Our thanks for this page of
extracts go to the
Long Rider's Guild, publishers of our own books and many hundreds of others,
using Print on Demand. Here they
explain the reasons why.
For the unedited version
please go to
http://www.classictravelbooks.com/articles.htm
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In a
world Dickens would not have
recognised, artist Adam Bateman has used
more than 50,000 books to create a
series of "sculptures" like the one in
this picture.
Incredible though it may seem, in 1905
there were a host of critics who
condemned the automobile as a passing
fad. Yet this single invention
revolutionised the twentieth century.
It so redefined how people worked, lived
and learned, that between 1900 and 1920
England left behind its agrarian way of
life forever and embraced the Industrial
Age instead. One machine thus brought
about an avalanche of social, financial
and educational changes by its indirect
creation of factories, suburbs and
unified school districts.
One hundred years later another
innovation - the Internet - is changing
the way we work, live and learn. The
articles below demonstrate the seismic
shift in the literary landscape which
twenty-first century authors are
witnessing.
New!
One of England's leading
environmentalist authors, Dr. David Reay
of the School of Geosciences at
Edinburgh University, published a
thought-provoking article in the London
Times Higher Education Supplement
wherein he expressed concerns about the environmental
impact of publishing his latest ecology
book using traditional methods.
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"Even in the
shadow of the environmental studies shelves - which groan
under the weight of titles giving the expert synthesis on
everything from arsenic pollution to climate change - I
shudder to think of the potential for harm. For, like
Christmas, this first-time feeding frenzy at the bookshop
will be short-lived. Soon the returns will begin flowing
back to the publishers, vanload after vanload of unwanted
stock hauled off to become a vast reservoir of fodder for
the pulping machines," he wrote.
Click here to read the full article,
reproduced courtesy of the author and
The Times Higher.
Too posh to publish?
That common
leveller, the internet, dictates that the publishing game, as we
knew it in the 20th century, is over. Copyright protection, like
it or not, will eventually go, just as the Net Book Agreement
did. Second-hand books will sell in
increasing quantities and the buyers on eBay and Amazon won't
give a damn whether or not the publisher and author lose out.
It's goodbye to all that. The web appeals to the many who
question why publishing houses should be the gatekeepers of
information. We're all publishers now, or at least we can be.
Click here to read the article by Colin
Walsh in The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors.
A miss hit
Companies should wake up to the new economics of the internet,
and think abundance, not shortage. The internet is changing the
entertainment business from one that is driven by hits to one
that will make most of its money from misses. This is good news
for consumers, because it means more choice, and we all like
things that will never make the best-seller lists for CDs, books
or movies. And although it might sound strange, this "new
economics of abundance" is already the basis of the net's most
successful companies, such as Amazon, eBay and Google. Click
on this link to read the story by Jack
Schofield in The Guardian, 24th March 2005
M6 Toll Road built with pulped fiction
Old copies of novels are being used to help prolong the life
of the UK's newest road. It has emerged that about 2,500,000 of
the books were acquired during construction of the M6 Toll. The
novels were pulped at a recycling firm in south Wales and used
in the preparation of the top layer of the West Midlands
motorway, according to building materials suppliers Tarmac.
Click on link to read more:
BBC News, 18th December 2003.
University dumps rare books
In his satire about a library, The Battle of the Books,
Jonathan Swift recounts that "a restless spirit haunts over
every book till dust or worms have seized upon it." More than
300 years later, the library at a London university is having
its own battle with accusations of "book-burning" and
"sacrilege" flying through the air. Click on link to read
more:
Duncan Campbell in The Guardian, 18th June
2005
Publishing
makes shift to digital
According to a study commissioned by the British Library, 90% of
newly published work will be available digitally by this time.
Only half of this will also be available in print form, with
just 10% of new titles available only in print. It represents a
"seismic shift" in the world of publishing said British Library
chief executive Lynne Brindley.
Click here to read the full story.
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