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.

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!

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 Expedition – https://gocardless.com/pay/3sh_gXZR

Material Conditions 1 – https://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.

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:

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.

• 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!

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!

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.

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.

We’d like to hear what sort of things you’d like help with: from basic level introduction to specific topics – such as designing project notebooks, embedding multimedia links via QR codes and preparing books for printing via our Short Run Printing Service. If there’s interest we can run specific workshops aimed at transferring our experiences of working with kids in schools to use bookleteer, or with other community groups.

Each workshop place will cost about £20 (UKP) and will include complimentary Alpha Club membership, discount on Short Run Printing Service orders and a free pack of new Medium size StoryCubes. You’ll be able to book places online via eventbrite.

We’d also like to hear whether people would prefer the sessions to be run during the day or evening – we may alternate if it helps more people take part.

Please contribute with your suggestions and requests – we’d like these sessions to be as useful and focused on your needs as possible. You can post comments here, or add them to the discussion on Facebook.

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.

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.

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.

eBooks
UK orders : 6th December (3pm GMT)
International orders : 1st December (3pm GMT)

StoryCubes
All orders : 1st December (3pm GMT)

Some Christmas Ideas
StoryCubes and eBooks can make great gifts – why not design a Christmas StoryCube to send instead of a card, or print a photo book of family pictures to share with relatives? At bookleteer’s PPOD prices, individual eBooks and StoryCubes can work out at similar prices to traditional designer Christmas cards.

I had the chance to pay a visit to Julie Anderson, Assistant Keeper for Ancient Sudan and Egyptian Nubia at the BM on the 14 September to talk about her work with the eBooks. Julie is the project leader for what is known as the Berber-Abidiya archaeological project in Sudan. She and her collaborator Dr Salah eldin Mohamed Ahmed in Sudan have been working with Proboscis to develop a version of the eBook as part of this project. This was my chance to find out a bit more about the project.

Sample project: Excavations in the Temple Precinct of Dangeil

One of the sites where Julie and her team have been excavating since 2000 is in Dangeil, about 350km north of Khartoum. The motivation for creating an eBook first came when teachers from local schools started bringing their students to visit the site. Most of these teachers had very little information about the site itself or about the Kingdom of Kush who were attributed with having built a temple on this site more than 2000 years ago. It was at this point that the team realised they needed to make some kind of resource available to people from the region so that they could learn more about the project and why it was so significant.

Julie was later introduced to the eBooks through someone else from the BM who had been using them as part of an ethnographic project (more on that next week). She then got in touch with Giles from Proboscis who demonstrated some of the material and proposed a number of options for using the eBooks. After considering their options, she and Salah decided to use the eBook and began the process of writing the material.

The book would cover some of general history of the period and specifically develop the history of the site. The information contained in the eBook was designed to be fairly flexible: although it was written at a level that would not have been easily understood by primary students, it was accessible to teachers and older students as well as the general public who would be interested in the site. You can download an English version of the eBook here. The final version is nearly 40 pages long in the A5 format which meant that the foldable version of the eBook was ill-suited to this project (it tends to get quite difficult to fold that many pages together, especially when you want to make a lot of them). For this reason and for greater durability, they chose to work with the pre-bound version of the eBook.

When I met with Julie, the project was entering its final phase of development. She was hoping to have 500 copies of the eBook made in English and 500 copies made in Arabic. These would hopefully be distributed widely: in the National Museum in Khartoum – to antiquities staff, but also with local government officials, as well as anyone visiting the site including school groups, as well as the local community.

Distributing to the local community was particularly important for Julie. The site itself is located right in the middle of the village. Having been there for over 10 years now, the team has been working closely with many of the villagers and she felt this was one of the many ways in which she could ensure a good interaction with the community.

Julie sees this eBook as potentially the beginning of a series of of eBooks about the project and hopes to produce more versions that would cover other sites in the region. She hopes to get some feedback from the villagers about this version and incorporate any suggestions into future iterations of the publications.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

Julie found the eBooks and the Bookleteer website extremely easy to use. She felt that it was easy to modify the eBooks in case there was anything wrong with the text and to quickly see the new results. For her, this was an advantage compared to dealing with other forms of desktop publishing where you can’t immediately change something and produce it again.

As with the case of Niharika Hariharan last week, the ability to publish in other languages was also a considerable advantage. Although there were a few early formatting issues to resolve for publishing in Arabic, Julie felt that this option made it a particularly attractive resource for institutions like the BM who operated in many different countries:

“I can see actually from the use of this as a bigger institution, looking at this is that it’s very effective for communicating with our local audiences worldwide in their own languages.”

I would say that this project represents a clear example of the publishing category I initially proposed in a previous post. I will be pushing this reflection a bit further in future posts. But first, stay tuned next week for the second of my two part look at how the eBooks have been used at the BM.

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!