Publishing



:: Publishing ::

  • Lulu
    Electronic publishing / print-on-demand. What makes Lulu especially interesting, and appropriately cited here as a ’social networking’ / ‘Web 2.0′ venture, is the blogs, ‘friends’, and ‘groups’ functionality based on tagging. Description from the site: “Lulu is a marketplace for creators of content, so what you see is actually the product of a community that has grown up around Lulu’s electronic publishing technology. We give the creators and owners of digital content complete control over how they use their work. Individuals, companies and groups can use Lulu to publish and sell a variety of digital content including books, music, video, software, calendars, photos and artwork.”
  • PBOS (the Processed Book Project)
    “A Processed Book is distinguished from a traditional book (called a ‘primal’ book in the context of the project) in that it reflects countless manipulations or processes, which are themselves abetted by microprocessors. A Processed Book is a highly unromantic view of books; it is not the creation of an author with something important to say but a snapshot of a series of steps as that original utterance is read, commented upon, and amended in many ways, sometimes by impersonal machine processes. As it is expected that all books will be ‘processed’ in this manner in the future (just as many are so processed today), authors will begin to anticipate the processing of their books even as they write them, giving rise to new forms of expression.”
  • Scribd
    “Scribd lets you publish and discover documents online. It is like a big online library where anyone can upload. We make use of a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser. There are all sorts of other features that make it easy and fun to publish, convert, embed, analyze, and read documents. Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read. With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.” Or, in other words, pretty much in the same vein as Google Scholar or CiteULike, but with Scribd hosting the documents rather than simply pointing to them.
    » http://www.scribd.com
  • SpoiledInk
    The web is littered with online vanity publishers, amateur creative talent sites, and the like, yet this one looks a litte different: it’s a bona fide Web 2.0 “social networking” arena, with keyword tagging, readers’ feedback and comments to uploaded writings, author’s readers added to author’s profile page, blogger. From blurb on the site: “Spoiled Ink offers the best online tools for writers to: Network, interact with and learn from other writers and readers, improve their writing skills as well as strengthening and promoting their careers as a writers.”