Describing itself as a “pioneering crowd-funding portal for book publishing”, the website launched at the Hay festival in May and has already successfully published a number of books from well-known authors such as Terry Jones and Kate Mosse, as well as newcomers like Jennifer Pickup.

The authors post an extract from their book and a video pitch of their idea on the site in a bid to get financial support from enthusiastic readers. So instead of waiting for their work to be published, users get to listen to writers’ ideas before they’ve even started.  If you like the idea, you can pledge a certain amount of money to support it, and once a target number of supporters has been reached, the writer can start writing (if this isn’t met, pledges can be refunded or switched to another project).

The higher you pledge, the greater recognition you receive in the finished project – from your name in the back of the book, to lunch with the author. Another incentive to pledge is the resulting access to the author’s ‘shed’, with exclusive interviews, progress updates, draft chapters and much more.

Finally, the book is written, designed, edited, printed, and sent to you either in e-book form, or as a beautifully bound limited edition hardback. The founders of Unbound claim they are ‘bringing authors and readers together’, allowing an interactive dialogue to help shape the writing and reading process.

Current projects include academic psychologist and writer Charles Fernyhough’s A Box of Birds, a pacy thriller set in a near-future world of experimental brain research. Fernyhough uses neuroscientific ideas in his work and will be hosting discussions with neuroscientists and fellow writers about some of the themes that emerge from the story as he completes it, which he hopes his Unbound pledgers will join in with.

He has 89 days to get 533 supporters, so why not read an excerpt and watch the video pitch here, and decide if you want to help bring a book to life…

This statistic relates to sales in America, although amazon.co.uk are selling more ebooks than hardcovers, despite the increase in hardback sales. 242 ebooks are sold by Amazon in the UK for every 100 hardbacks. Waterstone’s sees an even greater ratio of 4:1 in favour of ebooks.

Figures in the publishing industry have been keen to point out that these figures relate to individual unit sales rather than income or profit.

It seems that every reader has an opinion on ereaders. Traditionalists love the smell and feel of a good book that can adorn their shelves and give a bit of character to a room. The clumsy ones amongst us like knowing that if a drink leaks in our bags then it generally causes £5-10 of damage, rather than a three-figured amount. (My Lucozade-soaked War and Peace is testament to that.)

On the other hand the techies amongst us like the ability to get a book instantly and to hold numerous books on one small device complete with annotations and electronic bookmarks.

But as long as people are reading great literature, we’re happy!

However, as technology progresses and we are offered new and innovative forms of reading, what does this mean for the publishing industry? As  intriguing and exciting as Ryu Murakami’s deal with Apple is, he has left his publisher in the dust and gone straight to the technology giant to get his new book to readers. Not so bad if it’s just him, perhaps, but what if there are many authors that follow hot on his heels (and I think there will probably be a fair few)? It’s a worrying thought but, just maybe, we’ll see the world of reading develop more fully from a beleif that only one form of publishing can exist to realising that there are different markets and that both eBooks (especially those that are complemented by audio and visual elements) and proper books (if I dare call them that) can exist together, each offering different things: we’ll have eBooks and paper books, not one or the other; the sphere of reading may open up, particularly if technology is able to engage with different readers and bring them to the world of literature by new means. I don’t think that my desire to read A Singing Whale will in any way change the fact that I love to read a good novel with pages.

Maybe this won’t signal the beginning of the end but rather the beginning of a new beginning for reading, one that encompasses technology and tradition, and alongside that, if we can continue to encourage more people to be sharing their reading in groups, the reading revolution may be kicking off very differently. Or maybe I’m just hoping for the best of both worlds and in reality, that’s just not possible. Time will tell. And during that time, what will I really spend more time on, reading books or thinking of ways in which I can make money to buy an iPad? One guess.

The arrival of e-book readers such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader has triggered a lot of discussion in the media and among bloggers about the future of the book and the ‘interesting’ state of the publishing industry. Reading a book on an electronic handheld device is a utilitarian act: I need something to read, but I don’t want to carry a hunking great hardback book around with me. Oddly enough, that was partly the thinking behind the invention of the paperback. I’m not convinced (yet) that one of these techno-readers will become my primary reading device any time soon, but I believe they are already changing the way publishers do business and I think in the long run mid-range paperbacks are an endangered species. It no longer works simply to ship any old atoms to sell bytes; they have to be the right kind of atoms and they have to be flying in the right formation.

Penguin’s recent release of leather-bound editions of books from the Penguin Classics range suggests the company is changing the formation of the atoms it ships and making an effort to move into a more tactile and emotive market. In fact they are selling the book itself rather than its content. These editions, at £50 each, look very lovely indeed, but they are not really the kind of thing you might sit down and actually read. They also have a whiff of good economic times past about them, which makes the inclusion of The Great Gatsby in the list rather more interesting. Fitzgerald’s role as the chronicler of a society heading for destruction has to some extent turned his books into historical curiosities. We wouldn’t be so stupid as to make those mistakes again, would we?

As with closets full of shirts, so there has always been room for boutique books. But I doubt Abigail’s Party is the image Penguin is looking for. In a world where day-to-day reading is increasingly done on a screen of some kind, real readers may well be prepared to pay more for high quality editions to read at home. But they will have to be robust and usable. Lower down the scale Everyman’s Library has been doing ‘value quality’ for over a century and may be about to issue the most patient ‘I told you so’ in publishing history. Penguin revolutionised publishing with its paperbacks in the 1930s. These catwalk classics are strictly for for the display cabinet.

Note: there was a server problem while this post was being edited so it originally appeared in a slightly different form. This may explain why email subscribers have received the post twice.

Posted by Chris Routledge

The arrival of e-book readers such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader has triggered a lot of discussion in the media and among bloggers about the future of the book and the ‘interesting’ state of the publishing industry. Reading a book on an electronic handheld device is a utilitarian act: I need something to read, but I don’t want to carry a hunking great hardback book around with me. Oddly enough, that was partly the thinking behind the invention of the paperback. I’m not convinced (yet) that one of these techno-readers will become my primary reading device any time soon, but I believe they are already changing the way publishers do business and I think in the long run mid-range paperbacks are an endangered species. It no longer works simply to ship any old atoms to sell bytes; they have to be the right kind of atoms and they have to be flying in the right formation.

Penguin’s recent release of leather-bound editions of books from the Penguin Classics range suggests the company is changing the formation of the atoms it ships and making an effort to move into a more tactile and emotive market. In fact they are selling the book itself rather than its content. These editions, at £50 each, look very lovely indeed, but they are not really the kind of thing you might sit down and actually read. They also have a whiff of good economic times past about them, which makes the inclusion of The Great Gatsby in the list rather more interesting. Fitzgerald’s role as the chronicler of a society heading for destruction has to some extent turned his books into historical curiosities. We wouldn’t be so stupid as to make those mistakes again, would we?

As with closets full of shirts, so there has always been room for boutique books. But I doubt Abigail’s Party is the image Penguin is looking for. In a world where day-to-day reading is increasingly done on a screen of some kind, real readers may well be prepared to pay more for high quality editions to read at home. But they will have to be robust and usable. Lower down the scale Everyman’s Library has been doing ‘value quality’ for over a century and may be about to issue the most patient ‘I told you so’ in publishing history. Penguin revolutionised publishing with its paperbacks in the 1930s. These catwalk classics are strictly for for the display cabinet.

Note: there was a server problem while this post was being edited so it originally appeared in a slightly different form. This may explain why email subscribers have received the post twice.

Posted by Chris Routledge

On November 10th, The Institute for the Future of the Book kicks off an experiment in close reading. Seven women will read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and carry on a conversation in the margins. The idea for the project arose out of my experience re-reading the novel in the summer of 2007 just before Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Golden Notebook was one of the two or three most influential books of my youth and I decided I wanted to “try it on” again after so many years. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reading experiences of my life. With an interval of thirty-seven years the lens of perception was so different; things that stood out the first-time around were now of lesser importance, and entire themes I missed the first time came front and center. When I told my younger colleagues what I was reading, I was surprised that not one of them had read it, not even the ones with degrees in English literature.  It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between two readers, one under thirty, one over fifty or sixty, in which they react to the book and to each other’s reactions. And then of course I realized that we now actually have the technology to do just that. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Meade, my colleague and director of if:book London, the Arts Council England enthusiastically and generously agreed to fund the project. Chris was also the link to Doris Lessing who through her publisher HarperCollins signed on with the rights to putting the entire text of the novel online.

Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn what’s necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible. In addition to making comments in the margin, we expect that the readers will also record their reactions to the process in a group blog. In the public forum, everyone who is reading along and following the conversation can post their comments on the book and the process itself.

Here’s the link again to The Golden Notebook.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Literary magazines have been fairly slow to adapt to the online world. The economics of running them have never been good and those with the longest histories have always been well supported by grants, donations, or gifts. In some ways they have been isolated from the pressures of having to reach a large readership because nobody ever expected them to be read by millions. But good writing needs to be read by as many people as possible and this is one area of publishing that could benefit enormously from the shift online. The Reader magazine will continue to be offered as a high quality printed volume, but earlier this year we began publishing a free full-content download edition, which can be found at scribd to read online and also as a downloadable pdf for you to keep.

For new magazines the choice to go online is much easier. The cost of producing a paper publication is high in proportion to the likely readership and for a magazine starting from scratch it makes very little sense to chase after a hard-to-reach small market rather than an easy-to-reach big one. In recent weeks three new online-only literary magazines have caught my eye:

Hamish Hamilton, UK publisher of McSweeney’s, has just published issue two of Five Dials, which is free to download in pdf format and is intended for printing out. I find it works well on my iPod Touch.

Taking a more web-based approach Salt Publishing has revived the title Horizon, a ‘small magazine’ originally published by Cyril Connolly in the 1930s. Editor Jane Holland says:

As a reader, my ideal literary magazine is one where ideas and style matter equally, where the creative dynamics are allowed to shift from issue to issue, keeping readers entertained, informed, and provoked. As an editor, I want to stretch and challenge contributors as much as readers, to give writers considerably more scope for daring and ingenuity than they might get from a print magazine.

Of course publishers have ready access to established writers as well as to hopefuls wanting to impress, which makes these two extremely promising prospects.

The most recent of this new crop of online magazines is The Manchester Review, based at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Edited by John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire, the Manchester Review has big ambitions:

The Manchester Review … uses online media to show and sponsor the interplay of poetry, fiction, music, visual art and essays by new and established practitioners. We hope that it will find new readers and audiences for exciting and innovative creative work, which is steeped in traditional virtues.

Those are sentiments we heartily endorse. As online publishing becomes easier and more respectable the future for literary magazines and for high quality writing, on page and on screen, looks brighter than ever.

Get The Reader magazine free in pdf format or click the banner below to subscribe to the magazine.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Here’s the link again to feedbooks.com. Thanks for the tip to Merlin Mann on the Macbreak Weekly podcast.

I felt sick. I felt panic. Everything was going to change again. Bang. Those butterflies exploded into a fluttering frenzy inside my stomach. Fright. They needed to escape. I didn’t open my mouth. I feared they would flurry out of my throat. They would attack Rita. I would be in trouble. I kept my mouth shut. Tight. Tight. Tight.

For Jude, the world outside doesn’t really exist. She blocks it off because her experiences have proved that it’s too painful. So she is a solitary figure, alone in a world that wants to punish her for reasons unknown. Any external experiences are manifested internally and eat away at her self-esteem: “Whirling. Swirling. Round and round. Twirling secrets round and round.” After her mother’s suicide, it begins to feel like Jude takes responsibility for her dead mother’s ‘crime’. There is a strong message in the novel that our human need to blame and ridicule leads to the suffering of the next generation. Children are pure, but only until they are tainted by the malice of accusatory adults, imposing their opinions of others upon the child. In Search of Adam explains this with compassion and shocking power. Jude’s search for Adam is ultimately a search for untainted and innocent life.

By Jen Tomkins

___

Caroline Smailes’ novella Disraeli Avenue will be available as a free to download ebook from February 18th, 2008 is now available as a free to download ebook from here. It is about the street that is the backdrop to In Search of Adam. You are encouraged to donate whatever you can to the charity One in Four, which provides counselling services for adults who were abused as children. Read about Disraeli Avenue here. We covered this project earlier here.

Smailes decided to find a way to give something back to those whose lives have been touched by abuse and has written a novella, to be published as an ebook, asking only for donations to the charity One in Four in return. The charity offers support for people who have experienced sexual abuse and sexual violence. As a small organisation it desperately needs funds to continue its work. The novella is called Disraeli Avenue after the street in which In Search of Adam is set, and is a collection of short insights into the lives of the people living there.

Caroline’s publisher, The Friday Project is in full support. MD and Publishing Director Clare Christian said “This is a fantastic idea which will raise money for a very important cause and which will give fans of Caroline’s writing much pleasure at the same time.”

The Disraeli Avenue eBook will be available mid-February 2008 and can be downloaded from The Friday Project or from Caroline Smailes’s own website. Here is the link to the charity One In Four again.

___

Caroline Smailes was born in Newcastle in 1973. She moved to the North West to study English Literature at Liverpool University before going on to specialise in Linguistics. A chance remark on a daytime chat show caused Caroline to reconsider her life. She enrolled on an MA in Creative Writing in September 2005 and began to write her first novel, In Search of Adam, which was published by The Friday Project in 2007. Her second novel, Black Boxes, will be published in July 2008.

Powered by Qumana