A Book is a Start-Up
This post has been viewed 2,733 times.
The world of digital publishing start-ups brings to mind blogging in its nascent stages. The guiding principle seems to be: if anyone can scribble on the Internet’s wall, anyone can become an author, and any text can become a book. Online, a book’s form warps into something more malleable, and fired-up digital publishers are trying to figure out how to turn that into a business—even if it means a proliferation of books that might as well have been blog posts.
“A book is a startup,” declared Peter Armstrong in a speech about his serialized book company, Leanpub. “I said it in 2010, and I’ll say it again.” Armstrong had on Steve Jobs couture—a long-sleeved black shirt and blue jeans—as he addressed a packed audience in New York at the Tools of Change conference, three days of workshops about the future of books, specialized breakout sessions, and an e-reading exhibition called the “Digital Petting Zoo.” This was a house of mobile apps and metadata, seemingly built in a clearing in the wilderness; there was something of an adventurous spirit, as if making a book were unchartered terrain. The halls were buzzing with frenetic publishers and entrepreneurs. Many were tweeting furiously.
This corner of the publishing world envisions a book as a technological enterprise, and the Web’s hustlers are riding in from every direction to get in on the market. Their approach is informed by scrappy tech culture, but motivated by the literary cachet of books. Tim Sanders, a former Yahoo executive who is now the C.E.O. of Net Minds, a service for crowd-sourcing book production, said that it’s “the allure of the book” that entices people to work on one.
Sanders founded Net Minds about a year ago. “The biggest problem with authors today is that they overestimate their writing and editing skills,” he said, adding that, without editing, “It would have been ‘The Meh Gatsby.’” Then he told me his solution: “Run your book like a start-up.”
Tags: digital publishers, Peter Armstrong, Steve Jobs
