My colleague, co-founder, and the chief architect and getter-doner at Book Oven, Stephanie Troeth has proposed a moderated panel at SXSW this year called: Beyond Publishing: When Every Book is Connected to Everyone We have an all-star line-up who have agreed to join us (if SXSW agrees to give us some space to talk): Kassia [...]
danah boyd points to a study of Twitter usage by PearAnalytics, that concludes: 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.” As danah boyd suggests in her first sentence, studies like this are irritating. [...]
Roberto Rocha of the Montreal Gazette has a good article about Book Oven and the new publishing landscape, with a nice pic out the window of the office (with me blocking the view, unfortunately): Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters [...]
Today is LibriVox’s 4th birthday. LibriVox is a kooky kind of project with the following objective: To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. Some statistics, as of today: Total number of projects: 3113 Number of completed projects: 2556 Number of completed non-English projects: 364 Total [...]
Book Oven Open for Cooking We’ve been toiling away behind the scenes on the Book Oven for a few months. Now we’re ready to show you what we’ve been cooking. But there’s still work to do, and we want your help in building a new model for publishing. Are you a writer? An editor? A [...]
August 22 is Ray Bradbury’s 89th birthday. Here’s the opening of his short story, The Long Rain, about summer in Montreal: The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; [...]