I've been trying to get this site to work like a wiki so that users could help me annotate Ulysses. But it's not working. Instead, I've started a new site dedicated to this project: www.difficultbooks.com.

My good friend Philip Clarke turned me onto ELGG, an open source social networking platform.

This sort of application would be useful for publisher to develop brand loyalty. Collaborative book clubs are the first thing that comes to mind. But there must be hundreds of other uses.

The main point is that these applications would change the way a publisher is perceived. Instead of being seen as a faceless corporation, publishers could use these applications to build communities around its content.

Thoughts about Epstein’s Book Business and Schiffrin’s The Business of Books

Here's another interesting piece I found on the 'net today: Innovation and the Future of e-Books by John Warren.

I would like this website to grow beyond my Masters program at the George Washington University. The subject of starting a publishing company seems so rich with information that I could mine it for a long time to come. The main advantage is that the page starts at ground zero; this is the first attempt at a website, and it will grow as I learn more about this stuff.

Anyway, the next steps is to buy a domain name or two and find a web host. Right now the site is sitting comfortably on the GW server. But I graduate this summer and will lose access. So, how do I find a good web host? What can I expect to pay? What services are provided?

Jason Epstein is always interesting. This talk he gave at the Tools for Change meeting is good stuff.

Lately I've been focusing on the possibility of start-up publishers using open source as a means to save cost. But I'm interested in the whole problem of how someone would start a publishing company with little to no capital. This includes non-traditional business models.

Today I came across a couple of open source blog authoring applications: Movable Type and WordPress. Both applications are described as "publishing platforms," though I'll have to play with them to see what that means exactly.

I suspect that they are basically web CMS applications with limited functions. That's fine, but I wonder how well they would integrate with a more fully functioning CMS like Drupal.

The webdistortion blog has an articles that will be interesting to explore further: Web Design on a Buget (6 Free Alternatives to DreamWeaver).

Here's a late addition to my list of open source software available to publishers.

Open Medicine, an open-access medical journal, posted an article (No budget, no worries: Free and open source publishing software in biomedical publishing)about open source options for smaller publishers of scholarly journals.

My original plan was to look at ecommerce in great depth, with the possibility for setting up a dummy ecommerce site using Drupal. But my research keeps moving me in the direction of open source software. Ecommerce is only part of the story.