission from the copyright holders. Planned as an annual

As we continue to process our BookExpo America experience, we’ll be posting all sorts of exciting news. We did want to start your morning (it’s always morning somewhere) with an introduction to what we believe was one of the coolest announcements of the conference. Amazon.com (you may have heard of them) unveiled a complement of new features designed toward moving the publishing game into this brave new digital era. We’ll be looking at these with our noted depth later, but one item caught our attention: Amazon’s aggressive move into Print-On-Demand.

Not that we’re the type to complain*, and we’re going to be talking more about this as we get our thoughts in order (one thought, we have discovered, got on the wrong train last night and is somewhere in Virginia — as the rest of the thoughts are safe in Maryland [it turns out the states on this side of the country are really close together], we need to wait for its arrival)..where were we?…ah, thoughts, thinking, complaining. Okay, so we are at BookExpo America. It is, and there is no other way to describe this, a big-ass conference. You

Publisher’s Lunch alerts us to a new approach to galley distribution. Simon & Schuster will be experimenting with new, more communicative galleys for Stephen King’s new book. The purpose, of course, is to cut down on selling those “Not For Sale” copies. To quote from Lunch:

This just in: the publishing business is inefficient! Hmm, okay, so that’s not really news. But the fact that they’re trying to do something about it is. Business Week explores the idea of multi-channel delivery — you know, releasing in multiple formats simultaneously. The article starts off with amusing anecdotes — customers walking out of bookstores because they don’t want to wait a week for product, and bookstores over-ordering to meet quotas…then sending large quantities of books back. The so-called Caravan Project

We have a small confession to make: yesterday, we did something unethical. Willingly and deliberately, we snuck into a workshop at someone else’s conference. Yes, we walked down the hall from our own conference to another conference and brazenly walked in, sat down, and listened to a panel discussion. We will let you pause for a moment to reflect upon our crime (though we believe we have sufficient positive karma banked to protect our soul) as we reflect upon the irony of walking out of a session on blogging and writing to sneak into a session on writing and blogging*.

As we read articles about how the various Google initiatives are destroying life as we know it, we have to wonder where the viable alternatives are: There is much hue and cry about how Google is a commercial entity and surely has a profit motive. Only the most naive of us would believe otherwise. But we should recall that this project does not come free to Google, either. While authors’ groups and publishers decry the commercial intent of a corporation, largely absent from the discussion is the announcement of a hint of an announcement of an industry initiative to engage