I still haven’t decided what’s most impressive about this project. To start, it’s worth mentioning that this group of graduate students: Vanessa Chan, Cari Ferguson, Kathleen Fraser, Cynara Geissler, Ann-Marie Metten, and Suzette Smith operating as Pressplay, an imprint of the CCSP, have literally “produced a book on a magazine schedule,” as they explained during the April 16 launch. And they’ve done so by using a WordPress blog as their publishing platform. In doing this, they’ve created a collaborative online editorial space that allows them to engage with their audience of publishing industry professionals by inviting them to become a part of the project. As the group explains in their documentation of the project objectives, “The Book of MPub was, in the best sense, crowd-sourced and community-powered, raised by a village of industry experts—and it shows.”

As a second aspect of the project, they conducted in-depth research into the tools available for producing the book in the various formats they wanted to offer it in, then used the best of those tools to turn their dynamic blog into a PDF, EPUB, and print book. Just as they were able to mold the existing tool set within WordPress to speed up the editorial process by opening it up to collaboration, they’ve cut production time by incorporating cutting-edge technology like the Espresso Book Machine at Oscar’s Art Books. But it’s not just a shortcut: they’ve made their publishing platform all the more flexible by taking this approach. As publishing technology advances and new tools become available, they are ready to plug in.

Currently, the Book of MPub is available in its entirety for purchase on BookRiff, or for adding to another book or set of notes in your own personal Riff. But as planned, the chapters (individual student essays) will also be available to add to Riffs separately. As more student work becomes available, Pressplay and the CCSP have the opportunity to use BookRiff as a way to let individuals create their own anthology of student work based on individual interests and needs.. and I do hope to see this happen.

For BookRiff, one of our goals from the beginning has been to create a site that’s not only innovative but that’s also fun to use and accessible to everyone. Because we are introducing a new way of working with print media, this means we’ve had to be extra cautious in the way we introduce ourselves to the world. We want folks to be intrigued, but not afraid. Also, because BookRiff is meant to be an open platform whose community will help define it through their own uses of the tools, we’re careful not to be so directive as to hamper creativity. This creates an additional challenge for us because we want people to know how to use the basic tools; we just don’t want them to stop there.

In other ways, it is easy to talk about BookRiff simply, because while there’s a complex set of machinery beneath the user interface that makes book-building possible, the basic idea is just this: build your own book. Choose your own chapters, order them, and add anything else into your Riff to make it yours.

Likewise, from a content provider’s point of view, BookRiff introduces an entirely new publishing business model, along with a new way of thinking about the value of book (and other print media) content,  but the process is easy. As a “Creator”, you choose how your content is split up and viewed, you choose its price, and we don’t touch your revenue.

Establishing a brand to present BookRiff as a simple, useful tool for both consumers and creators is really the icing on a larger effort to make those messages ring true through every aspect of BookRiff. From the business model, to the site navigation, to the printing and shipment of books…

It’s nice to hear that we’re doing an o.k. job so far, but we’ve got our work cut out for us in the coming months. Beta testers, send us your thoughts!

Even after watching the video, taking the Learn to Riff tour, and perusing the FAQ, until you can see it in action, it is difficult to pin down the concept of BookRiff. This is a factor of the nature of the site, and in some ways it is intended. BookRiff is an open platform. It is moldable by-design, and the hope is that it will take on the shape of the people who use it (…and the creative works they upload and the Riffs they build).

Given that the above is all true, it’s no surprise that BookRiff has been labeled everything from a self-publishing application to most recently by author Michael Turner in a Globe and Mail interview and then again in the Quillblog, “a print-on-demand content broker.” There’s nothing wrong with boiling something down to its essential elements. As someone who is generally in favor of cutting the crap, I must admit there’s nothing false about that definition, and I appreciate the critical thinking behind it. But to be fair, in a world where BookRiff is simply a content broker, authors are peddlers, publishers traders, and booksellers merely cash registers. As someone who is also a bit of a romantic, I can’t accept any of the above. The problem is that in an industry where creativity is the fundamental value, you can’t get rid of the fluff to find the truth. With BookRiff, just as with publishing, it is the fluff: the innovation behind the machine, that makes a difference.

Right now, even behind closed doors, BookRiff is a bare-bones framework of powerful made-from-scratch tools. We think it will evolve to become a way not only for individuals to create something unique, but for publishers, authors, and other content curators to reach new audiences, engage their readers, and branch out into new sales models that they control.

We absolutely can’t wait for that to happen, and more. But first, we have to build the tools, tinker with them, and invite a few people in to tinker some more. Want to be one of those people?

Take author Michael Turner, for example. He’s planning to use BookRiff to remix his upcoming book, 8×10, which will be published as a trade paperback by Doubleday Canada in September. The book is a series of 64 loosely related fictional events that lack any defined time or place, and are ordered only by Michael’s own logic. His plan is two-fold: he’ll create a Riff of 8×10 by assigning a random order to the chapters, then work with Doubleday to make the book “open to interpretation by recomposition” by allowing readers to assign their own order. You can read more about the experiment from his blog. This is just one way BookRiff will be used by authors and publishers to engage readers in their books.

UBC Changing Technologies Panel