So I was at Democamp 12 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada last night doing meet and greet, and talking with fellow technology start-up people. Democamp is always a blast, it gives me a chance to bounce some of the ideas here at Sharing Books off a group of tech people and entrepreneurs. We did not present at this Democamp, but there were some really neat companies there.

One in particular I'd like to give a shout out to, www.christmasfuture.org. Christmas Future allows you to take your some of the normal money you spend on Christmas gifts and buy people charitable donations, letting them pick where the money gets to go. They focus on big ticket projects like water purification, housing, land reformation. It is easy, it is cool, and they are run ultra lean. 100% of the money you donate to a project goes to that project. Check them out if you have time.

For people in Calgary who use transit, check out www.trainit.ca. There isn't a ton open to the public right now, but keep an eye on them. They have a site that gets you transit information ultra fast.

For the gamers, check out www.gwabs.com, neat and crazy stuff from the Cambrian House crew.

I try to get out to as many of the tech events in Calgary as possible, particularly Democamps and Barcamps. I will try to post a heads up for events I'm going to be at in the future so that anyone in the area who is interested in finding out more about Sharing Books can track me down.

Labels: calgary, democamp, event

On Friday afternoon (081121), I Visited Niina Chebry's studio as she was getting ready for the 2008 Eastside Culture Crawl. Niina is featuring this year 35 paintings that are the illustrations for her new Sharing-Book: Auguste Rodent, the Artist of Abundant Talent. With me was Louise Clauesson of Grace of God Productions who will photograph and digitize Niina's paintings prior to publication on Sharing-Books.

Niina presented her Auguste to a small Sharing-Books group almost a year ago when we were researching the project and conceiving the company. As we heard the story of Auguste Rodent, we all fell in love with him and with Niina's humour and the music of her text. No reader can escape grinning as they read the story of Auguste overcoming adversity.

Niina has worked diligently on her text and her paintings, constantly refining her text and the personality of Auguste and the other characters of the story. We arrived just in time to help Niina put the finishing touches on her exhibit. Tomorrow we will join the crowd visiting her studio and see if they will have the same smile we have when they read the story of Auguste Rodent.

Labels: Author, event, Illustrator

I attended the Vancouver Children Literature Roundtable annual Illustrator’s breakfast featuring Shaun Tan. I must say that I attend these events with a lot of humility being relatively new to the children literature world. The passion and enthusiasm of the attendees are inspiring. With his years of dedicated work Dr. Ron Jobe has facilitated a powerful legacy as evidenced by the attendance at the roundtable. We have to be thankful to leaders like him and his colleagues on the board of the roundtable.

However, I was surprised when less than ten people stood up, when authors and illustrators were asked to identify themselves. I don’t know if this low turn-out of book creators was due to competing events in Surrey and Granville Island or if some are too shy to identify themselves as book creators because they have not been published yet. In my opinion, book creators should not hesitate to identify themselves as such even if they are not published yet. Claiming the role goes a long way in assuming the responsibility of creating books. Being in the process of creating should define an author not what has been done in the past. Hopefully, the easy publishing offered by Sharing-Books.com site will help many more book creators identify themselves as such.

The event was also the occasion to introduce the six books shortlisted for the Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada 2008 Information Book Award. This award honours books created with an educational purpose. This will be a difficult choice as all entries were of very high calibre in my opinion. These excellent books highlighted for me how children literature influences the values of the next generation. The topics chosen reflect the concerns of today’s adults and have the purpose of communicating these concerns to our children. I could not help but think of how many important topics remain unaddressed in children literature because of the constraint of paper publishing. There are many topics that may never be addressed unless you make publishing easy and do it in such a way that it can reach an audience spread over vast areas. Some audiences would never be big enough to aggregate locally in a “market” deserving a book, but once we use the web these audiences can be found and communicated to in an effective way.

The keynote speaker, illustrator Shaun Tan, gave a most interesting talk explaining his progress from early childhood drawings to the wonderful images he shared with the audience. I found his images and his talk absolutely fascinating. However, I am not sure I see his award winning books as children books. To me (and I am not an expert) they are more illustrated poetry where adults can spend hours exploring the rich details and symbolism of his images. I do not know if they would keep a child’s attention in the same way. Shaun himself admitted that he gets the most compliments about The Arrival from older immigrants who describe the book as depicting exactly what they felt when they arrived in their new country.

Perhaps such a high level of art intimidates new creators and prevents them from identifying themselves as authors or illustrators. We often hear comments like, “I am not good enough to be published” or “my book is not good enough to be published”. We address this with the “versioning” ability of our publishing engine. Start, publish your book. Share it with the world and connect with your audience. As feedback comes or as you feel inspired it is easy to update a book with new images or text on sharing-books.com. What is important is that you create and share your message.

Labels: event, news, vancouver