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Open Publishing: The Net and the E-book
from the the-problem-isn't-the-book-stupid dept.
"It's a fundamental shift in the paradigm of publishing," Claire Zion, editorial director of Time Warner's electronic publishing division, recently told USA Today. "We're no longer dictators of taste; we are listening to what readers want." And Bill Gates is just trying to encourage innovation.
The idea that corporations like Viacom, Bertelsmann, or the nascent AOL/Time-Warner, have suddenly relinquished their vast cultural power and gone populist is a joke, of course. Companies that size, with their zillion-dollar firms run by zillion-dollar CEO's and global boards of directors, aren't in the business of letting Martha and Harry in Sioux City dictate taste. They're in the business of synergistic mass-marketing, which sometimes involves having to appear forward-looking, techno-savvy and interactive.
But interactivity isn't a remote possibility for companies like Bertelsmann's Random House (my book publisher) and Viacom's Simon & Schuster. Their very natures -- the closed doors, the semi-monopolistic clout, the power flowing down from the top -- are antithetical to interactivity. You'll know they are really changing when they tell us as much about them as they know about us. Interactivity isn't about distributional formats anyway. It's about content.
It's worth noting that the people screaming loudest for e-books tend to be 50-year-old publishing executives. Computer geeks have been reading comic books, gaming manuals and sci-fi stories since they could walk. It's a myth that younger consumers don't like books. But the Net generation does have a particular creative sensibility that is profoundly interactive.
The writer/artist/creator reflects the radical restructuring of storytelling that's characteristic of cyberspace, creating a different kind of relationship with the reader. Kids don't think of this in literary terms, but they know it when they see it.
Consider Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Or Mark Z. Danielewski's amazing House of Leaves, first published in bits and pieces on the Net. Both are being devoured by kids on college campuses. And both are powerful examples of how interactivity is a cultural and creative idea that depends on its audience for authenticity. It's not a simple matter of distribution. These books do indeed mark a paradigm shift, because they show how interactivity affects content.
Egger's novel plays with reality on every page. It pulls back the curtain on the business of writing and publishing itself, exposing hype, challenging standard literary conventions like prologues and epilogues, even traditional narrative itself. At one point in the story, Eggers auditions for MTV's "The Real World." He recounts an astonishing inteview with one of its producers about the death of his parents. Midway through this account, though, Eggers startles the reader by declaring that the interview, which contains some of the best and most revealing writing in the book, never occurred. Then he goes on with it.
In a way, science fiction comes to mind -- William Gibson, for instance, has created a mutant breed of sci-fi that mixes surrealism and pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Cyberspace has bred a chaotic new kind of technological creativity. Gibson's own characters connect with an abstract geometry of data, risking life and safety to plumb the depths of data and perspective.
So House of Leaves is an interactive novel because it reinvents the stuffy format of the novel, injecting an informal, risk-taking approach that is one of the hallmarks of younger consumers raised on interactive technologies. It's the way they see the world, the way it often appears as the result of traveling the Web via e-mail, messaging, browsing and gaming.
And House of Leaves provides other radical demonstrations of how creative interactivity works. A scary, disjointed, and truly brilliant novel, it was born on the Net in some of its original incarnations and is also popular in its paperback -- yes, paper, not e-mail -- edition. It too is intensely interactive in blasting away the conventional structure of the novel. House of Leaves is neatly blends the kind of first-person horror of The Blair Witch Project and the techno nightmare of movies like The Fly.
Hopscotching back and forth in time, it invokes Gibson's Neuromancer and his disjointed and disconnected notions about actual and virtual realities. House of Leaves changes typefaces, relies on footnotes, prints pages in chunks and upside down, uses a variety of voices, styles and formats. Yet, amazingly, a coherent and genuinely disturbing story emerges. This might turn out to be one of the important fictional works inspired by the Net and its culture.
"Dutch," biographer Edmund Morris' controversial best-selling biography of Ronald Reagan, also qualifies as interactive, albeit in a different way. Morris invented a fictional character to help him explain and enliven the life of a dull and inarticulate leader, a move which outraged traditional publishers, biographers and critics. But the device worked very well.
Creative interactivity isn't just about playing with narrative and structure, challenging convention. Mostly, it reflects the particular technological and cultural sensibilities of younger people raised in cyberspace, the terrority Gibson has written about. Traditional corporate publishing by conglomerates whose dictators strive not for innovation but for mass market acceptance and profit margins, and whose business and editorial decisions are conducted like CIA operations, isn't in a good position to reach these new markets.
Will electronic books replace their physical counterparts, one of the world's most efficient and enduring technological innovations? Not soon, not likely. An e-book can be a viable alternative in some cases, though -- some e-books might even make money.The real significance of Napster appears completely lost on publishing executives, however. File-sharing is what the Net was made for, but is it really what publishers want: readers passing their e-books around for free on file-sharing sites? Probably not. But by taking a middle way -- in which publishers give consumers a say in titles, book purchases and pricing -- they'd end up publishing a lot more writers like Eggers and ultimately sell a lot more books. Don't hold your breath.
Re:As a Rocket eBook Owner... (Score:3)
This is exactly the problem. Why would I pay $24.95 for the new Tom Clancy novel in e-book format, when for 4 more dollars I can have a nice hardcover edition that I can read, re-read, pass on to my father, and read again, no matter what the state of the batteries in a laptop or whatever?
Last time I checked the book publishers hadn't been able to make it illegal to pass a book over to a friend to read after you're done with it. There's no convenient way to do this electronically, and my father won't be buying a e-book reader of any flavor anytime soon.
Publishers don't yet seem to realize how important a friend's recommendation is.
And this is especially true in books, where there is little that can make a book stand out amongst the thousands of titles that come out every year. I can't tell you how many books I've bought because a friend gave me a book and said "You've got to read this!". For every time that has happened, I've usually bought at least one more book by that author, and often I have even purchased the original book to have my own copy.
I've bought 4 complete sets of the Lord of the Rings books in my lifetime. I gave a friend one, read one into pieces, and bought a new set that was just a nicer edition than the one I had. I don't see myself buying an ebook more than once because they've 'printed' it on a nicer CD or whatever...
I will.. (Score:3)
...eventually. I promise to die one day.
As a Rocket eBook Owner... (Score:3)
I sorta like it. I find it convenient to download freely available texts (like OS documentation or really old fiction) in HTML form, and stick it on the eBook to read at my convenience later.
However, I don't use it at all for it's intended purpose. I've never purchased any books for it. I find the idea sorta annoying that if I download a book, it's tied to a specific reader. I know that if my book is damaged, it is possible to re-register all my purchased books onto another reader. But that sounds like a hassle. Not very convenient.
I understand the desire of copyright holders to try to earn money on sales. But the new electronic formats aren't convenient. I can't loan a book to a friend, unless I loan that friend my reader too. But then I can't read anything! Ugh. Very annoying. It also doesn't help that the e-book prices are about the same as the paper books.
I have no idea how these e-books are going to work in a library. The readers are over $100 each, so you can't afford one for each separate book.
Publishers don't yet seem to realize how important a friend's recommendation is. Often being able to sample a piece (music, literature, etc.) will lead to future sales. In the end, I think they'll just be hurting themselves sales-wise, and hurting the rest of us by reducing the average quality of literature easily available to the general public.
Electronic Publishing (Score:3)
However, to start with I don't think such backward thinking technologies as "glassbook" and its equivilent will make it. I just don't see paying my money to d/l a book that I can't copy, search, or whatnot, except through a canned interface. And no doubt these "ebooks" will only work on Windows, at least at first.
However, simple self publishing in HTML or PDF is a great tool for writers. Will they be able to make money from it through "tip jars" or whatnot. Maybe.
A more interesting technology, however, is print-on-demand. I've bought one such book so far, and while the print quality lags behind conventional publishing, it is on par with a good laser printer, and certainly quite readable. The thing about print-on-demand is that eventually every neighborhood bookstore and printshop could have the equipment on site. That means you walk into your local bookstore, pick what you want from their catalogue, and they zip you one out that afternoon. No doubt you could preorder online and pick it up the next day. I think this technology, backed by some smart online retailers, could break the conglomerate hold on publishing, and really get the little guy into the game. A good search engine could support millions of titles on as many subjects, and it would cost little to maintain the manuscripts electronicly, and you still get a real honest-to-goodness book for the price of your purchase.
For myself as the consumer, that is the model of electronic publishing I most hope will succeed.
e-Katz? (Score:3)
On topic (maybe) : I wonder how Katz would react if he saw all his books in multi-formats being spread around on the internet. A few web sites here and there, with catch phrases like: Why buy the book? Get it here for free!
He'd either have to become a hypocrite and defend his copyrights by going against the site, or maybe he'd use his own new catchphrase: Most copied & plagarized Author: John Katz!
It would be interesting to see.
Rader
Re:Two points... (Score:3)
Well, then it wouldn't really be a book any more would it? It would be something completely different. One of the best things about books is that no one is telling you what the characters look or sound like. You build your own mental image of the characters based on the descriptions and your own impressions. That would be ruined by the introduction of graphics to the format. You would then have a Graphical Novel, which is a totally different beast.
Kintanon
the real issues (Score:3)
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All generalizations are false.
What is open publishing???? (Score:3)
I would have thought that Open Publishing would be having groups of people working on a book, a little bit beyond the unleashed books (Linux Unleashed, OS/2 Unleashed.....).
Bruce Eckel [bruceeckel.com] has been doing this for a while with his Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++ books.
Not only that they are on-line, but he takes input from others.
Two points... (Score:3)
How to make a sig
without having an idea
Members of the NSA are people too! (Score:3)
And Katz, if you choose to criticize the NSA any further, we may choose to release some photos the readers (and your employers) may find very interesting.
The NSA: Keeping you in the dark for your own good.
-David
Value added (Score:4)
Which is why adding value to the product is an important concept.
I'd personally like to see a model where the text of books are deliberately given to file-sharing sites and their kin, while the physical, printed version has some extra that isn't available in the free version. This can be a number of things, such as interior art, extra content (like a related short story) or some other bonus. Even aside from that, there is a tangible quality to reading a printed book, a mystique, shall we say, that e-books will likely never reproduce, and is undoubtedly a marketable quality that should not be forgotten.
These aren't new ideas; just a new format (Score:4)
We're no longer dictators of taste; we are listening to what readers want
I am a reader. I want books that are written on paper, so that I can read them in a well-lit room for 12 straight hours and not completely destroy my eyes. I want books I can carry anywhere, and curl up with, and accidently leave on a bus. I want books that when I purchase them, they are mine to read and enjoy and loan out and hoard.
Books published in pieces are not a new idea. They're an old Victorian idea. Dickens wrote his novels in serial. It's neither a better nor worse idea then books as we have them now -- it's merely different.
Novels that play with reality are not a new idea. It's know as post-modernism. Read something by Jorje Borjes, and you'll see the same "cyber-concept" written long before computers where prevelant.
I've never been an Anti-Katz poster, but JonKatz, please check your literary history before writing about all these new ideas. These are old ideas. It's only a new distribution.
I am, among other things, an English Major. As far as I'm concerned, books have always had creative interaction between reader and writer. The writer puts in something, the reader takes out something.
The only new twist that the internet adds to this is that it's easier to communicate with the writer about the writing. Or you could contribute to the progress of a story by commenting on the writing if the writer publishes in bits. But through magazines and other literary forums, you've ALWAYS been able to do this. The internet provides easier access to do so. I'm not even convinced that allowing the connected masses to contribute to a story will really improve the quality of the writing.
This isn't some revolutionary cyber-writing change. Writing continues to evolve as it always has. Revolutionary changes -- like the creation of a new genre with Gibson's Neuromancer -- happen infrequently. The eBook is not one these changes.
Project Gutenberg and TEI are doing it "right" (Score:5)
Most of the current Ebooks rely on broken structure models designed to exclude unwanted users.
Yes, most of the stuff on Gutenberg is certainly not bestseller material, but they are the trailblazer when it comes to making texts truly open and available.
All a matter of classification (Score:5)
-- ShadyG