Just stumbled upon one of the first (of maaany) early design concepts I did in early 2007 for Faber Finds (which was [maybe still is?] Faber & Faber's imprint of digital on-demand book reprints). The project brief & mission was to create a unique full book jacket (incl. cover/spine/back) for every title and every single book printed. The final design direction we ended up with was very different (frames of flourishes), but this particular design system was based on a Braitenberg vehicle sim with its params seeded by a book's ISBN (plus some additional randomized params)...
If you want one of our items by #Xmas you need to get your order in by the end of next week, to ensure our #PrintOnDemand supplier can ship it before the last #ChristmasPostingDates - so for the #ScottishIndependence supporter in your life, or if you just want to support the station, take a look at the Radio Jammor shop.
Dear English-speaking #indieauthor.s, can you help me out with a question on book catalogues? Currently my books are listed in the German VLB, but print on demand providers like Bookvault request the data from Nielsen. How can I get my book data into that Nielsen catalogue? In which catalogues do you list your books? @maryrobinette or @mwl maybe? RT welcome.
Yesterday was all excitement in the afternoon, at least for me. My first bulk order of my Ruska series of fabric designs printed on organic cotton percale arrived from CottonBee! It was a joy to just stare at the full patterns and imagine what projects to use them in.
I hope there will be more orders for others to enjoy too - otherwise I might have a printed fabric hoarding issue.
I wonder if the whole #AI thing will finally convince artists that modern #copyright regime was never meant to protect them.
It was meant to protect the middlemen. The Amazons, the Spotifies, the Sonys, the Disneys. The film studios, the publishing houses.
Now the middlemen figured out they own basically all of art, and that they can just train a computer on that, to replace artists with a piece of software.
And then stop paying artists even the pittance they were being paid so far.
Before #PrintOnDemand#POD and online book sales, a book run was generally 10K copies or more. Someone had to organize & oversee the logistics of moving them all to stores & maintaining stock at the point of sale. Plus, 10K copies requires a lot more storage space than you would think. That's also another cost.
If you were lucky & your book sold more than 10K, another print run were another cost. Translations & international sales meant more expenses.
Back then, the only form of real "self-publish" was #VantiyPress, which was as much of a ripoff and waste of money then as it is today.
Basically, it's easy to be comfortable in this modern era and think that things have always been as they are now, that the #arts were always something that #artists could do on their own and pay the rent. It's easy for younger people to think that the middlemen were always unnecessary, but that's not true.