Songhay Studio: second printing of “the adolescence of the cool,” my chapbook, will be based on open source software

The folks at CafePress.com stopped offering print-on-demand services for books in or shortly after the fall of 2013. It is possible that I was notified that change was taken place but it has come to me (a few days ago) as a surprise.

My only CafePress.com title, “the adolescence of the cool,” was designed in Adobe InDesign 2.0 on virtual machine I built to support my ‘legacy’ investments in Adobe/Macromedia software. To make my life even more interesting, this virtual machine is effectively lost on a corrupted Western Digital Passport drive.

So, I could build another virtual machine and live in the past or I could bite the bullet (again) and invest in a possible future (that is rapidly shrinking for me). This future is open source software (and hardware). I have decided to use Scribus (which is crappy, compared to InDesign 2.0, but more than enough for a little chapbook)—for the second printing. My screenshot of Scribus on my Ubuntu virtual machine looks damn near glamorous in a 1990s desktop publishing sort of way. Scribus is just about as decent as my last copy of Corel Draw! (in terms of desktop publishing features)—and you not knowing what Corel Draw! Is reveals just how old and how long I’ve been doing this… whatever this is…

Here’s a few Scribus bullets just in case a search engine finds them:

• My number-one gripe with Scribus is its failure to remember child-window/palette positions. The GIMP excels at this—another open source tool, by the way.
• Scribus should continue to be a front end for PDF generation—to meet and exceed Adobe Acrobat.
• For some reason Scribus will make copies of my styles—I still cannot figure out how it’s doing this.
• Scribus should not bother with competing with Adobe InDesign until it can match Aldus PageMaker—especially in the user experience around flowing text.

There are around 20 people on earth who have the first printing of this book. These people definitely do not know it, but they possess a potential collector’s item! In typical, flaky, artsy/emotional chaos, I cannot find any copies of the first printing for my private collection!

rasx()