BOOKS
The book is the original and ultimate intellectual medium. World religions, political movements and vast subcultures revolve around books.
Properties
Books have many inherent advantages over other media.
Size, Depth and Knowledge
Their greatest advantage is size. Books can accommodate much more in-depth writing than other media. This allows a knolwedgeable author to maximize the book’s potential by writing richly detailed information.
Infrequency
Books take time to write and produce and cannot keep up with the pace of events except by connecting readers with other media.
Audience: Losing Our Literacy
The audience for books is deep but narrow.
Creation: Time Consuming
Writing books takes a lot of time. Writing a book takes considerable skill applied over a long and involved effort. Many people start books and never finish them while others line whole bookshelves of material with their prodigious output.
Assistance: Ghostwriting
Unlike media where the creator must perform, the printed word is as seperate from its author as a child from its parent. It is not immediately proveable that an author even wrote a particular book.
Books are usually published through publishers, but some have published books independently. Getting an advance to write a book depends largely on your reputation. Many writers get an agent to shop their work around.
Writing Books
Writing books is hard work!
Publishing Books
Getting books published is a complicated business.
Publishing Example: Soft Skull Press
+ Knowledge, Fact-testing
Properties
Obviously, print media requires literacy of its audience to be effective.
Limitations
Print media lacks the moving visual stimulus that makes Television so hypnotic.
Declining Influence
Print media are declining in influence as people read less and less.
PRINT MEDIA
Print is the oldest and most historically influential mass media. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg made possible the wide availability of books which fanned the flames of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.
The steam powered press invented in 1812 made it possible to print tens of thousands of copies of a page in a day. Koenig and Bauer sold one of their first models to The Times of London in 1814 and perfected it to enable printing on both sides of a sheet at once. This made newspapers available to a mass audience.
Today, printing presses churn out electronically designed copies by the millions. Publishing is the second largest manufacturing industry in the USA. The movable type has been credited as the single most important invention of the millennium.
The printing press was the first mass media whereby information could be copied to thousands of readers, spreading new ideas and literacy far and wide.
Books are a major spreader of ideas. They are the ideal form to discuss something at length, and assist knowledge skill chances.
Timeliness
Books suffer somewhat from a lack of current updating, which is sometimes periodically addressed through new editions or links to supplementary web sites.
It makes sense for every author to keep a little log of ideas that occur since writing the book.
This could be part of the Empowerment idea system online for authors to stay engaged with their work.
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Production: Printers & Publishers
CafePress Costs
“Pricing includes book manufacturing, order management, fulfillment and customer service. You choose the retail price and earn the difference between the retail price and our base price. For example, the base price for a 100-page perfect-bound book would be $10.00...Book contents are printed in black and white. Book covers are printed in full color.” —CafePress.com
Book Bindings
Perfect Binding: Novels, poetry, paperbacks. Saddle-Stitch: Lays flat. Comics, magazines, and coloring books typically use saddle-stitch binding that lays flat. Wire-O: Manuals, how-to books, opens wide for easy page flipping
Binding Types: Saddle O Wire Perfect Bound
Per Page $0.045 $0.045 $0.03
Flat Binding Fee $4 $5 $7
Price $5/22pg $7/50pg $10/100pg+$3/+100pg
Pagecount 1-52 1-500 50-580
Sizes:
4.18 x 6.88 Grocery Paperb. x x
5 x 8 Standard Paperback x x x
6.625 x 10.25 Comic x x x
7.5 x 9.25 Technical Manual x x x
8.5 x 11 Letter Size x x
Getting Books Into Libraries
http://www.crimethinc.com/main/into_l.html
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