“What the photocopier was to zines, we hope the People’s E-Book will be to digital books.” – Greg Albers
Working for TOC, I meet and talk to people from all over the world who are doing incredible things to transform the publishing industry. Sometimes I forget there are people right here in my own Arizona backyard doing some pretty cool things to transform publishing.
Greg Albers
One such person is Greg Albers of Hol Art Books. Greg is the best kind of book person. He’s an art book person. He’s also prone to thinking outside the book box in big way, and his wildly successful “People’s E-Book” Kickstarter campaign aims to do just that.
We’ve seen publishing/book-related Kickstarter publishing campaigns aplenty, but most focus on a particular project – seeking funding for the making, promotion, and/or distribution on a specific title. Greg’s Kickstarter campaign, “The People’s E-Book” is about creating an ebook production app. One that is both super simple to use and free.
The details on how the app will work/what it will do can be found on the Kickstarter page, and it’s well worth taking a look. (nutshell: the people’s ebook app will output .epubs in as wysiwyg a way as possible). But to me the truly intriguing part of this project is beyond the details of hows and whats, it’s the why and for whom. As Greg states on the site:
The People’s E-Book seeks to be a lab, an incubator, an e-book creation platform for artists, authors, and alternative presses who want to try new things, publish new books, and push into new territories. The People’s E-Book will handle e-books of all sizes and scope, but it will excel in areas that no one else has cared to consider—the very small, the quick and dirty, the simple and the experimental.
The People’s E-Book is a tool that doesn’t account for what e-books are, but rather lets its users imagine what they can be.
This tool aims to be simple from the start, and that simplicity lowers the barrier in a whole new way. People who maybe didn’t think about themselves as authors can see themselves as authors. The community that Albers is courting is not authors or publishers – it’s everyone else.
What is possibly even better, while the tool is starting super simple, it will evolve based on the needs and desires of its users. The People’s E-Book intends to encourage the community it serves to collaborate, experiment, and influence the tool’s evolution. Creators/artists/storytellers will be creating the tool based on how they want to tell their stories. That’s exciting stuff.
Working with Albers to develop this nifty ebook tool is the Present Group, developers who are devoted not only to creating tools of change, but enabling creators to create tools of change.
The People’s E-Book Kickstarter campaign ends tonight at midnight (Tucson time), so head over to the site and jump on the bandwagon while you still can. If all goes as planned, we can expect to see the first iteration of this cool ebook tool making an appearance in late Spring. And, I for one, am really looking forward to it.
