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BBC’s website today focuses on self-publishing and e-books with several articles — and within hours the broadcaster’s program Click will devote its show to self-publishing. Even if you miss today’s website features and the broadcast, this post will provide links to help readers track down this coverage later on.
CLICK on SELF-PUBLISHING
A website article about Click’s program on self-publishing hints at what will be covered. The program will visit a British bookseller who has one of the new Expresso printing machines that can transform a digital book, be it a self-publishing work, a classic from the Gutenberg project, or a digital book from a traditional publisher, into a printed and bound volume — in five minutes. I’ve discussed this amazing technology before on this blog. It’s a very expensive machine, and distribution into bookstores seems to be slow.
Click reports that Expresso output of printed volumes is currently heavily tilted toward self-publishing, accounting for 70 percent of output. As the equipment becomes more broadly available, this may be a major benefit for writers.
Click will also look closely at online print-on-demand publisher Blurb.
The bottomline for writers, however, is the effort that must go into promotion. The BBC quotes author MG Harris on the matter:
It will all be about having a really good looking website, having a fantastic way for readers to interact with you. If the traditional publishers go that way, they will be in a much better shape to promote a book than a self-published author.”
BLURB
Online print-on-demand publisher Blurb has been in business for four years and has already sold more than two million books. Blurb offers a rather different approach to self-publishing from the now-in-vogue e-books. Users download a free software called BookSmart through which a writer creates and designs a book which can be ordered in hard-copy form.
There are some interesting advantages to this approach. Most important is the ease with which one can include color photos and graphics into one’s book.
This software does take some work to learn. To help, Blurb offers a range of excellent Tips and Tutorials, videos that walk one through the process step-by-step. Blurb can also publish a print-on-demand book from PDF files.
Frankly, this approach to self-publishing is so different that I really want to watch the Click segment to gain more insight — if only I can stay awake until 11:30 p.m. Philippine time to watch it.
E-BOOK READERS
The BBC site also offers links to two close-up reviews of several e-book readers. You will find both in our sidebar VIDEO FOR WRITERS, where they will be visible for a few days. Or you can go direct to our VIDEO FOR WRITERS online collection, where you will find these reviews along with dozens of other videos or particular interest to writers. To simplify things, you can also go direct to the BBC site for the better of these two reviews, which looks at the distinguishing features of the various readers. This one is quite up-to-date, covering as well the recently unveiled Intel Reader for vision-impaired readers.
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