Nifty and useful: A readability checker for Word documents and web pages.

(Lia via Cup of Chicha.)

Continuing the topic of the previous post: Stephany Aulenback received an email from a bookseller who explains some issues with print-on-demand. You can read the full text there, and if you’ve an interest in books and publishing you should, because it’s a well-written and interesting letter.

But I’d like to focus on one aspect, which is that print-on-demand is frequently conflated with self-publishing. When in fact they’re not the same thing at all.

POD means printing small quantities of a book in a cost-effective manner (but also one hopes in a high-enough quality manner that the book is pleasant to read). Self-publishing means publishing your own book, in either large or small quantities.

I think both are great things, and I believe they are mingled together in many minds because POD make self-publishing affordable to a normal person. But a small or even large publisher might want to take advantage of POD for a book that is predicted to have a small audience, or a very specific type of market, or for which the roll out has to be long and gradual, a building type of awareness among the readers.

POD is perfect for certain books for all those reasons, and has nothing to do with the book being filtered by editors — I’m referencing the quote in the letter linked above that “the LA Times is refusing to read pods on the basis that they’ve gone through no editorial filtering,” which seems a poor policy on the LA Times’s part.

So the irony is that POD could be a great boon to publishing, which is looking for ways around the economics of large-scale publishing (which require a book to sell so many, many copies to be profitable, and few books will ever sell that way); and yet publishing frowns on POD because it wrongly thinks it’s only for vanity publishing.

Stephany Aulenback wonders when electronic books and print-on-demand will come into their own.

I think e-books are waiting for the right delivery mechanism, devices that are easier to read from than the tiny screens on PDAs.

But I don’t see any such holdup for print on demand — the hurdles seem to be in people, in old mindsets and inertia. It’s crazy that a finished book takes so long to hit the shelves, that print runs must be so large, that an author can earn just 70 cents per copy sold. It’s too broken a business model to sustain itself much longer.

The first issue of Swink arrived in my mailbox today, apparently ahead of the issue’s debut in bookstores. Coincidentally, the mag is also featured in today’s PW Newsline (a daily email from Publisher’s Weekly) under the topic “The New New Literary Magazine.” Founder Leelila Strogov is quoted describing the intended readership:

“There are many magazines who are doing things right,” she says. “I don’t think they’re always getting into the right hands.” The audience here, she says, is kind of literary-commercial. “It’s Granta and but also The New Yorker,” she said. “We want a literary audience that crosses over into real-live people.”

(Steven Zeitchik wrote the PW Newsline entry.)

Here’s my first impression of the first Swink: Looks artsy, with its funky color illustration on the front and its unconventional size (7 in x 10 in). Similar to late-model McSweeney’s in its use of the paperback format and heavy reliance on all caps and the list of authors on the back. But then it also has a less affected|art school feel than McSweeney’s. The design is a little more mass market, friendlier, more pick-up-able.

Looking at it close up, I think I recognize the dot over the ‘i’ in the logo as being from the Microsoft Design Gallery (from whence I procured the splat used on the Inkburns mug and t-shirt as well, by the by).

Because of the bigger format, the magazine is easier to read than many lit mags (Paris Review, McSweeney’s sometimes), rather like Tin House. No glossy cover like Tin House, though. Also, the interior design is simpler than Tin House, which seems to like to change the page format from story to story.

In short, it looks quite appealing. I’m interested to read it.

This might be a good point to mention that although I subscribe to all these lit mags I read barely any of them. Sometimes I’ll dig into an issue of any one of them and get through most of it, especially Zoetrope, but often I’m overwhelmed by an issue’s arrival, the sheer mass of quality and challenging writing staring me in the eye. Which makes the name “swink” all the more appropriate, as the masthead says it is a noun (archaic) meaning “labor, toil.”