A serial that is OPEN ACCESS (the ponderous academic term for what you and I, the little people , would be content to simply call "free-to-read" magazines) can hardly afford to provide endless amounts of mailed out printed "offprints" of its longer "feature" articles when it has *little or no income -- so what is the best solution ?
(*Charging - rather than paying - an author to publish their article can only be justified in academia , where there is an expensive (because labour-intensive) process of peer-reviewing articles before they are published.)
Both authors and readers sometimes rather like having a printed out version of feature articles to carry about.
The quick and dirty PDF offprint is free to email worldwide and the end reader pays only for the computer paper and ink to print it out.
But as conventionally printed out on A4 or letter sized pages, a long feature article is a pain to read.
The endless pages of overly-wide lines of text confounding centuries of typography best practises and it still isn't really "printed" in the sense we think journals or books are printed.
I much prefer the fiction-bound *A5 variant (based upon four print pages roughly 8.5 inch tall by 5.5 inch wide on each single letter sized sheet) of the 19th century story paper or feuilleton.
Simply by folding the sheets of paper and re-arranging the page order ("imposing") allowed narrower columns of text reading correctly from the front cover to the back cover.
And : the friction of folded page on page holds it all together, much as conventional newspapers hang together without staple binding.
Pre-imposing the conventional PDF is easily done with cheap or free software (I like Cheap Impostor myself) and the end user needs simply to access the increasingly common office duplex computer printer to make up a little chapbook for the article in one go.
Or , do it at home in two stages on old fashioned simplex computer printers.
Presto --- Bob is your auntie's live-in lover ...
(*Truth be told , I really prefer A6 sized books myself - fits (hides) in any pocket, attractive to read , but until A5 computer paper is readily available I doubt many readers have access to the high quality blade paper cutters needed to make the idea do-able !)
Showing posts with label story paper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label story paper. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Print in 50 years : Downloadable pre-imposed PDFs , aka MUNROs
The book "as we know it now" will be dead in 50 years, but the book itself will not be dead, far from it.
I publish my own journal and write occasional book reviews, but I have also worked in four different bookstores for a dozen years and am a lifelong avid reader, so I hope I have seen the issue from various sides.
I insist that the book, Phoenix-like, will be revived as downloadable pre-imposed PDFs, (what I have labelled as a 'MUNRO') to produce story papers or even slim saddle bound books inside the ultimate reader's own home.
Today the average copy of a print book or magazine is written here, edited there, printed over there, shipped out to a warehouse, shipped to thousands of stores, shipped unsold back to the warehouse and then finally shipped out to be pulped.
In addition, the meaningful contents have often been deliberately padded up in size till it is at least 250 pages thick , to be profitable and or convenient to handle for conventional literary agent, publisher ,book critic, book store and library.
In the world of culture, print book publishing is like the Alberta Tar Sands in its impact on our planet.
In the commercial model of my alternative scheme, a customer would pay online for a link to a downloadable PDF of the book or magazine which they will print out in their homes or offices on their own duplex* computer printer.
*The scheme doesn't need "printing on two sides at once" (duplex) printers to work - that just makes it easier.
The key is that the PDF is already pre-imposed , in printing industry lingo , so it will read in correct order, when simply taken out of the printer and quickly folded in on itself like a conventional newspaper, magazine or booklet.
To wit : imagine an A4 or letter sized piece of paper as printed in 4 'page' panels - two to each side and then it is folded in the middle of the longest dimension.
So in a 64 printed page magazine, one side of a sheet of paper has page 64 on the left and page 1 on the right, flipped over, page 2 is on the left and page 63 is on the right.
64 printed pages from only 16 sheets of A4 paper.
The assembled pages no more need staples or a stiff cover stock cover than your everyday daily paper needs them to remain together ; thank friction of rough paper on rough paper for that.
If it is unbound by anything but friction, technically it isn't a book but a story paper --- a book in the form of a daily newspaper, in a sense.
Any history of publishing will reveal just how big this story paper format once was and how savagely the fearful elites opposed this democratization of literature.
Now there is a limit to the number of sheets that hang together in this fashion without need for a sophisticated trimming operation : perhaps 80 printed pages is the limit.
Still if the paper size is upped to A3 or tabloid (11x17) (my home printer is that size and I bought it in 2013 for $150 Cdn), we do thus end up with a magazine sized product that can hold about 50,000 words in a two column layout - enough for a lot of novels or non fiction works.
But I expect most books will be printed on A4 paper and produce novella sized work of about 20,000 words.
As in Victorian times, 'books' might be once again produced in three or more volumes.
Yes, the end reader must come up with a dollar or two for their own paper and ink , but the market will see the price for the link is set at below an equivalent of today's $5 to $10 dollars.
Some of us, very old, can remember having to cut the pages of books we brought ourselves, or only receiving the text block of a book and having to have a cover put on ourselves at a book binder.
Somehow, we survived.
The competition is bookstores with incredibly expensive machines that can print out thick "perfect bound"* books very slowly and expensively one at a time, when the customer requests them.
* Ie, books with a thick square spine.
Bookstores and book publishers hate/fear slim staple bound publications and teach us all quality literature and intellectual thought can't live within them.
Is this is because anyone can make them - and then what will they do for a living ?
Strange when we consider all the good literature and intellectual heft that has traditionally come out of the slender , staple bound, magazines.
If the Book Trade can be believed, the literary or intellectual quality of a work falls off alarmingly, when the material is shifted from a lot of small pages in a book to a few big pages in a magazine.
Bosh, a cartel is a cartel whether it involves drug company presidents in a smoke filled backroom or cosy publishers,booksellers and critics laying down the rules in public at a wine and cheese salon .....
I publish my own journal and write occasional book reviews, but I have also worked in four different bookstores for a dozen years and am a lifelong avid reader, so I hope I have seen the issue from various sides.
I insist that the book, Phoenix-like, will be revived as downloadable pre-imposed PDFs, (what I have labelled as a 'MUNRO') to produce story papers or even slim saddle bound books inside the ultimate reader's own home.
Today the average copy of a print book or magazine is written here, edited there, printed over there, shipped out to a warehouse, shipped to thousands of stores, shipped unsold back to the warehouse and then finally shipped out to be pulped.
In addition, the meaningful contents have often been deliberately padded up in size till it is at least 250 pages thick , to be profitable and or convenient to handle for conventional literary agent, publisher ,book critic, book store and library.
In the world of culture, print book publishing is like the Alberta Tar Sands in its impact on our planet.
In the commercial model of my alternative scheme, a customer would pay online for a link to a downloadable PDF of the book or magazine which they will print out in their homes or offices on their own duplex* computer printer.
*The scheme doesn't need "printing on two sides at once" (duplex) printers to work - that just makes it easier.
The key is that the PDF is already pre-imposed , in printing industry lingo , so it will read in correct order, when simply taken out of the printer and quickly folded in on itself like a conventional newspaper, magazine or booklet.
To wit : imagine an A4 or letter sized piece of paper as printed in 4 'page' panels - two to each side and then it is folded in the middle of the longest dimension.
So in a 64 printed page magazine, one side of a sheet of paper has page 64 on the left and page 1 on the right, flipped over, page 2 is on the left and page 63 is on the right.
64 printed pages from only 16 sheets of A4 paper.
The assembled pages no more need staples or a stiff cover stock cover than your everyday daily paper needs them to remain together ; thank friction of rough paper on rough paper for that.
If it is unbound by anything but friction, technically it isn't a book but a story paper --- a book in the form of a daily newspaper, in a sense.
Any history of publishing will reveal just how big this story paper format once was and how savagely the fearful elites opposed this democratization of literature.
Now there is a limit to the number of sheets that hang together in this fashion without need for a sophisticated trimming operation : perhaps 80 printed pages is the limit.
Still if the paper size is upped to A3 or tabloid (11x17) (my home printer is that size and I bought it in 2013 for $150 Cdn), we do thus end up with a magazine sized product that can hold about 50,000 words in a two column layout - enough for a lot of novels or non fiction works.
But I expect most books will be printed on A4 paper and produce novella sized work of about 20,000 words.
As in Victorian times, 'books' might be once again produced in three or more volumes.
Yes, the end reader must come up with a dollar or two for their own paper and ink , but the market will see the price for the link is set at below an equivalent of today's $5 to $10 dollars.
Some of us, very old, can remember having to cut the pages of books we brought ourselves, or only receiving the text block of a book and having to have a cover put on ourselves at a book binder.
Somehow, we survived.
The competition is bookstores with incredibly expensive machines that can print out thick "perfect bound"* books very slowly and expensively one at a time, when the customer requests them.
* Ie, books with a thick square spine.
Bookstores and book publishers hate/fear slim staple bound publications and teach us all quality literature and intellectual thought can't live within them.
Is this is because anyone can make them - and then what will they do for a living ?
Strange when we consider all the good literature and intellectual heft that has traditionally come out of the slender , staple bound, magazines.
If the Book Trade can be believed, the literary or intellectual quality of a work falls off alarmingly, when the material is shifted from a lot of small pages in a book to a few big pages in a magazine.
Bosh, a cartel is a cartel whether it involves drug company presidents in a smoke filled backroom or cosy publishers,booksellers and critics laying down the rules in public at a wine and cheese salon .....
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