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news

Back to everyday life!

Its been a sensational summer on so many levels and in so many ways. To celebrate we’re offering a special 10% discount on bookleteer Short Run Printing costs from today until the 30th September (n.b. : can’t be added to any additional discounts or offers). Use this discount code BTEL-092012 when ordering.

Why not use bookleteer create your own record of what you’ve seen and done this summer – here’s one I created from a visit to the hauntingly beautiful Achamore Gardens on the Island of Gigha this summer.

Super Cheap StoryCube ‘Taster’ Packs
We’ve put together 25 ‘taster’ packs of blank StoryCubes – containing 8 medium and 8 original size cubes) for just £5 plus post and packing.

It super easy to create storycube layouts with bookleteer and print them onto sticker sheets which can be cut out and stuck onto the pre-cut and scored card cubes. Lots of fun for sharing your memorable moments or building up blocks of memories for storytelling and games.

Categories
news

Soho Food Feast: We Are All Food Critics – The Reviews

In May, Proboscis supported the children of Soho Parish Primary School at this year’s Soho Food Feast – a community fundraising event held for the school at which many of London’s celebrated chefs and restaurants provided signature dishes to raise money.

We designed a special eNotebook alongside Fay Maschler, Restaurant Critic of the London Evening Standard, encouraging the children to become food critics and experience the food through all of the five senses. After the event we scanned their reviews and made a sample selection to be published in a compilation eBook (using our Short Run Printing Service) which has forewords from both Rachel Earnshaw (Head Teacher) and Fay. Take a look at the bookreader version below.

Everyone’s already looking forward to next year’s Food Feast and more budding food critics!

Categories
news publishing on demand

Testing a New Payment Service

We’re just testing out a new ‘cardless’ payment service as an alternative to Paypal – Go Cardless. It works by creating ‘Paylinks’ that enable customers to buy something via the Direct Debit system direct from their bank account (and consequently covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee so highly safe and secure).

To test it we’ve created Paylinks for some of the recent eBook sets we’ve published (UK bank account holders and delivery only for now) – we’re interested to see if people find this more attractive or safer than using Paypal and/or credit cards. According to Go Cardless they expect to extend their service to European Union bank accounts later this year and to other places further in the future.

So, if you’d like to pay for a copy of one of our fabulous sets of eBooks by bank-to-bank transfer, then try out a link below:

Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expeditionhttps://gocardless.com/pay/3sh_gXZR

Material Conditions 1https://gocardless.com/pay/sqbBKQb_

City As Material 1 (London) – https://gocardless.com/pay/rUK2BFtk

You can find a range of our publications (both bookleteer and other productions) with Paylinks over at the main Proboscis Online Store.

Categories
education ideas & suggestions publishing on demand

Pocket Portfolios 2012 Special Offer

A couple of years ago we wrote about how bookleteer could be used to create shareable personal portfolios or pocketfolios. We continue to think that the eBook formats are ideal for making a simple pocket portfolio about your work to share and/or give way to prospective clients, employers, commissioners or funders. More than a business card or the generic student postcard, even the smallest eBook of 10 pages plus covers offers a chance to show what you’re capable of, what experiences you’ve had and who you could be in a highly personalised way that exceeds what any CV could indicate. Share your pocketfolio as a handmade ebook, online with bookreader or have them printed at low cost using our Short Run Printing service to stand out from the crowd and communicate something special about yourself.

As a new crop of students are preparing to graduate into one of the harshest employment climates ever, and with youth unemployment at an all time high, we have a special offer for anyone wanting to make and print their own pocketfolio – taking advantage of our recent price reductions for A6 Short Run printed books and lower minimum print run of just 25 copies:

    For every Short Run Printing order for 25 copies of a portfolio style eBook, we will send an additional 25 copies free. Just use the discount code “PORTFOLIO2012”.

Sign up for a free account at bookleteer today and get creating!

Meanwhile here’s an excellent example by artist and lecturer, Gair Dunlop:

And check out this lovely example of using bookleteer to publish a group catalogue of work, created by Mah Rana for the 2nd Year Jewellery and Silversmithing Course at Cass, London Metropolitan University:

Categories
news updates & improvements

What’s next in bookleteer’s evolution?

Following our major updates of last year – the user API, bookreader and integration of QR codes and short URLs bridging the physical/digital divide – we’ve been concentrating on using bookleteer in our own projects like Agencies of Engagement, Material Conditions, Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition and Pallion Ideas Exchange, helping others create their own eBooks and StoryCubes and generally getting on with the business of keeping things going through these tough times.

More recently we’ve had some time and space to think about what else bookleteer could do and how we might make some adjustments to improve its usefulness. Over the past month or so, these ideas have been gestating into actual plans, scenarios, requirements and site maps for our next round of upgrades and improvements. And these themselves follow the price drop for Short Run printing of A6 books, as well the new minimum eBook print run of just 25 copies, which we recently announced.

Going Public
The first change we plan to implement will be to allow users to publicly share their eBooks and StoryCubes direct from bookleteer. Members of the public will, for the first time, be able to browse (without needing an account) library pages containing links to eBooks and StoryCubes which users have shared. We also hope to build in simple social media links to enable these pages to be tweeted or shared on Facebook. And sharing via bookreader will also be available to all members. In addition to this, and reflecting our own practice of publishing series of eBooks and StoryCubes, we plan to create Collections – a new way to organise own eBooks or StoryCubes into named and distinct series.

Making bookleteer Economically Sustainable
To keep bookleteer going we need to encourage more people to use the Short Run Printing Service service to print their eBooks and StoryCubes. Other than donations to the Alpha Club this is the only source of income to pay for our hosting, bandwidth, development and maintenance costs. As you may have heard, Proboscis no longer receives funding from Arts Council England so we are having to find sustainable sources of income for projects like bookleteer. If we can significantly drive uptake of the Short Run printing service, then we hope to sustain bookleteer as a platform indefinitely. To help people with ordering we’re already working on building in pricing estimation direct into the ordering page. This should make it much simpler to see print estimates when you are considering using the Short Run Printing service.

Pledge For Print
This leads on to the biggest and most exciting aspect of what we’re planning. A couple of years back I wrote a post speculating on how a crowdfunding marketplace within bookleteer could transform the way people create, print and share their publications. We have been working on a model for such a concept – allowing users to offer Collections of eBooks or StoryCubes for others to “Pledge For Print“. We won’t be handling financial transactions to begin with, simply creating a mechanism for users who want to print an edition of 1 more more eBooks or StoryCubes (in a Collection) to know that there are people out there who will pledge to buy a copy from them once its printed. Ultimately we would aim to build in a full crowdfunding-type system, accepting pledges and automating the process of collecting donations once the pledge target has been reached to trigger the print run & shipping. Its a huge project for us – but we think it will transform bookleteer and publishing on demand in the process.

Community Support is Vital
To fund the development we’re hoping to entice more friends, fellow travellers and supporters to donate and join the Alpha Club and take an active part in the developing ‘community’ of bookleteers. We’re also aiming to attract a main sponsor for bookleteer – a company or organisation which shares our values and ethos of creating Public Goods and enabling people to make and share hybrid physical/digital stuff. If you also think what we’re planning could be the next best thing since sliced bread – please donate today!





And do please get in touch with your feedback, comments and suggestions.

Categories
news updates & improvements

Big Price Cut & Minimum Print Run Halved!

selection of highlights printed with bookleteer's Short Run service

Today we’re very excited to announce a couple of major changes to bookleteer’s Short Run Printing service :

  • Minimum print run is now just 25 copies per eBook – half the previous minimum of 50 copies
  • We have also slashed the cost of A6 printed eBooks between 30%-50% (depending on quantity ordered)

Check out the eBook price estimator to see how much your eBook would cost to print (we’ll also be overhauling the ordering system in the next few weeks to integrate the estimator there too).

We believe this makes it much more accessible for people wanting to experiment with having their eBooks professionally printed and bound but only want a few copies at a super competitive price.

We’ll be posting soon about our other plans for bookleteer which we aim to introduce in stages over the summer – all in all its going to be a very exciting year of changes for bookleteer and its users!

Categories
news

Xmas 2011 Printing Discount For Festive Ideas

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.

Categories
news

October 20% Discount on Short Run Printing

This month (October 2011) we’re offering a special 20% discount off Short Run Printing orders.

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!

Categories
news

June 20% Discount on Short Run Printing

To celebrate the launch of bookreader, we’re offering a special 20% discount off Short Run Printing orders this month (June 2011). Check out prices on the estimator & use code : BKLTR0611-20 when ordering.
(This offer cannot be combined with any other offers or discounts).

Happy Bookleteering!

Categories
ideas & suggestions publishing on demand

crowdfunding publications

The estimable Alex Steffen, founder of Wordchanging.com, has recently announced a new project – Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City’s Future – which he’s attempting to fund through the crowdfunding site kickstarter. This is a really interesting idea and something we’re keen to investigate ourselves, having had some small success with our own Alpha Club crowdfunding efforts. I wrote last year about investigating the ways in which crowdfunding could be linked to forms of rapid publishing like bookleteer’s short run printing service to make it even more accessible to people who just want to produce a small number of books without having to bear all the costs up front.

Alex’s project is on a bigger scale than this, and suggests a very different approach to the problem of funding the time required to research and write the books, not just print them. This has some obvious and interesting implications for publishing as a whole, and for other creative endeavours as well. The concept seems so simple – the people who want to read his book also pay for the writing of it – but which has some other subtle implications. Usually we buy books (or other media) after the fact of writing – the burden of supporting the artist or writer is usually absorbed through some form of patronage (via public grants or private sponsorship), or through the personal dedication and effort of the individual themselves. But asking the readers to pay for more than the cost of the book, to support the very effort of making is to ask people to become part of the process. It establishes the possibility of creative work being seen in dialogue with others, as a craft, not just as something which appears magically from an aloof and remote genius. More and more the previously mysterious and detached processes of creative people are being acted out in ways that allow others to take part in some way or be witness. It is an empowering and transformational process that I believe gives hope to others that their own forms of expression may also have value. This is not about the distinction between amateur and professional or high/low art – tired debates now – but about that scope for the craft, skill and impact of creative people to be seen in relation to the work of others and valued in new and meaningful ways.

bookleteer is part of a toolset we have been building for more than a decade for public authoring and to enable cultures of listening. These tools are sometimes techniques which we develop to help people combine other media, to figure out how to create their own tools as much as use ones we may have introduced them too. What Alex is demonstrating with this project is not only how to use such tools, but how to create a community around the process of making too. With our new programme of projects, Public Goods, which we start next month too, we are hoping to engage people in similar processes of taking part in the construction and sharing of cultures and cultural artefacts that they value. Our new series of City As Material events in towns across the UK and abroad will be an important part of setting the frame for this kind of dialogue and collaboration, and perhaps a way for us to explore crowdfunding in direct collaboration with the people who want to contribute and participate.

Alex is aiming to reach his goal or raising $10,000 by Earth Day, Thurs April 14th – he’s more than 50% of thew way there (at time of writing). I do recommend supporting him as the results (judging from the wonderful 2nd edition of the Wordchanging book just published) are bound to be great.