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Category: E-books

Published February 26, 2019

The ‘Future Book’ is Here

I haven’t posted anything about books and technology here for a while, but I thought this recent Wired piece by Craig Mod on the “Future Book” was quite interesting: 

Physical books today look like physical books of last century. And digital books of today look, feel, and function almost identically to digital books of 10 years ago, when the Kindle launched… Yet here’s the surprise: We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

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Published February 16, 2012

E-Books Can’t Burn

Author Tim Parks has an interesting post on the virtues of e-books on the NYRB blog:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves…Add to that the e-book’s ease of transport, its international vocation (could the Iron Curtain have kept out e-books?), its indestructibility (you can’t burn e-books), its promise that all books will be able to remain forever in print and what is more available at reasonable prices, and it becomes harder and harder to see why the literati are not giving the phenomenon a more generous welcome.

It is encouraging to see a writer at the venerable NYRB enthusing about e-books, but two things immediately spring to mind. First, that reading on the screen might present more, not fewer, distractions than reading an unconnected book. And, second, the idea that e-books — which can not only be monitored but endlessly rewritten and immediately deleted across an entire network without a reader’s permission — are some how less vulnerable than paper-ones seems, to put it politely, naive.

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Published March 31, 2011

DODOcase

In yesterday’s round-up I briefly mentioned DODOcase who use traditional bookbinding techniques to produce iPad and e-reader covers locally in San Francisco. Here’s a video introduction to the company and their products:

Another reason (were one needed) to get an iPad (right after Swords & Sworcery!).

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Published September 22, 2010

IDEO’s Future of the Book

Design consultancy IDEO present three visions for the “future of the book” (none of which include print of course):

Any thoughts?

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Published August 5, 2010

Opportunities and Charm

In a recent op-ed for The Financial Times (registration required), John Makinson, CEO of the Penguin Group, outlined the opportunities e-books offer to publishers:

What is being missed in the debate about the division of digital spoils is the opportunity offered by e-books to authors and readers, as well as to publishers who have the specialist skills to exploit it… [W]e should not forget that the growth of the book market has always been driven not by changes in consumer demand but by the availability of new channels of supply. It was true of supermarkets and book clubs, and it will be true of digital platforms and formats.

While e-books mean that publishers can develop new products that expand on the traditional book, says Makinson, digital technology will also provide them with “rich consumer data” that can inform decisions about pricing and content. Furthermore, social networks and online communities  will allow for greater reader engagement in the publishing process.

According to Makinson, technology will redefine the industry but, so long as publishers are adept at learning new skills, it will enhance their role rather than diminish it. And even with the “explosive growth” of e-books, Makinson is optimistic about print:

Perhaps the charm of the physical book will be lost one day. But I doubt it. Readers of all ages retain a remarkable emotional attachment to the thing. It is portable, convenient and a pleasure to own… There’s life in the old book yet.

(link)

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Published July 22, 2010

Pass the Gestalt, Please

An interesting post by the whip-smart Evan Schnittman, Managing Director of Group Sales and Marketing at Bloomsbury, about e-book rights and royalties at his blog Black Plastic Glasses:

[A] successful and coherent publishing is not the sum of individual publishing rights, but rather the gestalt work presented coherently to a global audience. Viewing the ebook out of the context of the rest of the work gets us nowhere. We must understand how ebooks fit into the publishing ecosphere and only then can we determine what the right royalty should be… The whole work has FAR greater value than the sum of the individual rights. Allowing each individual part, or right, to be disaggregated and auctioned to the highest bidder serves only those who make profit from short-term gain.

(via MobyLives)

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Published March 29, 2010

Doctorow at Bloomsbury

Whether you agree with him or not, this is an interesting — if scatter-gun — talk by Cory Doctorow on publishing, e-books, pricing, and DRM (and more) at UK publisher Bloomsbury:

There are some additional notes (and a couple of corrections!) at Cory Doctorow’s website.

(via Ted Striphas’ The Late Age of Print)

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Published March 3, 2010

The Discussion That Will Not Die!

Tales from the Crypt Bronte

Now the dust has almost settled on the Amazon-Macmillan dispute, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, laid out their new position on availability, pricing and the (much discussed) agency model yesterday:

We will price our e-books at a wide variety of prices. In the ink-on-paper world we publish new books in different formats (hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback) at prices that generally range from $35.00 to $5.99. In the digital world we will price each book individually as we do today… For physical books, the majority of new release hardcovers are published in cheaper paperback versions over time. We will mirror this price reduction in the digital world.

This follows hot on the heels Motoko Rich’s second stab at explaining the issues around pricing for The New York Times (her previous — fairly woeful — attempt is here):

Publishers argue that it would be difficult to sustain a vibrant business on much lower prices. Margins would be squeezed, and it would become more difficult to nurture new authors…“You’re less apt to take a chance on an important first novel if you don’t have the profit margin on the volume of the big books,” said Lindy Hess, director of the Columbia Publishing Course, a program that trains young aspirants for jobs in the publishing industry. “The truth about this business is that, with rare exceptions, nobody makes a great deal of money.”

This echoes similar points made by Lydia Dishman’s in an earlier article, “The Case Against Dirt-Cheap E-Books”, at BNET:

If massive sales are the only aim, content is devalued to the point of creating digital pulp. Maybe no one old enough to remember real pulp fiction (not the Tarantino film) is reading this, but the only thing that lives on from that era are histories of the pulp fiction genre, not the actual books, which by definition were cheaply produced and contained even “cheaper” content. Pulp’s inherently ephemeral — not exactly a stable foundation for a new business model.

Pricing seems to be the issue that just will not go away right now, and none of the points raised here are new. But I guess the upside is that there is now some more informed discussion going on and publishers are beginning to take it seriously. That, and John Sargent giving other CEO’s a free lesson in communications and transparency.

(Image from R. Sikoryak‘s Masterpiece Comics published by Drawn & Quarterly)

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Published February 11, 2010

Workflow Part 2

One of the ‘joys’ of not getting quite enough sleep at night is that you don’t always say things with the kind of nuance that you might intend. Sometimes the coffee speaks for you.

Unfortunately that happened yesterday with my post about production, which was taken in some quarters as a damning indictment of publishers, rather than a post about some of the problems we face creating decent e-books. Coffee 1, Optimist 0.

Anyway, after I published the post, I was chatting with a friend and colleague at one of the big publishers about their production process. She told me that although they have been converting PDF files into e-books, they are moving towards changing their workflow. This can’t happen overnight though, she said. Changing something that complicated takes time, especially when people have to learn new skills.

She also reminded me that we have to put things into context. Publishers are not the hold-outs they are often portrayed as (or at least not all of them are) — e-books are still only a small part of the overall business, and even though we’ve seen a rapid growth in the market, it is not the same for every genre, category, or publisher. New devices (with different standards) are also appearing on the market with alarming regularity.

None of which means that publishers should sit on their hands of course. But — as my friend rightly pointed out — this a process not “a flip a switch situation.”

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Published February 10, 2010

Workflow in the House

As I’ve mentioned in the past, many publishers have tended to treat e-books as shovelware, and (unsurprisingly) the hasty conversion of files intended for print into e-book editions — with little or no consideration for the medium — has meant the quality of e-books has suffered.

Needless to say, poor quality e-books are becoming something of an embarrassment for publishers trying to convince readers to pay a premium for downloads (as Kassia Kroszer recently pointed out in Publishing Perspectives: it is hard to justify higher e-book prices when the product simply isn’t up to scratch), and clearly it’s an issue publishers need to address sooner rather than later if they want win this argument.

The problem of substandard e-books partially stems from the fact that many publishers currently lack the means and expertise (and, to some extent, the will) to produce high quality e-book editions themselves. Their workflow and production process are set up for print, so the quickest way to create e-book files has been to outsource the job to third parties, inevitably with very little quality control.

This was the subject of an interesting (if somewhat snarky) post this week by Pablo Defendini, producer and blogger at Tor.com, at The New Sleekness:

[B]ig publishers outsource a large part of these services… They’ve found that cutting out expensive production departments and hiring out the services of middlepeople, who also handle distribution and sometimes even retail fulfillment, saves on people power (read: health insurance and pensions), hassle, and extra load on their IT departments. Well, guess what one of the cardinal rules of the digital revolution is: digital production eliminates the need for most middlepeople. Bring this all back in-house, make it a lean operation. Settle on nothing less than a standards-compliant workflow, but please, build it from the ground up, as opposed to tacking it onto your existing production setup as an afterthought.

Pablo is picking a crowd-pleasing soft target in the “big publishers” — many (most even?) small and medium size publishers (the notable exception being O’Reilly of course) are also outsourcing their e-book production — but he does make some really important points about the need to learn new skills, rethink workflow and (ideally) bring e-book production in-house.

The comments are also worth reading but, — if like me — you are just beginning to get your head around this stuff, definitely work your way through the Digital Book World presentation by Liza Daly, of Threepress Consulting, referenced in the article:

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Published February 1, 2010

Obligatory Apple/Amazon Post

It somehow seems terribly appropriate that I spent the week Apple unveiled the iPad battling with problems with my own PC laptop (*sigh*) and missed a lot of the excitement.

Even at the best of times, I am usually at least a day behind the news cycle, and so not for the first time, I thought I’d write a post as a way to get myself up to speed over the weekend. But, just when I started to think I had a handle on it all, I got sideswiped by the not unrelated kerfuffle between Macmillan and Amazon… (*sigh*)

Needless to say, things are happening at a frightening pace and so this post will probably be out of date even before it is live. It should also go without saying — although I’d better say it anyway — that any opinions expressed here are my own, not those of my employer…

So, as I was saying, Apple launched the iPad and iBooks store.

Many in the tech crowd — who were apparently expecting Jesus 2.0 — were, unsurprisingly, a little disappointed by the name and the lack of features such as multitasking, Flash, and a camera.

But, even if you don’t accept that disappointment is the condition of our age, the loquacious Stephen Fry pointed out that many the same critics were also underwhelmed by the iPhone and look how that turned out:

[E]ven if they couldn’t see that three billion apps would be downloaded in two years… could they not see that this device was gorgeous, beautifully made, very powerful and capable of development into something extraordinary? I see those qualities in the iPad. Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want now and one that will not be matched this year by any company.

Fry believes (and rightly I think) that the big impact of iPad will be on the media and the way we consume it:

[I]t is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic textbooks, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed.

Ivor Tossell makes a similar point in today’s The Globe and Mail. According to Tossell, the iPad will essentially be used to “piss away time on the Internet”:

[S]o now we have a tablet that’s perfect for the couch, and the restaurant table, and the party, and the lecture hall; for reading in the bathroom, for floating in space, and possibly for using in the space-bathroom. Who knows – the future is grand… The question, in the end, isn’t whether you want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new tablet computer. It’s about whether you really want the Internet lying around the house like that.

Of course, this is not news to book folk. I think we have always seen e-readers as a new way to read in the bath.

Nevertheless, the iPad’s sleek design, intuitive interface, and startling low starting price of $499 USD, make it welcome alternative to Amazon’s somewhat ‘fugly’ Kindle. Mashable (although they were not alone) were quick to give reasons why the Kindle is Dead (while others have been equally quick explain why it isn’t).

And then there is the iBooks store. Not only does it support e-Pub, but most of major publishing houses — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette (although notably NOT Random House) — have signed up. As Sarah Weiman noted at Daily Finance :

If it wasn’t clear that iPad and iBooks are two shots across the bow of Amazon’s…. Kindle e-reader, Jobs’s left-handed compliments drove the point home: “Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this….We’re going to stand on their shoulders”

It has, of course, been something of an open, if largely misunderstood, secret that publishers are not happy with Amazon pressuring them on prices, discounts, and marketing dollars (although I’m not quite sure anyone expected Steve Jobs to say it aloud) and so it is not surprising that publishers are embracing the iPad. But, with apps for the kindle, better terms for self-published authors, and persistently loud (if vague) announcements about sales, Amazon had clearly been preparing for this moment for some time.

It was still a shock however, when after a disagreement of pricing and terms, Amazon (briefly) upped the stakes even further by withdrawing both print and digital titles published by Macmillan from their site. That Macmillan was coincidentally one of the publishers signed up for iBooks was not lost on people.

As Cory Doctorow notes at BoingBoing, Macmillan were not blameless, but Amazon — perhaps fearing a PR disaster after Macmillan CEO John Sargent went public — quickly capitulated (albeit grudgingly and, as Fast Company and Moby Lives noted, somewhat disingenuously) and things are beginning to quieten down, at least for now.

Others — notably Andrew Wheeler (a braver soul than me), the indefatigable Sarah Weinman, and author John Scalzi (another brave soul), not to mention the mainstream media et al — have done a far better job of unpacking this farrago than I could, especially since I have to be somewhat guarded in what I say.  I’m just going to end by saying that this fight was probably inevitable — predictable even — but, if nothing else, this is surely a sign of things to come…

Update:

For more of the industry nitty-gritty and some (estimated) numbers around the Amazon-Macmillan disagreement, Mike Shatzkin’s post on the subject is also worth reading…

Update 2:

Two things:

One, if I was going to rewrite the part of this post about Amazon (heaven help me), I would  say — and say early — that despite all of the complaints about Amazon, they are good at selling stuff. Publishers like Amazon’s sales figures and relatively low return rates. If Amazon were just rubbish, this wouldn’t be half as complicated as it is…

Two, I wanted to post this from Bobby Solomon’s blog Kitsune Noir on the iPad:

For those who are disappointed by it, who think it’s a rehash of the iPhone, I honestly feel bad for you. I know it doesn’t cook you toast, and I know you wanted it to have lasers, but you’re completely overlooking the fact that no one else on Earth could make a device anything like this. Please prove me wrong, I would love to see some competition on this device…  P.S. They could call it the iDouche for all I care, if it’s amazing who gives a rip?

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Published January 19, 2010

Heads Will Roll

Steve Osgoode, Director of Digital Marketing and Business Development at HarperCollins Canada, pointed me (and everyone else on Twitter) to an interesting post on e-books at An American Editor by Rich Adin. It’s a nice coda to the Guy LeCharles Gonzalez post I mentioned yesterday:

No industry changes overnight, so it is certain that publishers aren’t going to change their business model tomorrow just because a handful of people demand it… But the anger of the devotees, as few as they may be in number, continues and becomes increasingly strident, with neither side willing to “hear” the other.

Adin goes on to raise some interesting points. I do, however, have problems with his argument that the internet has fostered a sense of entitlement:

The Age of the Internet has birthed a belief among some consumers that they are entitled to everything they want when they want it at a price they want to pay…  Entitlement says I have rights that are more valuable than your rights (or that you have no rights)…

There is certainly some grain of truth to this and, to be fair, Adin’s argument is more nuanced than the quotation suggests. But it is also a dangerously seductive argument for publishers who don’t want to take full responsibility for their actions.

On a basic level, blaming the consumer and/or accusing them of being uppity (or worse, criminals) is not a good business strategy. Figuring out what they will pay for is a much better idea.

Customers don’t necessarily want cheap — they want value. Sure, everyone likes cheap stuff in the short term — free is even better — and yet most people know that in the end you get what you pay for. Quality costs.

Consumers will pay for things when they believe they are worth it, and as publishers, we need to recognise we aren’t always providing real value for money. We publish too many books and (shh… whisper it) a lot of them aren’t very good. We can do better. How many books really do need to be released in hardcover a full year before they’re available as paperbacks (or e-books) for example?

I also don’t think you can ignore that consumer attitudes are being led by businesses — that publishers have been all too willing to oblige — who have an interests in devaluing creative content as much as possible. Cheap content gets people in to stores and sells devices and publishers have benefited from this in the short-term. But we need to realise that cheapening our own content is like pissing in the pool. Not cool and not a good idea — even if it feels good at the time…

That all said, I think Adin recognises that it is not a one way street. He argues that publishers and consumers need to compromise:

The ebookers have thrown down the gauntlet, the publishers need to pick it up and accept the challenge. Simply because some ebookers have decided that publishers have no role to play in the future ebook world doesn’t make it so. Publishers need to redefine themselves in 21st century terms, not rehash 20th century concepts.

This, at least, seems spot on to me…

Read the whole article.

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