We are very happy to announce the second installment of “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto,” (published by O’Reilly and edited by Hugh McGuire of PressBooks and Brian O’Leary), with new essays from Eli James, Erin McKean, Terry Jones, Aaron Miller and Travis Alber, Brett Sandursky, Ron Martinez, Peter Brantley, Kassia Krozser and Hugh McGuire.

While Part One defined the current state of publishing as it moves to digital, Part Two opens up new ground about what we can now do with books — if we choose to be bold. We explore web literature, books as data sets, social reading, obscurity, and the reader’s role in the new digital world.

You can buy the book here, or read it online for free:

Part 1:

• Context, Not Container (Brian O’Leary)
• Distribution Everywhere (Andrew Savikas)
• What We Can Do with “Books” (Liza Daly)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata (Laura Dawson)
• Analyzing the Business Case for DRM (Kirk Biglione)
• Tools of the Digital Workflow (Brian O’Leary)
• Designing Books in the Digital Age (Craig Mod)

Part 2:

• Why the Book and the Internet Will Merge (Hugh McGuire)
• Web Literature: Publishing on the Social Web (Eli James)
• Making Books Out of Words (Erin McKean)
• Why Digital Books Will Become Writable (Terry Jones)
• Above the Silos: Reading in the Age of Mechanical Barriers (Travis Alber & Aaron Miller)
• User Experience, Reader Experience (Brett Sandusky)
• App, Meet Book (Ron Martinez)
• The Curation of Obscurity (Peter Brantley)
• A Reader’s Bill of Rights (Kassia Krozser)
  

So how long does it take for a publishing startup built on WordPress to get its own blog? A while, apparently. But we’ve got one now. Finally. So in addition to making it easy for authors and publishers to make ebooks, printbooks and webbooks … we’ve now made it easy for us to write our own blog posts.

We’ll post mostly information about PressBooks here – updates, new features, newly-found bugs & fixes, and news. We might have the odd bit of commentary on the exciting world of ebooks, digital books, libraries, dusty books, great books, words, sentences, paragrpahs, monographs, and other wordly things.

If you are wondering what PressBooks is:

PressBooks is a simple book publishing tool that makes it easy for authors and editorial teams to generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs: .epub, print-ready PDF, InDesign-ready XML, and of course HTML. We’re in public beta, meaning PressBooks is good enough for professional book production, but we’re still improving things.

You can read one of the books produced on PressBooks for free, online: Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto (Part 1) (O’Reilly), edited by Brian O’Leary and me. Part 2 is coming out VERY soon.

Say hi in the comments below, on Twitter, or on our forum. Or send us an email: support@pressbooks.com.

Thanks for stopping by!