How a Book is Made, Circa 1947

2011 is barely underway and it’s already been a tumultuous year for the evolution of publishing. As entire industries struggle to plot the future of the book, we find it important to take a step back and take a look at its past. An 8-bit unicorn tipped us off to the priceless 1947 documentary Making Books — a joint effort of Encyclopedia Britannica Films and the Library of Congress that will make you gasp and wince and gasp again as it opens its treasure chest of retro technology, matter-of-factly industrialism and unwitting vintage sexism. (Alnd cue in omnibus of short films about obsolete occupations.)

This man is an author. He writes stories. He has just finished writing a story. He thinks many people will like to read it. So, he must have this story made into a book. Let’s see how the book is made.”

While we aren’t ones to romanticize the wonders of yore, there’s something to be said for the kind of craftsmanship that we lose, or at the very least dramatically alter, as we substitute the digital page for the printed one. We also have to wonder about the lens of delightful quaintness with which tomorrow’s historians and media scholars will tell the story of, say, designing for the iPad reading experience.

via Dead SULs

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PICKED: The Smashing Book #2

Smashing Magazine is among the design community’s most revered online bibles and this month, they’re back with an excellent second book, putting their finest design wisdom in print.

The Smashing Book #2 is a treasure trove of best practices, practical insight and rich visual inspiration for modern web design.

Each of the ten chapters, contributed by a different expert, tackles a specific hot point in design, from typography to mobile experiences to the psychology of web design, and features stunning exclusive full-page, full-color illustrations by Australian artist Yiying Lu, of Fail Whale fame, for a total of 360 gorgeous, insightful pages.

True to the magazine’s social web roots, the book even features the the names of readers.

You can sample its goodness with a free chapter, Visible vs. Invisible Design (PDF), by Francisco Inchauste.

But perhaps most interestingly, for us at least, The Smashing Book #2 was published completely independently and is only available online, through Smashing‘s own site — another sign of the publishing times, adding to the rapid decentralization and democratization of the book business.

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Merchants of Culture: A Meditation on the Future of Publishing

What Gogol, Seth Godin and TED have to do with the fate of the written word.

The year has barely begun and already it’s been a tremendously disruptive month for the publishing industry, with a number of noteworthy developments that bespeak a collective blend of optimism, fear and utter confusion about what the future holds for the written word as its purveyors try to make sense — and use — of digital platforms. Here are just a handful of important, potentially game-changing, events in the publishing world that took place in the past month alone:

• Amazon finally unveiled the highly rumored and anticipated Kindle Singles, a new format for non-fiction works between 10,000 and 30,000 words — that’s longer than a magazine article and shorter than a novel — that authors can self-publish and sell for $1-$5, an effort hailed as the last saving grace of long-form journalism.
• TED, always the beacon, immediately jumped on the format with the landmark launch of TEDBooks — short titles by TED speakers that adapt important ideas worth spreading from the screen to the digital page.
• Seth Godin officially kicked off his Domino Project in partnership with — you guessed it — Amazon, an effort to reinvent what it means to be a publisher through a hybrid publishing house and distribution channel for a highly curated stable of authors. Poke the Box, the first book from the project, was just released for pre-sale today in a limited edition of 400, available as a hardcover ($9.99), Kindle download ($7.99) and ultra-limited-edition signed copy with a letterpress cover and companion poster ($75).
• Former Brain Pickings contributor Kirstin Butler released the first excerpt of Dead SULs, her modernization of Gogol’s iconic Dead Souls, exploring identity in the age of Facebook — an experiment in digital self-publishing powered by an open-source writing process.
• Startup The Atavist unveiled a revolutionary platform for long-form journalism and novella-length fiction, available on a number of e-reader devices, including the Kindle.
• Renouned libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, of Marginal Revolution fame, announced that he’ll be publishing his highly anticipated new book, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Bette, on Kindle only — a strategic stance against the slow turnaround of the traditional book industry, which makes timely topics dated by the time they hit bookstores.
• Noted design thinking advocate Frank Chimero opted to fund his new book, The Shape of Design, on Kickstarter. (Please support him.)
• Amazon’s ebooks sales eclipsed paperbacks for the first time, a landmark moment in publishing history.

So what is all of this momentum building up to? That’s exactly what John B. Thompson explores in Merchants of Culture — a compelling and necessary new book about, well, books. Thompson contextualizes the current turbulence of the publishing world in an ambitious analysis of five decades of publishing and bookselling, laced with rigorously researched historical background and invaluable interviews with veterans across the entire industry spectrum. (So excellent is the book, in fact, that we’re willing to overlook the irony of its print-only availability.)

Hovering between a serious academic text and an Entourage for the publishing business, full of high-rolling agents and drama-ridden deals, Merchants of Culture is as much a how-to for the everyman author as it is a what-now for the digitally paralyzed publisher, as well as an all-around treat for anyone interested in the future of the written word.

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