PUBLISHING FUTURES: NEWS

The Generalist has been following the growth of e-books, e-paper and the environmental footprint of the global publishing industry, print-on-demand and related developments.

Image from excellent blog Open Reflection, accompanying article  about a  Round Table discussion on ‘Digitisation and the Trade Book’, organized by the department of Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University.

See Previous Posts:

GREEN PUBLISHING AND THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK

THE END OF PAPER ?

Here's some more news from that front:

'The Espresso Book Machine® (the “EBM”), which was named to Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2007” list, provides a revolutionary direct-to-consumer distribution and print model for books. The EBM is essentially an ATM for books that automatically prints, binds, and trims, on demand at point of sale, perfect-bound, library-quality paperback books. These books, which have full color covers, are indistinguishable from other books sold in bookstores. A 300-page book can be produced in four minutes (serially, in three minutes) for a cost of consumables of a penny per page (the EBM can produce a book of up to 830 pages). “EspressNet,” the EBM’s proprietary and copyrighted software system, assures the security of publishers’ titles, automatically tracks all jobs, and remits all royalty payments. The EBM produces a books using letter sized (8.5" x 11") or A4 paper, tabloid (11" x 17") or A3 coverstock, toner, ink and glue. Ultimately, the EBM will make it possible to distribute virtually every book ever published, in any language, anywhere on earth, as easily, quickly, and cheaply as e-mail.'  'www.ondemandbooks.com/the_ebm.htm

  The site includes a pdf of a speech by EBMs developer Jacob Epstein. Here is an extract.

'Ten years ago in a series of lectures that I delivered at the New York Public Library in which I sketched out the digital future as I saw it then and as it has since emerged I said that a book making machine, an ATM for books that receives a digital file and automatically prints, trims and binds single copies on demand at remote locations anywhere on earth where connectivity exists was an essential component of the decentralized digital future. In 2007, the last year for which figures are available 3.2 billion books according to the Book Industry Study Group were sold in the United States alone, not including the rapidly growing self-publishing category made possible by print on demand technology. In the digital future the world wide production of titles in all languages can hardly be imagined, creating myriad opportunities for decentralized print on demand and improved mobile, multipurpose devices with longer battery life and more legible screens. To speculate further at this stage is useless, except to posit billions of texts for billions of readers: the Gutenberg effect to the power of x. '

The first such machine in the UK was installed at Blackwell's Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London in April. See: 'Revolutionary Expresso Book Machine launches in London' by Alison Flood [The Guardian. 24.4.09]

http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/digitisation-and-the-trade-book/

'The decline and fall of books: Traditional bookshops are closing; vending machines are churning out novels; and e-books are the new paperbacks; so is this the final chapter for the book industry.

Interesting piece by Nicholas Clee , the joint editor of the book industry newsletter BookBrunch in The Times (May 7, 2009)? In short, bookshops and publishers declining, digital readers & POD still in development.

He concludes: 'Will the bookshop of the future consist of a few hundred bestsellers and a print-on-demand machine? At Blackwell's, such a prospect required an imaginative leap. The EBM would print only some out-of-copyright works and those only if purchasers knew exactly what they wanted. The customers' terminal in the store was not functioning: you had to ask the bookseller to search for a title. The copyrighted works that various publishers are making available had not yet come through, and there was no search function on Blackwell's website. A Gutenberg-style revolution is not, on this evidence, expected in the next few months. But if you are a lover of well-stocked bookshops, then you should enjoy them while you can. '

One of the most interesting Print-on-Demand companies is Blurb  Good interview with Eileen Gittings, the company's founder on POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing, an excellent blog site by Mick Rooney. For tips on how to make a Blurb book, see The Art of Engineering. Watch Eileen Gittings speak on Vator TV on YouTube.

According to vunet.com, this week Google, who already maintain a catalogue of 500,000 public domain titles announced plans to enter the electronic book sales market later this year. Amazon will be shipping a new Kindle DX reading device this month.

Borders has launched book downloads on its site for the first time in a bid to become the leading UK online bookseller, according to newmediaage.

http://bznotes.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/e-ink-digital-books-soon-in-color/

Boston Business Journal reports this week that E Ink, the Cambridge, Mass.-based developer of display technologies for Amazon's Kindle e-reader, said it has agreed to a $215 million buyout by Taiwan’s Prime View International.

UK consumer guide to E-book readers published last week in Daily Mail

WILCO & THE LIEUTENANT'S MISTRESS

Its Wilco's only UK club gig and my son Louis bought me tickets for my birthday. New album out now.

Louis' band The Lieutenants Mistress are competing in the Green Man Festival band competition. Vote for them here [you have to register].

BIT TRAVEL GUIDE: Richard S. Erlich

Left: Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma. 16th July 1995. She is currently on trial.

Ever since we posted up the Intro to the 1970 BIT Travel Guide - and the story got picked up by Slate, interest has remained high.

Pleased to receive recent feedback this week from one of its original users, Richard S. Erlich, who writes: 'I probably bought it in a bookshop in California before departure, or was given it along the way by a returning traveller. I am now searching around to find a copy to read again.

'Legend has it there a frayed original BIT guide is somewhere in northern Thailand, so i am rounding up the usual suspects to see if I can find it and, ultimately, scan its best parts, including its introduction, and text on Kathmandu and Goa.'                        [Above: Coneheads, China. 1980s]

Richard is a foreign correspondent, photojouralist  and author, who has been reporting from Asia since 1978. 'As you'll see from my website, once I read the BIT guide I travelled to Asia and have lived here happily ever since. Am now in Bangkok'

Left: US troops, Bagram, Afghanistan. Dec 2001

You can find his excellent reportage and details of his book here.

Check out his photos on Flicker

[Below}: Kashgar. 1985

FOR MORE ON BIT SEE ALSO PREVIOUS POST:

ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY 1970s: FEEDBACK

AN INDEX OF POSSIBILITIES

Strang how things happen. A friend tipped me off to an article Fom Here to Divinity in the Sunday Times by writer and novelist Tim Lott which begins:

'As soon as I lost my faith in God at around the age of 14, I started looking for something to fill the God-shaped hole. Just a few years later I discovered the spiritual possibilities of science after stumbling on a remarkable book called An Index of Possibilities. Eschewing equations and textbook pedantry in favour of cartoons, humour and wild graphics, the book explained in layman’s terms the remarkable philosophical and theological implications of relativity, quantum theory, gravity and other science fundamentals. Index suggested that what I had thought a tiresome academic discipline could actually stimulate the imagination rather than murder it.'

This was the first name-check for the Index for what seems like decades. A number of conversations with Tim ensued which led me to write down something of those days when, with a crew of like-minded crazies, most of us in our 20s, we set out to produce an encyclopaedic work of strangeness and charm. There must be many Index readers out there. Hope to hear from some of you. What follows is not an official history but a first attempt of what was one of the formative experiences of my working life.

AN INDEX OF POSSIBILITIES: THE BACK STORY

The late 1960s/early 1970s were a time of considerable social turmoil, of experimentation, of protest – above all, of new thinking. Millions of young people across the world were searching for new ways of living, in building a counter-culture in opposition to the establishment.

In the USA, The Whole Earth Catalogue (a huge counter-culture publication of alternative

information, tools and lifestyles, produced by Stewart Brand) sold a million copies and we were originally commissioned by Oliver Caldecott and Dieter Pevsner (bless their cotton socks) of Wildwood House in the UK to produce 'The Great British Catalogue' along similar lines, in the hope that we could emulate that success.

[There's a lovely memoir of Wildwood House on Elain Elkington's blog. Scroll down and look for Alternative London: TEST and Wildwood]

So a small group of four of us set off down that road but it soon became clear that the book we were seeking to produce was growing into something very different.

One important aspect of this change of perspective was our discovery of modern science and our interest in finding ways of popularising science. In this we were ahead of the times. For instance, the New Scientist at that time was still a stodgy black and white journal. Omni, the first pop science magazine, funded by Bob Guccione, wasn’t published until 1978.

Our aim was to try and encompass the breadth of what we saw at the time as a new revolution in thinking in a series of five volumes that took broad general themes – Energy & Power, Structures & Systems, Communications, Down-To-Earth Life and Survival Facts, and Inventions,

Discoveries, Explorations, Games containing cross-referenced information from not only many areas of science but also mysticism and religion - to form a new kind of encyclopedia for a new age, which we named initially The Catalogue: An Index of Possibilities. The sub-title took over.

When the book was signed up by Andre Schiffrin of Pantheon Books in New York, he likened us to the French Encyclopediasts who, between 1751-1772, produced twenty-eight volumes of their Encyclopedia, which captured and embodied the spirit of the Enlightenment.

The Team: (Back) George Snow and Richard Adams (designers) with John May (centre); (Middle) Michael Marten, Nadine Seton, Lee Torrey; (Front) John Trux, John Chesterman

The first volume, a monumental effort by an eventual main team of 10, working together for more than two years, was widely celebrated at the time of its publication in 1974 as a unique book, not only for it’s the broad sweep of its written content but also the verbal and visual style in which it was delivered.

We described it thus: ‘The huge range of subjects is presented thematically, using feature articles, biographies, chronofiles, quotation and psychodramas to achieve an effect which combines the feel of an encyclopedia with elements of magazines, wonder books and comics.’

A huge factor in the book’s success was the superb original design layout by Richard Adams and George Snow and the more than 50 original illustrations, comics and diagrams.

Our background in the underground press meant that the layouts were slightly anarchic, and that the book was irreverent, iconoclastic and laced with an in-house humour.

ILLUSTRATIONS: Aleister Crowley by Edward Bell; the opening picture for the Mind section by Bill Sanderson; diagram of the Spectrum by John Chesterman.

During the book’s production, our office at 2 Blenheim Crescent with its giant round table and huge library, catalogued according to a unique classification system based on Roget’s Thesaurus, became a mecca for druids, dowsers, airship builders, particle physicists, ecologists, alternative technologists, healers of many disciplines, Sufis, scientists and sages of all denominations. 'Future Shock' author Alvin Toffler came round for tea, Oxford dons invited us for supper, Chrissie Hynde tried to steal on of the first copies.

The book was finally published in 1974 to some hoopla.

Arthur Koestler called it: ‘A promising experiment in coping with the information explosion.’

The Evening News said it was ‘perhaps the most remarkable paperback yet produced.’

Bill Butler in Time Out called it ‘one of the best alternative books to come out of Britain to date.’

Features appeared in The Times by Caroline Moorhead and in the Sunday Times by Philip Oakes.

Ronald Fletcher, in an extensive review entitled ‘Shock and Engagement’ in the Times Education Supplement wrote: ‘An index of possibilities it is – punching, provocative, unpretentious, alive, extravagant – but always seriously engaged…It is, above all, alive to the complexity and challenges of our time. It is comical, outrageous, provocative, frightening.’

In fact, Volume 1 was to be the only completed work; eighteen months into Volume Two we had to throw in the towel and put our energy into a new project – Worlds Within Worlds – the first popular book to capture a wide range of scientific imagery – which sold widely, was serialised in the Sunday Times magazine, won an award from the New York Academy of Sciences and led directly to the foundation of the Science Photo Library, which for the next 30 years continued to supply publishers and publications worldwide with state-of-the-art imagery.

The Index sold well on its first publication, an estimated 60,000 copies in the UK and US and in addition I believe there was an Australian edition. A measure of its success was not only the reviews and sales but also the continuing correspondence and compliments we received from all over the world. The Index touched a chord with many.

In the subsequent years, the cult of the Index has continued to grow. Original readers are now reporting that their young teenage sons and daughters are equally intrigued by the book’s style and content. Second-hand copies are rarer than hen’s teeth and pricey. So much for the past.

Previous Mentions of the Index:
NIKOLA TESLA

To explain. That's Tesla on the front of The Index. We discovered him in the early 70s and have loved the man ever since. Strangely or not, Indexer Michael Marten was in Portland, Oregon for a show of his photographs recently and picked up a copy of the 'Science Times' supplement of the New York Times. The headline is 'A Battle to Preserve A Visionary's Future' and the excellent piece by the fine science writer William J. Broad concerns the struggle over the site of Tesla's giant tower and laboratory at a 16-acre site called Wardenclyffe on Long Island. A science group want to turn it into Tesla museum and education centre and wants the owners to donate the land. The Agfa Corporation want to sell it. (There's some fabulous pictures from Tesla's laboratory, one of which became the Index cover, on a slideshow accompanying the web article.

Perhaps they should ask David Bowie for some help, who played Tesla in the movie The Prestige.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: GERARD PIEL'S HISTORY
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

Two linked stories, the first documenting a correspondence I had while working on the Index with Gerard Piel, the publisher of 'Scientific American', who wrote a history of the magazine
for us.

The following story is linked through a review of our second book Worlds Within Worlds in Scientific American.

Interesting Index-type links found while looking for something else:

''Alphabetical order' By David Weinberger

A Review of the Index by an Amazon customer
You might be lucky and find a copy of the Index here