Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

Preface

This book is the result of a belief: that “digital” fundamentally alters the mechanics of publishing books. There is much talk about this shift in the publishing world — a calendar filled with conferences, a blogosphere popping with opinion, and not a few op-eds and even books on this very topic, some many years old.

But we wanted to get beyond beliefs with this work, to get into the nuts and bolts of things. We wanted our contributors to be not just perceptive thinkers, but also doers, people who are building the kinds of tools and companies that will continue to shape publishing for years to come.

Indeed the idea for Book came about not so much as an idea for a book, as a way to put to real-world use a new kind of digital tool for book publishing that my small company was (and is) in the process of building: PressBooks.com. PressBooks is a simple, but powerful web-based book production tool, that produces ebooks, print books, and webbooks, all from one online source file. I thought I should be in the middle of it, testing it with a real publishing project.

So I pitched the idea for the book, first to my friend Brian O’Leary, who is as seasoned about book publishing as I am naive. Brian liked it, and we agreed that the best place for the book was O’Reilly Media, a publishing company known for its aggressive embrace of digital innovation. Joe Wikert, Publisher at O’Reilly, liked it too — and we spent a good number of hours talking about how to “walk the walk” of the changes ...