Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu Morning Media Menu (MP3 link) was Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose talking about how the journal rushed a brand new eBook, The New Arab Revolt: What Happened, What It Means, and What Comes Next.
The digital collection pulled together timely articles, interviews, and primary documents to help readers understand the historic changes sweeping through the Middle East. Rose talked about the powerful eBook opportunities available to magazines and journalists.
Follow this MP3 link to listen. Here’s an excerpt: “We did an instant book right after 9-11 called How Did This Happen? We managed to basically pull together within a few weeks a full-scale, serious book. We published it with Public Affairs and it sold more than 40,000 copies. It was a back-breaking effort. It’s something that I’m proud of, but I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to repeating the crazy experience.”
Rose continued: “But what the new publishing tools give you is the opportunity to take your text and design and put it together pretty quickly–to rush it out there in a PDF or eBook form. It allows you to speed up the time and lower the cost.”
He concluded: “It’s a little bit like the role of technology in the revolutions themselves. People have used whatever technology was available to them at the time. During the Iranian revolution they used cassette tapes. Then you had satellite TV and the Internet, and so forth.”