‘Picnic: Order, Ambiguity and Community’ by Kevin Harris, an author and community development commentator, and Gemma Orton, an artist, is an illustrated essay focusing on the relationship between food and social interaction, particularly on that “wobbly combination of conviviality and disorder” – the picnic. Using the A5 landscape to great effect, Kevin has placed footnotes and references alongside the text, interspersed with Gemma’s lovely images.

Fifty limited edition copies, complete with special signed wrappers, will be sold in aid of the homeless charity Crisis at the publication launch on the 14th November, at the Wellcome Trust Gallery. Register for tickets here.

‘Sites and Strategies’ by Gair Dunlop, a visual artist, is a portfolio of select artworks created between 2003 and 2011. A document of his numerous sculpture, media and installation pieces, as well as his approach, it can distributed fluidly both in print, through galleries and art festivals, and online, through the digital bookreader version (below), acting as perfect companion text to Gair’s work.

You can also download, print and make it for yourself on Diffusion here.

Have you thought of using bookleteer to make special gifts to give to people at Christmas? Such as Festive StoryCubes as an alternative to sending traditional Christmas cards, or picture album eBooks to share with family and friends?

To help you get into some festive bookleteering we’re offering a 10% discount on all Short Run Printing prices.

The Last 2011 Printing Date for StoryCubes will be 2nd December – all orders must have been received and paid for by this date.

The Last 2011 Printing Date for eBooks will be 7th December – all orders must have been received and paid for by this date. Any orders after this date may not be delivered in time for Xmas.

Please use the discount code – BKLTRXMAS11

See Proboscis’ own 2010 Xmas/New Year StoryCube alternative to the traditional card.

Check out prices on the estimator & use code : BKLTR1011-20 when ordering.

Before ordering StoryCubes, please get in touch to find out when our next planned printing date is (we have to send them to press in batches of 1000 or more).

***NB : the discount only applies to printing costs (not shipping costs which remain the same) and can’t be combined with other offers.

Happy Bookleteering!

Happy Bookleteering!

We think this is a great way of showing how easy it is for individuals or groups to create and print multiple books in short runs (such as 50 copies) that can be collected together to make a beautiful publication. We will be aiming to add the ability to design and print out your own slipcases to bookleteer later this year, but in the meantime we’re happy to discuss designing and printing custom slipcases for your projects.

Both eBooks and StoryCubes can now be ordered in multiples of 50 (from 50 to 500, then 750, 1000, 1500, 2000 etc). eBooks are printed as soon as payment is received, turnaround from 5-15 days depending on the shipping destination; StoryCubes are printed in batches of 1,000 – orders will be added to a batch and will go to press as soon as a batch hits 1000 cubes.

We believe that we offer some of the most competitive prices for full colour printing of booklets, coupled with our ground-breaking short run service enabling you to print from just 50 copies. Plus the unique Diffusion eBook & StoryCube formats allowing your publications to be downloaded and handmade by anyone anywhere. It all adds up to a remarkably flexible way to create and share both online and off.

If you haven’t already got an account, sign up and get bookleteering.

students on their way to school

So, what sort of reaction did the eBook receive? Simply put, its reception, both in Khartoum and in the rural farming village of Dangeil, exceeded expectations. We produced 500 English copies and 500 in Arabic, the local language. We ran out of the latter. In retrospect, we should have produced a greater number of copies in Arabic. Copies were given to the local school and arrangements were made so that every household in the village received a copy.

Unloading eBooks and textbooks at the school

Although our eBook takes the form of a more traditional and perhaps somewhat static publication, its impact cannot be underestimated. The Dangeil villagers, and indeed university students and antiquities staff in Khartoum, viewed the publication as written for them, about them, and in their own language. The eBook has served not only as an educational tool, but has empowered the local community and created a sense of pride and proprietary ownership of the ruins and their history.

Julie Anderson
Assistant Keeper
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum

the minimum total order for StoryCubes will be just 50 cubes (the minimum per cube design). We will print orders as soon as we have received enough for a print run (1000 cubes)

eBooks will be available to order in multiples of 50 (the minimum per title) up to 500 copies, then 750, 1000 and custom orders for over 1000

StoryCubes will also be available to order in multiples of 50 up to 500 cubes, then 750, 1000 and custom orders for over 1000

the website and app will have an estimate calculator for all variables of eBooks and StoryCubes including prices for shipping to the UK, European Union, North America (USA/Canada) and Rest of the World.

the ordering system will support both online payment via Paypal (including credit cards) and pro-forma invoicing for institutions and for larger orders where electronic bank transfers are preferred.

We are keeping in general to 2010 prices, although since we are changing our shipping methods there may be some small variances in total cost compared to last year. Members overseas will now be able to estimate prices for their location and order direct.

The key difference is that members will be able to order just 50 StoryCubes at a time – much more affordable than our previous minimum of 250 cubes per order. We hope this enables lots more people to experiment with making and using StoryCubes in their own projects and work.

We’re aiming to have the new system in place within the next week or two – meanwhile the 10% discount offer is open until Friday February 4th.

Describing the evolution of the Diffusion eBook & StoryCubes formats, as well as the development of bookleteer over the last dozen years gave me an opportunity to reflect on what’s different again about our approach to publishing and sharing of knowledge. It also reinforced for me how bookleteer and our own PPOD service are yet again quite different to other POD platforms (such as Completely Novel, Lulu or Blurb) – offering something more than just a cheap means of producing and micro-selling books. Our public authoring and shareables concepts, which underpin both the eBooks and the StoryCubes, presents exciting opportunities for mixing the digital with the physical in ways that no other POD service can offer. During the workshops I showed the flow of creation from simple blank sheets of paper than can be folded and cut into eBooks, through to their use as notebooks that can be written or drawn in by hand and then scanned in as PDFs to make them printable by anyone, anywhere, on to the next stage of being able to -reflow the scanned pages back through bookleteer to have PPOD versions printed (my examples were the wonderful set we created for the British Museum’s Melanesia Project with Porer & Pinbin from Papua New Guinea).

The response from the participants was very positive : we’re looking forward to welcoming many more bookleteers to the growing community and excited to see what they create.

This recently published eBook by Julie Anderson and Salah Mohamed Ahmed describes the progress of the Berber-Abidiya Archaeological Project in Dangeil, Sudan. Julie is Assistant Keeper of Sudanese and Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and Salah works for the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, Sudan and the eBook was written for a conference Julie attended. It was then printed at A5 size using the bookleteer Publish and Print on Demand. Download the A3 / Ledger PDFs here.

The eBook is full of rich details about the site in Dangeil (which sounds huge – 300x400m) and the remarkable and beautiful statues and buildings they’ve uncovered there. Intriguingly the site consists of several mounds covered with fragments of red bricks, sandstone, pot shards and plaster and each mound represents a well-preserved ancient building. It’s even possible to see traces of colour left on the stones.

As well as describing the buildings there are also fascinating insights into the rituals, food, rulers and everyday life of the temple, including the information that the Kushite language, Meoitic Meroitic, is one of the few remaining languages in the world which has not yet been translated. And running all through the book are casual glimpses into the detective work of the archeologist.

The idea is that Salah will now translate the eBook into Arabic so it can be distributed to schools around the archeological site to help them understand what’s going on and what has been uncovered. Which would be very exciting for bookleteer because that would allow us to produce our first eBook using the Arabic font and right-to-left reading that we worked so hard to include!

On Sunday (June 20th) I got an email from James asking if it was possible to have some copies of the eNotebooks we made last year printed up via bookleteer’s PPOD service for him to take to Reite village on his next trip to Papua New Guinea in July. I just had to remake the scanned-in versions into new eBooks with bookleteer (which took about an hour for all 4), and I then sent the eBooks to press first thing on Tuesday morning. In a super quick turnaround time, I collected the printed versions this morning (Friday 25th).

Porer & Pinbin’s visit was part of the larger Melanesia Project, a conference for which happens next week (June 28th & 29th) at UCL’s Anthropology Department. We’re looking forward to sharing the printed eBooks with colleagues there and getting their feedback and ideas on using bookleteer and the eBooks as innovative ways to capture and share field work, both with each other and with the communities they work with and study.

We’d love to hear from other anthropologists and ethnographers (and any other disciplines too) interested in using bookleteer and the eBooks as creative and shareable notebooks for fieldwork – please get in touch.

We presented bookleteer alongside Chris Meade of if:book, Ben Terrett of Newspaperclub, Stefan Tobler of And Other Stories as well as Simon himself presenting OpenMute’s Progressive Publishing Service concept. As part of OpenMute’s research they have created a wiki page exploring many digital publishing projects and services.

We’ll be sending out some samples to various friends, colleagues and bookleteers, meanwhile we will start accepting orders for POD eBooks & StoryCubes from April 12th. See the prior post on POD for our initial prices.

We’re also announcing our initial prices for the POD service (see below) which we hope will meet with approval. There are two POD options for eBooks, with a minimum print run of 50 copies :
Option A – for eBooks between 12 – 24 pages and,
Option B – for eBooks between 28 – 40 pages.

Option A prices start from around £3 per copy and go down to £1.61 per copy.
Option B prices start from around £4 per copy and go down to £2.29 per copy.
All prices include shipping within the UK. Please contact us for enquiries about larger quantities and overseas shipping. Turnaround time is expected to be 5-7 working days.

The StoryCube POD service has a minimum print run of 200 full colour cubes (single or double-sided), which can made up up of one or more StoryCube designs. Prices include VAT and shipping within the UK. Please contact us for enquiries about larger quantities and overseas shipping. Turnaround time is 5-7 working days.

Get in touch if you’d like to know more – we aim to start accepting POD orders after Easter.

8 of the cubes formed a special set (in an edition of 75) of drawings inspired by the issues and challenges faced by parents and community workers in Birmingham. A further cube was created for the Birmingham Total Place conference which was designed to provoke questions about Early Intervention and what more can be done.

We also had some fun making up large exhibition versions of the BTP cubes:

To create and order your own StoryCubes, contact us for details on prices and delivery options: sales at proboscis.org.uk