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Getty Images has come up with an odd, inventive, and intriguing take on the streaming music service (pandora, last fm, etc.). Getty’s Moodstream combines audio with shifting still and video images. The user dials up a “mood” by adjusting sliders for such qualities as “happy” vs. “sad,” “calm” vs. “lively,” and so on. (Or you [...]

“If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which …” — William Butler Yeats

Read at Work : amusing
The all-important author photo : lessons from Capote
It’s difficult to talk coherently about typefaces without some sense of the history of typography
Nipplephobia : watch out, they’re coming to get you
Books flying off the shelves in Spain
PhotoShop [...]

Want to bribe the New York Times Book Review into reviewing your book? If so, you’ll have to come up with something better than these examples of book review swag.
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Book publishing has always been a little backward in some aspects of marketing. For example, while a graphic designer might produce several covers for a book, these are usually reviewed only by a select group of decision makers involved with its production and marketing. I’m not aware of many focus group tests, even for titles [...]

No, not op eds — op ads. I had forgotten how pervasive op art was in advertising of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also a period of increasingly globalism, as design fads trends quickly spread from one culture to another.
Italy produced some of the boldest op art ads, such as these ads for a [...]

Among the words I’d like to retire, toward the top of the list would be branding. It’s not, of course, that I’m opposed to marketing, or creating a coherent and persuasive product or company identity. Helping products find appropriate audiences is good for everyone; in the book world, you don’t want books going out to [...]

Stephen Page, publisher and chief executive of Faber and Faber, writes in an article in the Guardian that “the industry is closer now to a tipping point that would see a dramatic reduction in range, a shortening of writers’ careers, and a reading culture that errs towards mass forms of entertainment alone.” He is talking [...]

Recently there has been an increase in calls for the inclusion of ads in printed books (this “On the Media” report, for example, touches on the idea). There’s a degree of desperation in this — supposedly it would help to address the difficulties of making publishing profitable. Alongside these calls has been the inevitable hand [...]

BLURB: A brief noise that embarrasses everyone.
– Tom’s Glossary of Book Publishing Terms

A curious aspect of book publishing is that publishers have never quite figured out what the best way is to sell books. Not only is the industry cursed with a byzantine distribution system, but publishers routinely repeat the stale promotional techniques of past [...]

If I was still doing trade book publishing I would recommend to my authors that they try blog touring. Conventional book tours have their place, especially for developing bookstore relations and to some degree local media, but a virtual tour via blogs would certainly reach a much larger audience. The return from that audience would [...]

Ten Questions is an occasional feature in which folks involved in some aspect of publishing kindly oblige my interrogative impulses. Today I’m talking with Jeffrey Lependorf, who serves as executive director of two three different nonprofits, Small Press Distribution, based in Berkeley, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, based in New York City, [...]

Publisher 010 Uitgeverij has made what I think is probably a smart decision to put their 2004 title Dutch Type by Jan Middendorp in Google Book Search. Of course we have seen public domain books in GBS for some time (by the way, it is absurd for Google to claim any proprietary rights at all [...]

I love ghost signs. I’ve been meaning to take some pictures in SF. Now I find (via Book of Joe) that Sam Roberts has an entire blog devoted to them.

BookSwim is attempting to replicate the netflix model for the book world. They’re offering a service where you pay a monthly fee and receive and return books without the obligation to purchase. No late fees.
I think this is a questionable plan. People are used to renting movies — renting books would require developing a new [...]

Tim O’Reilly has posted some observations on whether allowing free downloads of books hurts or helps their sales. This is a question that is difficult to resolve empirically. O’Reilly allowed free downloads of their title Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, by Leif Madsen, Jared Smith, and Jim Van Meggelen. 180,000 copies were downloaded and [...]