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Tag: E-books

Published October 1, 2008

Midweek Miscellany Oct 1, 08

Great book covers and  design by pioneering graphic designer Erik Nitsche on Flickr  . (Via Ace Jet 170 who has more Nitsche images).

On the subject of Flickr , the San Francisco Chronicle visits the offices of the popular photo site and talks to Director of Community Heather Champ:

“I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own.”

Photo District News considers the market for limited edition photography books.

10 Things Epublishers Should Do For Readers : a nice wish list from Dear Reader.

And Kassia Krozser has further thoughts on moving from Print to E on Booksquare:

“eBooks are not going to be the next big thing; they’re going to be a thing. A part of a complex mix of reading choices. With that in mind, let’s think about ways we can blend ebooks into the publishing culture without pain.”

Publishing is Dead, Long Live Publishing:  Hugh McGuire  responds to that New York Magazine article on the Huffington Post:

“There’s been much teeth gnashing and lamenting over the impending collapse of the publishing business… Well, the traditional publishing business might be in for a rough ride, but I think we’re poised to see a flowering of a new kind of independent writing, book-making and reading, driven by the web but rooted in the old-fashioned book.”

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Published September 30, 2008

Are E-Books Shovelware?

Introducing his five-part series BASIC Principles of Online Journalism (discussed last week), Paul Bradshaw notes:

It shouldn’t have to be said that the web is different, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is different. It is not print, it is not television, it is not radio.

So why write content for the web in the same way that you might write for a newspaper or a news broadcast?

Organisations used to do this, and some still do. It was called ‘shovelware’, a process by which content created for another medium (generally print) was ‘shovelled’ onto the web with nary a care for whether that was appropriate or not.

It was not.

With Peter Kent of DNAML recently suggesting  on the O’Reilly TOC blog that publishers treat e-books like software, and many e-books just digitalized versions of their print edition, are e-books falling into the category of  ‘shovelware’?

Certainly trade publishers have tended to think of the e-book as a ‘format’ — a cheaper, more convenient way to read text than an ordinary book that requires little amendment — rather than an entirely different ‘medium’ with new rules and possibilities.

Andrew Gallix, editor-in-chief of 3:AM Magazine mulled some of this over in The Guardian last week:

Bar a few notable exceptions (Penguin’s wiki-novel or We Tell Stories project), traditional publishers have used the internet as a glorified marketing tool providing them with new ways of flogging the same old same old: e-books, Sony Readers, digi-novels, slush-pile outsourcing… So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic…

I don’t think you  don’t need to embrace Gallix’s avant-garde e-lit leanings — or see e-books as completely detached from print — to appreciate that if they simply reproduce what’s already available, e-books are not really reaching their potential.

At the very least, authors and publishers should consider how the digital reading experience differs from that of print, whether this is producing new texts specifically intended to be published as e-books, or providing additional digital content for existing texts.

Thinking about Bradshaw’s  principles — brevity, adaptability, scannability, interactivity, community, and conversation — seem like a good place to start.

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