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This article by Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) on GigaOm (@gigaom) summarizes author and Internet technologies consultant Clay Shirky’s (@cshirky) interview with Findings (@findings), a site for collecting, sharing, and discussing clips people find when using their Amazon Kindle and from any website. Shirky pronounced publishing itself is no longer a job, “it’s a button.” He said, “We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.”

His point is the same as the one [technology journalist] Om Malik (@om) made in a post about what he called the “democratization of distribution” that social media and other Web tools have created: namely, that publishing is now something anyone can do. You no longer have to be part of a priesthood or guild of professionals, whether it’s the book-publishing industry or the traditional newspaper business, in order to create content that can (theoretically at least) reach tens of thousands or even millions of people.

And what are publishers to do amidst this kind of disruption? The unique control publishers once had in owning a publishing platform or distribution system “— and the ability to manufacture demand or create information scarcity that came along with it — is effectively gone forever.” Shirky says publishers need to add value where it’s now required:

The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet.

Read this in full.

Depend on Somersault (@smrsault) to add value to your publishing needs, from ideation to editorial development to market research to book packaging to marketing strategy to publication to social media marketing to distribution and anywhere in the middle.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The wonder, the art, the magic, the work of creating a printed book  — often forgotten in this digital age  — is demonstrated in the above video. Filmmaker Glen Milner (@glen_milner) visited Smith Settle bookbinders near Leeds, England, where the owners, Don Walters and Tracey Thorne, allowed him to film the making of the 17th Slightly Foxed (@FoxedQuarterly) book, Suzanne St Albans’ memoir Mango and Mimosa, from start to finish. The Telegraph (@Telegraph) reports:

Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the printing plates, the stitching of the “signatures” (folded sections), the pressing and gluing, the adding of the ribbon bookmark and head and tail bands, the making of the final hardcover in green linen cloth and the numbering of the copies. All of it done with great care, much of it by hand.

The video below on Kottke.org (@Kottke) shows that back before print on demand, laser printers, and the Internet, even machine printing and binding was a time-consuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book.

Just for fun, here’s a video of what the help desk would look like back in the day when print books overtook scrolls.

And, one artist looks at print books and sees a canvas from which to carve art.

See all the amazing photos.

Also see our previous blogposts “The Technology of Storytelling” and “Introducing the New Book.”

Whether pbook or ebook, contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you pursue publishing in this digital age.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

According to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s (@pewresearch) Internet & American Life Project (@pewinternet), 43% of Americans age 16 and older read long-form digital text such as ebooks and magazines, and many say they’re reading more because books and other long-form material are in a digital format.

One-fifth of American adults (21%) report they’ve read an ebook in the past year; this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and ebook reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks. In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an ebook in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

The average reader of ebooks says she’s read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by a non-ebook consumer. For device owners, those who own ebook readers say they’ve read an average of 24 books in the previous year (vs. 16 books by those who don’t own that device). They report having read a median of 12 books (vs. 7 books by those who do not own the device.

·         30% of those who read e-content say they now spend more time reading, and owners of tablets and ebook readers particularly stand out as reading more now.

·         The prevalence of ebook reading is markedly growing, but pbooks still dominate the world of book readers.

·         People prefer ebooks to pbooks when they want speedy access and portability, but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others.

·         Ebook reading happens across an array of devices, including smartphones.

·         Those who read ebooks are more likely to be under age 50, have some college education, and live in households earning more than $50,000.

·         11% of all Americans age 16 and older – or 14% of those who have read a book in the past year – consume audiobooks.

·         The majority of book readers prefer to buy rather than borrow.

·         61% of e-reading device owners said they purchased the most recent book they read, compared with 48% of all readers.

·         Owners of e-reading devices are more likely than all Americans 16 and older to get book recommendations from people they knew (81% vs. 64%) and bookstore staff (31% vs. 23%).

·         26% of those who had read a book in the past 12 months said that what they enjoyed most was learning, gaining knowledge, and discovering information.

Read this in full.

Also see Mike Shatzkin's (@MikeShatzkin) analysis in "A feast of data to interpret in new Pew survey of book readers about ebooks."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for ebook (as well as pbook) publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Reporter Lauren A. E. Schuker of The Wall Street Journal interviews bestselling author James Patterson, who had 11 books released last year and has 13 coming out this year.

To date, the 65-year-old author has published 95 books and according to Nielsen ranks as the country’s top-selling author. Those numbers have added up to big business: Mr. Patterson earns more than $80 million a year, according to people familiar with his publishing empire.

Mr. Patterson works seven days a week out of a two-room office suite at his Palm Beach, FL oceanfront home. White bookshelves line the first room, where he does the bulk of his writing, all in pencil on white legal pads. There’s no computer; just a telephone, fax machine, an iPad, and a bag of bubble gum. The second room looks like a traditional bedroom, but the bed is covered by books, loose-leaf papers, and manuscripts.

When it comes to writing, he has a well-practiced system: he writes a detailed outline and then hires someone—often a former colleague from his advertising days — to write the ensuing scenes, usually in 30 to 40 page chunks. He will review those pages every few weeks, sometimes providing notes on them and other times re-writing them entirely.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you pursue publishing in this digital age.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Linguist David Crystal describes English as "a vacuum cleaner of a language" — speakers merrily swipe some words from other languages, adopt others because they're cool or sound classy, and simply make up other terms.

Crystal believes every word has a story to tell, even the ones as commonplace as “and.” In his new book, The Story of English in 100 Words, he compiles a collection of words — classic words like "tea" and new words like "app" — that explain how the English language has evolved.

On NPR’s Talk of the Nation (@totn), he tells about the challenge of compiling this list and the idiosyncrasies of the English language.

Read and hear this interview in full.

This interview clearly sets the foundation for the reason the new Common English Bible (@CommonEngBible) was just published: because the digital revolution is accelerating changes in the English language and its everyday usage and understandability. The popular Common English Bible, ranking #7 on the Christian retail bestseller list for April, is necessary to clearly communicate God’s Word since 9,000 new words and meaning revisions are added yearly to the English lexicon. The Common English Bible is today’s freshest translation and uses natural, 21st century English.

Sample the CEB on its website.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you clearly communicate your brand’s marketing message.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Recognizing the absolute highest quality in Christian books based on excellence in content, literary quality, design, and impact, the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (@ecpa) has announced 40 finalists in 7 categories (Bibles, Bible Reference, Children, Fiction, Inspiration, New Author, Non-Fiction) for the 2012 Christian Book Awards (@ChristianBkExpo).

The debut of the “New Author” category resulted in 6 finalists from both fiction and nonfiction, and represents a new opportunity of exposure for new voices in Christian publishing. One new author title, Kisses from Katie, also appeared on The New York Times bestseller list in the past year.

Judging results in the Non-Fiction category yielded a 3-way tie for a total of 7 finalists in that category. Other ties are in Inspiration, New Author, and Bible Reference. “This year’s 40 finalists and 5 ties represent the strength and quality of content our industry continues to produce, in both seasoned and new voices and from small, mid-sized, and large publishing houses,” says ECPA President Mark Kuyper. “We congratulate each author and the 16 publishers represented on this list!”

One title from each category will be announced April 30 as the Christian Book Award winner. And one title will be chosen among all the finalists to receive the highest honor of 2012 Christian Book of the Year.

Read this in full.

See previous winners.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate 21st century Christian publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, designed especially for publishing and marketing professionals.

The Pew Research Center’s (@pewresearch) Project for Excellence in Journalism (@PEJPew) summarizes its State of the News Media 2012 report in this Infographic.

TV is still a strong news source, but digital is the growth area, with tablets the fastest-growing platform. Social media is a fair source of news recommendations, though news consumers prefer to find stories themselves, and direct from sources like CNN.com, newspaper, and network sites. Among the findings:

·         23% of U.S. adults get news from two devices

·         44% own a smart phone, and 18% own a tablet computer

·         70% get their news from a desktop computer, and 56% from tablets

·         64% of those employed full time own a tablet computer

·         Twitter is more highly regarded than Facebook as a source of news story recommendations.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you understand the sea-changes occurring in media and publishing, and how they affect your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

A publishing mainstay capitulates to electronic technology. In The New York Times blog Media Decoder (@mediadecodernyt), Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) reports that “after 244 years, the Encyclopædia Britannica (@Britannica) is going out of print.”

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the website Wikipedia — Encyclopædia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The website is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Read this in full.

According to the Financial Times (@ftmedia), "The emergence of the Web decimated sales of Britannica. From a peak of 120,000 sets sold in 1990, sales fell sharply, with just 8,500 sets of the 2010 edition shipped."

A.J. Jacobs (@ajjacobs), who read the Encyclopædia Britannica from beginning to end and lived to write about it in The Know-It-All: One man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, says,

...the [printed] Britannica encouraged serendipitous discoveries. Look up Abbott and Costello, and you might be lured in by abalones or Absalom, who died after his luxurious hair got caught in a tree.

...physicality has its rewards....For decades, the Britannica served a symbolic purpose. Fill your living room shelf with encyclopedias, and you were announcing, "Yes, we are an intellectually curious family." A mounted moose head, but for the brainy.

Read the obituary he wrote in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the revolutionary changes occurring in 21st century publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

In the literary magazine n+1 (@nplusonemag), Maggie Gram (@maggiegram) writes about the wonder and love of listening to audio books.

Audio books are good for people driving cars because they are good at occupying part but not all of one’s attention. For me this is also true of regular books: I am a profoundly distractible reader, like a raccoon tasked with doing something tedious in a vast field of shiny objects. But while when I’m trying to read a regular book my focus takes a sort of oscillating form—now I’m reading, now I’m distracted, now I’m reading again—with audio books it’s more like sustained equilibrium. Maybe 60 percent of my attention is going to the Audio book; the other 40 percent is absorbed by something else. The exact balance shifts, but most of the time I am actually doing both things.

This is part of the appeal. Since the 1980s there have been more sighted people than blind people listening to audio books, and most of us have done so because we were also doing something else. Audio books are good for long trips. They are also good for housework, although they can be drowned out by a vacuum. I started listening to audio books because I was reading for my first set of graduate-school qualifying exams. My list of books seemed endless, and I thought that listening to some of them on mp3 might solve the problem of having too little time to read. Or rather, too little time to both read and run. With audio books I could do both at the same time.

The possibility of reading while also doing something else produces one of the stranger phenomenological characteristics of audio book reading: you can have a whole set of unrelated and real (if only partially attended) experiences while simultaneously experiencing a book. You live in two worlds at once. My first audio book was Flo Gibson’s recording of The Mill on the Floss, which, by the way, is one of the very great audio books: the sound is scratchy, but Gibson’s voice is confident and almost conspiratorial, warm and intimate and pleased to be recounting a story she knows you will be glad to have heard. I listened to it running by the Charles River with earbuds in my ears, and three years later I still associate certain spots along the Charles with scenes from the novel’s Dorlcote Mill. I also remember exactly where along the Weeks Footbridge Lucy Deane marveled at how beautiful Maggie Tulliver looks in shabby clothes. I think of it whenever I pass that spot, which means I think of it most days.

Read this in full.

We love audiobooks at Somersault (@smrsault). Contact us to help you produce and market your book(s) in audio.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Julie Bosman (@juliebosma) and Matthew Richtel (@mrichtel) write in this New York Times (@nytimesbusiness) article about the many ways tablets – by providing too many options – can distract people from concentrating on the books they’re reading; fragmenting their experience or stopping it altogether.

Email lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled ebooks on apps from Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading.

Read this in full.

The article focuses on apps and email being distractions, but we also ask the question, “When do you think the digital features and creative apps of an enhanced ebook cross the line from augmenting the book reading experience and become a distraction and interruption? Write your comments below.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan and execute your ebook publishing and marketing strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.