An article in The Wall Street Journal tells about best selling business author Seth Godin who has decided to cut his ties to his commercial publisher and go electronic and/or print-on-demand. He says he’ll hire a professional editor and formatter, and sell his books directly to his hundreds of thousands of blog readers and book fans.
Archive for August, 2010
Best Selling Business Author Dumps Publishing Business Model
Thursday, August 26th, 2010Old published books– Going digital…
Thursday, August 19th, 2010I am still splashing around in the web water, not always quite sure why I do what I do, but the one thing that has become clear to me is that whatever I write, web-based or hard copy, it has to be digital.
My latest book (just published: a short story collection called Out of the Mountains ) had electronic galleys that came to me by email. I was supposed to print them out and mark them, but some publishers I’m told are asking the authors to do mark-up electronically as well.
But here’s the point: I have at least three books from the early nineteen eighties when I was first publishing that are out of print from the original publishers and were never digital in the first place. A couple of them can be ordered now through the wonders of one-book-at-a-time technology (the hard copy was scanned in as .pdf files), but as I begin to prepare some of my books for e-readers, I wanted to get them scanned in as word processer files so I can make changes and digitalize for e-readers.
I’ve now done one with a pleasant-to-work-with company in Missouri called Golden Images, LLC. If you try them write to Stan Drew, who may be the whole show, but is in any case very responsive to email. The price is less that .50 a page, much less for .pdf files, but I think most of us with old books want the word processor files. Even with Stan’s good work, I am having to go through the book (Higher Ground) looking for anomalies (apostrophes that became Greek sigmas, etc.) but that’s fine because I wanted to see how the book felt anyhow– this was a book that I wanted at one point to make changes in, but couldn’t face retyping. So I’ll take my time and have fun.
More later about the differences in a typewritten book and a word processed book.
New Uses for Old Books?
Monday, August 9th, 2010The New York Times Magazine gets cute with an essay called “Creative New Uses for Books.”
Plagiarism versus Sampling
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Today’s New York Times has a piece about students who don’t know that they should, according to university standards and custom, credit Wikipedia for quoted paragraphs even though Wikipedia is a group written source. The piece ends with more conventional cases of students who simply, in order to get their degree and get on with life, use papers written by others– old fashioned plagiarism and paper buying.
But much more interesting to me is the first group, the ones accustomed to “saving” images off the web (I do this) and to downloading music and movies– a whole host of materials from the web that we consider fair game for fair use.
The piece suggests that young people raised in this world, themselves perhaps participants in the great group writing project of Wikipedia, really see quotation from sources in a different way from a previous generation with perhaps a different view of self and individuality.