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.
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?
Shit happens in any case. Trust me.
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.
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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.
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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 . . .
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I need my dead trees. I love books (the objects as well as the data they contain). I like the feel of the paper, the smell of them, the intimate tactile interaction with them. I like the history a book collects as it bangs around in your knapsack or when it gets coffee on it when you lend it to a friend. Curling up on the couch with a Palm will never be the same.
That said, I like the idea of having an electronic version as well. It's easier to find that quote you were looking for, or send someone an excerpt. I hope analog books are never replaced, but digital books will increase the number of ways I can use them.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
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.
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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.
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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
So I wonder... usually if something isn't feasible, won't work economically, or is too early for its time... it just doesn't happen.
So I'm wondering why we make such a big deal about ebooks then. We do we keep on asking ourselves... where are our ebooks?
It reminds me of the commerical that's on TV... The black guy with a great deep voice... it might be an IBM commerical. He starts asking loudly, "Where are my flying cars!"
I love it.
Actually, I'd like to have some sunglasses that scrolled text. I could then read it on the plane, I could read it on the train.
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.
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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.
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-*- 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."
I'm 100% sure it's the real Jon Katz, and not one of the imposters.
.sig: Now legally binding!
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.
excuse me, but how is a link to more information any different than the "links" I put into my thesis when I referenced other information or cited information from another book? just because clicking on the link actually takes you to the information in question, it doesn't differ in concept that any normal in-line citation.
"textbooks linked to spreadsheets (for lab section) and Mathematica (for lecture section)"
yea, what's the difference between linking or having an appendix with all of this information at the end of the book?
"now consider cross linking those disciplines..."
I think you need to stop drinking koolaid.
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.
please explain to me how this is any more successful than the practice of simply writing a story?
and just because it's different doesn't make it any better. it simply makes it different.
And an e-book doesn't have to be "open-published", and e-book is just another book that is distributed electronically.
oh, and no, open publishing is not any more creative. again, it's just different. Just because 2000 people created it doesn't mean that it's any more creative than if one person created it. It's simply that 2000 people created it. More hands in the kitchen doesn't always end up in a better meal, just more messy hands doing stuff that they're not always the best equiped to do.
And younger consumers are buying Harry Potter books in droves. Hmmm, when you stop to think about it, who's name do you recognize first? Harry Potter (a fictional character) or Eggers (a real live author)?
And why does informal, anti-hype, and experimental have to represent the web and interactive sensibility? Anti-hype... hmmm, is there a reason why racist and anti-semetic sites about on the internet? Informal... is there a reason why one of the most documented reactions on the internet is the flame? Experimental... is there a reason why the biggest group of users on the internet use AOL as their ISP and Microsoft as their OS?
I think you've lost touch with the populace.
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.
Somehow I don't think you are the real JonKatz, because your comment is shorter than 7500 characters and doesn't allude to the disaffected American geek anticulture and its ramifications on emerging technologies and how you molest children.
Quick, someone post a link to that story which summarized how JonKatz raped Slashdot. It was on kuro5hin or Salon or something.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
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.
When I am rich, I will have a room devoted to the display of my books, and I will call this room my Library or Study.
One of the first things I do when I walk into someone's house is look at the books on their shelves. If there are no books, I note that as well. An ebook will never compare. Yes, the bulk will be gone. No longer would I have to worry about being wealthy enough to devote an entire room just to the storage of books. All I have to worry about is magnetic fields wiping out my 'database' of books.
The nice feature would be being able to call up the book anywhere in the house. So the aforementioned bathtub scenario could be as easy as saying, 'Computer - Tale of two Cities, last accessed page'
There will have to be some pretty amazing advances that creates equivalent items before paper books go out of style. Will it happen? Yes, we only have so many trees to turn into books.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
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
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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