RSSMicropublishing is Already Here
The success of Amazon’s Kindle and speculation about the Apple iSlate has led to many a blog post about the future of eBook publishing. Neven Mrgan’s take is one of the most interesting. He hopes Apple will unveil an eBook publishing system that will make micropublishing easy:
Let’s say you’ve written a short story. (You’re still working on your first novel; courage!) As a piece of entertainment and education, it’ll enrich about twenty minutes of someone’s life. That’s worth 99c in my book. You write this in Pages, perhaps using the app’s writer-friendly full-screen mode, and lay it out using Apple’s elegant templates. You publish it to the, err, Media Store - hey, I’m no ad wizard - where it’s checked for plagiarism, validated for formatting integrity, and placed in your desired category. Congratulations! you’re an almost-self-published writer. Tell your friends, blog about it, buy ad space. Whether you make millions on your story or not, you’re better off than when it just sat on your hard drive.
It’s an excellent idea. John Gruber, who makes a living writing about Apple, agrees with Mrgan, and adds this flourish:
Here’s my other thought: the old-growth print industry — books, magazines, and newspapers — have shown zero aptitude to date to produce compelling designs and business models for digital content. Left to themselves, they’d botch this too.
It’s hard to argue with Gruber on this one. The legacy publishing world is built around a scarcity-driven model. Scarcity of access to publishing tools. Scarcity of distribution capability. Scarcity of pricing options. It’s no wonder they are having a difficult time adapting to abundance.
So it’s up to a completely different kind of publisher to bust the mold. Enter FastPencil.
You can use our book writing software (which also includes built-in collaboration tools) to write your book. Sell any combination of print, PDF, or ePub in the FastPencil Marketplace at a price of your choosing. Your book is stored in XML, so you never have to tie yourself to a particular army in the eBook Format Wars. As new eBook formats become popular, FastPencil will support them. As new devices take center stage, content developed in FastPencil won’t be trapped inside a walled garden.
Easy micropublishing is already here, as these sample FastPencil titles illustrate:
