#publishing

RSS has always worked quietly in the background. In a moment when the web is being reshaped by enclosure, consolidation, and algorithmic mediation, its reliability is exactly what we need. It offers a simple, durable way for publishers to keep control of their distribution and for readers to keep control of their attention, without permission, platform lock-in, or hidden agendas. If we treat RSS not as a relic of an earlier web but as the strategic infrastructure it already is, it can continue to anchor a more open, more resilient, and more humane internet for decades to come.

From Google to Microsoft, European newsrooms often rely on tools built in Silicon Valley. Some are trying to break free, turning to open-source alternatives or home-grown solutions.

Last week marked 12 years since the launch of Ghost on Kickstarter. I was 24 when I first started working on the idea, and back then I had no idea what I was doing. Fast forward to 2025 and I still have no idea what I'm doing, but we've come a long way nevertheless. What started as little more than an idealistic open source pipedream has blossomed into a business with $8M/year in annual recurring revenue and a full-time team of 34.

Make eBooks.Really simple.Right fromGoogle Drive™

Make eBooks.Really simple.Right fromGoogle Drive™

A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js.

A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js.

Single source publishing, also known as single sourcing, allows the same content to be used in different documents (deliverables) or in various formats. The labour-intensive and expensive work of editing need only be carried out once, on one document. Further transformations are carried out mechanistically, by automated tools. You may also add new output formats in the future, as your organization's needs change.

Until academics get their acts together and start using new modes of publication, we need to recognize that actions like Aaron Swartz's civil disobedience are legitimate. They are attempts to liberate knowledge that rightly belongs to all of us but that has been acquired by academic publishers through tens of thousands of contracts of adhesion and then bottled up and released for exorbitant fees in what functionally amounts to an extortion racket.

Until academics get their acts together and start using new modes of publication, we need to recognize that actions like Aaron Swartz's civil disobedience are legitimate. They are attempts to liberate knowledge that rightly belongs to all of us but that has been acquired by academic publishers through tens of thousands of contracts of adhesion and then bottled up and released for exorbitant fees in what functionally amounts to an extortion racket.

To the point of Jeff’s post, I would absolutely not write a technical book again. It’s a tedious process and unless you LOVE writing and are really good at it (like Nicholas Zakas or Dave Flanagan) then I suggest that you stick with the medium that is truly successful: Writing long-form articles/blog posts and possibly spinning them off into purchasable ebooks. (As an example, I’d point to Juriy Zaytsev and Peter-Paul Koch both of whom could get any JavaScript position in the world purely based upon the quality of their articles and sites, without ever having written a book.)

To the point of Jeff’s post, I would absolutely not write a technical book again. It’s a tedious process and unless you LOVE writing and are really good at it (like Nicholas Zakas or Dave Flanagan) then I suggest that you stick with the medium that is truly successful: Writing long-form articles/blog posts and possibly spinning them off into purchasable ebooks. (As an example, I’d point to Juriy Zaytsev and Peter-Paul Koch both of whom could get any JavaScript position in the world purely based upon the quality of their articles and sites, without ever having written a book.)

Self-publish your book as you write it, and earn great royalties!

Self-publish your book as you write it, and earn great royalties!

In this world there wouldn’t be any ebook developers any more than you have .doc developers. The fact that we have an industry of people whose job description is close to indistinguishable from ‘fixes office documents by hand in a hex editor’ is insane.

In this world there wouldn’t be any ebook developers any more than you have .doc developers. The fact that we have an industry of people whose job description is close to indistinguishable from ‘fixes office documents by hand in a hex editor’ is insane.

Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we're redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we'll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we'll kill our apps, too.

Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we're redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we'll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we'll kill our apps, too.

As ebook sales mushroom, the Big Six's insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy[*], it has locked customers in Amazon's walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon's leverage over publishers. And unlike pirated copies (which don't automatically represent lost sales) Amazon is a direct revenue threat because Amazon are have no qualms about squeezing their suppliers — or trying to poach authors for their "direct" publishing channel by offering initially favourable terms. (Which will doubtless get a lot less favourable once the monopoly is secured ...)

Pelican is a simple weblog generator, writen in python.

Making systemic change like this is hard and it will require every invested party to stand up for what they know is right and chip away at the old system. I don’t have tenure (and at this rate, no one will ever let me). I am a young punk scholar and I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to stand up for what’s right. Open-access is right. Heavy metal gates and expensive gatekeepers isn’t. It’s time for change to happen! To all of the academics out there, I beg you to help me make this change reality. Let’s stop being silenced by academic publishers.

Over the past three months or so, I wrote an ebook on Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master Tips. I wanted to do nearly all of it myself, save artwork and editing, so I ended up doing the writing, conversion, publishing, financial transactions, and marketing all myself. The following are my experiences and instructions on writing and publishing your very own beloved ebook. Let's dig right in.

"Bookworm isn't just for readers. Publishers can use it to test their ePub files before distributing them, and to experiment with advanced features such as stylesheets and SVG. "

"As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators."

"Hi, Ellis— Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books."

"my point here is to discuss whether WordPress can be extended to accommodate most conventions found in scholarly publishing and where it is lacking, to identify the development work required to meet the needs of most academic who wish to write on and publish to the web"

"If the mainstream of "college teaching" becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts, we'll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced."

"A tribute to "fair use" and the AP's misguided crusade against the hyperlink. All content on this site was generated automatically from the AP's own RSS feeds. (Sorry, we forgot to include your magic DRM beans.) ♥"

"Based on the amount of time we put into the book this works out at something slightly below slave labour rates. Never write a technical book for the money. No really. Spend your evenings in McDonalds if you need extra cash."

"MAGHOUND is an exciting new online membership service that allows you to choose, change, and manage all the magazines delivered to your home for one low monthly fee."

"If you have enabled and configured Publish Queue, when a user saves an entry, leaves a comment, or performs any action that would publish new content to your blog, the system puts that publish action into a queue. Jobs in this queue are then processed by

"Given the difficulty of breaking into print in the traditional way, the Internet looks to many aspiring authors like a powerful new way to distribute content and find an audience; it has promise, not peril."

"I want starting a Digg-like community to be as easy as creating a weblog on blogger.com."

"I suppose sheer numbers might indicate there are more authors in social applications than publishers, but that stands to reason. Many of us are pushing into this space and although it is too slow for my taste."

"The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme."

"In the end, Twitter is just another tool. It’s value is in how you use it."

"The problem is I just don’t know what will happen in the future. And neither do you. So if you’re about to sign a contract of any sort with a noncompete clause, try to get out of it."

"A publishing agreement should be a partnership, and if an editor is doing his or her job it should be part of an ongoing relationship with the most valuable asset any publisher has - its authors. If both parties are reasonable and understand the otherâ

"Two days of intense work didn’t uncover big holes in the spec, which is nice."

"I’m not suggesting that authors or publishers purposely try to game the Amazon.com reviewer system. However, there are several ways authors can participate to be sure that their voice is part of the conversation."

"There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers."

"This is the real lesson of the move to electronic formats and distribution: not that everything should somehow be free, but that with many of the production tasks automatable or off-loadable to the authors, the editorial costs will then dominate the cost

"Conversation, not content, is king. If you were stranded on a desert island and you opted to bring your records instead of your friends, we'd call you a sociopath."

"Libraries have warned that the rise of digital publishing may make it harder or even impossible to access items in their collections in the future."

"I've been talking to a lot of friends and acquaintances who are writing tech books for a wide variety of old-school publishers and I can't believe the deals they're taking."

"We're looking for both full-length books and shorter PDF-only Fridays."

"No DRM, because DRM on e-books is a silly thing."

Heard about this on the TWiT podcast from Leo. Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this what URLs and URIs are for?

"The Internet has undercut the businesses of newspapers, book publishers and magazines for years and now these media are looking for ways to fight back." ...and in so doing, will cut their own throats.

It's like Microformats meets DocBook! Or something.

"A computer magazine is positively ancient news."

"We've got to do a better job of providing that information in a manner thats relevant to the next generation of customers."

"The Lawrence Journal-World has always gone beyond providing hardcopy text -- they've delivered everything from audio clips to whatever you can imagine."

"What a self-published book probably won't get..."