Baldur Bjarnason

Why does it matter?

2013-05-09T16:00:00-07:00

Last week I wrote a blog post where I outlined some of the reasons why I think ebooks aren’t a disruptive innovation.

Latched onto that argument was the observation that despite all of the changes the publishing industry has seen over the past few years the actual shape of the market hasn’t changed that much.

Amazon was the dominant force in the market before ebooks. Indigo, Kobo’s former parent company was a dominant force in Canadian book retail. Barnes & Noble were number two after Amazon in book retail.

We’ve lost Borders but the new top dogs are very much industry incumbents that predate the arrival of the Kindle. They are not scrappy disruptive startups.

Now, one of the major counterarguments to my spiel is that the industry has actually changed a lot and that change was caused by ebooks. The most eloquent of these counterarguments was made by Eoin Purcell

It’s a great question and he supports it well, but I think he’s wrong in his assessment for a number of reasons. Firstly his premise is mistaken, ebooks are not the disruption, merely the manifestation of the disruption (of which more below) and secondly even if we are to accept his categorization of ebooks as the disruption/sustaining innovation, he misses a key point about the nature of the trade publishing industry that undermines his argument.

He makes a lot of good points and you should definitely go read it before you read further.

I actually agree with a lot of what Eoin is saying. The points he makes are quite good. And I do agree with him that booksellers are being disrupted by ebooks which in turn is making a hash out of many major publishers (mainly mid-sized publishers, as I understand it, the big ones and the small ones are, as recent industry numbers demonstrate, doing all right).

That still doesn’t mean I was wrong in my earlier post. If you think that, then the fault is mine for not explaining myself properly.

So, how can I both agree with his major point and still claim that my earlier points were right?

Easy.

By being a pedant (if X doesn’t have the characteristics associated with group Y then X is unlikely to be a member of group Y) and…
Because the timeline of events is wrong.

First, my pedantry.

A disruptive innovation has a very specific set of characteristics as described by Clayton Christensen (I quoted bits of his explanation on this in my earlier post).

The reason why it has these characteristics has to do with how he discovered the phenomenon in the first place. Namely, these were changes in the market that not only did not take the incumbents by surprise but were often often first invented by the incumbents themselves. These companies then, for sound business reasons, decided not to develop these innovations, letting smaller startups build on them and grow in such a way that those startups often ended up replacing the incumbent.

These were well-run companies, managed by competent, experienced, and smart people, with plenty of capital, and they still got rumbled by this new thing, a thing they had often first invented themselves, no less.

For this to happen the disruptive innovation had to have characteristics that let it fly under the radar of the incumbent corporations and let the startup grow and develop without interference. Which is what Clayton Christensen discovered.

The specific characteristics of disruptive innovations are exactly what caused them to disrupt a well-run, well-capitalised, and healthy competitor. If a new product in the market doesn’t have these characteristics then it isn’t a disruptive innovation as defined.

I argued in my earlier post that ebooks have very few of these specific characteristics (read the post for details) and so they must be something else. I argued that they fit Clayton Christensen’s other type of innovation, a sustaining one, much better. Ebooks were developed by a major incumbent to further its core business, which is basically how Christensen defines a sustaining innovation. (No matter how loudly people shout, Amazon was a dominant force in the publishing industry before it released the Kindle. They are and were then the very definition of a publishing industry incumbent. It’s been years and years since it was a scrappy startup.)

Despite all of the above, ebooks can still be disruptive and, as Eoin argues, they probably are.

I’m going to repeat myself, so pay attention:

The specific characteristics of disruptive innovations are exactly what caused them to disrupt a well-run, well-capitalised, and healthy competitor.

If ebooks, which aren’t a disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, are disrupting incumbent businesses then we’ve either discovered a completely new type of disruptive innovation (unlikely) or these companies weren’t well-run, well-capitalised, or healthy before ebooks came onto the scene.

Given the state that booksellers were in before ebooks arrived, I think there’s a strong case to be made that they were very unhealthy businesses.

The timeline of bookseller crises worldwide doesn’t fit the thesis that the crises are caused by ebooks. They may well be exacerbated by ebooks, but ebooks are more playing the role of the pneumonia virus killing an AIDS patient than they are a lethal pathogen on their own.

For example, throughout the 2000s, booksellers (in fact, the entire offline retail sector) have been facing problems in many countries. Borders UK collapsed in 2009 but Amazon didn’t launch the Kindle UK store until mid–2010. Ebooks simply didn’t have enough of a presence in the UK for them to be the cause of the crises Borders, Blackwell, and Waterstone’s had been facing prior to the 2010 launch.

Healthy businesses quite simply aren’t rumbled this quickly by a change in the market. Even disruptive innovations take time. Ergo, booksellers were a dying business even before ebooks entered the market.

So, why weren’t these businesses healthy enough to respond to ebooks? My theory is that they had already been struck a terminal blow by online retail well before ebooks first made their stab.

Notably, the first to fall, Borders, was exactly the bookseller that had tried to stay out of the online retail business entirely by outsourcing it to Amazon.

Somebody who is unhealthy and whose body is failing can die from a rough and sudden sneeze. That doesn’t mean that the sneeze is the cause of death.

—But aren’t ebooks a part of a major society-wide shift to digital media?

Sure. But that doesn’t mean that print and selling printed books can’t still be a good business. Books aren’t music or movies. The book artefact has a much longer history and it will take a lot more for it to be displaced completely. I seriously doubt that ebooks will ever drive print out of the market. Unlike its digital video and music counterparts, ebooks are going to coexist with print for a long time.

Let’s imagine that online retail had never taken off and ebooks had come in 2007, launched by a major incumbent or a bookseller, and over the next few years taken 30–40% of the market. Let’s imagine that the market had transitioned directly from solely offline retail to a mix of offline sales and digital downloads.

First of all, booksellers would have had much greater resources to combat ebooks. They would have had a much easier time of both presenting the value of printed books and capturing that value (instead of losing print sales to Amazon). They would also have been healthy, well-capitalised businesses with the resources to properly enter the ebook market. We would have almost guaranteed seen print/ebook bundles as a standard offering.

Booksellers were blindsided by online retail because online retail is one of the canonical examples of a disruptive innovation. It has all of the characteristics of its species. That’s what disruptive innovations look like. But the industry should have been able to deal better with ebooks, and it’s my belief that booksellers would have if they hadn’t been weakened by online retail.

That still doesn’t answer the question why publishers (that is, not booksellers or authors) haven’t managed deal well with the arrival of ebooks.

My pet theory on that is that they have let themselves be held hostage by a couple of software companies: Adobe and Microsoft. Almost all of the process problems publishers face when dealing with ebooks can be traced to the fact that they have locked themselves and their processes into using Word and Indesign. Two tools that are not and will never be suitable for purpose once you add ebooks into the mix.

Few other industries of this size let this sort of tools monopoly hijack the market. I still have no idea why anybody finds the Word-Indesign status quo acceptable.

Parting blow:

While I don’t think ebooks are a disruptive innovation, I do think the web and apps are potential disruptive innovations for the media industries. Hence my Google remark in my earlier post.

Which kind of innovation?

2013-05-02T16:00:00-07:00

Arresting iterative improvement. A key property of disruptive innovations is that they improve very fast. Ebooks have stalled.

Instead of iterating on ebook formats and features based on customer adoption and needs, ebooks are leaping headlong into complexity.

They are sustaining to the current order—a disruptive innovation hijacked, controlled, and directed by the incumbents. It could have been truly disruptive but is now instead a discontinuous sustaining innovation.

So…

What makes people think ebooks are a disruptive innovation?

By and large, a disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market. Hence, most companies with a practiced discipline of listening to their best customers and identifying new products that promise greater profitability and growth are rarely able to build a case for investing in disruptive technologies until it is too late. (Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma)

Unlike most disruptive innovations, ebooks were very quickly adopted by the publishing industry’s most profitable customers, people who buy the most, spend the most, and talk the most about books.

Disruptive innovations start out by addressing the needs of a small unprofitable market. They address a customer base that non-disruptive products do not. Those who buy a disruptive product at the outset are customers who are less likely buy the disrupted predecessor. Disruptive innovations are usually a viable but small business from the outset, create new markets, small at first, and then they grow them. The makers of disruptive innovations then iterate and scale into the incumbent market. That is, it’s only once the disruptive innovation begins to mature that it begins to target the customers of the disrupted product, and it goes for the segment with lowest profitability first.

Ebooks, on the other hand, when they first became an even remotely viable business by most standards (i.e. when the Kindle was launched) they directly addressed the industry’s most valuable audience. Their customers were heavy readers who bought mainstream books. This audience is the core of the industry’s profitability.

Disruptive innovations usually address markets that don’t exist prior to the innovation. Ebooks revalued a preexisting market and customer base.

Ebooks are to books not what tablets are to PCs but what laptops are to desktops. For a long long time laptops were a sideline in the PC business, but iteratively they improved until PC manufacturers began to make laptops that were viable as desktop replacements while retaining their portability. Laptops now dominate the market and are generally made by the same firms as those that made desktops. Much in the same way, ebooks have existed alongside the publishing industry for more than a decade (version 1.0 of EPUB’s predecessor, the Open eBook format, was released in 1999).

Amazon’s release of the Kindle was like the iteration of the Thinkpad or the Powerbook that first made them viable as desktop replacements, not a disruptive innovation but a discontinuous sustaining one.

Ebooks weren’t made viable by technological improvements. Amazon’s Kindle format remains for all intents and purposes a 1990s technology. Eink was slowly and persistently developed specifically as a sustaining technology to create readable screens. Ebooks, compared to most other modern software technologies such as the web and apps, plainly suck and have reliably sucked for more than a decade with little improvement in sight.

Of course, the same technology used by different people can either be sustaining or disruptive. Ebooks as used by Amazon, Kobo, and the big six publishers, aren’t disruptive. iBooks isn’t disruptive, but iBooks Author could have been. O’Reilly adding EPUB to the list of formats it sells wasn’t disruptive but Safari Online was and is. The disruption is in how the technology is applied to the business model.

The fixed layout portions of ebook specs and formats are the clearest indication yet that the ebook is a sustaining innovation. These format extensions contain no disruptive or innovative features to speak of, they are merely an accumulation of complex print-like cruft to aid the transition of illustrated or designed print books into digital. They are a complexity tax imposed by industry incumbents on the entire market.

Alternatively you could compare the ebook-print dynamic to the dynamic between software downloads and packaged software. The transitions from the latter to the former is discontinuous but still a sustaining innovation nevertheless. Most of the big downloadable software publishers used to be big packaged software publishers. Some of them are getting battered by the transition, but for the most part the big dogs in the new world were big dogs in the old world. It is just another distribution method to reach software publisher’s core market. (Web apps, on the other hand, truly are a disruptive innovation.)

Ebooks are a sustaining technology that are being mismanaged into devaluing an entire industry (that mismanagement is a subject worthy of a series blog posts) while the true disruptors get to work in peace. (In the long run, Google is the real winner here.)

The tech-oriented online retail side of the publishing industry didn’t get a lead on publishers in ebooks because ebooks are disruptive. As I’ve written above, they aren’t. Publishers failed because the skills and expertise at format transitions they had built up during the various paperback/hardcover/trade paperback format revolutions weren’t applicable in the digital context. That only happened because they stopped investing in sustaining innovations. It’s been clear for decades now that the future of publishing is digital. Communications are digital. Printing is digital. Organisation is digital. Production is digital. The publishing industry should never have been blindsided by ebooks. This is a sustaining innovation that has been a long time coming.

Clay developed the theory of disruptive innovations because he couldn’t explain why these firms were failing—their executives were doing a good job, too good.

He had to develop the theory because all the evidence he gathered showed that they weren’t stupid and incompetent. On the contrary, these were the best and the brightest of each respective industry, making all the right decisions but still failing when faced with a disruptive innovation. Before assuming that ebooks are a disruptive innovation instead of a discontinuous sustaining innovation we have to disprove the possibility that publishers have simply been incompetent and have flubbed a major sustaining innovation.

Ebook retailers, Amazon and B&N, were the primary retailers in print books. Kobo was launched by Canada’s biggest book retailer and bought by Japan’s biggest online retailer.

Kobo, Amazon and B&N are all classic examples of publishing industry incumbents, not disruptive new entrants.

The primary producers of ebooks, the big six followed by a smattering of smaller publishers, are generally also the primary producers of print books. Big ebook consumers are the industry’s best print customers: expert readers who buy and read dozens of books a year. The ebook industry largely consists of the world’s largest book retailers selling books published by the world’s biggest publishers, bought by people who are habitual and lifelong book buyers.

This isn’t a disruption no matter how you slice it.

Ebooks are sustaining innovation developed by the publishing industry. That’s why it’s technologically frustrating and that’s why the vendors of ereader platforms resist any change that would make it truly disruptive.

The only exceptions are Google, who has failed to gain any traction as it has tried to fight the publishing industry on its own turf by copying their own sustaining innovation without making it disruptive, and Apple, who has skirted on the edge of disruption while being hampered by a desire to work with the existing industry and an unwillingness to give up its self-destructive business policies.

What absolutely is a disruptive innovation, however, is the self-publishing programme Amazon pioneered. A self-serve self-publishing service for ebooks is a disruptive innovation where ebooks as a platform aren’t. It’s also the one part of the Kindle platform that hasn’t received any update to speak of in the platform’s history.

Kindle serials aren’t self-serve. Kindle shorts aren’t self-serve. KDP users can’t offer in-book payments or sell ebooks via a subscription plan. Amazon has iterated on the format and the production tools but the service that is the most disruptive of all in the Kindle platform is still limited to the same features it had when it was first launched. In fact, the way things are heading I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t start seeing core features cut or at least limited to KDP Select.

A lot of the tensions in the ebook development community are derived from this schism between sustaining the incumbents and disrupting them. Some people are focusing on the disruptive side of the platform, where wiping out the incumbents is a feature, not a bug. Others are focusing on the sustaining side of the platform, where the survival of the incumbents is vital and necessary and the concerns of self-publishers and independent developers secondary. Most companies and platforms are trying to be both at the same time.

Now that the battle for the ebook market is in full force, corporations that try to do both will not have enough focus to succeed at either.

The same obviously does not apply to authors who can easily be a supplier to both sides in this race, both publish and self-publish.

But for the rest, all of the startups, retailers, and platforms of one kind or another, you are either here to disrupt the publishing industry as it currently exists or you are here to preserve it.

Pick a side.

Books and Print Showcase

2013-05-01T16:00:00-07:00

Yesterday (1 May 2013) I went to the showcase for the REACT Books and Print sandbox.

In their own words:

Books&Print Sandbox is supporting eight ground-breaking collaborations between creative economy partners and academic researchers to explore Books and Print as historical, contemporary or future phenomena.

In other words, a sandbox for trying crazy things, where failure is relatively safe for everybody involved, something that’s a rarity for many of the ‘creative economy’ partners (I always find the term creative economy weird for some reason).

All of the projects were interesting. Some more so than others.

Nico Macdonald opened up with a statement that is both true and not true (paraphrased slightly as it’s from memory):

In thirty years we’ve gone from ebooks to… ebooks. Which isn’t a lot of progress.

It’s true insofar as progress in ebooks has been slow and in many ways has been (and is being) held back by misguided elements in the ebook industry.

It’s not true insofar as it implies that iterating on improving ebooks isn’t a worthwhile endeavour or a potential source for innovation. There is a lot of value in nailing the process of creating and presenting long-form readable text in an attractive design.

But that’s a nitpick on my part because I’m sure his point was that after thirty years of digital reading the only thing we’ve got to show for it are ugly websites and half-arsed ebooks; surely we can do more?

It’s an excellent point that I’ve just intentionally hijacked to elaborate on a pet peeve of mine. Sorry, Nico.

First project up was Book Kernel. As I understood it, this is a project to make it easy for event organisers to create books out of their events, offering crowdsourcing, easy editing, and simple creation of ebook and print book files.

Each of the audience members should be able to create their own memento of the event; a custom ebook or even print book.

For the love

2013-04-13T16:00:00-07:00

Why I joined Unbound and other assorted observations on the publishing industry.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when I fell in love with the book as a form – a medium – but it must have happened when I was seven. That’s when I began my twice-weekly treks to the local library, maxing out my library card in each trip.

Of course, years later I discovered that some of the books I loved as a child actually sucked in other languages, that the Icelandic translator had ‘fixed’ the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and other series as he translated them, smoothing out inconsistencies, improving the dialogue, and generally turning them from tripe to tolerable entertainment literature. This, apparently, had been common practice among translators in Iceland. It had pretty much died down by the time I was born but the libraries were left full of these ‘improved’ books. Actually, let’s drop the quotes. Those books were superior to the originals and are now out of print.

It would be impossible to publish translations that unfaithful in today’s publishing climate so these books, which are now too old to be commonly available in libraries, are going to be unavailable for good.

It’s also hard to pinpoint the moment when I fell in love with movies as a form. My dad has always been a film buff and considered it his duty to make sure that me and my sister were au fait with the classics of film—classics being anything from Humphrey Bogart to Steve McQueen, from Looney Tunes to Blake Edwards’ slapsticks. That as well as keeping up with what’s new. Me, my sister, and my dad still go to the movies regularly. Parental indoctrination at its finest.

What makes interactive media so different is that I can pinpoint exactly the moment when I first became fascinated with the medium. I was ten and my dad had brought a new Mac from work home with him. He opened a hypercard stack for children, let me play, and I was hooked for life. This was either late 1987 or early ’88.

Of course, the DOS PC that my parents owned wasn’t nearly as fun or fascinating. But the Mac and Hypercard gave me enough of a glimpse of what could be done for me to start playing a bit around with Basic and begin a lifelong habit of messing around with computers.

The responses to me getting a job with Unbound have generally one of the following two varieties:

—Yay! My son/friend/acquaintance is no longer unemployed. Congrats.

Or…

—Unbound? Really? That’s interesting. Didn’t expect that.

A lot of people in the industry don’t really know what to make of Unbound. It’s both a crowdsourcing company and not. Both a publisher and not. Both a social platform and not. It’s all of those things but doing them in an unusual enough a way for people to pause and ponder.

What convinced me to join them was simple. After talking to a lot of the people involved in it I now believe that they get it. Where ‘it’ is the true point and purpose of a publisher in the digital era.

People who work with media tend to do so because they love that medium.

The few times I’ve met, for example, some of my sister’s fellow animation graduates, their love of the form, of the art of rendering motion through drawing or plasticine, is almost glaring. As with every other human being, when you switch conversation tracks onto something they love, they shine.

The same thing happens when you meet some of the Media Practice students here in Bristol and get them started on whatever mad thing they’re currently working on. You get less enthusiasm and passion from them when they are talking about their lover or their children.

That last part might well be a British thing, though.

My role at Unbound will be in digital production: I will be making ebooks and the like. That, in and of itself isn’t that interesting.

The pitch was, though. Instead of just making these books by hand, I’d try and address every problem we encounter in eproduction by creating a tool, script, or module that automates solving that problem after that. So, while this would make the first few ebooks a bit more of a slog than it would have been making it by hand, over time every new ebook production project becomes easier than the one prior to it.

Most of these tools won’t be easy enough for us to just hand them to authors and let them produce their ebooks. At least not at the start. But, hopefully, they’ll be building blocks we or others can use to build author-friendly tools in the long run.

(Yes, I really really want to open source these modules as they become ready. Thankfully, the folks at Unbound seem to like the idea.)

You can break down the role of the publisher in many ways and a certain level of breakdown and disaggregation is inevitable. Some publishers are trying to get ahead of that curve by switching to a services model, offering their tools, processes, and expertise to the constituency that used to be their others. But too often those services are exploitative, charge exorbitant rates and grab all the rights they can get away with.

What these service providers miss is a purpose for these services beyond that of squeezing money out of gullible writers (a tactic that is completely unsustainable). Having a purpose isn’t a touchy-feely, hippy-dippy thing to have but essential for any sustainable business. Your purpose is where you create value. It defines exactly the reasons why people give you money.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been talking to a lot of publishers over the last few weeks. I see the same pattern of love for the medium there. Almost everybody involved has a bright burning passion for books—bibliophiles to a tee.

As it turns out, people who work in publishing tend to love books. That shouldn’t have been a revelation, but coming from the software industry, which is full of people who actually dislike software or, at best, have no love for software, good or bad, it took me a bit by surprise.

It didn’t matter whether the books they made then sold under a thousand copies or close to a million, the people working on them love the medium.

The reader is a stranger to most publishers. This is a holdover from the era when the only way to sell to readers was through bookstores. And, honestly, it marks the publishing industry as a relic of the past.

Of course, some publishers are going through heroic motions to build up a vivid picture of the reader, buying into analytics, doing surveys, and using every method they can to pile up data that they’ll never be able to pull apart or understand.

Most publishers know that having a direct relationship with their readers ties directly into their purpose somehow and they can clearly articulate the financial benefits of having that relationship. Of course, they can’t list a single thing the reader might gain from it beyond vague ‘social’ and ‘community’ handwaving. So, they dive in and gather data.

I’ll need to write at some point about how limited ebook analytics really are and how the picture they paint is a misrepresentation at best, but even if we assume that analytics work perfectly (they don’t) then they still wouldn’t solve the publishing industry’s reader estrangement problem.

Publishers don’t know their readers because they treat the reader as an abstraction. Editors and others involved have pictures in their head of what their readers are like, platonic ideals that drive their decisions and affect their priorities. Publishers think, a lot, about this abstract reader, which is why many of them think they know their readers when they don’t.

The only thing analytics do is sharpen the detail in this abstract image. Your readers are still strangers; they’re just strangers you’re spying on. A reader stops being a stranger when they’ve given you their name. They stop being a stranger when they have a direct relationship with your writer. You have a relationship with people you talk to directly, not to people whose conversations you listen in on.

It’d be tempting here to point to the list of paying supporters in the back of every book Unbound publishes and say that, yes, Unbound does get that and, unlike most other publishers, has an actual relationship with their readers.

But, no, that would be missing the point.

As an outsider wandering through the publishing industry, there were two things that struck me. The first one was that even though almost everybody there loved books, they didn’t all love text. Of course the editor-types, wannabe writers, and authors all love writing, specifically the act of writing and the act of messing around with text – more specifically, they love being seen messing around with text – but the people that love the output, love text no matter where it is to be found or what form it takes, are a lot rarer animals.

Of course, you’re still going to find more text-lovers in publishing than in most other industries, but this love of the image and social role of writing does explain why so many people in the industry are capable of releasing tripe in glorious packaging.

The second striking observation was that a lot of people in publishing don’t see interactive media as a form to be loved by anybody.

None of them would hire an impersonal design firm to lay out their books where they shovel in the text in one end and get a workmanlike but uninspired PDF out the other. No, even when they hire out they hire people, specific individuals with a love for the medium.

None of them would outsource the entire production of a book, every stage from editorial to design to print, to a firm in India, but that’s what they do when they commission apps. A lot of the firms the publishing industry today is hiring to create apps and ebooks are simply in the business of capitalising on the industry’s fear of investing in a new medium—leveraging that lack of commitment into a profit margin. That profit margin also more than nullifies whatever savings the publishing industry thinks it’s getting.

A company that hires a firm to do a by-the-numbers app or ebook shouldn’t be surprised when what they get back is unimaginative and dull.

You know that list of subscribers in the back of Unbound’s books? That isn’t a list of people with a relationship with Unbound. It’s a list of readers with a direct connection to the author.

Huge difference.

And that’s the point that I discovered the people at Unbound really get: The greatest service a publisher can contribute is to help authors connect directly with their readers.

A lot of the money can and will be made from other stuff. Providing services is always going to be lucrative. But the value is created through the author’s direct connection to a reader. That connection is the reason why readers invest in writers, both financially and emotionally. That connection lets authors experiment with a variety of formats and merchandising. That connection transforms the author’s body of work into a cityscape that the reader can inhabit and be a part of. That connection gives both author and reader a security to experiment, spread their wings, and make things simply for the love of the medium.

How to create great works is a dark art probably dominated as much by random chance as it is by skill. What isn’t a secret is who creates them. Great works are created by people who love the medium. And interactive media – apps, websites, and interactive ebooks – is definitely a medium. A data centre full of bored programmers writing a corporate database app one week and an ebook app the next week will not result in a great app.

Great works are collaborations. They are not created through outsourcing. A great app will not happen unless everybody involved is both invested in the app and owns a part of the app. The developer is a co-author of the app they make, not just a construction worker erecting somebody else’s design.

The publishing industry has very few great works in interactive media and most of those it does have are produced by relative outsiders. There’s a simple reason for this. For publishers, interactive media is just a financial imperative. They do not know, love, or care for the medium, which in turn undermines their ability to make money from it.

Unbound isn’t the first to realise the importance of a direct connection with readers. Others have been talking about it for years; their words usually falling on deaf ears. Mike Masnick is one of the most persistent articulator of this idea and he has presented it in the form of this very simple formula:

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model

The formula makes it clear that it isn’t about just dumping free stuff into the market and hoping for the money to roll in (a key mistake many in self-publishing are making at the moment, myself included). The value is created first, by establishing a direct connection with the fans. That value is turned into money later, once the fans are given a reason to buy. The RtB can be anything ranging from t-shirts to books to apps to donations. As long as the connection is healthy, the fans will be flexible in how they support the artist.

By establishing the CwF + RtB model as Unbound’s primary focus it lets us (Unbound and its Authors) experiment more. We have a freedom to try a variety of projects others won’t touch. We can try experiments that might have no immediate financial value but do strengthen the connection the authors have with their readers. The entire playground of modern publishing is open to us. Where others are held back by business model concerns we can experiment and mess around knowing that it will feed back into the business by keeping the connection with readers healthy.

Because Unbound can experiment, they are more likely to stumble onto something new that nobody else is publishing but readers end up wanting.

Of course, since Unbound is a startup there’s a good chance that all of this will crash and burn, but for that risk to be worth it there has to be an upside—a potential for big things. I think it has that potential upside in spades.

The risks of joining Unbound are obvious and non-trivial. But I like the vision well enough to see if we can pull it off.

One of the many things I like about the English word ‘love’ is how watered-down it is compared to similar words in other languages. The verb ‘elska’ in Icelandic implies a much greater intensity of emotion than ‘love’ does. When you ‘elska’ something you’re saying that it’s either a cause you’d risk your life for or a person you’d like to boink.

Or, conversely, it’s a person you’d risk your life for or a cause you’d like to boink. Either way it’s intense.

‘Love’, however, is a nicely diluted emotion. It does the job of stating that you more than like something, care for it, but it has enough of a range of intensity for that more-than-like to be anything from a primal torrent of sex and sticky hole-poking to a staid and virtual poke on facebook.

Which means that ‘Love’ as a word has the connotations of passion while still being utterly staid and dispassionate, making it a very English word.

The English themselves are a bit like that. They get all of their sexual exertions out of the way in their twenties before retiring in their thirties into the bedroom with a book, only occasionally having a dry fumble with their partner to make sure the birth control is still working.

The staid but heartfelt nature of the word make it ideal for describing exactly what is going on in the CwF + RtB formula. Love for the author’s work drives the readers’ willingness to invest in the author. Love for the readers drives the author’s generosity which is the foundation for the bond. As is appropriate for art and culture, CwF+RtB is a business model that is fundamentally built on emotions.

As are a lot of good business models. Anything that is labelled ‘aspirational’ might as well be tagged ‘emotional’ as well. A bottle of good whiskey is as emotional a purchase as can be. There is no stigma in building a business on emotion.

And it’s probably the only real way to build a business around art or literature.

The B&N fallacy

2013-02-26T16:00:00-08:00

Ebook retailers should stop making hardware and stop making ebook reading apps.

This blog post is written in the time-honoured fashion of blogging where I aim to clear up what I think is a common misconception, get carried away, and spiral into an almost philosophical point on bigger issues.

The misconception that serves as the seed here is the idea that Barnes & Noble is in the devices business. They aren’t. Far from it.

You can see it in almost every commentary on B&N’s recent setback. People talk about them being an also-ran in the tablet business, that their experiment in the device business has stalled and things along those lines.

B&N isn’t experimenting in the device business. They’ve had a laser-like focus on a single model: a infrastructure-heavy customer relationship business.

Or, in other words, storefronts.

—That really doesn’t make sense. They make and sell devices. Ergo, they are in the devices business. Q.E.D.

I disagree. Devices are a cost centre for all major ebook retailers. It isn’t a part of the business model but infrastructure for their business model.

The mistake B&N did wasn’t in making sub-par devices but in thinking that subsidised tablets were a good investment for building the foundations of an infrastructure-heavy digital storefront.

They aren’t. Which is something I personally think Amazon and Kobo are also going to discover. Tablet and phone churn is much too high and you are constantly competing with groups like Apple and Samsung. Those two do the whole devices thing for a living and are very good at it, much much better than any book retailer is ever going to be.

Anybody who thinks that a 300–400 dpi 4–5 inch smartphone isn’t a first class reading device hasn’t laid their hands on one.

—But that’s just another way of saying that they make crap devices?

No, it isn’t.

B&N, Kobo, and Amazon fundamentally aren’t in the business of making devices. Almost all of their devices are going to be primarily designed and manufactured by Asian original design manufacturers (ODMs). Some of the design and manufacturing partners are going to get better and better at making those devices, subsidised by short-sighted book retailers, until they are good enough to enter the market on their own terms and leave the retailer screwed with no market share (i.e. do to the retailers exactly the same thing that AsusTek did to Dell and, arguably, what Samsung did to Apple).

Also bear in mind that almost anybody with a line of credit can walk up to these OEMs and ODMs and buy the exact same device design and manufacture services. No book retailer has a real core competency in devices.

So, they are going to be caught between their ODMs on the one hand and successful tablet and phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung on the other. Rock. Hard place.

Subsidised hardware as distribution infrastructure is a dumb dumb tactic and it demonstrates a singular lack of vision.

—What B&N should do is make a better device, one where the tablet’s operating system isn’t crippled by the vendor.

No, they shouldn’t. They’d just mess that up as well because the problem isn’t the quality of the device but the dynamics of the business model surrounding the device and the value network of the company making it.

Because you people never follow links even though you should (I know, I checked) I’m pasting the relevant bits about value networks below:

The concept of the value network—the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers’ needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit—is central to this synthesis. Within a value network, each firm’s competitive strategy, and particularly its past choices of markets, determines its perceptions of the economic value of a new technology.

These perceptions, in turn, shape the rewards different firms expect to obtain through pursuit of sustaining and disruptive innovations. In established firms, expected rewards, in their turn, drive the allocation of resources toward sustaining innovations and away from disruptive ones. This pattern of resource allocation accounts for established firms’ consistent leadership in the former and their dismal performance in the latter. (Clay Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma)

Barnes & Noble make storefronts. No matter how many devices they make, no matter what device strategy they try, what they release will always end up being a storefront masquerading as a consumer device. Changing that would require firing everybody who currently works on the Nook and building a new, isolated and insulated, business unit elsewhere, preferably on the other side of the continent, and treat it like a well-funded startup.

That’s obviously not going to happen.

—What about the eink devices?

Fine. I’ll give you eink devices. Compared to LCDs and OLEDs eink screen evolution is glacial. That, along with the low performance requirements of most eink reader activity, makes these devices ideal for the subsidised hardware as distribution infrastructure strategy. Churn is lower than with phones and tablets. Change is slower. Older models are likely to remain in use longer.

Keep on making eink readers as long as there is demand. Of course, the popularity of tablets and big screen phones means that demand is softening so now might be the exact right time to stop developing them and let them peter out quietly.

—What should B&N do?

I’m glad you asked. Others have answered this question elsewhere, like Joe Wikert.

The short version:

Create a first rate storefront+reader on Android and the web.
Shift more resources into the iOS app and make it better than anybody else’s.
Perform a series of commerce-oriented experiments, e.g. subscriptions, bundling, in-book payments, etc.

Those are all good but I’d argue that doing this wouldn’t solve B&N’s problem in the long term.

What I suggest they do is discontinue their reader app development as well.

—Now I know you’re insane.

Bear with me here. One of the biggest expenses with an app-oriented ebook retailer is the reader app. One of the biggest expenses (i.e. time waster) for publishers is testing for reader app compatibility and dealing with reader app differences. And from the reader’s perspective reading apps are pretty much interchangeable commodities. Beyond startups like Readmill, precious few of those apps have any distinguishing features or innovations.

So, my suggestion would be to scrap the reading app and just license someone else’s. Bluefire Reader is a decent, well-made app and seems to be the current safe bet. A slightly more off the wall bet would be to do some sort of deal with Readmill. Or, if B&N can talk publishers off the DRM ledge and onto the watermarking perch, they could just switch to using iBooks when on iOS and have a book delivery app that doesn’t do anything but notify people when new books are ready to be copied into iBooks. Going the watermarking route would also enable readers to just use their favourite app for everything.

The good thing about this approach is that it doesn’t require a corporate culture transplant. It means their business would fundamentally come down to making a better storefront and discover new, sustaining, commerce innovations which is a priority that B&N should be able to understand and perform on.

It’s not as if reading app features are a point of differentiation for ebook retailers. If they were, the existing feature set across the ebook reading app market wouldn’t be so undifferentiated and boring. And the most popular reading app on iOS wouldn’t be that massive suckiness singularity that is the Kindle app.

But the prevailing feature set is undifferentiated and the Kindle app does suck. Having your own reading app and dev team isn’t a point of differentiation. However, having a good reading app is essential to an ebook retailer’s business. The easiest way to get there from here, and the easiest way to stay on the road to there and not veer into the wilderness of what-the-fuck, is to license a reading app from people who do those apps for a living.

Most of these suggestions go for Kobo as well:

Discontinue the tablets.
Milk the eink cow until it topples over.
Make an awesome storefront.
Discontinue the reading app and license somebody else’s.

I’d flip that suggestion around for Apple. I’d like to see them discontinue the iBookstore, stop asking for 30% of ebook retailer in-app revenue (lower it to, say, 5%), and offer iBooks as a more generic webview-style ebook reading API and view so that anybody can integrate a top-notch ebook reader with next to no effort. The iBookstore is chump change for them anyway and it would massively level the playing field while still netting them a token slice of the overall iOS ebook cake.

The good thing about separating reading apps from retail is that the negative consequences of outsourcing/licensing complementary tech expertise in hardware become positive in software.

The hardware ODMs improve until they become a power of their own and disrupt your loss-making hardware business. You’re basically subsidising their prep for screwing you royally. But as the licensed reading apps improve, all that happens is that everybody’s overall experience improves. Readers benefit. Ebook retailers benefit since better apps mean more readers and more reading by each reader, which means more sales. Ebook reading software houses benefit since improving ebook retail sector means more licensing revenue. Everybody involved in this model has plenty of incentives to work in a way that benefits others. Retailers work on the storefront and customer service and won’t try to do development because it’s a fast paced world requiring a dynamic and flexible business. Development houses improve the apps and won’t try to do retail because it’s a huge, infrastructure-heavy business that requires a lot of staff and staff training.

Because reading apps are a complement to an ebook retail business, retailers really really should want them to become high quality commodities. And that’s never going to happen as long as they continue with their own in-house reading app development teams, not to mention their format forks.

—I’m not talking to you anymore. I’ve flipped the bozo bit on you. Jerk.

Fine. Whatever. Get out of my head then. Arsehole.

ETA: Mike Cane has replied to my post over on his blog. His points are all good. We both agree that B&N is in a very difficult position.

And there are a few interesting comments on this post on Google+. If you want to make comments or other remarks, that G+ post seems to be the place to go to.

Hire me!

2013-02-18T16:00:00-08:00

I’m without a day job as of a few days ago. You can help me find new work. I hope. :-)

About a month ago, the company that had recently acquired my employer decided to ‘refocus’ (the details are a long story and not mine to tell). As a result I, along with a platoon’s worth of engineers, salespeople, and marketing folk, was suddenly without a job. They took great pains to tell us all that they had no complaints about our performance or capabilities, it was just that they weren’t going to do what we do anymore and so didn’t need us.

(In other words: I suspect I know what the newly laid off Presto engineers over at Opera are feeling right now.)

I’ve spent the last four weeks sorting things out, handing over the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, and documenting whatever hadn’t been documented before, but now I need to seriously consider the future.

And that’s where you come in. :-)

What can I do for you?

I can make websites and ebooks. I can also help people make websites and ebooks. I’m confident that, if there is anything about developing for the browser that I’m not familiar with, I can become familiar and proficient in a short space of time.

As should be clear from my blog and my publishing project I’m most interested in anything that involves the vague and ill-defined genre called ‘content’. That can be anything ranging from creating content websites and ebooks to creating tools for consuming those things, to helping you create tools for those who are making websites and ebooks.

Anybody who reads this blog also knows that I’m fond of researching and analysing problems and problem areas and trying to figure out how to address them. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’d be really keen if what you’re working on is something new or a problem that hasn’t really been solved before.

On the other hand, I’m not ruling anything out, so if you’ve got something interesting send me a line and try me out. Have a look at my CV or at my profile at linkedin and have a think about it.

(I’ve been staring at that CV for hours, trying to make it sound more ‘official’ but failed miserably.)

What am I looking for?

Anything, really. Like I wrote above, I’ve decided that it’d be more fun at this point in my life to be open-minded and not rule anything out.

I’m looking for short-term work, long-term work, permanent positions, freelance jobs, one off gigs, startups, or whatever—I’m more than willing to be flexible if the task is interesting.

I’m currently based in Bristol, UK, but am willing to relocate if the right opportunity requires it. It would have to be a really, really, good opportunity for me to relocate outside of Europe. Obviously, if you’re open to me working from home then it doesn’t matter where you’re located. I’ve been working from home for the past few years so that’s what I’m used to, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

The deal-breaker

The only real, non-negotiable, deal-breaker is that I can’t work for you if one of the conditions of employment is my silence. If I can’t blog, write and publish essays, and write and publish ebooks in my spare time while working for you, then I’d rather not work for you.

Get in touch

Even if it’s just to sound me out about an idea, make a suggestion, or whatever, feel free to get in touch.

Email:: baldur.bjarnason@gmail.com
Twitter:: @fakebaldur
App.net:: @fakebaldur
Google+:: Profile

Respect the reader

2013-02-05T16:00:00-08:00

I'm sitting here trying to write but a web page I saw a few weeks ago keeps bugging me.

Gather together a bunch of web developers and you’ll find it hard to get any of them to disagree with the principle that you should always respect the user and their wishes.

Of course, they all turn around and make hideous websites, with awful readability, loaded with ads, but they will all also loudly proclaim that they had no choice. Their manager, employer, or customer demanded it. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the business model of most websites hinges on a certain level of disregard for the reader’s best interests.

Still, at least these web developers can argue that they did it for money. In our capitalistic society, doing grotesque things for money is practically every citizen’s patriotic duty.

—Why is he prancing about, dressed like a monkey, harassing passersby?

—He’s doing it for money/charity/advertising.

—Oh! Okay. Fine.

As is obvious from just watching the news and following current affairs, destructive and hostile acts are clearly considered a-okay as long as they are for pay. This is the society we live in.

Amazon, Apple, or Google do something potentially destructive to an entire industry but it’s okay because they make money doing so.

However, just because human decency is for sale, that doesn’t mean you should discard it arbitrarily.

So, getting back to the principle that you should respect the user: what does it mean?

It means you don’t do things like this.

(For those who can’t be bothered to follow the link, it’s a page that recommends adding a clever bit of code to ebooks that nag the reader to change their reading settings.)

—But, surely, a polite note at the start of a long book is acceptable? Nobody is being hurt and the book would be so much better if they saw it the way it’s supposed to be seen.

No. Not really. There are two sides to this:

The platform owner has defaults you don’t agree with.
The reader has changed the settings to something you don’t agree with.

The only correct response to number one is to lobby the platform owner to change the defaults. I’ve tried that myself and it usually doesn’t work.

Most platform owners choose the defaults of their apps and devices for specific reasons. If they have ‘Publisher Fonts’ turned off by default, there’s a good chance it’s because of how the device renders arbitrary fonts. For a platform as old as the Kindle, if you go through all of its default settings you’ll find that most of them have a history and a reason. Often the reason is bad, weak, or even stupid, but it’s still a reason the platform owner valued over the counterarguments.

And the only correct response to number two is that you should never ask the user to change their settings.

You don’t ask them to change the font. You don’t ask them to change the font size. You don’t ask them to turn justification on or off. You don’t ask them to turn social features on or off. And if you’re making a website, you don’t ask them to resize the window, allow popups, install flash, or enable cookies.

You are allowed to tell them when, say, they try to log in, that this feature is broken when cookies are disabled, but that’s more in the context of explaining why a feature is broken than of trying to nag them to change it.

And when the only difference between your preferred settings and the reader’s preferred settings is aesthetic, no you don’t get to nag the reader.

It doesn’t matter what the context is, you don’t ask the user to change their settings. You work with them, because you work in a service industry.

This is the key difference between book publishing and the various forms of digital publishing.

A book is an object. An ebook is a service. An object is supposed to have holistic embodied aesthetic. A service is there to serve. The relationship to the reader is different. Of course, services can set ground rules (‘no jacket, no service’) but most of those ground rules are there to serve the other customers (‘I don’t want to eat with riffraff’, ‘I want my coffee as quickly as possible’, ‘I’m a cheapskate’), not the proprietor. The ebook designer’s relationship with the reader is more like a waiter’s relationship with a diner than that of Henry Ford to the buyers of his cars. Once you enter the digital publishing industry you cease to be the purveyor of created and designed objects and become a provider of services.

This, by the way, is the reason why many existing publishers find it difficult to do ebooks and apps without running into process, quality, or marketing problems. The print mindset and processes often directly conflict with digital best practices.

So, please respect the reader and accept that their settings are their business.

Unless, of course, you are a member of the current generation of ad-loving, social-media addicted web developers who willingly disrespect the reader and sacrifice all that is good about design in the name of money.

If your business model requires you disregard basic human decency, then you can do so knowing that society will not only forgive you, but, if you make enough money, society will glorify you as a divine being blessing us earthly creatures with your godly presence.

In that case, the only thing I ask is that you feel suitably guilty on the way to the bank, counting your ill-gotten gains.

ETA: William Ockham, the ebook developer whose web page it was that I linked to above and prompted these thoughts sent this response:

A response, of sorts, on respect.

I wrote a post last month called “Making the world safe for embedded fonts” and Baldur responded to it on Wednesday. I believe that his response unintentionally mischaracterized me and the work I’m doing. He has kindly agreed to allow me this space to explain that. The most important point for me is that Baldur and I are in agreement that, in the context of ebook design, respect for the reader is paramount. Where we disagree is on how to show that respect.

The fairest way to judge Baldur’s response to my post is to use his own standards. Here’s what he said on Google+ about what he would prefer when someone responds to his posts:

I would just like one, just one, response to a blog post of mine to be actually about the blog posts and not the crap they make up to not actually address the issues I raise.

Bill’s comment is typical of what I usually get. It argues against points I didn’t make, accuses me of opinions I don’t have, and ignores every single point and argument I actually made in the post.

My post had one simple point.

Fonts should be the foundational choice for an ebook design.

Baldur never mentions that. Conversely, the first eight paragraphs and the last three paragraphs of his post were a recitation of his opinion about web design and doing grotesque things for money, two topics that have nothing to do with my post. Sure, it’s his blog and he can write about whatever he wants. But he casts the post as a comment on my work, and then leads and finishes with something completely unrelated.

When he finally gets around to mentioning the web page that has been bugging him, he hits the trifecta of arguing against points I didn’t make, accusing me of opinions I don’t have, and ignoring the points I made. He frames the discussion with this:

—But, surely, a polite note at the start of a long book is acceptable? Nobody is being hurt and the book would be so much better if they saw it the way it’s supposed to be seen.

This would the position of someone who wants an exception to a rule they accept. The rule here is that asking the reader to change a setting is a violation of the principle of respecting the reader. That is not my position at all. I reject the model that Baldur wants to impose on this discussion. I’ll explain in more detail below.

Next, he asserts that I disagree with ebook platform defaults and that there is only one acceptable response to that. Perhaps, if I actually held that opinion, I would agree with him about the correct response. But that’s not my opinion. My opinion is that the platform owner has given the reader the option to choose whether or not display “Publisher Fonts” on a book by book basis and that we should honor the reader’s ability to make that choice.

Worse, he asserts that I disagree with settings that the reader has changed. Nothing could be further from the truth and by imputing this opinion to me, he makes it easy for him to put me in the wrong. To be honest, his position seems to be that by notifying the user that they have a choice, I’m automatically proving that I disagree with the user’s choice. Baldur includes a lot of “you don’t ask” and “you don’t get to” examples, but the only explanation for this is an analogy.

The ebook designer’s relationship with the reader is more like a waiter’s relationship with a diner than that of Henry Ford to the buyers of his cars

I don’t quite understand how this analogy works. When I go to a restaurant, there is often an empty water glass on the table (that’s a platform default). The waiter (the ebook designer) might fill my glass without asking, ask me if I would like to have my glass filled, or wait for me to ask for water. Am I supposed to feel disrespected if he asks me if I would like my water glass filled? I’m not being facetious. I think this scenario is useful because there are ways for a waiter to ask me if I would like to have my glass filled that are disrespectful. For example, if the waiter comes by every five minutes, interrupts my conversation, and asks me if I want my glass filled when it is half full and I’ve turned him down 3 times in a row, that feels disrespectful to me.

And this gets to my opinion. The only way to evaluate whether or not an act is disrespectful is to evaluate its impact in context. Although respect describes the attitude of the actor, what we are really talking about in this case are the effects of the action on the reader or user. Which means intent is irrelevant. As is the act itself. It is a mistake to say that some action is always disrespectful or that avoiding some action is required to show respect. The context does matter.

When I apply this test to the web “don’ts” that Baldur lists (“don’t ask the user to resize the window, allow popups, install flash, or enable cookies”), I see a list of things that are disrespectful for different reasons. And none of them are disrespectful only because you are asking the user to change defaults. And there any number of things that are just as bad or worse, in exactly the same ways, that web designers can do that don’t involve asking the user to change their settings. If you fail to keep your platform software up to date and expose your web site to infection by a “drive by” virus, you are showing your users disrespect in essentially the same way as if you convince them to install flash.

Even Baldur admits that it is acceptable to notify your users if a feature is broken due to a setting being disabled. As I stated pretty clearly in my original post, I came at this issue from the perspective of a reader with personal experience of a core ebook feature (formatting) being broken and not understanding why. He ignored that and chose to dismiss my concerns as merely aesthetic, but there is no clear boundary between the aesthetic (it looks better) and the functional (the formatting is so goofed up that I have a hard time reading the story) in ebooks.

Ultimately, the question of whether or not my suggested technique will be judged as disrespectful to readers will be made by the readers themselves. There is no ironclad principle involved in whether or not it is acceptable to notify readers of a choice they can make. I believe strongly that readers will benefit from this, but this kind of stuff has to be field-tested. Because I believe the only way to fully evaluate impact of something like this is in context, I willing to admit that I could be wrong. And if I am, I will redo every book I’ve done this way. Respecting the reader also involves taking risks on their behalf, even if it means ending up egg on your face.

Needless to say, I disagree.

It’s not your call to decide if a default setting is broken or not.
I am of the opinion that asking the reader to change their settings is fundamentally disrespectful.
You can’t tell the difference between somebody who has publisher fonts disabled out of ignorance and someone who has them disabled them deliberately. Both are subjected to the same notice.
An ebook or a website whose functionality is compromised because you can’t load the font you want, is a badly made website or a badly made ebook. It may not look as good, but it should be readable.
If the formatting of a text-oriented narrative ebook is broken due to publisher fonts being disabled, then the ebook is broken. You can make the argument that design-oriented ebooks require greater capabilities, but I’d argue that those books simply cannot be done as ebooks; the platform simply can’t handle them.
Many readers see the proposed behaviour as incredibly hostile.
Honouring the reader’s ability to change his settings means not asking them to change them. Asking them to change a setting only when it is disabled necessarily implies that you disagree with that choice. Some of those readers have deliberately chosen that setting. That is a curious definition of honouring their choice. You don’t honour somebody’s right to vote by telling them to just vote for the party you favour and targeting only those who have shown an interest in the opposing party. If your goal is to honour choice you do that by educating people about all of the choices they can make, even the ones you disagree with.
So, if it were truly about ‘honouring the reader’s ability to make that choice’, you’d also let those who have enabled publisher fonts know that they can disable them. Just in case they have it set like that out of ignorance. You’d include a link to a page that explains the choice, both pros and cons. You’d only include the notice once, at the very beginning of the book, somewhere on the copyright page. You wouldn’t use font hacks to selectively display the notice just to the people you want to influence (i.e. whose setting you disagree with) because the goal would be to educate all your readers about what they can do (i.e. honouring their ability to make that choice).
“Fonts should be the foundational choice for an ebook design.” Indeed. And that choice lies in the hands of the reader, not the designer. It’s the ebook developer’s duty to accommodate that choice. If I want to read all my ebooks in Baskerville, I should be able to make that choice without running into a notice at the start of every chapter.