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Tag: craig mod

Published February 26, 2019

The ‘Future Book’ is Here

I haven’t posted anything about books and technology here for a while, but I thought this recent Wired piece by Craig Mod on the “Future Book” was quite interesting: 

Physical books today look like physical books of last century. And digital books of today look, feel, and function almost identically to digital books of 10 years ago, when the Kindle launched… Yet here’s the surprise: We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

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Published August 5, 2010

On Publishing 8 Faces

Following on from Craig Mod’s recent essay ‘Kickstartup’  (and to some extent Derek Powazek’s older essay ‘How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half’) designer Elliot Jay Stocks has written an interesting step-by-step post on traditionally publishing the first issue of his typography magazine 8 Faces:

Right now, in an age of print-on-demand for real-world publication and iPads / iPhones / Kindles for virtual publication, it would — on the face of it — seem unwise to launch a magazine like 8 Faces, especially as it’s targeted at such a niche audience. As I said in the introduction of the magazine, “everything about this project shouldn’t work.” But it has, and it’s done so in a bigger way than I ever would’ve imagined. I was confident that there was going to be a demand for the first issue, but I had no idea that it’d sell out in under two hours…

The essay is full of practical insights and 8 Faces is another great example of how people are using the web and traditional print media to publish in new and innovative ways.

(link via Eightface)

How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half

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Published August 2, 2010

Kickstart

Craig Mod’s fascinating essay on re-publishing his book Art Space Tokyo using fund-raising website Kickstarter has been much linked to elsewhere, but I’ve only just found time to actually read it and it is definitely worth your time if you have hadn’t had chance to read it yourself yet:

I had one chief consideration in defining the goals for the Kickstarter project: make enough books to generate substantial returns. Then use those returns to further expand this or similar publishing endeavors.

I never intended to just sell a few books. The last thing I wanted was for this Kickstarter project to be nothing more than the start and end of Art Space Tokyo’s new print run. Instead, I wanted it to be the jumping point for exploring more projects in a similar spirit to Art Space Tokyo; a means to explore digital books and to fund the startup of a publishing venture that could make this happen.

(link)

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