Self Publishing Takes Off

You can’t get it on Amazon.com… yet…

When future archaeologists begin to excavate our civilization they may come to believe that some tragic event befell our culture in the early 21st Century.

That is because all historical records of our time here will have ceased to exist.  They will see a constant and continuous growth of science and art and math literature and films and music, and then, suddenly, around 2010 or so, it will all come to an abrupt end.

“Meteor” they will say.

What they probably won’t say is ‘digital’.

But that will be the right answer.

As we begin to store just about everything ‘out there’ somewhere, (and God only knows where that is), our historical archive is being diminished.

Who will be able to retrieve these things?

No one, most likely.

The Roman Empire, which was around for a good 500 years or so, used to pay their legionnaires with ceramic chits, which they could later exchange for dinari or sestari.  There were, on average, about 60,000 or so legionnaires across the empire. They got paid monthly.  Over 500 years. That is a lot of chits. Do you know how many chits are in existence today?  Less than a dozen.

Physical stuff just does not hang around.

Imagine what happens to cyberspace stuff.

It is gone before we even start.

In the 1980s, The BBC, trying to get on the cutting edge of things, decided to ‘preserve’ the Domesday Book for future generations by putting it on an optical disc.

Today, the optical disc is unreadable. All the optical disc readers are gone.  Fortunately the original, on sheepskin, is still around. It turns out sheepskin is a much better medium for the ages than optical discs – or hard drives for that matter.

Today’s cutting edge technology is tomorrow’s 8-track.

Anyone still got a working 8-track player?

Anyone under the age of 30 know what an 8-track is?

A natural reaction to this vaporization of content is to go to the other extreme. Instead of taking paper and making it digital, there is an increasing trend to take digital and make it paper.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that 764,861 titles were self-published last year.  This is up 181% from the year before.

I have done this myself, many times, for photographs.

Photographs used to sit in a box or an album, but at least they were there. I recently went through my father’s old Kodachromes of his trip to Greenland in the 1950’s. Still as sharp as they day they were shot.

My digital photos may be of great resolution, but who knows where they are now, and more importantly, where they will be in 50 year’s time. Probably out there with the optical discs.

So I have begun self-publishing photographs, using the software that comes along with iPhoto. It’s drag and drop and email and a few weeks later, the book or books arrive. And it’s cheap – around $60 per book. Not a bad price for eternity.

A few months ago, I started to digitize my dad’s old slides. Then, I realized that maybe digitizing wasn’t the best thing to do with them, so I also published a book for my mother for her birthday in March.  It’s a collection of 75 years of her life (all lived int he same house).  Makes  a nice gift – and it’s more likely that her great great grandchildren will look at that, as opposed to trying to find iPhoto, whatever that is.