Borrowing some inspiration from Richard Nash's Cursor project and Hol Art Books, the bizarre Bite-Size Edits wiki, and two of my favorite bookstores (Left Bank Books in Seattle and Boxcar Books in Bloomington, both run by anarchist collectives), after ALTA last fall I started thinking about applying the collective idea to publishing translations. It's really just the next step combining the non-profit community orientation of small publishing with the peer networking of Web 2.0. I did some research and made some notes and talked to some people informally at MLA, but without active social contact with the kind of people who might be able to help make it happen, I never went any further.
Well, turns out I wasn't the only one thinking along those lines: according to Words Without Borders, Stefan Tobler and Jamie Searle in England are starting up And Other Stories, a collaborative publishing venture that sounds like it will proceed along very similar lines to what I was thinking. (I'm really just going on Stefan's blog posts, particularly this one.) Of course, they're in London and I'm in Port Townsend, so face-to-face collaboration won't be possible, but this might be a good test for the magic of the web—or at least LibraryThing.
2 comments:
I think you should own a bookstore and put a classroom in the back. Good idea? Yes.
Buy me a bookstore?
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