booktwo.org

After the recent, ongoing hullabaloo over Amazon’s attempts to monopolise the print-on-demand market, I thought I’d point to some interesting uses of POD that might change some peoples’ perceptions of the technology, and show it’s not all vanity presses and Lulu photobooks.

First up is PublicDomainReprints.org, a project by book geek and hacker Yakov Shafranovich, which takes texts from The Internet Archive and Google Books (over 2 million works) and automatically formats them and sends them to print. It’s a non-commercial project based on his own commercial POD company, and while (confessedly) ropy, it’s a good example of what can be done to get books which would never be available otherwise into readers’ hands.

Tikatok bills itself as a community “where kids channel their imagination into stories – and publish those stories into books for you to share and treasure with friends and family.” Writing and illustrations can be shared, and kids can choose from story outlines to help them write their own. In the end, they get to order their own printed book. I don’t know much about designing for kids, but the video tutorial in particular is quite helpful, and bound to get them off to a good start. As a way of bringing value to the physical book at a time when reading is allegedly in delcine, this really can’t be beat.

At the other end of the scale is OpenMute’s POD system, which builds on Lightning Source’s (I think) to offer POD services to artists and writers who wouldn’t be able to set up by themselves (although the barriers are dropping all the time). As an Arts Council-funded operation, OpenMute can afford to pay to open up services like these to others, and a great job they do too. Despite the improving quality and ease-of-use of services like Lulu, the importance of organisations that bridge the technological gap can still not be underestimated.

Finally there’s the Bookmobile, which remains for me the ultimate exemplar of the benefits of POD in action. Here’s a recent video of it in action:

• [TRAILHEAD] We Tell Stories - If you want to play the WeTellStories Arg, Unfiction’s forum is the place to go. Already spotted a number of new Twitter users playing the game.
• Sophie - Sophie 1.0 is available now. After the interesting experience I had reviewing the beta, I’ll get onto this soon.

I wanted to post this quickly, before it gets lost in the weekend. Authors and publishers who use Print-On-Demand printers in the US have recently been hearing that Amazon will only continue to carry their works if they switch to Amazon’s own POD property, BookSurge. WritersWeekly has the full story.

This is a pretty big deal. Amazon has around 15%-20% of the total book market (in the UK), but the vast majority of the online book market, which is growing all the time. Meanwhile, POD has been turning from a vanity publisher’s niche into a mainstream printing option - Cambridge University Press recently passed the 10,000 title mark (pdf news release) with Lightning Source. Big publishers are increasingly turning to POD to support backlist titles, while new publishers use the technology to bypass the industry’s traditional (and traditionally expensive) high print run, warehousing and return mechanisms (and yes, this is personal: an upcoming project of mine uses POD extensively - and not BookSurge).

Have no doubt that POD is only going to grow. 50% of all books printed are never read - that figure, coupled with the growth of ebooks (another potential monopoly for Amazon), ensures that POD will account for the majority of books published at some not-too-distant point in the future. At the moment, there are price and quality issues, but these are rapidly changing.

What Amazon is attempting to do is build a print/bookseller monopoly as POD enters the mainstream. As Amazon is the largest online bookseller, POD publishers are going to have to use BookSurge even if there books are sold in plenty of other places. And using BookSurge involves higher costs, and being locked into Amazon’s crippling discount rates. Some may say it’s time to boycott Amazon, but most won’t have that option.

It’s an incredibly retrograde step. All our recent talk about mass customisation entirely depends on open, independent manufacturing and distribution platforms - the opposite of what Amazon is trying to force on its suppliers. I have to say that we did see this coming, but it doesn’t excuse a clearly monopolistic and unethical action on Amazon’s part. We’ve yet to hear anything in the UK, but we’re going to be watching developments in the US with a keen interest.

UPDATE: I’ve already heard from one POD publsher who has 30,000 books with Lightning Source, and an exclusive contract. Over a third of their sales are through Amazon, so if this happened to them…

UPDATE 2: The same POD publisher has been back in touch, and according to Lightning Source UK, Amazon hasn’t done anything on this side of the pond yet, and they “don’t think” they will, which isn’t terribly reassuring.

UPDATE 3: Teleread’s up with it’s usual high standard of analysis.

UPDATE 29/3/07: In the comments, an anonymous POD publisher says they’ve had the buy-button removed from their Lightning Sourced books by Amazon UK. Anyone else?

• Scott Sigler’s INFECTED - free download, inexplicably limited - Boing Boing - Cory on publishers’ schizophrenic attitude to ‘free’, and the internet’s Eternal Now.

• poetrymagazines.org.uk - Just found this excellent resource from the Poetry Library: “a free access site to the full-text digital library of 20th and 21st century UK poetry magazines from the Poetry Library collection.” Awesome.
• Spurious - Just returned to reading Spurious after quite a gap. If you don’t know it, it’s one of the most intriguing literary ventures on the web. Go see.
• Pixels Vs Paper | Thu 27 March - “Should published mean ‘in a paper format?’ A chance to meet and speak with 21st century publishers of short fiction and find out where they stand in relation to the paper/online divide.”

Continuing booktwo’s mission to push lit into every available media space, online and off, we’re pleased to present a muxtape featuring some of our favourite pieces of poetry and spoken word. I’ve always been rubbish at arranging mixtapes, so apologies if the order jars a little.

1. William Burroughs - Thanksgiving Prayer
2. Stephen Spender - The Truly Great
3. Thom Gunn - Moly
4. Richard Hell - “The Rev. Hell Gets Confused”
5. Rainer Maria Rilke - Too Alone
6. Louis MacNeice - Prayer Before Birth
7. Ivor Cutler - Shop Lifters
8. Don Paterson - The Lover
9. Hilaire Belloc - Tarantella
10. T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland Part I - The Burial of the Dead
11. Brion Gysin - Junk is no good baby
12. James Joyce - Anna Livia Plurabelle (Finnegans Wake) > London, 1929

Listen to it here.

All readings are recordings of the authors themselves, with the exception of Rilke, who was, you know, German (I actually love my bilingual edition of Rilke’s selected poems, which allows you to savour the tone of the original language, even if you don’t quite understand it - but I digress). There is something quite special about hearing an author read their own work. They’ve been gathered over time from the peerless Poetry Archive, Ubuweb, and other places.

Enjoy - and know this isn’t just fobbing you off instead of real content. We’re actually working on something quite big.

• We Tell Stories - ‘Slice’, by Toby Litt - Part 2 is on - told through blogs and Twitter this time.
• FRBRizing Amazon?s Catalog - ISBNs and Related editions on Amazon and LT. Heavy geek. Ta, Ben.
• GameBoy ebook reader - Anything you can think of, the internet has already provided.
• The B&N Challenge to Publishers | Booksquare - “Visiting a publisher site means being subjected to bad design, bad search, and - yes - bad content. Not a single one of these is forgivable.”
• Wordie - Like Flickr, but without the photos [Via Russell Davies].
• Ponoko: Design and Sell pretty much anything - Mass customisation (the internet as cornucopia machine)

• Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours - Very smart article on why the big boys ebooks aren’t ‘yours’ when you buy them. No more second-hand books, but does that matter?

• Abram Games - Abram Games Poster Store - As penance for my © violation, why not go by an AG poster?
• Vatican ‘bans’ book revealing ’secret’ of pope - Fascinated by how you can can ‘ban’ a book in this age. People keep trying, and they keep failing.

• Hørselstest - Fascinating example of online interaction. Go check it out.
• Wikihistory - Short SFX story detailing the revert wars of 2104 time travel [Via Boingboing].
• BookRabbit - In Beta, this new site offers Shelfari/LibraryThing type book indexing, social features, and the promise of a lot more features. They’re courting publishers, and show a lot of promise, but it’s a crowded market.
• Encyclopedia novels [ReadySteadyBook] - “I?m trying to hunt down novels whose form is that of an encyclopedia, catalogue or dictionary.”
• Watch the Skies! - Tor are relaunching, and giving an ebook a week away with it. Good-o. [Via Csensedesign]