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I’ve long been a fan of Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials magazine, an occasional, elegant, high quality and free literary journal – except that I have a huge problem with its attitude.

Five Dials is only available as a PDF, intended, say HH, to be “downloaded, printed out and enjoyed (we hope) away from the computer”. Well, bah. Not only do I think it disingenuous to use the internet for your distribution while so pompously thumbing your nose at it, PDFs are horrible on screen, and I don’t have a printer capable of rendering them any better, nor the funds to print 60 page magazines regularly. (HH even included a bizarre, fake reader’s letter to this effect, without explanation, in the first issue.)

But, but, but. It is full of lovely stuff. So I did what any literary geek would do, and printed it properly, as a nicely-bound anthology.

You might notice I’ve been using Lulu a lot recently – for this, and the Bookkake furniture manuals, and some other things… In this case, it was particularly easy, as Lulu has a default, perfect-bound A4 template, so it was just a matter of uploading each PDF issue in order, slapping a cover together, and for £8.80 (£5.81 + P&P), I have my own Five Dials anthology of the first eight issues. (Although it took three weeks to arrive… My only beef with Lulu is their fulfillment, which even without an unexplained stall and a support request, as happened in this case, delivery time is rarely less than a fortnight for standard orders. That, and the lack of an API.)

So, yay, I have a lovely bog-side coffee-table anthology to dip into over the Christmas period.

Hey Hamish Hamilton – how about offering this yourself? Keep the free pdfs, but offer a simple POD anthology once every year or so?

Or, you know, pay a decent web designer half what you must be paying your (highly skilled) illustrator/typesetter/designer for Five Dials, and actually publish on the web? We do read on it too – and there are a lot of us who’d genuinely appreciate it.

Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who don’t get Twitter, and those who are just bored by it’s sudden, seeming ubiquity: move along. Nothing to see here.)

→ The full photoset is here.

I wanted to test Lulu’s capacity for hardback books, to continue experimenting with the literary cornucopia machine, and to see if you could make a traditional diary/journal in retrospect. And you can, and it’s quite nice (apart from some weird kerning issues). No, most of it doesn’t mean anything, certainly not to anyone else, but it makes physical a very real time and effort.

(It’s a seriously good way of practicing your InDesign scripting skills too, all you book design nerds and Start-with-XMLers.)

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.

And yes, I’ll make one from your tweets, if you ask nicely and pay me a lot of money.

Update: Here’s the very hacky, very simple script I used to get all my tweets, as several people have requested. Use at your own risk. There’s almost certainly a better way.

As a little end-of-year project, I’ve just launched jocelynbrooke.com, a site dedicated to the life and work of English writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908—1966). I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Brooke in the last few months, and have begun a small campaign to revive his reputation.

Brooke’s writing, which clusters in the decades around the Second World War, is unique in English letters. I’ve managed to amass an almost complete set of his books with a particular penchant for the Kafkaesque Image of a Drawn Sword and the angst-ridden The Scapegoat, and extending to his delightful botanical treatise The Flower in Season, and his extraordinary Surrealist work of 1956 The Crisis in Bulgaria, or, Ibsen to the Rescue! His semi-autobiographical novels are works of a rare quality, combining a deliberately Proustian longing for things past with a very English melancholy and sense of place, and a sensual quality that feels quite out of its time, and which is deeply rooted in his private and currently little known life. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Brooke’s works are currently in a kind of limbo. I approached the agents for Brooke’s estate several months ago with a view to acquiring the rights to republish several of his works, as some of the lead titles of a new imprint launching later this year. Although I was initially informed the rights were available, it subsequently appeared that Faber, in the form of their ‘Finds’ POD imprint – who are already republishing Brooke’s Military Orchid trilogy – have expressed an interest in the other books as well.

While I’m pleased that anyone is interested in republishing these works, anyone who knows my opinion of Faber Finds won’t be surprised that I’m deeply opposed to this – and not for entirely selfish reasons. Faber Finds, while a great way to get little-known works back into print, does no promotion of the titles on its list, and there is no way that Brooke will find a new audience through this method. As time passes, it becomes harder and harder to revive a writer’s reputation, but it can be done: see the recent renaissances of B.S. Johnson and Julian Maclaren-Ross. For this to happen to Brooke, he needs to be republished properly, and promoted.

Conflicts between long-tail POD databases like Faber Finds and true classics republication are only going to increase, and Brooke’s agents are currently considering their position on POD and the way they license rights. I hope I get the opportunity to work with and increase the readership of Brooke’s outstanding work, and in the mean time I’ll crack on with jocelynbrooke.com.

Happy New Year.

Faber Finds is the new print-on-demand (POD) offering from Faber. It’s a classics list made up of old Faber titles, with the intention (I believe) of extending to a wider range of ‘forgotten classics’.

Slowly, the larger publishers are coming round to the view that much smaller publishers (such as Salt) have had for a long time: POD offers great benefits for publishers, mostly through doing away with the old and horrifically wasteful system of printing thousands of copies up front without any real idea of whether they’ll sell or not. This increasingly outmoded system is the root cause of much of the mid- and backlist malaise currently affecting the industry.

Publishers have traditionally looked down on POD as the domain of vanity publishers and cranks, largely due to the unacceptably poor quality of the final product. This disdain is no longer justified, and POD lists are starting to appear. I’ll declare my interest now: I’ve been working on a POD project for some time, the fruits of which will be available soon.

However, I don’t think many of these publishers have really got it – including Faber Finds, and the recently announced PFD list – and I’ll explain why.

Publishers have been at pains for some time to stress that what matters in their books, after the quality of the writing, is the production and presentation. The book as a premium object, well-made, lasting, and respectable. This is why they’ve stayed away from POD, and, to a large extent, ebooks, for so long. Leaving aside the fact that many, many current paperbacks produced by ‘traditional’ methods don’t really stand up to this, it has been the statement.

So what are Faber’s aims with the Finds list? They claim to have have spent a long time looking at the various POD offerings from printers, and they’ve gone with Antony Rowe over the US-owned Lightning Source (these two are the only real possibilities at the current time). At a glance, the books look good (they do on the website too), but both my editions arrived in substantially less-than-pristine condition. Both are heavily marked with dirt and even a large thumbprint – more obviously than these photographs show – a recurring problem with white-covered books, and surely one Faber could have anticipated. Far less forgivably, the Newby edition is badly cut, with jagged edges.

Dirt aside, I like the front covers, I really do, but there is little more to appreciate in these editions. They have generic back covers trumpeting not the book but the Faber Finds list. They have no introductions, nor any signs of individual craft or attention. Worst of all, they are both – and I expect the whole list is – photostat editions: straight reprints of previous editions without regard to consistent typography or the book format they are printed in. The result is acres of white space as an old edition is shoehorned into the new. POD printing costs by the page, so it’s no wonder they have to sell lots of copies before they make any money.

All of this seems to fatally undermine the publishers’ insistence on the premium object. Both of these books may technically have been ‘out of print’, but the Conrad is easily available in a much nicer edition from Amazon, and Abe Books has plenty of old editions of the Newby, all for far less than the £10 – £15 asking price of Faber Finds. So with no added extras, who is expected to buy them?

POD does offer a huge opportunity for publishers, but these current offerings from Faber and PFD appear to have more to do with hanging on to the rights to these works than any genuine desire to see them prosper. The rights to books that are out of print for a particular length of time revert to the author, and while the new technologies have muddied this issue somewhat, the lack of care and attention given to these reprints smacks of opportunism rather than any genuine benefit to readers or the authors’ estates.

We’re all for publishers using new technologies to create new markets for old as well as new books, and applaud any move in this direction, but these shoddy POD titles, coupled with the recent spate of lazily-designed, ill-conceived and just plain broken websites, suggest that publishers have a long way to go before they understand the workings of the new market.

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.

*

Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild. The Authors Guild is the [US] nation’s largest society of published book authors.

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:

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?

The Great Escape cover above, designed by Abram Games for Penguin in 1951, is one of my all-time favourites. And when, Moleskined-out, I needed a new notebook, it sprung to mind.

So here’s what I did. I scanned in the cover, and created a dummy edition, complete with 200 blank, numbered pages, which I had printed by Lulu – a replica edition for my own use. It cost £5, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

If you’d like to do the same, here’s the blank, numbered interior pdf for a 200pp paperback notebook (what Lulu calls Pocket B&W, Perfect Bound, 10.795cm x 17.463cm). And if you have InDesign CS2+, here’s a blank cover file, complete with bleed and spine correctly sized for 200pp (I’m pretty sure this is copyright violation, so you’ll have to scan your own favourite cover).

Note that I messed up the bleed a little, trying to preserve the edges of Games’ design, but trial and error will out.

I’m starting to see the internet as an (admittedly very slow) cornucopia machine (yes, I’ve been overdosing on the Stross again). The number of web services that let you customise ‘things’ – and sell them on – is growing rapidly, and has quite profound consequences for traditional first-order (manufacturer) and even second-order (designer) producers. And quite interesting ones for the rest of us.

So, what a surprise. Amazon has announced that it’s starting a Lulu-type POD system, through its wholly-owned subsidiary CreateSpace, which has been churning out self-published CDs and DVDs for several years now. The difference to Lulu being that products of said service will be searchable and buyable through the mighty Amazon.com, making them much more discoverable than stuff on Lulu, which is mostly only linked to from authors’ homepages.

There’s a bigger story here though, and it’s linked to this announcement:

The National Archives and Records Administration, the federal government’s official archivist, has entered into an agreement with CreateSpace, an Amazon.com subsidiary, to digitize the motion pictures in its collection. CreateSpace will digitize movies chosen from NARA’s collection of more than 200,000 motion picture titles, most of them public domain. Amazon.com will then make the DVDs available in a DVD-on-demand service ($19.99).

Creating better access to archives is unquestionably A Good Thing, but this way of doing things provokes a number of questions. The NARA claims they can’t possibly afford the costs of digitisation, and so getting Amazon to do it benefits everyone, as they get free, new copies for their archives. Charging for DVD hard copies on Amazon’s part is also justifiable, but what about electronic copies?

The reported trigger for the NARA’s decision was an earlier partnership with Google, which saw a trial run of 101 films made available through Google Video. From 200 requests for the hard copies in the previous year, the movies were seen over 200,000 times when available on the web – a clear indication that the interest was there, but not the availability. Hence the Createspace project. The NARA and Amazon executives have made the fascinating and fantastic statement that the material will remain in the public domain, meaning you can copy your Createspace DVD as many times as you like—but will they cut out the middleman and make the whole, Createspace-digitised archive available online through Google Video or similar?

The question is particularly pertinent because this is exactly what concerns me about Google Book Search: entering into partnership with libraries and archives to digitise public domain content, but not honouring the spirit of that public domain status by making the texts fully available and downloadable (including, particularly, being indexable by other agents). The Amazon/NARA partnership seems almost too good to be true, but public-private partnerships make me nervous (if you live in London, like I do, you’ll know exactly what I mean), and when rights and digital access are involved, I get very nervous indeed.

One of the subjects touched on in the fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle which I linked to yesterday was the Bookmobile, an on-demand books service in the back of a van connected to the Internet Archive’s hundreds of thousands of free, digitised texts.

The set-up, which cost around $15,000 including the car (breakdown below, no pun intended), consists of a mobile satellite connection, a couple of laptops, a laser printer, a guillotine and a book binding machine. It can produce books anywhere in the world that can see a satellite, in minutes, for a cost price of $1 a book.

The Bookmobile has been touring US schools and shows for a few years now, but in 2003 IA spin-off Anywhere Books (site unresponsive; cached here) took a Bookmobile to Uganda, where they demonstrated the technology to ministers and took it to outlying areas where books are extremely scarce:

Each class – dressed in pink, blue, or yellow school uniforms, many in bare feet – took turns watching and helping Carol make books. Watching these scenes, trying to put myself in the kids’ heads. Did they see this as simply a wonderful and fun day? Or was this like a Bookmobile from Mars? It didn’t really matter: clearly, the kids were thrilled to take part in their own educations, their own futures, in a culture where passing annual exams is far more important than the joy of reading. [Link]

As more books become digitised, come out of copyright, or are released without copyright, so more become available to those whose lives will be radrically changed for the better by them. Kahle speaks of a project in India, which has also experimented with Bookmobiles, to create an “open source” textbook for schoolchildren, available everywhere, for free. We often think of projects such as the Internet Archive and Wikipedia as centralised deposits of information, but they also serve as distribution points, spreading knowledge to places where it did not exist before.

Brewster Kahle’s very rough breakdown of the cost of the Bookmobile was as follows:

• Satellite connection: $5,000
• Car (Secondhand Ford Aerostar): $3,000
• Printer: $2,500
• Binder: $1,500
• Laptops: $2,000
• Networking: $1,000

The IA’s own Bookmobile site seems quiescent for the moment, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this. And if anyone wants to finance one of these for me to drive round the world giving books to the needy, get in touch.

Photos by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge (via First Monday) and Richard Koman.