OPEN REFLECTIONS

Tag: POD

  • Notes on Unbound Books – A Conference Report (Part II)

    One of the most interesting sessions on the last day of The Unbound Book conference, was the session on Future Publishing Industries. According to the program the session focused on the affordances and political economies of the publishing industry and libraries. Underneath a small summary of three of the papers presented on the panel and…

  • Touched by History

    The first publication of the OAPEN project has recently come to light, a collection of essays by Johan Huizinga entitled De hand van Huizinga, collected and with an introduction by Willem Otterspeer; the essays are in Dutch, via Amsterdam University Press, but will also be translated into several other languages via the other OAPEN partners,…

  • Patronage

    Kevin Kelly reports on his blog about an experimental book publishing model. In this model you first sell a required amount of (hard cover) books (in this specific case 200), enough to cover for the costs of the print run, after which the book is made available online for free as a downloadable PDF. Actually…

  • Print will survive

    Charming initiative by Dave Eggers (via De papieren man and Gawker): he send an email to everyone feeling at loss about the possible demise of print and all-round literacy. After an evening organized by the Authors Guild, Eggers promised to brighten up the pessimists. The New Yorker published a few lines from his speech:  “To…

  • Homo Ludens

    “While I make my work public, the fear comes over me that many will consider it an insufficiently documented improvisation, in spite of all the labor that went into it. It is the fate of anyone who wants to deal with cultural topics, that he is compelled to make incursions into all sorts of provinces…

  • Digitisation and the Trade Book

    During last Thursday’s Round Table on ‘Digitisation and the Trade Book’, organized by the department of Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University, the focus was on the future role of ‘intermediaries’ (distributors, booksellers and librarians) in the age of the digital book. What kind of value will these ‘old players’ still add to…