Maybe I’ll become an analog/atomic/paper-based published author sooner than I thought, and maybe you will too.
Borders has partnered with Bookbrewer, which lets bloggers turn RSS feeds into ebooks and now printed books with relative ease… and relatively little up front cash: Less than $100 if you don’t want to own your ISBN, and $200 if you do.
Last week’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “As Textbooks Go Digital, Will Professors Build Their Own Books?” offers more reasons to acknowledge we are entering a golden age for writers and communicators.
Next week McGraw-Hill Higher Education plans to announce its revamped custom-publishing system, called Create, with an emphasis on electronic versions of mix-and-match books. Macmillan Publishers this year announced a similar custom-textbook platform, called DynamicBooks. And upstart Flat World Knowledge touts the customization features of its textbooks, which it gives away online, charging only for printed copies and study guides. Other publishers have long offered custom-textbook services in print as well, though they have always represented just a sliver of sales.
“The reality is by and large they don’t customize,” said Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, in an interview. “We think the more all this becomes digital, the more people will want to customze, and we want to be able to do that.” McGraw-Hill officials say custom textbooks are now the fastest-growing area of the industry.
Several months ago when I first learned about Flat World Knowledge, I realized its revolutionary, customizable model makes them the perfect publisher for “Powerful Ingredients 4 Blended Learning.” Is there a market for an ebook of printed book versions of “Moving at the Speed of Creativity?” It might be interesting to see what an aggregated collection of my posts on “school reform,” for example, would look like. The cost of such an experiment is less than it ever has been.
References:
Read Write Web: Borders Partners with BookBrewer to Turn Blogs into eBooks
Fast Company: Did Borders’ New Self-Publishing Tool Make Blogs Smarter or Books Dumber?
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– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Comments
3 responses to “Welcome to the golden age of writing and publishing”
It makes me think- to be even more organized with how I publish my content, so that it can be aggregated in this way. Every post is part of a curriculum of sorts- that grows over time. I had been thinking about publishing a book, but the more I think about it, I should just write my posts as sub-chapters of a larger idea.
Interesting!
This seems technologically interesting, but I am skeptical that it has any real educational value or will be used to create a coherent high-quality text.