Q: The iPad is so new. What is it like working in such uncharted territory?

Oldenburg: It harkens back to the early days of film. It’s still very Wild West and experimental right now and it is really exciting.

Enochs: The first movies were a locomotive and a guy running and that was it, and everyone was thrilled. We are still a little bit in that stage, I’m sure.

Moonbot Studios are the same people behind ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore‘.

The great hidden virtue of e-books—hidden beneath the chatter about their effect on the bottom line—is that they allow stories to be exactly as long as we want them to be. It turns out that many of them work best between 10,000 and 35,000 words long—the makings of a whole new nonfiction genre occupying the virgin territory between articles and hardcovers.

(Thx, Johnnypat)

This is the wrong question. The right question is: How much will an ebook cost? Because the answer isn’t up to one author or one publisher or even a price-fixing cartel. It’s up to the market, which is a far more complicated entity. There are no shoulds in the market, just reality.

He makes an interesting argument for dynamic pricing: that unknown authors should release their ebooks for free, and then scale the prices up.

The gist of the talk is in this graph:

(Point: that whole industries do just fine without Intellectual Property protection.)

Now, I do question one of the assumptions behind this: while it is true that fashion, food and furniture cannot be copyrighted, and that these industries are still highly innovative, we should also remember that they are more necessary than music, films, and books. Gross sales is an oversimplification of the effects of copyright: certainly more people would buy clothes than they would books!

But, that said, her primary example holds true. High fashion is indeed still very lucrative (and creative!) without IP protection. Would publishing be in a similar environment if books were not copyrightable? It doesn’t take much to imagine a world in which fan-fiction is sanctioned, where riffing on the books you love is a norm.

So here’s a thought experiment: if for one year all copyright were to be revoked (or demoted to a Creative Commons-like attribution-only license) would innovation increase worldwide, or would the opposite happen? Would this be good for society?

Writers like Nicholas Carr have argued that our digital culture values mashups over source material. I disagree with that (I believe both are equally valued, and equally valuable, though we should perhaps leave that argument for another day); I suspect that the world would benefit as the rate of innovation increases in response to these freedoms.

What I’m not certain about is how this would affect the creators. Would they benefit, if at all? Or would the benefits only show themselves after the industry has had to make do without copyright, like how the fashion industry has had to do?

I will admit, though: a future where Pride and Prejudice and Zombies can then be combined with Twilight and Buffy The Vampire Slayer sounds like a very fun world indeed.

Ms. Liss says that the offers from U.S. publishers so far don’t improve much on what Ms. Chan is making on her own. She’s made around $130,000 before taxes—substantially more than a standard advance for the average debut novelist—and she’s getting a steady stream of royalties every month. “I told Darcie, at this point you’re printing money. They’re not. Go with God, we’ll sell the second book,” Ms. Liss says.

Nothing new here, but it’s a nice article from the Wall Street Journal about our little corner of the publishing world.

Genre YA fiction has an army of promoters outside of the field: teachers, librarians, and specialist booksellers are keenly aware of the difference the right book can make to the right kid at the right time, and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince kids to try out a book. Kids are naturals for this, since they really use books as markers of their social identity, so that good books sweep through their social circles like chickenpox epidemics, infecting their language and outlook on life. That’s one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences—it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works.

So, so true.

You should date a girl who reads.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

You may find Rosemarie Urquico, a writer from the Philippines, over at Goodreads, and on Facebook. Here’s the full story of how she came to write this piece.

(Russell Grandinetti) pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

Amazon has been launching imprints for the last year or so, including romance imprint Montlake Romance, thriller imprint Thomas & Mercer, and most recently sci-fi imprint 47North. Nothing new here, this article has been a long time coming.

Honestly, once I got into what I was reading, I forgot about the cheap, crappy page-turn buttons and the tacky ads on the sleep screen. Even the distorted unblinked text isn’t very noticeable when you’re engrossed in a book.

And therein lies Amazon’s true genius with the relentless pace of making the Kindles cheaper in both price and quality: they know that once you’re reading, minor hardware flaws are quickly forgotten.

Sounds like a good deal.

Devices

The first reason for publishing’s comparatively slow change is obvious: there were no good reading devices before Amazon got into the hardware business. It won’t be much of an exaggeration to say that the Kindle singlehandedly jumpstarted the ebook industry — it showed, amongst other things, what was possible given E Ink technology and a persistent link to a rich ebook store. In the meantime, the music industry had a bunch of companies building mp3 players, long before Apple entered that market with the iPod. Innovation was certainly not lacking in music.

(There’s a remarkable story here, if you’re interested in such things. Amazon really struggled to build the first Kindle. Businessweek reports:

The effort to develop the first Kindle ended up taking more than three years. Nearly everything went wrong. The black-and-white displays from E Ink, an offshoot of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab that makes screens resembling the printed page and requiring very little power, would look good for one month and then degrade alarmingly. Qualcomm, which was set to provide the wireless chips, was sued by a competitor, Broadcom, and for months was enjoined by a judge from selling its wares in the U.S. The Lab126 team repeatedly urged Bezos to make their project easier by considering a Wi-Fi-only connection for the Kindle. He rejected the idea, constantly suggesting new ones for complicated features, like the notion that customers’ annotations of books should be backed up on Amazon’s servers.

Looking back, it’s remarkable that Amazon — a retail company — even considered making the leap into hardware. Writers have a lot to thank Amazon for.)

Industry attraction

The lack of innovation in E-Reading devices is symptomatic of a larger fact: that music, as an industry, is more attractive than publishing. Dalton Caldwell of music startup imeem has said that people keep trying to do music startups because they love music. In comparison, publishing startups are few and far between.

Now I’m not saying that it’s easy to innovate in the music industry today. In fact, Caldwell’s speech is an argument against doing music startups, given the industry’s love of lawsuits. What I am saying is that the lawsuits are a result of the early innovations that so quickly changed the music industry.

We don’t know if publishers would turn to lawsuits in response to increasing levels of ebook piracy. I’m inclined to think not: a good side-effect of publishing’s comparatively slow change is that publishers have more time to cope with the disruption.

Ebook Formats

But a third reason is that of formats. This seems clear to me only in retrospect, after the Tower of eBabel fiasco during the dot-com boom, and more recently, working on ebook conversion software for the past year. In music, mp3 won the format wars a long time ago. In publishing, the format wars are far from over.

Amazon is the hold-out here: they refuse to use EPUB, the format everyone else is using. Why they choose to do so is mind-boggling to me — AZW is based on mobi, which in turn is an old, clunky format that ought to be retired. The EPUB3 spec, for instance, defines many new features important for the future of ebooks (examples include multimedia embedding and interactive scripting), features that AZW will struggle to include.

In fact, I wonder if music piracy owed much of its growth to the .mp3 format. If you run a cursory search for pirated ebooks on Google today, you will still find an unwieldy number of formats: PDF, EPUB, mobi and a few obscure others. These confusing choices may explain why publishers feel less threatened by ebook piracy, especially when compared to labels. At any rate, a large number of ebook formats make it hard for both consumers and publishers — in particular it makes it difficult to build a good digital publishing workflow. Could the lack of a winning format be a cause of the slow shift to ebooks? I should think so.

Beyond the ongoing clash between EPUB and mobi, however, a host of other questions have yet to be answered. What is the best way to store metadata across these formats? What’s the right way to do annotations? (This is called marginalia by the industry, but I’ll talk about that in some other post). And what of the networked book – how would that look like?

In some ways, ebooks present us with a set of difficult problems that the digital music pioneers did not need to solve. And solving them would be an ongoing challenge for publishers and hardware-makers alike.

I find the music industry a curious phenomenon — so many parallels, and yet so different when you examine the challenges ahead. But of the above three obstacles, only ebook formats remain an unknown variable. Amazon’s relentless innovation with the Kindles, and the increasing excitement amongst authors and agents almost guarantee growth in the coming months.

Summary: Watch The Formats

Writing this makes me realize that the factor we should all be watching out for is the future format of publishing. And I don’t mean EPUB vs mobi — I mean the various additional structures that we would have to build in response to publishing’s problems (that list of questions that I outlined above).

I think this is clear: if tomorrow Amazon were to release an updated AZW, one with support for animations, music, and video; or if next year the EPUB3 working group were to announce a new method for hosting and linking to an ebook, our entire approach to writing and selling these books would have to change. (I’m being random with my examples here, it’s just as likely that successful networked books would come from a startup of some sort, or perhaps from some iPad-related innovation.)

New formats and new structures mean new ways to discover, create, and sell ebooks. This is the one variable most likely to change in the near future, and it is — I think — the most likely to influence the shape of publishing. Format problems are what makes publishing most different from music. They have the potential to change the very way books are written.

I look forward to building (as well as finding out!) what these future structures would be.

Update: Adam Gurri and Kevin Kurz have both pointed out in the comments that content creation is another factor: it’s much easier to rip music from CDs than it is to digitize books. I’ve no idea how I missed that.

Although Amazon did refresh the ID of their PlayBook derivative, I’m told that this first tablet of theirs is “supposed to be pretty poor” and is a “stopgap” in order to get a tablet out the door for the 2011 holiday season — which doesn’t exactly leave the best taste in my mouth. But it’s also not the most uncommon story, either: when you’re breaking into a new market, sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to get in the game. You may remember how crappy the original Kindle was compared to later models!

It’ll be sad if this were true — I’m really hoping that the Fire would pan out – I’ve been doing a heck load of reading on my iPad recently, and a competent, reader-focused competitor can only be a good thing.

Swiftly and at little cost, newspapers, magazines and sites like The Huffington Post are hunting for revenue by publishing their own version of e-books, either using brand-new content or repurposing material that they may have given away free in the past.

The easier it becomes to publish ebooks, the more publishers we will see.