Anatomy of an Online Launch Party

My publisher has set up an online launch party to celebrate the release of Howard Carter Saves the World. I've had a couple of people ask me what an "online launch party" was and what it is for.

It's a Facebook event, so it will take place on social media. Specifically, it is a page they set up that I can invite people to (consider yourselves invited) where I will spend a large part of the day on Tuesday  talking to readers, answering questions, sharing stories, posting more of my illustrations and silly artwork from the world of Howard Carter, sharing previously-recorded readings from the book, and generally having a digital hootenanny.

Fun fact: Because it was set up by my publisher, who live in the UK, it technically starts at midnight BST. I'm not sure if that means that the book drops on Amazon and elsewhere at that time (5:00 pm here in the Pacific Northwest, if I'm not mistaken).

I'll have some silly giveaways, additional writing, and a limited number of autographed postcards with one of the aforementioned silly illustrations on it that I will be sending out to a lucky few.

Howard Carter lives in a world that is rife with silliness and much of it leant itself to my penchant for illustration and faux ephemera, so there's quite a lot of it lying about waiting to deepen the world that is introduced in Howard Carter Saves the World.

All are welcome to stop by! You can find us here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1396956627287554/

More to come!

The Buggywhip Defense League

I'm a big fan of buggy whips, and you just can't find anywhere to buy them anymore.  Sad, really.

In recent weeks I've been accused of being a Luddite, a snob, a hipster, and a Luddite hipster snob.  Just because I prefer printed books to the digital ones.  Or was it for whining too much about Daylight Saving Time?

Might have been both.

Earlier today, someone sent me a link which implies I'm a "Book Fetishist", which has implications I don't care to delve into here.  Though here's a hint to the guys who wrote that: you're not going to win a booklover's heart by handing them a gutted book unless it was used to smuggle another book into the former Soviet Union or something.

Preferably with the smuggled book still inside.

I do love books.  I love the sensory experience of them and feel that I retain more of the text reading paper rather than the screen, but contrary to what is apparently a popular belief, I'm not anti e-book. Being anti e-book would be like being anti paperback. In point of fact, I'm fully in favor of someone making this digital marginalia idea from the New York Times a reality with all due haste.

If they do that, I will be first in line for my ticket.  Please make it available for the Kobo.


I am blessed with a personal library that runs into the thousands of books, some of which I inherited, some of which were gifts and some of which I bought when I was a bookseller and could get them at a steep discount.  I grew up surrounded by them and cannot imagine a house that feels homey without them.  Not everyone has that luxury and not everyone has the space to store them properly even if they can acquire such a collection.  Electronic formats allow someone to acquire such a collection at a significantly lower cost in terms of both money and space.

I don't think that any booklover in his right mind would begrudge someone that joy over a simple matter of silicon & pixels versus paper & ink.

Just mind those user's agreements.  Read it before you click "I agree".  Know what you're signing away in terms of rights and privileges, because you're not getting them back.

The part of the digital domain that does bother me is the part that eliminates bookstores.  And mayhap that does make me a Luddite or one of the other things I've been called.  Nevertheless, I posit that the ecosystem that grew up in support of the written word is not the Cult of the Buggywhip as it is often portrayed.  It was the support system that gave rise to our literary culture. A support system which at present, no one has presented a replacement for it that seems to have the chops to go the distance.

I'm not actually talking about publishing.  Publishing will evolve and the publishers will evolve or not as their survival instincts dictate.  Publishing will find a way to survive, they always do.  I'm talking about bookstores.  Indies, Barnes & Noble, Borders, the lot of them.

Only recently has the Googlebooks launch made it possible to buy e-books from my local bookstore (and this time I am talking about the indie bookstores such as our beloved local independant Elliot Bay)
There's nothing wrong with reading books on an e-reader any more than there's anything wrong with listening to music on an MP-3 player, but I'm not a fan of leasing any of my media.  And while the comparison between music and books is tenuous at times, I mention music specifically because of the death of the independent music store that used to be a part of the culture of every city.

To throw that away in the name of convenience is a crying shame.  When you throw out the bathwater, don't be surprised if you look down and the baby's no longer there.

And if that makes me a Luddite, a hipster, or a snob, then so be it.

A Skeptic Crosses the e-Rubicon :: E-books & Digital Rights Meditations

The other day, my wife came home with our first e-reader, a Kobo, and all my careful research on the best and rightest of the electronic readers went out the window.  Why?  Price.  The Kobo was on sale for about $75.00 at the Borders liquidation in my town.  At a price point like that, how could any ardent reader resist?

Yes, my wife bought an e-reader at the Borders liquidation sale.  A sentence so laden with irony that you'd need a hacksaw to cut it.

Thankfully, the Kobo is e-Pub friendly and does a good job displaying .PDF's which were my main requirements.  I reckon that the amount of paper I save printing out reading and proof copies of my stories will offset the cost of this new widget twice as fast as the others I've looked at.


Being cross-platform friendly is nice.  The price was nice.  In fact, I suspect the Kobo people might look back on the Borders liquidation sales as a watershed moment for their device.  Already attractively priced well below other e-readers, I suspect that many people who were on the fence about the things might make the leap based upon price alone.

Food for thought at any rate.


Digital Rights Meditations...

The e-Pub format is a nice step in the direction of creating a digital library that is truly a movable feast, but not quite the whole way.  With some effort, you can carry your library from one device to another, but you still don't 'own' your books.  Honestly, I think we've given up entirely on the concept of ownership.  Of our music, of our computers, our phones and our video games.

Honestly, even though it brands me a luddite in most circles, I find it all a bit sad.  Sony is suing the hell out of a kid who figured out how to reactivate a function of the Playstation that was on there when he bought it, the option to install a different operating system.

If you think about it, prosecuting someone who wants to update or run "unapproved" software on a Playstation is a bit like Nissan prosecuting me for dropping a new engine in my Xterra.

Actually, it's exactly like that, except that Nissan didn't force me to agree to a ream of terms and conditions before they would allow me to start the engine the first time and then update and change the way the car works periodically without my permission.

I wonder how long we'll have to wait until that does happen?

I also wonder how much case law will be on the books already when it happens, which will tell us that while we're allowed to own the cars, we're only allowed a limited license to their engines and won't be allowed to sell them second-hand because that would rob Nissan or Toyota or GM of the sale of a new one.

Think about that for a moment.

Because no matter how the advertising copy of the electronic booksellers is written, you don't buy an e-book, you buy a license to access one.  A license that can and will be amended and revised or revoked as the licensor sees fit, as many American libraries discovered last week to their chagrin when Harper Collins changed their minds on how they were going to go forward on library loans of their e-books.

And as loud as the uproar might be, Harper Collins didn't do anything wrong.  They were acting well within their rights as licensor.

All of this relates to e-readers because I've never once picked up a new author without someone I trusted first handing me a copy of one of their books to read, which got me hooked.  So when I see publishers or other authors saying that a library or book loan is tantamount to piracy or theft, it makes me wonder if they're really paying attention to which writers are doing  well with young readers in the new publishing paradigm.  Not the older readers that keep the established mega-sellers like James Patterson aloft, but the future readers that will be buying books for decades to come... writers like Neil Gaiman.



I found out this morning that a company called Calibre has made finding and listing DRM-free e-books their business model for a new site.  It will be interesting to see if they succeed on that model.  Though, I sometimes wonder what the founders of Project Gutenberg think about the many e-book purveyors who are essentially re-packaging their content and making a note of how many free e-books they have available...

The Circuit Board Jungle :: E-Booked

E-reader Revolt: I'm Leaving Youth Culture Behind

Emma Silvers for Slate.com

...One recent story in the New York Times went so far as to claim that iPads and Kindles and Nooks are making the very act of reading better by -- of course -- making it social. As one user explained, "We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone." Hear that? There's a stigma about reading alone. (How does everyone else read before bed -- in pre-organized groups?) Regardless, it turns out that, for the last two decades, I've been Doing It Wrong. And funny enough, up until e-books came along, reading was one of the few things I felt confident I was doing exactly right.
Read more at Slate...

This article from slate was bandied about quite a bit on Facebook the other day.  Mostly, I think it draws attention because it's a voice rising from a generation that led us in lockstep into the digital world: cell phones, iPods, digital filesharing.  These so-called "Millenials" are the engine in that change, a generation that we are told has never worn a wristwatch or known a time when TV's weren't video game monitors or desks didn't have computers (or laps for that matter).  And this 'kid' (at 26, no one's a kid really) doesn't want e-Books.

Gasp.  The horror!
The statistical outlier gets the press, as always.

While it's at times funny and poignant and a lot of the points are well-argued, there's an underlying problem with it that most of the retweeting and facebooking and commentary have missed: the issue of ownership.  Therein lies the single greatest logical leap from Generation X (me) to Generation Y (Emma Silvers).

The single greatest problem we should all have (or so I arrogate) isn't that we can't read the spines to see that the burly biker next to us is reading Harry Potter, but that whether he's reading Grapes of Wrath or Artemis Fowl, it's not his.  He's just leasing it from Amazon or Apple.  We don't own our e-books or i-books, we lease them from the distributor and for the most part are only able to read them on that distributor's software preference.

Less like your local library and more like literary pay-per-view.

I think she was fishing around for it and couldn't find it.  Her generation feels that these things they paid for should be theirs -- they should be able to pass that great song or cool movie along to their friends.  "You've got to see/hear/read this!"  But to do so with digital downloads requires the breaking of laws.  And they do break that law.  In droves.

The central problem of most articles on e-books is that they avoid this topic like the plague.  When we ceded our right to own the music we listen to in solid-state, we gave up thinking about ownership.  It gets argued ad nauseum on the internet, but most people don't seriously think about it outside of the comments section of Wired magazine's latest article on the subject.  And just about all of those commenters have iPods.

The zeitgeist states that this format change could "save publishing".  If a format change is all it takes, then there's no conclusion to be reached other than there was something wrong with the prior format.  And as far as publishing was concerned, there is something wrong with print books: You could hand them to someone else or to a used bookstore and they could go on shelf-hopping forevermore without a dime making its way back to New York.

But this puts publishing in a terrible position where the fan advocacy that once pushed the great and the good to the top of the bestseller lists is shackled by the inability to press a well-thumbed paperback into the hands of a friend with the earnest insistence that YOU HAVE GOT TO READ THIS!.


I'm a writer and I want, oh yes, I want to make a living from my work.  So I am in no way, shape or form advocating that writers should give away their books for free.   Library bookloans, used bookstores, earnest friends, garage sales... those are lost sales.  Authors and publishers don't get a dime (at least in the United States) from that secondary and tertiary trade in books... but really, who cares?  There isn't a bestselling, successful author working today that wasn't helped by that trade - helped far more than they were hurt.

And to say there's something wrong with that is to say that I somehow gypped Nissan or Subaru when I sold my last couple of cars to some college kid I found on Craig's List.  A secondary market is part of doing business that only musicians, writers, and publishers in music and print seem to think they should be immune to.

Does the iPad Free Us from the Tyranny of Creation?

or: Is the iPad Really the Evolution of the Personal Computer or Is It the Advent of a More Interactive TV Set?

As you all know by now, I'm sort of a tech guy.  Not in the sense that I have to own every new wireless widget to come down the pike.  Far from it, in fact. But I make it my business to know what's going on so I can have an informed opinion on exactly how it's sucking the souls out of our lives...

Of course, I'm just kidding.  (Sort of.)

So over the weekend, the age of the iPad dawned . . . on the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express.  (I don't know that this is significant, but it's worth noting all the same.)  And as usual, I think the press surrounding the thing missed the real story.

This morning's story on NPR made the iPad sound like the death knell of the free internet.  The spark that sets alight a million free-content websites.  As the masses swarm to the "gated community" afforded by Apple's restrictive content controls and the industry adopts its usual posture of chasing Apple... where does that leave us?

That depends upon how you view media.  In other words, are you a creator or a consumer?  Let's face it, Lev Grossman's assessment of the iPad in this Time Magazine article is pretty dead-on: the iPad is purpose-built for consumption of media, not the creation of media.

I take exception to all the many articles and news stories (seriously, could there be more hype?) that call it the evolution of the laptop computer, or even the "end" of the laptop.  This is just a platform for delivery, as many people describe it it's basically just an enormous iPod Touch.  In my view it's the newest incarnation of the television or radio, not the latest evolution of the laptop.  You've spent your entire life with such devices and Apple's new device just makes the things interactive.  I don't know a single author, blogger or other sort of "content creator" (as we are now called) that is ditching his or her Macbook or PC in favor of the iPad.

Why?  Because typing on a big sheet of glass that won't or can't multitask sucks.

But I think that's just fine.  Seriously, there's not a darn thing wrong with that.  Why?  Because without consumers, what are we creating content for?  Whether it's a more interactive e-reader or a delivery system for cleaner HD NetFlix downloads or just a way to read the digital newspaper, this device isn't a disruptive technology.  Far from it.  NPR is right, this is a device that harkens back to the era of hardcopy, a chance to preserve the old paradigm of "We create, you read" that has seen us through the centuries since before Gutenberg went out and MacGyvered a winepress and started printing Bibles.

I know a lot of people see the wild and woolly, freewheeling internet as the height of human social development.  Those are generally the same people who complain about all the "clueless n00bs" clogging the pipeline and generally getting in their way.  The wild west is great as long as you're one of the gunslingers, but all those pesky civilians just get in the way.

The simple fact is, there are too many content creators already.   Andre Codrescue once warned that we are a nation of exhibitionists that is running desperately short of voyeurs.  The iPad is tailor-made for voyeurs.  (As long as the exhibitionist isn't using Flash) and I say more power to it.  The iPad gives content creators the chance to create content and it relieves those who would rather consume than create relief from the tyranny of that keyboard that seems to haunt far too many with the imaginary onus to do something with it.

I posit that there are those in the world who shouldn't have a keyboard handy.  I'm sorry if that sounds elitest or not at all the PC thing to say (pun intended) but there are simply too many people who feel that they HAVE to tell their story and get out there only to find that they don't actually have a story to tell.  These are the people who Tweet their every bowel movement.

The iPad is a gated community.  It takes away the keyboard, along with its implicit exhortation to type something even if you don't have anything to type, and it restricts what you can view to Apple-approved content.  With all the constraints that Apple puts on their devices, don't be surprised if the Federal Trace Commission eventually tells them to knock it off.  The things they got away with when their market share was too small to create waves that way will eventually get them in trouble just as it did Microsoft.

But in the meantime, I think this device is going to ultimately clear the pipeline of a lot of people who would rather not have the QWERTY keyboard staring them in the face, tempting them with all the banality they can Tweet about.  The iPad creates audiences and if you're one of the exhibitionists... more voyeurs is good.

Anyway, this sense of the iPad as either the beginning or end of something new and frightening is nonsensical.  We've had gated communities on the internet before or have we forgotten AOL?

State of the eBook

It's been a tumultuous month for the ebook and it's only the sixth of February.  The fracas between Amazon and Macmillan is settling while the Googlebooks lawsuits are heating back up with the Author's Guild finally getting out there and trying to explain why they settled in they first place.  (Essentially they were trying to not become the RIAA.) 

The ripples of this thing continue to spread and the book industry is just trying to surf the wave... but really, why do we care?

Warning: If you've an aversion to statistics, you might want to find another post to read.

They get 90% of the press and actually represent just one or two percent of the actual sales. e-Books are the Prius of the publishing industry.  Nevertheless, the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show was the debutante of more and yet more e-Book Readers.  The Plastic Logic Que, the HP Tablet and the Blio (among many others) were all rushed to the podium to get out there ahead of the much anticipated advent of the Apple iPad.

If you think about it, this was probably the first time since Gutenberg started printing his Bibles that book technologies were discussed on this scale.  Certainly no futurists of the 1950's would have predicted that a new way of delivering books to readers would trump coverage of the introduction of 3D Television!

So, are we really seeing publishing turn a new page in the long journey that began with Cuneiform stamped into terra cotta tablets?  Will electronic readers like the Kindle do to paper books what Gutenberg's press did to the medieval scriptorium or more recently what CD's did to LP's?

It's impossible to say without doing a little bit of math.  

In spite of the hype, adoption of e-Books has been slow.  In 2008, e-Books accounted for an estimated 0.46% of total book sales, up 68% from the previous year (APP statistics).  Exact 2009 statistics aren't available yet, but the publishers are generally agreeing that it's risen to 1% of total sales.  While that's impressive growth in an industry that only grew on the whole by about 2.5%.  The long and the short of it is that unless something groundbreaking happens and all hell breaks loose, at the current rate of growth, we're probably looking at about 2016 before they equal the current sales of audio books.

That's not a tsunami, that's just the tide coming in.  e-Books certainly aren't going away, but without some sort of unforeseen intervention in the market to drive more readers into the arms of the e-Readers, the physical book will be with us for some time to come.  So don't go tearing out those pretty bookshelves in your living room just yet.

I see three main challenges to the e-Reader market before it can truly come into its own...

• Standardization: At present, there is no standard format that can be effortlessly transported from one reader to the next.  Even ePub, which is quickly rising in favor, has problem jumping from one reader that uses it to another due to some of the DRM problems.
  
• DRM: More authors have been helped than have ever been harmed by the secondary market in used books.  Trading, loaning, and sharing literature is ingrained into literary culture and readers have been significantly less inclined to accept that they won't own their books and be able to give them to friends or resell them.  The Barnes & Noble "Nook's" loan feature is a step in the right direction, but not a solution.
  
• Pricing/Valuation: The Macmillan/Amazon battle is just the tip of the iceberg. The publishing industry is only this past week finally taking steps to preserve the valuation of books.  It's a simple fact that printing and distribution of a physical book only accounts for (at most) 20% of the cover price.  Establishing the idea that a standard price of $9.99 or less for e-Books in no way reflects the reality of production.  The inclination of people to view digital content as essentially free will take a long time to reverse.

As I've said before, we have to get away from the idea that what we see now is necessarily any indication of what will be reality in ten years.  I don't think you could have looked at the early output of Gutenberg's presses (Bibles, indulgences and religious tracts) and seen an accurate view of what would be happening once writers stopped playing with the new toy and really started to create.

I'm reading a book by literary agent Donald Maas called Writing the Breakout Novel (which I will be reviewing here in the next week or so as past of the Backlist Book Review series).  In the first chapters he gives a sort of a summary of the "State of the Industry circa 2000" (when he wrote the book).  It's interesting and I'd like to see it updated, but there is a lot there that we need to remember.  Maas has the reputation of being the agent's agent and much of what he's saying came to pass and much is still in the works.   He's especially skeptical of the predictions that were being bandied about back then of the impending ebook revolution and that "in five years print books will be finished".  It's 2010 and we're still waiting.

He is especially skeptical of the writer's fantasy that the electronic book will somehow make the publishers disappear or that such an event is even desirable.  I refer you back to  John Scalzi's play for why I think that operating without a publisher is not the panacea that many want you to believe it would be.    Check it out at Scalzi's blog "Whatever".

Verso Advertising recently compiled data gathered from 110 million internet users across 5,100 websites to compile a broad-spectrum look at the book market as it was in 2009.  There's a definite marketing slant to this information insomuch as the data is used to underline the need for publishers to advertise in order to sell books.  

The e-Book data is a mixed-bag, mostly anticipating several proposed e-Book strategies such as pricing adjustments above the $10 benchmark that Kindle used to adhere to (back in the old days) and whether they would pay a premium for a hard copy if it came 'bundled' with an electronic version.  Most interesting to me was that 29% of e-Reader afficionados admitted to downloading pirate e-Books with 8% unsure.  (Which in this case I think translates to "I don't really want to answer this question because I have enough of a conscience to feel guilty about it").  45.9% of males age 18-34 admitted to slapping the skull & crossbones sticker onto their e-Readers!

Overall, Verso concludes that a 10-12% market portion for e-Books is theoretically achievable in two years, but no promises as there is no visible tipping-point event on the horizon.  With echoes of presidential elections ringing in our ears, we are forced to conclude that the revolution still isn't here and once again the undecideds hold all the cards.

e-Books start on Slide 19

Amazon's Uncomfortable Dinner Party

They're fighting again.

Throwing dishes and swilling wine and shouting about how the other one has been making time with that Jezebel, Apple.

Yes, it's happening again. It's messy and confusing and it's all over the papers -- The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly are both reporting that this weekend, the uneasy relationship between Amazon.com and publishers reached that awkward stage when their friends start avoiding them.

The marriage between Amazon's Kindle and publishers has never been particularly easy. For the most part, pubs have been skeptical of the e-Book format from the word go. Most just thought that the Kindle's default (and seemingly arbitrary) asking price of $9.99 was well below the margin at which even an electronic book could be written, edited, typeset and published. Then Apple came along and offered to do for publishing what they did for music downloads. Apple would let the publishers set the prices (in the manner that they always have) and take a percentage.

Apple. What a tramp.

You might have heard this called the "agency model" -- which just means that Apple acts as a sales agent for the publisher, earning a cut or comission of around 30%. You know... like bookstores have for the past hundred years or so?

This model can be good or bad. The publishers argue that the prices would be higher, but quality would be better. Amazon argues that higher prices for e-books means fewer people will buy books (And Kindles). 

The argument is about e-Book pricing. (What, that doesn't prompt plate throwing at your house?) Amazon has been busily trying to get the bookbuying public to expect that e-Books shouldn't cost more than $9.99. In fact, they made a point in the New York Times recently about how the top downloaded books are usually free. All part - say publishers - of a far-reaching goal of undercutting the value of books. So publishers have apparently been coming to Amazon's Kindle team demanding the same deal they're being offered by Apple.

To teach publishers a lesson, Amazon de-listed all titles sold by Macmillan press. In the words of Science Fiction author Scott Westerfeld "Amazon more or less “de-friended” one of the six big US publishers". Saying they did it "in protest", Amazon stripped all of the "Buy" buttons from every new Macmillan book both in physical and Kindle format.

Gee... Passive-aggressive much?

The Internet lit up with the rage of a thousand dissed novelists and their fans. Picking on a publisher with that many sci fi authors was tactically unwise. As Scott Westerfeld noted on Twitter: "They'll blog you dead". And boy, do those folks know how to blog.

Which is where we venture into Shakespearean territory: Two industries, alike in dignity, here in Interwebzia where we lay our scene. The trouble is, Amazon thinks they're in Taming of the Shrew and the publishers are terrified that they might be in Romeo & Juliet and they've read the end of that play.

So I ask you, is it a comedy or a tragedy? Publishers are clinging to life, bookstores are laying off staff and closing stores... it certainly doesn't carry the air of comedy about any of this. If you think the literary landscape would be better off without publishers (and bookstores), then I suppose you will disagree with me, but for all their sins I feel that they do more good than harm. One thing is for certain: no matter how you feel about iPad (that shameless hussy), the Kindle can no longer dictate terms to publishers. But on behalf of both readers and writers, I say unto both of you: No matter what anyone tells you, this is a pox on both your houses. Get those houses in order, your public tussling serves no one, least of all yourselves.

 Think of the childr... er... books.

 Get your coat honey, we're leaving.

Narrow bandwidth

They don't mention books in the NPR segment that follows, but this very much affects how eBooks can and will be delivered over the wireless devices such as the iPad, the Kindle and other electronic formats that depend upon the stability and availability of a wireless network to deliver your books to your screen.

iPad

A colorful technology

Honestly, I've never much cared about color screens for e-Readers and never really understood the furor surrounding the perceived need to develop one. I suppose if the e-Reader is going to replace textbooks, that would be easier with a color screen, but beyond that, I don't really care. I personally read novels mostly and want the highest resolution black & white screen available to me to prevent the sort of eyestrain generally associated with reading from a screen. If I was going to read a comic or graphic novel, then the collectibility of the physical item is a significant factor in the purchase. A factor that would be negated by buying it electronically. (It's a geek thing.) If we're talking color screens for laptops that don't give me a headache after looking at them for about eight hours straight... well, then we might be on to something. As we've discussed before, the "e-Ink" screens used in the Kindle (and almost all other leading e-Readers) haven't yet been able to present color. Debuting at CES this past week, it looked like Pixel Qi might just have cut the Gordian knot on the color page front. Anyway, if you're looking for full-color e-Books, I suppose this is good news for you! Read more at GizModo.

You know, for kids!

The guys from Crunch Gear check out a color e-Reader at the CES conference.

Kurzweil casts his vote and backs it up with "Blio"

Text-to-speech pioneer and inventor Ray Kurzweil has cast his vote in the e-Reader debate in favor of a convergence device. What's more, he's putting his software where his mouth is. CNET is reporting that Kurzweil is behind a new software from KNFB Reading Technology called "Blio", a full-color e-Reader for your laptop. You might recall this post where I asked when we would begin taking full advantage of the digital domain rather than just reinventing the printing press with electrons instead of ink. Kurzweil answers this call with an emphatic statement -- Blio not only reads to you, it has the capacity to integrate animation, video, audio and other additional content. For better or worse, this is not the paper-replicating e-Reader you've come to expect. This is a bit of a reinvention of the e-Book from the ground up. Additionally, according to reporting by All Tech Considered (NPR), the innovative new software has already secured audio rights to a significant catelogue, perhaps learning from the Kindle Text-To-Speech debacle. Despite a burgeoning market in "More of the same" Kindle clones, it feels good to know that not everyone is running with the pack. Blio is due to hit the shelves next month.

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and blogs on the interface between technology and literary culture. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines. Email: swalkerperkins@gmail.com

Cool Tech @CES: Transparent Display "of the Future"

This would make for a wild e-Reader screen... CES 2010: Hands-On With Transparent Display of the Future - Video - Wired Posted using ShareThis

Because people don't read anymore...

Last week, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Newsweek and said he thought that while the novel would survive virtually unchanged, the ink & paper book was a rapidly-fading technology, soon to be replaced by devices like his company's Kindle e-Reader.

 He would say that, wouldn't he?

 Well, he had some daunting sales figures to back it up. He further made a pitch for the continuation of a dedicated e-Reader rather than creating convergence devices such as the proposed Apple Tablet that is rumored to be appearing at an Apple Store near you sometime this year. Before Apple could pull the curtain back on the Tablet, HP preemptively announced that they are rushing a similar tablet PC to sales floors and the product demo apparently featured the device running Kindle software.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” - Steve Jobs quoted in the New York Times: 15 January, 2008

Prognostication fail.

 You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the tech industry who still believes that and I'm sure Jobs would love to erase that quote. Almost exactly two years later, the CES tradeshow is all about the e-Reader. The Plastic Logic Que will be unveiled today and the new tablets are largely being touted for their capability as e-Readers.

3-D televisions are getting scooped in favor of the next, best way to digitally deliver books to readers. e-Readers are the hit of the season, one of the few markets where the electronics industry is expanding rather than contracting.

Bezos seems very aware of the Jobs quote when Newsweek interviewed him. He obliquely referenced that Jobs quote when he said that "...two years ago, none of us expected what has happened so far. It is [our] No. 1 bestselling product." No one knows better than Bezos that Amazon is out in front and some very very big gorillas are chasing them, desperate to catch up. Hence the pitch for the continuation of a dedicated device for reading e-Books. 

The biggest threat to Kindle is that people will actually want an e-Reader/laptop hybrid. There's a lot of debate out there about how far consumers want their devices to converge into a single omni-gadget.

 This week, comedian and YouTube vlogger Craig Benzine ("Wheezywaiter") distilled the zeitgeist into the ultimate hybrid machine, the logical evolution of the smartphone, essentially a cell phone taped to the back of his MacBook.

Is it better to do everything poorly or one thing well?

Jeff Bezos spent the entire Newsweek article effectively arguing that Benzine is right. Readers want devices that just do one thing really well. Nevertheless, readers are clamoring for full color and the current e-Ink technology used for the screens of almost all e-Readers currently on the market are incapable of going color at least anytime soon.

e-Readers continue to be rather clunky devices, and what no doubt haunts Bezos is that the fact that Apple wasn't the first company to put out an MP-3 player, they were the first company to put out an MP-3 player that wasn't a pain in the butt to use.

Apple's business model is often touted as being about innovation, but really their most successful products have all been about doing something new with existing technologies. Apple specializes in breaking into existing markets with better-designed machines and gradually dominating those new markets to the point where we forget that they didn't invent them. Amazon should be worried about getting iTuned out of the market.

Snapping at Apple's heels (maybe) are netbook innovators Asus. They have been pitching an intriguing folding e-Reader with two color screens so you would see facing pages and replicate a real book reading experience. The device was rumored to be slated for a 2009 release but it hasn't materialized and there are no updates that I could find. Critics point out that if the screens are really just standard touch screens, it won't really be an e-Reader, but another evolution of the netbook with all the eyestrain issues currently keeping most people from choosing a $300 netbook over the $400 Kindle. Of course if they can hit their target price point of <$150.00, they may pull it off, who knows? Asus seems to like snapping at the heels of the bigger companies, it's been a successful business model for them. So, what is that the future of the e-Book? Is it a convergence of gadgets into a single multi-use device, or will the dedicated e-Reader survive?

The market is groaning under the influx in a winner-take-all bout and there's no end in sight. In the meantime, save me a place in the queue for the Wheezy 1Billion.

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and blogs on the interface between technology and literary culture. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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Can the Apple Tablet Save Print Media?

Can a digital device "save" print media? Will people be willing to pay for previously-free content if it's packaged in the right way? Provocative questions that strike to the heart of the digital divide and the inherent paradoxes of digital content delivery...

New York Times - The Media Equation

A Savior in the Form of a Tablet

By DAVID CARR

Published: January 4, 2010

"Is an Apple tablet the second coming of the iPhone: a device that can do anything, including saving embattled print providers from doom?"

Fair warning, the tablet-related religious metaphors lie thick across this article. Nevertheless, I think my biggest beef with it is when he tries to answer my question: "It's free now, what's to entice readers to pay for it plus the cost of the new device needed to view it?" His answer is this: "...why would people suddenly be compelled to pay for something that they’ve gotten for free? That’s where Apple comes in. A simple, reliable interface for gaining access to paid content can do amazing things: Five years ago, almost no one paid for music online and now, nine billion or so songs sold later, we know that people are willing to pay if the price is right and the convenience is there." I find this difficult to swallow. Mostly because the comparison isn't apples-to-apples (if you'll forgive the pun). Before iTunes and their imitators, most digital music was illegally downloaded. The dominant portion of our society is inclined to follow laws as long as they make sense and aren't the pragmatic equivalent of going five miles over the speed limit. So a cheap, easy and reliable legal path to digital music was win/win for the listener. This paradigm doesn't apply to print media. It's free and legal at the moment. I'm not downloading New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles from Napster, I'm reading them for free on those newspapers' websites. So a simple comparison simply doesn't work. For better or worse, print media from the New York Times to Sports Illustrated have been offering free, legal online content almost since they opened their first website. In order for it to change now, all of them would have to change together so that no one site continues to give away the milk for free. Which is called 'collusion' and it's my understanding that that's still illegal. Attempts prior to this to get people to pay to view news stories & feature content have been met with mixed results outside of niche markets like stock tracking. At the moment, the market stands thus: If you're offering a unique service that others cannot duplicate at all or at least as well, you can charge for access and people who need that information will pay to see it. Outside of a few exclusive scoops, news reporting is not unique to you. Put another way: if I can get perfectly legal milk free from the New York Times, why would I buy it from Slate? I feel for print media, as you may recall I began my college career as a journalism major before - perhaps wisely - deciding that my future lay in more artistic directions. And I have all the sympathy in the world for people who would like to get paid to write. Me too, please! If they're ballsy enough, then they could conceivably gradually shut down their websites all together (which is probably what we're talking about without really saying it in the NYT article) and offer more and more of the content on the new Apple Tablet, iPhone/Droid apps, Nook or Kindle. But that's still a dicey proposition when free, legal, content that competes isn't going away. It's a format-shift that beggars comparison to the shift from CD's to MP-3's. It's about shutting off a tap altogether and replacing it with a new outlet, and that's beyond risky, it's damn near suicidal. Then again, something's got to give or we'll lose print media as a viable business altogether which would be a blow to us all whether we realize it or not.

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Scott Walker Perkins blogs on technology and literary culture and writes literary thrillers. His current novel is titled The Palimpsest and he is working on a project tentatively titled 42 Lines. Email: swalkerperkins@gmail.com