OT - eBook publishing

[Kirok of L'Stok]

Following on from Jeff's post on the last FIC thread, I just thought
I'd pass on a couple of links that I've read recently that I found
fascinating!

TIME ran an article on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009 called "Books Gone
Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature" By Lev Grossman whose most
telling paragraph for me was ...

"We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was
shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by
creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries,
the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th
century. This wasn't an accident, and it didn't happen because a bunch
of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we
should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a
result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and
technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant
you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace
had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there
was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle
class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place,
writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of
them."
<http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1873122,00.html>

Grossman goes on to show ways that he can see the Novel as evolving
along electronic lines, some more probable than others, but that last
paragraph sounds so much like the the advent of the digital age that
its spooky!

The other thing I lucked onto was a free eBook from The Rand
Corporation called "Innovation and the Future of e-Books" by John
Warren <http://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP1385/> This is more wide
ranging, looking at educational & reference works in particular and
the significance I saw for us was in the way that traditional
publishing could be *enhanced* by multimedia.

This was where I got the idea for making up freely downloadable CD/DVD
ISO images over the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networks like Bittorrent. Its
not new - ST Phase II are using this to make available copies of their
fan films that can be played on a standalone, lounge room DVD player
<http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/forum/index.php?topic=6643.0> and
Pendant Productions have been using P2P to distribute their "CD
Quality Season Sets" of Star Trek: Defiant for quite a while.
Interestingly both give "added value".

An interesting side point is that the Issuu interface that we've been
using has now added support for (self-hosted) WordPress blogs and
Joomla plus some cool looking bells and whistles although some seem to
need encoding experience. <http://blog.issuu.com/?p=108> Another
reason for looking at a self-hosted WordPress magazine or media CSS
website for 2009.

K