The Caravan Project - new publishing paradigm
Well, this sure looks interesting. The Caravan Project is an experiment into offering non-fiction titles in a whole range of formats, including electronic:
“Just as consumers of music, film and television now can choose how to receive those media, the Caravan Project will offer buyers of serious non-fiction books a “menu” of formats, both print and digital, from which to choose how they read a book.
“Caravan, funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, will use all the emerging digital and time-tested technologies for the manufacture of books with a goal of making their distribution in the marketplace significantly more efficient by placing them when and where they are needed.”
Of course, this is ’serious non-fiction’ they’re talking about. You know, the sort of thing that has a small dedicated readership, and has miniscule print runs in comparison to the latest blockbuster best-sellers. Which reminds me somewhat of a genre I’m rather fond of …
King Canute got wet feet. The tide is coming in. I know that suggesting electronic formats as a future for genre fiction isn’t popular with a lot of people, but I’m damned if I’ll admit defeat yet.
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March 20th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
If this manages to produce academic texts at affordable prices, I will be very interested. But then the whole point of academic texts is that they’re expensive because so few people buy them. Um. I’ll see how this pans out…