At the eBook Summit on Wednesday, Electric Literature c0-founders Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum introduced Broadcastr, a storytelling app that will let people record audio versions of location-specific stories around the globe. We’ve embedded video of the presentation above.

Like Foursquare for storytellers, the new platform will link the audio to that specific place, allowing listeners to hear your story when they enter the same location. The platform will officially launch on December 20th, but the editors gave eBook Summit a sneak peek at the project. Publishers Weekly also covered the “rousing afternoon presentation.”

Here’s more from the Broadcastr page, including audio samples:  “We tweet. We blog. We YouTube. We connect on Facebook. What about our voices? Now, we broadcast them. Broadcastr is a new Social Media platform. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can record, index, listen to, and share audio via a map-based interface.  From the historical to the hysterical, the hilarious to the anecdotal, Broadcastr amplifies all our voices.”

Read more

Two eBook Summit speakers were featured in The New York Times and Publishers Weekly today. Electric Literature founders Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum will join our Digital Storytelling panel at the Summit on December 15th, 2010.

At Publishers Weekly, Hunter described his journal: “This isn’t an essay on how to build an ark. It’s about two boys who built a raft.” In the same way, their eBook Summit presentation will focus on practical, scalable lessons for publishers and authors hoping to create content for tablet computers, eBooks, enhanced eBooks, iPad apps.

The duo also helped author Stephen Elliott create an iPhone and iPad app for his memoir, The Adderall Diaries. ere’s more from the New York Times: “Electric Literature is a literary journal that enlists all manner of digital formats, like PDFs, Kindle, iPhone, YouTube animations. The money saved by not using a printer ($5,000 by their reckoning) goes to pay five authors $1,000 each for appearing in the journal. In the more than a year since the founding, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum said in an interview at their offices, the challenges of marketing a digital journal have taken up the bulk of their time, rather than finding great writing to publish.”

With two million iPads in circulation, one literary journal wants to help other indie publications create iPad apps. Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was Scott Lindenbaum, one of the co-founders of the literary journal, Electric Literature.

He described, in practical terms, how the indie publication built a new iPad app. In addition, we discussed how the journal hopes to license its iPad app platform to other small publications and how the journal landed a new story by the bestselling Spanish novelist, Javier Marias.

Press play below to listen.

Here’s an excerpt: “It takes hundreds of hours, with a typical development team, you could be paying hundreds of dollars an hour per developer. It can be very, very expensive. We got lucky because we had this team that’s working for literature, rather than development, purposes. So we were able to build it sort of on the cheap. But even so, it cost us thousands of dollars to develop the thing. We did learn a lot about how this kind of thing is cost prohibitive for most independent presses whose yearly revenues aren’t that high–they can’t spend ten or twenty thousand dollars on a single platform.”

Read more

In the an afternoon session at mediabistro.com’s eBook Summit yesterday, three new media literary pioneers debated the recent trend of offering free content online.

Electric Lit founders Scott Lindenbaum and Andy Hunter spoke about eBook lessons. Earlier this year, they gained 10,000 followers and grew traffic by 300 percent while serializing a Rick Moody story on Twitter–they now have more than 60,700 followers. Using a print-on-demand print schedule, they can pay authors $1,000 for a story. Nevertheless, they noted that they have only raised enough money (so far) to publish for a year.

Susan Danziger (pictured), founder and CEO of the newly free DailyLit, a company that serializes books and stories in daily newsletters. “We had a number of pay titles that didn’t have a lot of traction,” she said, explaining why they switched to a new free model. However, with the site’s new free model, they will experiment with “pay what you want” model and a donation model patterned after Kickstarter. “Our subscribers are amazingly affluent,” she said, “but they like free content.” She also announced that popular novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow will launch a science fiction channel for the site.

Follow all the summit action on Twitter: @galleycat and @eBookNewser and @RonHogan; also, check the hashtag #ebooksummit for even more 140-character wisdom.

In a Flavorpill interview, the editors of a new journal explained how they manage to pay contributors $1,000 for a story in this difficult economy.

Electric Literature co-publisher Scott Lindenbaum and EIC Andy Hunter outlined their innovative model: a literary journal published as a digital text, with a print-on-demand option for readers looking for paper copies of the journal. In addition, the journal can be purchased in e-book, Kindle, or iPhone format.

Here’s more from the fascinating article: “With an initial investment in the ‘low five figures,’ Hunter and Lindenbaum managed to put together their first issue in a matter of months. Since they avoid upfront printing costs–only printing issues when requested and paying the printer in bulk at the end of the month–and work with an independent distributor, they can afford their first priority: fair, even generous, compensation for writers.”