
Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book - benwerd
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/04/app-stars-push-pop-press/
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lucasjung
The internet is already full of self-published crap because self-publishing in
digital form is already trivially easy. Making it easier to self-publish is
not going to disrupt the publishing industry, because the publishing industry
still serves a valuable service: they sift through all of that crap to find
the few good stories. More importantly, they identify promising authors and
mentor them into authors worth reading. If you want to disrupt the publishing
industry, you need to develop an alternative solution for helping people
figure out what is worth reading (probably not too difficult) _and_ and
alternative solution for developing the skills of writers (much more
challanging).

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melling
You can crowd source this by allowing people to rate the material. Sounds like
a good idea for a startup. A "rottentomatoes.com" for self-published books?
User rating and "pro" rating?

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lucasjung
A rating can tell potential readers that a book is worth reading or not. It
can't grow a talented but unskilled author into a great author. Most
successful authors will tell you that they had to write hundreds of thousands
of words worth of crap before they were able to produce anything worth
reading, and then only because they were getting quality coaching while
writing all of that crap.

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huherto
Following your line of argument. Is there a career path for independent
writing coaches? Would it be possible to create a service for that?

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lucasjung
As far as I can tell, the closest things currently in existence are: 1:
Writing workshops 2: Short-fiction magaziness

#1 is open to anyone who has the cash to get in the door, but isn't well set
up for establishing long-term mentorship relationships.

#2 is good for long-term mentorship relationships, but you have to already be
a pretty good writer to get your foot in the door and the price of entry is
selling the rights to your work. Also, a "slow-starter" with the potential to
become a world-class novelist might never get off the ground under this
system.

I'd love to see someone establish independent coaching services for developing
writers, but I think there are some significant difficulties. The biggest
problem is: where do you get the coaches? Good traditional publishers and
editors are good at mentoring authors because they have years of experience
acquired by slowly working their ways up through the traditional publishing
industry.

I'd like to believe that there are other ways to make great editors, but
there's no substitute for experience. You would need a seed of experienced
editors from the traditional industry and they would have to do double-duty
mentoring both aspiring authors _and_ aspiring editors. Eventually you might
be able to get to the point where you have a self-sustaining community where
the authors have reputations based on their work and editors have reputations
based on the quality of the authors and editors they have mentored.

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ugh
What's great about Push Pop Press is that their interaction design doesn't
suck. All iPad magazines I have tried suck. Big time. I feel lost, gestures
don't work as expected, magazines take forever to download. They definitely
did a great job with the software, I encountered none of those problems.

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Jun8
WOW! This has the potential to be _really_ big. Just think about all the
cookbooks, children's storybooks, and DIY guides you can create easily with
such a tool, if it's done right.

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steverb
I'm getting flashbacks from the heyday of CD-ROM publishing. I suspect the end
story will be the same.

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Jun8
Maybe not. I've already spent $20-30 on iPad audio books for my son, they
highlight the words as they are read, he loves them. iPad is his favorite toy,
unfortunately, I've found out: I bought him a Stinky the Garbage Truck for
$50that he's been talking about and he _still_ wants to play with the iPad.
And he's 4!

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javanix
I'd be more excited about a really good self-publishing platform for non-
interactive e-books.

A lot of the cost of e-books comes from publishers needing to support various
paper-related overhead like binding, printing, etc. If it was possible for an
author to self-publish I suspect it'd be very easy for them to equal the per-
book profits (obviously, advertising would be a different story) that they'd
get going through Harper-Collins or the like.

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roc
Can't you self-register and publish whatever you want via Kindle and iBooks?

Specifically to your second point, you may want to read this link:
<http://www.novelr.com/2011/02/27/rich-indie-writer>

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javanix
Oh, yes, you can. But I think its probably beyond the technical abilities of
many authors.

If there was a cheap, e-book-only publisher around that could help with all of
the traditional publisher duties (editing, typesetting, advertising, etc)
without the overhead of actually printing anything (or at least with being
able to print things on demand rather than buying a big batch and praying) I
think there would definitely be money to be made.

The number of submissions that large publishers get every day has got to be
staggering - what if a small company could dedicate their extra resources to
actually reading through more of them than Random House can? The beauty of the
novel that it is pure content, especially on an e-reader.

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jamesbritt
"The app is the richest form of storytelling"

What a bizarre claim.

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r0s
Sounds like they're trying to recreate the web.

On a tiny platform, limited to the ebook market, mac only.

How is that in anyway pushing towards mainstream?

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cletus
This is interesting because this was what I was going to do mid-last year but
decided to go work for Google instead. There were other issues involved.
Another key one was the biz dev side.

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wdewind
This is not self publishing, this is powerpoint.

