"authoring" entries

Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks

A post by Steven Poole looks at the arguments and counter-arguments surrounding free digital books.

Early Look at HarperCollins' Social Network for Writers

HarperCollins' social network for burgeoning authors, Authonomy, is now in private beta. Booktwo.org provides an analysis: The real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all — in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being 'stolen', enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web…

News Roundup: Google's Book Scanning, Kindle's Future Path, Authorship Increases Exponentially, Amazon Takes on "Amazon Tax," 5 DRM Messes

A Glimpse into Google's Book Scanning Google doesn't divulge specifics about its proprietary book scanning set-up, but the Associated Press offers a brief look into the manual scanning process used for old/fragile titles. (Continue reading) Kindle's All-Encompassing Future Path Jeff Nolan writes about the path of the Kindle: It's clear that [Jeff] Bezos sees a day when any and all…

Q&A: Philip Parker, Developer of Automated Authoring Platform

Philip Parker uses his automated authoring process to develop thousands of books across 17 different genres.

Book Reading Down, Book Writing Up

In a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay, Rachel Donadio notes the interesting discrepancy between book reading and book writing. Namely, people aren't reading, but they're certainly doing a lot of writing. In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which…

Writing and Tracking through Subversion

Programmers use version control systems to track and monitor code revisions. Writers can bring the same functionality to their drafts by following Rachel Greenham's Mac OS X Subversion tutorial: What does it [Subversion] do? It manages multiple versions of a project in development. You check your project out of the repository, make changes and you commit those changes back to…

Pan Macmillan Plans Ebooks Showing Edits and Changes

Pan Macmillan is releasing ebooks with extra sauce. From thedigitalist.net: The idea that a special edition eBook can contain marginal material produced before, during, or after a print edition features in two other eBooks to be published by Picador this year. Sid Smith’s China Dreams, which we published in hardback in January 2007 and in paperback in January 2008, will…

Q&A with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner

In this Q&A, WEbook president Sue Heilbronner discusses her company's Web-based collaborative publishing.