The new volume, again on the right, is much whiter. It’s only when you compare standard books with really white paper that you realise they’re usually a bit yellow, slightly textured. You might think that having whiter, smoother paper is an improvement. It’s cleaner, brighter, more contrasty, but… it feels cheap. The paper is smooth and crisp, like the kind of paper you buy in reams to feed through your temperamental inkjet printer. [...] Then there’s the printing. Like the cover, there’s something slightly off about it. Not only does the paper look like slick office paper, but the printing looks like it’s been churned through an office photocopier. It looks like a photocopy of the original.

… and there’s a lot more. But his point is a wider one, and bears repeating:

When publishers appear to love their own books so little, when they’re apparently happy to pass off a print-on-demand photocopy of a book as a full-price volume, it’s hard for the reader in turn to feel much love for these gradually disappearing objects.

I want to love books, but if the publisher treats them merely as interchangeable units, where the details don’t matter so long as the bits, the “content”, is conveyed as cheaply as possible, then we may be falling out of love.

I wrote about the shoddy use of POD back in 2008. Well look, the customers have noticed.

And, just as they’ve noticed this, so they’ve noticed the increased tendency of books to fall apart because they’re glued rather than stitched, and they’re starting to notice how badly-produced most ebooks are: poor OCR, bad proofing, little error correction, little or no attention to typography.

The publishing industry is happy to crow about how much it loves books, but it doesn’t often look like that to the consumer. Technologies which should be attracting more readers are being badly used to make a fast buck, and putting them off. If we lose the trust of readers, at this most critical of junctures, we will never regain it.

Photograph by Phil Gyford, licensed under Creative Commons.

So, I can finally show off this utterly lovely project we’ve been working on at Apt, with the help of my awesome friends at Asylum Films.

Two weeks, never enough cash, animators sleeping in shifts in the Directors’ flat in Haringey, and almost a thousand books…

More (and bigger) video and info at 25thestate.com.

I’m very pleased to announce that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between my employer Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live.

Several months ago we heard that the Institute was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book London on a joint project. The result of this was the realisation of a long-cherished idea from Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute. Bob had recently reread Doris Lessing’s classic novel The Golden Notebook, and wanted to bring it to a new audience by creating a public reading group, composed of younger readers.

With Lessing the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, it seemed an appropriate time. We approached HarperCollins, Lessing’s publisher, and persuaded them to allow us to use the full text of the novel online, in the most accessible format we could. We built a website which allows the text to be read, bookmarked and commented on, page by page; a blog for the readers; and a forum where the public could discuss the novel, and the reading of it – all built on free, open-source software.

This Monday, November 10th, the reading begins. Seven readers, invited by the institute and including novelists, screenwriters, critics, and journalists, will read and comment on the book, and everyone is invited to join in. We’re very proud to be a part of this collaboration, and hope it’s a great success.

HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good – HC haven’t overreached themselves, they’ve simply created a site for people to join, upload their work, and read that of others’. Sounds simple, but many similar projects have failed thanks to scope creep.

Every user gets a profile where they can create a virtual bookshelf showing which other writers’ works they’re supporting – authors get the chance to create their own “cover” for a work too, a pointless but satisfying little feature which is sure to go down very well indeed.

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 surfer. The Front List, a previous attempt at a “YouTube for books”/”crowdsourcing the slushfile”-type site, solved this by hiding everything from non-members; one approach certainly, but not one likely to bring in the crowds.

Authonomy’s FAQs wisely address many of these concerns, and they haven’t done too much to break the site in the implementation, short of disabling right-clicking on book text. As they put it, “if someone really wants to pass off your efforts as their own they�ll probably find a way” (Hint: turn off javascript). Their real attitude to the problem is more sensible: “here at authonomy, we believe that your talent is better displayed than kept hidden � and that the chances of good things happening are more likely the more hands your manuscript passes through, and the more people you enlist in your support.”

On the technical side, users upload books by chapter (as few or as many as they like) in Word or RTF formats, which are then displayed as is – imagine hitting ‘Output as web page’ in Word, if you’ve ever done such a thing. It doesn’t result in the prettiest pages, but it does mean the book appears on the site as the author made it, which is, quietly, quite a thing.

Authonomy has been a long time in the making, and in the wake of the disastrous relaunch of HarperCollins.co.uk, we feared the worst. But Authonomy (still very much in Beta, which HC.co.uk can’t claim to be) looks like a very good little set-up which is bound to get plenty of attention and users. Nice one, HC.