"self publishing" entries
The Crowdsourced Cat Book
Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog: The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours in late July…
Lulu Adding WeRead's Social Networking Tools
Lulu is teaming up with weRead, a book-centric social network. From The Bookseller: The agreement would combine Lulu.com's free self-publishing tools and distributions capabilities with weRead's independent ratings and reviews and readership communities on social networks. (Via Jose Afonso Furtado's Twitter stream) Related Stories: Free Ebooks with Embedded Ads Via Scribd-Lulu Partnership POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization…
Budding Authors Use Espresso Book Machine to Publish
The future of print on demand might lie in personal expression. Customers at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT are using the Espresso Book Machine to produce their own titles. From Vermont Public Radio: Since it was installed, some of the store's customers have been using the machine to produce hard-to-find books from a huge online database of titles in the…
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…
Does Skipping Publishers Mean Skipping Libraries?
When I speak to an audience of publishers, I use Getting Real as an important example of how popular bloggers who want to publish can easily skip publishers all together. 30,000 copies of a self-published PDF @ $19 (with no incremental unit cost) implies some enviable margins. Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing brings up an unintended but important consequence…