You know book-movies, don’t you? Yes, I’m sure you do. Most people don’t care much for them, and neither do I. But if there’s one thing I detest about book-to-movie conversions, it’s that every single time (and I kid you not about this) one such conversion is made, the cover of that particular book changes. And that happens like clockwork, doesn’t it? The publishers will decide - one month before the movie release date - that it would be best to switch the existing book cover into a bloody movie poster. Or a still from the movie. And then suddenly you see your favourite bookstore plastered over with these hideously moviedified books, all covered with a messy porridge of actors and faces and backdrops that can only come from a studio-sponsored photoshop, and it’s all crass and horrible and you wonder at the state of taste in the publishing industry.

What’s worse is that the original book covers are often works of art in their own right. Don’t believe me? Alright. Take Atonement then, by Ian McEwan.

Before:

After:

That first one was better, wasn’t it? And when the movie came out I hopped over to the nearest bookstore to find the book, but I came back empty handed. I did not want Keira Knightly’s face on my bookshelf, hot as she was; if I did, she would pop up in my head the instant I sat down to read … and the idea of having my reading experience shaped by a hot girl on the cover; no sir, not my cup of tea.

I have by now lost count of the number of times I have stopped myself from buying a book … because of a movie cover. I own a movie-cover version of The Kite Runner, and a movie-cover version of The Lord of the Flies (think: half naked boy holding spear looking at second half-naked boy on a leafy set that can double as the backdrop to Gilligan’s Island … hell, I should sell the thing as a novelty item on eBay) and they are by far the two most despised covers in my collection. They stick out like sore thumbs. I bought another copy of The Lord of the Flies, and I now keep the second one in a storage drawer, far from prying friends and curious relatives.

Oh and The Kite Runner? That one sits buried under the casing of my external hard disc drive. I think it makes a fine shock dampener.

This is a quirk, sure, just as even the best of us have quirks. But it is a quirk with a reason: I want my books to be as perfect as they can possibly be, and in this day and age where we consume most of our text on the Internet, the book is the last remaining proof that there still is care in this world, and good taste. It is the final bastion of loving typography, and new-paper-smell, and tight binding, and I want my books to be beautiful things I can own, and when I’m done I want to pass them on - to my kids, perhaps, or to friends and family (and yes, by gum - I WILL get them to read).

Just - imagine now, would you? You’re old, and the movie stars of today have passed on the way of Marilyn Monroe and James Mason, and one day you give your kid a movie-copy of Atonement along with all the other books in your collection. And your kid asks: “Who’s that?”

I fear for my book collection. I really do.

A book holds your hand in solitude and says, here you are alone in your room and everything is alright. You don’t need to call a friend or Twitter something. The world is still turning. If you go for a forty minute walk without your mobile, don’t worry, you’re not going to miss anything.

I need to start reading again.

Now any idiot can be a critic. Writers used to review writers. My second novel was reviewed by Ann Tyler. So who is Roberta Silman?

Roberta Silman turns out to have a hell of a literary career. But that’s not all. Entertainment Weekly writes:

… Hoffman’s next tweet bordered on harassment: “If you want to tell Roberta Silman off her phone is [Silman's number here]. [Silman's email here]. Tell her what u think of snarky critics.” Now, Hoffman is free to form her own opinions about her reviewers. But at what point does she go too far? Releasing the email and phone number of a reviewer to her fans? Is it acceptable for novelists to exact revenge on their reviewers, especially considering the fact that Hoffman is already a successful author who hardly needs to rely on good reviews for sales?

It is not. I find this behaviour disgusting and childish, even if it’s not unknown in digital fiction circles. I do believe, however, that the appropriate response to a negative review is always - always - dignified silence. (via)

They say that every man has his price – and now a New Zealand school has discovered that the cost of getting a teenage boy to read is a can of Coke.

Rongotai College in Wellington is currently trying out a new scheme to get boys reading, offering them a can of drink if they can prove they’ve read two books, a voucher from Subway if they are able to stretch to five, and a movie voucher if they can make it to 10. The school says the scheme has been so effective that library book borrowing has doubled since it launched.

This is awesome. (via)

I wonder, then, if the promise of an ebook isn’t the book but the library. And if, in all our attention to a new device for reading, we’re neglecting methods for shelving. A search engine cannot compete with Warburg’s delicate, personal library. The metadata of a book extends beyond the keywords held between its covers to the many hands the text has passed through; it’s not enough just to scan every page. We need to also scan the conversations, the notes left in the margins, the stains from coffee, tea, and drink. We need to eavesdrop on the readers, without whom every book is mute. That is the promise I seek.

The one thing I’ll miss about real books if and when the conversion to ebooks are complete: the smell. I love the smell of a new novel, the papers clean and fresh against my fingers, the whiff of the bookstore on the cover (I swear, the ones from second-hand bookstores smell differently from the ones I buy in Borders). I know I’m being unnecessarily nostalgic … no, wait. The one thing I won’t miss about books is the lack of a search engine. Mandy’s assertion about losing the metadata of touch and feel and smell is correct, but it’s a small price to pay for never having to thumb through an index ever again.

Emulating the style of the pulp adventure magazines of the 1920s and ’30s, Steampunk Tales contains first-run, original fiction written by an A+ list of award-winning authors. Issue #1 contains 10 stories, each running between 4,300 to 11,000 words, for the unbelievable price of only $1.99.

I don’t like the font they’re using, nor do I like the parchment texture they use as background for their stories. But I do think that this is good first step for iPhone ebooks - it is, after all, the first indie-original effort I’ve seen on the app store. Kudos to the publishers, next up: a service for non-programming writers to publish to iPhone, perhaps? (thanks, Duane)


[Update]: Received an email from the developers. The reader does offer multiple fonts and backgrounds, which is a relief - the default curly script is barely readable.

The ebook format fiasco is sometimes called ‘the tower of eBabel’, and for good reason: there are too many of them. But because we deal in digital fiction, and because ebooks are fast becoming viable models of distribution, we need to consider the sticky question of which ebook format, and why. This post attempts to answer that question. (Note that this is quite difficult to answer without looking into the future, simply because it is unclear if there’s ever going to be a victor in the ebook format wars. But I’ll get back to that in a bit.)

Context

E-book formats are no longer created from scratch. In most cases, the ebook maker - regardless of whether it’s a vendor or an open-source project - will decide to adapt and use an existing format, or to have some underlying programming language to make coding the format easier. Today, that language is often XML, or eXtensible Markup Language. Before we talk about the various ebook formats in proper, it’ll be good to talk a little about XML, and why it’s so popular as an underlying language.

The answer to that lies in XML’s name. ‘Markup’ and ‘Language’ are pretty self-explanatory; it tells us that XML is a programming language that consists primarily of markup tags, much like HTML.^[1] In fact, an XML document looks pretty much like any HTML page, the only difference being that XML is powerful enough to define and shape other languages ^[2]. But unlike HTML, XML is extensible. This means that XML allows you to define and create your own tags. For example, if I were an e-book-format creator, I can easily create and define <title> as a tag describing the title of an e-book. <title> doesn’t actually exist in XML. However, because XML is extensible, I can create what is effectively a whole new platform for my e-book format, and it’ll contain <title>, and whatever other tags I see fit to use. All I have to do is to define them, so that my ebook reader will understand which bits are which, and treat those sections accordingly.

You can tell that XML is useful precisely for this flexibility of form and function. The language is now used for many, many things - sometimes even as the foundation for web services to send requests and responses, behind the scenes, server-to-server. And if you take a look now at even the simplest of RSS feeds, you’ll find a language that is defined - and made possible - through XML.

Most of the major ebook formats today are all built upon some foundation of XML. The ePub format, widely tipped to become wide-spread, is built on a strong XML base. The Amazon Kindle format is built on a modified version of the Mobipocket ebook platform, which is in turn built on XHTML (with a dash of javascript/frame support). So is the format used by the new Sony Reader, though that’s known as the Sony BBeB. The conclusion you can take away from this is that sooner or later, XML will become a major part of your workflow regardless of which ebook format ends up as the eventual winner of eBabel. There’s no running away from it. The good news is, however, that XML is a remarkably convertible format. It’s going to be easier and easier to work with as most major software vendors make the jump to XML-based files; case in point: Microsoft Word’s new docx format is built on XML, and it’s not very hard to convert XML to other formats - say, PDFs, or HTML, or an XML-based ebook format of your choice.

The e-book Formats

So let’s get started. The following are the e-book formats in use today, ones that I believe still have a fighting chance of becoming the format of the known universe.

1. Amazon Kindle’s AZW. The Kindle uses Amazon’s proprietary AZW format, but can read unprotected Mobipocket e-books, HTML, Word documents and plain text (.txt) files. You convert to AZW using Amazon’s online Digital Text Platform, and you format your e-book using rudimentary HTML. AZW supports DRM (unfortunately) and is built around the Mobipocket format - though, confusingly, DRM-protected Mobipocket files cannot be read on the Kindle, because they’re not exactly one and the same. Is it worth it? Publishing your work in the AZW format grants you immediate access to the Amazon online store, where a number of online writers have been making a decent sum selling their work … some of which have been regularly hitting the top 10 bestseller lists for Kindle e-books. So … yes, it’s worth it.

2. Sony Reader’s BBeB, which stands for Broadband eBooks, is perplexing: Sony does not offer any tools to convert to the format, making the Sony Reader a closed medium to all but the biggest of publishers. In fact, the only way to publish for the Reader is via RTF or PDF … but XML to PDF conversions aren’t solid, not at the moment, and RTF limits your formatting options (it’s hardly better than a .txt file, to be honest). And there is at least one unofficial converter to BBeB, but Sony’s lack of support for writer releases is discouraging at best. Is it worth it? No.

3. Mobipocket (also known as mobi). The Mobipocket format was originally created by Mobipocket SA, a French company, in 2000, which was then bought over by Amazon in 2005. It’s been around for quite a bit, and it’s probably the only ebook-ish format at the moment that can claim full multi-platform compatibility. It runs on just about everything: the Kindle, the Palm OS, Symbian, Windows, Mac, and on the iPhone (the Stanza reader allows you to read Mobi books, though it was recently bought over by Amazon and is now in a vague sort of flux). It is, however, not very popular, and there doesn’t seem to be a captive audience or a community built around the format. A quick snoop around the official Mobipocket site confirms this. Why? I’m not sure, not at the moment (and I’m still looking for proper mobi-related numbers) - but a surprising amount of traditional publishers offer their ebooks in a mobi format. Is it worth it? This is hard to say. On one hand, the Mobipocket software suite is completely free, and it’s old enough to make conversion and formatting very easy on the writer. But the truth is that it’s not an exciting format to talk about, and this lack of excitement can probably be attributed to a lack of Mobipocket users … even with free software for just about every platform. And if you’re not likely to get serious ebook readers on Mobipocket (and you can’t sell mobi ebooks on Amazon for Kindle, anyway), then I guess it’s not worth it to spend so much time and energy on a format not many people would use in the first place.

4. ePub originally started off as the OEB (Open eBook) initiative. ePub is currently tipped to be the next big ebook format, if only because it’s backed by a loose consortium of publishers, writers, and programmers, who are tied together in the IDPF, or what is known as a ’stardards and trade organization for the digital publishing industry’. As mentioned earlier in this article, ePub is built on XML, and so the IDPF leaders are currently trying to push it as a distribution standard for e-books. This means a couple of very interesting things. If the ePub people have their way, publishers will no longer have to produce e-books in different formats for different e-book vendors; they publish in just ePub, and demand that everyone else (say, Amazon) convert ePub to their own proprietary format. And it’s really simple to do that, primarily because ePub’s built on a nearly 100% XML base - itself a highly convertible format. Is it worth it? As of late 2008 Sony announced that their reader would now support the ePub format, and publishers (or at least, the ones who have vested interest in a digital book future) have been relatively supportive of ePub over others. If the IDPF people get their way and ePub becomes the industry standard (or even if it becomes just a distribution standard), ePub would well be worth it. I’m fairly optimistic that ePub will win - at the very least, I want it to win - but the road to that future is far from clear-cut: Amazon has yet to announce any plans about ePub compatibility. They’re the one major player who’s yet to come around to ePub, and for what it’s worth - I think that it’s going to take a bit of time, some elbow grease, and a lot of arm wrestling to get them to see things from the publisher’s point of view. But give it time. It should happen … eventually.

5. Adobe’s PDF format is probably the most known amongst the e-book formats I’ve discussed so far^[3]. There’s not much to talk about: PDFs are simple, familiar, and easy to use regardless of medium, plus they’ve been around long enough for everyone to know, more or less, what a pdf file looks like. And because the PDF format is so old, it’s not likely that you’ll ever meet anyone with a computer that can’t read the PDF file format. Is it worth it? Hell, yes.

The Format That Wins

I want to make a case here that the primary ebook format we’re going to work with is probably going to be whichever ebook format wins on the iPhone. The Apple developer conference, WWDC, happened not very long ago, and several very interesting things became clear during that conference, most of it worrying news to the rest of the mobile phone industry, but good news for the rest of us. Here’s what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has to say:

On the whole, there was a palpable sense that the iPhone is a peer to the Mac in Apple’s eyes. This isn’t about counting how many sessions were devoted to each. Nor is it an indication that the Mac as a platform is slowing. Quite the opposite in fact — Apple is selling more Macs than ever, and, knock on wood, there’s a strong consensus amongst developers that Snow Leopard is going to be the best release of Mac OS X yet. It’s simply that for however fast the Mac is growing, the iPhone is growing far faster.

But the two platforms are symbiotically intertwined. The Monday schedule at WWDC is static. In the morning comes the keynote, which the press attends and where all public announcements are made. After lunch, though, there comes what is effectively a second keynote, this time with material aimed squarely at developers. A technical keynote, as compared to the morning’s marketing keynote, if you will. This technical keynote has for as long as I can remember been titled “Mac OS X State of the Union”. This year the title changed to “Core OS State of the Union”.

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system. Neither felt more important than the other this year at WWDC, which is remarkable considering that one of them hadn’t even shipped two years ago.

But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year. In other words, I think it will have taken just three years for the iPhone to supplant the Mac as Apple’s primary platform. By 2011 it will be obvious.

It’s simply a matter of users. During Phil Schiller’s keynote, he showed a graph of the “OS X” user base over time, with steady growth over the first part of this decade followed by a sharp jump from 25 to 75 million over the past two years. This figure was widely mis-cited, however, as showing growth in “Mac OS X” users. It did not. The graph said “OS X”, not “Mac OS X”, and what Apple meant to show were the combined number of users of Mac OS X and iPhone OS. It was a very misleading and poorly-designed chart.

This doesn’t prove anything on its own, but stick with me for a bit. I’ve been seeing several articles arguing the point that AT&T isn’t providing immediate MMS and tethering support due to fear that their network would crash the very instant a million or so iPhone users decide to connect their devices. And I’ve noticed that the iPhone is itself a remarkably tactile platform, one perfect for reading books, and that we’ve already seen a number of apps showing us just that: that reading, and reading on your iPhone, is one hell of a revelatory experience. We’ve also been hearing rumours of an Apple tablet, with all the touchy goodness associated with their current multi-touch technology, and having that released in the not-too-distant-future would mean bringing the tactile interface to a fully-fledged operating system. And that, lastly, all those people connecting to an online network on such a small device will be a community of captive, fanatical users limited by the processing capabilities of their phones, but not by their phone’s features … making the iPhone all at once better than any ebook reader out there (cough the Kindle cough) but also perfect for reading text on the go.

But all of the above are small, fragmented pieces of information, hardly worth talking about, individually. It’s when you look at them from a broader perspective that things begin to become a lot more exciting, particularly from a digital-fiction point-of-view. Allow me to pull it all together for you: Apple sees the iPhone as a peer to their traditional Mac platform; the iPhone is a superior tactile device perfect for on-screen reading; the iPhone has a fanatical userbase that is connected to the Internet, one that downloads and consumes content through the iPhone itself; and Apple is a master at enabling 3rd-party (software) innovation. Put two and two together and you’d realize that this platform is ready for just the right ebook app^[4] to come along, and whichever one it is - be it Amazon’s Kindle app, or an Eucalyptus-type reader, or even one that we’ve never heard about - whichever one that is, that app will be the turning point that defines our industry. Want to know which format you should end up supporting? Watch the iPhone, and watch it closely.

____________________________________________________
^1. HTML isn’t really a programming language, but XML resembles it in the sense that both have very simple opening and closing tags as a foundation, like, say: <head></head> or <blockquote></blockquote> ↩

^2. Don’t worry too much about how XML works with other languages - that bit’s not relevent to this article ↩

^3. Though I must note here that the PDF is really more of a document format, not an ebook one. ↩

^4. This is dependent on one more factor: the app must have seamless integration with an online store, which in turn must be stocked with a good collection of ebook titles. In this aspect, at least, Amazon seems to have a clear lead, but no more so than if Apple decides to enter the ebook market themselves. If they do, or if some publishers decide to take things into their own hands and cobble together an online store/app combination, then I’m willing to bet that things will get very interesting, very fast. ↩

In a monomyth, the hero begins in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unknown world of strange powers and events. The hero who accepts the call to enter this strange world must face tasks and trials, either alone or with assistance. In the most intense versions of the narrative, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift or “boon.” The hero must then decide whether to return to the ordinary world with this boon. If the hero does decide to return, he or she often faces challenges on the return journey. If the hero returns successfully, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world.

It’s also why Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Matrix and Star Trek are so similar. And don’t get me started on the Inheritance trilogy, whose 15-year-old author ripped off just about every famous monomyth there ever was. (via)

We are all in the content business, and we are going to have to move into the context business. The ownership in the future of eyeballs will be more important than the ownership of IP, because value moves to scarcity. This is immutable, you cannot change this. Content creation and distribution are no longer scarce. Anybody can do them. Distribution is not an issue. I can type something on my computer today, I can flip it to my website, it is distributed. Any body in the world, on the web, can get it. The problem is, will they know about it? That’s the problem. Marketing is the problem. Distribution is no longer the problem. And you’re going to do your marketing niche by niche, and nugget by nugget, and it does require scale. If you don’t have enough content, or clout in a community, you won’t be heard. If you don’t pay enough attention or put enough labor into a community, you won’t be able to command the attention of that community.

I don’t agree with everything he has to say - in particular, I think his view of the cloud being the future to be overstated (he argues that we’re no longer going to download - or own - products, we’re going to buy access to them, ‘they’ being stored online) … but he makes rather good points about what publishers need to do to thrive in a completely different environment. The underlying shtick of his talk is that publishers will first have to build audiences, and then sell them products. And to keep doing the first until the latter makes financial sense.

THAT NIGHT, AT THE BOOK STORE, I started working on the new visualization, thinking I could impress Kat with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

The Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store is also available in Kindle and PRC versions.

Not to be confused with Grazers, who are content to look at anything so long as it’s a vaguely booklike object set up on the most prominent, most convenient displays, the Browser has an interest, or a Goal: They want a gardening book, but don’t need that specific gardening book. They’re mystery fans, but are happy with any decent read, they don’t need the latest book from the one author who writes the cat mysteries, “oh, you know the books I’m talking about, they’re so good and I can’t wait for the new one, surely you know the author I’m talking about” (sadly, ‘cat mysteries’ isn’t specific enough — and I hate you.)

There are also subtypes, like the Saw it in the New York Times subclass of Idiot.

J_R_Caroll: Their haircuts mattered more than their emotions. They had fucked and snorted through the weekend without a hair out of place.

Am addicted. Read more about it here.

Still, the major stumbling block for a self-published author is audience building. Maybe Wheaton could sell as many books this way if he never appeared on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” But there’s no way self-publishing could be profitable for him without his broad Internet fanbase. Authors, by nature, tend to be a shy sort, who would rather not go about the business of shaking hands and kissing babies. But that’s also an issue easily corrected with folksonomy and greater participation in the book world social media like GoodReads. It’s pretty hard to find books similar to that last book you really loved, for reasons I described earlier. If I could enter Max Frisch’s “I’m Not Stiller” in a search engine and receive several recommendations of similar books, you bet I wouldn’t care if they’re self-published or not.

Sounds like a good business idea. (via)

These startups do not complain, because it is from Y-Combinator that they get their seed money. More importantly, it is from YC that they get their business education.

But let’s face the truth: life sucks when you’re a startup. Your primary need in the first stage of a startup life-cycle is money - and just enough of it to survive. If we look at this from an economic perspective, we would say that the balance of power lies on the side of the investor, particularly in investor-startup relationships. You are at their mercy. You pace nervously outside VC offices. Your worst fear is to fumble your Keynote presentation in front of a bread-faced panel of execs and you pray hourly that they agree to invest in you. 

Strange, then, that Paul Graham and Y-Combinator think otherwise. YC only offers $5000 per founder for the three month period, though they do provide many other intangible benefits (like contacts, and protection, and legal advice) for the young founders they take under their wing. And what do they get in return? The answer may surprise you: 2-10% (usually 6) of  a startup’s stock. Which isn’t much. In fact, that’s a little like getting paid feathers for a day’s work at the chicken farm, because 6 out 10 of those startups die silent deaths in the years that follow. But the people at YC thinks it’s a good trade:

Why are we so flexible? Not (just) because we’re nice people. We realize that, as it gets cheaper to start a company, the balance of power is shifting from investors to hackers. We think the way of the future is simply to offer hackers the best possible deal.

The truth about starting companies today is that things have changed. The Internet, for reasons best explained in another article, is driving startup costs down. It takes far less to implement an idea than it used to be, 4-5 years ago, and with that comes a couple of implications that Graham himself explains in an essay on his site. But this is common knowledge: most of you do know this, especially if you’ve been following even a small amount of businesses online. It is the rule, not the exception, and the same factors that are now driving costs down for these startups enabled a small company in the summer of 1995 to take on the big boys of the publishing industry, and win - turning its financial-analyst-founder rich in the process. That company, along with its founder Jeff Bezos, was Amazon.com.

The Amazon Blog-Publishing Service

Novelr reader Jan Oda alerted me recently to the outcry against Amazon for its Kindle blog-publishing service.^[1] Most of those critics were themselves writers, or publishers, or book industry watchers who had enough foresight (or nerdery - and I mean this in a good way) to read the Amazon vendor terms and conditions. And they didn’t like what they saw. 

In summary, the main arguments against the Kindle blog-publishing service are that

• The terms and conditions allow Amazon a ‘nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide right and license to distribute Publications as described in this Agreement’.
• Bloggers only get 30% of the revenue.
• Amazon sucks, for multiple reasons (i.e.: they’re big, they’re evil, they’ve got a nasty history, #amazonfail)

These arguments, and their writers (see: Eoin Purcell’s spot-on coverage) highlight a major problem with the initiative: Amazon seems to have forgotten how the power distribution falls in today’s digital economy. If even startup companies - traditionally at the shallow end of the bargaining pool - are finding themselves with more breathing room around deal makers … then independent writers, and musicians, and poets who do not even face the cost issues that startups do are at the opposite end of that spectrum … in the deep. The power to decide and dictate the terms of a business relationship fall heavily to them. Bloggers don’t need Amazon; conversely: Amazon, too, need not offer blog content. They can simply limit the Kindle’s marketplace to distraught publishers, where they have the power to set and decide who gets paid what, and how. They’re much like Apple and the iTunes store in that context, with but one big difference.

Waiting for a User Complaint

It’s funny that I’ve yet to see any complaint coming from a Kindle reader, amid all the commentary and noise you get from writers and publishers circa post-service-release. Where, I wonder, are the user complaints, or the unhappy tweets? Amazon’s got a stupid idea - I’m never going to read a blog through my Kindle! … we don’t see any of those now, do we? The complaints we do see today are primarily from the writers because these are the customers - or at least the potential customers - most affected by Amazon’s offering. I doubt many Kindle users would register and purchase blog-subscriptions, when they can get it for free, from, say their web browser. Amazon may have been aiming to increase Kindle usefulness, but by and large the Kindle is not a multimedia device - it’s an ebook reader, and any attempt on Amazon’s end to increase cross-medium usefulness is akin to adding extra fins to an already quick goldfish. This is the difference between the Kindle and the iPod: the iPod has a gigantic userbase loyal to the iTunes store; the Kindle does not. Their monopoly is built around the fact that they’re the largest online retailer for books, a fact that can change at the drop of a hat should another clever, competitive hardware/software company enter the market.

The crux of this issue is that this should not matter, or at least, not yet. The Kindle is hardly an alternate reading platform to the Internet, not when it comes to blogs. More importantly, the ebook market as we know it today is far too fractured for the Kindle to make any huge impact on the way blog fiction is consumed (if at all). The Kindle, is, after all, not even offered in the UK. Whatver screw-ups Amazon make with regard to the Kindle are just going to hinder them as the ebook market explodes around us; what remains to be seen is whether or not Amazon can remember the very principles that brought it to where it stands today. Will they remember the law of the Internet, the law of falling costs and the implications that result from these factors?

Y-Combinator remembers. This year they’re celebrating the recession by expanding their intake to 60 startups, as opposed to the usual 40. Paul Graham has his head screwed on right, and it shows in Y-Combinator and the results they’ve been delivering for the past 4, 5 years. Amazon was once a startup, taking on the world. The question here is: will they remember? I sure hope they will.

^1.To recap, this service allows bloggers - or in our case, blookers - to publish their content directly to the Kindle platform, in the shape of a blog subscription. ↩

In a world in which just about everyone is a writer and just about every writer wouldn’t mind benefiting from their work, there’s a huge need for people who can help us publish profitably. Or, failing that, figuring out a way to get your own words published profitably. Some people will happily remain amateurs, but history shows us that the real explosion in content happens after people figure out how to make money.