Kickstartup: Where is Publishing Heading?
By the Branta Webcrawler • Jul 29th, 2010 • Category: Branta Recommends, Brave New World, From the Interweb, Publishing
Where is publishing heading?
We have Kindles and iPads, iPhones and Androids. Print on demand is cheap — and good. Everyone shops at Amazon.com. Most books are a click away.
Contemporary publishing is engulfed by a forest of question marks. What defines a beautiful book? Is it printed or digital? How much does it take (time, money, energy) to produce? How do you get it to your audience?
There are so many questions because there are presently so many available options. Advancements in affordability of printing, promotion and distribution has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for would-be publishers.
We choose the medium.
We build the audience.
And now, with Kickstarter, we also raise the money.
I want to share with you a story about books, publishing, fundraising and seed capital. It’s a story that I hope will change how you think about all of these topics. And it’s a story that I hope will serve as a template.
In April 2010, Ashley Rawlings and I used community fundraising to raise nearly $24,000[1] to breathe new life into our book, Art Space Tokyo. My goal here is to outline what we did and why we did it, with the hope of inspiring anyone with an itch, gumption and a good narrative, to do the same. To bring beautiful, well-considered things into the world.
The story begins on March 29, 2010, 10:18pm JST, when a woman sitting in her Brooklyn apartment pushed the first domino. Her $65 pledge kicked off a monthlong fundraising effort that would culminate in a room full of hardcover books, a publishing think tank and the means to begin experimenting with books on the iPad. Oh, and this essay.
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Read more about Kickstartup and Art Space Tokyo on Craig Mod’s Livejournal
the Branta Webcrawler is a compiler of information discovered, recommended and retrieved from either the "real" world or the world which is both wide and webbed.
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