Manifesto

La Belle Inutile Éditions La Belle Inutile Éditions is currently a de facto association. It is a group of friends who self-publish their books individually and independently, but under a common label. La Belle Inutile Éditions was co-founded by La Belle Inutile, based on an idea of J. Karl Bogartte.



The general orientation of La Belle Inutile Éditions is surrealist.

---

Why publish books today?

Mainly because digital memory is fragile and fallible.
Digital memory media are fragile (try re-reading your old CDs or worse, your old floppy disks)
Digital memory formats are subject to rapid obsolescence (try playing Flash files or old video files...)
The proprietary formats, specific to a given firm, can be abandoned if they are no longer profitable for the firm, which in addition can also go bankrupt.
machines capable of running old software for reading old digital data formats
disappear or no longer work.
Generally speaking, the only reliable way to conserve memory is to produce as many copies as possible. and disseminate them as much as possible. This is what life has been doing for 3.5 billion years.
Printing on paper remains the most accessible and durable memory medium.

Why publish books yourself?

Publishers have not always existed. They only appeared around the 16th century. But since they've been around, they've complicated the rules at their pleasure and have contrived to pass themselves off as indispensable. The public is now totally intoxicated by publishers' propaganda and is convinced that only what is published by a publisher can have any value. However, we are quite far from that.. Anyone can easily see that publishers essentially publish and distribute what allows them to make a profit.

There are, of course, true publishing heroes, usually small, courageous publishing houses, but the concentration of capital in the field of publishing no longer favors the appearance of heroes. As a result, in democratic countries, freedom of expression is restricted by publishers who generally do what they want and effectively control everything that is published.
The freedom of expression of all is therefore reduced to what meets the interest of a few.

Can we do without publishers ?

Book technologies have evolved like other information technologies, leading to machines capable of printing on demand a single copy of a book at a very low cost, which, hence eradicating any storage requirement, allows all repentances and corrections. It follows that if the work of the printer remains unavoidable, the work of the publisher, on the other hand, can now be carried out by anyone with a sufficient level of general education and knowing how to use word processing software.

Books published by means of print-on-demand are not self-published through an agreement with a commercial publisher and at the author's costs, because the sums necessary for the publication of a book via print-on-demand are reduced to the purchase of the few proof copies required for the last checks and possible corrections and this at the printing price which represents only half or a third of the sale price.
It is therefore cheaper to publish a book yourself than to buy one from a bookstore.

Print-on-demand books are actually published "at the readers costs" like any other book. As printers are generally taking care of sales and shipments, print-on-demand books can also be printed and distributed in a few days all over the world, which is not the case with books published by traditional publishers who themselves, remain dependent on their traditional distribution channels.

Current problems - Advertising

Printers will not advertise your books But in most cases, publishers will not advertise yor books either,unless they expect real profits.
However, publishers have advertising networks that you don’t have. They can rely on lobbies, journalist friends and “critics” and you cannot They can afford paying for copies and press releases

Current problems - Criticism

The function of criticism as to books no longer exists. It has long been replaced by a creeping form of advertising. The original function of criticism was to work...

For the honor of the human mind

It is hence important to use Print On Demand to publish high quality texts.
Turning Publishing into a social media equivalent is undesirable - yet a risk.
But publishing things like anthologies of George W. Bush's dumbest sentences, as some professional publishers happened to do is undesirable too.

Current problems - Bookshops

We love our small bookshops and our valiant booksellers. The pleasure of leafing through a book before buying it - or not, currently has no digital equivalent.
Yet, booksellers are often used to selling what publishers and distributors offer them to sell.
Taking care of our booksellers means offering them the opportunity to discover and directly get from printers, at suitable prices, books that are not distributed through traditional channels.
Building our own advertising media ourselves therefore means to provide them with a useful service, and perhaps even more useful than to ourselves.

This should be achieved by means of co-operatives _