Let the nightmare begin. Novelist Ryu Murakami plans to release his latest novel exclusively for digital bookworms through Apple Inc.’s iPad ahead of the print version.

Appears to be a trend – Stephen King did something similar in April this year.

English speakers tend to say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.” Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

Somewhat related: what language do the deaf think in? (thx, Tanushri)

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

The stories I love often involve world-building. But most people working in the tv business are terrified of building worlds. They want shows that are relatable and recognizable. They want real worlds with real people that will under no condition make viewers uncomfortable or remind them of anything remotely strange and unknown. No Ordinary Family is a perfect example of this: the family is Absolutely Ordinary until they’re NOT. And when they’re NOT, they respond to that very NOT-ness just as any other Ordinary Family would.

Then he finds a whore in his office and decides to write a procedural around that.

Wired editor Chris Anderson calls this the “best speech (he’s) ever seen on book publishing”. My eyebrows went up at that, and so I sat down for a listen. Anderson was right. Here are the best ideas from that speech; or at least, the ones that struck me as most surprising.

“We are a small industry sitting atop a huge hobby”

I’m not sure if Nash means reading, the hobby, or writing, the hobby (I suspect the latter), but I’d never thought of the publishing industry like this. An implication: publishing may become a hobby, just like how reading is part of the writing hobby, or computers are part of the programming hobby. A little far-fetched, I know, but something to keep in mind.

“(Writers) are not happy about being published. They want to connect. (…) They don’t write to stay alone. They write stuff so they can get out and connect with people who read their stuff.

We’ve known this for some time, of course. My contention is that writers want two things the most: a) to write, and b) to talk to readers. Anecdotal evidence suggests this to be true – Keren Wehrstein has a lovely guest post up over at Becka’s writing blog, where she talks about her shift from being a traditionally published writer to a online one:

When I first decided to do this, I emailed Alexandra Erin to pick her brain. She told me that she thought the biggest adjustment for me, switching from traditional to online publishing, would be dealing with immediate feedback in comments, and that it might be tough. My feeling was—are you kidding? That would be like nirvana! I did have a little trepidation—the net abounds with trolls, for one thing—but mostly felt I’d enjoy getting immediate comments.

The social component of people responding to your fiction, online (or anything of yours that is online, really) is incredibly addictive. Think of Facebook, and how much a timesuck that is.

“We’re in the writer-reader connection business. If our supply chain doesn’t do it (connect writers and readers well) we should abandon it.”

I found Nash’s articulation of the ‘publishing problem’ very elegant. My assertion – that publishing is a solution to the problem of distribution – seems obfuscated in comparison.

“Currently, publishing has products in the $10 – $30 price range. What about below $10? We have no products there. Or what about above $30? Say: $100? What products do we have there? Like perhaps a meeting with an author? We’ve not met all the demand at all the price points we might have possibly met.

This applies to big-name publishers, of course, but the idea that there are price points on the demand curve that are not yet addressed is worth looking into.

“The 20th century was about supply management. The 21st century is about demand management. You have to own the community.”

Nash’s thesis is that publishers no longer need to manage the supply side of things – there is more content now than at any other point in time in the history of publishing. He contends that publishers now have to ‘manage demand’. That they have to find, and build audiences, or at least create digital systems where communities of readers get to pick what books they’d like to see published.

“The absence of audio and video in long form text is a feature, not a bug.”

This is something I’ve been saying for a bit, but never have I seen it expressed so … succinctly. Nash has a real talent for ideas like this – I’m keeping an eye on him, and I think you should, too.

The second system is web fiction. You upload a text on what is likely the most open, distributable format available: a website. You make purchasable editions (ebooks, POD paper versions) available to readers. You design your own online presence, craft your own books, and in turn you get loyal readers you can talk to, get to know; readers who will support you and may become benefactors of your work.

These two systems are currently competing for writer mindshare. Just as VHS fought for mindshare with Betamax, and SLRs and rangefinders fought for photographer adoption in the 90s, so is web fiction fighting for mindshare with eBooks. And web fiction is currently losing.

I believe this is bad for all of us.

How is Web Fiction Losing?

A cursory glance of the blogosphere suggests that most writers think the ebook/digital-bookstore/electronic-reader ecosystem to be the shape of the bookfuture. It’s easy to see how they may think this: that particular vision isn’t very different from the current paper-book/phsyical-bookstore/home-bookshelf manner of reading that we all know and love.

The truth is that independent writers today don’t think of posting their book in website form. They think instead of creating a pdf and uploading that to Smashwords, and then perhaps opening a writer blog and building a following around that. (A quick comparison: Smashwords has 15360 listings; Web Fiction Guide: 754). Web fiction is not an obvious choice for the new writer. Nor is it, currently, the default manner of thinking about digital publishing.

Now I must note that the web fiction model is compatible with the ebook one – you may both have your book on a website and sell that same book through ebook stores (e.g.: Amazon, Smashwords) at the same time. But what it also means is that more writers are likely to plug their books into the Kindle store, instead of starting their own web-based books.

Why this happens is simple: it’s easier, for one. Uploading to the Kindle store and waiting for the money to come in takes far less energy than setting up your own blog, designing your own book, and building your own audience. There is a technological barrier to web fiction that we have not yet overcome. The other bit of it is that it’s easier to understand the idea of a ‘digital bookstore’; as I’ve mentioned above, it’s not very different from what we have in the real world.

So then – why is this bad? Why is web fiction so important, if the ebook model works?

Pros and Cons

I’m going to go on a tangent for a bit here (forgive me this!) and run through the pros/cons of web fiction before I tackle that question proper. I think the context is important.

The advantages for web fiction are fairly obvious. Off the top of my head: you get to watch a book take shape, right in front of your eyes – week in, week out. You get to talk to the author while you’re reading, via book comments and Twitter. You get to be part of this crazy, rabid, fanboyish group of fellow readers who await the weekly update with barbed club in hand and then afterward gather together in the comments to speculate on plot development like Potter-maniacs on the eve of a book launch.

For many writers currently engaged in web fiction – writers who want most to write and to talk to fans – this is enough. And so web fiction is satisfying in a way that pushing your content via Kindle is not: you gain a following, a community of loyal readers.

The problem with this is that the model for web fiction isn’t working out. MCM wrote recently of how he has given up on relying on donations in the weblit sphere:

(…) But just looking at the numbers, and getting a sense they seem to hold true across the board, I think there’s at least a subtle trend towards NOT supporting weblit authors. Not in a vindictive way, but in a “I just can’t, right now” sort of way. And if enough people feel that way, weblit authors are looking at tough decisions about how to proceed.

And herein lies the danger, I think, for the weblit community: Kindle is easy for writers to use. It’s a massive crapshoot, but if you get a reader, you get a sale. Self-publishing used to require proofs and shipping and all that jazz, but now it’s just “upload a file and wait.” It’s like weblit, only with a searchable catalogue. And if the numbers in “free to access and depend on donations” continue the way they’re going, I think we’ll see a massive shift away from true weblit, into something akin to serialized e-book publishing.

These are the disadvantages, ones I suspect are crippling the medium: 1) there is no possibility of an impulse buy with the web fiction model. 2) There will be no reader cross-hopping between works, based on store recommendations. Those two things are possible only within the store model, and right now this means that there is a lack of attention (and therefore money) going to web fiction. And a withdrawal from web fiction would be a bad thing indeed.

More than mere melancholy

I should pause here to note that I’m very much involved in web fiction, having put together the first bits of the current community, and so may be the wrong person to be writing about this. I may also be completely mistaken – having spent the last three months programming under the proverbial rock.

But I firmly believe in this: if the primary model for digital publishing turns out to be the ebook one, we would have lost more than fond memories. We would have lost a brighter bookfuture.

Bookfuturist and blogger Craig Mod has argued that there is a great need for an open, web-based format for books. He thinks, as I do, that such a format makes for richer reading experiences. Mod says, in The Cornerstone of Digital Books:

(…) when a blogger — and Infinite Jest fanatic — wants to point out something he or she loves in the book, and that book has a digital edition, is it not mad that the digital text isn’t ‘publicly’ referable?

Openness is a big part of the discussion behind books in HTML5. Not openness in terms of ‘free’ books, but openness as books being free from the referenceability prisons of eReaders. Which is not to say that applications like Kindle or iBooks shouldn’t exist, or that the only way to do books is in HTML. But, one might go so far as to say that having a strong HTML based, publicly referable edition of a book is the cornerstone of a strong digital edition. (emphasis added)

The problem with this, of course, is that there are no natural forces acting to create such a ‘strong, HTML based, publicly referable edition’ of a book. Publishers are busy squabbling over ebook prices; writers seem perfectly happy with the mere ebook upload. They don’t really know what they’re missing – the fulfillment from writing to a live audience; the depth of the reading experience made possible only through the web, something that we as web fiction readers have had the luck to experience over the past couple of years.

This last point is one that I keep going back to, in my head. The reading experience with the ebook is solitary at best. It is no different from the reading of a paper-bound book – and I think its evolution will be limited by this. A web based book-future has more possibilities: imagine a central, online version of the book where your annotations appear as you read. The online version shows where you mark pages for quotes, or highlight specific passages for ideas that leap out at you. Now imagine what it would be like if you had access to everyone else’s annotations. What a difference that could make – to bibliographic knowledge, to literature!

Possibly the only way to force this change on them is to make it easy enough for writers to consider the weblit path. Part of it lies in making the technology of publishing a book online (hacking the blog software, designing the text) normal and boring. The other part lies in getting the word out. I am working on the former, and am thinking of the latter. There is much to do.

The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all.

So, so true.

If you browse around webfiction stories you’ll see the same tricks and ideas almost everywhere. Donation buttons, incentives ranging from becoming a fan on Facebook to tweeting about the story and so on. If you’ve been around the block a while, like I have, that becomes repetitive. And it stops working.

That bit jumped out at me, and I think Jan’s right. MeiLin (of An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom) chimes in at the comments – saying that it’s something she’s experienced as well.

At the moment, plenty of people still pay for media content. Those reasons will evaporate. Let’s consider books. Most people still prefer old-timey tree-based books, but the Kindle and other ebook readers are eating into that preference quickly. I haven’t yet heard of anyone buying a Kindle and later returning to a preference for regular paper books. It appears to be a one way ride. The Kindle, and similar devices, are designed for buying legal copies of books, which is a doomed attempt to forestall the inevitability of all media content becoming free.

I’m not sure why this notion makes me so uncomfortable. It could be because I’m supportive of writers making money off of their content, or it could be because I’m also building something that may go that way.

My immediate, almost visceral reaction to this is to argue that there is value in commercially-created content. I think of software when I make this argument: free, open-source software has existed for years, and yet consumers have historically opted to buy closed-source products over free, open source ones (e.g: the iPad, and the variant of OSX that runs on it).

But that doesn’t make sense. Software isn’t exactly the kind of content we’re talking about – people don’t need a book or a game or a song the same way they need Microsoft Office. And I suspect open-source software isn’t as widely adopted simply because its creators (i.e.: bored geeks) don’t spend enough time optimizing for non-geek users. So this is one argument that’s fairly easy to discredit.

But then where does this leave us? It leaves me with my original discomfort, certainly. It is true lately that content is a bad business to be in, and whatever business models there are that are working are vastly different from merely ’selling’ content. iTunes works, but then they’re not really a store – some have described it as a tollbooth; a gateway that charges you at a rate below your threshold of attention. And even if that were not true, iTunes still sells its albums at a price-point lower than albums were sold pre-Internet. If we extrapolate this, we’d probably have to accept Adams’s theory as the logical end-point for the value of content.

I’m still not sure if he’s right, because the argument sounds a little odd to me. And I can’t figure that out. It’s simple, but is it too simplistic? I’d like your help here. What do you think?

PS: Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been spending the last three weeks programming (and all the learning that goes with that) for Pandamian. This post is my way of easing out of code and into the text editor – updates are forthcoming, I assure you.

The agency model is ultimately going to change the structure of the ebook market; if ebooks become more profitable for publishers, we’re going to see more of them. And indeed, in the past year I’ve seen a startling increase in the speed with which ebook editions of my work are rolled out by my publishers.

It helps that Stross is a Computer Science graduate. He understands the difficulties of building an eBook platform – something publishers are currently not equipped to deal with.

… we get writers, musicians, actors, and other creative types to summarize their favorite novels. In 60 seconds or less. With no time to prepare.

First up is Matt Mazur – a NYC-based folk and comedy musician – on The Great Gatsby.