Launched in 1996, AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) is an online marketplace where consumers can buy new, used, rare, and out-of-print books, “as well as cheap textbooks.” It’s a connection point between shoppers and “thousands of professional booksellers around the world who list for sale millions of books.
One way it markets its brand is through video; lots of video. It’s produced 140 videos so far and offers them on its YouTube channel. Here are 3 examples.
From Kottke.org (@Kottke) comes word that the Internet Archive (@internetarchive) is hosting a copy of the American Specimen Book of Type Styles put out by the American Type Founders Company in 1912. It’s an elegant 1300-page book showing 100s of typefaces and their possible use cases, as well as all the equipment, tools, and furniture of the printing trade at the turn of the 20th century.
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.
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.
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.
Reporter Lauren A. E. Schuker of The Wall Street Journalinterviews 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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."
...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.
The Associated Press is talking up a new “visual identity system,” to be rolled out over the coming months (a historical retrospective of AP logos is shown above with the new logo on the right).
The global news network says the look and logo are designed for the digital era and are supposed to unite its various offerings as part of a “master brand” strategy. AP called this the first significant change in its look in 30 years. The first use is on its new AP Mobile news app and AP.org website (@AP). According to its brand introduction (pdf) document, the new visual identity system brings to life the AP values of “integrity, action, and independence...and creates a distinct footprint in the media marketplace.”
AP President/CEO Tom Curley says in the announcement, “We have world-class content and world-class products and now we have the world-class look to go with them.”
The system expands the range of colors and designs available for use in AP products and services. The logomark recognizes the past stencil pattern while the logotype is black with a red underscore, both in a white box. This design is by the firm Objective Subject (@ob_sub), which says the red underscore, dubbed ‘the prompt,’ “evokes AP’s emphasis on editorial rigor and precise and accurate approach.” It goes on, “We retained the original logo’s stencil lettering, which embody the gutsy and adventurous personality of an international news organization.”
I tried to say the same thing in chapter 9 of my upcoming book Viral ("Turning a Tin Ear to Poetry"), but Baines is more comprehensive and scientifically compelling. “As the world recedes from the written word and becomes inundated with multisensory stimuli (images, sound, touch, taste, and smell), the part of the human brain associated with language will regress. While visually astute and more aurally discriminating, the areas of the brain associated with language are also associated with critical thinking and analysis. So, as the corpus of language shrinks, the human capacity for complex thinking may shrink with it.”
“Losing polysyllabic words will mean a corresponding loss of eloquence and precision. Today, many of the most widely read texts emanate from blogs and social networking sites. Authors of these sites may be non-readers who have little knowledge of effective writing and may have never developed an ear for language.”
Like so much else, that began to change in the 1960s. It was then that the Japanese inventor Yukio Horie created a felt-tip pen that used water-based ink. The following year, in 1963, the Massachusetts print-media giant Carter’s Ink developed a similar water-based marker that emitted an eye-catching translucent ink. They called it the Hi-Liter.
... The highlighter’s appeal has flourished in the digital age. Most word-processing and e-reader software products have a highlighter function. And the hand-held highlighter continues to evolve, too....When the highlighter business saw that it wasn’t being embraced by holdouts who preferred pens, it made the dual highlighter/pen. There are now retractable highlighters. And flat ones. And ones that smell like pizza.
...Due to the thin paper used in most Bibles, typical highlighters often bleed through. For that reason, G.T. Luscombe (@GTLuscombe), a distributor of Bible-study accessories based in Frankfort, Ill., got into the business of Bible-paper-friendly highlighters. John Luscombe, the president and chief executive, explains….
