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Another Sky Press Driving Neo-Patronage
avidreader writes "Another Sky Press is making a serious go of the neo-patronage / tip jar model — their tagline is 'Welcome to Another Sky Press. We want people to read our books even if they read them for free — though we'd love it if you bought a copy!' Not only are they putting the entire text of their releases online, but they're selling the dead tree versions at cost plus optional contribution. Their first release is garnering some great reviews - 'Intelligent fiction for the mentally unhinged.' According to their website, there are more projects in the works — everything from a short story anthology to a coloring book by artist Jesse Reno. They've also got interesting essays on why they're doing this and neo-patronage. They're even getting neo-patronage some mainstream attention — the Metro Times calls them '...more punk than the punks at Dischord Records.'"
No kidding. I don't intend to read the book online. And it looks like they've gone out of their way to stop people from easily saving the pages and patching together their own copy to print or convert to pdf or whatever. Think of it as low-tech DRM.
This guy's the limit!
Not only might they not have enough money to distribute, but I can't see them doing decent typsetting either. The new publishing firms like iUniverse, essentially vanity press, will print your book, but don't spend any time actually making it look professional since that threatens profit. As an example, I recently picked up Solar Labyrinth , Robert Borski's kookish commentary on the writings of Gene Wolfe, and the book was so obviously done in a second-rate word-processor without even the slightest effort to emulate the standards of real typesetting engines. From what I've seen, Another Sky Press doesn't even have things like hyphenation.
It really sucks that in the era of TeX, when the finest typesetting of the pre-computer golden age can be had again, publishing houses are getting even worse in making their products readable and easy on the eye.
MXPX isn't punk. Choking Victim is punk.
ResidntGeek