New Booktype magazine offers open perspectives on publishing
Our project to release the second edition of the Sourcefabric Magazine, after several months, has finally come to fruition. This week, when the Sourcefabric team travels to Frankfurt for one of the largest industry events dedicated to publishing, we will also take with us 1,000 printed versions of the Booktype Magazine.
Between the covers
The idea was to convey the diversity of publishing today. Binding these thoughts into the ever-important printed object brought this to the fore. However, the goal was also to address a larger concern for the transitioning publishing industry on the brink of going digital.
Perspectives on publishing
One of our first tasks was highlighting strong voices and unique perspectives on publishing. We were incredibly lucky to find authors who represent a wide breadth of views.
Our leading article by Joe Wikert, general manager of O'Reilly forecasts some major developments he expects to see in publishing. While these shifts may unsettle some in the industry he remains positive that it is an exciting time to work in publishing.
Siyavula is a non-profit textbook publishing organization in South Africa. They use online, collaborative writing to make textbooks free and open to the public. They explain how their textbooks are impacting students and how important mobile applications are becoming in order to distribute these texts to poor areas.
From within academics, Ulf Grüner, who works at the department of Journalism and Media Management at the University of Applied Sciences Vienna, describes the information environment of these institutions. He quotes Paul Bradshaw, a leading journalism educator, to explain how technology can be used to enrich the learning process.
Adam Hyde, Booktype's project lead, tells us about the collaborative spectrum of publishing. He emphasises that collaboration is part of any project and acknowledges that in today's web based world we should take advantage of this more and more.
Dr. Jörg Dörnermann, CEO of epubli, a German print-on-demand service, focuses on the history of self-publishing and the plenitude of options that self-publishers have today.
Dr. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter co-wrote an article about their collective experience during a Book Sprint. They explain the taboo that exists in academic writing and they explain the benefits of collaborative publishing, encouraging authors to share knowledge.
The art director of our magazines is Matthias Last. The photographer of this issue is Florian Oellers and the Illustrator is Florian Sänger.
What we learned along the way
As a non-profit company who make tools for media organisations we are not often in the situation of publishing a magazine. The venture proved to be a valuable lesson where we could test our editorial and publishing skills. These efforts also helped us understand the perspective of publishers a little more.