March 20, 2004
I'm a publisher

I'm a bonafide publisher now, and you can be one too.

A couple weeks ago, Cory Doctorow relicensed his book Down and out in the Magic Kingdom with the least restrictive Creative Commons license possible. Basically, I can take Cory's book and do what ever I like with it as long as it's non-commercial and I give Cory credit for writing the original book.

I got to think about what I could do and quickly realized that there wasn't much I wanted to do with his book. I considered taking the text, reformatting it and publishing with the new instant book publishing systems. But I want Cory to make some money off of the book, so I dropped the idea.

In the shower one morning, I was pondering what book to read next. I had just finished my latest book and needed something different. The John Carter, Warlord of Mars series popped into my mind. I pondered re-reading it. But I didn't have the books and would have to visit the library or buy the books. Then it hit me. The entire book series is in the Gutenberg Library online.

The Gutenberg Library is an online collection of FREE books that you can download and read. Truly amazing. Almost 10,000 books are available currently.

Then I knew what I wanted to do. I downloaded A Princess of Mars, the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Warlod of Mars series. It took me about 45 minutes to format the text into the right format and add a table of contents. Cafepress offers instant book printing and make it extremely easy to do. If you can make it into a PDF file, you can publish it. Within about an hour, I had everything uploaded to Cafepress and ordered a copy.

About 4 days later the book arrived, and I was amazed. It was a real book, like any paperback you could buy in the book store.

As you can see, I made a fairly plain cover graphic. Anything you can make into a jpeg file, you can make the cover, spine, and back of the book. I'm sure you creative types can do better.

Happy with results, I ordered more copies and they arrived promptly. I sent out a few to friends that like science fiction and gave out a couple at SXSW. Everyone seems quite impressed that it's so easy to publish a book. The book is on sale at Cafepress for $13.15. There's no markup, that's the price Cafepress charges and I make no money.

Yes, you can buy the book for $6.50 new on Amazon, as long as it's in print. That's not the point.

The point is that the technology exists for no book to ever go out of print. As long a writer makes an electronic copy available, their book can be bought by readers and printed one at a time. For example, the book, NeoAddix by Jon Courtney Grimwood is out of print and I can't find a used copy. The only copy I can find is in French. If he made the book available via instant book publishing, there would be no publishing costs until I agreed to pay the price he set for it.

I've got one copy of the book left. If you are a science fiction fan, and you want it, drop me a line. BTW, if you've got a copy of NeoAddix, name your price.

Posted by michael at March 20, 2004 09:34 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Thanks for my copy! I'll be reading it soon.

Posted by: Anita Rowland [http://www.anitarowland.com/] on March 20, 2004 11:16 AM

I didn't know you made it through CafePress -- I thought you'd met up with the Internet bookmobile at sxsw or somewhere (as seen at the Supreme Court case a while back).

Posted by: Anita Rowland [http://www.anitarowland.com/] on March 20, 2004 11:20 AM

Sweet! What a cool idea!

Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com [http://www.8bitjoystick.com/] on March 23, 2004 02:09 PM

You are so awesome. This is a great idea... man it was hard to find a copy of John Dewey's lectures on school reform - we had to share copies of the book in my early childhood class - i was sitting down to individually photograph every page digitally so i could read it at another time before i had to trade it off to another student when i took one last look online for the full text. I initially tried project gutenberg, which didn't have it.. but i did find it in hypertext from a university. i ended up reading it with Microsoft Reader on my tablet pc, but heck, it would'a been nice to have a version from cafepress. come to think of it, we could probably compile a while compilation volume of original public domain educational texts for this class and offer them up as one book.

thank you for the idea.

My friends and i have paid for a full CafePress account for our record label/collaborative, so this will be easy. With a free account you are limited to one book. We could publish a whole library.

If anyone is preparing texts such as Michael has described, crunched it nice into a PDF, made sure copyright licenses are all in check ...

WE WILL PUBLISH THE BOOK WITH YOU via cafepress

... i love that micheal didn't charge any markup for the book. i think we would do the same with this kind of text.

Additionaly, any budding authors (writers, comic, photography, manuals) who wish to publish a book, please feel free to contact us about using the account - we have always been about helping other people out with their creative projects. It would go into our Kempleton store: http://shop.kempleton.com under the Book section. We have one already original text, i'd love to see 50 in a year. We would put the public domain books in another section i think. Additionaly, we would probably be changing around the abtrusive branding of things, etc. if anyone cared. WE'D LOVE TO PUBLISH YOUR (Creative Commons Licensed) BOOK (via CafePress)!!!

If people happen to listen to our kick butt records and buy some art because of it, that'd cool too: http://www.kempleton.com

-Sean

Posted by: Sean [http://www.kempleton.com] on March 23, 2004 04:53 PM

Another great self-publishing company is Lulu press, http://www.lulu.com. It was started by Bob Young of Red Hat fame, so it's all about some open source and strongly encourages sharing and collaborating between works. I think you could probably make the books a lot cheaper there too- would depend on length I think.

I just think Cafe Press sets their base price too high for most of their products, but haven't looked into their books yet.

Posted by: ana [] on March 23, 2004 05:09 PM

Awesome idea Michael! What are the correct formatting specs for the PDF?

Posted by: Jeremiah [http://www.fringeblog.com] on March 24, 2004 07:23 AM

Sean, I may want to talk to you about publishing my novel in about two months...

Posted by: Jeremiah [http://www.fringeblog.com] on March 24, 2004 07:29 AM

please do jeremiah, meantime i will check out the lulu thing.

Posted by: Sean [http://www.kempleton.com] on March 24, 2004 11:38 PM

nice.

Posted by: ryan [] on March 28, 2004 04:25 PM

Would you be interested in publishing a new play?

Posted by: Lawrence Bullock [] on April 2, 2004 02:06 AM

I can't find a copy of NeoAddix either! If anyone can help....!

Posted by: Ruth Deary [] on May 11, 2004 08:39 AM

Thanks for remining me about the Gutenberg project. I read the Tom Swift books from there years ago.

Posted by: Paul [] on June 16, 2004 08:30 AM

I have a copy of the UK version of Neoaddix...

it has a small tear in the back cover of about 3cm but the book is in good usable order!

What is the going price for a copy? Any offers?

TW

Posted by: TW [] on October 4, 2004 12:40 PM

TW, I'll give you £10 for your copy of NeoAddix? Sorry not to get back to you until about 6 months later! I'll keep checking this site - let me know.

Ruth

Posted by: Ruth [] on March 22, 2005 08:05 AM
No more comments accepted on this post.