Lecture 4

Wow, this week has flown by! Did any of you attempt to publish your own book this week after reading my blog about the online publishing website lulu.com last week? If so, I hope that your attempts were a success. It’s amazing what you can produce using the website, and it’s a brilliant idea for that perfect gift for family members or friends at Christmas or for a special occasion (http://www.lulu.com/).

Until this week, I have always thought of blogs as a form of expression, a medium in which to log your thoughts and ideas in which you can add photos and links. But the more that I study blogs and the blogsphere, the more I am inclined to wonder…can blogs be used as a propaganda tool? Of course they can! Blogging has become an art form with more people beginning to realise the impact that blogs have on the public’s lives as well as views, it’s now a cultural phenomenon. As previously stated in an earlier blog by myself, the number of blog users has soared in the last ten years, from about 50 in 1999 to millions of blogs by now. It’s no wonder then that politicians are now jumping on the band wagon, and using it as a form of political propaganda. Ten years ago, when would you have seen a politician writing a blog? Let’s be honest, hardly ever! So why now? In an article online about Oakland Mayor, Jerry Brown it states that-

“more politicians are following in his footsteps, looking to the web as a way to bypass the media and get out their own message- unvarnished and unedited”
(http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0324/p02s01-uspo.html).

This is a great point, as politicians can get their message out to the public without the media putting a spin on what is said in order to sell papers. Also, I suppose that a blog is more personal, therefore, it’s easier for the public to identify with the candidates rather than read a story written by someone else about them in the paper, or as online articles. By using blogs as a communication outlet to the public, their facts can be publicized correctly, and the chance of a false story getting released is quite slim. This ensures that the public receives the story straight from the horses’ mouth. Therefore it can be used as a primary source of information.

I suppose there’s always this notion that if one politician is seen with a blog, it is vital for other candidates to have one too. Otherwise they would be seen as the weaker candidate. It’s this same notion of politicians not doing television and radio interviews or public appearances. If they’re not seen and heard, who will know of them and their policies? Hardly anyone! As it states on the bloggerheads website, through politicians having a blog 'You can show the people who vote for you how hard you're working, and attract the majority of those interested in issues you care about' (http://www.bloggerheads.com/politicians.asp). Therefore keeping up-to-date with the latest cultural phenomenon such as blogs is vital for success in politics, as they’re in constant competition with each other for supporters for their party. Here are some examples of political blogs-

http://www.richardallan.org.uk/
http://www.boris-johnson.com/
http://romseyredhead.blogspot.com/ (which is a blog on this website!)

Blogs can influence the public without them even realising it. They have the power to sway public opinion. Think about it. Have you ever read a blog, and after doing so changed your mind about a certain topic? I certainly have!

In saying the above statement, I cannot help but wonder…how reliable can a blog be? Are they trustworthy? Especially when thinking about using it as a source for an academic essay? Let’s face it, not all blogs are reliable news sources. Think about it. How much does the name ‘John’ for example tell you about John as an author to the blog? Nothing at all! Without blogs going through a process of peer review by experts in the field such as essays, articles and journals do, they cannot be trusted to tell you the “truth” as it were. But that’s a matter of opinion. After all, how trustworthy is this blog? Are academic blogs even trustworthy? Have a think about it. Here's a link if you wish to have a deeper explanation by another blogger of why blogs aren't trustworthy- http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2004/02/11/71163.aspx.
This week, I produced an RSS feed to my blog on moodle, many websites provide an RSS feed. Take the examples of the links I have included above to politicians blogs. It is plain to see on the top right of the screen of Boris Johnson's blog. This is how the icon looks-
I’ll be honest with you, until this week I had no idea what an RSS feed was, and I’m sure quite a few of you won’t have an idea what one is either. It’s otherwise known as “Really Simple syndication”. Basically it’s a web feed format used to publish frequently updated works which can include news headlines/articles, journals and blog entries. You automatically recieve updates via e-mails, and it 'contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text, making it possible for people to keep up with Ingenuity without having to check the website manually' (http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.albertaingenuity.ca/files/u1/rss-icon.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.albertaingenuity.ca/rss/feeds&usg=__6zWHWcNGUGQuYZTEz8TuaJT4u6c=&h=300&w=450&sz=15&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=A9zPscd9IDQqJM:&tbnh=85&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3DRSS%2Bfeed%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1). It comes in a form of an XML file, and allows information to be published once, and accessed by many different programmes. The benefits to the public when subscribing to an RSS feed is it saves time looking for all updates. Not only this, but it also updates you on your favourite websites. If this appeals to you, why not subscribe? Just enter the feed’s URL or click an RSS icon in a browser, and this should initiate the subscription process. Click on the following links to view great examples of how to create an RSS feed-

http://tlrg.bangor.ac.uk/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=1415
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/465.cfm

Post your comments if you have any views on the issues raised in this weeks blog. Until next week.

Lecture 3

Hi!
Well another week has flown by since my last blog, and a lot has happened since I last spoke to you. I have now become a publisher! I know it sounds impossible, but you can become one too! It’s simple!
This week was the first I’d ever heard of a certain website called Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page). As it says on the website, 'Project Gutenberg is the place where you can download over 30,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPhone, Kindle, Sony Reader or other portable device' therefore it enables you to download any book that is out of copyright for free as an ePub, Mobipocket, HTML or simple text formats.

As I have no work of my own to publish, I went to this website and typed in an author and the title of the book that I wished to publish (I chose Jane Austen’s, Pride and Prejudice- a classic). Once it came up on the screen, I proceeded to copy and paste the novel in to Microsoft Word Document, and saved it. I then went on to a website called Lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com/uk/publish/books/). This website enables the public to take anything that they themselves have written, or something that someone else has written, and publish it into an actual book which is available for you, and others to buy online on amazon (an online retailer of books) http://www.amazon.co.uk. After signing up to Lulu's website I then went on to decide what sort of book I would like to publish the novel as, for example paperback or hardback, student's keep in mind that the cost of producing paperback is lower! Then the design, how would I like it bound, did I want it in colour or black and white, and the size of my pages. I proceeded to upload the file that I had saved in Microsoft Word earlier which was the actual content of the novel, and proceeded to chose the cover of the book and its layout. Whilst in the process of publishing my book, I found it was possible to add illustrations if you wish to do so, as long as you get the permission of the creator of the photo to use it, and include their name somewhere in the book, which I did on the back cover. As I decided to use the website flickr.com (http://www.flickr.com/) for this purpose, I had to ensure that the photos I chose to use were under the creative commons licence and therefore meant that I had permission to use them. I then saved all this information, and published the book. The cost of my book was £6.84, price varies depending on the type of book (paperback, hardback), size of the pages, and the amount of pages. The process of publishing the book took no longer than an hour to complete, and left me satisfied with the end product, as it was exactly how I envisaged it. It felt great to have my name on the front cover of a book! Take a look at it-
Can you believe that it is that simple and easy to publish your own book? If so, why not try it! I thought this website was amazing, and I’m not the only one, as I found a review of the website on ciao- http://www.ciao.co.uk/lulu_com__Review_5707484 which said 'So, how does it sound, if you had complete editorial control over your work? If you could publish it, edited as you wish, with your own cover design and everything you would like? It sounds great doesn't it?...and might even get you noticed by 'established' publishers'. Go on, have a go, you don't even have to buy it if you're not satisfied with it, why not do it for a bit of fun!

After fully enjoying the experience of publishing a book, and having full creative control of the end product I have decided that I will probably be using this process again to create my “artefact” for my practice-based project. I’m quite looking forward to the challenge!

Throughout the course of the module we have discussed and read about this idea of the birth of the technological age, and the impact it’s had on the publishing industry. This week, I’ve been thinking about what the author John B.Thompson addresses in chapter 15 of Books in the Digital Age. He mentions this notion of the traditional book being eclipsed by the delivery of content online. Yes, the digital revolution has impacted the world of book publishing, and transformed it, websites such as Project Gutenberg and Lulu shows us this. But in my opinion this is a good thing, as Thompson says, it has given the world of printed books a new lease of life, ‘rendering it potentially immortal’ by providing different revenue streams, for example the backlist. This means that it is now possible to publish books that were once put out of print through publishing companies and websites such as Project Gutenberg storing these books as PDF files in their archives. This means that it is possible to print them on demand. This as Thompson says means that ‘with digital printing, the life of a book can be stretched out indefinitely, as the book can be permanently available’. This is a good thing, as it means that every book ever created is most likely to be available to the public, and that many commentators who predicted the death of the book will be wrong! At least I hope so. What do you think? Do you believe that the death of the book is soon around the corner with the birth of e-books? Leave your comments.

I bid you farewell until next week’s blog. I hope that your publishing attempts go well, and that you have as much fun publishing your own book as I did.

Lecture 2

I cannot believe that a whole week has passed by since my last blog! It feels like yesterday on me blogging for my very first time!

In this week’s lecture so many different aspects of the publishing world were discussed, which got me to thinking of the changes that have occured in the publishing world since the rise of the e-book. This issue is discussed in three readings provided for us in the readings for this weeks lecture, which were-

The Rattle of Pebbles, by J.Epstein http://tlrg.bangor.ac.uk/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?inpopup=true&id=1321
The Gutenberg Elegies- The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkets http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm
and
Chapters 1-3 from Books in the Digital Age, by John B.Thompson http://www.amazon.com/Books-Digital-Age-Transformation-Publishing/dp/0745634788

Over the decades the publishing industry has been transformed from a 'cottage industry' (a small publishing business, run by a few people) as J.Epstein refeers to in his e-journal, The Rattle of Pebbles in to an industry full of corporate business conglomerates taking hold of the market, consisting of different departments to carry out different functions for individual aspects of the publishing value chain. This no longer required the need of all publishing work to be carried out in-house like in Epstein’s days. This idea of the publishing world being taken over by conglomerates is something that is also mentioned in chapter 3 of Thompson’s- Books in the Digital Age. Thompson states that since the 1980s, large corporations began to emerge through merging or taking control of smaller independent companies. It is no secret that this transformed publishing into a world where conglomerates became the dominant players in the publishing field. One of the downfalls of this was that these independent publishing companies were being taken over by conglomerates that were mainly from the media sector. This therefore meant that publishing wasn’t their only focus; they also diversified into films and television broadcasting. This is known as vertigal integration, where companies own different operations and businesses across various industries and verticals. Here are two examples of media conglomerates integrating vertically by taking over publishing companies:
AOL Time Warner- Little Brown and Company
Viacom/CBS- Simon & Schuster

As the publishing world has transformed throughout the decades, this has made way for new publishing distributors to squeeze through, mainly because of technological advances. The most successful example to show you would be the online book retailer Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/. I’m sure that all of you have used this website to purchase a book at least once in your lives, and if not, I’m sure you will one day. This website has been distributing books since 1995, and has become a phenomenal success through internationalizing itself, as most publishing chains now do to capitalise on profit margins, and diversifying itself through distributing CDs, videos and toys as well as books. Amazon is now an extremely popular worldwide bookseller of new, second-hand and backlist books. This is largely down to the fact that it can undercut bookstores as their overhead is lower.

This leads me to the question; does the rise in online book selling as well as e-books spell the demise of bookstores and further down the line libraries? Will Robert Zich’s vision of the future in Sven Birket’s The Gutenberg Elegies- The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age come true? Will the libraries become more like dusty unattended museums? I certainly hope not! But as Robert McCrum iterates in an article from The Guardian on August 16th, 2009, 'There's no question that their (libraries) role has been transformed. The highly controversial digitising programme of " the Google initiative" means that many of the world's copyright libraries (in Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, among others) can be retrieved at the click of a mouse' http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/16/robert-mccrum-ebooks-kindle. Does this therefore mean that there's no call for public libraries any longer when you can easily access it on your computer at home? But the journalist also says 'Many people will hate e-reading. The screen is only a tool, and not much more, and a poor substitute for the printed page'. This was something I learned to be true when reading The Rattle of Pebbles by J.Epstein as an e-journal. I found it a highly unpleasurable experience to read the journal as an e-journal as the technology was getting in my way of being able to enjoy the reading because I had to constantly zoom in, scroll down, then scroll to the side for every single page, all 24 of them! Instead of experiencing the simplicity of turning the page as I would have experienced with an ordinary journal. Therefore this notion of disruptive technology always changing things for the better did not stand its ground with me when it came to evolving a journal to an electronic version!

Not only will online books and journals change the simplicity of reading, but arguably the language according to Sven Birkets. He claims that the traditions of print literacy will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic “plainspeak” which I agree with as the language seen online in visual novels a.s.o is not how the English language should be written or spoke when it comes to works of literature or academic purposes in my opinion.

Technology has also affected the publishing value chain in the sense that every link adds value to the product, as Thompson points out in the reading,
‘each of the links performs a task or function which contributes something substantial to the overall task of producing the book and delivering it to the end user’. If a link does not fulfil its function, and doesn’t justify its expense, then there's no need for it to stay in the chain, it will be dinitermediated. So, if technology is disrupting the normal, and creating new advances where this means that a link in the chain is no longer needed, such as when the author Stephen King sold his novel Riding the Bullet as an e-book online, this means that not every link in the publishing chain was needed for the creation of that book, or its distribution. It’s questionable if he even needed a publisher at all. Will this lead the way for other authors to follow in his footsteps, until there will come a day when the publisher is no longer needed? For example, on page 24 of Thompson’s reading he says-
‘Given that the publishing chain is not rigid and that particular tasks or functions can be eclipsed by economic and technological change, what reason is there to believe that the role of the publisher itself might not be rendered redundant?’.
(Here’s how the publishing value chain is implemented at the moment- http://tlrg.bangor.ac.uk/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=1392).
Does this mean that the cottage industry of publishing will be making a comeback? I’m sure that we’re not far from it!

I hope all this wasn’t too confusing for you to grasp the basics of what I’ve been researching this week. Feel free to express your views on the issues raised in my blog today by leaving your comments.

That’s the end of my blogging today, until my next installement!

Lecture 1

Hi,
Welcome to my first ever blogging session. As a traditionalist usually, my thoughts/ views are normally recorded down on paper in my diary, but not today! Today I’m joining in on the new blogging craze which has soared since the estimated number of 50 at the end of 1999 link and I am attempting to write my first ever blog today!

In relation to this weeks lecture, I suppose that what I’ve written above about blogging today instead of writing with pen and paper could be linked to our discussion in the lecture on the evolution of publishing into e-publishing through technology. This is a great example of how diaries, books and journals as physical artefacts have been disrupted by technology, and have been transformed into electronic artefacts.

In order for you to understand what e-publishing is, it is important firstly to define the proccess of publishing. In short, it is to find content, develop it, go through different processes such as proofreading, designing, printing, and then market the product and later distribute it (here is a link of a more detailed process used to publish work- http://tlrg.bangor.ac.uk/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=1392 ). After defining publishing, look at how in recent years the involvement of technology has evolved the proccess of publishing, and what the outcome of the end product is, and the means of distribution. Analysing this situation gives you the definition of e-publishing, which is a way in which individuals can tell a story/ express views interactively, not in a physical artefact such as a book. Therefore, e-publishing is a digital distribution of content to a public audience.

If you are not familiar with the process of e-publishing, it includes many different means of creating work electronically, and 'disseminating information via electronic means including e-mail and via the web' http://www.desktoppub.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-electronicpublishing.htm . These electronically created works include: digital publication of e-books, electronic articles, podcasting, e-journals, and visual novels (which are popular in Japan). All these things are changing daily with new technology constantly being produced.

Even though e-publishing is a relatively new medium, and realistically is only being born, according to consulting firm IDC, 'the demand for digital books will build quickly over the next several years' http://www.allbusiness.com/professional-scientific/management-consulting-services/1102903-1.html. Does this compromise the future of the traditional book?

With technology, people, and culture rapidly changing, new technology is regularly getting produced, and changes everything, this is otherwise known as disruptive technology. For you to grasp this concept, a great example of this would be in the music industry where it changed from records to tapes to cd’s to files, to just getting the music, and not having to pay to listen to it through such software as spotify. As new means of distributing music electronically has been produced, gone are the days where we can walk in to a store and buy a music tape. Will this be the case for books in years to come? Where we will no longer be able to purchase a book from a store, only download it as a PDF file? I certainly hope not! As this will spell the end of the authenticity of reading a book!

With technology rapidly changing, I have no idea and cannot even imagine where e-publishing will be years from now, but I am very interested in witnessing what these technological changes have in store for us.

I’m no where near an expert on e-publishing, but I hope to learn more about the field, and grasp a greater understanding of what e-publishing entails through this module.

I have come to the end of my blogging session for today until my next instalment next week. I hope you had a clear insight into the mechanics of what e-publishing is.

Bye for now.