Access to Public Sector Information : Law, Technology and Policy: Volume 1 , , Sydney University Press

On the back of the growing capacity of networked digital information technologies to process and visualise large amounts of information in a timely, efficient and user-driven manner we have seen an increasing demand for better access to and re-use of public sector information (PSI). The story is not a new one. Share knowledge and together we can do great things; limit access and we reduce the potential for opportunity.

The two volumes of this book seek to explain and analyse this global shift in the way we manage public sector information. In doing so they collect and present papers, reports and submissions on the topic by the leading authors and institutions from across the world. These in turn provide people tasked with mapping out and implementing information policy with reference material and practical guidance.

A free online version should be accessible shortly.

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

Five years later, it seems as if the answer is: yes. [more...]

Here are my ten thoughts:

1.
Marketing isn’t convincing people to buy your stuff.
Marketing is making sure that the people who want your stuff will find it.

2.
Social media is not a tool.
It’s a strategy.

3.
If you are using social media for business or marketing you have to know:
a. who you want to connect with
b. why you want to connect with them …
…then you have to figure out what you can do to give them value.

4.
Don’t blog to be known.
Blog to be knowable.

5.
Figure out who the influencers are.
And who they are influenced by.
Interact with them.

6.
Don’t be a social media douchebag.

7.
Blogging effectively requires discipline.

8.
When other people talk about you, Google hears them.
And Google smiles upon those who are talked about.

9.
Spread the love.
Link out, retweet, show appreciation.

10.
Social media works when you give value to others, so:
a. publish good content
b. show appreciation for others
c. point to great stuff on the web
d. interact with your readers
c. care about your readers

Follow us on Twitter: @bookcampto
Hashtag: #bcto2010
Web site: http://bookcampto.pbworks.com

BOOKCAMPTORONTO: TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:

ROOM ONE:

9:30 Launching a Digital Business from Inside a Print Business
* Sulemaan Ahmed (Director of Digital Marketing, Harlequin)
* Jenny Bullough (Manager, Digital Content Harlequin)

10:30 Reading is Everywhere
* Michael Serbinis (CEO, Kobo)

11:30 Distribution for Everyone
* Allen Lau (CEO, Wattpad)

2:00 When CanLit Becomes GlobalLit
* Sarah MacLachlan (Publisher, Anansi)
* Michael Tamblyn (EVP Content, Sales & Merchandising, Kobo)

3:00 Data-geek Extravaganza! Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bibliographic Metadata.
* Julia Horel-O’Brien (General Manager, LitDistCo)
* Meghan MacDonald (Project Coordinator, BookNet Canada).

4:00 Building Communities
* Tan Light (Coordinator, Digital Sales and Marketing, Random House)
* Meg Mathur (Online Merchandising Manager, Indigo)

ROOM TWO:

9:30 The (Shifting) Role of Design in Publishing
* Ingrid Paulson (Ingrid Paulson Design)

10:30 But Is It Art?
* Kelsey Blackwell (StudioBlackwell)

11:30 Obscure Objects of Desire
* Neil Stewart (Anstey Book Binding)
* Aurelie Collings (Folded&Gathered Books)

2:00 From Letterpress to XHTML
* Scott Boms (Principal, Wishingline)
* Joe Clark (journalist, author, and web accessibility consultant)

3:00 The Book of MPub
* John Maxwell (et al.), SFU/Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing

4:00 Venturing Beyond the Text
* Ian Barker (CEO, Symtext) & TBA

ROOM THREE:

9:30 eBooks in Education and Academia — the glacial revolution
* John Dupuis (York University)
* Evan Leibovitch (York University)

10:30 Writing about Writing
* Stuart Woods (Editor, Quill & Quire)
* Amy Logan-Holmes (Executive Director, OpenBook Toronto)
* Conan Tobias (Taddle Creek)

11:30 Where are you at? Geolocating Lit
* Ashleigh Gardener, (Digital Manager, Dundurn Press)

2:00 Leaping off the Page: Transmedia Storytelling
* Mark Leslie Lefebvre (Titles Bookstore)
* Jill Golick (consultant, screenwriter, creative producer)

3:00 Unleashing Your Inner Reader
* Marichka Melnyk (CBC Radio, CanadaReads)

4:00 The sBook
* Bob Logan, Greg Van Alstyne, Peter Jones and friends -sLab at OCAD

ROOM FOUR:

9:30 Literate Video Games
* Tim Maly (Founder, Capybara Games) & TBA

10:30 What Does the Writer Want?
* Nichole McGill (author)

11:30 A Bucket of Cold Water – a Digital Reality Check
* Denise Bukowski (The Bukowski Agency)

2:00 Writers from the sidelines: challenges and successes
* Khadija I

3:00 The Onset of Exhaustion: Publishing in 2010
* Alana Wilcox (Editor-in-Chief, Coach House Books)

4:00 Going Alone: Educating the Market
* K Sawyer Paul (Gredunza Press)
* Eisee Sylvester (Gredunza Press)

ROOM FIVE: HANDS-ON WORKSHOPS

9:30 Digital Do-Dads: Digital Reading Devices
* Mark Pavlidis & TBA

10:30 Making Books into Audio
* Miette (miettecast.com)

11:30 Video and Books
* Ian Daffern (IDFACTORY)

2:00 Print-on-Demand Workshop
* Rob Clements, Lightning Source Inc.

3:00 Pimping Your Book
* Ian Paul Marshall (Book Marketing & Toronto Writers Mastermind)

I’ve been meaning to update the theme on this blog for some time, along with sprucing up some of the aboutish stuff too (still in process).

I played around a bit with some other minimalist WordPress themes, but this one – Manifest, by Jim Barraud – seemed to most closely match what I want these days out of a web page. Namely, to get the hell out of the way, and leave the text to do what it’s supposed to do.

I’ll likely be doing some little tweaks and fiddles over the next while. Though the beauty of this Theme is its constraints: there’s not much fiddling to be done, without a bit more than my rudimentary html skills.

In any case I like the look.

Now I just need to write a bit more.

The question you might ask yourself is: who is creating all that text? Well, if you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you are.

You might ask another question: who’s going to edit all that text? And if you are reading this, we’re hoping you’ll help with some of it.

Connecting Writers, Readers, and Word-lovers

That’s why we built Bite-Size Edits: so that people who write text can connect with people who can improve it. Usually that implies a vice versa.

Last month, we announced that we’d split Bite-Size Edits out of Book Oven, but it was a very barebones affair: text in, editing, text out. But while editing is the reason for the existence of Bite-Size Edits, the real power lies in connecting writers, readers, editors and people who love words.

We’ve just released a whole host of new social features: contacts, random editing, privacy controls on texts, and much more. We’ve built in some gamish stuff too – everything you do in Bite-Size Edits will win you points, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Try It, It’s Fun!

So, we invite you to come take a look at the new Bite-Size Edits, to add some text for editing, and even better, to do some editing yourself.

Bite-Size Edits is a work-in-progress, and we’d love to get your feedback, suggestions, as well as your complaints.

You can tell us what you think by:

* sending us an email at: contact AT bitesizeedits DOT com

* @’ing us on Twitter at: @bookoven or @bitesizeedits

* submitting bug reports or user feedback at: http://feedback.bitesizeedits.com

« Le numérique ne tuera pas l’édition traditionnelle, mais il va la changer », dit Hugh McGuire. Cet ancien ingénieur en mécanique âgé de 35 ans lançait en 2007 un autre collectif, Earideas, qui recense les balados (podcasts) de l’heure sur le Web. Et voilà qu’il vient de créer The Book Oven, un nouveau type de maison d’édition. « The Book Oven offrira une plateforme d’autoédition, qui permettra à un auteur de collaborer avec des rédacteurs, des réviseurs, des recherchistes, des photographes, des maquettistes », dit Hugh McGuire. [more...]

Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters into his own hands, head to the print shop, and hawk the book himself.
Rejected auteurs today have it easier, with a handful of websites that let them write, edit and print books bound like the pros.

Call it Self-publishing 2.0. And it’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of the book world, which is itself enjoying a nice growth period despite the recession and the glut of competing media choices.
“Like in any other media, when you the make tools of publishing easy, people will take advantage of it,” said Hugh McGuire, founder of Montreal self-publishing start-up Book Oven. “It’s just now coming into public consciousness.”

McGuire is one of the leaders of the movement toward digital empowerment in books. When it officially launches (it’s in beta testing now), Book Oven will let people collaborate in the writing, editing and proofreading of a book, all through online tools. When it’s ready, book lovers will be able to buy a copy on the website, either in electronic or paper format. [more...]

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a long-winded manifesto about the term “self-publishing.”

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 number of languages: 29
• Number of languages with a completed work: 26
• Number of completed solo projects: 1214
• Number of readers: 3094
• …who have completed something: 2867

Total recorded time in all rss-ified works: 49596721 seconds, or 574 days, 0 hours, 52 minutes, and 1 seconds. Total of 50774 sections.

If you have a soft spot in your heart for LibriVox, perhaps you might consider leaving a little message on the blog, or the forum.

Or even better, perhaps you might help us record a few chapters of public domain texts? …

Are you a writer? An editor? A proofreader? A small press? A designer? An agent?

If so, what would be the ideal web tool to help you get your manuscripts through to finished product? We want to build it, and we want to build a global community of book lovers and makers of books who will come together to make better books.

Bite-Size Edits

Our first offering is Bite-Size Edits, a new way to proofread text. You can help proofread other peoples’ texts, you can proofread your own text (in private) using Bite-Size Edits, you can invite a small group, or open up your project for proofreading by the world.

And, if you can believe it, Bite-Size Edits actually makes proofreading fun. And addictive.

But don’t just trust me, try it.

There is more to Book Oven (though for the next couple of weeks there will be an extra step to see the rest of it…).

Cloud-based Book Publishing

We call it “cloud-based publishing,” but the name doesn’t matter. The web has given us the ability to connect and collaborate in new ways. It’s given us the ability to make and distribute our art and writing to a global audience of billions, at almost no cost. We think this means that millions of people can engage with books in ways they never did before. And we want Book Oven to be a place where book lovers of all stripes come together to help make (and buy! and read!) better books.

Background: LibriVox

Back in 2005 I started a project called LibriVox.org — to get volunteers to make audio recordings of public domain texts. LibriVox started as a crazy idea, but it has evolved into a big, vibrant platform to help groups of people get together to make and publish audiobooks (it’s actually pretty complex, with recording, proof-listening, project management, metadata allocation, uploading, cataloging etc). We’re now the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, all run in a totally distributed way by “strangers” from all over the globe. It’s worked because people naturally find things they are good at and enjoy – editing audio, recording texts, organizing projects, organizing files, prooflistening, and much more.

And what’s amazing is the creative ways people find to organize themselves to do interesting things when they have the right kind of platform.

Background: Books and Digital

In the mean time, there has been a revolution bubbling in the book world, and digital has arrived: ebooks, print-on-demand, and online sales mean you don’t need thousands of dollars to make & distribute a book anymore. You just need the time and passion and skill.

One of our myths is that writers work alone. In fact, they collaborate all the time: writers share their work, get feedback, editors help them sculpt their language and content, proofreaders clean up their copy, designers make it pretty, other designers make beautiful book covers.

A Space to Collaborate on Books

Book Oven was born of this inspiration: to make an online space where writers could gather a group of collaborators (editors, proofreaders, designer) around their work to help take a raw manuscript through to finished product, and then, if they wish, to sell it through online channels (though of course, if they wish to ship the final manuscript to a publisher, they can do that too; or they can just keep it for themselves).

That’s what a bunch of us have been working on for a few months: Stephanie, Yanik, Antoine, Marie-Eve, Suw, Andy, Dan, Chris, Frederic, and me … and a few others.

So, What is Book Oven?

Book Oven is: an online space to create, collaborate on, and sell books.

In the end, though, it’s about building communities: the smaller communities that form around writers and their works, and a larger community of writers, readers, editors, proofreaders, designers, and book lovers of all kinds.

How far along are we?

We are excited to show you what we’ve built so far. It’s pretty exciting, we think, but there’s more to do. We hope that you can help craft the long-term vision. Right now, you can upload your text in certain formats, build your team, comment on and edit your text, read/annotate in our (we think) beautiful interface. You can also play around with Bite-Size Edits.

But there is much more we want to do.

In the coming months we’ll be tweaking the interface, making things easier & more obvious, adding new features.

We’d like your help

We hope you’ll have fun with Bite-Size Edits. We hope that you’ll poke around in Book Oven. We hope that you’ll start a writing project, and invite some colleagues, friends, editors, reviewers to help you out. We hope that you’ll be tolerant of bugs when you find them, and let us know about them. We hope you’ll be mindful that we have many more features we plan to build, and that we’ll need your help in figuring out what the essential features are.

Above all we hope that you will think of Book Oven as your space, a place where you can contribute to building a new community and platform where you will, we hope, make and help make many great books in the future.

Questions?

If you have questions, problems, confusions etc … please do send me an email:
hugh@bookoven.com

Or ping us on twitter: @bookoven or identi.ca @bookoven.

If you have some specific feedback about Book Oven, bugs or feature requests, you can tell us about it here:
http://feedback.bookoven.com/

Looking forward to seeing you in Book Oven!