futurebook and The Internet Archive
The message one reporter took away from the 2011 'Books in Browsers' convocation hosted by the fabulous Internet Archive in its headquarters in the grand old Christian Science on Clement Street & Funston:
the writer is the editor is the reader is the publisher is the librarian in you.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the archive (far left in the crummy iPhone photo taken by a guy sitting in a pew toward the back) who's mind-blowing non-profit enterprise--to 'offer universal access to all knowledge--hosted the event.
On this world stage--presenters came from, among other places, Berlin and Hong Kong, the past met the present met the future--possibly and perhaps--as one speaker after another presented the current face(s) of information production, storage, and retrieval.
Not only can you make your own book, you can publish it, have it made available in any number of digital showrooms, share favorite books with friends, obtain reader analytics and...
One guy said "writing is easy." Another said that "the average American reads six books a year." Though one couldn't be sure what one guy's company did (24Symbols), he was full of energy and seemed to love books and be having fun.
Only one of the speakers mentioned anything about money, i.e. how their company was compensated for what they did. The fee was breathtakingly inexpensive.
Click on the following for a sense of what the evening's presenters are up to:
Reps of two other firms--Mobnotate and Systime--could not be located at press time.
In his opening remarks, Kahle said the Internet Archive is now collecting real books and that the San Francisco Public Library just gave the archive a sizable contribution of them.