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.

Author

24 thoughts on “I’m a publisher”

  3. ‘Out of print’? — not any more

    … 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. The Gutenberg Library is an online collection of FREE books that you can …

  6. Getting your thesis published…

    At the AAG conference so recently attended, Chris, Matt, Shane and myself were talking about the need to publish your thesis to get a good tenured position in the academy. We had all wandered around the publisher’s stalls in the conference hotel, an…

  7. 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

  8. 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.

  9. Anna oma (või kellegi teise) raamat välja

    Ei tea, kuidas mul see varem märkamata oli jäänud, aga Project Gutenberg, kuhu eelmise aasta novembriks oli kogunenud üle 10000 tasuta raamatu. Kõik tasuta, nende autoriõigused kas aegunud või siis juba algselt välja antud vabana. Alla laetavad HTML-is…

  10. Anna oma (või kellegi teise) raamat välja

    Ei tea, kuidas mul see varem märkamata oli jäänud, aga Project Gutenberg, kuhu eelmise aasta novembriks oli kogunenud üle 10000 tasuta raamatu. Kõik tasuta, paljudes erinevates keeltes, nende autoriõigused kas aegunud või siis juba algselt välja antud …

  11. I’m a Publisher

    Seems like I’ve rambled about this before, but some random guy (link via kottke) was talking about the ability to be your own publisher. He took a public domain book, found a version online, and made his own edition of…

  14. Cruftbox Publishes a Book

    Michael of Cruftbox has reprinted a book! He downloaded Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars from Project Gutenberg, did some formatting, and printed it via Cafepress.

  15. One of those great ideas that just gives me a wetty

    Oh digital technology, how I love thee! Cruft: I’m a publisher is a gem of a blogdex meme : take out-of-print public domain books, reformat them, have CafePress or any other company publish it for you and, voila! you’re a publisher. Here’s how Croft go…

  17. One of those great ideas that just gives me a wetty

    Oh digital technology, how I love thee! Cruft: I’m a publisher is a gem of a blogdex meme : take out-of-print public domain books, reformat them, have CafePress or any other company publish it for you and, voila! you’re a publisher. Here’s how Croft go…

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

  23. 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

  24. 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

Comments are closed.