Slashdot Mirror
Open Publishing: The Net and the E-book
"It's a fundamental shift in the paradigm of publishing," Claire Zion, editorial director of Time Warner's electronic publishing division, recently told USA Today. "We're no longer dictators of taste; we are listening to what readers want." And Bill Gates is just trying to encourage innovation.
The idea that corporations like Viacom, Bertelsmann, or the nascent AOL/Time-Warner, have suddenly relinquished their vast cultural power and gone populist is a joke, of course. Companies that size, with their zillion-dollar firms run by zillion-dollar CEO's and global boards of directors, aren't in the business of letting Martha and Harry in Sioux City dictate taste. They're in the business of synergistic mass-marketing, which sometimes involves having to appear forward-looking, techno-savvy and interactive.
But interactivity isn't a remote possibility for companies like Bertelsmann's Random House (my book publisher) and Viacom's Simon & Schuster. Their very natures -- the closed doors, the semi-monopolistic clout, the power flowing down from the top -- are antithetical to interactivity. You'll know they are really changing when they tell us as much about them as they know about us. Interactivity isn't about distributional formats anyway. It's about content.
It's worth noting that the people screaming loudest for e-books tend to be 50-year-old publishing executives. Computer geeks have been reading comic books, gaming manuals and sci-fi stories since they could walk. It's a myth that younger consumers don't like books. But the Net generation does have a particular creative sensibility that is profoundly interactive.
The writer/artist/creator reflects the radical restructuring of storytelling that's characteristic of cyberspace, creating a different kind of relationship with the reader. Kids don't think of this in literary terms, but they know it when they see it.
Consider Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Or Mark Z. Danielewski's amazing House of Leaves, first published in bits and pieces on the Net. Both are being devoured by kids on college campuses. And both are powerful examples of how interactivity is a cultural and creative idea that depends on its audience for authenticity. It's not a simple matter of distribution. These books do indeed mark a paradigm shift, because they show how interactivity affects content.
Egger's novel plays with reality on every page. It pulls back the curtain on the business of writing and publishing itself, exposing hype, challenging standard literary conventions like prologues and epilogues, even traditional narrative itself. At one point in the story, Eggers auditions for MTV's "The Real World." He recounts an astonishing inteview with one of its producers about the death of his parents. Midway through this account, though, Eggers startles the reader by declaring that the interview, which contains some of the best and most revealing writing in the book, never occurred. Then he goes on with it.
In a way, science fiction comes to mind -- William Gibson, for instance, has created a mutant breed of sci-fi that mixes surrealism and pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Cyberspace has bred a chaotic new kind of technological creativity. Gibson's own characters connect with an abstract geometry of data, risking life and safety to plumb the depths of data and perspective.
So House of Leaves is an interactive novel because it reinvents the stuffy format of the novel, injecting an informal, risk-taking approach that is one of the hallmarks of younger consumers raised on interactive technologies. It's the way they see the world, the way it often appears as the result of traveling the Web via e-mail, messaging, browsing and gaming.
And House of Leaves provides other radical demonstrations of how creative interactivity works. A scary, disjointed, and truly brilliant novel, it was born on the Net in some of its original incarnations and is also popular in its paperback -- yes, paper, not e-mail -- edition. It too is intensely interactive in blasting away the conventional structure of the novel. House of Leaves is neatly blends the kind of first-person horror of The Blair Witch Project and the techno nightmare of movies like The Fly.
Hopscotching back and forth in time, it invokes Gibson's Neuromancer and his disjointed and disconnected notions about actual and virtual realities. House of Leaves changes typefaces, relies on footnotes, prints pages in chunks and upside down, uses a variety of voices, styles and formats. Yet, amazingly, a coherent and genuinely disturbing story emerges. This might turn out to be one of the important fictional works inspired by the Net and its culture.
"Dutch," biographer Edmund Morris' controversial best-selling biography of Ronald Reagan, also qualifies as interactive, albeit in a different way. Morris invented a fictional character to help him explain and enliven the life of a dull and inarticulate leader, a move which outraged traditional publishers, biographers and critics. But the device worked very well.
Creative interactivity isn't just about playing with narrative and structure, challenging convention. Mostly, it reflects the particular technological and cultural sensibilities of younger people raised in cyberspace, the terrority Gibson has written about. Traditional corporate publishing by conglomerates whose dictators strive not for innovation but for mass market acceptance and profit margins, and whose business and editorial decisions are conducted like CIA operations, isn't in a good position to reach these new markets.
Will electronic books replace their physical counterparts, one of the world's most efficient and enduring technological innovations? Not soon, not likely. An e-book can be a viable alternative in some cases, though -- some e-books might even make money.The real significance of Napster appears completely lost on publishing executives, however. File-sharing is what the Net was made for, but is it really what publishers want: readers passing their e-books around for free on file-sharing sites? Probably not. But by taking a middle way -- in which publishers give consumers a say in titles, book purchases and pricing -- they'd end up publishing a lot more writers like Eggers and ultimately sell a lot more books. Don't hold your breath.
please take a look at OpenMind and the OpenText Project.
It seems to me that eBooks, or what it will evolve into, will replace the real paper and glue types, both because it is easier to store and more long lasting. I wonder what the book genre itself will evolve into? Will it be completely phased out in favor of more interative versions? How many of you are reading less books so you can stay online more?
We still have this, though it's frequently under attack by copyright holders. Fanfiction has taken over this niche in modern society; using a plot or a setting or a cast of characters that are well known to all (eg the characters of Star Wars) totally new stories are created.
Personally, I read a lot of fanfic based on Japanese anime. While there's the standard 90% of crap, many of the fics are not only written in serial as is suggested for successful net books, but are better than their source materials. And many writers borrow from each other's interpretations of the common sources in fact. And yet, despite this thriving community, and the rather large number of good stuff it generates, it's all illegal. Where the justice is in that, I don't know. There surely must be more of a place for derivative works than there is now, I feel.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Just had to comment. Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is a great read. I must recommend it for anyone reading this thread. And no I'm not going to spoil the secret either. :)
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
As I'd define it, open publishing is creating books that are more creative, not that are simply distributed electronically. This means reflecting an interactive sensibility that successful writers like Eggers are bring to books, and which younger consumers are buying in droves. This writing is informal, anti-hype and very experimental. In my mind, it definitely reflects a Web and Net and interactive sensibility.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
My theory is that the move for e-books is coming from publishing execs much more than from younger book readers, who have no problem with the form of the book -- a book is a miracle of efficient technology -- but find few books they want to bother to read. House of Leaves and the Eggers book prove this, I think. There is something special about the feel and experience of a book, I think, that isn't replicable on screen. I'd be interested in knowing if many of you agree with that.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
I'm not sure what fiasco Messenger is referring to here..If he means making sure people are giving permission to have their comments included in a book, that doesn't seem like a fiasco to me. The Hellmouth experience was anything but a fiasco..And I can't imagine what it has to do with open publishing.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
I didn't say they weren't.
Once upon a time all video was available in Betamax format.
The format that is documented on the openebook Web site is a text format. The Microsoft Reader files are not text. Where is there public documentation that allows me to build a reader for this "open" format?
Microsoft has cooked up a proprietary file format and a proprietary Windows-only ebook-reader that, if successful, would create yet another barrier to the open sharing of information.
See http://etext.lib.virginia.edu ... where well over a thousand works in the public domain have been converted to Microsoft's proprietary format.
Among the "advantages" of Microsoft's format is encryption -- an anti-"piracy" measure. I don't know much about it, since Microsoft's Web page on that subject is all buggered up and won't display properly with Netscape.
There is an Open Ebook Forum that has documented a text format, but it has not documented anything about encryption, rights management, etc.
It is not merely the prospect of a single company controlling the "standard" that I find chilling; it is the opportunity for the standard to be abused in the ways the DVD cartel has abused its power. By companies, or by governments.
Imagine geocoding that keeps out bad thoughts from other countries.
Imagine some 14-year-old programmer getting arrested for making it possible to read.
Remember, also, that people are willing to pay for that which they can get for free;
Look no further than Stephen Kings project, where he writes a part of a novel, publishes it on the Net for people to download, and lets them pay one dollar if they liked it.
If enough people pays, he'll publish the next part and so on. Apparently, people did pay enough although they could get it for free.
:wq!
Katz, it's wolfsbane not wolfbane. Maybe you haven't been playing enough D&D.
Foo!
This is the internet. *EVERYTHING* is a buzzword. Nothing is real until it actually happens.
Funny thing is, the only articles that I almost never read the comments on are the Katz articles. It's just too much work to sift through the "I hate Katz, but don't really have anything of substance to say" posts.
Tell you what - you don't litter up the comments page, and I won't tell you to suck it up and change your preferences.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
One thing I find really entertaining is the perennial whining about how literature is dead. Putting aside for a moment that writers like Milorad Pavic or Milan Kundera (to name-drop just two mainstream authors) put the lie to that rather quickly, the critics making the claim are obviously completely unaware of what's going on outside of their little dead-tree sphere.
I haven't read House of Leaves (although I'll be looking for it right away), but it should be patently obvious to anyone paying attention that the 'net is the most interesting thing to happen to text in a long time.
You can have stagnant authors in any medium, but when you give a whole generation of writers such a fabulous new tool, you're going to have interesting things come out of it. We're barely seeing the beginning of it.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
My first instinct is to agree that this isn't something fundamentally new. (Although I'd probably argue that writing is something that always has been, and always will be, a solitary art. No matter how much interaction you add, it ultimately comes down to the author and the paper in front of him).
My second instinct is to wonder if this isn't the whole point. Would Dickens have happened without the press? It was only a new form of distribution, but how much did knowing how it would be distributed affect the author? Did the fact that his work was published as serials change his approach?
How much is the ability to publish and interact in near real-time with the reader going to affect what's written? How much will the ability to directly link otherwise disparate pieces of writing together affect the use of context in a work? Obviously, this won't impart any great increase in the quality of what's written, but it does change the nature of what's possible. And when you do that, you tend to get new things.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
Would like to see if Katz would SELL in e-format. Beg pardon, suppose Katz DOES "sell" this way, but does work stand on its own?
Lowmag.net
Can see Sony come along in no time to make bright yellow eBook with shower head hook or somesuch. They will call it "WalkBook Sport" or "VAIO Book" perhaps. Can find no reason to read under water or in shower -- Spend too much time in mornings there as is.
Lowmag.net
Reverence and mystique for books comes from old days when books were scripted and not blocked out with press. Is unusual these days for books to have mystique. "Zen For Americans," written around 1909 had mentioned reverence and mysticism concerning books touching floor. This was because books were handmade and floors were dirt, not because of religion. Practical measures made books valued as mystical. These days, books are just books.
Lowmag.net
Does not "groovy" become synonymous with a broken record, stuck in rut? Is appropriate analogy. I may have nothing to add to threads, but at least I don't post ten page article with little impact on Slashdot, yes?
Lowmag.net
Words cost money to put on paper. Katz uses too many words. Too bad costs readers when you put same words in electronic format like slashdot. Saw some good reviews on Jon Katz murder mysteries. I suppose this isn't same John Katz. Must be hard on other John Katz.
Lowmag.net
Is good point you make milesthecat. There are readers for sight-disabled peoples. Unfortunately, readers do no good when they are not transportable. On the TV show McGyver, actor Dana Elcar (McGyver's boss) was suffering from retinoapathy, and they wrote that into his character. He read with a very large font on the show. Newer personal readers are smaller, but still somewhat clumsy. You may not get good font out of handheld either. They only swing 10 points each way for most part.
Lowmag.net
Most books tell a narrative, they have a beginning, a middle and an end. As far as I understand it, an interactive book lets you change either the decisions made by the characters, or the events that affect them.
If there aren't many choices, then I don't see why it needs an e- prefix, you can simply put the extra text in a bigger book with 'if you think John should eat the sheep's eyeball, turn to page 234', and the like. If there are lots more decision points, isn't this just a text based adventure game? If so, then a good text-based adventure, written by an accomplished author would be quite fun, but can it offer the same power as a good novel?
When I read a book, I expect the author to make me see the world differently to the way I saw it before. Good books can be funny, informative, insightful, interesting...in fact, all the possibilities in the Slashdot moderator's pull down...if they are none of these things, then they aren't worth reading. The trouble is that to be one of those things often requires saying something quite complex, and that takes time. In some of the best books I've read, it's only in the final few pages that the author's real point becomes clear... Can an author make a single, important point, given all the different routes through the book? Can an author make enough interesting, different points?
Novels aren't the only types of literature, of course, anybody remember the interactive comic books from the 70s? Arrow pointing down the manhole cover marked 'page 71', up the lampost, 'page 23'. These were graphic adventures, I guess.
One of the most interesting interactive books on the web is Jeff Ryman's 253 about 253 people on a tube train. You pick a person, read about them, who they are, what they're thinking, who they're looking at on the train and so on. The book is heavily hyperlinked so that you can find people that know each other, are looking at each other, share the same likes/dislikes and so on.
It works because there's no narrative; it's a vehicle for Ryman's characterisations and descriptive prose, which are excellent. Well worth checking out. You can also buy it as a paper book, which is just as good (especially to read on the tube). But, how many types of 253 can we have - 122: people on a New York Subway, 12,456: people at soccer match etc...
One final point, ebooks won't really catch on until the displays are as nice to read as paper-I have a 600x600 laser printer in the office, but it's still not as easy to read as a novel. Books have a really good user interface, they look pretty on my shelves, and I can read them in the bath without being too worried - I might cause £10 worth of damage if I drop it (to the book that is)...
- to the guy who thinks Gutenberg are doing it right; ASCII would be useless for books like Tristram Shandy or Alice in Wonderland which use things other than ASCII. Its also useless for works in languages other than English, textbooks with diagrams, and so on.
- Book readers on my PC are no use; as other people pointed out, if you're using a reference you need to flick between the text and the thing you're doing.
- I hate dead trees. I travel round the country 2 or 3 days a week; I am now down to 1 (1) manual in dead tree format because its an NDA'd text the vendor only supplies on murdered oak; its 700 pages and hurts my shoulder...
In short, give me an eBook reader I can download huge chunks of pdf, or OpenEBooks on to and I will be your friend. My only worry with eBooks is if the reader breaks, then I've lost the text. Paper has an edge here in that it absorbs the food/drink I spill on it and keeps working.
So the added value service *I* want is an online bookshelf I can _upload_ text to; a mymp3.com for eBooks if you will, that records the fact that I've bought the stuff that needs to be bought, but doesnt limit me to commercial texts. That way I won't lose all my stuff when my PC/reader dies. And then I want someone to scan in all those books that have taken over my house...
All digital media distribution is predicated on "rights protection" and loaning your "right to read" to someone else ain't gonna happen under that system. So consumers won't care for it, and so we have Napster suits and possibly a decades-long stalemate between industry barons and consumer serfs.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Maybe I'm reading him wrong, but Katz seems to be implying that writers who publish on the net somehow share a relationship with their readers which is different from those who publish purely in the print media. This simply isn't true. As an example of a shocking revelation in a book, read Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried", a book which recounts some of the author's experiences of Vietnam. In the middle of one particularly gruesome encounter the author lets the reader into a secret. I won't spoil it by telling here, but it is worth a read. Fact is, authors have been aware of their readers in this way for a long time; when I first started reading some of Wells' (spelling?) work I was somewhat unsettled by the way much of the narration formed a kind of monologue, with the protagonist directly addressing the reader. Used to more "modern" fiction, I simply hadn't encountered this before. Yet, without a trace of irony, we find people like Katz referrring to these techniques as if they are cutting edge and a product purely of the internet age. Face it Jon; the beauty of many sonnets is the way the poet uses the strict rules. We don't need "interactivity" or "bottom-up" business rules for writers to astound us and amuse us with their imagination and word-craft.
Not only is serial publication an old idea, it used to be a major determinant of how things evolved....Dickens' novels have so many sub-plots for instance because, needing money, he gained more by stringing them out.
/. history...This is about the third or fourth article in recent days here on e-type publishing - and it says nothing new or informative.
Not only are you right that e-books are nothing new (nor is Print On demand, which now gives all the major publishers copies, esp out-of-print stuff, BLAH BLAH BLAH). You are also right that Katz ought to be checking out history rather than just hitting the keyboard.
Specifically,
Did you not get one of your books published? Closed as the NSA? Really now that is the strangest thing about publishers I've heard. I guess the Disney mafia (see previous stories) didn't want this story published, now did they?
I don't really think they are quite that closed. They do after all publish their books and they don't sue you for letting other people read them and used bookstores are legal. (Unless it's those new textbooks, but I don't think those will take.)
All in all, publishers of paper books are the only ones that haven't gone all anal about sharing of information. But then I'm not Katz, my world isn't one where big companies are only out to destroy us...
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
Some of the best stories ever created are created by groups of people. Folk tales, Homer's Illiad and Odyssey... refined through generations of storytellers. If you ask me, given the crap that most writers hack out now-a-days in search of a quick and easy pay-check, a revise-a-book-by-community approach would rock.
lf.o
/. used to be full of life, then you sucked it all away -- all that remains is disease, yet you continue to drain. The parasite dies with the host, and you are the parasite.
I normally just ignore your work, but today was too much. Don't fuck with me on a Monday.
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius's style is influenced not by its author's immersion in a world of "interactive" whatever-buzzwordy-thing-you-said, but by his having read the works of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Mark Leyner, Don DeLillo, Thomas PynchonÑetc, etc; this list could go on for daysÑall of whom wrote a hell of a lot like Eggers (but mostly better) many, many, many years before there was any "interactive" whatever to give them their ideas. Writers read books. You should try it.
-1, Flamebait
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Caveat:I have not read the stories Katz recommends. But given that he can't even get the name of an RPG right (It's "ShadowRUN", not "ShadowRUNNER", Jon) and tends to make 'discoveries' nearly a decade after the fact (M:TA was released in 1993, Jon), I'm less than trusting of his literary judgement.
[1]Granted, I'm an old fart(tm) in net-years, too, but I happily admit I'm out of touch with you young whippersnappers. Back in MY day, we had 8-bit processors and 6-color graphics (if you counted 'black' and 'white' as colors, and we LIKED it!
- Katz has become extremely wealthy and has made millions of dollars per year from his book
- With the advent of e-books Katz (and other publishers/authors) will no longer to make money off of writing
- Katz risks losing it all with the advent of e-books, and this scares the daylights out of him
- Therefore, Katz uses his position in a multi-billion dollar media and computer hardware firm to spread FUD about e-books and discourage its adoption.
This is all fine, of course, but it is not fine when on the other hand Katz first words were "information wants to be free". His words about what "young, techno-savvy" people read is just plain insulting (game manuals?!).
Katz, e-media means that books, music, and movies will all be free to download for anyone. Please decide your position on this. You are for e-media when it doesn't affect your income, but it scares the droppings out of you when it does. As long as you are for freedom of e-music, and e-movies, but against e-books, you have absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
I think that advocating XML/SGML for Gutenberg is a typical case of geeks wanting more complexity because it's cool. Right now you can probably read the PG texts on any modern computer, without special software. Use lynx, vi, less, MS Word, Internet Explorer, whatever. If people have to use special software to parse or strip the markup tags, the barrier to exploring PG will be raised.
I'd rather that PG's volunteers have more time to scan in books and correct them. I want the writings of good authors, not the incidental craftsmanship of typesetters et al.
I run e-texts through a short script that strips the header and pipes the body through par. I set the width to 50 columns, as I find this very readable. Then I read them with less(1). I don't want something like Adobe Acrobat, which is slow and crippled and addicted to "page" metaphors from the tree world.I think the idea of page numbers in an e-text is especially ridiculous. Page numbers are like inodes - an artifact of a particular storage mechanism. Even if you want greater document structure, the "page" is an entity which should certainly be discarded in translation from paper to bytes.
While electronics books sound like a great idea, especially for textbooks, and informational books, I don't think it will replace paper books. Paper books have a certain appeal over a book on some computerized pad. I guess it's more aesthetic than anything else. Durability also plays a part. You can put a paperback in your back pocket, do that with an electronic book and you might break it. The cover art, many books have beautiful bindings and covers. The feel and smell of the book as well. Sure 'E-Books' will probably catch on because they are practical in many terms, but will never fully replace paper books.
Stupid is as stupid dies.
Actually, this is the sort of thing that bears more open discussion, so I'm replying here.
The tactics I mentioned (interior illustration, extra story) are elements which I plan to use in a current project of my own, which is a novel set in the world of the upcoming open source RPG, Adonthell. The novel is intended, with the cover art, to be freely available on the Adonthell site and freely distrubuted. But the purchasers of the physical publication would also receive interior illustrations, a bonus short story not available on the site, and the satisfaction of having something you can put on your bookshelf.
However, I don't claim to be an authority, and I'm sure that there's more I can learn between now and the time the novel is ready for publication (I judge roughly a year, by which time the first demo and a good part of the actual Adonthell game will be completed). So I invite anyone with good ideas or experience at this sort of thing add their opinions to this discussion. I, for one, would be eager to learn as much as possible.
I also have learned a great deal from this site, and I would recommend anyone involved in the discussion look here as well.
Personally, I'd feel like I was cheating the readers.
This may be a viable business model, but I can't shake the feeling that there's something wrong with not making the full story available in the same format, without having to change horses to get the ending.
Besides, it feels a little too much like kidnapping.
"Buy this book or you'll never see the last chapter alive!!"
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
I don't care for the smell of paper, I'm not especially entranced by the feel of paper, and I don't particularly care for the crack of a new spine.
Does this mean I own an e-book reader? No -- but for "practical" reasons like resolution and technology maturity.
I'm not saying that I'm Right or anything, just that I've never understood this weird affection people seem to have for physical books. Is it a function of early childhood exposure or something? Habit? Long-term exposure? I'm serious; can someone explain it to me?
I have no
It just seems to be hanging around in the background noise of technologies.
Is it a question of complication (the DTDs look hellacious) or is it a lack of evangelism?
I have no
The ONE thing in favor of lower prices is, believe it or not, Napster. Publishers are sufficiently afraid of Napster that I've overheard (online, not real-world) them talking about lower prices in order to encourage payment.
I have no
I have to disagree with the premise that the Net has brought a lot of innovations to the form of the novel. So what if House of Leaves prints pages upside down, etc: that sort of play has been done at least since Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy in 1760 and did things like insert an entirely black page after the death of a character. I also disagree that publishing houses are so hierarchical and controlling. Book publishing actually puts a lot of control in the author's hands, particularly when it comes to content. Books are mostly written by individuals and there isn't a lot of heavy-handed editorial control of that content (for one thing, no one wants to pay for that editorial process). Publishers are also fairly willing to try different kinds of content, as long as they think a book might be the Next Big Thing. If anyone disagrees with the last paragraph, compare the book industry to the music industry. Artistic content is massaged much more heavily in the music industry; the company participates in the recording and production process where the final artistic product is created. And commercial music has much tighter and more restrictive genres than book publishing. Maybe book publishing isn't an absolutely open process, but it is relatively open compared to other forms of commercialized art. To contradict my subject line, I'll add that I think the Net has brought some writing innovations. The obvious one is email. RFC is also pretty cool.
I have been reading e-books from PeanutPress.com and FictionWise.com for about 5 months now. The convience of having the book on my PalmV is amazing. I carry the Palm everywhere, and if I have a few spare min I turn it on and read. In line at a store, on the can, in a plane, with green eggs and ham... it's awsome. The Palm has a backlight feature, which my SO loves too. She no longer has to fall asleep with the light on. I always read myself to sleep and with the eBook I can do it with the backlight. My primary style of literature is Science Fiction, and there are countless references to authors touting the "Death of the Book." I used to count myself on the side that would resist it, but having tried it I love it. If the title I plan to read next is available in eBook, I'll read it on the Palm. I just wish I had a dictionary on the palm... right now I "Annotate" my copy of the ebook, a feature of peanut reader which lets you write a note and refernce the page. When I'm next at my desktop I look the word up at dictionary.com.
Krispy Cream is people
Yeah, but if technique is far enough, why couldn't you change the characters to anything you would want them to be? You could make the story sort of like how you would want it to go, or just try out different options or strategies. You could even try this in a multi-user situation. A bit like a RPG, but still different.
How to make a sig
without having an idea
Actually, Project Gutenberg has a whole lot of bestsellers, only most of them where bestsellers about 100 years ago.
;)
Nonetheless, quite a few of these books have never disappeared from the bestseller lists entirely (Not to mention the bible
And a lot of it is still a better read than 99.9% of what you'd find in a bookshop today.
It's worth noting that the people screaming loudest for e-books tend to be 50-year-old publishing executives.
It's worth noting that the people screaming loudest for e-books are people with print and learning disabilities. Publishers have been cooperating with not-for-profit organizations that provide print material in digital format to people with sight disorders and learning disabilties for years.
This is simply mainstreaming an idea that's been around for a while.
Don't feel bad... I think Katz is the one who's lost it. I've never seen anyone so dependant on buzzwords and stereotypes. (And the annoying part is that he seems to latch onto the ones with the least truth behind them. Can he really be this clueless????)
Well, all I can say is that I've been looking forward to a paradigm shift that would broaden the bounds of publishing and further innovate out geek world. It'll probably happen before JK says something with substance in one of his articles...
-Space for rent
Blah blah blah blah blah.
/. has to offer. We already have enough questions in our own heads, we don't need yours. It's answers we want. Answers you don't have.
Sir Katz, you dearly need to find another outlet for these witless masquerades that light up the deepest flame-throwers
I made my point. Good night.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have a bit of affection for the processed tree packets myself, but I'll be the first to buy an e-book reader, when it has the capabilities I'm looking for. I really think it's a matter of adding functionality to the written word, rather than just e-converting existing material.
Interactive fiction and all that sounds like the multimedia CDs that came out with the first CD-ROM drives - all fluff and "gee-whiz look at the new tech!!!" It wasn't for a while that people understood that flash and animations did not make content. E-books, once it becomes cheap enough, will go through a phase like that, trying to add web links and photos of the author, etc. Eventually, however, they should add the quality content that the better DVD's have - good packaging, behind-the-scenes stuff, maybe background notes or a volume specific dictionary. That volume of Crime and Punishment may look a lot like the romance novel, but you could look at the Russian side-by-side, maybe with some translator's notes to add to your experience.
Once we get past the liscensing problems, I'd like to see a general-purpose USB port as well. You could slide next to that cute girl, link up, and take a look at what she's reading, as well as get an email address. When I get kids, I could link my daughter's e-book, and read a children's book off my e-book while images and large-type words went by on her screen.
In short, e-books have a great deal of potential - but they are mostly just potential right now. Today, I'm on your side, happy with thumbing through the pages. Eventually though, I'll trade it in for a set of light LCD screens, and probably never look back.
Buy me, you cheap jerks! I'm only 2 bucks!
Would sales increase if I put clip-art of a penguin on the virtual cover?
Sensitive, purple prose for purple times.
www.ridiculopathy.com
My second instinct is to wonder if this isn't the whole point. Would Dickens have happened without the press? It was only a new form of distribution, but how much did knowing how it would be distributed affect the author? Did the fact that his work was published as serials change his approach?
First off, Dickens knew he was writing serials. Many Victorian authors were published this way. Sometimes the book preceded the serialization, but (to the best of my knowledge) many novels were subsequently created from serials. Moreover, Victorian readers primarily read novels in serial form.
You do, however, raise an interesting point about the effect of distribution on the writing. If you look at novels that were written serially, chapters in the novel tend to corespond to one serial issue. Thus, a single chapter in a serial novel tends to be a complete sub-story, which makes the novel into a series of substories. (As cheesy as it sounds, Anne of Green Gables is a really obvious example of this.)
Novels that aren't written serially tend to have greater complexity in their plot. (Though clearly this is not always the case.) You can jump around in the plot, because the reader isn't waiting a week to see what happens next.
The big question then, is how frequently would the next segment be published? (Note that there still remains a physical speed to writing.) If it were published daily, then would plot complexity change? If it were weekly, would we be back to a more linear structure?
Moreover, many modern novels are not written sequentially. Or if they are, they go through frequent revision. Look at the Lord of the Rings. The first and last novels (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King) flow smoothly. Tolkein wrote these all at once. The second novel (The Two Towers) is a lot choppier, but sections of that were written as serialized letters to his son. Moreover, after he reached the end of the book, his ideas had changed, and so he actually went backwards through the entire book revising the plot so that it fit better. (Example: Sam Gamgee mentions Rose Cotton several times while he and Frodo are in Mordor, but there's no mention of her at all in the first book.)
An epic novel like this would be very difficult to write serially -- there are too many interconnections. And if it had been written on the web, Tolkein may have been too overwhelmed with people pointing out inconsistancies or fussing with smaller details to complete the novel; as it stood, the book took years to write. The internet does not allow for that kind of time.
I can spell. I just can't type.
Here, I'll spell it out for you:
He points to examples of Big Eveel Publishing Houses telling us how electronic books are going to be the Next Big Thing. Of course, when a corporation does so, they don't want to tell you they're doing so just to make more money, so--as Katz points out--they talk about paradigm shifts, "listening to the customer," and attracting all those mythical geeks that just don't like books.
Of course, the real (well ok, paranoid but easily imaginable) reasons for doing so are less rosy. Large corporations, as Katz points out, are not generally fond of paradigm shifts and increased openness. Instead, it's not difficult to see a movement toward e-books as a DMCA-approved, license-agreement-protected model where resale or fair use of "your" book is restricted, and where publishers can milk the format by offering routine "new editions" or introducing something like a per-view micropayment. Never mind the increased ability to track people's buying habits or "increasing value" by putting banner ads at the top and bottom of your nice little e-book. Remember the electronic-textbooks story from a little while back? It's not difficult to see execs lusting after a similar model where popular fiction is concerned.
Ultimately, we may not need a "paradigm shift" anyway. Gibson is given as an example of how the existing model can shift to accommodate customers' wants without an artifically-imposed media model. People don't necessarily want to use e-books for all or even most of their reading needs, and it's presumptive to say that existing methods of publishing can't adapt to the public's new tastes--especially since the ultimate source of written material isn't corporate manufacture but individual writers, often writing to "scratch an itch" rather than in expectation of a big payback (at least where fiction and popular nonfiction are concerned).
In my opinion--and I don't think the article contradicts this--electronic-style publishing may have its uses. But the existing genres of novels, nonfiction, reference books, etc. will probably not wholly merge with it--instead, any new technology will probably develop its own genres. That's the way it's historically been, despite people's expectations otherwise--movies are more than theater-on-film; television is different than radio-with-pictures; and the Web isn't just magazine articles with hyperlinks.
Clear enough for you? This Katz article was a bit unstructured--well, in the freshmen-comp sense that it doesn't have a neat little topic sentence and summary paragraph to spoon-feed you its thesis--but readily understandable if you're willing to put more than fifteen seconds into it.
Yeah, Gibson rocked in the 80's, when Japan was gonna rule the world, but has he written anything relevant since, or has he just kept on rewriting Neuromancer.
Plus, did he ever give a huge cut of his royalties to John Brunner's estate? Having just finished Stand on Zanziber, and adoring Shockwave Rider, al I can say is Brunner did it first and better.
Jon, read some science fiction that's been published in the last 5 years, (except for that miserable Benford Foundation book, yuck!)
I will have to look for House of Leaves, it's on my Palm.
I just took issue with your statement that Gibson created a new form of science-fiction when I find his work very derivative of Brunner's in the 70's.
Take some Brunner, some PK Dick, mix in some PC magazine, voila, Gibson. Entertaining, somewhat provocative, but not as novel as Brunner of Dick was.
In many cases, book access control software eliminates the 'first sale' doctrine whereby you can legally resell or give away a book you have purchased. It also prohibits loaning the book to a friend, which has traditionally been legal.
I think electronic books need to be defined as books, not as software. The content, the text, should be treated seperately from the software program and subject to fair use rights, the first sale doctrine, and other similar precedents and laws.
The reader software itself could be defined as software, and perhaps put under the GPL, a non-commerical license, or sold for a small charge.
For a wonderful discription of the possible future of this type of interactivity, read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
-Chaswell the non-contributer
Seriously though, I love how these companies really want to put their stuff online, then , we didn't do this correctly, so we're suing you all because we screwed up in the development stage. Makes you think big business is taking its development process from the government :)
--trb
the major problem with ebooks is the convenience of printed books....
/. about a week ago)...but anyways, this device will fail just like Circuit City's DivX (or something of the sort) failed: the consumers won't buy it
most books are read in places where a computer is either not accessible or not convenient (in addition to the fact that not many people have laptops) sure they'll come out with handheld devices that can read books...but
1) they'll be expensive
2) they'll need batteries
3) they'll be -outdated- soon (people collect original printings of Shakespeare, how are they going to do that with electronic versions?)
the other problem is piracy...sure, they'll try to create some sort of access control, which IMO will be about as effective as the DVD access control...
the only way that they'll make a worthwile profit from ebooks is if either:
1) people were honest and bought every book they read (not going to happen)
or
2) they create a pay-per-view type of system (similar to the device that's going to be used in the Ney York School of Dentistry- I forgot what it's called, but there was an article on
also look at it this way: the people who MIGHT use such a device would be techies...the people who -read the most- generally aren't techies, and those that are read to -get away from the computer-...
anyway, there's my two cents
Yeah, and if you listen carefully you'll hear the same comments about the new "net style" - informal, sprawling, terse, inventive etc. Excuse me? Hasn't anyone ever read beat poetry or Jack Kerouak? There's a straight line you can draw from the modern to the "net style". Problem is, most writers think coders mostly write original code, and most coders think writers invent their style and format from the ground up. But they both depend on legacy documents.
What happens to our historical record in an age of digital texts? I have recently been doing research for a book and have been calling upon a local university's excellent collection of 15th and 16th century texts (both in their original manuscripts and in microfilm). In 400 years, will libraries need to have a copy of Microsoft Reader handy to access old digital texts?
I realize this argument is a bit farfetched. We would certainly hope that, at some point, the publishers would simply release the text into the public domain in an unencrypted format for archival purposes, but with corporations holding on to their copyrighted properties with two hands and their teeth these days, it seems less and less likely that we'll ever see the resurrection of the concept of public domain.
Do e-books have their place? I certainly believe so. For example, I wouldn't mind seeing e-books being used in schools. The savings on print media would be spectacular, and it would be absolutely acceptable for students to "mark up" their texts any way they see fit. No more year end inspections or backpacks containing 20-30 pounds of books. The best advantage would be the availability of texts updated every year, freeing educators from the need to use 10 year old books in subjects such as science, history, and geography in order to cut costs.
However, I am a bibliophile at heart. My inability to resist purchasing every new iteration of Tolkien's texts is testament to this. I prefer hardcover to paperback, because hardcover just feels better to me. And don't even get me started about slipcases. These are all things I would miss in an e-book world.
What I would miss most, however, is the ability to pass on my love of literature and the physical book to my progeny. If my child insisted on not going to the used book store with me because we can "just download it", I think I'd be heartbroken.
Take a moment to imagine if the Declaration of Independence had been an e-text, digitally signed by the founding fathers of the United States. Would that carry as much awe and inspiration when you visited the Smithsonian to see that document displayed on an e-book device at low resolution?
Print gives us the ability to freeze time and carry it with us. It will always be compatible. It will always be charged. It will be downloaded again and again into the mind of the reader without the need for a transfer protocol. It will, I hope, never be obsolete.
Sadly, yes. Your comment's score may presently be +3, but the loyalist moderators will come gangbang you back into oblivion.
--
"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire
What's new about an ebook is: text and graphics and sound and video all together. If you have read "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud, you'll know what I mean. If not, by all means read it and connect the dots.
Also here's a site that can take you some places you've never been: http://www.eliterature.org
Try especially some of Rob Wittig's wonderfully inventive stuff, which you can link to from eliterature.org and I think you'll change your mind about whether the net has resulted in innovative writing.
There is an entirely new artform being born...don't miss it.
The sort of creativity that JonKatz describes and (rightly, at least to my mind) praises, does not strike me as necessarily interactive. After all, writers (and reciters) from Homer on (and probably before) have sometimes played with the frame and structure of their narratives. This includes examples as diverse as Chaucer's tales-within-a-tale format and Luigi Pirandello's creation of a play in the audience's "real" environment. Are all these efforts necessarily interactive? Certainly, Pirandello's work, like all work that is performed before a live audience, is fully interactive. But is a novel that keeps reminding us it's a novel, while it suggests the reader read the work in order, as interactive as a "Choose-your-own-adventure"?
eBooks are a great concept, and could have a lot of benefits over paper books, but they don't right now. I wish they did. I would love to try this out.
I can carry a paper book anywhere and not worry about the batteries running out. I do need light though, which an eBook could provide itself.
I don't have to worry about turning off my paper book during take-off or landing on an airplane.
I can drop a book and pick it back up knowing that it's fine. Drop an eBook and it could well be junk.
People love books. Why do you think there are so many bookshelves with dusty books that don't get read more than once at so many homes?
The biggest problems with eBooks lie in the consumer. One is getting the consumer to change, that is often very difficult (a fact that the automatic billing companies use to their advantage).
Another is "borrowing". Yes, I can loan my paper book to a friend, but only to one at a time and I can not read it while they have it. With an eBook I could "loan" it to millions of people; hopefully that's obviously wrong to you. Somewhere in between should be a good compromise, but where?
I love good books. I expect the authors of good books to make a good living so they will keep writing; for my self-centered enjoyment. I would be more than happy to pay for an eBook, but how many people would get it without paying?
Yes, you could go to the library and read it for "free". The library paid for it though, and if it's really popular you will have to wait, sometimes weeks. Don't want to wait? Buy it.
So, are they selling convenience? The physicaly book? The author's work, advertising and distribution costs? Then there's the retailers costs and profits.
eBooks will have a cost, and we'll need to pay for them, or it will be theft. And that is one of the things that the publishers are concerned about.
I'm concerned that they'll still want $7.95 for a "paperback" book.
Hopefully there's a good middle ground.
Wayne
Publishers may be rushing to publish eBooks (or at least take advantage of Microsoft's marketing budget) but what is much more interesting is the rush pimp out interactive content to publishers. For example, Word.com -- one of the pioneers of interactive writing -- published Gig, a collection of interviews developed by a small army of interviewers originally featured online. The book is still in bookstores, and most likely still selling, but Word.com lost its corporate sponsor and is going out of business.
Another option that I would do that would work well for e-books is embedded ads. For example, between chapters of a book as you read it in Acrobat would be a full 'page' ad for Pepsi, or something that would target the book's intended readers well. Then you shouldn't have to give up any parts of the work in the free version, and yet still have the same result. Note of course that the ads have to be static with no phone-home effect like most banner ads -- I'll accept ads as long as its not trying to collect information on me. And of course, this really only works in the realm of books, because as pointed out, there is a drastic difference between the reading experience of an ebook and a real book, compared with an MP3 or a CD, and the fact that the technology won't be there for several years to handle all cases where people read books (such as sunglare on LCD problems) which are nonexistant for mp3 players.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Why not withhold the last chapter to those who buy the book.
:)
If it's a good book, you'll want to find out what happens!
Why not?
But there is no way I will post to any web site, or any mailing list (especially if someone on list is archiving to the web), because I don't think the internet community as a unit has any respect for intellectual property. This is my story dammit, as many flaws as it has, and I want it to remain mine - I don't want it to appear somewhere out there marked as someone elses.
I have a suspicion if I was a real author I would treat being published electronically in exactly the same manner - How possible is it for people to rip me off? DeCSS starts to look like an object lesson, in the "Let's avoid this issue altogether, and stay in print media"
... and today's pet project has
"House of Leaves" (published very recently, as it happens) perfect reflects Gibson's notion of a new kind of space, a new kind of reality. I think he caught the idea (whatever you think of his writing since) that there's a new kind of creative space betweeen traditional forms of narrative and new kinds of writing influenced in part by interactivity, life online, e-communicatiions and a willingless to play with the form of the story.
(p.s. I read sci-fi, all the time, though I don't get the relevance here)
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Books are portable. They can be passed along to friends and relatives. They don't need batteries. They can get smeared and batterred. They make bookends. The question is, is there something about the experience of readable a book as is that is particular, special or worth preserving. Personally, I don't buy the idea that everybody wants everything to be experience on a screen or tablet.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
You're describing House of Leaves to a T I think..A great novel, no music but different plots, lots of graphics..this is exactly what I was writing about...A new kind of creative sensibility.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
This is a very important point, I think, and I'd love to see more (can you e-mail me, user? I'd love to hear more about this from you). The idea of added value is the next big thing for publishing, I think, and something User ll0..etc has perfectly explained..That would combine the value of the printed book with a completely new and interactictive value..But I'd love to hear more about this from this poster or anybody else..this is the heart of it..
jonkatz@slashdot.org
I own part of OpenDocs publishing (http://www.opendocspublishing.com) and as a publisher I can tell you that e-books are cool but not really financially viable.
I predict that you will see an influx of both. For example at Mightywords.Com you can buy all the Oreilly books as e-books. Of course they still cost 30.00 USD.
Either way you are going to end up paying money out for quality book-length content. Where the e-books are going to be handy is things like whitepapers, HOWTOs, short stories.
Technical books are also good in this arena because you normally don't "read" a technical book. You browse a technical book for specific answers.
Imagine you are a manager and you are looking for a whitepaper that includes specific facts about a subject. You can go to to a website and pay 7.00 USD and get that whitepaper. You can print it and use it.
It will really give a chance to struggling authors who just haven't found a publisher yet. I don't mind reading small 30-50 page stories on the net but after that, it is tough on the eyes and it is real difficult to lounge in the recliner with a 17" Monitor.
More than anything it is important to remember that companies "need" to make money. If they do not, people will not have jobs.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
Of course, how likely it is to happen depends on how likely someone is to want to type or scan the whole thing in--and then on how likely other people are to want to read it. If his books are anything like his columns, I'd just about pay someone not to have to read them!
Of course, bookswapping goes on via Gnutella and the binaries groups all the time. Usually just the more popular books, like Zelazny, Tolkien, the first three Harry Potters, and so on. Many of the authors whose posts I read on SFFnet are annoyed about this (though some more than others).
And a sort of "open source" publishing model has been proposed in the form of the Street Performers' Protocol, which I'm sure someone will drop a link to elsewhere in this discussion thread. And the Storytellers' Bowl, if it ever gets off the ground, is planning to do something similar. And then there's Free E-press, who publishes on a shareware-like model: read it free, pay us if you liked it.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
If you read an e-book, you'll read it in different places than a regular book. You'll use it and read it in different ways. You can read it in the dark, or in the tub or the shower, or while standing in line, or on a bus, or somewhere else that a regular book will be inconvenient or not possible. But the same holds true for regular books! You'll read them sitting comfortably in an easy chair or at a desk or table, in places and situations where an e-book just wouldn't be as comfortable.
They're companions, counterparts. To claim one will replace (or never be replaced by) the other is to try to cram a square peg into a round hole.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I do agree with you, though, that Palms would be great for RPGs. I recently found that the Fudge RPG kit has been palmdoced--and there's a nice Fudge die-roller out there already . . .
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
But at the end of the day, it is the excitement of turning the next page to see what is going to happen, the smell of the paper, the heft and prestige of a good book that will keep them alive.
Yes, and that's why everybody does their writing with a hand-cut dip-pen. These newfangled fountain pens, cheap ball-point gadgets, and ridiculously expensive type-writers and word-processing computers, despite their much greater convenience, just don't have the same classic feel.
It's also why people always prefer to pay 5 times the price for hard cover editions, instead of buying more copies of the cheap paperbacks, despite the fact that paperbacks are released at the same time as hardcovers so they can compete directly with them.
Books are preferred over our current lousy LCD screens because they provide a much better image: higher resolution, higher contrast.
When somebody makes an e-book platform that looks as good as a sheet of paper, and sells it for under a hundred dollars (for a hardcover-sheet size), with conveniences like wireless instant download, week-long battery life, and availability of the complete offerings of all the popular authors, it will replace book sales almost completely.
It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. The technology isn't quite there and once it is, the industry will take a few years to adapt, but claiming that fragile, expensive, heavy, bulky paper books will indefinitely (rather than just for the next 5-10 years) remain the primary means of distributing text is ridiculous.
Sure, there will be a niche market for paper books in the future, like there is for calligraphy supplies and similar charmingly obsolete things. Most people will probably still have one or two treasured old hardback paper books... and several gigabytes of e-books.
--------
Plain ASCII with no formatting standards is not "doing it right".
They don't even use any means to encode italics, which can significantly affect the meaning.
Without any kind of standards of how to mark things like chapter changes, page numbers (even optional), paragraph changes, and so forth, it's very hard to make a half-decent Gutenberg text viewer.
Every book in the P.G. collection is just going to have to be re-done, to put the typesetting back in.
It's one huge wasted effort because they arbitrarily decided to throw out integral information that would be just a little harder to put in. Don't support P.G., your efforts can be spent better on public domain texts that won't be thrown out and re-done in a few years.
--------
Let's see if I get this straight:
He starts off talking about e-books, bashes Big Business and Publishing, spends most of the article talking writing styles, and then asks if e-books will replace their physical counterparts.
Huh? Did anyone else have trouble following the article? And his point was...?
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Also, they might become popular, or they might not.
And to finish up, ebooks might be profitable, but at the same time, they definately might not.
Rader
Basically, for a niche market. Gamers.
Start with a Handspring Visor. Take a Springboard cart and put the books on it in ROM and use the PalmOS's ability to make things non-transferrable to lock it in. Stick some programs in there for utility purposes - a dice roller and a character record maint function.
Boom. Niche filled.
I think the best way to deal with an e-book is to give something to add value to it. Like this idea, where you not only have the book, you also have something that'll be more useful for day-to-day (or game-to-game) situations. You can't just rely on the WOW! An E-Book!! factor anymore, you need something else to get people to buy it.
Most of these companies are missing it. Give something more. Put some Star Wars novels on a cart... and a Star Wars-based game. Things like that.
----
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Can we get a few things straight?
"Interactive" has been most commonly used to refer to content experience (that is the user's experience of the content) which is dynamically effectable by the user: e.g. video games, choose-your-own-adventure books, Eliza, etc. Heaven knows, when I say "interactive" I mean "When I do something to it, it reacts immediately and returns control to me"; that's certainly the common usage around here.
Applying it to content experience which is static, such as a normal linear book, is disingenuous. The word for books which, while static in content, are open to end user input in the initial stages of creation, is "responsive".
Furthermore, there is nothing necessarily interactive nor responsive about an e-book. It's content can be just a singularly and fixedly authored, just as static, as the old paper-and-glue kind. The medium in this case implies nothing of the message.
Finally, the use of "interactive" as a positive buzzword is a sign of datedness. Roger Ebert in his talk at MIT on interactive movies related that by and large, audiences are profoundly unsatisfied by any situations in which they feel they didn't get the whole story, including plot branches not chosen. Experimental movies which have voting buttons to direct the plot flopped. Meanwhile the "interactive" exhibits at the local science museum have not brought it up to the attendence levels of the almost wholly non-interactive Aquarium.
----------------------------------------------
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I don't know if I really buy the idea of "interactive books". I mean, the book is the ultimate passive media. It doesn't know or care if you are reading it or not. It just sits there. It's a book.
However, "e-books" could open up real interactivity, like perhaps Choose Your Own Adventure books. Perhaps even profile the way you are reading and the things you are interested in (?? how ??), and guide you along different plot paths according to that data (e.g., perhaps you are really interested in a certain character so the book opens up a new plotline around that character). However, I don't know if people will go for this. Sort of like those "interactive" movie games. Remember them? For some reason people still just want to sit down for an hour and a half and watch a Plain Old Static Movie.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What you need is XML-compliant tagging, so that no specific format is enforced, but you can use an XSL-compliant translator. This way, you can automatically publish open netbooks with your own XSL specifications.
Guterberg's approach is so backward that it's as useful right now as shovelling clouds. Why does 'Openness' have to rhyme with 'crappy presentation and organization'? Somewhere along the line, someone forgot that these things need to be sexy too.
Yeah, but if technique is far enough, why couldn't you change the characters to anything you would want them to be? You could make the story sort of like how you would want it to go, or just try out different options or strategies. You could even try this in a multi-user situation. A bit like a RPG, but still different.
That still doesn't make it a book. And while some people may have the fantastic artistic ability to draw exactly what is in their head others of us are limited to stickfigures. I think I'd prefer to take the text and convert it to image internally...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I am afraid that I distrust the subtle overtone of optimism in Katz' article.
All of his points seem valid enough, but I worry that we'd be setting ourselves up for disappointment should we believe that there's a chance that the publishing industry will accept Open Publishing, a kind of Darwinian experimental brain pool find the most popular new authors. Or, for that matter, if we convince ourselves that they should embrace open publishing.
To implement such a dynamic system would require the cooperation of the stodgy executives who do not understand the new world and its technology.
Even if they did understand the new paradigm of Open Thought, they might not like the idea: Quite simply it's probably not profitable.
Let me explain that last point: To some extent, the Open Source movement has been an economic success. Red Hat has yet to really turn an impressive profit, but as per Eric S. Raymond's suggestions we should wait until the first quarter of 2001 before passing judgement. That the Open Source movement succeeded was to be expected: Geeks love Open Thought, of course, and software is possibly the quintessence of geekdom. More importantly, the value of software comes from not from the code itself, but more often from the sservice one expects in the form of compatibility, updates, support, etc. Because of this Open Source can be profitable.
On the other hand, Open Publishing (that is the publication of prose, usually in an electronic medium, without charge for royalties) is not profitable. Precisely because it is not the stuff of Geekdom. Katz may focus on the success of works like House of Leaves (I absolutely love the book, btw) and the need of the technocratic community to experience interactive, iconoclastic literature, but we have to face up to reality: Most people simply do not care. Most people in the western world want the linear progression of books by authors like Crichton and King. Most could care less about interactivity in their novels. Most people probably couldn't stand House of Leaves.
In other words, most people don't read slashdot. And it's primarily because of this, one suspects, that Microsoft feels it can make a profit off e-books. Who cares if Geeks and college kids will pirate them like a Napster Feeding Frenzy? Sadly, geeks and college aren't the people who read the most books....
More importantly in the medium of the written word, all value of the work is intrinsic to the work itself. Whoever heard of rpm -Uhv Watership-Down.noarch.rpm? If the profit in the work is purely a matter of the content itself, there's really no economic point in Opening it, because there is no market for support from which to obtain revenue. If you're a FS-Fanatic, you might not care, but I think publishing executives might be a little more interested in the Green Stuff....
So while from our Silicon Tower, we may mope that the e-book revolution is foolhardy and missing its chance to be embraced by us, I think we should take a step back and realize that the rest of the world probably doesn't care.
--Lagos
"There's no shame in shape."
OK, let's go back to Composition 101 and see what the hell Katz is trying to say.
A. Big publishing corporations are bad because they're closed, stuffy, and don't give a rat's ass about the consumer.
B. List a bunch of books published by the above which are somewhat interactive, not at all stuffy, and target a distinct group of consumers.
Now, what's the point being made here? And what the hell does any of this have to do with e-books?
Look, e-books aren't going to be this great revolutionary thing that will rock the publishing world for the average consumer. For the writer, they're great as they let them not have to deal with the eggheads in New York and let them go direct to the reader. (see bookface.com for a great example of this) For the publisher, they're a nightmare for exactly the same reason.
But for the vast majority of people, they're not ever going to replace a real physical book except in limited applications. There's just too many centuries of mindshare for physical books. Maybe when the technology becomes cheap, portable, and ubitquitous they'll catch on. Just don't be holding your breath quite yet.
Once again, Katz makes a nice little rant against the corporate America that pays him, without ever making a hint of substance or understanding more than "big corporations are bad" and "geeks are good." If I wanted that kind of wooden mindless regurgitation I'd listen to an Al Gore speech.
Forgive me for asking, but within a multi-national , billion dollar conglomerate, who answers the phones? who reads the documents that get presented? who proofs and edits the documents? who actually reads the documents and determines whether there will be interest and will be able to recoup the costs in printing?
hint: chances are, you're one of them.
human beings are the ones filling these functions, not faceless machinated artificial intelligences.
people like my ex-girlfriend. people like a good friend of mine. (both of whom work as editors for big publishing houses)
yes, they have a say in deciding whether a publication goes to print. no, they're not all that in favor of e-books, but so what? it's not like they have this huge secret conspiracy in changing or upholding some archane design to put out only a certain type of writing that forwards their goals at controlling the political and socio-economic future of the civilized world.
"The idea that corporations like Viacom, Bertelsmann, or the nascent AOL/Time-Warner, have suddenly relinquished their vast cultural power and gone populist is a joke, of course. Companies that size, with their zillion-dollar firms run by zillion-dollar CEO's and global boards of directors, aren't in the business of letting Martha and Harry in Sioux City dictate taste. They're in the business of synergistic mass-marketing, which sometimes involves having to appear forward-looking, techno-savvy and interactive. "
No JK, they're not in the business of synergistic mass-marketing. They're in the business of publishing books that sell. I won't try to make the argument that they're in the business of fullfilling aspiring authors dreams, but they're also not in the business of putting themselves out of business.
Maybe one of the directors read the Cluetrain Manifesto and thought you know, maybe our business, just like encyclopedia britannica's, is in the process of being squeezed out. maybe we need to do something about it. maybe we can adapt to this newfangled thing called the internet. maybe we can lower our costs in some way and get more creative and entertaining authors by opening our distribution streams, both in terms of in-coming material and out-going documents. maybe... just maybe...
remember, that director is human just like you.
My one 'beef' with the eBook format is that it doesn't do much with XML and is very limited compared to what can be done in terms of adding meta-information and linking to books. Take a look at TEI, which is an SGML derivitive... and much more interesting. For example, the ATLAS project is putting 50 years worth of journals online using this robust XML format which should add a LOT of value to online text.
g .html
http://vedavid.org/xml/docs/xml_journal_encodin
http://rosetta.atla-certr.org/CERTR/ATLAS/
For example you could delimit text in a novel by who is speaking--- or delimit text by ideas or concepts. Then you could highlight or graph out frequencies and interrelationships between people and ideas in new and interesting ways.
Compare it to the eBook format which basically is plain text with a very slight set of meta data that mostly deals with author name, copywrite crap, etc.
If eBooks are just simply placing text into a new format then they are missing out on the real potential of hypertext- and the current format is doomed to a quick death.
By the way I'm working on an idea for providing the ability tie online threaded discussion messaging to select passages in eText. If you know of good technical solutions to providing index pointers to textual segments (not line numbers, as some texts change over time), please let me know.
Thanks!
Nothing is real until it happens on Slashdot!
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Just as IANAL and IMHO have gained widespread acceptance, i believe these may be next:
IAUNAKBB - I am usually not a Katz-basher but . . .
KIUAMB - Katz is usually a moron but . . .
Since so many people seem to feel the need to include one or the other of these disclaimers, their use could save us precious seconds of time.
They may also provide another much-needed way to obfuscate our writing so that non-geeks with the gall to read the holy SLASHDOT will think we're cool, hip, and well . . . more geeky.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
True enough though, some aspects of a book are lost in their encoding, and that is why I also included the TEI link for those who favor very strong (yet device independent) encoding.
Many people, especially the beancounters of the world, are strangely pragmatic for some reason.
For instance, the Stephen Kings, JK Rowlings and such make millions selling books in the old fashioned, bound paper way. King alone has sold over a billion dollars worth of these old fashioned books.
Barnes and Nobles, Borders and Crown super book stores are being built at alarming rates throughout the country. These stores have one time construction costs and recurring costs of employment, utilities, rent and taxes. Yet they still build them.
It is nice to imagine a world where an author writes a book and people drop change in his "tip jar" and download it over the 'Net. No stores, no distributor, no editor, no bitchy publisher, just simplicity.
But the reality is the systems works for the people who benefit from it. It makes money, and lots of pinheads in Manhattan publishing companies are making dandy livings keeping things just the way they are. Don't forget, these are the same goons who run most of the newspapers and broadcast content here in the States and do you really think they would figure some way to work themselves out of the equation? Get real.
Two years ago I was ranting about this--see my dialog on this subject.
And the current print edition of MIT's magazine "Technology Review" contains a letter from me restating this point--Microsoft Reader and Adobe Glassbook are all about locking up books--not serving users.
Instead of buying into this pay-per-view model where the big media giants own all the content, we should use computers and the Internet to make information and books more accessible and useful. All information need not be free--authors should experiment with selling works online too--as long as they are not locked up.
At the same time we should sue to overturn these laws that seek to privatize the public domain of books and other culture.
We should not waste time arguing over the right format--HTML is good enough now, it can be converted into XML if the content and structure is tagged properly, and even Project Gutenberg's ASCII can be coded so it doesn't lose information. The key is to eschew proprietary, binary formats, but publish freely online and link to other works to make the content come alive. Too many "eBook publishers" have no imagination and only shovel the text online, then complain that it's too hard to read and nobody buys it. So use computers wisely!
Microsoft Reader cannot lock up "eBooks" forever, though they will try to lock us up if we try to unlock them. In another /. thread, in YRO,
under "Microsoft Ebooks and Copy Protection," you can see that the encryption can be circumvented. So now let's compare the locked books to the unlocked ones to see which is better, on technical grounds.
Even the terminology used to describe acts of reading seem to take us away from the silicon world. For example, you curl up with a good book. This implies there is a real connection between reading and comfort.
Oddly, e-books have the potential of being able to go more places than real books. An e-book can be made to be water proof so you can read comfortably in the bathtub, pool, or shower without fear of soggy pages. But at the end of the day, it is the excitement of turning the next page to see what is going to happen, the smell of the paper, the heft and prestige of a good book that will keep them alive.
Imagine a time when Crime and Punishment or War and Peace have the same weight as Harliquin Romance vol. #666. Also, as a train rider, I love to look to see what other people are reading. If everyone has e-books, I would never know that really cute girl is actually reading a compilation of Lovecraft or just another Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Let the e-books come, but don't expect them to take over.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I don't think I'll buy an ebook 'till they duplicate the feel and smell and weight of a new unopened book in my hand.
Perhaps my literatuary enjoyment requires the sacrifice of innocent trees...
Mind you -
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
At the moment, nothing can beat the sheer interactivity and functionality of pieces of paper bound in a cover. Whilst there is growth in the amount of online literature, the current state of play of the technology we use in browsing the net makes it a lot more convenient just to pick up a book.
Who do you think gets more "hits": Project Gutenberg or the Library of Congress? It's not the former I'm guessing...
Whilst we are hearing a lot about electronic books recently, the failure of companies to decide on a standard, and the failure of the technology to be as robust or as comfortable as books means that for the moment, "open publishing" will remain firmly a minority phenomenon.
The Rain Forest has no chance against my Everyone better start learning how to breathe co2.
Sig it.
One more time (with PREVIEW): .
The rain forest has no chance against my printer. Start learning to breathe co2. See Details
Sig it.
This is exactly the problem. Why would I pay $24.95 for the new Tom Clancy novel in e-book format, when for 4 more dollars I can have a nice hardcover edition that I can read, re-read, pass on to my father, and read again, no matter what the state of the batteries in a laptop or whatever?
Last time I checked the book publishers hadn't been able to make it illegal to pass a book over to a friend to read after you're done with it. There's no convenient way to do this electronically, and my father won't be buying a e-book reader of any flavor anytime soon.
Publishers don't yet seem to realize how important a friend's recommendation is.
And this is especially true in books, where there is little that can make a book stand out amongst the thousands of titles that come out every year. I can't tell you how many books I've bought because a friend gave me a book and said "You've got to read this!". For every time that has happened, I've usually bought at least one more book by that author, and often I have even purchased the original book to have my own copy.
I've bought 4 complete sets of the Lord of the Rings books in my lifetime. I gave a friend one, read one into pieces, and bought a new set that was just a nicer edition than the one I had. I don't see myself buying an ebook more than once because they've 'printed' it on a nicer CD or whatever...
...eventually. I promise to die one day.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
I sorta like it. I find it convenient to download freely available texts (like OS documentation or really old fiction) in HTML form, and stick it on the eBook to read at my convenience later.
However, I don't use it at all for it's intended purpose. I've never purchased any books for it. I find the idea sorta annoying that if I download a book, it's tied to a specific reader. I know that if my book is damaged, it is possible to re-register all my purchased books onto another reader. But that sounds like a hassle. Not very convenient.
I understand the desire of copyright holders to try to earn money on sales. But the new electronic formats aren't convenient. I can't loan a book to a friend, unless I loan that friend my reader too. But then I can't read anything! Ugh. Very annoying. It also doesn't help that the e-book prices are about the same as the paper books.
I have no idea how these e-books are going to work in a library. The readers are over $100 each, so you can't afford one for each separate book.
Publishers don't yet seem to realize how important a friend's recommendation is. Often being able to sample a piece (music, literature, etc.) will lead to future sales. In the end, I think they'll just be hurting themselves sales-wise, and hurting the rest of us by reducing the average quality of literature easily available to the general public.
However, to start with I don't think such backward thinking technologies as "glassbook" and its equivilent will make it. I just don't see paying my money to d/l a book that I can't copy, search, or whatnot, except through a canned interface. And no doubt these "ebooks" will only work on Windows, at least at first.
However, simple self publishing in HTML or PDF is a great tool for writers. Will they be able to make money from it through "tip jars" or whatnot. Maybe.
A more interesting technology, however, is print-on-demand. I've bought one such book so far, and while the print quality lags behind conventional publishing, it is on par with a good laser printer, and certainly quite readable. The thing about print-on-demand is that eventually every neighborhood bookstore and printshop could have the equipment on site. That means you walk into your local bookstore, pick what you want from their catalogue, and they zip you one out that afternoon. No doubt you could preorder online and pick it up the next day. I think this technology, backed by some smart online retailers, could break the conglomerate hold on publishing, and really get the little guy into the game. A good search engine could support millions of titles on as many subjects, and it would cost little to maintain the manuscripts electronicly, and you still get a real honest-to-goodness book for the price of your purchase.
For myself as the consumer, that is the model of electronic publishing I most hope will succeed.
On topic (maybe) : I wonder how Katz would react if he saw all his books in multi-formats being spread around on the internet. A few web sites here and there, with catch phrases like: Why buy the book? Get it here for free!
He'd either have to become a hypocrite and defend his copyrights by going against the site, or maybe he'd use his own new catchphrase: Most copied & plagarized Author: John Katz!
It would be interesting to see.
Rader
1. I wouldn't trade my (rather big) *paper* book collection for all the e-books in the world. There is more to books then content alone. 2. A *real* interactive book would be great. Think of a great novel, combined with music, different plots, and gameplay graphics a la Quake. Now that's a combination I would go for!
Well, then it wouldn't really be a book any more would it? It would be something completely different. One of the best things about books is that no one is telling you what the characters look or sound like. You build your own mental image of the characters based on the descriptions and your own impressions. That would be ruined by the introduction of graphics to the format. You would then have a Graphical Novel, which is a totally different beast.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
I would have thought that Open Publishing would be having groups of people working on a book, a little bit beyond the unleashed books (Linux Unleashed, OS/2 Unleashed.....).
Bruce Eckel has been doing this for a while with his Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++ books.
Not only that they are on-line, but he takes input from others.
Fight Spammers!
1. I wouldn't trade my (rather big) *paper* book collection for all the e-books in the world. There is more to books then content alone. 2. A *real* interactive book would be great. Think of a great novel, combined with music, different plots, and gameplay graphics a la Quake. Now that's a combination I would go for!
How to make a sig
without having an idea
I also resent the "closed as the NSA" comment. I've been a field operative in the NSA for over 15 years. We've always had open and fair hiring practices; and we do not discriminate either in our personnel decisions or in our choice of surveillance targets. Just last week I had to arrange for the assassinations of both a WHITE MALE CEO and an elderly LATINO WOMAN who simply knew too much. Is that discrimination? Hardly. Secretive? Yes, but only to the extent that it was necessary for a successful operation.
And Katz, if you choose to criticize the NSA any further, we may choose to release some photos the readers (and your employers) may find very interesting.
The NSA: Keeping you in the dark for your own good.
-David
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Which is why adding value to the product is an important concept.
I'd personally like to see a model where the text of books are deliberately given to file-sharing sites and their kin, while the physical, printed version has some extra that isn't available in the free version. This can be a number of things, such as interior art, extra content (like a related short story) or some other bonus. Even aside from that, there is a tangible quality to reading a printed book, a mystique, shall we say, that e-books will likely never reproduce, and is undoubtedly a marketable quality that should not be forgotten.
We're no longer dictators of taste; we are listening to what readers want
I am a reader. I want books that are written on paper, so that I can read them in a well-lit room for 12 straight hours and not completely destroy my eyes. I want books I can carry anywhere, and curl up with, and accidently leave on a bus. I want books that when I purchase them, they are mine to read and enjoy and loan out and hoard.
Books published in pieces are not a new idea. They're an old Victorian idea. Dickens wrote his novels in serial. It's neither a better nor worse idea then books as we have them now -- it's merely different.
Novels that play with reality are not a new idea. It's know as post-modernism. Read something by Jorje Borjes, and you'll see the same "cyber-concept" written long before computers where prevelant.
I've never been an Anti-Katz poster, but JonKatz, please check your literary history before writing about all these new ideas. These are old ideas. It's only a new distribution.
I am, among other things, an English Major. As far as I'm concerned, books have always had creative interaction between reader and writer. The writer puts in something, the reader takes out something.
The only new twist that the internet adds to this is that it's easier to communicate with the writer about the writing. Or you could contribute to the progress of a story by commenting on the writing if the writer publishes in bits. But through magazines and other literary forums, you've ALWAYS been able to do this. The internet provides easier access to do so. I'm not even convinced that allowing the connected masses to contribute to a story will really improve the quality of the writing.
This isn't some revolutionary cyber-writing change. Writing continues to evolve as it always has. Revolutionary changes -- like the creation of a new genre with Gibson's Neuromancer -- happen infrequently. The eBook is not one these changes.
I can spell. I just can't type.
Most of the current Ebooks rely on broken structure models designed to exclude unwanted users.
Yes, most of the stuff on Gutenberg is certainly not bestseller material, but they are the trailblazer when it comes to making texts truly open and available.
-- ShadyG
Nerd Rock In Progress