The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

The current self-publishing industry doesn't seem to be addressing the ills facing the publishing industry today, nor emulating traditional publishers' strengths, but, rather, seems to be targeted on producing wonderful-looking bound books for authors or special purposes ranging from photo-albums to corporate communications. This is what I've taken away from C|Net News' great overview from the New York Times on the various aspects of the self-publishing industry, Technology rewrites the book. I learned of this article via Joe Wikert in his post:The New York Times on Self-Publishing.

Joe Wikert writes about the challenges and short-falls of the traditional publishing industry, especially in regards to technical publications. We've written about our own frustrations experiences [as I actually agree with the publishers that the time for this topic as a book is past - it wasn't a year ago, but it is now] in OSBI Book Status.

I don't get the impression that the self-publishing industry, in its current form, is addressing long time-to-market issues, relevancy, incremental publishing & updates, or the apparent need for multiple-format publishing and access through various means, from different locations at different times that we're seeing. The self-publishing industry also seems to abandoning the strengths of the traditional publishers, including editing and peer review.

Perhaps the answer to the technical book publishing woes lies in an integration of online publishing techniques with self-publishing. We're beginning to work on this through the use of blog, wiki and lens for our Open Source Business Intelligence research project. Would you, our readers, consider paying a subscription fee for premium content? Would anyone be interested in having the capability to have that content in multiple formats such as PDF, Motricity eBook and/or bound books? Would you pay a premium above the subscription price to do so? Should we start a new business based on the answers to these questions?

We've started to get answers to some of these questions. And maybe we should.