The Future of Publishing?

September 28, 20090 Comments

On Wednesday morning, we woke in Sydney to a blood red sky. Some severe winds had blown in a dust storm from west of Broken Hill, and the sky was a haze of red dust.

All around Sydney people were waking to the same scene. For many (myself included) the first reaction was to run outside and take some photos. As the morning progressed, more and more photos of the eerie scenes were uploaded to flickr and other photo sharing sites.

Enter Derek Powazek. Powazek was co-founder of JPG Magazine (a user-submitted photography journal) and is currently a consultant working on MagCloud (a magazine print-on-demand startup in the US).

Within a day and a half, Powazek had contacted photographers to request use of their photos, laid out a 40 page magazine, and published it through MagCloud. Strange Light had been created and release within about a day and a half.

Powazek has a post up documenting the process, which is a great read. In Powazek's words...

"But, really, I can’t believe how easy it was. Making print media used to be so difficult. I remember cutting and gluing long columns of text together, shooting flats, and generally sweating for days to create my college newspaper. Now the the most time-consuming part is simply asking for permission from the content creators."

This is only a small story in the world up publishing, but it gives us a glimpse at what the future possibilities may be. Far from the death of print, we may be seeing the traditional barriers to producing publications being broken down. The tools to produce are being in the hands of the people, and we remain to see what will be done with them.

The field of Architecture has had a long association with printed publications. Monographs, photography books, intellectual discourses - all are commonly produced in association with the design and construction of buildings. It makes me wonder what the accessibility and cost effectiveness of these tools will mean for these publications. Will we start to see self-published magazines from firms and studios, or perhaps journals and magazines from people who appreciate but may not practice architecture?

I for one am excited to see what happens.

(This article was first posted over at jordesign.com)