We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet. These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Mod says something rather interesting when he talks about the potential for digital: that fiction would become edgier, riskier, a direct result from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. And a direct result of this: a rise in the importance of editors. Whole article’s worth a read. (via df)

My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”

Amazing.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Watch the video, don’t read the transcript.

… to customers, Amazon would like to be a monopoly (i.e. the only store in town). To suppliers, Amazon would like to be a monopsony (i.e. the only customer in town). Their goal is to profit via arbitrage, and if they can achieve those twin goals they will own everyubody’s nuts — the authors, the customers, everyone. They are, in fact, exactly the kind of middle-man operation that the internet tends to squish, gooily.

It’s also worth noting that Amazon is the only company on the market that doesn’t do ePub. Everyone else – Sony, Apple, Baen, is going with the format, and ePub doesn’t force DRM down anybody’s throats.

And now this new device takes the iPhone’s virtues and scales them up—plus, no text mes­sages while you’re read­ing. So more than any­thing else, the iPad looks to me like a focus machine. And it looks, there­fore, like such an oppor­tu­nity for sto­ry­telling, and for inno­va­tion around sto­ry­telling. It looks like an oppor­tu­nity to make the Myst of 2010.

If Robin is right, the multimedia ebook may have just found its messiah.

I think there are two things that we need to talk about. First, the Kindle is screwed. There has been some debate on Twitter as to why and how Apple compares with Ye Olde Amazon, and the biggest argument against the iPad is that it has a backlit screen, and backlit screens suck for reading.

Now this is true. Backlit screens do suck for reading, and I know this because I own a aluminium Macbook, and the screen is terrible when I’m doing work under sunlight. But I don’t think it matters. Isa asks: Why would anyone want to read on an iPad? and that is, I think, a rather valid question.

It is also the wrong kind of question to ask. The correct question people should be asking isn’t “why would anyone want to read on an iPad?” but rather “why wouldn’t they?” Isa’s question assumes that the majority of buyers would be logical book-nerds – comparing e-readers on metrics such as heft, size, and screen quality, but that’s the wrong way of looking at things.

The right way of framing the question is to begin asking: who’s likely to buy the Kindle? Who’s likely to buy the iPad? What kind of people are they, and how are they different?

The Kindle is for readers – book nerds, but of a particular, non-technophobic kind. People like you and I. The iPad, on the other hand, appeals to just about anyone: rich geeks, early-adopters, technophobic aunts, families who’d like a secondary computer, kids who want a gaming device, your uncle Harry who loves reading in the toilet … the list goes on and on.

The iPad is a computer. The Kindle is an ebook reader. In this aspect, at least, the Kindle is outclassed. There are more people interested in buying the iPad than there are people interested in buying a Kindle.

And so the question isn’t – who wants to read on an iPad? – because that’s the wrong question to ask. The question you should be asking is rather – what, exactly, is going to prevent all these people from buying books and reading them? What’s going to prevent Johnny, say, whose parents buy him an iPad for Christmas to play games and surf the web on – and one day the new Harry Potter equivalent comes out – what’s going to prevent him from thinking: hey, the book’s cheaper on the iBook store, and I don’t have to go all the way downtown to buy it from a shop. What’s going to prevent Johnny from buying the book – literally flicking his thumb over a sheet of glass – and reading it on his iPad?

The answer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the truth of the matter is that Johnny’s probably going to buy other books for his iPad, and spend ridiculous amounts of time arranging them on his virtual bookshelf, simply because it’s a) cheaper, b) quicker, and c) it’s all just a thumb flick away.

And so now here’s a related question: given the audience of these two devices, who do you think the content producers – the publishers – are more interested in going to? The Kindle? Or the platform that is the iPad? The answer to that, of course, lies in the number of potential readers, which is related to the number of current users, and I’m willing to bet that there are far more potential readers on the iPad than the Kindle ever would have, given a year or so.

It isn’t clear, however, how Amazon would react to this news. John Gruber predicts that Amazon would jettison its Kindle arm to sell content through the iPad, because Amazon is a content company first and a product company second (and Apple the reverse). I’m not sure if this would happen, because I can imagine Amazon’s fears of being locked into a single store, but regardless of how you look at it, the Kindle’s days are numbered.

There is one last thing we should know, and this affects us more directly than any of the above predictions. It is this: the iPad uses the ePub format. The ebook format wars are effectively over. We’ve got a winner, folks, and that winner is ePub. Plan for that, because things might get pretty heated, pretty fast.

Not long ago, I got a letter from a reader named David Hildebrand that nicely summed up the problem. Hildebrand managed to teach his 82-year-old mother how to use a few easy programs, but that wasn’t enough: “While one or another program may be simple enough to use,” he wrote, “it is still very difficult to manage folders, force-quit applications, adjust screen displays, tweak volume, and do all the other fairly arcane things one must learn about an OS in order to get the simpler applications to be simple.” The reader wondered whether that would ever change. “In short, when will the computer become an appliance?”

This is exactly what the iPad plans to be, to the average user. Arguments about the iPad’s screen quality, its wireless connectivity, its lack of published content, is besides the point. People aren’t going to buy the iPad for ebook reading – they’re going to buy it for whatever reason and then they’re going to buy ebooks on it. Computing is what the iPad’s going to be about, and that’s why the Kindle is screwed.

I often struggle with my author bio, feeling that I need to “impress”
journals with publication credits or honors, uncertain if they’ll think
I’m so charming once I say what I really am, which is an administrative
assistant (ppl. who have “failed” in life). Writers are pressured into
offering themselves as more interesting or accomplished than they are,
resulting in cloying tales of the minutiae of one’s life: has lived in n
number of continents; nominated n times for a pushcart (or
“lesser” award); “splits” time between New York and [other metropolitan
city, preferably in Europe]; is also a [insert other artistic
vocation]. There’s a mix of glibness and desperation in these long
drawn-out bios, as if the writing weren’t enough. Save the narrative for
your characters, not your bio.

Watch out for the brilliant last paragraph. (via LitDrift)

If Apple can bomb so badly on the name choice for an important product launch, they are probably getting other things wrong as well. Maybe people who are manufacturing e book readers will listen to consumers. I am looking for the perfect e reader. It has not yet come out. Here is what I’m looking for in my dream e-reader.

I love the idea that Rudi Stettner, a sample size of one, is all out and ready to teach Apple the right way to build good products. Give it a year, I say, and she’ll be eating her hat. (Update: Stephen Fry gets it.)

What has changed is our sense of text as fixed, not fluid, as something solid to which we can return again and again. That’s the influence of the Web, of course, where story has no end and no beginning, and readers are not passive but play a determining role. This is scary to a certain way of thinking, but I want to look in the opposite direction, to suggest that what is more compelling is how this opens up the possibilities.

This essay is a wonderful way to wrap up 2009, book-wise. I take particular comfort in Ulin’s conclusion about books: that despite the technological chaos of the last decade, reading – for better of worse – is here to stay. (via)

Trend #1: Writers In Control

Say you’re an author and that you want to get published. A couple years back, this would mean the usual gamut of things new authors all over the world have come to know and dread: you find an agent, the agent finds a publisher, and depending on the circumstances – the quality of book and nature of the market, say – a protracted game of cat-and-mouse begins. We all know this, of course. If you survive the initial negotiations, the publisher signs you on, wins himself a whole damn chunk of your book’s profits; and you in turn gain access to a global distribution network the publisher readily provides all its authors with.

Thing is, that’s not how it works today. Publishers used to have complete control over the distribution network, and the only way for writers to reach readers would be through a contract with a major publishing house. This was the value proposition that the publishers brought to the table – they connected writers with readers. It was a good value proposition. A fair one. It was also, however, the value proposition that the publishers no longer have today. New writers don’t need a publisher to reach readers; they may simply take their writing online. Publishers, on the other hand, have no easy way out of a low-margin business, and as such are beginning to do certain things that reflect this shift in power.

Three quick examples? Harper Collins hopes to capture new material from online writers with Authonomy; Harlequinn gets yelled at for releasing titles under a self-publishing model (never a good idea with an old-boy network); and – earlier this week – an editor hires a publisher to do his dirty work for him.

Trend #2: Separation of Bits from Atoms

Trick question: which business is a publisher engaged in? The business of atoms (bound books) or the business of bits (content)?

I used to believe that publishers dealt in both, but the problem with this idea is that the economics of the two are worlds apart from each other. Businesses that deal with atoms aren’t nearly as affected by the Internet as businesses that deal with bits. Conversely, businesses that ship bits (e.g: ebooks) are able to keep their costs down, while businesses dealing in atoms (paper books) need to pay for the logistics of handling merchandise – be it bicycle or warehouse or plane or ship. These two paradoxes come to a spectacular clash in today’s publishing world, where many publishers seem trapped between the costly bloat of their atoms and the low prices of their bits. This is probably why you hear so many of them arguing for higher ebook prices. They are eager for a new revenue stream, but they do not realize that they may need to jettison the bloat to focus on one or the other, but not both.

Trend #3: Alternative Value Propositions

So the publishers have lost their status as the only gateway to the readers. But really – when you think about it, that isn’t as bad as it sounds. There are other value propositions that publishers may bring to the table. Existing publishing houses have been designing and promoting books for a far longer time than writers ever have. So yes, the Internet has gone out and made things easier for writers to reach readers. But when it comes down to actual marketing, fact remains that writers are not particularly good at it. And when you’re talking about artwork, and getting good book covers for your book, publishers are particularly experienced in finding people to do just that. (At the very least, they know who to go to for artwork/typography, and unlike writers, they don’t settle for vomit-flavoured book covers).

Trend #4 Loyal Audiences

Seth Godin argued recently that book publishers needed to start thinking like magazine publishers. In simple terms: that publishers needed to create passionate audiences for themselves, in the sense that when readers buy books, they do so because the publisher logo on the spine tells them something about that book. I think Godin’s on to something with this idea. To back it up, the two book publishers who already are thinking like magazine publishers seem to be doing well for themselves – I’m talking, of course, about publishing houses McSweeneys’ and O’Reilly, both of whom have loyal audiences built around their brand. Compare this with most other publishing houses: you may come across a J, K. Rowling fan, but it’s unlikely to find a member of the Cult of Bloomsbury (who was first to publish the Harry Potter books). If publishers want to prevent themselves from being commodity businesses, this is one way to do it, even if it’s terribly difficult in today’s level of imprint-shrimprint saturation.

Lots Of Profitable, Small Publishers

So what do these trends mean? I believe they all point to a future of many small, profitable publishers, most of them operating online. My belief is that it’s no longer particularly difficult to create and run a digital publishing house. If you start small, and keep your costs low, you should be able to do fine even as the publishing industry behemoths crumble around you. Keep your business model light and centered on bits. Printing presses expensive? Outsource them to POD companies. Don’t know who to go to for cover art? Scour deviantArt and build relationships with the artists your writers like. Want to find and publish new, original fiction? Last time I checked, there’s a heck lot of web fiction out there. You only have to reach out to find them.

But those are the benefits to the publishers; the business owners. What of the writers? What benefits would they have of signing up, voluntarily, with a digital publishing house? Just off the top of my head – the digital publishers would have to show writers that they’re good sources of readers; that they provide invaluable support in editing; that they know a thing or two about design, and who to find and what to do when a book is dealing with a specific genre or audience. If I were to sum up the publisher value-proposition today, I would call it the Publisher Support Layer.

The Publisher Support Layer

The Publisher Support Layer is this idea of mine that publishers exist to enable writers. I must admit that this is a rather stunning reversal from how writers have been thinking about publishers, say, from just ten years ago. But let’s be realistic about it. The first thing a small publisher can do – particularly so if the publisher is a digital one – is to recognize that it is the writers who now hold the power. If the writers don’t like you, there’s nothing to prevent them from packing up their bags and leaving the building. With this kind of power, we have no choice but to rethink the writer-publisher relationship. Publishers exist to enable writers. Publishing a book is a tough thing; and so it is within the publishers’ best interest, once they have some good writers to work with, to do everything possible to make it easy for the writers to do the one thing they’re good at – write.

Because you know what? Writers like to write. They don’t like to promote. They don’t like spamming writing forums every couple of weeks to post links to their fiction. They don’t enjoy surfing webcomics to decide on ads, and they don’t enjoy cross-promoting their work through Twitter. (Okay maybe some do, but that’s beside the point.) The point is this – given a choice, I’m pretty sure any web fiction writer will tell you that the most enjoyable bits about writing web fiction is a) the writing, and b) the interaction with the readers. And that’s all that matters. My contention is that a digital publishing house will succeed if it recognizes this fact, that if it goes out of its way to act as a support layer for the writers; taking care of everything else but the writing and the interaction, the writers would be happy, and the publishing house would be able to exchange this value for a slice of the writer’s profits.

Here’s another way of looking at it: I’ve shown you four trends that are shaping the publishing industry as we know it. Taken to their extremes, we may conclude that:

1. The writers have power; publishers will need to compete with choice
2. Publishers should deal with atoms or bits, but not both
3. Publishers should offer writers things they cannot readily find on their own
4. Publishers – digital publishers in particular – must find their own readers

The unifying idea here is that, if you’re a digital publisher, you are only good for the things that the writers cannot themselves get, easily, online. Writers don’t have good designers; publishing houses do. Writers don’t really know how to market their work; publishing houses should do this for them. If you want to take the idea of indie-publishing a step further, you may even say that publishers should exist to connect writers with readers and designers, for a fee.

Now I’m not sure if this idea – this publisher support layer – makes sense when seen from the birds-eye view of the publishers in London and New York. I doubt it will. But if you’re talking about independent publishers – small, net-based publishers with little history and no traditions, then yes, this should be something that makes sense.

And of course that isn’t easy. In fact, there is absolutely no empirical evidence to show that this is even possible. I haven’t talked about finding readers, and I’ve absolutely no idea how the business model would look like. But the truth is that I’ve been thinking about these things for close to two years now, and I’m coming close to launching a digital publishing house as a proof of concept, early in 2010. I hope to prove it to you, the same way that I hope this idea won’t crash and burn. Till then, these are some of the ideas that I’ve had about digital publishing houses. I hope you’ve found something useful in them.

… here is an editor, who built and owns his publication, who is now going to be the editor-owner, who will employ the publisher. For those of you who have worked at any sort of publication, the implications of this are staggering.

(via df)