WebJunction

Your library collects and organizes your community’s stories and makes a broad range of stories available to your community. Who creates and publishes community stories?

If there ever were sharp distinctions between creators, publishers and readers, those distinctions become fuzzier with current technology. Some call “Web 2.0” the “read/write web” because new services and systems are designed so that every reader can also write for a worldwide audience. There’s nothing new about the concept that every reader has their own story to tell—but the barriers to telling those stories beyond family, friends and campfire circles have dropped dramatically.

Some libraries have created publications and published community stories for years. Libraries have published books about themselves or their community. Charlotte and Mecklenburg County created first-rate multimedia “story” CD-ROMs in the 1990s, when title CD-ROMs were in vogue. But publishing has been an expensive process requiring special talents, typically reserved for large library systems—and few of those could consider facilitating the publishing process for their community.

That’s changed. The changes don’t necessarily mean publishing on the web, although that’s the easiest and cheapest way. Today, any library with a personal computer equipped with good contemporary word processing software and an internet connection—which probably means 99% of all public libraries—can create, facilitate and publish content both online and in print form.

Put that another way: Your library could publish a book about your community—even if your library has almost no budget and couldn’t possibly allocate a few thousand dollars for an initial print run.

For all but the smallest libraries, you can also help community members to publish their own stories, in book form when that’s appropriate—or, in some cases, gather community stories to make compelling publications.

The Basics

To do a book or help someone do their own book, you need four things:

• Good content: Stories worth telling, saving and reading.
   
• Software that can produce a well-formatted set of pages—a book without the binding.
   
• Enough design capability (inhouse or via templates) to take advantage of that software—to turn the stories into a proper book.
   
• Production capabilities to go from the machine-readable manuscript to the printed book.

The first hasn’t changed or gotten easier. The others have—although finding or creating an appropriate design or template may still take some work.
 

Software

I believe you can produce an attractive book with any full-featured contemporary word processing program. I know you can do it with any version of Microsoft Word from XP on. I strongly suspect that’s also true for WordPerfect, OpenOffice and other options. (I produced my latest book, Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change, with Word XP as the only layout software.)

Publishing software may make it easier, if the publishing software’s designed to handle book-length projects (which some low-end programs may not be). High-end publishing software will offer more flexibility and power, but most libraries may not need that much power or want to pay the price—not only the purchase price but the learning curve. Programs like QuarkXPress may do a slightly better job of kerning than Word, for example—but you may not notice the difference.

If you plan to use typefaces beyond those that come with Word or Office, you’ll want software that can produce PDFs—but the set of commonly-available typefaces includes some highly readable and attractive options such as Garamond and Book Antiqua.

Design

Yes, there are book templates for Word and Office. No, they’re probably not what you need for a typical book (6×9” paperback with normal chapter headings) without modification. You need someone with a little typographic or design knowledge or the willingness to learn. Templates aren’t that difficult to design and tweak. Use books that you consider well-designed as examples: Aim to duplicate the page layout as a first step.

You can certainly buy templates and design, but that will increase your costs. I’d offer the book template I use, but it relies on licensed typefaces you probably don’t have.

Production

Here’s the real breakthrough. You can get handsome books produced with no upfront costs and surprisingly little hassle, thanks to print-on-demand systems and the web.

I’m using Lulu.com (http://lulu.com) to publish specialized books in the library field, beginning with Balanced Libraries. Lulu isn’t a publisher. It’s a services and fulfillment company. It’s not the only one. There are many different services to fill different needs, probably including local printing-and-binding operations. Lulu stands out because it’s clean: it does exactly what it says doesn’t claim to be anything it’s not. It also charges nothing up front, which makes it very attractive when you’re wholly unsure how well a book will do.

Lulu works best when you’re able to design your book (either as a .doc or .PDF file), when you can follow directions, and when you don’t want to (or can’t) handle sales and fulfillment on your own. Lulu handles the sales and fulfillment and produces each book after it’s ordered and paid for. They charge a fairly high production charge (figure $8 for a 173-page 6×9" paperback) and take 20% of the difference between that charge and the price you set. You can choose to offer books only through Lulu (the easiest method) or add an ISBN and offer distribution elsewhere (with Ingram as distributor); the latter choice adds some cost and a little complexity.

Lulu may not make sense if you have a Friends bookstore ready to sell copies or if you know you’ll sell a few hundred copies. You should be able to find service agencies with much lower per-copy costs if you (or a community member) plan to stock inventory and do your own sales. The upfront costs are higher (you have to pay for a few hundred or a few thousand copies), but the cost per copy should be much lower.

There are other models as well. Blurb, for example, will apparently prompt you through the whole design process with special software—but the per-book cost is very high as a result (a 160-page 8×10" paperback costs $33.95 per copy—Blurb doesn’t do 6×9). On the other hand, self-publishing companies that produce short runs for you to sell on your own should have much lower costs—as long as they’re really supporting self-publishing and not acting as vanity presses (with much higher costs not directly related to manufacturing).

Does This Make Sense for Your Library?

That’s a local question. I’m not suggesting that every library should be a publisher or should help its users to publish. I am saying it’s become a lot easier and the risks involved have come down to almost nothing.

Technology won’t make you or your patrons better writers. But the new tools can make it a lot easier and more realistic to do something with that writing. For some of you, it may make sense to help tell your community’s stories.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.