|
|
Saturday, 29 May 2010 21:22 |
|
Today I spoke at a meeting of the Professional Editor's Group at The Book Lounge in Cape Town. The good turnout, about forty editors and affiliated publishing professionals, was evidence of their enthusiasm to understand how digitisation affects their work. I hope I satisfied some of that curiosity in this talk. This was my prepared speech, from which I did wander a little from time to time.
Thanks to Kristina for asking me to speak today. Before I get started, can I ask:
Has anyone here bought an ebook?
Does anyone own a dedicated ereader?
Does anyone have an iPhone?
Has anyone every downloaded a PDF to read on screen?
Anyone who's said yes to any of these questions is already a consumer in the ebook industry. To get one myth out of the way: ebooks are not a big part of our future, they are a big part of our present and even our recent past. And they are not a bad thing or a good thing, they are just a fact, a product that most people do and will find useful and valuable some of the time. In a developing country, ebooks solve all kinds of cost and distribution problems, like mobile phones solved communication problems, so they're going to have a greater and greater impact on the nature of the work that editors do in South Africa.
|
|
Read more: What ebooks mean for professional editors
|
|
|
Saturday, 17 April 2010 10:36 |
|
 I recently finished reading Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's great history of the origins of the Internet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Early in its story, it describes JCR Licklider's vision for computing when he first started working on networking projects in the late 1950s:
The idea on which Lick's worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be "informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government." He imagined what he called "home computer consoles" and television sets linked together in a massive network. "The political process," he wrote, "would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer."
|
|
Read more: Sixty years later, Licklider's vision is Africa's
|
|
Tuesday, 30 March 2010 12:52 |
|
Geekrebel posted a very exciting press release today, accouncing a joint venture between Vodacom and Nedbank to bring the M-PESA mobile money solution, hugely successful in Kenya and Afghanistan, to South Africa. M-PESA allows anyone with a cellphone to transfer money without a credit card or bank account. In Kenya, it has become commonplace to accept M-PESA payments for products from groceries to flights, and has greatly increased safety for people who now no longer need to travel with cash. As a payment method, M-PESA could allow online retailers to sell to markets that till now have not been accessible because they have not had credit cards.
I expect to see online retailers (including ebook retailers) accepting M-PESA payments soon after rollout. There are millions of people in South Africa who have not been able to shop online because they don't have credit cards. Soon they will be able to shop online using M-PESA. In Kenya, PesaPal has developed an online payment system for accepting M-PESA payments.
|
|
|
Thursday, 01 April 2010 14:02 |
|
 This month, in time for the London Book Fair where South Africa is the featured country, Modjaji Books has published their Small Publishers Catalogue 2010 (buy it on Scribd), a catalogue listing about forty smaller publishers in Africa, along with articles on aspects of their work. The catalogue's editor, and tireless champion of small publishing in South Africa, Colleen Higgs, asked me to put together some digital-publishing suggestions for small publishers for inclusion in the catalogue. Here's the article: seven tips for small publishers on digital publishing.
If you're a publisher of any size, you're thinking, and possibly worrying, about ebooks. There is no doubt that the ever-rising tide of the Internet has turned publishing's erstwhile paper hillsides into shorelines. Now the question is, what are you doing about it?
|
|
Read more: Seven digital-publishing tips for small publishers
|
|
Sunday, 07 March 2010 18:10 |
|
During last year at Electric Book Works, I received more and more calls from publishers (of all sizes) wondering how they should start making ebooks. While I point a lot of people towards outsourcing conversion, I actually don't believe that's a long-term solution for a frontlist. Making ebooks should be a zero-cost by-product of a production workflow, whether it's print- or digital-centric. In real terms, this means that designers and typesetters, and their project managers too, need some new skills.
Some of those skills are pretty straightforward, and some are tricky to learn. And each designer or typesetter will need to develop their own toolkit around these skills, depending on the kinds of books they work on. That may take years to perfect, just as it takes years to get really good at, say, designing magazines or book covers. But at the heart of that toolkit will be a few fundamentals – some conceptual, some practical – that I thought I could offer.
|
|
Read more: Designing for digital: get the course notes
|
|
|
|
|
RSS 