"I've been waiting my whole career to sell something like this," says Mitchell Davis of BiblioBoard, a platform that helps libraries and institutions create and sell elegant multimedia anthologies and "exhibits" from their catalogs and collections.
Davis is a veteran of Amazon: He sold his first company, Book Surge, an integrated publishing and print-on-demand platform, to the Seattle etailer in 2005 and then went to work for them. In 2007, says Davis, the original founders of Book Surge got back together in their hometown of Chareston, S.C., to start BiblioLabs with the focus of reducing the costs of making historical books available via POD.
"We didn't do much with digital in the early days," says Davis, "because most of the devices were E Ink and we just didn't think they would do justice to historical artifacts. The iPad changed all of that."
Mitchell Davis
In 2006, after a career as an editor and writer for publications such as Outside, GQ and The New York Times Magazine, John Tayman's new book, The Colony, was doing well, and Scribner urged him to start thinking about a second book. Three things gave him pause.
First: "I had just finished a long slog on a single book and was not so eager to jump into something of that size immediately."
Secondly: "I could see and recognize significant changes afoot as the industry moved from analog to digital."
The events of September 11, 2001 were of such a horrific and shocking nature that they did not allow for the careful planning that is often associated with the publishing industry. Rather, the devastating terrorist attacks, and their aftermath, demanded quick action to satisfy the public's need for information—and answers. To fulfill this need and to raise money for Red Cross relief efforts, BookSurge.com, BlueEar.com and the New York University (NYU) Department of Journalism joined efforts to produce 09/11 8:48 AM; Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy. The book recounts stories of those who survived the attacks and those who are involved in the civic aftermath.
