Form and Content

I'm off next week to the national AAUP conference, at which Paper Age oldsters stagger around like Jack Nicholson in "About Schmidt," trying to work through the life-negating death of print publishing that (inexplicably) they never saw coming. Last year everyone suffered through session after session of bad news, then went looking for a bar to get proper drunk in. Academic publishing is suffering more than trade, in some respects, because its main customers, academic libraries, are defecting from paper books at an even faster rate than retail consumers.

Five years ago academic libraries were willing to pay $120 each for your arcane little monographs. Sell even 1000 copies at that price and you are still making money. Now libraries only want your publications if they come in huge, discounted ebook packages from vendors like Elsevier, where you may earn as little as a few dollars a title. No wonder the publishers' long faces.

The iPad is not helping things. It provides such a great reading experience that, not only do libraries not want to buy paper, soon nobody will want to read it. Publishing is just starting to reinvent its content for tablets, and already the results are astonishing. Obviously graphic-rich publications (glossy mags) benefit hugely, but more surprising is that even longform, text-heavy publications can, too.

John Biggs just discussed this with respect to the New Yorker. Talk about graphically spare. It's the anti-Wired. But even so, the iPad version is a substantial improvement over the paper.

There are no graphical tricks, not too many multimedia events, and when there are, they’re great (one poetry reading by Sherman Alexie in the latest issue was amazing). And even the ads are unobtrusive and, dare I say it, beautiful in full living color. Everything about the iPad version is the same, yet strikingly different. This isn’t some rush-job given to a bunch of magazine designers who slap a little video in the corner of a horribly laid-out page. This is a full rethinking of the title and changes entirely how we consume long-form writing.

This leap to tablets is not just a design issue for publishers. It demands new forms of writing from authors. We'll start seeing more and more books like Al Gore's Our Choice, that simply "does things that no paper book ever could" (gushes Gizmodo). Designers like Craig Mod are completely rethinking what books without pages, designed for the "infinite content plane" of the iPad, should look like. On a multimedia device without any fixed content plane, or even the necessity of static content, do the monomedia codices of the Paper Age even make sense?

Reading habits change over time, always have, but the shift we are experiencing right now may be without parallel in its abruptness and rapidity. While the evidence is not unambiguous, I think longform has been in decline for some time, in part because the internet makes longform reading less necessary, or in many cases unnecessary, for informational purposes. (Thanks for that, Google.)  Certainly monographs are dying a slow death in academic publishing.

But writers have a bigger problem to worry about. They will increasingly, by themselves or collaboratively, be forced to become more than monomedia writers of words. The supplantation of books by multimedia tablets is already creating a new demand for rich content, even beyond the current demands of the internet. If hoary old standards like the New Yorker get that fact, this reality will very soon impose itself on even the most fusty Paper Age relics.

As print publishing dies, print writing will die with it. Words will still be words, and sentences sentences, but content will necessarily follow form. And the form of tablet publication is already so fantastic that even the internet looks dull and quaint beside it. Tablets must be recognized as new medium, and they are utterly irresistible.

First Thoughts on iPad + Ebooks

Work bought me a new 64gb iPad 2 (wi-fi only). Not really a bonus for finishing my dissertation, but it feels that way. Impressions? Like everyone says, it's just a big iPhone. If you are used to the iPhone/iTouch, it won't wow you. But it will still fill you with a slow, fizzy elation, if only from the undeniable fact that you are holding the future of reading in your hands.

This fact really hit me when I downloaded a copy of Wired magazine for the iPad. It incorporates innovative navigation and formatting, audio, video, and other rich content in a seamless and compelling way. You read a book review and then just hit a button to download a chapter from the book. A film review will have a stills gallery and trailer, etc. It sounds (duh) like the Web, but the tablet format and touch navigation make it much more compelling experience. It really is comparable to reading a book, but a super-book.

It's way beyond the Kindle. When Tani the Kindle User first saw my iPad, she had zero interest. Ten seconds into browsing Wired, she said, "Oh, I have to get one of these." The future of glossies, clearly, will be on color tablets.

The future of ebooks more generally will be on both color and e-ink tablets, it seems. E-ink readers will soon be cheap as chips, though already, even the Nook Color is just $250. And now that I am actually using a tablet, I confess that my love of analog books is a bit diminished. The ergonomics of tablet reading are great, I'm used to reading on screen (anymore, who isn't?), and the convenience is surprisingly compelling. It's increasing the amount of discretionary reading I do, which I would never have expected. (That may just be Shiny New Toy Syndrome. Time will tell.)

Yet another surprise: I'm seriously reconsidering the future of my physical book collection. I have a whole wall of my large study taken up with books I never read. Many I have never read once. I have hundreds more at work, in boxes, on other bookshelves, etc. A certain subset I own as a collector, and that segment I expect both to keep and to grow. But all those crumbling Baen and Del Rey paperbacks? As physical objects they give me little pleasure, and space is at a premium. Why keep them? Nostalgic commitment to print, even among print lovers, is evaporating before our eyes.

This is why we are using a very, very precious empty staff position
at my institute to hire a digital publishing specialist. We're rapidly
reaching the tipping point where if your publications are not pushed to
portable devices, you are severely limiting your readership. I've been asked to take a point position on the hire. This should be interesting.

Penguin Group Starts New "Writing Community"

Just saw this in a NYTimes article.* Writers have been forming collectives themselves for ages, but now a major press is doing it for them. For Penguin, clearly it is intended to be a low-cost bush league. Why spend the money to work through slush piles and coach developing writers when you can get others to do it for you?

*Tip of the day: If you run of out monthly free views for the New York Times, just start up an anonymous session on your Web browser. An anonymous session clears your cookie cache and resets your view counter.

Publisher Pays $2 Million to Remain Relevent

After Amanda Hocking sold one million copies of her ebooks, on her own, she decided to open up her work to traditional publishers, who fought a bidding war. St. Martin's Press "won," with a $2 million contract. NYT reports, "Publishers, weary of hearing about their disposability in an age when writers can self-publish their work on the Internet and sell it on Amazon.com, said they were vindicated by the news."

Vindicated? Er, right. A writer who doesn't need you is willing to let you pay her to work for her. Sure, you're both making money on this, but who works for whom?

No More Harper Lees

I was going to comment on Fweem's post on the dismal economics of book publishing, but then it led me to Nathan Bransford's blog, and to this post on self-publishing ebooks, based on this post by author Amanda Hocking. Read at least the Bransford post and comments. This is the future happening before our eyes.

The music industry had no idea that the iPod and iTunes signaled an apocalypse for their business, even if at the same time it was making them money. Publishers probably are not as naive, and would surely kill ebook readers if they could. But they can't, and while publishers are already reeling, they are barely beginning to feel the mighty contraction and redistribution that ebooks will cause to their industry.

Ebook readers turn every work of literature into a blog post, the perceived value of which is zero. Anyone can publish a blog post, and anyone can publish an ebook. Publishers can still provide editing and marketing for the author, and more invaluably, filters for readers. Readers will be willing to pay a certain amount for the benefit of these services. But when publishers are puzzled as to why readers undervalue the very costly business of publishing (my own business), which they love to explain, they need to look at Hocking, shut up, and get to work reinventing themselves around new paradigms.

When one hardworking, mid-grade author like Hocking can sell 450,000 copies of her ebook in one month, without a publisher, the publishers' business paradigm and grasp on the market has just been smashed. It shows that an author can do it all herself and succeed in a big way. Are they scared? Terrified. Hocking says modestly, "[N]o publisher is afraid of me. That's just silly. I'm one girl who wrote a couple books that are selling well. That doesn't scare them - they just want to be a part of it, the same way they want to be a part of any best seller."

If I were a for-profit publisher, I would only be publishing work by authors with established online/ebook audiences. An audience is an audience, and it is the only thing a book needs to succeed. While some authors still believe self-publishing is debasing, that's old thinking, and irrational. I can foresee a day when publishers will be loath to publish anyone who does not already have a digital reader base. Building that base clearly requires quantity, at least moderate quality, and relentless self-promotion. Any shy author with just one great book in them will probably never be heard above the din. I hate the fact that there will be no more Harper Lees, but you read it here first: There will be no more Harper Lees.

Kindle in the House

In an interesting turnabout, Tani has become the new technophile in our house. First she bought a new Zune HD, then a very swish new computer, and this past week she got herself a Kindle. As for me, I mostly listen to an old hand-me-down ipod nano, my computer is an ugly beige retro-tower from the 90s, and I'm buying and reading more old-fashioned tree-based books than I have for years.

And honestly, I don't want a Kindle. No interest at all. First, I'm no longer willing to pay just to read something. I read on the internet for free constantly. I read books at my university for free constantly. So I've become unwilling to pay for words just to read them. Words are so plentiful and cheap that I can no longer see in them any economic value. And in fact, there is almost nothing I could possibly purchase on the Kindle that I could not get for free by other means. I see Kindle book purchases as the buying of a convenience, and for a mere convenience, the price per unit is far too high.

My second issue with the Kindle is that I read from a screen continuously. I spend more time "interacting" with words on a screen than I do with human beings by a ratio of probably 10 to 1. That's a conservative guess, and I'm really not joking. And I regard it as a sterile and numbing activity, an activity demanded by necessity. If I could sustain employment and feed my interests through purely analog means, that would be my strong preference. But books are just too inefficient to fill most informational needs. I'm surrounded by several hundred books in my office all day every day, and rarely is one taken off the shelf. Internet resources have long surpassed their academic utility, and that makes me very sad.

My need for analog is one reason why I've been buying paper books lately. No surprise, mostly I buy and read books of photography or on photography. As I've written (here, here, here), the printing of photographic images has reached such a peak of high art that it can now approximate a photographic print. Viewing such books is an intensely aesthetic experience and, by extension, owning them feels like collecting art. It is collecting art, but very often at pulp paperback prices. I still don't know how, economically, one can buy a $50 coffee-table book, new in shrinkwrap, for $5. But it thrills me.

Most surprising to me is that I now find my experience of reading an analog book much more immersive than I ever remember it being. Maybe I've just forgotten, or maybe I'm at a different place in life. It's not just that I lose myself more completely in the book. I swear I feel a more intense connection to the content, the characters, the ideas than I do when reading on screen. Books and LCDs convey information equally well, but I find I have a relationship with print that I do not have with pixels.

Maybe I am just an analog man, but I think there is something more universal to it. There is an impressive revival in vinyl record sales, now at their highest point in 20 years. Even tape cassettes are coming back. Film photography is not only surviving, but is rebounding in some segments. Kodak even just released a new film emulsion. This is not being driven by oldsters, but youngsters, who are rediscovering the joy of analog. The limits of analog are seen as creative constraints and lovable idiosyncrasies. Analog's defects, often inherent in its materiality, also make it personable, something capable of being loved.

Producer and artist Brian Eno touched on the reason for this in an article some years ago in Wired. He is speaking specifically of artistic tools, but the principles here are more general:

With tools, we crave intimacy. This appetite for emotional resonance explains why users - when given a choice - prefer deep rapport over endless options. You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits it keeps becoming something else. . . .

This is the revenge of traditional media. Even the "weaknesses" or the limits of these tools become part of the vocabulary of culture. I'm thinking of such stuff as Marshall guitar amps and black-and-white film - what was once thought most undesirable about these tools became their cherished trademark.

Since so much of our experience is mediated in some way or another, we have deep sensitivities to the signatures of different media. Artists play with these sensitivities, digesting the new and shifting the old. In the end, the characteristic forms of a tool's or medium's distortion, of its weakness and limitations, become sources of emotional meaning and intimacy.

Although designers continue to dream of "transparency" - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with "personality." A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.

No Dead Tree Edition for OED3

I was told by a colleague that OUP is pulling the plug on print dictionaries, but this will even include their flagship, the Oxford English Dictionary. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year." So OED3 will probably not appear in print. Unless it is shown that iPads and Kindles cause brain cancer and print books make an unexpected comeback.

But Simon Winchester, renowned specialist on professors and madmen (great book), thinks that unlikely, and calls the online-only edition "prescient":

Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise.

The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed. I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them – I use the online OED five or six times daily. The same with many of my reference books – and soon with most.

Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities.

The Real Revolution: Addendum

I just came across a recent book on the history of photographic printing, Richard Benson's The Printed Picture (2008). It was produced in conjunction with an exhibit at MoMA in New York and reads something like an exhibition catalog. It covers the history of photographic processes and print reproduction briefly and in a non-technical way. It's thin on detail but good for a quick 10,000-foot view.

It was interesting to see how high quality printing of images has been possible for a long time through processes like photogravure and collotype. These are expensive and comparatively fussy processes that have been mostly supplanted (or entirely for collotype) by offset printing, even for high quality reproduction. And with good reason. Quality offset printing is really superb.

The main issue for most publications is, of course, cost. Producing great printing for $100 art books is one thing, but doing it for a $2 magazine is another. Two mass-market publications often praised for their printing quality are Arizona Highways and National Geographic. Arizona Highways prints at 175 lpi using standard offset color. It looks good for a $2 magazine, certainly, though what is a little surprising is that almost any well-produced magazine today looks equally good next to it.

Benson is unabashedly enthusiastic about offset printing, "my trade and my chief love." "Today," he says, "we are witnessing the peak of the process's development. . . . I think it will be around for quite a while yet." While a $2 offset-printed magazine can look quite good, Aperture and some other art-grade periodicals reveal that a $10 offset color journal can achieve near-photo-print quality.

National Geographic has long used 175 lpi (perhaps higher for some plates) six-color rotogravure rather than offset for its editorial well content. Gravure uses regular square cells etched to different depths, each cell being inked to a different depth to describe tones, rather than using dots of varying sizes like offset. This can produce images that look much more like photographic prints. Gravure was the high standard for photo printing in books and journals from the turn of the century though the 1960s. At its apogee, in the hands of the Swiss and French in the 50s and 60s, "the printing is among the very best ever done."

The superlative flat-plate gravure of these old photo books is long gone. National Geographic's modern web-press gravure process is, comparatively, a poor cousin, but at its best is still as good as you can get in a $2 magazine. This expensive process is only cost effective for them because they print six million copies of every issue. Ten years ago that was almost nine million, and with a shrinking subscriber base, it seems their print quality has dropped a bit, too. Issues from the 1990s used a slightly heavier stock and on average exhibited less streaking, skip dot and dirty scrape. Some people attribute this to a change of printer (Quad/Graphics) about ten years ago.

"Despite its complexity," says Benson,"in the end color printing turned out to be easier to do well than black and white." The reasons for this are bit complex and obscure, but basically, color printing "could be done badly and still look good. Even if the print was too heavy, or too light, or somewhat out of balance, the colors' interrelationships could still hold and the colors could be enticing, even if inaccurate. . . . But in black and white work, errors in weight and scale could remove whole areas of content, and tonal distortions could murder the picture."

Just as print starts to fade and ebooks begin to dominate, I find myself becoming increasingly compelled by fine printing. Fortunately, I believe the most aesthetic books with be the last to disappear. They are more than carriers of information and will long have an audience. And on the art side, printed books have never been more beautiful or inexpensive. Print may be tipping into decline, but in this same anxious moment, there has never been a better age for print book lovers.

One and a Half Benjamins

I blogged a couple weeks ago about self-publishing through POD services like Blurb. That's great if you want to sell your work on dead trees, but what about self-publishing ebooks? Self-publishing your ebook on Amazon or iBookstore is actually a bit difficult. They are set up to serve commercial publishers, not authors themselves (at least, yet), and formatting your book for ebook distribution require some know-how.

Fastpencil.com provides both print and ebook formatting and publishing services for authors at very reasonable prices. It will publish your ebook to all major platforms for $150, including "Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle, iPad, Sony eReaders, and the entire Ingram Network." Then they collect payments and send you the royalty check. On a typical $9.99 ebook, you earn $5.60 per copy. Sell just thirty copies, and you are well into the black. And ebook buyers are currently on a bit of a binge.

All you really need is an irresistible title, like the absurdly popular ebook, Sh*t My Dad Says. Its success is only made more absurd by being based on a lowbrow TV series starring William Shatner. Yes, that William Shatner.

Please, Please Pirate Me!

In 2002, tech publisher Tim O'Reilly published a controversial essay titled, "Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution." The clunky title does not do justice to its broad vision and insight into the future of publishing, of all media. Time is proving O'Reilly correct, and daring to practice what he preaches, he continues to flourish as a publisher. A recent speaker at AAUP reported that the consistent feedback from ebook users is: if you want our business, we want all our ebooks like O'Reilly ebooks (DRM-free pdfs). A room full of fearful publishers groaned.

I won't summarize all of O'Reilly's article. No point. It's essential reading, so just read it. He breaks down his argument into seven "lessons," but I'll single out just three highlights.

1. O'Reilly's first lesson is, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." There is a massive disparity in supply and demand for all creative work, and as I've noted before, this disparity is growing exponentially for books. This greatly dilutes their economic value. Even if you can get published, the vast majority of books fail to find readers and fail commercially. The flourishing of niche enthusiast communities online and the "long tail" serviced by omnibus sellers like Amazon has certainly been a boon for authors, "But even then, few books survive their first year or two in print. Empty the warehouses and you couldn't give many of them away." Authors and other creators who are not established should be primarily concerned with finding an audience. Once you have an audience, you can find a way to monetize your popularity. But as for the great mass of unknowns . . .

2. "For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say 'may' because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues." With respect to music, for example, another essayist says likewise, yes, you should be worried about piracy, if you are U2. Otherwise, this system of free and easy distribution only works for you. And anyway, the only way to stop it is to stop recording music.

3. I'll say it again. I believe you can always turn popularity into money. If you fail to do so, that is a market or marketing problem. O'Reilly highlights the basic market problem that is feeding "piracy" (a term he rejects for unauthorized online distribution). "The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price." The problem is that the pricing in old distribution models is not transferable to new distribution models. Traditional publishers are aggregators, publicists and printers who used to be necessary to connect content creators with an audience. Some of their services are still very necessary, but to remain economically viable at all will require for many self-reinvention.

The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.

As I've noted recently, when it comes to using socially traded content, free is not free. This is an O'Reilly principal (often repeated). People will cheerfully pay for you to give them the content they want, if you can provide it "at a fair price," meaning at lower cost than they can otherwise obtain it. Time and frustration are costly, and convenience, in aggregate, is worth a lot. That's why one of O'Reilly's seven lessons is, "'Free' is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service." The reason why so many paid services fail is less their cost than their poor implementation (limited selection, poor navigability and filtering, etc.) and unreasonable restrictions (limited format and quality choices, platform restrictions, DRM). iTunes has been a wild success compared to other music services because it's not in the music business at all. It's in the convenience business.

For unknown creators, particularly of fungible works like fiction, the great takeway from this is that, yes, the free and easy distribution of your work should be a concern. Not as something to prevent, but to promote, by every means available to you.

Pirates, Hoarders, Saviors of Culture?

This post by David Pogue is not interesting for David Pogue (who I rarely find interesting), but for the letter it reproduces, the issue it raises, and some of the 300+ comments it has generated. The fundamental issue it raises concerns those (many, MANY) people who are engaged in scanning and trading print materials in the same way millions do music and movies. The particular subject here is sheet music, but it could be anything ever put into print. I've been involved with this professionally for some time, for example, in creating a digital library for Syriac scholars. For this project we only included out-of-copyright materials, but informally scholars trade copyrighted research materials on a massive scale, just like these music traders. With equal excitement and glee, and a similar lack of compunction.

Academic swapping and hoarding of copyrighted material is called research and is protected in some measure, ostensibly, by fair-use laws. These laws exist to facilitate research and creative work. There is no possible way any scholar could purchase all research materials used. But no scholar was ever sued or even called a pirate for photocopying (now, scanning) an article or monograph, because you can't produce more articles and monographs without doing this. Copyright law was always meant to curb commercial exploitation of another's creative work, not to prevent the use of that work in creating new work, whether artistic or scientific.

Also, I'm not sure copyright law was originally intended to curb the profitless enjoyment of creative work without payment to the copyright holder, who so very often is not even the creator, but rather a commercial exploiter of creators. But I'm no legal scholar and that's another topic.

When a pianist, as in this article, collects all the significant piano music ever published, pops it on a thumbdrive, and gives it away to other pianists, I have a hard time seeing any difference between that pianist and most scholars. Probably, true enough, this is sowing some seeds of destruction, but it also contains the seeds of creation. And I don't know why doing this is fair-use if you work at a university but piracy if you, well, work for a living. But of course, if academics ran the world, we'd replace copyright with open access on day one, or at least some generous implementation of Creative Commons licensing.

I see this as principally an economic problem, as many commenters to this article pointed out. People with more time than money will always trade and hoard, but put all this sheet music in a database and charge $10/mo for access, and much of this activity would stop. The people who did not stop are mostly people who would not buy your stuff anyway (i.e., the teenager in the article). This is just the market's way of saying that prices are too high and selection too limited. If your time is worth anything, this traded music is not free. People spend years collecting this stuff, at a very high effective cost. It's just cheaper than the alternative, and for many rare or out-of-print works, the only alternative. As one commenter observed:

This is actually quite an interesting economic phenomenon. The fact that people illegally acquire content that is copyrighted shows the imperfect market. We, as consumers, don't always find the suppliers we want. As an example, in my town I cannot buy bok choi in the supermarket. I'd have to drive really far away to get it. I don't have the option of "stealing" it in any way that is easier. The internet allows this, though, and it's something classical economics hasn't thought about much: Stealing as a means of overcoming the imperfect market system.

First Trip to iBooks

So, I load up iBooks for the first time and find that three of the top ten paid books are by Mormons, two by Stephenie Meyer and one by Glenn Beck (a novel, ghostwritten). I've puzzled on this before. Mormons seem to have a disproportionate presence in politics, popular fiction, and multilevel marketing companies. In all those areas we are consistently an embarrassment. Can someone decode this for me?

Apple is reported to have added 30,000 free titles from Project Gutenberg. Searching for "Gutenberg" will get you to quite a few. But trying Treasure Island out on the iBook reader, it doesn't impress me. There are basically no configuration options. Parts of the copy of I downloaded do not scale to portrait orientation, so you have read it landscape, ten lines at a time. When you change orientation, the iBook reader takes a five full seconds to respond. The book has plates, but again, they only display landscape and are a bit scrambled. Etc., etc. Stanza beats this reader to pieces. Color me unimpressed.

Self-publishing Blurb

There are at least four threats that academic publishers, mostly in common with traditional publishers, are facing. The first is, naturally, the internet, which allows anyone to publish anything to everyone for free. The second is a decline in academic library purchasing and changing acquisition strategies, described partly in my previous post. The third is open access initiatives and university archival repositories, which are initiatives to make published research publicly accessible and (in cases) keep it under the control of sponsoring bodies. Universities are sick of having to, e.g., pay $10,000 a year to subscribe to a single scientific journal so that students can access the work their own faculty have published in it. They want to quit giving their intellectual property away.

Finally, there is the unstoppable tidal wave of self-publishing. Laura Cerruti of UC Press threw out this terrifying statistic. In 2009, 288,355 titles were published by US publishers, but an additional 764,488 titles were self- or micro-published. From other statistics I could quickly find, this is apparently about a 270% increase over 2008 totals, which had increased 132% over 2007. In 2007 traditional publishers were still publishing most books. In 2009 they were fighting to retain 25% of exploding booklists. UC Press is themselves shifting their resources into assisting (on a contract basis) UC units in self-publishing their research. That's clearly where the action is.

The gamechanger here is the plummeting cost and rising quality of print on demand (POD), which revolves around self-contained printing/binding machines that can produce bound books on a per copy basis very cheaply. The U of U's Marriott Library has one and are rapidly moving to the point where students can use ebooks online and, if they want a print copy to use, just hit a "Buy" link, type in their account code, then walk down to the Espresso POD machine and pick up it up. The library will add books to their own print collection in the same way.

Traditionally POD books are ugly and cheap paperbacks, the product of a fancy copy machine, but there are commercial-grade POD presses that can produce high-quality hardbounds. In fact, many commercial presses are moving to POD-only printing (most everyone will eventually), since it eliminates too-large press runs and warehousing. Third-party services will proxy for individuals wanting this same quality for their personal publications. The cost is shockingly low.

I read an article today on one such service specializing in full-color art and photography books, Blurb. Per unit prices for 7x7 color start at $12.95. They provide tools for online promotion of your title and a bookstore to sell it in. The quality is 100% commercial grade. Of course, editing and design is up to you, but all profits from sales are yours, too. Services like this are why self-publishing is going through the roof, and publishers are very, very worried.

The Ebook Revolution in the Academy

I just attended the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) conference in Salt Lake City. I've seen the future. Print is declining and, at least in academic publishing, is about to fall off a cliff. University libraries are moving to e-books as quickly as possible, for two main reasons:

1. Ebooks never go out of print, so there is no reason to buy them purely against future need, as has been the case with print titles. Since about half of all library books are never used (really, zero usages, ever), that represents enormous cost savings. For the University of Arizona, for example, buying only titles that researchers actually used would mean saving about $20 million over ten years.

So U of A and most other schools are revamping their acquisitions to be patron driven. For example, in one system, if a library patron wants to use an ebook, they click on a link and it is rented to the library by a vendor. After three or four usages (rentals), the ebook is automatically purchased. Libraries are willing to pay higher than print cost for ebooks if they are actually used, and with the upside that they quit purchasing books that are unused.

But in fact, ebooks are generally much cheaper than print titles, since they are often purchased in large bundles for just 25 or even 10 cents on the dollar of print cost (and needing a fraction of the conservation and storage costs). And with library budgets being slashed, print books are seen increasingly as a nostalgic luxury.

2. Users now expect instant (= digital) access to information. The current generation of students, so-called “digital natives,” have ceased to regard libraries as repositories of information, and are as comfortable reading books digitally as in print. And since digital is more convenient, use of print materials is dropping. Print is therefore both more costly and less used.

Protests that paper books are preferable to ebooks are not borne out by usage rates. At Univ. of Chicago, they have tracked usage rates for titles held in the collection in both paper and digital formats. The print titles average .43 circulations per year, and 3.81 circulations over their lifetime in the collection. The very same titles in electronic format averaged 17 uses per title per year. That’s 34 times the usage rate for digital items over their identical paper counterparts.

Even when digital collections are purchased as large packages, usage of the entire package per year is consistently over 80% (i.e., only 20% of titles are not used at all per year). However, usage of print materials in collections is a fraction of that and falling. Circulation rates of printed books per student have fallen by half in the last 15 years, and are accelerating. Presently, 75% of all library print materials are used just 0-1 times per decade; 47% are never used at all. And again, these printed book usage rates are falling at an accelerating rate.

What many of us who are older utterly fail to appreciate is that the rising generation has no preference at all for print over electronic reading. In fact, just the opposite. We duffers who extol the tangible aesthetics of print over cold and soulless digital are like the ancient scribes who carped that scrolls were far preferable to those newfangled codices (i.e., books). Parchment better than paper. Elegant scribal handwriting over ugly movable type. Really.

As a press director from MIT said, “What is amazing is the generation gap between people who are 30 and people who are 23.” This is why print is dying; younger readers do not like it. The overwhelming and rising demand from students and scholars generally is for e-pubs that are supported on multiple platforms, DRM-free, and available off-line. Think iPads, iPhones and Kindles. If you snooze on this, you lose basically everyone under 30 as your readers. Again, academic ebook sales are growing 300% a year and rising, while print book sales are stagnant or falling.

This is not just terrible news for print book lovers, but much more so for publishers. They were stumbling out of conference sessions to the nearest bars. They, too, have seen the future.

Orwellian Irony

The latest Kindle-bad/books-good story, reported by the NYTimes, is satisfying on soooo many levels. I won't spoil it with a rehash. Just read it and then go curl up with your own dog-eared paper copy of 1984 from high school.

Kindle's DRM Hell

After a rosy post on Kindle the other day, I then came across disappointing news on my new favorite geek site, Gizmodo. Turns out that there is no clear and uniform policy for how many times a user can download a Kindle book to various Kindle-capable devices. Every book has different DRM restrications and even technical support cannot tell a purchaser what exactly the download limit is for a particular title. This is literally locking users out of their books permanently, as they use Kindle software on their iPhones and Touches, migrate to new Kindles, etc. Here is a first person account from someone locked out of their books who called Amazon customer service for help:

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device”.

“Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren’t currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again. . . .

It gets worse.

I asked the customer representative where this information was available and he told me that it’s in the fine print of the legalese agreement documentation. “It’s not right that they are in bold print when you buy a book?” I asked. “No, I don’t believe so. You can have to look for it.”

We’re not done-it gets even worse.

“How [do] I find out how many times I can download any given book?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t think you can. That’s entirely up to the publisher and I don’t think we always know.”

I pressed — “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say ‘this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”

Here is the major problem with this scenario.

First, it’s not clear that this is the policy.

Second, there’s no way to find out in advance how many times a book is able to be downloaded. You can buy a book and it can be downloaded numerous times or you can buy a book and only then discover that it can be downloaded only once. (The rep even put it this way!) There is no way to know.

In the meantime, Amazon wants us to upgrade our Kindles every year or two. Apple wants us to upgrade our iPhone or iPod touch every year or two. This means that although the books remain in your Kindle library online you may not be able to download them once you upgrade your hardware. And there is no way to know — at least according to what the customer service rep told me.

Update: This poor Kindler is still trying to clarify with Amazon what has happened to all his books, and it's becoming obvious they really don't have their act together. Courtesy of a rant by Mr. Fweem.

Books Not Blogs

So, what are you still doing here?

Kindle: Verb or Noun?

I could be writing another "death of books" post, because I have seen it again today. But I won't.

Ok, maybe I will, just a little. The BYU library has just been chosen as an Internet Archive partner, which means it now has an IA book scanner that will be relentlessly turning out-of-copyright and uncopyrighted works in the BYU collection into pixels. The library has reversed their conservation policy. It used to be that virtually no book would be deaccessioned unless it turned to dust. Now old and brittle books will be scanned dirrectly into the Internet Archive and then discarded. This is but the tip of the iceberg in terms academic libraries becoming data centers. But enough of that.

I was told earlier today that there is also "a pilot project by the library to use kindles for faculty inter-library loan." This is the first I have seen "kindle" used as a generic noun for books delivered in Kindle format.

And then later today I read a great article that observed, "Amazon cares less about our choice of screen than our choice of store. Amazon wants Kindle to be a verb, not a noun, as in 'I Kindled that book,' which could mean that I read it on a smartphone, computer, or dedicated electronic-book device."

This is certainly true. Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, just explicitly stated that Amazon sees their Kindle device and Kindle ebook business as two separate enterprises. Kindle book sales have skyrocketed. 35% of titles sold which are available in both print and Kindle formats are sold as "kindles."

Even more interesting, Bezos also recently said, "We see that when people buy a Kindle, they actually continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle. And then incrementally, they buy about 1.6 to 1.7 electronic books, Kindle books, for every physical book that they buy."

The article I mentioned above discusses our increasing consumption of books in multiple formats, or at least profiles one person's experience. These multiple formats–print, Kindle, iPhone, audio–are not really competing. Many of us, as did the author, may find ourselves increasingly consuming books across multiple media at the same time. Amazon is already selling Kindle/print bundles, and has enabled Kindle purchases to be available simultaneously on the iPhone. And the new Kindle DX can read those books aloud to you (if you can stand the robovoice and the feature withstands the lawsuits).

I predict proper 4-in-1 bundles are next, perhaps with synchronization of Kindle/iPhone bookmarks with iPhone audio books, and vice-versa. This isn't the end of dead-tree books, but soon I expect most of us will also be kindling kindles along with our books.

Comic Books: All Grown Up (Part 3)

Of course, comic popularity is even bigger in movies than in print. Badly-animated children's cartoons and silly live-action TV series have given way to Hollywood blockbusters, and even to independent hits like American Splendor. It began with Superman (1978) and then Batman (1989), a decade later, but now with the massive success of the Spider-Man and X-Men movie franchises, comic-based movies are coming fast and thick. As many as came out in 2008, this year looks to be even more so the Year of the Comic Book Movie.

Naturally this is giving print comic popularity a bump, and at the same time, digital comic collecting has taken off. Comic enthusiasts began a number of years a go to scan their old comics into pdfs and share them with fellow fans on internet forums and newsgroups. The more ethical groups impose a moratorium on trading files of comics less than one year old. No one wants to hurt the publishers. But the publishers have been curiously slow to capitalize on this interest in digital copies of their back-issues.

But I predict that will change very soon, thanks to the iPhone/Touch. You can now purchase digital comic reader software for the iPhone/Touch (ComicZeal) that is specifically designed to read the most popular formats for scanned comics. The interface is a little rough (it is fairly new), but it works very well. And, the software publisher also has out-of-copyright comics available for download.

The major publishers will certainly make paid content available on iTunes sooner or later, and iVerse is leading the way with the backing of a number of smaller independents. The idea of iPhone comics has been dissed. The content problem (lack and cost thereof) can be solved, but there is not much to do about the small screen size. For me the Touch screen is just big enough, but just barely.

The majors (DC and Marvel) are already testing the waters with different comic-based products, in particular with voice-over narrated, semi-animated comics which Marvel calls In-Motion or simply motion comics. These are based on print comics and have some big talent behind them, like Joss Whedon. Most ambitiously, a 12-episode motion version of The Watchmen was published on iTunes, as well as on DVD and Blu-Ray. Unfortunately, at $20 on iTunes, the price is simply obscene.

But motion comics are really minimalist cartoons, not comics. Since a lot of enthusiasts are already trading scanned comics, and loading them on their iPhones/Touchs, the major publishers will not be long in getting their content up. In fact, Marvel has a digital comics subscription service, but they need more content, especially at $60 a year. And it's not available through iTunes. But it'll happen.

Comic Books: All Grown Up (Part 2)

Comics have had some big ups and downs. I became a fan as a kid during (for me, at least) the golden age of "kid comics," the 70s and early 80s. (Collectors call it the Bronze Age, the Golden Age being the 30s and 40s.) While most of today's best-known superheroes and franchises were created in the 1960s or even earlier, their popularity was huge in the 70s. Comics could still be purchased new in any corner store and used at any bookstore. I spent countless hours digging through old stacks at the local Bookworm paperback exchange (there were no comic shops then). It was cheap and easy to collect complete sets spanning years. They were our video games.

In the late 80s and 90s, three important things happened. First, comic collecting turned serious, driving up prices and spurring publishers to put out a lot more product, which bloated the franchises and inevitably lowered the quality. Comic collecting became expensive, pricing kids out.

This may have contributed to the second change: most readers came to be older teens or adults, and the content came to reflect that. While the majors (DC and Marvel) submitted to the Comics Code Authority (a censoring body), mature-content independents came out of the underground and started grabbing market share. So the majors started non-Code subsidiary imprints, which have become very popular. Marvel withdrew from the CCA entirely in 2001, starting their own code.

Finally, I think comic art became stylistically homogenized in the 90s under the influence of superstar artists Todd McFarlane (Spawn), Jim Lee, and other manga-influenced artists and works popularized by creator-owned Image Comics. This was after my time, but I hate the "Image look," and I think it turned off a lot of fans.

And then collector prices collapsed, after pricing younger readers out of collecting. Demand fell off a cliff. Marvel was pushed into bankruptcy. Comics entered the new millennium with greatly diminished fortunes.

Now, however, comics are bouncing back, changed and much improved. First, the writing is very good. Literary talents like Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller and Alan Moore have pushed the writing to a new level. All three authors have had a number of their works made or optioned as movies.

At the same time, comic art has now greatly diversified in style and is of the highest quality. The introduction of computerized colorizing and much improved printing has eradicated those awful, coarse half-tone colors that only look good in a Lichtenstein painting. In fact, just in the last five or so years, the art quality of comics/graphic novels has become stunning. The art has caught up with the writing. When asked when the heyday of comics was, one collector recently replied, "Right now!"

Max Collins' gritty Road to Perdition is a 304 page graphic novel that was made into a major film starring Tom Hanks. Time Magazine praised the original: "[It] has more to recommend it than just the source material for the movie. It turns out to be a neglected work of smart, tense, hard-boiled crime comix."

(continued)