Archive for the ‘The Publishing Frontier’ Category

Interesting article on Slate about the environmental impact of paper books vs ebooks.  The author, Brian Palmer, suggests we “think of an e-reader as the cloth diaper of books.”  “The iPad pays for its CO₂ emissions about one third-of the way through your 18^th book.”  (It takes 23 books to pay off the carbon footprint of a Kindle).

This is all fine and good, but he then urges us to “Buy your books online.  Brick-and-morter bookstores are horribly inefficient.”  Easy there, Brian.  I like my local bookstores, and I’ll keep shopping at them since they do good things like support local authors, recommend books I’d never have heard of otherwise, and say hello when I walk inside.  By the way, when was the last time you went to a real live author event at Amazon.com?

Omnibucket offers an imaginative marriage of literature and multimedia.  These are novels with included soundtracks, illustrated future fairy tales, paintings with words, and all editions are super limited.  A team of writers and artists take each book from concept to product.

Eleventy Billion Miles Away is a collaboration among writers and artists.  A soundtrack is included.  The project explores mankind’s place in the universe and the quest to connect to the dark beyond.

The Book of Clav is an imagined found art piece.  The story is manic and compelling, and the art puts shivers in your veins. Clav also includes a soundtrack, and is limited to 75 copies.

Riders’ Collective just published my article about a bike tour I took with Dawn through the California and Arizona desert.  Click the picture at left to download the magazine.  The piece is called “Highway 62 Revisited.”  Enjoy!

As a side-note, this magazine is structured as an aggregate.  That means it culls relevant content from the web.  It works because Paul Kramer, the editor, works hard to meet a quality standard that his readers expect.  With so much content out there, and so many people eager to publish, Paul creates value by doing the hard work of filtering through the rubbish.  It’s like a magazine mixtape!

Courtesy of Green Apple Books (one of my favorite bookstores)…

(click to enlarge!)

Think the novel is dead?  Far from it.  These are rough stats culled from various sources.  Numbers only refer to U.S. publications and tweets, and are based on 2009 figures.

VS

Methodology is as follows:

Words per day in books: based on Bowker’s stats of approx 1,000,000 books published in the U.S. in 2009.  An average length of 240 pages is assigned to traditionally published books and 50 pages to self-published books.  An average of 250 words per page assigned for all books.  (Data from Bowker’s and PWCwriters).

Tweets per day:  based on 2009 estimate of 32 million tweets per day, and a U.S. share of 1/3 of all worldwide tweets, and an average twitter message length of 15 words (data from Twitter and Oxford University Press).

Folks, I’m just having fun here.  The numbers are real, but it’s a back-of-the-envelope estimation [insert smiley face here].