I’ve seen some very heartening gestures coming from many different sides of the publishing world recently. First PictureBox announces subscriptions for the upcoming PowrMastrs book from CF and Brian Chippendale’s epic If’n Off. First of all, the facts that PictureBox publishes work like CF’s and Chippendale’s and allows for such beautiful editions show how much smarter and insightful they are than even other smart comics publishers. PictureBox had to close down its storefront (which was very cool and not far from my apartment), and projects like Frank Santoro’s serial Cold Heat got put on the shelf for funding reasons. So now they are creating their market ahead of time. They are using the trust they’ve built among their readers (trust built with excellent project after excellent project), to ask readers to pony the money up front, to ensure that the company can survive putting out these amazing cut-no-corners books. And they’re throwing in extra treats from the artisits. This is an art-first, mature take on publishing. Let’s hope they do this with Cold Heat, as well.

Then some big publishing veterans (I think), one with an English accent that legitimizes the whole venture (and the other with a very sharp navy blazer), John Oakes and Colin Robinson, described the very smart publishing model for their new house OR Books. Their plan is sell books straight to the consumer, with a platform-neutral model (they’ll let you download the ebook immediately, or they’ll send you a hard copy, produced print-on-demand). They’re getting rid of the dying system of intermediate retailers that is pulling the publishing industry down with it. (It’s amusing when they look at the graveyard in this video and point at the tombstone for Harper Collins.) They’re also done with the silly print run system (still practiced by so many small publishers too) that leads to a glut of unread printed books, and the ultimate sin of pulping remainder copies. The world has changed, we have new opportunities, and these guys are taking advantage of it. This is not publishing for babies who want count how many books they’ve sold and what award they’ve been granted by some market-driven panel of judges.

OR Books from OR Books on Vimeo.

The OR guys’ ideas remind me a lot of how my own publisher, Geoffrey Gatza, runs BlazeVOX books. He’s understood the destiny of publishing for some time now. It’s not about ego and material; it’s about making good literature readily available to readers, and connecting authors to these readers. Geoffrey’s being doing this for years, though. They should do a news story about him.