ReadWriteWeb

Online book publishing service Blurb today launched a new way to publish collections of photos - as an eBook for the iPad. The new eBooks come in templated or custom two-page layouts, which readers can swipe through, search the text of and zoom into full resolution images.

Publishers pay $1.99 per book and get to keep 100% of the profit beyond that cost. Paper books from Blurb start at $10 each to print on demand. Two buck easy-to-make eBook publishing on demand sounds awesome.

Volunteer-run organizations often spend thousands of dollars on quarterly newsletters and direct mail solicitations. While the groups have the best of intentions, they often lack the in-house graphic designers and high-quality printers to actually produce these goods. Nevertheless, they almost always have blogs, websites and social media profiles for outreach purposes. In the past few months ReadWriteWeb has seen an influx of blog-to-newsletter media solutions. While many technologists have criticized print as a dead medium, blog-to-newsletter tools may be fantastic for advocates and service orgs. Below are a few companies to help get you started:

You could write a novel in binary, but it's hard enough getting people to pay attention to your words in plain English. Futurists and programmers like Paul Graham, Eric S. Raymond and Ray Kurzweil may be prolific thinkers, but if they hadn't bothered to write down their ideas, many of us would have never found them. All of us have stories to tell, and Fast Pencil offers us a chance to format and publish them.

Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales has just joined the advisory board of CK-12 Foundation - a nonprofit organization that provides standards-aligned online textbooks to kindergarten to grade 12 students. One key element of the organization includes offering "FlexBooks" - a product that allows educators and students to create and edit their own open-content teaching materials. Users can add chapters to existing texts or create completely new material using the Flexr tool.

"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspaper business. A more interesting and nuanced wave is now hitting the book publishing business. Actually, it is three waves: the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. However this plays out, a lot of people will be affected, but the way in which it will play out is not at all obvious. This is too big a subject for one post, so read this as an introduction to a multi-post investigation.

Just when you thought the Obama lovefest was dwindling, Photographer Rick Smolan released his latest book, The Obama Time Capsule. The book includes photography, maps and election results from President Obama's road to the White House. What makes this project unique is that Smolan offers readers a chance to upload their own photographs and personalize their copies.

"VC-Backed Startup Is Profitable" should not be a headline worth making. But far too many Web 2.0 ventures don't bring in enough revenue, let alone profits, and some don't even have a revenue model. We see a lot of gritty entrepreneurs with profitable bootstrapped SaaS ventures. But the number of VC-backed startups less than 5 years old that are profitable is sadly low. That's why we wrote about Blurb back in October 2008.