“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
— A.J. Liebling

Eons ago, when the web was emerging from its grey-background Times Roman infancy, one of the aspects that drew me and many people to it was the relatively cheap and open platform it offered as a publishing medium. While desktop publishing innovations in the 80’s put a new class of tools into homes, there was still a large price barrier to publishing and distribution. The web came along in its initial creeping 2400 baud glory and a new medium that offered creation, production, publishing, and distribution began to flourish.

We’re now a couple of decades into referring to the many things that are “The Web” and countless billions of words and pictures have been published by individuals with many others worldwide also acting as simultaneous creators, publishers, collaborators, and audience. It’s still exciting to see the variety and scope of work that appears daily and to boggle occasionally at just how much has changed. But it’s interesting how some things stick with us.

That excitement I feel for everything that interactive media can be hasn’t stopped me from also continuing to be drawn to the products of those “old” media. Sometimes ink on paper just feels like the right thing. The tangible experience of a book, a zine, a poster, or a card can be intrinsically unique and enjoyable. Where am I going with this?

Recently, I’ve been excited to see some advancements in printing and production technology have bled some of the open new media back into the old. A variety of on-demand services mean we now have cheap (even free) access to printing presses and tangible distribution networks. Publish your novel yourself? Why not? Make a glossy magazine that people around the world can buy? Sure. Releash a graphic novel? Easy. Have a funny t-shirt slogan? Someone could buy one from you five minutes later. Very thrilling stuff.

Here are just a few websites which in different ways offer over the keys to the press:

MagCloud.com is a pilot on-demand magazine project from HP. If you have the software to produce a letter-sized PDF, you can make and sell a magazine with MagCloud. Just browse through the wide variety of titles already available. Amazingly, making a magazine this way is free! Yup. That’s right, the beer and the speech are free! Here are a few choice magazines to check out: Fray, Mankind, LAB, Rubyist, and Kalina.

Want to publish a book? Head over to Blurb.com or Lulu.com. Once again, the relative ease of creating a PDF is all you need. Because these on-demand publishers have multiple size, cover, and printing specs, the process is a bit more involved. But the outcome is similar to MagCloud, you can publish and sell your book through either Blurb or Lulu at no cost to you. Here are some examples from Blurb (I love photography so I’ve chosen some photo titles): Johnstown by Ed Panar, Removing Mountains by Daniel Shea, and Indoors, Out-of-Doors by Helen Jones

How about an on-demand print option that uses something many of us already have on hand? Moo.com lets you upload or import photos that you already have on Flickr, Etsy, Facebook, and other networks and print high-quality cards and stickers. At Moo, you do pay for what you order but it does allow you to print just a few totally unique cards which is not something you can easily and cheaply do with your local print shop. The images can be photos, illustrations, whatever… A smart friend of mine made a beautiful set of mini calendar cards as a New year’s present one year.

Finally, for something really different, you can now create and sell printed apparel like t-shirts and hoodies without forking out for that 4-colour silkscreen press you’ve always wanted in the middle of your living room. SpreadShirt is one of the recent companies that will host an online store for you and produce all sorts of products on-demand. My friend Dave Cole runs his Glarkware shirt jobbery on SpreadShirt.

Dewey was discovered in late 2005 by intrepid explorer, and builder of fine boogaloos, Jerrold Connors. Since then, Dewey has been hard at play hanging out with all sorts of kids online and at Toronto Public Library branches across the city. Each Dewey likes to do different things from reading, to bocce, to knitting, and they can also be distinguished by their handy numbered jerseys but no one has ever counted them all.

We also knew that we wanted to create both the book assembly and viewing tool in Flash as opposed to Director. The tool is written in AS1 and uses Screentime Media’s MProjector software to create a standalone tool for creating the bundles of assets and text that are loaded into the viewer which works equally well locally or online.

What we see now as a version 1.0 tool has been used successfully by the Toronto Public Library in a public touch-screen kiosk format at the Metro Reference Library and had it’s widest release just recently as the core of a jointly produced project called Ontario Time Machine.

At this year’s SXSWi and the Museums and the Web conferences, the “VirtualBook” or “Page Turner” (it needs a real name) was greeted with interest by quite a few people from libraries and museums and it got us thinking about the possibility of a version 2.0 which would build upon the functionality and strengths of the existing version.

We know some of our basic goals in working towards a new version:

• Author in AS3 (bitmap handling and more structured code just a couple of the reasons)
• Streamline the book assembly process and application (cross-platform desktop application and/or hosted process)
• Make the viewing interface relatively “skinnable”
• Expand the display/export options (Flash viewer, HTML view, text only, PDF, etc.)
• Open the process and the product up to benefit from outside knowledge, criticism, and development

The first step in this is this post. We know there are a number of projects with similar goals out there in varying stages of production and we certainly have our personal opinions of where those tools succeed and fail but we would love some direct public feedback on what we have done with version 1.0 and on an on-going basis as we work towards a new version.

As an aside, here are a few companies and organizations with related goals or technology: Open Library, Google Book Search, Zoomify, and Issuu, Any others?

P.S. Please excuse the extremely punny title of this post. I shall endeavour to keep humour reigned-in during all future internet ramblings. Some may say it has been suitable reigned in that they noticed no humour present herein. To them, point taken.