Granta: Welcome to the magazine of new writing - Phase One of the new Granta.com went live today. I had a hand in the spec and design with my employer Apt. A long six months, a very stressful last month, and very pleased how it’s turned out. Will try and write a longer post soon.
3:AM Magazine » Petit mort - This old review was just posted to 3:AM (ignore the stated date). Makes me think I should read and write more, and talk less.
Control|Print - “Does the digital press represent a return to the sensibilities of a traditional ?craft-based? industry, printing material of beauty on demand for the most discerning audience?” [Via Russell]
cityofsound: Monocle: design notes - Such attention to detail. I’m not entirely sold on Monocle, but I do like their approach to the web.
WEbook.com - “WEbook is a revolutionary online book publishing company, which does for the industry what American Idol did for music.” It’s an idea, for sure.
Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever - their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create a new niche: the long moment.
The idea has been around for a while - see the ‘long pose’ meme on YouTube for an example - but Flickr’s smarts are in seeing the gradual amalgamation of digital video and still photography in the same devices, and making a useful connection between the two media produced.
Literature is usually, and paradoxically, perceived as both static - fixed and unchanging on the page - and temporal; spooling along a timeline, occupying an extended period from start to finish. If literature has a photo moment, a pinpointable spot, it is the phoneme, or perhaps the word. Joyce’s great ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng‘, my favorite sound in all literature, or Keat’s ‘Forlorn!’, tolling like a bell in Ode to a Nightingale.
Is there such a thing as a long textual moment? If there is, I would suggest that it can perhaps be found - again paradoxically - in silence, whether in the Beckett’s brooding pauses, or the crystalline, breathless moment at the end of a poem, when the last words hang in the air and, soundlessly, resound.
Above, my ‘long photo’ of African Wild Dogs pacing their enclosure at London Zoo, taken this bright, shiny morning on the canal.
Stefanie Posavec ‘On the Map’ (NOTCOT) - “Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space.” Beautiful visualisations.
Amazon threat on direct selling [Publishing News] - Amazon’s latest foray against sanity: threatening publishers who compete with them on the internet. Why Amazon thinks it has a god-given right to undercut everybody else, we’re all struggling to understand.
Skoob Books, London - “To the sheer delight of the book-loving community Skoob is back!” Yay!
If you’ve not been keeping up, Amazon is making a massive and highly controversial land-grab for POD and the long tail of publishing. More info here. As this is a very big issue indeed, and no worthy body on this side of the pond seems to be making a fuss, I’m only too happy to reprint this statement and appeal from the US Authors’ Guild. Don’t think it won’t happen here.
Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of environmental spin on the move, claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that’s another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.
We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries’ Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and appears to be quite efficient at its task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It’s a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.
What’s the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the “long tail” of publishing — the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it’s uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount — or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books — to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.
We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors — since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher’s gross revenues — and publishers.
We’re reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon’s bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to legalservices@authorsguild.org.
Feel free to post or forward this message in its entirety.
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Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild. The Authors Guild is the [US] nation’s largest society of published book authors.
Jon Udell: The LibraryLookup Project - “Let’s say you’re on a book-related site and your current page’s URL includes an ISBN. You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library.” (Via Alex)
How not to do a publisher website - Lesson #1. If you (Faber) use a third party for order fulfillment (Foyles), notice when said third party changes URL handling, otherwise all your ‘buy this book’ links will FAIL.
A Brief Message: No Resistance Is Futile - “Blessed and burdened with the most malleable medium in human history, we are overwhelmed by a surfeit of dross, battered by chatter. There are benefits to gain by adding, in the form of constraints, some resistance to the materials.”
Investment news | School of Everything - Not terribly book-related, but the School of Everything got some ca$h, and that is A Good Thing. Check them out.
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