Interview with Shirky on social reading, which point to the how people use what they read. A few side remarks on publishing:"Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done."

Ah, techcrunch finally catches some of the Reg's attitude. The Big Deal? The AP finally catches up with the colloquial use of email, cellphone, and smartphone. One more win for the corruption of language.

Martin Weller on how he composed his latest book: mining, tweeting, shouting, and testing.

Good news for open content fans. The problem isn't just subscription charges. The iPad mag is a closed system: can't link in or out, can't share it with others, can't tag it on pinboad or add it to Instapaper. Closed systems - like paper textbooks - are failing.

i love this guy, using the Palin Massive as a case study for author and publisher gamesmanship. Palin is all about control, and she's not going to get it from the open press. "Publishers simply don’t have the luxury of controlling the flow of information any more. The idea that they can release thousands of preview copies of a new title, in electronic form, weeks (or even months) ahead of publication and rely on a gentleman’s agreement with the press that their embargo will be respected is simply laughable."

From web to print. "The Journal Register Company’s Ben Franklin Project is an opportunity to re-imagine the newsgathering process with the focus on Digital First and Print Last. Using only free tools found on the Internet, the project will – from assigning to editing- create, publish and distribute news content on both the web and in print"

A BOOK CROWDSOURCED IN ONE WEEK MAY 21-28, 2010. A little thin. More like an academic magazine than a multigraph.

Superb primer on designing text for devices - with links. Read it

is longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Nifty project. Links to the end result.

A concise diagram with notes

The FLOSS Manuals Project wants to change all by bringing open source concepts to publishing. They are engaged in building a platform and community designed to get interesting books published and do it on faster cycles. I recently had a chance to participate in a FLOSS Manual Book Sprint as they worked on a Firefox Manual

Writing wants to be free. A significant project, but the anti-wiki spin isn't really necessary: "An Alternative to Wiki Textbooks. Some teachers might have thought about participating in other open access textbook projects like Wikibooks, but have not for fear that such work would go unrewarded in tenure and promotion. Writing Spaces' individually authored texts and more traditional proposal and peer review process gives you a line on your CV with direct publication credit for your work.An Alternative to Wiki Textbooks

Some teachers might have thought about participating in other open access textbook projects like Wikibooks, but have not for fear that such work would go unrewarded in tenure and promotion. Writing Spaces' individually authored texts and more traditional proposal and peer review process gives you a line on your CV with direct publication credit for your work." Seems the project is heavily embedded in traditional writing spaces.

"The purpose of this new set of notes is to expand the thinking beyond how a specific text is presented or interacted with. Reading (and writing) do not happen only at the level of the individual work. There is a broad ecology of behaviors, activities and micro-environments that surround each work and our relationship to it -- how things come to be written, how we choose what to read, how we make the purchase, how we share our experience with others. Currently (i.e. toward the end of age of print), that ecology is defined by agent/editor mechanisms of acquisition, sharp delineation between authors and readers, top-down marketing, heavy reliance on big mainstream media to get the word out, the bookshelves that make our books part of our daily life, bookstores and -- yes -- Amazon."

Another self-castigation about academic prose. Yes, good advice. Yes, a good position to take. But, as usual, the sense of academic prose is over-generalized and stereotyped. As here - "Revision requires making choices, something that academic writing allows you to avoid at all costs. Much of what makes that kind of prose so complicated is that nothing gets left out. Writing for a popular audience, in contrast, forces you to figure out what the hell you're trying to say and come right out with it."

So does writing for an academic audience when you respect that audience enough to bring your argument forward - which Hornstein finally nails when she looks at Graff and gets to writing for freshman.

Read Lanham's theory.

A few anecdotes about publishers malingering in the pre-digital age. Inky hubris. Makes the alternative of print on demand look good. "Publisher friends, I tell you this because I am your friend; I value your contribution and I like you. I want to work with you. But this is an intervention. You need to look at writers and illustrators as partners and collaborators and treat them as such. It’s time to step up in a spirit of partnership, "

http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0010.305. A consideratio of CommentPress and new practices in academic publishing

Utilities and toys for printing and mashups.

The following is a set of notes, written over several months, in an attempt to weave together a number of ideas that have emerged in the course of the institute's work. I'm hoping for a lot of feedback. If there's enough interest, we'll put this into CommentPress so that the discussion can be more extensive than the blog's comment field.

A cornerstone of journalism has always been reporting what key sources say, put in context and given perspective, alongside reported facts.

It’s time to reinvent that process on the web — make it dynamic — using the fundamental mechanism for connec

The New York Times has certainly embraced blogging, but it was striking to see in this post from The Lede just how much they’ve embraced link journalism:

wants to require those students, like others at West Virginia, to submit their writing projects electronically

sample the Google’s Project, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. This book proved a difficult challenge for Google’s approach, suggesting that quality is not automatic

Borders, in partnership with Lulu.com, has launched a comprehensive personal publishing platform.

Commentary version of the Ithaka Report on Univerisity Publishing paper. Contains the original text of the paper and demos how CommentPress works.

thorough

a Great Experiment in collective authorship, overseen by editors, and written by invite.