livebooks blog

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 :)

As of Wednesday, Microsoft Bing is using crowd-sourced photos to create a 3-D virtual worlds in its Maps application, according to FastCompany.com. Using a fascinating program called Photosynth (we saw it first in a TED Talk that’s included in the article), the 3-D worlds rely on images across the web tagged with a specific location to create a model that Microsoft undoubtedly hopes will improve on Google’s “street view.” Implications of this are big — from challenges to Google’s hegemony to image copyright questions — but mostly we just think it’s COOL.

Pictory, a new online photo magazine from Laura Brunow Miner, the former editor-in-chief and design director of JPG magazine, launched this week. Pictory draws images from submissions by photographers of every level and nationality, curates them under a specific topic, and asks the photographers to contextualize them with personal, sometimes intimate, captions. It’s a beautiful interface, a great idea, and more proof that magazines are not so much dying as evolving.

Collect.give is another innovative project that launched this week, this time using profits from print sales to support non-profits close to the photographers’ hearts. John Loomis, Kevin J. Miyazaki, Susana Raab, Dalton Rooney, Emily Shur, and Allison V. Smith are each selling one print through the site and have pledged to donate 100% of the profits from their print sales to their chosen charitable organizations. A simple but powerful example of how how photography can improve lives.

The front page of Phil Toledano's "Days With My Father" microsite.

During a recent talk at Amnesty International, I freaked out the organizers a bit by suggesting that the web was not the best place to see images. They had booked me for a debate in which I was supposed to be arguing for the greatness of the digital revolution, in which we can see everything for free, all of the time.

In the last year I’ve looked at so much multimedia and taken in so much photography that I’ve completely lost a sense of perspective and awe in what I’m looking at. It’s slightly pathetic,  but the critical, sometimes cynical eye I’ve developed keeps me from getting too close, too intimate with anything I look at. Before, I used to just enjoy looking at an image, a simple but wonderful pleasure — now I consume it and spit it out the other side, like a wine taster who sucked on too much vinegar.

At my Amnesty talk I spoke about getting up one morning to find a book come in the post from Joseph Rodriguez. It was a great moment. One to be treasured. Our lives touched, his work seeping into mine. I felt energized.

But right now I feel like slamming the door on multimedia, I’m worn out on its endless possibility. Exhausted.

So what can I offer this month? Two things.

One to illustrate a point and the other because when I look at it, the work it transcends all of my exhaustion and reminds me what it is to be a human, to love and to lose and also to be lost.

Phillip Toledano‘s “Days With My Father” is a masterpiece. Its a love letter that has nothing to do with any of us but that is written in such a way that it could have come from the pages of any of our lives. Its a gift and it proves that I was wrong, the web can be the best place to experience photography. The experience can be utterly transformative. No more words needed — just check it out.

I came across the the second multimedia feature I want to flag via Twitter. It’s astonishing. A panoramic image of a Nairobi street that takes the YouTube video six minutes to travel down. It comes from the book Trading Places, The Merchants of Nairobi by Steve Bloom.  It held my attention for at least a minute before I got bored and moved on. Had I come across this image in a gallery, though, I would have spent a lot longer examining and re-examining it.

So maybe I was right in the first place and the web is not the best place to view images. What do you think?