On his application to get into journalism school at New York City’s prestigious Columbia University, DW Gibson said he wanted to be the next Studs Terkel, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning career included “Working,” an oral history of working people.

Gibson’s doing it now, but with a different twist.

“Not Working” will be the title of the book he writes upon completing a cross-country road trip with boyhood friend MJ Sieber, who runs a theater company in Seattle. They are collaborating on a companion film about people they meet, all over this land, who have lost jobs in the Great Recession.

Part of the time, they will be accompanied by mutual friend and playwright Mallery Avidon. She already has contributed haikus on folks they’ve encountered in California and Nevada. One example: “Sandra’s eye wilted/ Home Care Nurse one week notice/ She is fifty-six.”

Read more at The Salt Lake Tribune

OR Books will publish a new multimedia project called Not Working–author D.W. Gibson‘s book-length oral history with film and audio segments.

The video embedded above introduces the project. Gibson will travel around the United States and interview people who have been laid off during the recession. His subjects will range from hourly-wage earners to entrepreneurial executives.

Read more at GalleyCat

On Tuesday, June 21, the latest in the Digital Book World/Publishers Weekly Webcast series featured a discussion about e-book distribution for small publishers. The panelists were John Oakes, cofounder of the digital-first startup OR Books; Tom Woll, president of Cross River Publishing Consultants, Inc.; and Adam Salomone, associate publisher of The Harvard Common Press. Matthew Mullin of DBW moderated.

The first part of the discussion was about digitization, and Salomone started by recommending a conversion partner for small publishers when developing digital content. Salomone explained that your partner should be familiar with your product. At Harvard Common Press, for example, cookbooks are its primary titles, so they chose a partner that was familiar with digitizing cookbooks. Salomone continued by saying that it’s crucial for small publishers to ask their conversion partner for conversion samples, and that to expect at least two back-and-forths and a four week timeline for the process.

Read more at Publisher’s Weekly

In our first exciting episode posted yesterday, I discussed things that were, in my judgment, receiving a disproportionate amount of discussion and attention from the publishing community. We seem to have a desire to discuss cool, sexy and more futuristic topics than those that are essential to getting us from here to there. The difference between the two is that the more practical matters involve a lot of hard, ‘dirty-fingernail’ work in the belly of the beast that are not sexy at all.

Today, I’ll point to a handful of things that are critical for us to be figuring out (and in most cases doing NOW) to position ourselves for success now and in whatever future unfolds. None of these is a silver bullet, but taken together and shaped to individual publishers’ specific situations, they can help keep us moving ahead as the ground continues to shift without betting the company on some specific outcome. All bear discussion in search of workable solutions that are more broadly applicable than only to the Big Six.

Read more at baitnbeer.com

OR Books and DW Gibson are proud to be launching Not Working, a multimedia project that will include a book-length oral history as well as ongoing film and audio segments.

Beginning on June 22, Gibson will spend the summer and early fall travelling across the US, beginning in Orange County, California, finishing in Camden, New Jersey. Accompanied by a videographer, he will interview individuals who have become unemployed as a result of the economic downturn over the last three years. Interviews will center on each person’s story of losing a job: the Friday visit to HR, the form letter, the pointed email, the profane text, the security escort. Gibson will visit epicenters of the recession such as Fresno, California; Reno, Nevada; Kansas City, Missouri; and Columbus, Ohio.

The project is a response to Stud Terkel’s seminal book Working, first published in 1972. Familiarity with Terkel’s book will absolutely enhance one’s interest in this project, but it is by no means a prerequisite. Not Working communicates on its own. By presenting the voices and faces of those affected, it reveals the Great American Recession not just as a set of statistics or a political debating point but as an intensely human tragedy that is sweeping the country.

“The reactions that DW is capturing so effectively are filled with emotion – the tension, humor, sadness and anger associated with losing one’s job are all starkly present,” says OR Books co-publisher Colin Robinson.“These personal close-ups are the essence of the project.” Interviews will feature those who have lost their job because of economic considerations, not poor job performance. These are workers who have been “let go” by forces beyond their will, ability, and sense of commitment. Those interviewed come from all levels of responsibility and income: from hourly wage earners to executives, with every tax bracket in between.

Unemployment affects the majority of Americans, directly or indirectly, and it is an issue that will certainly be central to the 2012 elections. Some interviews have been arranged before the cross-country trip begins; others will be found along the way. This project will operate in real time, capturing every place and life it enters on film, in sound and on the page.

Not Working will be published as a book in the early spring of 2012 by OR Books.

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011, Egyptians were scheduled to enjoy a national holiday: Police Day. But rather than being fêted by a grateful populace, Egypt’s police spent January 25 facing the greatest challenge to their authority in living memory. In accordance with a pre-arranged strategy, citizens began protesting at scattered sites across the city and attempted to converge at Tahrir Square in the heart of downtown. A sufficient number reached Tahrir that the police were thrown into a defensive posture from which they would never recover. Egypt’s so-called January 25 Revolution had begun, and its first stage would end less than three weeks later with the stunning resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. As a long-time resident of Egypt (I’ve taught philosophy at the American University in Cairo since 2000), I was astonished by these events. But I witnessed them primarily from abroad, having left for India via Bahrain on January 12, on a badly needed winter vacation. For this reason I, like most Americans, followed the events of this internet-triggered revolution largely on the internet itself.

Read the rest at The LA Review of Books

OR Books, the e-book and POD-only startup that sells direct-to-consumer, has entered into a partnership with Just World Books, a similar startup POD publishing house specializing in serious nonfiction, launched by jounalist Helena Cobban in 2010. OR Books will provide JWB with production, marketing and rights sales and assist JWB in speeding up the growth of its e-book list.

Read the rest at Publishers Weekly

OR Books and Just World Books are pleased to announce a strategic cooperation agreement that will extend the reach of the two companies and improve their efficiency.

Both publishers share a commitment to timely and high-quality turnaround of manuscripts with a strong focus on current affairs and international issues. They achieve this through publishing exclusively in print-on-demand paperbacks and e-books, and selling direct to the reader via extensive internet promotion. Under the agreement, OR Books will assist JWB in the production, marketing and rights sales of its titles.

OR Books began publishing in the fall of 2009 with its first title Going Rouge: Sarah Palin – An American Nightmare, which became a New York Times bestseller. Since then, it has published books by Gordon Lish, Raja Shehadeh, Micah Sifry, Norman Finkelstein, Laura Flanders and Douglas Rushkoff, among others. It s latest book Tweets from Tahrir was described by the New York Times as “a feat of nearly real-time publishing.” Next month it will release The Global Warming Reader, edited by Bill McKibben. It is run by John Oakes and Colin Robinson, who formed the company in 2009 to exploit the possibilities offered by new digital printing, ebook, and distribution technologies.

Just World Books (JWB) was founded in 2010 by Helena Cobban, a long-time writer and blogger on international affairs who contributed a long-running column to The Christian Science Monitor. The most recent of JWB’s five titles is Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring by Lebanese agronomy specialist and social activist Rami Zurayk. JWB’s other authors include veteran diplomatist Chas W. Freeman, Jr, and Afghan-affairs specialist Joshua Foust.

Cobban notes that the new cooperation agreement allows JWB to mesh its activities with several important aspects of OR’s publishing operations: “OR Books shares with Just World a strong commitment to books of cutting-edge social and political relevance. I think their list is amazing! But we have important complementarities, too, when it comes to how to publish. Independently, we each arrived at the same sort of model for making books work in the 21st century – selling direct, only producing books once they have a customer, and promoting heavily. I value the savvy Colin and John have accumulated during their extensive careers in New York and London and am looking forward to working with them and their team.”

For their part, Oakes and Robinson say they greatly admire the program JWB has published to date and appreciate the value of the range of international contacts Cobban has brought into JWB from her long career in journalism. “The new model of book publishing is going to be far less territorially restricted and more global than the business has been hitherto,” Oakes said. “We have already achieved significant book sales around the world, as well as a robust presence in the foreign rights market, but we think Helena can help us strengthen that. We are very excited about working with her and JWB going forward.”

Two rock star novelists share the stage (if only briefly). Eileen Myles accepts her Lammy from Emma Donoghue at the 23rd annual Lambda Literary Awards in New York City, on May 26, 2011.

See the video at Lambda Literary.

[Beyond the Pale] talks with Raja Shehadeh about his great uncle Najib Nasser, whose opposition to the Ottomon Empire’s entry into WWI on the size of the Germans led him to flee his home and travel through the region of the great Rift Valley (today divided among the states of Israel and its Occupied Territories, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan). In A Rift in Time, Shehadeh traces his great uncle’s footsteps and experiences both a temporal and geographic rift.

Hear the interview at Beyond the Pale

A discussion between authors Micah Sifry and Douglas Rushkoff about technology and its impact, both positive and negative, on the world. This event was hosted by McNally Jackson Books in New York City.

See the video at Book TV.