If Anybody Should Know This, It’s Publishing People
Enough disrupting! Disrupting is the unthinking mantra of technology companies desperate to carve a niche.
– Michael Bhaskar
During the FutureBook Hack in London last June, Faber Press’ Henry Volans said to me that it’s interesting that “publishing has taken the digital disruption very hard.”
As it would turn out, Volans was only a couple of weeks ahead of the publication of Jill Lapore’s controversial New Yorker piece, The Disruption Machine.
And it’s to that article that a new post at Medium refers: What we won’t do. Maybe.
This commentary — written by the ever-eloquent Michael Bhaskar, he has conceded — is the “Week One” expression of a new publishing start-up called Canelo.
The piece works as a sort of anti-manifesto (maybe), posted at a particularly pivotal moment (as the piece, notes): Canelo is pushing off into the choppy waters of digital publishing just as two other start-ups go under the foam — the audiobook-streaming Bardowl and the Tesco-touted Blinkbox Books. Indeed, a company of another kind, Germany’s Textr — which had floated a very inexpensive e-reader, the Beagle — is reported by Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch today to have “filed for insolvency proceedings with a German District Court.”
One of Canelo’s troika of founders, Bhaskar is more familiar than most with the precarious prospects of start-ups in our field. He has for years been keeping a list of digital publishing start-ups (some of them now shut-downs), and it’s a lengthy document, as you can see here, running to eight single-spaced pages, some 300 entries.
It might have given him a pause, in fact, when he installed Canelo on that list between the “open-source ebook library management application” Calibre andCinnamonTeal Publishing — “we are driven by our passion for the book.”
And aren’t we all?
There’s more: Read the full story at Thought Catalog
By Porter Anderson
Follow @Porter_Anderson
Writing on the Ether: Eyes Wide Open: Can Canelo Cross The Coals?
Originally published by Thought Catalog at www.ThoughtCatalog.com
