Halley & The Innocats! Join us at 12:00 EST for #Innochat Today

HOW TO JOIN: Thursday at 11:45 EST (try it out early, we start at 12:00 EST) Go to www.tweetchat.com It's web only. You simply login to Twitter go to the Tweetchat site and share your Twitter login which links your account to the app. Add the #innochat hashtag at the top and you're good to go.

Someone funny -- actually @TeteSagelyn (aka Teresa Valdez Klein) tweeted that I'll be hosting Innochat today at 12:00 noon EST on Twitter -- all true -- and she called me Halley & The Innocats! Love it, now I star in a rock band! I wish.

Here's what I really do -- I'm the founder of Halley Tucker's BoOkBoX -- right here where I tell you news and what's cool about the evolution of ebooks. I'm the author of a short new ebook called, "Does This Start-up Make Me Look Fat?" about women starting businesses. Here's the link to Amazon to buy my book (it's only $2.99).

Here are some more links we'll probably discuss today at the #Innochat.

My book: Amazon: Does This Start-up Make Me Look Fat?

Business Week by Scott Shane piece on women and small business:
We Must Change Girls' Perception of Business

Small Business Administration data/census stats about who's starting small businesses (piece mentioned in Business Week article.)

Change This: The Art of Female Alpha Blogging
By Halley Suitt

Change This: The Six Rules Women Must Break in Order to Succeed
By Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt.

Piece on Mothers vs. Single Women wage gap.

Book: The Price of Motherhood by Ann Crittenden

BIG THANKS: to our hosts the incredible Gwen Ishmael and the illustrious Drew Marshall! And of course to Renee Hopkins, Inno DJ the Master

Steve Jobs Book Arrives Instantly!

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was on pre-order and it suddenly appeared after dinner last night.

Got the book sent directly to my Kindle last night around 9:00 pm, a bit earlier than the promised publishing date of today. It was fun to have it just populate my Kindle without having to blink.

Plowing through the book. It's nicely written and is frank about Jobs' difficult personality. If you knew anyone who worked for him, you heard he could be ... challenging.

Back to my book!

Everything you ever wanted to know about Zines, don't be afraid to ask

Good piece in the Sunday New York Times Business section about Zines (short form of "fanzine" -- a short, often handmade limited-run magazine in tribute to a very narrow subject or particular person) by Jenna Wortham called Raised on the Web, But Liking a Little Ink this morning.

This supports my personal ebook and epublishing theory that most publishing will be very digital, very ubiquitous, very fast, but another side of the business will be customized, handmade, unique, slow, one-of-a-kind publishing.

As the fountain pen was a mainstream, must-have item you could buy cheaply anywhere in 1900 and now is more likely an expensive, rare objet d'art, serving less as a writing instrument and more as a collectible -- so goes the book, in my opinion.

A quote from the piece:

For Barbara Frankie Ryan, 19, a graphic design student in London who recently curated an exhibition of zines at a boutique there called Tatty Devine, the Internet and handcrafted publications exist in tandem. She runs a popular fashion blog and also makes a series of zines — although she said she wasn’t even aware of the rich history of zine culture when she started creating them in her bedroom at the age of 15.

Instead, she was looking for an outlet for her drawings and innermost musings on popular culture and romantic crushes. And she wanted to be able to experiment. While Web sites come and go, in another sense the Web is eternal: tidbits can be searched and found when you least want them to be. That can be inhibiting.

“I’m becoming more aware how permanent and accessible things are online,” she said.

Ms. Ryan also said zines have an air of exclusivity: they are like other artifacts that were never intended for mass consumption or distribution, like a scarf knitted by a friend, a sketch or a cassette tape filled with handpicked songs.

“I like the idea that I’ve only made 40 copies, and only 40 people will see it,” she said. “It’s really easy to reveal a lot about yourself, and so this is a way of getting control back, and I find that quite comforting.”

They also talk about the work of Malaka Gharib who's food zine, The Runcible Spoon, is pictured here.

You're Just My Type!

I was writing about printing presses yesterday, so it was fun to learn about a traveling printing press today from a post on Facebook.

If you can read backwards you'll see it says "You're just my type" on the type tray.

Check out this cool piece from Esty about the Type Truck! The Type Truck is visiting Brooklyn today!

These days, travel is all about packing light. If you can’t fit it into a carry-on bag, then chances are you don’t really need it, right?

Not so if you’re Kyle Durrie, proprietor of Power and Light Press and driver of a refurbished 1982 Chevy step van, dubbed the Type Truck. Since June of this year, when Kyle set off from her Portland, Oregon home, she’s traversed the country, visiting cities and towns large and small, sharing her love of letterpress printing.

The idea to take her art on the road emerged during the summer of 2010, when she toured with her boyfriend and his band.

More here on Esty.

A Room (and a Printing Press) of One's Own

I've been reading about Virginia Woolf's life and how she and her husband decided they needed to self-publish. In 1917, that meant buying a printing press. (Too bad she missed the e-book revolution by a hundred years or so.)

Check out this great site at Yale University called The Modernism Lab and this fascinating piece by Jessica Svedsen about Virginia and Leonard Woolf starting Hogarth Press. Their reasons for starting the press will sound all too familiar to ebook writers.

Leonard recalled that one of the major reasons for beginning the Hogarth Press was to publish small books that would otherwise have little chance of being printed by established publishing companies—small volumes that “the commercial publisher would not look at” (Woolf, Leonard 234).  The majority of Hogarth authors were a part of the Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle—Clive Bell, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West—and they were allowed to escape from the unpleasant pressures of editors and publishers.

Of course the notion now that “the commercial publisher would not look at” writers like T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, or Virginia Woolf sounds completely crazy. But escaping the pressures of the editors and publishers in 1917 sounds more than reasonable, even to the present day.

Virginia Woolf being 1) a woman writer and 2) a highly experimental writer, meant she had two strikes against her from the start in terms of getting a publisher and her husband Leonard understood this. Thank goodness they decided to start Hogarth Press. It meant we know Virginia Woolf's work, just the way she wanted to present it.

Photo Credit: The painting is "Portrait of Virginia Woolf" by George Charles Beresford via Wikipedia

Finally, those heavy textbooks are going "e"

This is very good news for students. No more dragging heavy textbooks around. But why isn't the US leading this?

Here's a piece from the BBC by Gary Eason about the initiative in South Korea to digitalize the classroom in four years.

South Korea, one of the world's highest-rated education systems, aims to consolidate its position by digitising its entire curriculum.

By 2015, it wants to be able to deliver all its curriculum materials in a digital form through computers. The information that would once have been in paper textbooks will be delivered on screen.

South Korea's Minister of Education, Science and Technology, Ju-Ho Lee, said that his department was preparing a promotion strategy for "Smart Education", focusing on customised learning and teaching.

The project, launched during the summer, will involve wireless networks in all schools to allow students to learn "whenever and wherever", as well as an education information system that can run in a variety of devices including PCs, laptops, tablets and internet-connected TVs.

Here's the link for more: BBC: Digital textbooks open a new chapter
By Gary Eason

USA Today Does A Lot of Book Blogging

USA Today does a lot of coverage of books and now they've added a Romance Novel blog, Happy Ever After to their other book blog, Book Buzz.

If you're a Romance reader or writer, do check it out. Here's the link to Happy Ever After.