Birmingham Arts Journal turns 5

Posted by trav in Birmingham, Events, News, Publishers      No comments

Feb
29

Tonight, 6pm at Urban Standard (2320 2nd Ave North) you will find a flock of Birmingham’s most clever and creative folks gathering to celebrate the Birmingham Arts Journalturning 5-years-old. BAJ Art Editor Liz Reed says both the party and 52-page quarterly publication are helping to put our city in the global arts spotlight…

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I want to mention…

Posted by trav in On the Web, Publishers      No comments

Feb
29

I just saw the theorist has already weighed in on DailyLit, as she has been a subscriber since 2006.

Novels in nuggets

Posted by trav in Book Talk, On the Web      1 comment

Feb
29

DaliyLit.com is now serving up dollop size doses of books. The new service sends you the book you are reading in installments, either via email or rss, so that you don’t have to ‘burden’ yourself with finding a place to sit and actually hold a book.

I guess there is a market for this? I can’t imagine reading The Terror (which I am about to finish) in my RSS reader alongside random posts from the blogs I lurk. I wondered how long it would take to read a book, the faq’s say:

…am currently reading Dracula, which has 187 installments and I am receiving installments on weekdays, i.e. 5 days/week. So at most it will take me 187/5 = 37 weeks. But when I am on the train or waiting, I often read more than one installment, so I usually wind up reading about 10 installments/week. This means I will finish Dracula in about 19 weeks or 5 months.

I guess that “send me the next installment immediately” feature helps some. The cool part are all the free titles. You don’t have to pay for the Public Domain stuff. So most of the classics are there. I couldn’t find any book that cost more than $6.95. So I guess there’s that factor too.

Let me know if any of you have experience with a service like this. It just seems like it’d be too hard to digest the books in any meaningful way.

{via Guardian Unlimited}

Small Press Month 2008

Posted by trav in News, Publishers      1 comment

Feb
29

Tomorrow kicks off the 12th year of Small Press Month, highlighting and featuring the smaller fish in the huge ocean of publishing. So let’s hear it for the folks still doing it for the love of it and loving what they sell. Don’t get me wrong, it is still about money and making a living, but there’s something almost perfect about a job that is built around creating and pushing products, you believe in and that you know contribute something to society. It’s about quality… not just appealing to the lowest common denominator.

In So Many Books (which should be required reading for anyone thinking about publishing, Gabriel Zaid notes:

“If not a single book were published from this moment on, it would still take 250,000 years for us to acquaint ourselves with those books already written.”

“Maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us. . . whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive”

Take that you multi-national conglomerates! You get the other 11 months… this one belongs to readers and smaller publishers alike.

Type awards

Posted by trav in Book Design, News, Type      1 comment

Feb
28

If you don’t enjoy typography or type geekery discussion, please move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Since the Quills are no more, I am going to spend my “award show tracking energy” to keeping up with the Type Directors Club annual competition. I have to say that I am in 100% agreement with the Superfamily winners this year! Awesome. Though I’m not a fan of the Display category winner, but then display fonts never really rank that high with me. And I am really digging the lowercase ‘y’ of Fondo.

I am, however, going to have to find a way to justify purchasing Tiina, just so I can use the italic face. Mmmmm, mmmm… that is one great slant!

{via ILT}

the future of the “classics”

Posted by trav in Book Design      No comments

Feb
28

Public Domain Reprints is a brand-spanking new non-profit has streamlined the next evolutionary step in book publishing. Basically you surf the net for any public domain title. The site says they have some 2 million books ready to print.

Once you have found your book, you submit it to Public Domain Reprints and they handle the hassle of submitting, typesetting, etc. with some online service like LuLu.com. Then you get your book, at cost (plus a $1 fee),in the mail. That’s it.

The cost “classic editions” is about to plummit. The only real value a publisher can now add to a book that’s been around forever is text design and cover design (though some may think a new ‘foreword’ or ‘introduction’ would be of value) . So it’ll be interesting to see what that is worth.

Would someone pay extra to have a better designed book? Or when it comes to the printing of the oldies, is it just the content (at the cheapest price) that they are after?

{via blogoscoped}

Many mini-books

Posted by trav in Book Talk, On the Web, Publishers      1 comment

Feb
28

While writing a previous post about a local book release party for Susannah Felts’ debut novel, I got sucked into her publisher’s site and found this rather cool, yet simple marketing tool.

Basically, they take a few excerpts and type set them onto letter size pages, for you to freely print out, from their site. Then, following the numbers, you fold it all up and have a little mini-book with cover and all.

First PhotoShop icon

Posted by trav in On the Web      No comments

Feb
27

This is pretty cool. Worked up in the 80′s by John Knoll, this 32×32 pixel icon is what Adobe kick started their PhotoShop application with. Pretty cool find. And the icon is a pretty good likeness to an actual “photo shop”.

{via digg}

Local author event tomorrow night

Posted by trav in Authors, Birmingham, Book Talk, Events, New Releases      4 comments

Feb
27

Tomorrow night at 7 pm, you can find Susannah Felts at The Bottletree reading and signing her new book This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record. The book is all about developing an identity as an artist among the culture of the New South. In anticipation of the book’s release I traded a few emails with Felts, to see what all the buzz was about…

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Bookshelf porn

Posted by trav in Bookshelf, On the Web      1 comment

Feb
26

I have seen some of these before, but there are enough new ones to post about it. The typogrphically inspired on remains one of my all time favorites.

But I have to say that this one…

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