Categories
publishing on demand

Alpha Club

As part of our thinking into new business and revenue models for Proboscis’ projects and practice, we’ve come up with a different approach (to relying on grants) for the next stage of bookleteer’s development.

To progress bookleteer to a public ‘beta’ version in early 2010 we’re looking for friends and supporters (initially organisations but also individuals) to join bookleteer’s Alpha Club. The club is an alternative support/fundraising initiative, aimed at partners, friends, colleagues and sponsors who share in our ethos of ‘public authoring’, providing public access to tools of creation, production and distribution and who, as members of the Alpha Club, would like to be at the core of the emerging bookleteer community. For a modest, one-off contribution (at least £250) we hope Alpha Club members will help us raise our target of around £10k for the next critical phase of bookleteer’s development.

Membership of the Alpha Club will be exclusive to those who join during the ‘alpha’ stage of bookleteer’s development, establishing a founder group of friends, supporters and sponsors.

Benefits include:

  • Up to 5 bookleteer accounts per member & technical support;
  • access to the bookleteer APIs to experiment with;
  • a private pitch up & publish style training session at our studio
  • a free copy of Proboscis’ bookwork, Social Tapestries: A Case of Perspectives (RRP £40)
  • Inclusion (if desired) on the Alpha Club’s ‘Roll of Honour’ webpage

If you’d like to support bookleteer and become an Alpha Club member, please contact us at bookleteer (at) proboscis.org.uk or donate now via Paypal:


Update 1/11/09: We’re pleased to announce our first two members: DodoLab (Canada) & Architecture Centre Network (UK).

Categories
updates & improvements

recent design tweaks

We’re continuing to make small changes and improvements to the design of the eBooks and StoryCubes – the most recent of which has been to make the way proboscis and bookleteer are credited on the back cover of eBooks more discreet:

bookleteer_credits_1bookleteer_credits-2

Categories
events publishing on demand

Pitch Up & Publish

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Starting in October we will be running regular informal evening workshops for people to literally pitch up and publish using bookleteer.com. Initially these will be held at our Clerkenwell Studio for up to 15 participants – all you need is a laptop and some content (text /photos/ drawings etc) you’d like to create and share as eBooks or StoryCubes (shareables). We will provide free user accounts to bookleteer and guide you through the steps of preparing and generating your shareables to share online, via email or as physical publications. Once created you can publish them on your own website or, if appropriate, we can publish them on Diffusion.

Update: The first workshop will be held on October 15th 2009 between 6.30-9pm at the Proboscis Studio.

To reserve a place please email us at diffusion (at) proboscis.org.uk Participants will be asked to make small donation to cover materials (paper/printing ink etc) and refreshments (beer).

Categories
publishing on demand

bookleteering is go!

As of Monday 28th September 2009 we have a working ‘alpha’ version of bookleteer deployed on our production server. Over the next few months we will be refining the user interface, developing contextual help and user guides and workflows for how to prepare files for upload. There’s also much work to be done on site functionality and some new shareable formats we’ll be introducing for the first time. We’ll also be testing and tweaking the API to be able to offer eBook and StoryCube generation to other websites and organisations.

Its been a long road to get this far and the way ahead seems yet more daunting, but its a hugely exciting leap forwards. The future begins now.

Our vague timeline is:
Sept 2009 to January 2010 – ‘alpha’ testing
January 2010 – ‘beta’ testing
Spring 2010 – launch of bookleteer

A big thanks is due to the team who’ve brought this to fruition: Stefan Kueppers (technical direction), Simon Whiteside & Yasir Assam (coding); Paul Makepeace (sys admin) and Carmen Vela Maldonado (illustration).