Try Submishmash for Collecting Submissions

Have you ever tried to hassle with documents attached to emails? In publishing, it can be an absolute nightmare. One manuscript may come as one document, while another may come as five or six. And, just forget collecting recipes for that new cookbook. Things are constantly getting lost or “archiving” themselves.

E-Books vs. Books: The Green Debate

Original image on NYTimes.com

I always have been a book person. I’ve been collecting them since I was three, from the Sesame Street how-to-count books to Maurice by E.M. Forster. I love the feel of books, the smell of them, everything about them. Also, vainly enough, I like the way books look on shelves; I have a tendency to arrange them by color. There’s just nothing like a book!

From the Publisher’s Desk: The Semi-Latest Book Publishing Industry News, 4/3/10

So this Saturday finds me up at the office with the blinds shut on my window while getting caught up on a variety of things that I didn’t get done during this four-day week that had a two-day trip out to Abilene wedged into it to discuss all things wind energy: approving pending requisitions, sending out belated emails, and closing out weekly reports. Plus, to top it all off, with all the running around, I didn’t even remotely have time to watch over my rss feeds like I normally would so that’s why this is the semi-latest publishing news as it comes from the week of March 22-26. On the other hand, this week’s news has been dominated by all things iPad and until I actually get to play around with one, I’ll try to stay out of that discussion.

From the Publisher’s Desk: Top Book Publishing Industry News 3/5-3/19/10

The conversation piece on my desk this week has been this coffee mug that Wes & Sheila picked up from another publisher—a venerable, long-time university press—at the TCCTA convention week before last. If I was still teaching, I could use it in class to illustrate the definition of disingenuous. I mean, c’mon people! If you’re not trying to sell books, make money, make a profit (if for no other reason than to keep your hard-working employees gainfully employed), then what are you doing in an exhibit hall trying to pick up textbook adoptions!?! Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not exactly the most money-grubbing book publisher alive—I’m working on it, though—but we can all at least be honest about what we’re doing and what effects we’re hoping to achieve.

A Publisher’s Room with a View: Top Publishing News of the Week, 3/5/10

This photo doesn’t really do justice to the window in my office, but the fact that since the first of the year—after our big move across campus into a newly remodeled suite of offices—I HAVE a window at all after five years of working in something of a cave in our old building is wonderful in its own right. Plus, for the first two months of the year it was gray, cold, and rainy outside most of the time which wasn’t too cheerful a view but spring is finally starting make an appearance with lots of blue sky and sunshine.

For all us here it’s been a busy week: Sheila and Wes are at the Texas Community College Teachers Association conference in Houston, we picked up our new summer catalogs from the print shop, a couple of forthcoming titles are being indexed . . . the last stage for them to go through before being sent to print, and the Lust, Violence, Religion: Life in Historic Waco Facebook page is up to 158 fans. (For anyone who hasn’t been there yet, you can listen to a podcast of the first chapter as narrated by Mike Jones, who is recording every essay in the book for us.) And, on the subject of LVR podcasts, within the next few weeks those audio files will also be available to download for free at Podiobooks during the run-up to the book’s 9/1/10 publication date.

Web-Based Applications: Issuu vs. Scribd Deathmatch

Just as soon as I did my last post about Issuu, a documenting sharing Web site that we’ve started doing some book previews on, I almost immediately came across Scribd, another site that provides the same basic kinds of online publishing services. I haven’t been able to find exact user/member/subscriber figures for Issuu, but supposedly Scribd is the largest of these sites with +50 million users and 50K documents being uploaded every day. So, I thought I would upload some of the same materials we’d put on Issuu and then track the results to see which one was generating the most views/traffic.

Web-Based Applications: Issuu

One of the things that we’ve been looking for lately is a good online book previewer to integrate into the individual product pages at our e-commerce site (as well as using elsewhere as applicable). The first good application I remember coming across like this was Amazon.com’s system. Another one is used by National Academies Press. Both these systems, though, are proprietary and what we needed was a system that was robust enough for our purposes and, because we don’t have tons of money for a new stand-alone application or one off the shelf, at the right price.

Thankfully, I think we’ve finally found what we’re looking for with Issuu.

Web 2.0 Social Networking: The Texas RV Professor Rides the Twitter Wave

I’ll be the first to admit that personally I’m a pretty slow adopter of new technologies. I finally broke down and bought a cell phone barely two years ago (if it was even that far back). Until last year ago I still had my $9.95 a month dial-up Internet service. I’ve yet to hold a Kindle, much less read a book on one. A big part of it is that it’s hard to tell exactly what the Next Big Thing is vs. just the Next Big Hype and what’s worth your time vs. just being a waste of time. Plus, when talking about tech gadgets or Web-based applications, you have the tech geeks who love anything as long as it’s the absolutely newest thing around however impractical, convoluted, and/or nonsensical it may be. (In fact, they’ll love it all the more for being exactly those things.) Then you have your average (that is, normal) person who likes new applications/gadgets that are both simple and powerful.

Falling into this latter category, I will happily admit, is Twitter, which we got one of our authors, Terry Cooper (better known as The Texas RV Professor), set up on this week.

Publishing Conferences: The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age

Blogging has been light lately—then again, blogging is almost always light—but the last month has been particularly busy with the PR blitz about to kick off for the new RV DVDs and forthcoming RV books. (Certainly, however, it does seem like a million years ago, not just a month, since I had the time/inclination to spend a big chunk of publishing-related energy doing things like editing videos of trips to Abilene.) This next week, though, will be a change of pace as I’ll be attending The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age conference at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas.