Category Archives: publishing

Future of Editing – Philip Carter of the ODNB

Today’s Future of Editing talk was by Philip Carter from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Notes have not been edited. 10 years of the publication of the ODNB in September. Wants to think about changing and curating text as part of editorial process. Sections: New content; curating; new ways of using for scholarship & […]

Future of Editing – some reflections on Nicole Pohl on Sarah Scott

The seminar in today’s The Future of Editing series, “An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’ (Piozzi): editing Sarah Robinson Scott“, by Nicole Pohl that the Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services is holding at the Oxford e-Research Centre was a thought provoking one in terms the questions raised a series of points […]

Publishers are not superfluous

I  saw this tweet via @tomabba who is doing some excellent and exciting stuff with digital books. In my mind, it epitomises the arrogance coming from the ill-educated about publishing and what publishers do: Oh, piss off, Matt Yglesias. Piss. Right. Off. pic.twitter.com/TP4Qu6Ca88 — iucounu (@iucounu) October 22, 2014   Yes, the times, they are […]

A blog becomes a book and thoughts on the process

The discussion on the future of publishing, or at least the strand that has come my way, is often about how digital is eating traditional publisher’s lunch. Techcrunch‘s John Biggs has written a few posts about this recently and the Kindle Unlimited launch and whether it is a good thing or not and Danny Crichton […]

Communities, hackers and curators – some thoughts on parts of the openGLAM meeting

I was fortunate enough to get invited to the OpenGLAM expert meeting (at which I felt a slight fraud – but you get over these things quickly) on Building the Cultural Commons as part of the OKFestival. James Harriman-Smith and I had attempted to do something similar with Panton Principles for Humanities and Literature a […]

The book is dead, long live the book?

Forbes Magazine, via Hacker news, has an article by Trevor Butterworth, ‘As The Age Of The Physical Book Retreats, The Cult Of The Physical Book Advances‘, which perhaps re-states where we are with publishing and bookselling. The physical book is enjoying a bit of renaissance in the sense that it appers to be viewed as […]

Minor musings on publishing

I’ve been reading some of Alistair Horne’s tweets marked #pubnow on Twitter, following some of Richard Charkin’s comments in his talk. One of his tweets is that financial publishers are transforming themselves into an information platform, following another that academic publishers are joining together to create platforms. It seems that there is some confusion, if […]

Hacking the book – a quick overview of Book Hackday

I  went to the Book Hackday on Saturday that was supported and organised by the Creative Industries iNet; Electric Bookshop; Geekcamp; idno; Free Word; and Perera. I’d been looking forward to this event, though with some trepidation. It sounds like I took the sensible option of walking from the bus stop over to Clerkenwell but I do like walking […]

CouchDb and Documents

I’ve been have a pre-Book HackDay hack at home (in between cat wrangling duties!) to use Couch DB in managing documents. Since it is a document centred database, no surprise there, but I’ve looking at it from the perspective of creating a system to allow to create their own documentation and make notes against the […]

The orphans are not being exploited

It appears that a court might be able to see some sense and stop Google digitising orphan works, according to a judgement today (source: Wired ). A US federal judge commented that whilst the agreement is good, it went to far. The original agreement appears to have given Google the right to digitise and sell […]