I know only one person who loves working in Word: my 4-year-old. It’s valuable to him to be able to put the names of subway lines in their correct colors, or to spell out “autumn” with each letter a different falling-leaf hue, or to jump from Times New Roman to Comic Sans to Chalkboard in midstory. He also loves to write things on my old manual Smith-Corona. A tool that’s lost its purpose makes a great toy.

I pity the technologists who still have to convert from Word. There has to be a better way.

I’m beginning to worry that ebooks won’t have any place in the future of interactive media. Interactive non-fiction will grow to encompass the markets that today are served by print non-fiction and it won’t look anything like a book.

In a way this has already happened. Reference books and cookbooks are being pushed out by reference websites and recipe blogs (emphasis mine). In a few years, non-fiction as a genre will be dominated by apps and websites, the exceptions being the fields that legitimately require long-form text to deliver their message properly.

I can’t think what those fields might be, but I’m sure they exist.
One exception might be textbooks and other fields that are bound by archaic institutional requirements.

Publishing is on a crossroads. It’s not just a question of how the form will develop but also who we want as an audience. As books lose their real-world presence, do we really want to just cater to a minority of voracious expert readers? A casual reader is never going to buy a bespoke reading device, but will buy an iPhone or iPad, where ebooks are competing with games, apps, websites, and comics.

Pretending you aren’t competing with other media on price, accessibility, and value, is a surefire way to kill off long-form reading.

At Books in Browsers 2011, Joseph Pearson of Booki.sh made the rather controversial remark that ebooks are simply ‘websites that are better paginated’. Everything else was better off remaining as a website.

Like many present at the time, I reacted rather negatively to his view. Then I stopped, thought for a bit, and realized that there was nothing I could think of that could be used as a counter example.

Pearson and Bjarnason have a valid point: dictionaries, recipe books and encyclopedias are not better paginated; they have little reason for existing as ebooks. Better that they remain as websites, where they are linkable, searchable, and editable. It is no coincidence that Wikipedia lives on as Encyclopedia Britannica dies.

Pearson’s remark makes more sense when you understand how ebooks work: the prevailing ebook formats are essentially bastardized HTML. And HTML, as we should know by now, is the stuff that websites are made of. If ebooks are but one conversion step away from websites, and the form of the website offers more benefits than the form of the book, why should anyone still publish such books?

(Let’s be clear, though: we’re not talking about fiction here. Fiction is — rather ironically — protected from this change, because the benefits of presenting fiction on a website aren’t as numerous as the benefits of presenting the contents of a cookbook as a searchable recipe site.)

One argument left in favour of ebooks in these categories is that of mobility. You can’t take websites with you! – you might say. But this isn’t true, or if it is; it won’t be true for much longer. Internet connectivity will continue to improve, as it has for the past decade. And even if it doesn’t — even if it we continue to experience connectivity blindspots, there is nothing to prevent us from caching websites in apps, the same way some feedreaders and read-later apps currently do.

Of course, everything about this idea is troubling. Books are easy to make money from; even ebook purchases are simple enough to understand as a business transaction. Getting rid of whole categories of books in favour of websites means throwing away all that is simple and understandable about the previous model, and diving into one where business models are yet unknown. It’s going to take some creativity to make money from a reference site; certainly more than it would take to sell an ebook.

The upshot of this is to not act surprised when the cookbook section disappears from your local bookstore. Cookbooks will likely drift the way of the programming reference book. Those are, believe it or not, being supplanted by Question and Answer websites like Stack Overflow! (When asked about his digital strategy, Tim O’Reilly expressed regret at not moving out of the technical book business and purchasing Stack Overflow when he had the chance.)

I find it funny that novels are safe as books, while all kinds of non-fiction genres are threatened and shifting to alternate forms. The lesson, I think, is to think about websites and books as two sides of the same coin, each side with a dynamic set of benefits and weaknesses. When the benefits of one medium outweigh the other, given a specific context (e.g.: pop-up books, picture books, cookbooks, novels …) we would soon see a shift from books being largely produced in one form to books produced in the other form.

Novels and coffee-table books are safe as books, for now. But other kinds of books may not be for much longer. The next time you start a book, here’s a question you might want to ask: ‘is this better as a website, instead?’

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

Worth reading in its entirety.

The Vook platform is meant to be easy enough so that aspiring self-publishers can use it, but robust enough for enterprise use. It was designed to be able to create and automatically distribute both text-only books and multimedia enhanced e-books to the Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iBooks e-book stores.

It’s not free, though. But definitely interesting, and much better than their previous business model (making multimedian eBooks called ‘Vooks’)

Words can’t begin to describe my hatred of Word right now. doc is bad; docx is worst. We need to fix this

— Eli James (@ejames_c) March 24, 2012

The problem was with Word. Word’s doc and docx formats are proprietary, clunky to work with, and incredibly hard to convert to ePub and mobi without weird artifacts and edge cases. It doesn’t help that the standard publishing workflow is in Word — many writers, editors, and publishers use Word source files in their daily lives.

The challenges of working with Word are not new. Smashword’s MeatGrinder engine requires authors to tediously format their doc files; other guides warn authors against using Word to ebook conversions. The Outsell-Gilbane report on Publishing Transformation advises publishers to switch to XML-first workflows ‘as soon as possible.’

There are two likely solutions for this:

1) Write a perfect converter from Word to X, where X is any other text-based markup format. This is a technological problem, and is incredibly hard.

2) Get writers to write in non-Word formats. This is a social problem, and is incredibly hard.

The comparison between the two solutions above is, of course, a little unfair. The truth is that the second problem is easier than the first … but only in the sense that nobody has really tried taking a crack at it. There have been many attempts at writing a good Word conversion library, but all attempts have failed for various edge cases. There have not been strong attempts at creating a beautiful writer-focused tool, save perhaps Scrivener. But Scrivener isn’t popular the way Word is – ideally, you’d want something so pervasive writers would be crazy not to use it.

(I could, by the way, be wrong on the first issue – if you know of a good library to use, please hit me up in the comments).

I’m very tempted to take a stab at both problems over the Summer. No promises, but these are huge problems I wish someone would solve. The alternative to a Word-first workflow is a greatly simplified publishing process, one that is accessible to both writers and publishers alike.

Here’s a taste of that alternative world: Matt Neuburg wrote an essay on his book publishing process for O’Reilly Books. It is, admittedly, very technical, and it demands some programming knowledge. But his process is this: he writes chapters in a text-based format; generates HTML for quick previewing (ebook formats are HTML-based, after all) and then, when he’s ready, types a single command to send his source files directly to the O’Reilly server.

Here’s the really cool bit: because he writes all his chapters in a conversion-friendly format, O’Reilly is able to instantly generate a PDF – all properly type-set with fonts and layout as in an actual O’Reilly book. Neuburg then gets a copy of this PDF to preview, walking around his house with the book loaded up on his iPad. If he so wishes, Neuburg may run another one-line command, and all the readers who have subscribed to O’Reilly’s Early Release program for his book gets a copy of the updated book – in PDF, EPUB, or web form (at Safari Books Online). Naturally, his editor is able to plug into this process from the O’Reilly side of things, and every change is backed up in a Subversion repository.

In Neuburg’s own words:

• I’m working in plain text, lightly formatted; so my writing and editing and revising are easy and nimble.
• I’m using TextMate, a text editor that makes my use of lightly formatted text easy.
• I can preview my work as HTML, which makes me a better proofreader.
• I can “chunk” my book into nice-looking HTML chapter files for public consumption, so the rest of the world can watch me work.
• Thanks to the O’Reilly commit hook, I automatically get a PDF version of my work. This is fun and encouraging as the book grows, and makes me an even better proofreader.
• We’re using Subversion, so my editor and I have an easy time communicating changes back and forth to each other.
• Without any trees being killed, readers can purchase an electronic Early Release edition of my book, and they are kept up-to-date as I continue to write and revise.

My point: moving away from Word enables writers and publishers saner publishing workflows. It doesn’t make sense for the writing/editing process to be done in a format separate from the ones used in the publishing process.

Word is a curse on digital publishing workflows. The sooner we move away from it, the better.

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.