From Gutenberg until pretty recently, the production of books was driven by the commercial sine qua none condition of selling a minimum amount to at least cover the initial printing and distribution costs. There was a price to become a writer.
This situation has changed. Last week, I went over to Blurb.com’s offices in downtown San Francisco to shoot a short video interview with Eileen Gittins, Founder, President and Ceo of Blurb.com.
Thanks to Blurb’s technology, if the average Joe believes he has valuable content he wants to share on a book, he can. With no money fronted, he can do what only folks like Voltaire, Twain, Hugo or Thoreau were able to pull out in the past.
The first technological twist is the Blog Slurper: Blurb has developed a feature that sucks the content of your blog or Flickr page into a book in less than 10 minutes.
Then, by using Blurb’s free editing software – the Booksmart – one can easily re-arrange the content to fit the new format.
If anything from re-writing to editing is too hard, the Blurb Nation, Blurb’s crowdsourcing community for book making, will help fixing any encountered problem.
Finally, once the book is ready for the world to see it, the copy exists virtually on Blurb’s bookstore. Copies are made by the order and average Joe never spends a dime to reach this stage where he is selling his own book.
On top of that, writers get %100 of the profit made on each sales. If at this point you’re starting to wonder how this is possible, I strongly recommend that you watch the interview.