From the monthly archives:

May 2009

Jetpack

by Dan on May 30, 2009

Tom Gauld of course…

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Something for Weekend, May 29th, 2009

by Dan on May 29, 2009

Hard-boiled — New designs for Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer books by Joe Montgomery seen at FaceOut Books. I know I link to FaceOut just about every other week, but it’s an awesome site and the juxaposition of images in this series are great (as are some of the unused comps).

The Concierge and the BouncerPublishers Weekly report on Richard Nash (formerly of Soft Skull) and Dedi Felmen (formerly of Simon & Schuster) and their plans to “push back against the outmoded idea of publisher as cultural gatekeeper” with their new venture Round Table (announced at BEA this week):

The key is a shift from a caretaker mentality to a service mentality, from a linear supply-chain model to the idea of a free-floating, non-hierarchical “ecosystem” of readers, writers and authors… Nash and Felman’s idea of Publishing 2.0 could make a semi-professional reader, writer, editor and critic out of anyone with the desire.

Reading in a Digital World — A killer line in an otherwise blah article for Wired by Clive Thompson:

“We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.”

Book Distribution in Canada — A Canadian Heritage study on book distribution in English Language Canada produced by Turner-Riggs dropped this week.

Can Editors Change Their Spots — David Hepworth’s thoughts on Robert G. Picard’s CS Monitor article ‘why journalists deserve low pay’,  and what “the new dispensation” means for  editors:

Magazine editors spend most of their time deciding what they’re *not* going to do and trying to arrive at a mix that the majority of people will like. They then find that whatever they’ve arrived at is too much for some people and not enough for others. This is made more difficult by the fact that their readers, being the most engaged in their particular area, are the people most likely to tap into other sources themselves. The people who value your mix most are also the people who would feel most qualified to mix it themselves.

The italics are mine.

Cover to Cover –  Steven Heller reviews newly released  ‘visual books’ in the New York Times with a nice accompanying  slide-show. (See image above, but hey NYT, when are you going to let people embed your slide-shows? When?).

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Turning Towards Our Shelves

May 29, 2009

Ellen Lupton, author of Thinking With Type (interviewed by me here), interviews graphic designer David Barringer about his new collection of essays There’s Nothing Funny About Design over at Design Observer today. It’s a wide ranging interview — mostly about design unsurprisingly — but a couple of paragraphs about books caught my eye: I do [...]

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What’s Next For Publishers?

May 26, 2009

An unforeseen consequence of the “New Think for Old Publishers” debacle at SXSW in earlier this year is that I will be a participant in a session on the role of the publishers in the digital age at Book Camp Toronto on June 6th. 140 Character Assassination The now infamous SXSW panel was supposed to [...]

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Meanwhile, Elsewhere…

May 26, 2009

As is probably obvious, I spend a lot of time online clicking on stuff. The things I bookmark, tag, and mentally store away that are (vaguely) about books end up here in one form or another. But because I have eclectic interests, I bookmark a lot of photographs, illustrations, videos, and other things that just [...]

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