My day that began in the “Death to DRM” session moderated by Sean Cranbury kicked off the debate about “how do we make money if we didn’t lock down digital books”, a topic that continued well into Peter Brantley’s session on “When every book is connected to everyone”. It was in Evan Leibovitch’s session titled “Kindle Shmindle: future directions for E-Books” where that it became obvious that there’s a definite lack in knowledge about how we should handle the technical transition from paper-book format to digital-book format. I don’t mean how the industry needs to change — that’s a much bigger/scarier issue. I mean, quite simply understanding what an ebook can look like today.

For someone who’s been creating web pages since the days of NCSA Mosaic, it makes my hair stand on end to think that we’re repeating the same arguments of print vs web. But digital is ugly. Eew, why would a reader be able to choose to mangle my design? Why would I want to let a reader ruin my beautiful optimal reading line-length?

In the session I co-moderated with Carlos Scolari on “The Evolving Ecology of Books”, visual book design was a recurring topic. Carlos began by introducing the evolution of the book, therefore how we interface with the book, and I challenged the participants to question why books were traditionally portrait but not landscape, and how it’s influenced even the design of e-readers today. From then on, the conversation snowballed; we spent a good deal of time discussing the relationship of content to its container in terms of design, and what this means if you’re a content creator or a book designer. You’ll find photos of the live mind-map that I did here, here and here. At the end of our session, Liza Daly kindly took a little time to demo the ePub Zen Garden project, a site modelled after CSS Zen Garden, “to dispel the myth that digital books can’t also be crafted works of visual design”.

It is humbling to realise that to evolve with the medium still takes a tectonic shift in philosophy. What differs between now and almost 10 years ago is that browsers have gotten a ton better with CSS support. Webfonts is not dead. Typekit is around the corner, and we will soon see where that takes us. All the outcry about how typography sucks, how there’s a lack of control over layouts — for the most part, we are getting close to solving the hairiest of these even if our solutions don’t replicate what we’ve done for hundreds of years. There are bucketfuls of resources out there on web typography and layout. Let me put this more succinctly: we have the technology to make digital design beautiful. We are just in the process of evolving, and part of evolving means letting go.

So, a question remains. Webkit is open-source. So is Gecko. ePub content is XML, XHTML/CSS. So why do so few e-readers re-use these rendering technologies that are freely available, instead of reinventing the wheel?

I’m sure BookCamp attendees left with many questions and many more ideas about the future of the book, as well as what will become of publishers, readers, writers alike. While many of my discussions with folks were positive, I came away wondering if we weren’t about to see history repeat itself with e-reader wars — much like the old browser wars, format and standardization wars, and fundamentally, the necessary culture shift in design that would see us learn to adapt to new ways of reading — therefore, potentially, new ways of writing and thinking.

[...] how will technology — and specifically the lowering of technological hurdles — allow storytellers to make their stories available in a myriad of formats?

In my humble opinion, most of what we perceive as “tech hurdles” exists in two forms:

• there is an actual technical or technological reason why we don’t have a better and easier solution
• we just haven’t come up with a good way to make the current solutions sensible and easy to use

Then there is a third factor that determines whether there is a need or a drive for improvements to be made in either of these. So, I’m thinking, what would people actually want to do with these formats? How much do our readers want all of them?

For these sort of questions where it’s too early to have answers to, I like looking back at history. Remember VHS vs Betamax?

The video format war is now a highly scrutinized event in business and marketing history, leading to a plethora of market investigations into why Betamax failed. Sony seemed to have misjudged the home video market. They believed that the 1-hour length of their current Umatic format would be sufficient for Betamax too. However, Umatic was primarily a professional standard with constant surveillance by television technicians and which did not need more than one hour length per tape. For home usage, one hour would not be enough to record an evening of primetime programming, or Monday Night Football. Therefore, consumers naturally flocked to the 4-hour “Long Play” VCRs offered by RCA and Matsushita in 1976.

Further driving the VHS format was its inherent 2 hour playback time (SP speed) – a much better fit for Hollywood movies than Betamax’s 1-hour limitation. This event spawned the huge video rental business that flourished in the 1970s and 80s. Being able to watch Hollywood movies at home was a major innovation that transformed consumer habits and allowed people to see older “classic” films that had been buried in the vaults for years.

In terms of books and digital, we already have a myriad of formats available today, and it’s safe to say not all of them will win, but it’ll be awhile until we know which formats come out tops. It’s difficult to predict, even if I like to think things like this can come down to straightforward factors as “how useful is this format for your readers and in what context”. Until then, it makes sense that a writer or storyteller should be heard or read in whatever way they choose. This is certainly what the Book Oven team believes, and it’s a small but important part of what we’re working on. For the time being, we’re more focused on making current solutions sensible and easy to use; but also, looking at the wider problem of what writing means in the digital age.

So let’s just say, I believe formats isn’t really going to be the direct issue nor the particular problem we need to solve; they have a way of evolving according to needs and users. What we need to be able to determine is where the key pain points are for the creative process of writing and the pragmatic process of publishing, and how we can use technology to make the pain go away. Part of knowing how we approach these questions should relate to looking at how we write and how we want to be read.

And here at this juncture, there are some really interesting questions we can pose.

A few days ago I made a random quip on Twitter: “it’s interesting that you can always tell if an email’s been written on a blackberry/iphone vs a computer”. I wasn’t referring strictly to the mobile signature (hat tip: @rhjr), but more how your context forces you to write differently because of time and space — unless you are deliberately attempting a novel on the F train. I was noticing that emails I get from iPhones and Blackberries are always more casual and conversational in tone, because the writing context typically means the writer is constrained for time and concentration. If you’re writing an email on your smartphone, chances are it means you really want the message to get across to the other party ASAP. Not so for, say, me writing this blogpost — I mean, I would struggle to write this if I was standing on a street corner (and would have found a way to fit my sentiments in 140 characters). For me, you can read this next week or next month, it wouldn’t quite matter.

How this sort of change to our daily lives makes an impact on what we write is yet a wonderful, great unknown. I remember with fascination how movies struggled to portray the sentiment of Internet communications in the early-mid ’90s. (Remember how bad Hackers was?) And again, it makes me wonder: how will the change in our notions of time and space affect what and how we write?

A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens’s day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We’ll have to see.

There’s one thing to be pointed out here: in the history of search engine optimization (oh, that dirty phrase), content has driven the evolution of search engines as much as the other way round. When the value of blogs started becoming apparent, Google undertook work to index individual blog posts. Blogs began to be indexed much faster than normal web content due to their faster content cycles.

I’m more willing to argue that how we write books will change because of how we begin to consume content ourselves — leading to new ways to tell stories as how we perceive time and space change. Our search engines will survive and adapt, just as they always have.

Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.

This fragmentation sounds unnerving — yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from “Middlemarch,” “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Beloved” will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today.

It might also be worth pointing out that “cliffhangers” now exist in any kind of serialized content, not only in text — think Heroes, or Six Feet Under. Pick your favourite daytime soap opera. It has survived not merely because it has monetary value associated with it (if you make your readers itch to get their hands on the next installment), but because it also happens to be a good storytelling device.

So, I wouldn’t worry much about long-form tales dying a slow painful death. The human race has been ingenious in finding ways to express ourselves; as long as we have stories to tell, there will be books to write. It’s worth remembering that our technologies exist to adapt to our love of storytelling — not the other way around.

Augusta Lewis Troup (1848-1920) is perhaps best remembered for her labor leadership as a vice-president of the Working Women’s Association as well as the Women’s Typographical Union, where she was elected president in 1870. She then became the first woman to hold a national union office as a corresponding secretary of the International Typographical Union. She was a reporter on the New York Sun, then worked as a typesetter on the New York Era and the New York World.

To better understand the context of how she became a feminist labor leader, it’s necessary to be aware of the working conditions of female typesetters in the newspaper industry at the time:

A survey of New York city working women indicated that female typesetters earned more than any other group, except professionals and the self-employed. Much like the profession of medicine in this same period, the trade of printing had a strong attraction for women who aspired to a more profitable and honorable field for their labor. Moreover, typesetting was a skill. Unlike most other jobs that women could hold, typesetting permitted them a certain degree of the craft-pride that was the nineteenth-century male worker’s primary source of dignity. Like the pioneering factory operatives at Lowell in the 1830’s female typesetters took from their work a sense of dignity and autonomy distinctive in a society that praised dependence in women.

[...]

As early as 1853, New York City newspaper owners tried to break the union’s power during a strike by hiring women and training them to set type. Over the years, most women entered the industry in this fashion.

[...]

The National Typographical Union’s response to the use of women as strikebreakers was to try to keep them out of the printing industry altogether. The union refused to organize women, hoping that this policy would drive them, if not back to their kitchens, at least out of the composing room. 

In December 1867, the local union called a strike against the New York World, which moved to hire women and trained over a hundred women during the strike. When a settlement was reached 10 months later, the women typesetters were dismissed, despite protests. 

Curiously, there is very little information online on the professional side of her life, apart from mention that she was, for a time, an “experimental machine typesetter”. She began in the newspaper industry as a writer, and was quoted to say she sought work as a printer to enrich her education in writing. 

After she was fired, Augusta Lewis found a job demonstrating the new Alden typesetting machine. She was already a journalist and typesetter for The Revolution, a publication she helped to launch with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  Within weeks after the strike, the Working Women’s Association was formed at the offices of The Revolution in 1868. In 1875, she married Alexander Troup, an officer and an important figure in the National Typographical Union. They moved to New Haven, Conneticut, and founded The New Haven Union, a newspaper dedicated to labor and union issues. She was later also known as a benefactor of Italian immigrants.

From an article at the Yale-New Haven Teachers’ Institute:

Throughout her later life, Augusta Troup encouraged education among immigrant families in New Haven and spent her days involved in socially conscious projects for the poor. The [Troup Middle School] was restructured in 1989 as the Troup Magnet Academy of Sciences. The magnet school model was developed with the expressed purpose of reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation [—] all notions that Augusta Lewis Troup would have promoted.

The irony is, relatively little information is available about her achievements as a typesetter, writer and journalist. But if  that were all that she had accomplished, she would have faded into history like many other working women of the time.

Sources and further reading:

• “The Women of Paris & Their French Revolution” by Dominique Godineau & Katherine Streip
• Feminism & Suffrage by Ellen Carol DuBois
• History of the Labor Movement in the United States by Philip Sheldon Foner
• The Swifts: Printers in the Age of Typesetting Races by Walker Rumble
• Unseen Hands: Augusta Lewis Troup
• Loose in Research Libraries
• 75 Suffragists
• Building Historidal Understanding by Exploring American Landscapes

One of the things that we try hard to do at O’Reilly is to identify what’s already happening not just at the horizon.

Quote from William Gibson: “The Future is here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

(bits about canary in the coalmine as warning signal)

Much of what I talk about today is based on our experience as a publishing company. It’s easy to chalk up our experience at O’Reilly …

Computer book market for past 4 years is dropping. Dropped 20% after the dotcom crash earlier in the decade and never recovered – data of printed books sold at retail.

As of late last year, we’re selling more digital books than print books on our website. Our print market share hasn’t dropped. Many of these sales are overseas customers who don’t have direct access to the print copies. And this is not just us. (Showing graph of entire computer book market .)

Despite stagnant market in print books, substantial growth in ebooks. Why has every speaker been up here today has been talking about ebooks?

We give customers 3 different DRM-free formats. (st: did I get that right?) One is e-pub, pdf, and mobi-pocket. Customers with Kindle can download/upload(?) mobi-pocket format.

Not selling through Kindle, until recently it didn’t support tables or computer code. PDF is most popular. ePub is catching up quickly.

Doctorow’s Law: “If someone takes something that belongs to you, and puts a lock on it that you don’t have a key for, that lock isn’t in your best interests.”

Publisher should have a choice to use DRM or not.  We learned the value of open standards. Users can add their ePub books to an online library: bookworm.oreilly.com

It’s not enough just not to tell people, it’s important to experiment.

Here’s bookworm on iPhone. it looks al lot like a webpage, and that’s an important thing to remember: ebooks are a hyperlink away from the web.

People may be reading fewer print books, but they are reading+writing more text than before.

The web in particular + digital distribution in general ….

(st: missed a couple of points here, I’m tired!)

What does the long tail mean for the publisher?  Our books online never go out of stock. Books shown as zero demand are still being consumed in digital format because they are on the infinite digital library.

Finding ways to make all your content available Safari books: 23% long tail, 77% short head.

web = free?! If our books are connected to the web, does everyone expect them to be free?

Do people really pay?

• Internet access fees: $25.8 billion
• Music: $2.3 billion
• Games: $1.8 billions
• (etc)

Quote – Scott Adams ” Free is more complicated than you think”. (example of attributing value to free)

Radiohead + NIN examples. NIN example: While free is always available, the $300 version is sold out by the next day. The content is free, but people would pay $300 for it.

People don’t always just pay for the content itself. They pay for packaging and convenience. There are people who subscribe to news+blogs on the Kindle and pay for it.

One of our books available for free: realworldhaskell.org/read This is an obscure book, but is in our bestsellers since it came out, even if it’s available for free at the author’s website.

This book was written online. Notice that after each paragraph, it opens up a comments dialogue. Every single paragraph in the entire book. 7500 comments during book development.
2000 more since publication. Only 10% were anonymous. 21 people left at least 75 comments.

People want to be part of the book production process. When readers are given early access, the books sales double.

If we start to think about the books as connected to the web, let’s think about how the next trillion books will be seen.

[Rise of cellphones]

Global middle class is booming in places that don’t have existing print + retail channel. It’s quite likely that these places will skip building a print+retail infrastructure.

Since iPhone missing manual app released,  we have sold more copies of the app than printed book. Ranked 6th computer book year-to-date.

In additional to not harming our print sales, we brought in more print sales through digital.

What happens when people are ready to read books Nokia phone? Blackberries? But you can’t just dump a book on the phone at the same price. This is a different market with different expectation on pricing. We launched the app at promotional price at $4.99. We raised it to $9.99, sales fell by 75%. We went back to $4.99.

A lot of opportunity for experimentation on pricing. If you overprice or underprice an ebook by 20%, it’s not going to break a business. Remember those who don’t have access to retail+print books.

Real numbers are hard to nail, but these apps are being sold [a lot] every day.  They are not substitution sales, these are real sales, plus people who buy both. Safari is growing 30% year on year.

What happens when something is released in both print+digital at once? I’m quite certain for most of the books we publish this year, most people will read them in digital than in print.

All publishing is now digital publishing. All writing is writing on the web. These aren’t print books you happen to sell digital, these are digital books you might happen to also sell in print

How many of you include hyperlinks in your books? We are geared to launch 20 more titles.  Showing: YouTube video launching from an ebook.

A book behaving like the web it’s part of.

Readers build commentary around what they are reading. TV & Radio: “the first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television – until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically.”

Quote: Alan Kay: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

In 30 years no one under 55 will remember life without the internet. There’s enormous challenges and extraordinary opportunity.

Q: Do you see any compelling reason for publisher to use DRM?
A: I can’t tell you how to run your business, but I just want to have a choice.

Q: Re Twilight series: it’s difficult to find space in the App store. the more popular your title, the most visibility you have.  Working with Apple to see how this could get higher visibility.
A: Changing the price might help the sales.
Q: Price is a huge factor in the app stores. $25 dollars and up is not that attractive.
A: Have you seen an impact on your print sales?
Q: Hard to tell if our print sales have been affected.

I’d like to talk to you about what we’re doing at Shortcovers. I’ve been at Indigo for 3 years. One of the exciting things about Indigo, we’re actually in pretty strong shape, our business is growing. We invest in kiosks, and our Indigo community, and also now Shortcovers.

When i first joined, this is the kind of discussion we had: one view of the future: impact of reading digitally. 10-20 percent of decline can mean serious impact to the business.  We are really focused about when it’s going to happen, when would we see decline, when would ebooks (consumption) be greater than 1%.

Here is a photo of a woman reading a book on an iPhone in a park — archetype of the reader of the future. what’s important to them about where they can read, accessing content immediately. We focus on what’s the consumer doing instead of focusing when ebooks will be more popular.

People are reading differently – nothing related to ebooks. There’s user behaviour that’s already there and changed. People have been reading ebooks for a long time; there is a graveyard of devices. You want to use a device you already own.

People want to be social, they want to engage with the content whether with the author, content or other readers.  Not too different from the behaviour of people in a bookstore on Saturday morning. We found people want that as well – they want social experience, they want book samples — things they can already do in a book store.

We are passionate about physical books, we view reading digitally as a convenience. Provide convenience to read anywhere — at a cafe, in a park — is something where we think is important.

We look at the changes in the music industry. Track sales accelerated.  User behaviour changed: an important thing we pay attention to.
Inflation adjusted newspaper revenues: are at 1982 levels. definitely change going on here. New tech, devices, screen technology.

Our goal is to be able to deliver a compelling experience. Enter shortcovers – a new digital destination for people to discover their next great read on any mobile device.  Use the web, or existing iphone, blackberry, android, etc. any device, any time and any place.

Sample: purchase & read content in seconds. Share your favorite reads with friends, family or create your own Shortcover through social network channels: Twitter, Facebok, etc. Instant acess to content; You should get content by chapter, or serially, buy physical book. Newpapers: by subscription, buy article.

Launch highlights: in 2 weeks, 124 countries visited. strong demand for all mobile applications. Our publisher offering: a solution that maximizes reach.
Our new publisher program should give you all the information you need to learn about Shortcovers, and if you’re interested, provide us with content, sales or distribution. Our intent is to support whatever content types you have, and get them to the consumer. We think that there’s a real exciting/growing market opportunity, but it’s still really early.

We saw what’s happened in music in the last 7 years. This is on the back of 25 years of Sony Walkmen. There’s behaviour and digital media there, that didn’t have to radically change to get to where we are today. The content has already been on digital media. it’s gone from one format to another.

Early days; there are new devices coming out. It’s going to be hard to compete if you think it’s only *your* device. There are real issues to work out: quality of data, support for metadata standards, supporting epub/formats, pricing.

Customers don’t see the sense to pay the price of a hardcover for an ebook. Exciting times – we see a lot of work ahead of us.  We’re listening to you and your feedback.

Lastly – we love to talk to you about Shortcovers and get your content up and available for the world.

(st: couldn’t get the questions, wasn’t able to hear properly from where I was sitting.)

I really believe that you know about me in order to know my bias. I’m not from publishing, I’ve only been in this place for about a year. We come from enterprise java background.

(st: I missed a joke here cos everyone laughed but I couldn’t hear what Neelan said)

In the electornic book world we live in a very interesting times. Let’s look at the last 30 days in this space, the number of of changes that happened.

Feb 5: google book searchfor iphone
Feb 6: amazon hints at mobile device solution
Feb 9: amazon kindle 2 launch
Feb 16: Adobe reader mobile SDK9
Feb 25: Indigo Shortcovers launched
March 4: Amazon Kindle for iPhone launch
March 6: B&N acquires Fictionwise.

If you go on vacation for a week, the whole world has changed. What’s interesting about [inflection point] …. $52 million whollesale e-books sales in the last 4 quarters.

The drivers of opportunity: why is there a hockey stick for ebooks?

Mainstreaming of e-books: the Oprah effect

Kindle: this is not the first time Oprah has pitched the ebook reader.

Big Name vendors involved: Amazon, google, B&N, Sony.
Lexcycle: 3 guys and a dog.

Competition is a very good thing.

New hardware: netbooks, lots of new eReaders.

There are lots of talk about E-Ink: the sony reader and the plastic logic device.

It is a significant advance in technology that has made ebooks possible to read form.

Improved mobile displays: It’s not just the iPhone – there are multiple devices trying to do bigger, hi-res, touch screens.

7 new devices announced in Barcelona. So much activity on the mobile side.

Apple’s app store makes a huge difference (in downloading content/apps)

Challenges of Navigating the Waters. eBook alphabet soup: lists of formats and DRMs for eBooks.

Enter IDPF’s EPUB.

• standard format: users don’t want to care about formats (or DRM for that matter)
• profileration of propreitary formats (and DRM) is bad for users, create lock-in for vendors.
• standard format eases a historical burden of conversion

Cory Doctorow summarized at TOC: if you own something and someone puts a lock on it, and doesn’t give you the key, they are not serving your best interests.

The Main players: Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader. So many more devices.

Mobile Reading: iPhone: 10 different applications, standalone book apps. Other devices: there’s a whole slew of these.

Keep doing PDF – it’s still the number #1 format.

Stanza Overview
iPhone as an eReader: interntional reach (available in 75 countries), color display, multi-function device, built-in wireless, no external light required (backlit), app store.

Stanza iPhone & iPhone Touch:

• 1.5 million users in 60 countries
• Over 7 million books downloaded
• 100,00k books available (half free)
• Translated to 12 languages
• Featured in: NY Times, Boston Globe, Time “Top 11 iPhone Applications”, Forbes, Wired “10 Most Awesome Apps”, iTunes Top Applications of 2008

Our favourite stories:

• The fact that someone is missing their bus top because they are reading on stanza
• Someone complain they were taping the right side of the physical book and it wasn’t advancing to the next page
• Someone tried to look at the top of the physical book to see what time it was

Not tied to providers, giving people maximum choice. Buying patterns representative of print sales

Our sources of free content: Harlequin, Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, Munseys, BookGlutton, Random House

Primary usage:

• in bed: 31%
• commnity on bus/train 29%
• in waiting areas: 13%
• at home: 12 %
• at work: 5%
• at a bar or cafe or lunch or dinner 5%
• On an airplane: 5%
• 2 write-ins “in the bathroom”

Publisher promotions: pan macmillian excerpts, first to notice Stanza; random house/harlequin free titles: back list of authors

Mention of O’Reilly Book Application. Mention of O’Reilly’s iPhone: The Missing Manual application

Mention of Hunted Book Application: a vampire themed book, released March 10, same day as physical book.

Lessons learned – readers: Its all about the people who are reading. We came at it from a simple approach.

(st: Here Neelan skipped over several points on his slides because he thought he was running out of time.)

Quality matters. popularity is a measure. we’re allowing people to read exatly the way they want to. You have to look at this as a holistic reading experience: search/browse, find book, purchase book … etc.

Publisher lessons. Your calls-to-action need to be clear and contextual. KISS – keep it simple for your users Use ePub, try to think about DRM-free content, support multimedia. Experiment: figure what it is that works for you. try different things, work out what works for you in your space. Have a budget for marketing e-books. major publishers that don’t have budget for ebooks – this is the same for physical books.

Start to figure out how to support your authors better in the electronic world:

• websites
• blogs, twitter, social networking, book trailers
• understand the technology
• don’t let this turn into a blockbuster industry: find self-service methods and appropriate revenue splits for mid-tier authors.

Author lessons: make sure your publishers are making your books available electronically. Don’t leave marketing just for publishers – be out there.

1st Q: are you imagining a time that Stanza is more successul thatn it is now, and you’ll be rejecting DRM content?
A: I’d love to say yes. I run a business, but i hope world changes to a point where I can do that. There is actually a price point to DRM. I would love to make that pricepoint transparent to users, so users understand DRM costs more for them.

At the end of the time, right now in this world, (the 2nd q every publisher asked) – do you do DRM?

2nd Q: Are you developing for android and symbiam?
A: Neelan. Our first app was actually on Andriod. We couldn’t get into second round of the Google competition, so we developed a platform that actually had devices.

3rd Q: (st: too long, didn’t get it.)

4th Q:one of the interesting thing is that books are turning into torrents. how much time do these folks have to do before what happens to the music happens to have? how much time do we have to figure it out?

A: Reality is, there is going to be a group of people who will figure out way .

Audience: 99% of the people who want to pay for stuff and read it on 2 or 3 device. (DRM don’t work for them.) people still pay for software.

My concern is not really that we will lose books as physical objects (though I’d be sad to see the book go), but that that the concentration, care and reflection intrinsic to literary reading will diminish if physical books are to be phased out. Susan Greenfield, a prominent neuroscientist, recently made headlines with the hardly surprising claim that Facebook and similar sites mar the attention span and social skills of young people. Surely this effect will only be compounded if books become one of many things we access on all-purpose electronic devices. The Kindle isn’t there yet, but it seems poised to be so soon.

The irony is that I only saw this article towards the end of a very long day, so I opened it immediately from my RSS reader into EverNote, went away from my computer screen, loaded up the EverNote application on my iPhone (which synced immediately over my wireless network at home), and read her words in comfort elsewhere.

I can’t help thinking that the studies around “Facebook and similar sites” are not all that different to how scientists and psychologists were concerned about the effect of the television on my generation while we were growing up. Yet we are in an era whereby if Oprah talks about a book — or more recently, a certain e-reading device — its sales is destined to go up. Are we that worse off, really? I think it’s a bonus that young people are actually reading more even if they are consuming content differently and in smaller bites than what we may have been used to. It simply means the way important information is disseminated, written about and discussed will change, and we may well have to accept that we’re not going to be part of the generation that will succeed us.

As for whether it’s really possible to read anything serious on an electronic device: a couple of months ago, I started a casual experiment on looking at what kind of content I would conceivably read on my iPhone — I’ve got Classics, Stanza, and eReader installed amongst others for documents. I completely devoured “Pride and Prejudice” on the Classics app while on recent travels. Similarly, I am hooked on Hemingway using eReader. But when it came to some Dante, no amount of formatting adjustment could beat the experience of reading “The Inferno” in paper form — it’s hard to top my edition that has Italian on one side and English on a facing page. In any case, it has come to the point whereby if there’s a book I want, I’d search for it as an e-book first. Failing that, I would look into a paper version if it’s not available electronically.

My thinking so far is that stories that propel you forward will suck you in regardless of what you use to read them. It seems that poetry may not work so well on a small screen; my humble theory is that poetry needs whitespace to give weight to the words and help get the rhythm across. As for multilingual content — without more eloquent interface design — paper still wins. I’ve devoured blog posts, long articles, even academic papers on the iPhone without any trouble. As proponents of the e-book keep saying: it’s just great to be able to read anytime, anywhere — provided there’s electricity to keep our devices nicely charged.

(And if you are worried about children and critical thinking, have a listen to the Philosopher’s Zone podcast on Teaching Children to be Philosophers.
If our next generation can think and converse like this, the world may just turn out to be a better place. I’ll bet they use Facebook too. Who knows? There may well be book clubs appearing on Facebook before too long.)

The physical aspect of our surroundings is something that has become easier and easier to forget. When we operate in the digital, it’s not until that there’s a power outage that we remember there is value to physical commodity; the simple act of being able to switch on a light (or a network router) is what facilitates the vast amount of things that we do online.

The views Virginia elegantly expressed in A Room of One’s Own are typically summarised by her own words in the opening paragraphs:

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction [...]

While Virginia examines women and fiction, and barriers women have had to face to strive for equality in literature (amongst other things), I am sure I am not the first to extend this to the idea of being able to create in general, by anyone.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.

I must not have been long out of my teens when I read this essay, or perhaps, in my early twenties. Something about it has profoundly affected the way I saw the world and my place in it, yet it’s only recently that I realised how much literature shaped something quite as fundamental as how I go about my day job of getting people to work together.

We take for granted that our physical environment, the ability to know when the next meal comes from, are very things that free us to dream, therefore to create. But we also take for granted the shape of things that inspire us.

Over at More Intelligent Life, Megan Busker wrote about an exhibition of Woolf’s books and papers recently at the Grolier Club in New York.

This paragraph, in particular, caught my eye:

[...] During Woolf’s lifetime, the telephone had yet to eclipse letter-writing as the primary form of communication and e-mail hadn’t yet blanched such correspondence of its personal touches. Many of the items here are biographically richer than their contemporary equivalents. [...]

It makes me wonder, as we move on towards digital dreams — while I believe how the richness of books has served our present destinies would change and not die, and maybe something could be gained from the lack of flourish and drama — that we might not one day end up with a literary comparison of the post-modern and the baroque, and would look back one day in longing for cursive details and frivolous ornaments? What does this mean for how we will write?

I consider something to be a literary object when all aspects of production and editorial come together to form something that is entirely complete in execution. That is to say the typography, layouts, papers, binding, cover, size and any other miscellaneous aspects of the object itself have been carefully considered and chosen to form something whole and much greater than the text alone.

[...]

It’s nearly impossible, I’d propose, to achieve this idea of literary-object-ness unless you, as the author, have taken control of all aspects of production. (Or are able to work extremely closely with the designer.) You must be the author, editor, designer (or art director), typographer, and publisher. You, not the market, determine the price point. You build (indeed, perhaps with a dash of selfishness) the object you desire — the object you see fit to wrap the subject and text you’ve written.

From an artist’s perspective (and Craig is rightfully an artist), this is something the bookmaking industry should allow: the ability to create a book as a work of art, an object of high aesthetic quality. However, we have a mainstream industry built upon the hope of economic success of a precious few books, so the production process needs to be cheap in order to maximise profit per book sold. The ability to create a more intimately designed book therefore rests on the shoulders of small presses and independent publishing houses.

One of the things that has preoccupied me for some time: if we are becoming accustomed to consuming everything low-fi, does it perhaps mean that we would one day cease to be able to appreciate true richness when we see it? Does it mean we would eventually be unable to appreciate beauty in its myriad forms? If the future is e-books and digital formats — most of which, by the way, still exercise bad typography and layout — would humans be so “content-attuned” that we become unable to appreciate the sensory richness that a well-designed book provides?

Wild digressions aside, the book market is still driven by production in volumes, and this has an impact on what gets produced. Until we completely lose the habits that we formed from the roots of the industrial revolution, we may have to continually compromise.

Where I disagree with Craig is that the author should be be the one in control for the whole production of a book. As a web producer, an important part of my job is to recognise a variety of talents and how everyone can creatively and constructively contribute into the building of a website — which in itself is a craft and a half. In recognising that some people have talent in writing, poetry or photography, it’s essential to acknowledge that others have talent in making things look good. Very occasionally, someone would have the talent and ability to do everything. It would be sensible on all counts if an author has a say in the cover of his or her book (which is apparently not the status quo), but Craig might have to recognise that he’s speaking with a voice of rare talent that does not apply to all authors, nor all artists.