Just a heads up to everyone, there has been an update to the site this morning. You may have noticed that there was a brief interruption of the site around 9:00am PST. The following things were fixed/addressed:
at some point in the past users were able to upload books without the nessesary text version of their books. This has been corrected and all future books will require a .txt or .doc or .docx version of the book in addition to the pdf.
some administrative tools on the back end were updated, letting us track things a bit easier.
ISBNs will now carry forward when you edit your book, meaning if you make an update or a change there will no longer be a lag time between approval and ISBNs being applied. The donation page at the back of your books will still have a lag period, unfortunately.
Advanced Search was cleaned up a bit and should be giving better search results. Quick Search still is having issues for the moment, and may not return 100% accurate results.
As usual if you find any bugs or problems please report them so we can track down issues and clean them up.
I was in a meeting with some people today and the subject of 'who is in the Sharing Books community' came up. It is a fascinating question. My answer at the time was 'the rejected'. Sharing Books is a lot like America at various points in history: give us your tired, your rejected, your unwanted. This isn't to say that the people we seek out or the books we publish are poor quality, far from it. Our authors and illustrators are proving to be far more talented and motivated then we ever expected.
When we started out we fully expected the need to deal with a serious quality problem. This is proving far from the truth. Our creators are putting together books that are full of fantastic illustrations and well crafted stories. We are seeing fewer and fewer books with technical problems, and in general as more creators get involved the knowledge base has steadily grown. We have a Facebook group for people looking for help, and it has been steadily growing as well.
All this leads to the point, and title, of this post. Sharing Books exists because there are tens of thousands of books that get rejected each and every year by mainstream publishers. These books are not rejected because they are poor quality. They are rejected because mainstream publishers have a huge production overhead and are afraid to take on the risk that a new author or illustrator represents.
So if you are a children's book author or illustrator, and you've been rejected, you have a home here at Sharing Books. We are happy to help get your work into the hands of children all over the world.
Today at Sharing-Books, we are celebrating UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day! April 23rd was selected as a date shared by several authors such as William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. On April 23 2009, we will join thousands around the world to pay respect to book creators and their achievements. As many of our book creators already know, Sharing-Books shares one third of its revenue with its book creators - a generous offer in the world of children's book publishing. Plus when you create, you also contribute to a growing library of online books available for free to our world's children. We publish stories in French as well as English, and are sourcing Japanese titles. All our classics are copyright-free as well, continuing to be on the forefront of the digital publishing industry. Come join us and register online - for free!
Pierre has put together a PDF on the Simone Wood Award, so if you are looking to help spread the word about this contest in your local library, school, or dance studio just download and print it off. The poster should be easy to print off on your home printer, and has all the details needed about the contest.
For those of you located in the Greater vancouver area, our friends at the local chapter of Room to Read are hosting an event open to the public with attendance by donation featuring Allison Rouse, Senior Development Officer. The event will be held on May 14th from 7 to 9pm at the Elsie Roy School in False Creek (in the library). Here is more information about Allison's career. This promises to be a very interesting evening.
As the Senior Development Director, Allison Rouse and his team are tasked with raising $14 million to support Room to Read ambitious 2009 programmatic goal: provide educational opportunities to an additional 100,000 children in the developing world. Allison recently joined the Global Office of Room to Read after spending a year working in Southern Africa as Room to Read’s Regional Director. In that capacity he oversaw the launch of Room to Read Zambia and managed day-to-day operations of the organization’s of the South Africa office.
Prior to his appointment with Room to Read, Allison worked with the San Francisco-based KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation, both in programs and fundraising. For two years he led a team of four full-time and two part-time employees in successfully recruiting and hiring 14 educators to start new KIPP schools throughout the United States. Two years later, Allison was promoted to Director of Outreach and Institutional Advancement and generated over $25 million from new donors to support the KIPP Foundation’s core operations, individual KIPP schools and special projects.
In August of 2006, Allison and his wife moved to Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso where his wife helped start a pediatric AIDS clinic. During that year, he continued his fundraising efforts for KIPP and was also instrumental for developing relationships in Africa for the Stanford Graduate School of Business and helped with start-up work for African LeadershipAcademy in South Africa. Allison has worked and traveled in many African countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania. He currently resides with his wife in Sunnyvale, CA
Just a notice to everyone on the site we have made some physical location changes to our database that runs the back end for most of the site. There was a brief interruption of site service this morning while that happened. You should not see any major change in site performance, but if you do, or if you find something broken, please send a bug report or email.
I recently posted a long reply to a good question posted on the Children Books Insider site. This is a frequent discussion for us so I thought I'd post my reply here. Hopefully it will help those of you pondering the question.
"First a disclaimer: I am with www.sharing-books.com so I am biased in favour of e-books.
However it does not mean that we believe paper books will completely disappear. I think it is Bill Gates who said that we overestimate how fast a new technology will change the world but we underestimate how big the change will be. In the mid eighties I worked in the cellular telephone industry, few of us dreamed that one day young people would not even consider having a land line phone. It never crossed the mind of our adult children to have a home line in their appartments. Yet we still have a land line in our home because my wife likes to use it (though I never use it being the family geek).
I am writing this note from a home office with walls and floor covered with paper books. Yet I believe that e-books will inexorably replace most paper books over the long term. Other than artfully created books which will remain with us, most paper books printed today are simply information containers. We have to make sure we do not confused content and container.
PCs and most new mobile phones can contain books and provide a decent reading experience. The development of e-readers is accelerating. Most units available today are still expensive and not completely satisfactory due to either format or proprietary closed distribution systmes for content. Similarly, the first cell phones were limited in functionality and cost $5,000 and up. One thing is sure - the e-readers will keep improving and become as convenient and affordable as today's cell phones.
The wild card we see is the gaming consoles adding reading applications. This is what today's children have in their hands today - not paper books. Some industry estimates report over 15 million Nintendo DS sold in the US in 2008. Add the other gaming devices offered and you see sales totals indicating a change as profound as the cell phone. When we researched the market before founding Sharing-Books, we searched photos of children holding gaming devices. We could not help to remark that most photos showed young boys and that most of them were forwning and looking rather tense as they played the game.
We believe that we have a collective responsibility to offer e-books that can be read on these gaming devices. The devices are ready. Gaming devices can browse the web and most can display e-books. What we need is content adapted to these new containers so that children can have the reading/imagination experience we all had to complement their gaming time. Hopefully our stories can be compelling enough to have them read more and play less.
As we consider e-books, we need to remember Marshall McLuhan's famous quote "the medium is the message". New technology transforms the content. Cell phones made us mobile but their digital capabilities compared to land lines made texting possible. Our children rarely answer their phones - to confirm a family dinner time it is more efficient to text them. Similarly e-books will change how we write and read books. We can lament the change but it will not stop it from happening. We believe it is best to embrace the new possibilities offered by e-books.
Publishing will change. A site like Sharing-Books offers speed publishing. Upload your book, it will be reviewed by our volunteer librarians for appropriateness and usually published within 48 hours. This is highly disruptive for a slow and methodical industry. It shocks elitists that we let the public decide what is a quality book. The truth is that the public always votes with their purchases as to which book has the most real value. What we built in is the ability to upgrade a book rapidly. If a book creator want to edit a book, they can simply upload a new version replacing the previous one. In the web world we use agile development - publish your site, get it out as fast as possible and keep fixing it and improving it. We see a similar process happening to book publishing.
More creators than ever will publish. Universal access to the web and speed publishing sites will unleash an enormous amount of creativity. Removing industry barriers to publishing will permit new authors and books to be read and discovered by millions. Clay Shirky talks about an enormous cognitive surplus. People wanting to create rather than just consuming information. In a few months, without any publicity, Sharing-Books has published 140 books, making it the second largest publisher of new children books in Canada. At this pace we will be a major publisher in North America by the end of the year.
Legal rights will change. We do not believe that Digital Rights Management (DRM) will ever really work to the satisfaction of all parties or that they will resist hackers. Lawsuits like the music and movie industry are engaging in will eventually alienate the audience - especially the younger audience that has grown up with unlimited access to free information. Fighting to maintain the old publishing models will be futile. We chose to offer our books free of DRM and in a widely available format PDF to maximize the exposure our book creators get. We also chose to leave the copyrights in the hand of the book creators.
New business models will emerge. The real challenge is how to make money at this new game. We are exploring some innovative approaches. No one has the right answer yet. But we know that new models will emerge that will transfer a higher portion of the revenue directly to the creators (1/3 in our case). News writers feel very threatened as the sale of news papers decline rapidly. I don't think the news writers are at risk. There will always be demand for good reporting. What will disappear is the inefficient industry of printing, distributing and recycling millions of tons of paper daily when every thing can be instantly distributed for free on the internet. This is an industry that has lost its economic value.
Printing fewer books is better for the environment. We will see on-demand paper printing becoming the norm. Paper books will be eventually printed only when really needed and because of that they will be valued and cherished more. The team at Read an E-book week researched extensively the amount of paper and ink saved by not printing. The potential ecological benefits are enormous. This consciousness is now part of our culture, especially with young people.
The users will find new uses for the new technology. As texting spawned Twitter and novels written entirely on cell phones in Japan, e-books creators and readers will invent unanticipated uses for the technology. Children e-books offer new possibilities for illustrators. For example, the images are backlit rather than needing reflected light, this opens up new illustration techniques. For the new digital arts graduates e-books mean a very fast production cycle. As touch screen become the norm we expect a new generation of pop-up e-books to be created. At Sharing-Books we have extrapolated a number of future applications by examining how people use technology, yet we have already been surprised by our users. Jennifer Poulter, one of our book creators came up with the idea of a one page book - poster poems as teaching aids. Teachers from around the world love them.
We had to interrupt our Easter egg hunt to watch the books downloaded counter tick towards 5,000. 5,000 books downloaded is another exciting milestone for Sharing-Books. We thank all the book creators who believe in this project and we are glad that thousands of children from over 70 countries have enjoyed their books.
This milestone is for us a confirmation of the value of our publishing model. We can now claim to have delivered a solid proof of concept and we are ready to advance the development of new features to enhance our book creators' and readers' experience.
I personally want to thank our Sharing-Books team members who persevere in our mission with dedication and passion. When you count all the book creators, the various technical colleagues led by Marcus Riedner, our investors and our executive team, you have a surprisingly large number of people who have committed time and resources to this idea.
Her name is Adora. She has been published in multiple languages in multiple countries around the world. She can type 80-90 words per minute. She has three blogs, and she covers current events and doubles as an illustrator. She hangs out online blogging, facebooking, and currently is not openly on twitter ( but I bet you can find her if you look ).
She is also 8 years old. Currently she is being called a prodigy, an outlier. Someone far from the norm. But if you ask me the only shocking thing I see here is that she types twice as fast as I do, and she has been published by traditional publishing companies. Yes she is a mature 8 year old, yes she has mad skills, but she is also a shining example of why Sharing Books focuses on digital content, not paper.
She is a kid, and she is massively connected to online culture. She is the coming generation of media consumers who participate in what Clay Shirkey and cognitive surplus devotees call the 'media triathlon'. People who no longer just consume media, but they produce and find/share that media. This drive to produce/find and share/consume media is at the heart of big media sites like Digg, YouTube, and Blogger. And it is the heart of Sharing Books.
How many other 8 year old kids are out there wanting to publish their books? Wanting to produce and share their ideas, stories, and content? How many 9 year olds. How many teens, adults, parents and grand parents. These people are ignored by the traditional publishers, and they can find a home here on Sharing Books.
Check out the video of Adora, it is fascinating and a sign of the coming times.
Sharing Books has been featured on the video podcast SmibsTV this week, if you have a moment go check them out! It is not to long, only a few minutes, and it features me ( Marcus ) chatting with Peter Urban from Smibs about Sharing Books, the publishing industry, and the fantastic people here on Sharing Books.
A big thank you to the Smibs team for driving down to Calgary Alberta from Edmonton Alberta to do the shoot. The roads and weather were typical Alberta in the winter, and they zipped down on the Red Arrow bus ( which apparently has wifi internet for all us mobile computing junkies ).
We are delighted to report that our friend Jennifer Poulter's book Mending Lucille, published by Lothian/Hachette Livre, has been nominated for two very important awards in Australia: the Family Therapists and the Crichton awards. In addition Jennifer's colleague and illustrator for Mending Lucille, Sarah Davis, has been nominated for the New Illustrator of the year Crichton award.
Mending Lucille deals with the difficult topic of a child losing a parent and it is recommended by the Australian and new Zealand Journal of Family Therapy to help children facing this difficult situation.
Jennifer has been an inspiration for many of us at Sharing-Books with her contributions, suggestions and words of encouragement. We are glad that her talent and hard work are getting this valuable recognition.
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