The ground beneath the book publishing industry dramatically shifted in 2007, the year the Kindle and the iPhone debuted. Widespread consumer demand for these and other devices has brought the pace of digital change in book publishing from "it might happen sometime" to "it’s happening right now"—and it is happening faster than anyone predicted.

The Digital Change

So I pitched the idea for the book, first to my friend Brian O’Leary, who is as seasoned about book publishing as I am naive. Brian liked it, and we agreed that the best place for the book was O’Reilly Media, a publishing company known for its aggressive embrace of digital innovation. Joe Wikert, Publisher at O’Reilly, liked it too — and we spent a good number of hours talking about how to “walk the walk” of the changes happening in publishing as we produced this book.

"Walk the Walk"

We’re building this book — writing, editorial, copyediting, proofing, and production of the ebook (and later print) output — on a new online tool, PressBooks, and learning valuable things in the process. We released the book in three parts, and O’Reilly experimented with staged pricing with these releases. In addition, we’re releasing the book for free online, and selling it as an ebook, and a print version as well.

A New Online Tool

Indeed the idea for Book came about not so much as an idea for a book, as a way to put to real-world use a new kind of digital tool for book publishing that my small company was (and is) in the process of building: PressBooks.com. PressBooks is a simple, but powerful web-based book production tool, that produces ebooks, print books, and webbooks, all from one online source file. I thought I should be in the middle of it, testing it with a real publishing project.

PressBooks.com

This book is the result of a belief:  “digital” fundamentally alters the mechanics of publishing books. There is much talk about this shift in the publishing world — a calendar filled with conferences, a blogosphere popping with opinion, and not a few op-eds and even books on this very topic, some many years old.But we wanted to get beyond beliefs with this work, to get into the nuts and bolts of things. We wanted our contributors to be not just perceptive thinkers, but also doers, people building the kinds of tools and companies that will continue to shape publishing for years to come.

Thinkers & Doers

Yet this is only a transitional phase. Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto is your guide to what comes next, when all books are truly digital, connected, and ubiquitous. Through this collection of essays from thought leaders and practitioners, you'll become familiar with a wide range of developments occurring in the wake of this digital book shakeup:* Discover new tools that are rapidly transforming how content is created, managed, and distributed* Understand the increasingly critical role that metadata plays in making book content discoverable in an era of abundance

What Comes Next

* Look inside some of the publishing projects that are at the bleeding edge of this digital revolution how some digital books can evolve moment to moment, based on reader feedbackWith Book: A Futurist's Manifesto, we at O’Reilly Media are actively practicing what we preach. Written and edited on PressBooks.com, a new web-based book-production system, this book also invites reader feedback throughout its development. Read the initial chapters and tell us where you’d like to go next. Are there topics you would like us to explore? Are there areas you want to go more in-depth? Let us know!

How to Practice What We Preach

Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto is as much about the process as it is about the content. A big part of that process is you, the reader — because publishing does not stop once the book goes out into the wild.Maybe that’s when publishing really begins. We’d love to get your feedback, thoughts and criticisms, and the best place for that feedback is the online version of this book, which can be found at: book.pressbooks.com.–Hugh McGuire.