Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
Is the Writing Revolution About Process, Not Product?
We have Blurb Mobile, Cowbird, Broadcastr, Slideshare — storytelling tools built by digital designers for creative expression. And yet, we craft our compositions first for the page. Perhaps this is correct. Perhaps these tools are meant to augment, not replace, writing, to extend the way we craft and shape our texts. Something similar has happened in publishing. Print books are alive and well, in spite of the headlines, but the way we make them is a long way from Gutenberg, his printing press, and moveable type. In 2010, Polity Books published professor John B. Thompson’s 432-page volume,
A Writerly Kind of Social Media: Michael Siedlecki on Neovella
The blank page is the great adversary of many working writers. Turn on your computer, open a Word document, begin. With what? What are you supposed to write? Michael Siedlecki’s collaborative writing tool, Neovella, offers an answer. This online application lets you work with friends to collaboratively compose a novella. One writer begins the story, one adds a plot twist, one turns that plot upside down; gradually the paragraphs accumulate, building toward a full-length piece. In the tradition of James Joyce’s The Dead and Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, the novella is part short story, part …
Should We Write Books? Writing and Publishing in the Digital Age
We have lived so long with the book that it’s easy to forget that it, like the iPad, was once a cutting-edge technology. From Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible to William Blake’s The Book of Thel, many of literature’s most sublime texts were offered as elegantly bound volumes, crisply printed, their pages illuminated by intricate illustrations. In this way the container for an author’s writing became an extension of his words, quietly enhancing the meaning of the text. Over centuries, publishers refined the format into a near-perfect content delivery system, a pinnacle of achievement in information technology, and in arts and …
