Friday evening 24th of October, de Balie, Amsterdam

De Balie organized Friday evening an event with presentations from  Worthington and Merijn Oudenampsen around the project More is More -Independent Media Distribution-. More is More is a recent launched web-based community project that focuses on creating alternative distribution channels for print publishing's, independent publications and small-scale cultural productions. The aim of the presentation is to analyze this model and gather interesting publishers to participate, and how to get publications spread around the globe if there is hardly any money available for distribution?

Website More is More

The evening started very nice by Eric Kluitenberg handing over the book Spectropia -illuminating investigations in the electromagnetic- to me. With the request if I could give back the book to Geert with kind regards from Rasa Smite. A typical example of Eric being part of the community courier following the More is More concept.

Print on demand example from Spectropia - Acoustic Space, issue #7

The first presentation was from Simon Worthington, co-director and publisher at Mute Publishing. He is active in the More is More network for more then 14 years. A network from media makers, media, distribution agent, orders, shipment, payments, community couriers, outlets and video screenings.

How it works
The economical model of an article is as following. Lets say the media sales price of an item is $ 10,-, then
5%  $ 0,50 for More is More
30% $ 3,- for the outlet
50% $ 5,- for the media makers
15% 4 1,50 for the distributors

More is More uses community couriers. People who are traveling over the world and carrying publications with them to spread them over the globe by delivering them at events or local bookstores. On the website people offer or request a community courier by putting online their traveling schedule and how much kilo's people are able to bring along their journey. With a system like this you really must have a lot of fellow travelers who you can rely on.

There are some comments from the audience that it is not affordable to carry around so many books. More interesting maybe is the idea to focus on the end point, according to Paul Keller (who works at Kennisland, who sponsored the project More is More is within the Digitale Pioniers). He brings up the suggestion for the consumer to use the possibility to go to your local bookstore and ask them to order a specific publication.

Another option instead of distributing trees around the world is the e-book reader -a device to read books on- says Reinder Rustema. Unfortunately this type of technology is still quite expensive and not for sale yet in Europe.

Of course there are still people who really like it to have a physical example of the book in their cupboard, instead of using the e-book reader.

Print on demand
Print on demand (POD), is a printing technology process in which new copies of a book are not printed until an order has been received. Often it is not economical to print single copies using traditional printing technologies. It's a solution for small book publishers to print older titles that had been out of print.

For more information about this topic read the POD paper from OpenMute or visit their website OpenMute. OpenMute has spent the last year researching and developing ways to solve the ongoing problems of
small print cultural/ community producers, essentially financial and reaching the audience.

About More is More
More is More is an open source, on-line distribution system for small and independent media. It's aim is to bring together publishers and local outlets and events. Commercial distributors are often not able to distribute publications and media products from the small-scale cultural sector, the non-profit sector or the political and community corner.

Interesting about More is More is that they are trying the fill the gap between purely local publications -which are sufficient with a physical distribution- and the large-scale distribution mechanisms used by the larger publishers, but where the smaller publications hardly have access to.