livebooks blog

In conjunction with our ongoing Future of Photobooks project with FlakPhoto, photographer-writers Harlan Erskine and Todd Walker are hosting a Tweetchat about the Future of Photobooks this evening (Tuesday, Dec. 15) from 9 to 10 pm Eastern (6 to 7 pm Pacific). This will also kick off their weekly Tuesday Photo Art Chats, which you can find by doing a Twitter search for #photoartchat.

To be part of the discussion, make sure your tweets include #photoartchat and a @reply if you’re responding to a specific person. For an even simpler way to take part, you can go to TweetChat, enter this hashtag, and interact as you would in an IM chat screen. You can also see the chat in the column below, which will update in real time with any tweets that include #photoartchat.

*UPDATE: Here are a few highlights from last night’s TweetChat about The Future of Photobooks on #photoartchat.

How often are photobooks purchased from print-on-demand storefronts like Blurb? Are they mostly photographers printing their own portfolios? People agreed they are more likely to buy books when they can touch them. If they’re buying them online, they need to be more of a “known quantity,” either a photographer or publisher they know, like, and trust to put out a quality product.

joostdeleij: Would be interesting if quality Blurb (etc) books, that sold over 100 copies, could for example be sold through Amazon
consumptive: i’ve sold about 30 books through the blurb bookstore. not bad, considering i’m not a name brand. purchasers are pleased.
harlanerskine: Steven Shore talks about his iPhoto experiments here: http://www.popphoto.com/Galleries/A-Conversation-with-Stephen-Shore

Questions of people’s favorite photobooks lately, as well as the “most influential” photobooks of the last decade, came up several times.

harlanerskine: I have really enjoyed Paul Graham’s “a shimmer of possibilities” (not that I can afford it)
tom_leininger: Most recent purchase Travelog by Charles Harbutt from the 1970s, great pictures and essay. Newest is Wessel 5 Books (Steidl).
OcularOctopus: @harlanerskine I’ve lined up Burtynsky’s “OIL” as one to get soon
joostdeleij: I love buying photography books. One of the most affordable ones and interesting ‘Terryworld‘ by Terry Richardson
OcularOctopus: Also on my want list: “Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive” http://www.joelsternfeld.com/Oxbow.html
joostdeleij: My last purchase was PhotoArt ‘the new world of photography’. Very nice! and affordable.
harlanerskine: I have also been revisiting Robert Frank’s “The Americans“ …
tom_leininger: Winteriesse by Luc Delahaye, Most of Thomas Roma‘s books. The Silence by Gilles Peress.
dariushimes: hmmm @ocularoctopus that’s a tough one. Anything Gerry Badger writes excites my intellect, & I’m in love w/ Violet Isle (from @RadiusBooks)
tom_leininger: My kids liked going through Dog Dogs by Erwitt, it was small and inexpensive so I did not mind the man handling of it.
harlanerskine: @OcularOctopus but I really like Alex Soth’s Niagara. Paul Graham’s Shimmer of possibilities…
harlanerskine: @OcularOctopus Taryn Simon’s “An American Index of the Hidden…” and Row Ethridge’s “Rockaway, NY”
OcularOctopus: @harlanerskine Sleeping By The Mississippi might be the most influential book of the decade.
tom_leininger: How about Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland? I have not seen it in person. I would say Wintereise is up there too for the decade.

A discussion of the ideal size for photobooks to be printed also surfaced.

tom_leininger: @consumptive I like the size. I am becoming more of a fan of smaller sized books.
tom_leininger: Smaller sized would be 8.5×11 and smaller. It is an intimate portable. Larger books is like an event.
harlanerskine: @tom_leininger it seems like some books are made with the wrong size. some times too big sometimes too small.
OcularOctopus: @harlanerskine Many retrospective books are too small. fitting pictures to a standard size for a series of books. detail lost
harlanerskine: @OcularOctopus I agree-some photography is difficult to put into a book. sometimes its like fitting a square peg into a…

And finally, can video be a book?

harlanerskine: @tom_leininger it can be sort of did you see this art video for sale in my post about the art book? http://tinyurl.com/yb2e949

RJ Shaughnessy, Your Golden Opportunity Is Comeing Very Soon. Via eyecurious

On Tuesday we started a cross-blog conversation about the Future of Photobooks, the first wave in a multi-week, crowd-sourced project to see if we can collectively figure out what of the more difficult questions facing our industry: “What will photobooks look like in 2019?”

In the course of that conversation, J. Wesley Brown at We Can Shoot Too came up with the great idea of putting together a list of all the best printers if you’re looking to self-publish a high-quality photobook.

J. Wesley says: “I suggested http://diyausa.com/ on my post because they printed R.J. Shaughnessy’s book, “Your Golden Opportunity Is Comeing Very Soon” and I think the quality is great for the price (at least in B&W – I’d have to see a sample of their color work before deciding on a color book).”

Dalton says: “I have heard good things about this place, which has a much more hands-on process on and is tighter with the QC. http://editiononebooks.com And the prices are very good, especially once you start looking at 10+ copies.”

@JSandifer says: “OR you could decide to buy a Vandercook and do it all by hand! http://www.themainemag.com/workshop/1167-david-wo… David Wolfe prints books, portfolios, and stationery by hand.”

Marc Feustel says: “I have been collaborating with a Kyoto-based printing company, Benrido, that has combined nineteenth century colotype printing techniques with digital technology to produce a series of portfolios with truly exquisite results.”

Joerg @ Conscientious wrote a post a year ago about “Richard Renaldi and Seth Boyd’s Charles Lane Press and their first book Fall River Boys.”

That’s just a very short list to get us started. Please leave other printers you know about or have worked with in the comments and let us know if you have experience with any of the ones above. We’ll include these results in our final Photobook Resource page :)

What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?

I know I’m not alone in pondering these questions. Joerg Colberg echoed these thoughts just last week in a post on Conscientious. Then I talked to Andy Adams at Flak Photo about his weekly features highlighting the winners of Blurb‘s 2009 Photography.Book.Now contest (left), and something clicked.

For a while now, it’s been our goal (at RESOLVE and liveBooks) to find and share new business models that will move photography and the creative industries forward in a positive way. But we’re also eager to conduct our own experiments. And what better place to start than the incredibly flexible blogging format?

Andy and I initially wondered how we could use our blogs in a new way to further illuminate the question, “What will photobooks be like in the year 2019?” We’re not psychic, but we do have a lot of faith in collective intelligence. And with all the talk these days about “crowd-sourcing,” we thought, why can’t we crowd-source a blog post?

Discussions in the blogosphere generally lead readers along trajectories of information, but all those useful ideas rarely get tied back up into a single useful post. We plan to centralize the discussion around this specific topic — photobooks — so that anyone searching for related posts can find them easily and understand the context around them.

So how does this Future of Photobooks thing work? Andy and I have contacted fellow bloggers and asked them to post about the most prescient innovations they’ve seen in the photobook and publishing industries. We’ll add links to those blogs within this post as they go live, so over the next few days you’ll be able to see the “research” for our final post developing in real time.

But please don’t wait for us to contact you to start contributing. If you have something you want to say about photobooks, write a post on your own blog, linking to this post, by Sunday, Dec. 13 (we’ve had so much great interest, we’ll continue to accept posts on an ongoing basis). Then ping Andy or I with the link on Facebook or Twitter, and we’ll add you into the list. (Andy: FB & Twitter. Miki: FB & Twitter.) Don’t have a blog or don’t have time to post? Simply leave your thoughts in the comments. If you want to be notified when other people share their great ideas, be sure to use the “subscribe” drop-down to received email updates.

And this is just the beginning. At the end of this week, Andy and I will choose the standout ideas and highlight them (with links to whoever suggested them) in another post. That post will be all about real-time discussion. We’ll organize the big ideas — it will be up to you to tell us what you think about them. Delve into the details, throw out some pros and cons, tell us we’re off base if you must. We’re just excited to host a healthy discussion.

Finally we’ll sift through all the great ideas and heated debate and pull it together in one final post, which we hope will live a long online life as a resource for anyone trying to understand where the photobook industry is headed. And your name, links, and/or blog will be an indispensable part of it. You’re helping us explain where photobook publishing is headed, and we’re helping people find you and your brilliant ideas. Everyone wins. Just the way we like it :)

Steve Jobs with the MacBook Air. ©David Paul Morris/Getty Images

First up is Dan Lyons’ Newsweek post about Apple’s new tablet computer. The news is a few weeks old, but Dan’s reaction to it is a breath of fresh air. “Veteran editor Tina Brown, who now runs The Daily Beast, says we are about to enter ‘a golden age of journalism.’ I agree, and I think tablet devices will hurry that along.” Compare that to recent pieces like The Digital Journalist‘s “Revisiting The Death of Journalism: Ten Years Later,” or “Lament for a Dying Field: Photojournalism” from The Times and you’ll see why I’m excited.

Vogue editor Anna Wintour. ©Getty Images

Then I spotted this story about Vogue hiring Obama’s web strategists to help them “analyze the Conde Nast publication’s audience as part of a broader, revenue-generating push that ultimately will involve implementing paid subscriptions on Vogue.com.” Sentences like this make me so happy — “Vogue executives, keenly aware that the monthly magazine is just one of many ways people connect with the publication, had been looking for ways to capitalize on its influence” — because it means publications are finally starting to understand that it’s their name, their cache, the respect people have for them that is valuable in the online world, not just the content itself. This is a lesson many photographers could benefit from. And, of course, if magazines like Vogue actually figure out how to make money online, we can only hope that will trickle down to the photographers they employ.

Cory Doctorow, by Jonathan Worth

Leave it to Fred Ritchin to put his finger right on the crux of this issue on his After Photography blog. He starts off by calling out Jonathan Worth, a photographer I’ve been following closely as he blogs about his endeavor to make money off of his photography by giving away the photograph itself (in this case a portrait of science fiction writer Cory Doctorow). Fred then moves on to the innovative approach the VII photo agency is taking to photo distribution, and wraps up with this little gem: “In a Boston Consulting Group poll published last week people in nine countries were surveyed asking if they would pay for online news: from 48 to 60 percent said they would, ranging from US$3 per month (Americans and Australians) to US$7 (Italians). Maybe we should take them at their word?”

Joe McNally

And I’d like to leave you with this gem from Joe McNally, a letter he wrote to a young photographer trying to find their way. It’s an inspirational, well-written, wandering piece, as Joe’s usually are, that I think is brilliant advice not only for young creatives, but also for the media industry in general: “You are just beginning to write your pages, and the thing to remember about this early rough draft is that it hardly matters what you do exactly, as long as you continue to become something close to what you might imagine you want or need to become.”

I encourage anyone in any kind of decision-making position in the industry — from individual photographers to multi-national publishers — to embrace that notion and keep experimenting, keep innovating, keep striving for something better. You’ll know it when you find it.