"Paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, articles, ordered and unordered lists, and so on, all emerged from age-old ways of working with text. Now new cowpaths are being paved on the web itself, and we need the people who love the text the most to get involved in where we go. We need you."

"More importantly, advocacy is one of the ways in which a publisher remains relevant in a world where the only obstacles to publishing are a reasonably fast internet connection and skill with a keyboard. By filtering and developing the best content—with an eye to how it benefits your readers—a publisher can simultaneously spread ideas both within and without a community. You can strengthen your readers’ ties with one another, and improve their lot in the rest of the world all at once. Think about that, and you can begin to see a much more compelling vision of the publisher of the future: not a gateway, but a representative."

Solid description of the challenges facing news organizations.

Solid exploration of the challenges facing authors and publishers.

"The current surface forms for digital books are far from perfect, but they work and are getting better with each device and software iteration. So, in my opinion, many of the critical future questions digital books designers will have to address don’t directly involve pure content layout. Future-book design is not merely about font sizes and leading. Instead, our hardest (and possibly most rewarding) problems will involve the intermingling of content and data."

"In short, by blogging the right things, and connecting the links together when a conversation gets going, we can really make things happen. That's still exciting."

Brilliance, really well thought out piece.

Fascinating story about all that can go wrong with the launch of a novel.

Beautiful essay by Merlin Mann. Really great stuff.

Great interview with Felix Salmon about how blogging has changed journalism.

A beautiful post from Marshall Kirkpatrick about Twitter, Evan Williams, and the joys of distributed, open, and public publishing.

Dave Winer's got his minimal blogging tool up and running. Sounds cool.

The book of the future requires collaboration, so let's start the change before we have to.

Gawker's new JavaScript-dependent URL structure is an utter fail.

Shawn Blanc is turning his site into a full-time gig. A $3 monthly membership fee is part of how he'll make the financial side of things work.

"We find the publics we wish to join based not merely on gross labels, generalizations, and borders drawn about us—red v. blue, black v. white, nation v. nation—but instead on our ideas, interests, and needs: cancer survivors, libertarians, Deadheads, vegetarians, single moms, geeks, even privacy advocates. We finally tear down the elite of the public few and each become public people in our own right. . . ."

"This is not to excuse Yahoo’s behavior, nor is it to say that we will be able to save everything, even if our efforts are heroic. But no civilization has ever saved everything; acknowledging that fact does not obviate the need to try and save as much as we can. The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills; sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient. Let’s hope that doesn’t last forever."

"Imagine a web publishing platform that costs $10 per month.

$5 of that $10 goes to the platform company for the boring stuff.

The other $5 gets split evenly between the writers, photographers, videographers, designers, and other creative people you follow who also pay to use the platform, up to a maximum of — say — 20 followers, hand-picked by you."

All the "wrong" things that 37signals did when writing Rework.

"Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively."

"I think it means the mobile is slowly but surely moving to a web model. And as that happens, it is important to think of it as one big web and lots of devices and software accessing it."

Perhaps listening to authors speak about their works in podcasts is a more effective way to understand their thoughts.

Tim O'Reilly's thoughts on what lies ahead for publishing and his company.

Alexis Madrigal lists his takeaways from Nick Denton's explanation of the changes coming to Gawker's format.

Khoi Vinh's epic thoughts about current iPad magazine apps.

"To put it simply: you can no longer measure value by pageviews, impressions, or subscribers. And so it’s folly to build a site that uses those numbers to measure its success."

5 lessons learned by Alexis Madrigal in the production of Longshot V1.

Seth Godin moves on from traditional publishing.

Scott Berkun on why writing is hard work.

"If publishers are to continue to be relevant, they need to repair both of these errors: first, by publishing lists, not books—meaning, collections of books where each book fits into the list and contributes to a larger story—and second, by cultivating a relationship with their readers. In either case, it helps to be small."

"People hear me whine about this and they say: Our case is different; we need to have a system that sends out seven thousand "todo" emails per day. And I grieve for the spirit of Work, killed by her evil child, Workflow."

Short interview with Jeff Bezos about Amazon and their efforts for the future of publishing.

Eric Rosenfield explains why Robin Sloan's brilliance in publishing models is an important model for the future.

"Newsweek is for sale. While sad, it’s also an amazing opportunity to reinvent what a newsweekly could be. And it got me thinking."

A worthy read exploring the current position and future growth of the book.

"The struggles of booksellers can be explained in part by a surge in competition. More than half of book sales in America take place not in bookshops but at big retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target, which compete to peddle bestsellers at ever steeper discounts."

The traditional publishing industry is struggling and there is growing pressure to publish in electronic media, and to do it well.

Merlin Mann is pissed that someone has create an anthology of tweets and is now selling it on Amazon. His window is broken, his stuff is stolen, and Merlin is not happy about it.

"They really hate when you actually read their content. That’s what they’re communicating by distraction-oriented design: 'We don’t respect you, and we’re trying to aggravate you as much as possible, but not quite enough that you’ll stop coming.'"