Saturday, August 28, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
adding language to our website
Over the weekend we read two stories dealing with the demise of publishing and the crowning "achievement" of e-books, prompting us at Plan B Press to adding language to our website that we PUBLISH ON PAPER. We believe in print. We believe in the physical thing that is a book. We believe in community structures called libraries and in rooms of one's home that are often called the same thing. We believe that there is something to thousands of years of writing and storing those writings that a devise can not compete with. To those who think of a book as a "bound text", then we can see them becoming excited about a devise that shows only text.
To those, however, who see a book as something more than text, we appeal to their nature - their truer nature - for we also see the book as something more than text, and always will. It is not enough to "talk the talk". We do not use Lulu, for example, since their operation is Print-on-Demand. We would rather work with human beings known for centuries as PRINTERS. Ben Franklin, for instance. A Printer! Another Philadelphia based publisher, Robert Bell, should be as famous as the author of a pamphlet he published in 1776 called Common Sense. These are real and actual people. Today, we are supposed to praise machines like The Expresso Book Machine for what they can potentially do "for publishing".
We don't buy the concept; nor the machine. Unless books made by machines are also made FOR machines, there is a flaw in the celebration for the emperor's new clothes. He is naked, as are the arguments toward paper-free books and machine generated books and an entire future programmed out of our (human) hands.
We will have none of it, thank you very much. Others see things entirely differently and that is their right. But, we like what we do and plan (B) to continue doing it for a long long time.
To those, however, who see a book as something more than text, we appeal to their nature - their truer nature - for we also see the book as something more than text, and always will. It is not enough to "talk the talk". We do not use Lulu, for example, since their operation is Print-on-Demand. We would rather work with human beings known for centuries as PRINTERS. Ben Franklin, for instance. A Printer! Another Philadelphia based publisher, Robert Bell, should be as famous as the author of a pamphlet he published in 1776 called Common Sense. These are real and actual people. Today, we are supposed to praise machines like The Expresso Book Machine for what they can potentially do "for publishing".
We don't buy the concept; nor the machine. Unless books made by machines are also made FOR machines, there is a flaw in the celebration for the emperor's new clothes. He is naked, as are the arguments toward paper-free books and machine generated books and an entire future programmed out of our (human) hands.
We will have none of it, thank you very much. Others see things entirely differently and that is their right. But, we like what we do and plan (B) to continue doing it for a long long time.
Monday, August 09, 2010
days of the summer dog
Time moves like molasses
the kids are too much, trapped inside when the heat index soars toward 100.
we live - we read (manuscripts), we publish(books), we try to stay cool.
stevenallenmay
the kids are too much, trapped inside when the heat index soars toward 100.
we live - we read (manuscripts), we publish(books), we try to stay cool.
stevenallenmay
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