There are text highlights from the interview with Ken Auletta on ebooks, ereaders, and publishers, based on a recent column of his from the New Yorker magazine here and the audio is here.
The piece is from Terry Gross's interview program Fresh Air on WBUR, one of the NPR member stations in Boston. I've recently managed to set up a kind of Mickey Mouse radio using computer speakers and my MP3 player, so I'm able to listen to NPR more regularly again.
What I find most interesting about these "salvation of the publishing industry" stories in general -- and this one is no exception! -- is the idea that the publishing industry is doomed (unless it can be saved by ebooks in some fashion) because "people don't read anymore." They don't? Really? I take the T in Boston almost every day and there's never less than 2 and often as many as 12-15 people reading in the car I'm in. I walk by people in the street reading Kindles, magazines, books, the free Metro newspaper. People stand in line waiting for the Boston Public Library, the Brookline Public Library, or the Borders down on Boylston Street (the most recent addition to the chain in Boston) to open (and they're not all waiting to go inside and fall asleep in the reading room or use the bathroom). I go down to used bookstores like Brattle Books near Boston Common and their $5-$3-$1 carts of books outside the store are always crowded. Reading is moribund? Honestly?
]]>The gist of the article is talking about the possibilites of what seems to me to be like meta-text: text on a tablet or an ereader which would, in some way, react to the reader. If your eye pauses on a word for too long, it might suggest definitions for the word, assuming that you were stuck for a meaning. It might condense the text to help you scan through and add information to a passage if background would seem to be helpful.
The author of the article, Eliot Van Buskirk, describes the possibilites of "Text 2.0": "This could present incalculable opportunities to reinvigorate the written word, and become a key differentiator from print — a positive one."
Van Buskirk also mentions the need to "breathe new life into the written word" which I don't particularly like as a statement. I think the written word is doing just fine; I'm not sure it needs "new life," but that's more a matter of nitpicking or personal opinion than anything else, and I've noticed such language comes as a pretty natural part of coverage of ereader/tablet news these days. It's interesting to ponder why this might be: do we have to prove that "old" text is no good in order to make room for the "new" stuff? If so, why? Is it impossible for the two to co-exist in some way? Maybe it is -- perhaps this is what the transition between scroll and bound book looked like and we just don't know it yet. I find that a little hard to believe, but climacterics are often difficult to see from the inside.
As far as "Text 2.0" goes, I have to admit that I can see more immediate possibilities for, perhaps not abuse, but certainly annoyance, than for utility. Who hasn't been annoyed by those pop-up or scrolling ads on websites or blogs that distract the eye and can be really hard to shut down? And I tried to picture what this sort of effect might look like as I was re-reading one of my favorite books last night in an attempt to soothe a bout of headache-induced insomnia. And all I could think of was: What on earth would this process do with a book with words like "Bookling," "Uggly," "Zamonian," and "Lindworm" scattered freely about?
But...on the other hand, as a devout lover of cross-references, I have to say there are some intriguing possibilites for inter-relations between texts -- to say nothing of the obvious ease of having a built-in dictionary if you're working with an academic or technical text. Even better if you can add a foreign language dictionary for relevant pieces. And presumably it would be the sort of thing you could turn on and off, or, like the better word-processing programs, teach, so it wouldn't be constantly trying to define words that were being defined by the text.
I'd love to see a mock-up for something like this; something that you could actually poke at and use for ten or fifteen minutes to get a sense of the possibilities in both directions.
]]>It's short and not wildly interactive although it says it is (perhaps I missed something?), and pretty basic. It doesn't claim to catch every single tiny disparity or similarity between the two and, indeed, it can't because, as the article points out, some elements of ereader make-up are proprietary and no-one really knows what happens. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain and so forth.
And I was thinking about the environmental blowback from ereaders this week with the release of the iPad because there's a really big, really new Apple store near one of the routes I walk home on a regular basis and, what with one thing and another and following a couple of big-time Mac fans on Twitter, I heard all about the release of the iPad as I heard all about the release of the Kindle awhile back.
Now, I'm not a Mac fan and I really have no particular interest in an iPad. Touchscreen technology makes me vaguely twitchy -- how do you clean it? what if it smears? what happens if a bit stops working?
And I think this last question, tweaked a bit, is an interesting point: iPads are the latest gizmo. They're a gadget and, yes, some people are buying them out of serious interest and desire to use, having followed pre-release publicity, checked out the specs, read advance reviews, and decided this is the gizmo for them. Other people, perhaps with more disposal income, are buying them because they're the latest cool thing -- like the Palm, the iPod, or the Blackberry was in its time. And what's going to happen when they lose interest? Sure, there's some likelihood of resale or donation -- but what happens when these gizmos start being thrown away?
Having grown up in a town with a giant -- and I do use the word "giant" advisedly here -- landfill smack beside it, I can vouch for the fact that people aren't generally speaking the best about handling their trash. The "trash" section of the public access part of the landfill was about the size of a fairly large parking lot. The recyling section? About the size of a fairly large room. You get the idea.
So what's going to happen when this gadget -- containing its 33 pounds of minerals, sundry fossil fuels, and battery components -- loses its glamour or gets too old? What does happen when the touchscreen stops working?
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The iPad might well be one of the more important machines to hit the ebook market of late. Maybe even on par with the Kindle ereader.
As I have mentioned before, and if you come across me in a pub I'll certainly rant and rave about it again, but one of the things holding back a more widespread adoption of ebooks is that you tend towards buying books in one format, for one type of reader.
Thus, Amazon Kindle ebooks cannot be read on the Sony Reader. Adobe digital editions ebooks for the Sony Reader cannot be read on the Kindle.
The two formats - EPUB and a modified MOBI, are so tied up with DRM that you cannot swap books between the two readers.
Unless you strip out the DRM and even for personal use that is someone... naughty.
So, what makes the iPad so useful, doesn't it just introduce a new format and DRM into the equation?
Well, while it is certainly true that Apple wraps it's EPUB format books in Fairplay DRM, as opposed to Adobe ADEPT, which is what almost every other DRMed EPUB seller uses, the iPad enables you to go beyond this.
By running separate apps the iPad turns into an almost universal reading machine.
To read your iBooks, you use the iBooks app.
To read your Kindle ebooks, you use the Kindle app.
To read your Sony Reader ebooks will just require someone, perhaps Sony, perhaps Waterstones, perhaps a third party, to write an app that handles ADEPT DRM. I'm guessing that when Waterstones sees how many books have been downloaded for the iPad they will be trying to get this app built as quickly as possible.
So currently the iPad will allow you to read four of the five popular formats, PDF, open EPUB, iBook EPUB and Kindle ebooks.
With luck, and sane businesses, perhaps we might finally have a device that can read anything - DRMed or not.
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Of course, this all depends on whether Apple allows the app to be built, after all they certainly aren't best buddies with Adobe. On the flip side, Adobe might refuse to license their system for the iPad.
When Amazon bought the company that makes Stanza they announced that they would no longer be planning to support Adobe DRM, this is understandable although a complete pain for those of us who buy many books from many different sources.
Let's hope that Apple and Adobe aren't so busy fighting each other that they can't come up with a way to make the iPad the ultimate format handler.
Of course, hoping for good sense is a bit like wishing for snow at Christmas - it rarely happens.
]]>So here are some of my favorite places to get book and ebook related news -- so often they're the same place since book/publishing/writing/library folks are a pretty natural audience for ebook news of all kinds! -- and if I miss your favorite site or there's something you think should be on the list, please, drop it in the comments.
So, in no particular order...
Now, if you're into more library-related ebooks news, there are some great places to look for that, too:
And if you're looking for more indepth, scholarly takes on e-issues, I'd suggest hitting up one of these three places:
And, finally, another hit from the UK:
So I hope that gives you some new sites to check out on your Tuesday -- and if there's something I missed, let me know!
]]>One thing that the release of the iPad has highlighted, it's that ebooks aren't just black text on white (or rather off-white) 'paper'.
One of the other types of document that is well suited for computer screens are comics.
People have been reading comics on computer screens since the start of the modern internet, look at the multitude of 'webcomics' that are available, at least some of which have made the jump to physical comics.
Now, moving from the computer screen we have comics being published with various 'e-platforms' in mind.
Take 'Valentine' for example, formatted for the Kindle this comic book is about, well, weird things during Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812.
This comic is specially designed to be read on a Kindle, it's in black and white and the text is formatted so that the Kindle's screen doesn't destroy it (Trust me, I've tried a few experiments in converting B+W comics for the Kindle and it's the text that causes the most problems, very easily becoming unreadable).
Look to the iPhone/iPad for what a full colour screen can do - 'Comics' by Comixology is a perfect example of what is possible. Unlike Valentine this app takes a regular comic and leads you through it panel by panel.
It's a very readable experience and for some of the comics the 'direction' of the way the panels zoom in and out and pan around make for a viewing experience that is perhaps even better than the original physical product.
The pricing is also reasonable - a Marvel comic that would normally cost £1.80 cost £1.19. As someone who is running out of longbox room in his flat, buying digitally has certain advantages…
Once more, what makes or breaks a platform is the amount of content that is available - 'Comics' has a wide range of independent comics (i.e. not Marvel/D.C) as well as some Marvel titles. Certainly there are a lot of comics to read, although sadly not a huge amount of Marvel comics (but they are making more of their back catalogue available)
D.C are yet to make any of their titles available via digital distribution.
I'll finish by mentioning 'Longbox' which is a multi-platform comics viewer that is currently in open beta, it certainly works, but again the real making or breaking of it will be the depth of content available. At the moment there have been no announcements as to which companies are going to be releasing comics for it, or if the comics will be the current issues or only titles from further back in their catalogues.
]]>I saw this article on bookshelves by Russell Smith linked through the Bookninja blog; if you don't know Bookninja already, you may want to check it out; it's a great source for all kinds of book-related news.
Since I was thinking about Libby's post from a week or so ago about checking out what people are reading, the Smith article about bookshelves showed up at just the right time.
Like Libby, I almost always try to check out what people around me are reading on the T (Boston's public transit system). Given that Boston is a pretty literate city, there's often a wide variety of things to be observed, from the daily free paper, to the Globe, to the Economist, to whatever's Top Ten on the New York Times Bestseller list, to things I know came off the local bookstore's $1 cart because I recognize the price tag. Now, you can cop a look at what someone's reading on a Kindle -- or other ebook reader -- but it's much harder than just taking a quick glance at a dust jacket or the top of a page. And it's possible the person might think you were casing out their expensive piece of hardware for possible theft. Not a happy situation when all you really wanted to do was check out their reading habits!
Akin to that, the first thing I tend to do when invited to someone's home is check out their bookshelves. If there are no bookshelves -- I start to get a little uncomfortable. As a person who has grown up with overflowing bookshelves (you'd be forgiven for thinking my parents' house was about 80% bookshelf and my room about 90%), I'm not sure I know what to do with someone who either has no shelves or hides them away. For me, books rather like de facto decoration elements, not to mention the original conversation starter: "I read [fill in the blank], too. What did you think?" The unused edges and tops of shelves house plants, pictures, random bits of stuff, candles, incense burners, boxes of matches, lens cleaning cloths, and so forth.
None of this can be done with a Kindle, needless to say!
Still, not wanting to end on a down note, perhaps there's some kind of new age bookshelf "display" yet to come -- on my own blog, for example, I have a widget from the Goodreads site that displays the covers of whatever I happen to have marked as "reading." Perhaps there's some way ereaders could take advantage of an idea like this: a scrolling display of the cover art for whatever books are in the reader. The enthusiastic reader might even find a way to hook this into a computer's screensaver program or, on a bigger scale, into a TV monitor. It wouldn't be exactly the same as my old Ikea bookcases with candle wax on the shelves, but it would be a lot easier to clean!
]]>It helps that he's also a professional writer as opposed to my pure luck in being published. It has nothing to do with him being one of my favourite writers.
So, go and have a look at these - he speaks the truth, and what is more he speaks it in an entertaining fashion.
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Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #1
Misconception #1: The publishing industry makes sense. Most discussions of publishing take it as axiomatic that there is a thing called the publishing industry and that the entities within it look similar and work pretty much the same way. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #2 (How books are made)
It is a common misconception — to paraphrase a commenter in the previous post on common misconceptions about publishing, that "the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one puts creativity in, the other money: the rest add cost)".
Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #3 (What authors sell to publishers)
I'd like to tackle two common misconceptions about publishing in this piece. Firstly, a lot of people who should know better — business journalists covering the publishing industry, for example — seem to think that authors sell the copyright on their books to their publishers. And secondly, a lot of readers think that if a book is available in print in the English language in, say, the United States, they ought to be able to buy it anywhere in the world. This might be true in a practical sense, but in a legal context it's anything but — and with more and more ebook readers trying to buy titles internationally and running slap-bang into software-enforced geographical blockades, it's time to explain why.
Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #4 (Territories, Translations, and Foreign Rights)
The point to take away from this essay is: if you're an author and you rely on your North American rights, you'll be on the bread line. To actually earn a living, you really need to exploit other territorial and language rights.
Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #5 (Why books are the length they are)
Publishing is a whole bunch of different businesses flying in loose formation; which is by way of saying that this particular topic is specific to commercial fiction publishing and has nothing to do with text books, technical reference manuals, autobiographies, or cookbooks. Why are novels (the prevailing form of fictional entertainment on retail sale today) generally the length that they are?
Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #6 (Why did you pick such an awful cover for your new book?)
Many readers hold the charming misconception that authors not only write their books, but are responsible for the size, shape, texture, flavour, and appearance of the finished physical object.
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Basically - this is required reading to understand why the ebook market is the way it is, like how an ebook doesn't cost 'nothing' to make and why publishers are still holding onto the idea of regional rights (although the publishers that I've spoke to have told me that this viewpoint is starting to soften a little.)
]]>For our site this week, I've been looking at the MyBeBook site.
Technically speaking, I suppose, this site comes in two parts: there are the books, which is the link above; and then there are the ereaders and accessories -- mostly cases for the readers and some memory expansion cards. The site offers three different readers: the Neo, the One, and the Mini, with different screen size, memory, and battery life (described in number of page turns). The Neo topped out at about $250, the Mini was all the way down at $200. So if you want what seemed to me to be a rather pricey ereader, come here.
The ebooks, on the other hand, are nice and free and downloadable in either .pdf or plain text, so they're not tied to a proprietary platform and you don't need one of the BeBook ereaders to use them.
You can browse the books by author, title, language (which also tells you how many books are available in each language: 1 in Breton, 21020 in English), and you can also search by author or book title. The site claims to have over 20,000 free titles in all. It isn't the most flexible searching interface you'll ever find and there's no advanced search, so you're stuck with one of the options above. On the plus side, though, the interface is clean, easy to navigate, and the pages -- including the book pages -- are equally uncluttered which, in my mind, makes up for the simplicity of the search options.
The files I downloaded were a combination of texts from Project Gutenberg and texts that were simply attributed to BeBook. I'm not sure if this means that BeBook has its own digitization project on the side or they're picking up files from another source or what. If anyone knows, please share in the comments! There's a pretty wide variety of texts available, most public domain or older texts: Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, The Raven, Les Miserables and so forth.
The .pdfs download quickly and cleanly -- I had some problems with Adobe Acrobat at this end but this was deinitely my problem and not the site's. The only one I had any issues with was a file that was supposed to be Trinity Atomic Bomb Test Site Photographs from the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The file downloaded all right, but it was just html code for photographs -- not the actual photographs. A bit disappointing.
This was the only mishap, though, and the other files were, admittedly, a bit vanilla to look at, but, other than that, in good shape.
]]>I got into a discussion on Twitter last night with someone who I respect about ebooks, made slightly difficult by constraining myself to 140 characters and by fitting my tweets around work. And it being silly o'clock in the morning when my brain turns, not so slowly, to mush.
He was suggesting that when you buy a hardback book there is within it a 'scratch panel' with a code for the ebook version. While I completely agree with the idea, and it has been one I've suggested in the past, I was trying to make the point that, especially when ebooks are concerned, the publishing industry isn't exactly the most sane creature.
For the record, I don't think that publishers will want to do this because it is too easy to buy the book and then email the code to someone else - or put it on a 'book swap' website where such codes could change hands. The publishers would then see this as a 'lost sale' and therefore 'lost profit' rather than as a marketing tool.
Our brief discussion then turned to whether ebooks are to MP3s as physical books are to CDs.
I maintain that ebooks are to DVDs as physical books are to films at the cinema.
You see, the publishing industry, like the film industry has long had a point of 'windowing' releases. That is, a film is released in the cinema - stays around for a few weeks and then only after a few months does the film get released as a DVD or digital download.
On the other hand, CDs are normally released at the same time as MP3 downloads.
Turning to publishing, like films at the cinema - hardback books are released first and it is only much later they are released as a paperback book.
This is known as 'windowing', and it is used to ensure that one section of the market, the section that is willing to pay more for first access, or for the 'experience', don't instead decide to turn to a less profitable product.
In the publishing world the profit margin on a hardback is much more than that on a paperback (although the risks are greater), it is a poorly held secret that while hardbacks cost three times that of a paperback they do not cost three times as much money to make and distribute.
This then is why many publishers are looking at a distribution scheme where the hardback is released first, and the ebook is held back until the paperback version is released, or even held back until later.
Is this sane?
Without the figures available I can only speculate - but I would imagine that the algorithm that the publishing house comes up with is perhaps lagging behind the real social change that the internet and social media has wrought.
I would guess that most people who buy hardcover books are those that simply cannot wait until the paperback to read the book by an author, or are huge fans of the experience of reading a book - the sheer physicality of a hardcover. These people will pay triple the price of a paperback for the same 'content' in order to read it as soon as possible - I know I have been that person in the past.
Then you have the second market - those that will wait until the paperback is released. This section are more wary of spending a lot of money and will happily put off that instant gratification in order to get a bargain.
The third market are those that will wait until they can borrow the book from the library, or will buy the book when it appears in a second hand bookshop. Publishers get no money from these people and so they are ignored, or marketed at in order to become members of the first or second market.
Where we stand now we have a new 'fourth market' with ebooks - people who don't care about the physicality of books and who want instant gratification. The jury is still out on how much money that they want to pay (this returns to the argument of 'how much should you pay for an ebook', do you pay near hardback prices for that instant gratification, or do you pay less because you are buying a product with less functionality?).
So, how do you window ebooks so that they don't gouge your physical books sales? Can you make the ebook price enough that you recoup any hardback sales lost, yet don't discourage people from paying that amount for a non-physical product?
One key question is 'how is the first market who buy hardbacks split?', Those who want the experience, the pure artifact of owning a hardcover will never buy that as an ebook as it doesn't have anything that they want. It's those that want that instant gratification that may start switching to ebooks, and publishers want to keep the profit that those people bring them.
It is simplistic to say that ebooks 'cost nothing'. Sure, the 'per unit' cost of an ebook is next to zero - once you have an ebook format you can sell a million copies for the same cost as selling a hundred copies - but the real cost is in getting to that finished ebook format. This means copyediting, author's advances, marketing and the myriad of other costs that go into making a book. It is this initial outlay that publishers look to recoup with those initial sales of hardbacks (because remember, the profit margin is higher on them).
So, what for the future?
I see publishers continuing to do one of two things, they will either 'window' their sales - making ebooks available only after the paperback version of a book is released, or they will embrace the 'variable pricing' model initially releasing an ebook at the same time as the hardback for hardback like prices. Then when the paperback is released they cut the price of the ebook for something more like a paperback price and then finally, after selling the majority of their paperback sales, they will lower the cost of the ebook even more in order to make the last bit of money from those who are only willing to pay secondhand book market prices.
This, in part, is why publishers are embracing the 'agency' model of ebook pricing that came to a head with the fight between MacMillan and Amazon, brought on in some part by the imminent release of the iPad.
Is this sane? Well it makes sense in some part - but then it ignores in part the influence of social media in book buying - and that is a subject for a later date.