(we distributed two different links- sorry!)

With your help, we’ve unglued three books: Oral Literature in Africa, The Third Awakening, and So You Want to Be a Librarian. With your help, we might unglue two more.

What we haven’t been able to do is attract a lot of books for ungluing. The reasons why are complex, but it’s clear that we need to make changes to the model to attract enough books to make the whole thing worth our effort.

One assumption we made at the start turned out to be wrong. We thought that lots of campaigns would be aimed at funding the conversion of print books to digital. But two years later, the conversion costs have come way down, and most books that can be converted to digital are being converted to digital. The ones remaining have problems- either they have really difficult rights issues or they’re just not worth converting.

Because of that assumption, our campaigns haven’t made use of the most powerful tool that an ebook-crowdfunding campaign can have- the ebook itself. So we’ve been talking to publishers and authors about a new type of campaign, which uses the book itself as the fundraising tool. We’ve been calling this “buy-to-unglue” but we’re not sure that’s the best way to describe it. The basic idea is that after N copies of the book are sold, an unglued edition is released.

So far, the reaction has been really positive, but there are a lot of details to work out. How to make it work for libraries, for example. The buy-to-unglue model will help us address the needs of new books and new authors, and we’re really excited about that.  We think that the existing campaign model will eventually prove its value, too.

We don’t have a timetable yet, and nothing has been set in stone, but we’d really like to hear your ideas.

There aren’t campaigns yet — that’s up to you! We’ll run campaigns for whichever books have the most support. You can tell us which books you support by adding them to your wishlist. (And use the sharing options to get your friends to support your favorite books, too.)

You can see all the De Gruyter books Unglue.it knows about (both these, and any others that ungluers have wishlisted or searched for in the past) at Unglue.it. But for your convenience, we’re also listing the hundred (technically, 104) books here, with links to their Unglue.it work pages.

• With the just-announced participation of De Gruyter, we needed to work on our publisher pages. Take a look: https://unglue.it/pid/popular/4311
• Login and account creation needed a lot of improvement. As a small example, if you’re not logged in when you click on a pledge button or a “login to add” button the website remembers what you were doing while you log in.
• The search now preferentially returns unglue.it campaign books. (No brainer!)
• You can now select your avatar from among twitter, facebook and gravatar pictures. If you’re not familiar with Gravatar, it’s a convenient way to maintain your identity across the web. 
• We’ve added ways to contact the authors and publishers associated with unglue.it campaigns. They also wanted better ways to send you thank you notes and private messages, so we added some notifications for that. As always, you can use the website to customize your notification preferences.
• If you’re a structured data enthusiast, take note that our web pages now include schema.org metadata!
• Campaign pages now have a neat little thermometer that shows you the campaign’s progress.
• Last but not least, we have a new homepage design. We always thought of the graphic that lived there as a placeholder, but never had time to make it easier to explore the site.

We have a lot more work to do, and we’re very grateful to ungluers who have taken the time to report bugs and make suggestions. Thank you!

Some librarians have asked us what they can do (beyond supporting our active campaigns, of course) to advance the mission.  Now we have a list!  There are a lot of things libraries are uniquely positioned to do: for instance, adding unglued ebooks to their collections, educating the public on the challenges of ebook licensing and the benefits of Creative Commons licensing, and making sure unglued ebooks get properly cataloged.  For the whole list of ways you can help, check out the Unglue.it ♥ libraries page.

(Now if only I could get another one of those maple syrup crepes…)

We’ve started concentrating on some specific directions based on the response we’re getting from authors and publishers.

One group that has been interested in the model is authors who’ve turned to self-publishing. And to make it easier for self-publishers to participate with Unglue.it, I’ve been talking with Mark Coker, President of Smashwords and a true advocate for authors. He’s letting Smashwords authors use the ebook-making machinery at Smashwords to produce books for ungluing. If you been paying close attention, you may have noticed that unglued book #2 was a Smashwords-produced title.

If you’re a Smashwords author and your book meets their standards for “premium catalog” inclusion, just sign a Platform Services Agreement with us and you’re good to go.   For the fine print, check out our FAQ for Smashwords authors.  http://unglue.it/about/smashwords/

(I loved hearing Mark on NPR the other day, check it out!)

Another group that I expect to begin testing the waters with significant numbers of books is academic publishers. They are struggling to find the sustainable models for open-access books that researchers are increasingly demanding. Last week I traveled to Berlin to speak at the Academic Publishing in Europe conference, and had some great meetings with some brand-name publishers. I’m hopeful that one or two of them will join Open Book Publishers  (unglued book #1) as participants in Unglue.it.

Oh, said Nancy, you live in Boston? I grew up there!

Oh, said I. Well then, I live in Somerville.

Nancy: I grew up in Somerville!

Me: …in that case, I live in [neighborhood].

Nancy: Wow, I grew up on [street in that neighborhood].

Me: What…number?

Me and Nancy, about simultaneously: 100.

Me: …

Me: … I bought your parents’ house.

There you have it. I met Nancy’s sister when we signed the sale paperwork. My home office, where I was having this conference call, was her bedroom. Those seven kids who somehow once fit in my 3-bedroom condo on a tiny two-block street? She was one of them.

So it’s fate. This book was meant to be unglued.

The Library 2.0 Ideas twitter feed (@library2) randomly generates modern (trendy? insane?) ideas for library services every half hour. A few days ago, it suggested this:

Write a song about LibraryThing for Libraries…FTW!!!

— Library 2.0 Ideas (@library2) January 13, 2013

So. As one must:

We sent that along to LibraryThing‘s Tim Spalding, who clearly has more sound-mixing skills and possibly a lot more he’s procrastinating on, because that resulted in this:

This…demands a response. Suggestions welcome.

59,932 unique visitors
2,678 registered users
12,462 dollars pledged
3 unglued books

If you took part in unglue.it in 2012, by registering, by pledging, by helping to spread the word, by reporting bugs, or by offering your works for ungluing, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. It is a great honor to serve as your instrument of change in the world of reading and creating books, even if just a tiny bit.

Here’s what happened:

We unveiled a preview of the website in January. We were immediately reminded of the importance of optimizing slow database queries.

We got a lot of good response, but we waited and waited for PayPal to approve our business. It was very frustrating for us, but in retrospect, the delay allowed us to get the website to a good place.

We switched to Amazon Payments, and at long last, on May 17, we launched. Of the 5 campaigns we were running, one of them really took off. The campaign for Oral Literature in Africa succeeded one month later with 259 pledges totaling a bit more than $7,500.

The remaining campaigns suffered a bit from summer doldrums, but the rug really pulled out from under us when Amazon told us we couldn’t do crowd-funding any more. In the ensuing uproar, we gained over 800 registered users, even while we were closed for business! So there’s always a silver lining.

In September, we helped to release the unglued edition of Oral Literature in Africa.

On October 17, we relaunched with Stripe as our payments provider. We like Stripe a lot, and we hope you do, too.

December saw two campaigns succeed. The unglued edition of The Third Awakening is ready to read, for free. So You Want to be a Librarian will be available soon. Next up is National Book Award winner Love Like Gumbo.

The three books could not be more different from each other. Oral Literature in Africa is an academic classic. The Third Awakening was self-published through Smashwords. And So You Want to be a Librarian is book for prospective library school students from an independent publisher. We don’t know yet what genres of books will best fit the unglue.it model. Trying is really the only way to find out.

I am frequently reminded of the scene in Return of the King where Pippin asks Gandalf if there is still any hope for Frodo and Sam. “There never was much hope. Just a fool’s hope” says Gandalf.

It turns out that what we’re trying to do together with your help is really really hard. When we talk to people our model, we find that our task is to create new understandings of what books can be. We have to help people and institutions open themselves to the new possibilities. This sort of change is not easy.

Much change will come to pass in the coming year. Some of that change will be of our own devising, but more of it will come from you, and from people who have not yet heard of unglue.it.

Things are now set in motion that cannot be undone.

Would you post it in your house?
Would you post it with your spouse?
Would you post it with great shoes?
Would you post it with tattoos?
Would you post it with your cat?
In Paris? Mountain View? North Platte?
Would you post from kayak trips?
Or while foodspottting? (Fish and chips!)
Would you post that book from trains?
Or 5k zombie races? (Braaaaaains.)
Would you post it on your shelves?
Look, we posted it ourselves!

We hope you post it here and there.
We hope you post it everywhere!

Lauren Pressley, Library Juice Press, and the team here at Unglue.it would love to see where you take your copy of So You Want To Be a Librarian. Take the most creative pictures in the most exciting locations and you’ll be awarded notoriety and much-coveted Unglue.it swag.

Winning photos will be chosen by our celebrity guest judges, Andy Woodworth and Cindi Trainor. Andy’s a rabble-rousing public librarian known for his thoughtful blog and social media campaigns to help New Jersey libraries, urge Ben & Jerry’s to make a library-themed flavor, and get the Old Spice guy to say a few words about libraries. Cindi’s an academic librarian turned community manager, helping other librarians learn about and use Springshare technology. She’s the Vice-President/President-Elect of the Library Information Technology Association and a professional photographer (check out her portraits of librarians). They’ll determine prize categories with their sole and arbitrary discretion, so be sure to pique their interest.

We’ve taken pics of our own copies, but we know you can come up with better ones. Take your book out into the world and post its adventures to Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, or Facebook with the hashtag #ungluelib. We’ll collect and share your photos. To be considered for notoriety & swag (what better holiday present?), post your photos by December 15, and we’ll announce the results shortly thereafter.

Photo by Lauren Pressley; CC BY-SA