The Evolving Newsroom

Web-to-print publishing sites are cropping up more and more. It’s an interesting idea, I think, to take material published online (or on your desktop at home) and republish it in book, ebook or magazine format.

Publish your own magazine

One such site is MagCloud, an HP venture some of us heard about at Webstock from contributor  Derek Powazek, who publishes Fray and was co-leader of the recent Managing Sustainable Communities workshop with Heather Champ, community manager for Flickr.

The idea is you create a magazine at home (using a desktop publishing system), upload the pdfs to MagCloud and get it printed on demand and posted out to you. No shopping around for printers or negotiating rates, just upload, say how many copies you want and hit the button. The pricing is all clearly laid out on the site. Simple.

We talked a bit about how on-demand printing might affect the news business. One point that’s stayed with me is that historically a newspaper’s community was defined by its location – the town it set up in – and it published news relevant to that community. But the internet allows us to define our own communities and belong to many.

Now those self-defined communities can engage with one another online and use print on demand to extend their reach. They’re not large organisations bound by daily print cycles and big overheads, they can just publish what they want when they want in whatever quantity makes sense.

Which is one more challenge facing the news business, given that it remains slow to grasp the conversational nature of online and that its one-size-fits-all model and heavy daily overheads make it far less nimble than web-first newcomers.

As an aside, someone in the communities workshop told us of a friend who took the best of her blog entries for the year, had them printed and gave them to family and friends at Christmas.  Plenty of potential in that idea.

Blog to print publishing

Zinepal lets you import content from your blog, or any RSS feed, and turns it into an ezine with a downloadable pdf, ebook format and optional public webpage complete with RSS feeds. Thanks to @stephenharlow for the link.

This is a free, no frills service which gives you a very straightforward layout, option to upload a single logo/image and a choice of five fonts.  It’s very quick, this is what my Evolving Newsroom Zine pdf looked like after three minutes’ work:

Zinepal won’t suit everyone but might, say, work for someone with a local-focused blog who wants to print the best of it from time to time and do a letterbox drop or have some promotional material to hand out at public events.

Wikipedia to book publishing

Then there’s the German company PediaPress which was profiled by Techcrunch recently. PediaPress, in association with the Wikimedia Foundation, let you collate and print Wikipedia entries in a book.

The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. PediaPress books are bound in dimensions 8″ x 5.5″ with a color cover and black & white interior, and the prices are reasonable. The cost of a book depends on the number of pages contained in addition to a base fee (starting at $8.90 for 100 pages) and worldwide shipping that’s charged extra.

The service has only just started offering English language printing and only in beta, but is already available in German and a few other languages.

This kind of thing has terrific potential for education. Imagine being able to collate the best of freely available online resources into book one for this class, book two for that class.