The Secret Of Our Brilliance Is Out

Via Boing-Boing, here is "The Secret of the Million-Dollar Briefcase"--an old comic-book style public service announcement about the wonders of books and their most convenient and affordable source, your public library.  A nice reminder that, in these days of budget cuts and anti-government mania, our libraries deserve and desperately need our support.

Book Publishing By Subscription: Everything Old Is New Again

Here, via Boing Boing, is a new/old twist on the self-publishing model: Fantasy novelist Diane Duane has financed her latest book, The Big Meow ("third and last in the Feline Wizards sequence") by soliciting advance subscriptions from readers.  The completion of the book was delayed by health and other problems, as Duane explains on her website linked above, but it has now been written and will be made available to subscribers, primarily in ebook format, after it has been edited and designed.  I can't tell from her site how much subscribers were asked to pay, and Duane hasn't disclosed how many individuals took her up on the offer, so there's no way to know how successful the venture was.

This way of publishing books, in which the "author's advance" is generated by direct sales to readers without the intervention of a publisher middleman, goes way back: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was financed this way in the eighteenth century, and Mark Twain raised money for the publication of U.S. Grant's autobiography by sending salespeople door to door to sell advance subscriptions.

Today, of course, marketing, payment, and delivery of the finished product can all be handled electronically, which saves time and money.  But it would seem that attracting a sufficient number of readers willing to fork over cash months or even years before the product is ready will be a difficult challenge, except perhaps for the handful of authors who already boast an avid fan base.

In the years to come, we'll be seeing more and more experiments with new business models for publishing, and I for one am hesitant about predicting with any assurance which ones will work and which won't. 

Linotype: The Film

We've been spending a lot of time on this blog lately debating the long-term impact of the e-book, but if you (like me) are fascinated by the story of how old technologies revolutionized publishing, check out this trailer for a movie now in production: "Linotype: The Film" (link via Boing Boing).

BTW did you know that Mark Twain went bankrupt investing in the Paige Compositor, a rival to Linotype that Twain was convinced would quickly conquer the world of automated typesetting? I'm guessing that if Twain were alive today he would have turned down the chance of investing in Google and would have sunk all his money into AOL instead . . .

The Bookstore To End All Bookstores

Think about the most beautiful bookstore you've ever seen. Then compare it with the picture above and admit there's no comparison. It's in Buenos Aires and you can read all about it on the wonderful website Boing Boing.