Code Meet Print

Today is the 20th anniversary of The New Press, the not-for-profit publisher that has smartly bridged the gap between academic and trade founded by Andre Schiffrin, after leading Pantheon Books for three decades, and current Executive Director Diane Wachtell. 

I was an intern at The New Press the summer after my freshman year and to this day recall how fully involved the entire staff was in integrating even us lowly book-peons into all aspects of the press, including editorial meetings, marketing, PR, and yes, reading slush.

The interns worked in the same room as the in-house inventory, and it was impossible not to feel inspired by what lay on the shelves. The New Press commissioned most of its non-fiction selections, highlighted by piercing works from the likes of Studs Terkel and James Loewen. They also publish a selection of quality non-US fiction.

Happy birthday to a rare and important curator of ideas and words (and sounds and sights) that have pushed forward the way we contemplate education, law, social justice, and storytelling across cultures. Here are five works you should know:

Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen

Its title says it all, ranging from the apotheosis of Christopher Columbus to the first Thanksgiving, it’s a scathing critique of the most important history textbooks of the time, selling over 1 million copies to date and winner of the American Book Award.

May It Please the Court: Live Recordings and Transcripts of Landmark Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court Since 1955, ed. Peter Irons and Stephanie Gutton

At a time when we called it “multimedia”, The New Press unveiled the primary text itself: recordings of history-changing arguments on CD, including Miranda v. Arizona and Roe v. Wade.

The People’s History of the United States: The Wall Charts, by Howard Zinn

In an era before “data visualization” was a thing , Zinn and The New Press brought us a vast visual representation of a vastly important book (and not just for being name-checked by Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting).

Other People’s Children, by Lisa Delpit

MacArthur “Genius Grant” Award winner Delpit dissects how deliberately unstructured teaching strategies like “whole language” instead put low-income students at an even greater disadvantage.

The Thought Gang, by Tibor Fischer

A personal favorite of mine from that summer of interning. A raucously hilarious British novel about a starving philosopher wandering around the south of France, robbing banks with a one-armed partner.

One of our (dear) Code Meet Print members, Mia Alvar, has a wonderful short story just published in the The Missouri Review winter issue. “‘The Miracle Worker’ is a part of a collection about Filipino exiles, immigrants and wanderers who uproot their families, settle on alien ground and struggle to connect across real and imagined borders,” says the author.

A year had passed since my husband, Ed, and I had moved from the Philippines to Bahrain, and still I thought of these three stories as “the” house—not “our” house, certainly not “my.” Expatriate families like ours were well-provided for: a car, a travel allowance, the promise of schooling if we were ever to have a child. Strangest of these provisions, to me, was the house. Too large for two people, it was outfitted with luxuries I would never have chosen myself: gold leather upholstery, curtains embroidered with camels and date trees, shelves and tables with brass frames and glass surfaces. Plush red carpeting covered every inch of floor except in the bathrooms and the kitchen. We wanted for nothing, and none of it was ours.

The Missouri Review is available in NYC at Barnes & Noble (let us know where else?). Mia is also headed to Yaddo (whose writers have won 66 Pulitzer Prizes and 61 National Book awards) next week. #Kudos

In “The Business of Publishing” Session II, Co-Founders Evan Ratliff and Jeff Rabb spoke candidly about the process of building The Atavist, both long-form journalism digital imprint and now media-rich content-management-system currently deployed as SaaS to big publishers like Pearson.

“In some ways, the business of publishing is 45 minutes of setup.. acquire a domain, host a basic website, and install WordPress,” Evan acknowledged to a highly-engaged classroom at General Assembly on October 3rd.  But the experience of consuming Stories, particularly in a world where most of us carry in our pockets computing devices more powerful than the ones that ran Microsoft Word 95, is often the process of consuming content across media within the narrative itself.  ”When I read a story by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, I want to hear that music.  I end up looking it up on Google and listening to clips [while reading],” elaborated Evan.

It’s implicit that readers and users are by now used to navigating instantly to new browser tabs for supplemental information and experiences to content online; ‘What is the population of Chad?’, or, ‘I’d love to see the interview where Kubrick says, regarding the Myth of Icarus, we should just do a “better job on the wings”’.  The Atavist has been integrating these behaviors natively into their long-form journalism publications-as-apps, eight so far, with sales numbering in the “tens of thousands” for several of them.

In order to manage the process of highly-edited media experiences for user/readers, Jeff built a highly-customized CMS, which has grown into a full-blown next generation multi-content-platform.  Humbly, Evan relayed that biggest names in news, education, and magazine publishing who engage with The Atavist as possible clients of their Software-As-Service tell them it’s the most robust they’ve seen.

“Another effect of building tools for ourselves is that it is another way to make money,” said Evan.  As is the case with much of the history of commerce, sometimes massive businesses are born out of happy accidents (cf. the microwave oven, Viagra).  But, as most of us who work closely advising and consulting with startups know: challenges are created by a plethora of opportunities as much as by a scarcity of them.  The rub, of course, is both selecting the pathway that affords the greatest chances of success (optimizing impact per unit effort), along with the matter of executing against it.  Yeah, that.

And Evan and Jeff and the team (growing fast on both tech and business) are doing just that.  They well see the power of the tools they have built and are hyper-focused on how they bring value to the world of Storytelling.  There are many pathways ahead, and I won’t give anything away, but suffice it to say the team is asking themselves the right questions as they plot the next chapter.  

We can’t wait to read (watch/hear) it.

GN

It’s easy for people to mistake books for merely source material to bigger, glitzier, glossier things. They have at times become a footnote, a hyperlinked-reference within (extremely) louder, (incredibly) closer sound bytes, moving images, headlines, and bullet-points.

For Session I of The Business of Publishing, Richard Nash unsurprisingly (and compellingly) laid bare this perspective. He reminded us that, unlike nearly every other medium, “books.. reward iteration” — a reader’s engagement and re-engagement with a book over days and years and re-readings serves to expand both the breadth of her understanding of it and the depth of her connection to it. I’d be fiercely curious to see what this would look like graphed (particularly if Ben Greenman were doing the graphing). I suspect it would look a bit(ly) different than these data, which demonstrate the average half-life of a link to be just 3.5 hours.

Nash went on to assert that Oprah Winfrey did not become, simply Oprah, until she focused on her now-since-assumed protocol of talking about: Books. To paraphrase (it’s hard to take notes on touch surfaces - Blackberrys [gasp!] had their place): “Books gave Oprah a way to talk about feelings, emotional responsibility.. a way to talk passionately about art, about food, about travel”.

I mentioned at the last Meetup that Code Meet Print is focused not only on Books, but #TheFutureOfStorytelling. Ours is a community that cherishes stories (the kinds that grow in our imagination over longer periods as well as the kinds that are fleeting, scarce, mutable), but one that is asking, hypothesizing, and experimenting about all manner of value that these stories create and exchange. Commerce (and livelihood) are part of this, and during Session I Nash was nimble and thoughtful about new possible Models: Artisanal Bookmaking (the Bespoke, the “vinyl collector’s edition for the written word”), as well as the Unpacking of Transmedia from within a Story.

Session II is Monday October 3rd featuring Evan Ratliff and Jefferson Rabb, Co-Founders of The Atavist, who will be looking inward at their own real-life, real-time experiment with the evolution of Non-Fiction Storytelling — one that more natively harnesses the experiential possibilities of touch interface devices.

Session III will be taught by Jacob Lewis — I cannot wait to hear his appraisal of Endemic versus Systemic Problems in Print, and his vision of where Digital might succeed, informed closely by his experiences at The New Yorker and now, creating highly-engaged reading communities at Figment.

Back to School never sounded so interesting.  Hope to see you there.

GN

While Code Meet Print has demonstrated the value of Community to the contemplation and creation of innovative processes and products across Texts + Tech, we are proud to take our next step in helping leaders across disciplines teach and learn and experiment around the #FutureOfStorytelling.

We are thrilled to announce our first Education Series:

The Business of Publishing, presented by Code Meet Print and General Assembly: a 3-Session Seminar Series

Monday September 26^th, Monday October 3^rd, and Monday October 10^th; 2011; from 8:00 to 9:30PM at General Assembly

In this 3-Session Series, students will be presented with a compelling and concise History of Publishing from Gutenberg to Kindle, review the evolution of creative, consumer, and commerce dynamics (and contemplate their future), and learn first-hand both the pitfalls and best practices of current disruptive Publishing ventures across Literary Fiction, Long Form Journalism, and the fast-growing world of Young Adult Fiction from Publishing and Tech innovators and stalwarts of the Code Meet Print NY Community: Richard Nash, Evan Ratliff and Jefferson Rabb, and Jacob Lewis.

*Code Meet Print NY Members: GET 30% OFF Full 3-Session Series or Single Session Tickets - Use this DISCOUNT CODE*

Session I: From Gutenberg to PageMaker to Kindle and Beyond – Richard Nash, VP of Community and Content of Small Demons, Founder of Cursor, and Publisher of Red Lemonade.

 Richard Nash is VP of Community and Content of Small Demons, Founder of Cursor, and Publisher of Red Lemonade. From 2001-2009 he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press, where books he edited and published landed on bestseller lists of the Boston Globe and on Best of the Year lists from The Guardian to the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Los Angeles Times. He edited Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Utne Reader named him “One of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World” and Mashable called him “The #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing”.

Session II: Storytelling and its New Toolkit: The Atavist, a Case Study – The Atavist Co-Founders Evan Ratliff and Jefferson Rabb

 Evan Ratliff is the Co-Founder and Editor of The Atavist, a digital publishing house creating bestselling journalism and multimedia nonfiction for mobile devices. His writing also appears in Wired, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, and many other publications. He is a past finalist for the National Magazine Award, and his writing on science, technology, crime, privacy, and terrorism has appeared in numerous anthologies, including “The Best of Technology Writing” 2006 and 2010, “The Best American Magazine Writing 2010,” and “The Best American Nonrequired Writing 2010.”

Jefferson Rabb is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of The Atavist. He is a programmer, Web designer, app developer, and game builder who has been creating innovative Web sites for the publishing world for over a decade. He has created a unique digital presence for best-selling authors Haruki Murakami, Jhumpa Lahiri, Laura Hillenbrand, Joshua Ferris, Gary Shteyngart, and many others. He previously worked on staff at MTV.com, Sephora.com, The Shooting Gallery, and Mutation Labs.

Session III: Endemic Vs. Systemic Problems in Print and The Potential for Success in Digital – Jacob Lewis, Co-Founder/CEO of Figment

Jacob Lewis is the Co-Founder and CEO of Figment, an online community for teens and young-adults to create, discover, and share new reading and writing. Figment enables its users to read amateur and professional content and create their own unfiltered creative writing to share with their peers on web and mobile networks. Figment provides dozens of publishers with a unique marketing and branding tool and hundreds of schools and libraries with a space for individual classroom instruction, as well as a community of more than 60,000 teens who have produced over 150,000 pieces of writing. Jacob is the former Managing Editor of The New Yorker and of Conde Nast Portfolio.