Our first batch of bookleteer POD eBooks arrived and we’re very, very pleased with the results:

We’ll be sending out some samples to friends, colleagues and bookleteers, meanwhile we will start accepting orders for POD eBooks & StoryCubes from April 12th. For more information on bookleteer’s POD service please visit the bookleteer blog.

Download
Expeditions in Paper Science A4 | US Letter PDF 330Kb
Unguided A4 | US Letter PDF 1.3Mb

About : These two eBooks were created by Matthew Sheret at the first bookleteer Pitch Up & Publish event in October 2009. Matthew writes, “Expeditions in Paper Science was my first pass at the system, a reasonably off-the-cuff collation of some of my blog entries this summer. I’ve long been interested in the idea of physicalising web articles, and while an industry has solidified around POD in the last few years they remain a step removed from the immediacy I’m itching for. Bookleteer instantly unlocked that; simple cut-‘n’-paste gave me a nice little document I’ve been throwing around since.

“The speed of delivery got me thinking about incorporating illustrations into the format. With content just a link away I turned to a story the We Are Words + Pictures team created for an anthology earlier this year. Unguided was another speedy job, knocked up in less than five minutes. Finding the source images was just a matter of dropping links into Bookleteer’s interface. The end result was admittedly rough and ready – I’d done it without much consideration of the effects of shrinkage on the A5 illustrations – but the story is still very much intact. It would be the work of ten minutes to optimise the images, and an easy design decision next time to say to an illustrator “Okay, let’s go for an A6 format” which is the kind of space a panel from a webcomic could thrive in.

“Seeing two diverse types of content drop nicely into the format actually sparked a lot of thinking among We Are Words + Pictures about the restrictions of our work in an online environment. The physical nature of the books is a joy; cutting and folding them together doesn’t make them any less robust, and when you introduce them to a group they’re thrown, passed around and digested in a way that even link blogging can’t replicate.”

Published December 2009

Matthew Sheret is co-founder of We Are Words + Pictures, an occasional market stall and exhibition team that promote the work of illustrators and writers creating ‘zines and comics worldwide. They have taken part in events in London, Leeds, San Diego and Stockholm, and will announce a programme of events for 2010 in the new year. He also works as a freelance writer for clients that include Last.fm, Global Comment and Newspaper Club, and can be reached at www.matthewsheret.com

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Not all StoryCubes are published just on Diffusion – some are printed on card and distributed as physical objects. We’ve printed a StoryBox of 8 cubes about Proboscis’ projects, a special illustrated set by Australian comic artist Matt Huynh and our own set about Under-Used Assets for Perception Peterborough as well as one off cubes for projects like DodoLab Montreal and Social Tapestries.

Now with bookleteer it has become even easier not only to create beautiful StoryCubes, but to have them printed as physical objects too. Last week we produced a stunning example for Birkbeck College’s In the Shadow of Senate House – from design to delivery in a week. Alongside these were two special cubes made as a promotional items for some up and coming bands, as well as limited editions of StoryCubes commissioned as part of our Transformations series.

The arrival of bookleteer makes it extraordinarily easy to create single or double sided StoryCubes for creative projects, marketing campaigns, games and events. Prices start at 87 pence per cube (plus set up, delivery & VAT) with a minimum order of 250 – not necessarily one design : a single order could be 1 each of 250 different cubes, or 50 copies of 5 cubes, or in fact any combination of copies and designs (i.e. there’s no need to order even quantities of each design).

If you’d like to know more or want to try something out please get in touch with us at sales at proboscis.org.uk

Proboscis is very excited to announce bookleteer.com – our forthcoming service for creating eBooks and StoryCubes which uses the latest version of the Diffusion Generator. We are planning a private beta test of the service in early October, with a public version launching in 2010.

Bookleteer will allow individuals and organisations to create personalised eBooks and StoryCubes under their own identity (the front covers of Bookleteer-made eBooks can contain a logo image) and with a cover image to make each publication more distinctive and recognisable. Bookleteer supports all 4 types of eBooks (classic/book ; portrait/landscape) as well as single and double-sided StoryCubes. It will additionally support eBooks created in many other languages and non-Roman alphabets (Hindi, Chinese, Greek, Russian etc) and will enable Right-to-Left eBooks to be created for Right-to-Left languages (Arabic, Urdu etc).

We’ll be developing some pilot projects over the next 6 months to demonstrate Bookleteer’s uses and capabilities, especially around its new API which will allow other websites and systems to call its services to generate eBooks and StoryCubes from external content and datasets.

We’ll be posting regular progress updates on Twitter as well as here.