Eoin Purcell's Blog

This is a new feature prompted by a real find. On reading The myth of “keeping up” on the Creating Passionate Users blog you are directed to Joe Wikert’s Book Publisher and eContent Blog. And a darn fine blog it is too.

For those interested in a career in publishing he has a great section that defines positions within the industry for example The Acquisitions Editor’s Role. It’s worth reading and so are the posts on Authors and Development Editors and a host of tips for authors.

The blog is crammed with great content and well worth visiting and digging through!

A really quality article on reading and unrealistic goals and The myth of “keeping up”!:
Here

Browsing the blog of The Institute for the Future of the Book I read over details of their forthcoming Sophie project and its well worth looking at and pondering:
Here

Normally I like to give three links but today is Sunday, tomorrow is a Bank Holiday and I am tired!

I have been looking through the really excellent blog and site O’Reilly Radar.

The site is the blog of O’Reilly Publishers who are one of the largest Computer Book Publishers in the USA. By far the most interesting aspect of all of this is that because of their involvement in computers and publishing their perspective on the future direction of publishing is well advanced of many others and items I have seen discussed recently have been mentioned in their posts and archives many months or years ago. It is well worth taking an hour or so to look over the publishing archive of Tim O’Reilly the founder which can be found: Here. One of the best posts in the mix is this one called Beyond The Book which dates from 2000.

I recommend reading as many as you have time for! It’s a treasure trove of thought provoking ideas and comment.

It’s only as you explore that you find ideas that will engage you and expose some of your assumptions for what they are.

There is a quality post on O’Reilly Radar about Purpose Driven Media.

Read the post but follow the discussion also and do, if you can (its behind a subscription wall), read the NYT article it links to.

I would draw your attention to a comment by “Brock” which I think challenges the basic reasoning and hype that the article and post are supporting:

Basically, there are two schools of though. Assuming a widget which costs $3 to make, and which customers are willing to pay as much as $10 for, how much do you charge. One school charges $3.15 to cover their costs and make a small profit. The rest of the value of the product goes to the customer. School #2 charges $9.99, maximising profit to the widget-maker.

It really is amazing what’s said and written online these days.

An interesting post from Brenda Coulter on her blog concerning Digitisation and second hand book sales.

Read it:
Here

And visit here website:
Here

There is a great post in Slushpile a blog I may have already mentioned. It’s on Self-Published authors and why people hate them. Not sure that people hate them but it is a good explanation of why there is a certain amount of skepticism of self-publishing:
Here

A great aggregating site for news on publishing from all angles. Worth reading everyday, if you have the time (which you should). visit it:
Here

The site of one of my favourite sci-fi publishing units, Tor. yes I am afraid I have a tendency to read High Fantasy and Science Fiction. The FAQ’s are worth reading in detail if you are interested in submitting a book for publication. Anyway its:
Here

The BBC is re-organising itself. At least that’s what they announced yesterday. They also released the “experimental prototype” database of their 1 million past and present BBC Programmes. It’s limited but excellent:
Here

While discussing the future with a colleague yesterday I accidentally said something that had been swimming in my head for some time. It was a simple idea, that maybe the current change is not really the CHANGE but the symptom of change that happened some time ago and the following through of all the implications of that change.

That change as I see it was the ability to easily create data in digital format. Simply being able to sit at a computer and write a document and rewrite, easily cut and paste elements within the document, send it to others with complete ease (and relatively cheaply) combined with the ability to post that data to a public audience without marked technical skills is the essential basis for this explosion in blogs and e-books and digital news.

Without the ability to write thoughts, profound or banal, easily and with features that masses of people can use, the internet would be a poorer place.

It was a comment by Emily Bell in a podcast that Jeff Jarvis directed vistitors to his blog to that really struck home. She talked of an industrial revolution phase. Now that is perhaps an over statement of the case but it strikes me that this technological change is a good example of Amara’s Law that:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

And it’s not just on the content supply side that the effect of the digital change is evident in publishing. Book publishers themselves have taken advantage of the change and are doing so even more. Layout and design done on computer has been with us since the 1980’s and it has been as much responsible for the revolution as easily exploitable digital content. It is now easier by far to exploit that content and to create inexpensive multiple versions of the content for use in a variety of contexts jobs previously done in a laborious way have become simple and mundane (and this has resulted in massively increased numbers of new titles per year as the cost of design and production came down).

That is why the article I read today here by Tom Coates made so much sense in terms of publishing.

It does mean that change is happening just not at the frenetic pace we assume and that the source and causes of this change are more prosaic than the currently fixated upon sources.

There are other implications too. It means that most publishing firms should have a better idea than they do of the direction that publishing is heading; and perhaps they do, they just aren’t telling us. In many ways if one had sat down a few years ago and considered the ease of creation, the ease of using layout and design programs that projects like lulu.com could have been foreseen and challenged.

So publishers should relax? Or rather prepare and watch, think and be ready to act when it becomes necessary (As the Guardian has impressively with Commentisfree! Or if you have foresight, resources and ability (and a good idea) pre-epmpt all the newcomers and act before them.

Businessweek has a decent article which tell us that book publishers are dead set against Google Book Search!

Google also has managed to rile up the publishing industry. Book publishers and authors have been up in arms against Google since early 2005, after the company announced its ambitious Google Print for Libraries project, now called Google Books. The project included plans to scan millions of books from five of the world’s largest libraries and make them searchable on Google’s Web site — including copyrighted texts.

It also highlights the possible partnerships against Google.

Good read

Interesting article here on Elsevier and jounal publishing.