The New York Times has a story today in the Technology section called Technology Rewrites the Book. The article discusses several print-on-demand methods and vendors and the impact this new publishing mechanism will have. The article starts: When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky”, filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.
Steve Mandel, above, created his book “Light in the Sky” using software from Blurb.com; the cover image is of the Hale-Bopp comet.
“I consistently get a very big Wow!” The printing of my photos was spectacular “I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said. “This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”
As publishing is spread more to the masses what steps should libraries be taking to acquire, catalog, and survey books that do not come through regular publishing channels? Clearly there will be many books that are not appropriate for certain libraries due to quality or character of the content. But when there is a gem of a book, should it miss the library world merely because it was not published by Knopf?
Strategery and the book business
This quote sounds like George W. Bush joins the book business.
Blurb, based in San Francisco, has many plans for expanding its software. Eileen Gittins, the chief executive, said the company would push new tools for ‘bookifying’ data, beginning with a tool that ‘slurps’ the entries from a blog and places them into the appropriate templates.
Bookify??
Slurp??
Ms. Gittins is a great executive because she uses strategery.
Re:Strategery and the book business
With prices like Blurb’s, they certainly should bookify and slurp. $30 bucks per copy for 1 to 40 pages; $80 bucks for a 301-page book. Maybe for coated full-color coffee-table books, but even there… Makes Lulu look like the bargain of the century, by comparison. But I don’t know whether Lulu will bookify!