[FM Discuss] reading about publishing

[Anne Gentle]

Hi all -
I'm enjoying this article titled "Post-Medium Publishing" because it
discusses the question, do people value better content? Since that's
part of FM's value proposition (better content), I'm fascinated.
http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html

There's one part that sticks out to me as well as FM seeks different
physical publishing mediums for our content.

"Clearly at some point in the 1960s the big publishing houses started
to ask: how cheaply can we make books before people refuse to buy
them? The answer turned out to be one step short of phonebooks. As
long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive it as a book."

I like the idea of newspaper-style printings to drive costs down and
perhaps give us a distribution model that we don't currently have -
something like printing a pile and placing them in a collage student
common area or handing them out between sessions at conferences and so
forth.

The idea of putting a one-page ad on a printing to support costs is a
good one as well - and something that zinepal.com seems to be after.
You can gather content from different RSS feeds and create your own
two-column "zine" then add ads on pages as you see fit. We could
certainly offer something like zinepal.com for FM content, it seems
feasible just like a remix, and might be a way to generate funds too
to cover printing costs or content generation costs.

I also think that using Lulu as our print and distribution helper is
costing us more than it's worth. I think we should buy a 10-pack of
ISBNs and pick a handful of books to sell through Lightning Source as
our print and distribution helper. I'll keep pursuing this option.

Thanks,
Anne