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!

Death & Taxes: The IRS, Amazon, my dad's library, and Book Pricing

Book pricing is in the news again. The US Dept of Justice has filed antitrust lawsuits against the Big Six publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to fix prices on e-Books (which would be illegal). The complaint stems from something we've talked about a lot: Amazon's efforts to unilaterally define the value of e-Books at rock-bottom prices in order to sell more Kindles.

There's a lot of inside baseball here, and if you want to see it from the publisher's point of view, you can read the open letter from Macmillian president John Sargent over on Tor.com. Book pricing is a complex issue and I've been searching for a real-world analogy, something I can point to that will prove my thesis on the perils of training the world to expect literature to cost $.99 (or to be free).  Turns out I didn't need to look farther than the outstretched hand of the tax man.

Believe it or not, the United States Internal Revenue Service has a lot to say on the subject of book pricing. And what they have to say has had a profound effect on the perceived value of books in the marketplace.  It's one of the few places where the market for used books has lessons to teach us about the market for new ones.

Bear with me a moment as I put on my storytelling hat...

My dad and I have always been fond of the idea behind Henry Ward Beecher's marching orders: “A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. I library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.”

That's a lovely sentiment from Mr. Beecher but what happens to those books when you are gone?

I've been sorting the final stacks of boxes that were once my dad's library. He passed away three years ago and I'm still shifting through the boxes and looking for places to donate the ones I don't have room for. Every time I think I'm done, mom says "Have you looked in those boxes in the attic?"

For the most part, these are books I already own or simple aren't interested in. Those precious to me or the family or those in which I have a particular interest I've already sent to live on my own shelves back in Washington. The rest must find other homes, preferably homes that will continue to nurture the love of literacy that my dad spent his life kindling in me.

What does this have to do with book pricing?

Death and taxes being life's two constants, it seems inevitable that they would somehow collide in a way that impacts pretty much every other aspect of life -- including buying and selling books. Hopefully, everyone in the United States knows that donating an item to charity allows you to deduct that item's "Fair Market Value" from your taxes for that year as if you had made a monetary donation in that amount.

This is how the IRS defines fair market value:

Fair market value.   Fair market value (FMV) is the price that property would sell for on the open market. It is the price that would be agreed on between a willing buyer and a willing seller, with neither being required to act, and both having reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts.

                                                         http://www.irs.gov/publications/p561/ar02.html#d0e139

Sounds simple enough, right? I mean, books have the market price printed on the cover. Publishers sell them for that price, so it seems simple enough, right?

Not so fast.

The chore of determining the fair market value of most items falls to the tax payer seeking the deduction and woe betide the person who gets it wrong. The penalties for over-estimating the value of donations are prohibitively steep. And I'm sad to say that no matter what the publisher prints on the cover, the FMV for books has little or nothing to do with what they cost at Barnes & Noble.

Donate your books to Goodwill, and you can expect to claim Goodwill's value for those books. They will usually sell them for somewhere between $1.00 and $3.00 each regardless of their rarity or condition. You can't claim more than they are worth on the open market, and no market is more open than Goodwill.

Fair enough. But what if I donate them to a library? Or my church? Or a prison literacy program?  Having done exactly that -- literally by the truckload and with the receipts to prove it -- I wondered what my family might claim as a deduction for those books.

The answer: From $1.00 to $3.00 for hardbacks. Because that's what those libraries, churches, and prisons could theoretically buy them for if they bought them from Goodwill or the Salvation Army.  It doesn't matter that for the most part, the libraries of the world wouldn't be caught dead buying books from those sellers, that's their "Fair" market value, defined by the free market.

In IRS Publication 561, the tax agency has defined the 'Fair Market Value' of most goods as the price two honest people can be expected to arrive at if one sells it to the other. For cars, it's the Kelly Blue Book value. But for books as the amount charged not by used bookstores in your area, but as the amount charged by Goodwill and the Salvation Army.

It's the Law of Unintended Consequences in full force.

Even if Half Price Books operates in your area, selling Stephen King hardbacks by the truckload at 1/2 their face value, the IRS wants you to declare their value as $3.00 per copy or explain why. And that explanation had better come in the form of a professional appraisal.

The cover price of the average new hardback novel is about $26.00. And to be fair to our friends at thre IRS, unless you are buying a signed first edition no one really expects that valuation to hold once you've taken the item home. It's like driving a car off the lot depreciates the car -- this is the way of things.

By charging too little for books for too long, these national thrift store chains have had a profound effect on the perceived value of used books. A perception that has taken the force and effect of law unless you care to pay for a professional appraisal.

I checked with my tax preparer, and it's not worth fighting them over it. Either pony up for a professional appraisal (which will also be affected by the degradation of market value) or take your medicine and collect your books for their content, not their value.

If you've ever discovered a rare gem in a thrift store and paid a song for it, you really have no right to complain.

Here's where we pick up the thread of the multi-faceted dispute between the publishers, Amazon, and the US government. The publishers have, for most of their existence, defined the retail price of their product. As they used to tell us at Borders, you can't very well threaten to go down the street to some other publisher and buy Stephen King's new book. If you want to sell King's books, you have to buy them from King's publisher at their asking price.  If you discount them, that's up to you.

Enter Amazon.com and the uncertainty of the brave new world of e-books. Amazon came out of the gate insisting that the fair market value for e-books (regardless of what they may cost to produce) is $9.99 or less.  They trained the market to expect e-books to be less than ten bucks, and to expect most of them to be a dollar or even free.  And in spite of voices raised in protest (including mine) the publishers mostly went along with it.  Even when they started to realize that they were eroding the fair market value of their product as surely as Goodwill has incidentally eroded the value of used books, Amazon was still the only game in town... until Steve Jobs reversed his previous assertion that books were dead and offered publishers a better deal: the "Agency Model".  It was a better deal that publishers were able to leverage into a (somewhat) better deal with Amazon.

All well and good.  But if they cooperated in any way, that's market collusion and it's illegal. Enter the US Attorney General and the current lawsuit against publishers for price-fixing.

What a mess.

The big publishers aren't going to come out well in this. The DOJ thinks they've got a good case, and they probably do.  But even if they defeat the suit by DOJ, (and there's a settlement already in the offing) they already can't afford the protracted battle.

Big Publishing may or may not be an outdated model. They might crumble under the weight of this thing, or they may consolidate further and get even bigger -- either way, there will always be publishers of some kind, whatever size they may be or whatever name might appear on their letterhead. Self-publishing is well and good, but there will always be writers who don't want or aren't able to do it themselves and there will always be people who will stand up and say "Give it to us and we'll be the middle-men for a cut of the take."  It won't look like it did in Salinger's day, but it already doesn't. Those days are gone.

Here's all I care about: the written word has to have a market value that allows writers to make a living writing it. If the agency model falls, if the seller-side model of pricing wins and booksellers set the price too low for the real professionals to stay in the market, we will all suffer for it. Even if it is more legal than what we've already got.

The bulwark of our literary canon is and always will be the professional writer devoted to holding up the literary mirror against all efforts to cover it. Without that professionalism and dedication to craft, we might get more books shoveled at us over the transom in the anarchic e-book free-for-all but we will get less and less of the real quality that already seems too rare.

This is the challenge of writers and publishers going forward: This is a tough thing to describe in a way that is interesting, sounds rational, is devoid of alarmist warnings but isn't laden with statistics, but it's paramount to our future literary legacy that we preserve the value of books.

If we don't, we will one day be gone and we will have left our heirs with a legacy that they can't even give away.

Judged By Its Cover: An Introduction to Book Design

Fact: 31% of book purchases are impulse purchases[1].

I haven't talked much recently about the business of publishing because I've been focusing on writing.  Recently, I put on my graphic designer hat to design the cover of an upcoming novel, and before I take it off, I wanted to talk about that a bit.

While I was researching the design, I trawled through the dusty remainder bins of the internet and what I found indicates a disconnect between the burgeoning independent book industry... and its cover.

I spent years working in bookstores, watching patrons peruse the shelves, picking up book after book and putting it back without so much as glancing at the jacket copy.  What were they looking at?  Title? Cover art? What was it about the books they put back that didn't appeal to them?

I posit that in many of those cases it was the cover. Something about the cover got in the way of them opening the book and reading the words.

I admit the possibility of bias, but I've watched it happen too often to discount it. Publishers agree with me.

In fact, in "ye olde days" (which was actually about six years ago) the best thing a publisher could do to get a book in a customer's hands was to make a deal with a bookstore to put it on a table, an endcap, or on the shelf with the cover facing out. This is called a "Co-op" and it's been the way of things for decades in both the book and music businesses. Heck, they do it in grocery stores too.

Why does it work? Because publishers know that a decent cover can get you to pick up a book. And if you pick it up, you're significantly more likely to form a bond with it, and ultimately buy it. [2]

Here in the future (cue beepy futuristic Star Trek noises) where we buy most of our books online, all book covers get the full-face treatment (which is awesome) but they're shown the size of your thumb print (which is not).

On the screen of the laptop I'm using to type this, Amazon displays thumbnails at about 100 pixels by 140 pixels, or approximately 1/3 inch wide by about a half inch tall.

That's about this big:

Consumers do indeed judge a book by its cover. Is it logical or fair? No. Does it happen? Constantly. Do I judge a book by its cover? No, but I do judge publishers by them. . . or rather I take it as a measure of their faith and how devoted they are to marketing the book.

As both a reader and as a designer, the cover art tells me how seriously the publisher takes the book. It tells me that they invested the time, energy, and money in getting a designer and a book packager in a room together to give the book a visual identity and that ineffable thing we used to call "shelf presence" but I suppose we should start calling "thumbnail presence"  that gets people to pick it up and give the words a chance to seal the deal.

At best, a book cover will make the buyer click on it (or pick it up) but really the best you can hope for in the thumbnail age is for it not to get in the way.

The fake cover shown above is frankly a bit pedestrian, but it works.  It's imperfect to say the least, but it's still perfectly adequate cover for a science fiction book about melty buildings. I cobbled it together from a picture my wife took of the Experience Music Project which, frankly, looks a bit like Tupperware that melted in the dishwasher.  (I felt bad doing this to a perfectly good photo. Behold the majesty of my lens flares!)

If nothing else, it proves that you don't have to be Saul Bass to make a workable book cover or poster. This isn't great, but it wouldn't hurt your book sales. Even with all the stops pulled, it still works as a cover.

Why?  Because it adheres to some basics of proportion and composition (more on that in a minute). It uses a clean font that has been optimized for contrast with its background. There is nothing about this image that would make you skip clicking on it.

Let's look at a different picture that gathers together many of the most frequent cover design errors that I see as I trawl through Amazon's lists:

This is illegible. I see it all the time and it doesn't work on any level. A loopy handwriting font is bad enough, but it's in a color that isn't a sufficient contrast to the underlying image -- even in white against a black background as with the author's name you can't read it.

Note that this one barely works at a larger image size or higher resolution.  Even blown-up, the red subtitle is gone.

Graphic designers are so touchy about handwriting fonts that it's nearly legendary. (Type "Comic Sans" into a search engine sometime.)  In fact, I'm just shy of saying that all handwriting fonts should be banned from book covers entirely.  Except that I've seen them work, but only in very select circumstances and in the hands of a trained professional.

Sometimes it's easy to see why one things works and the other doesn't. Even with all the silly Photoshoppery, When the Buildings Melt "works" not because it's brilliantly executed -- it isn't -- but on simplicity alone. Just being legibile will get you a long way. The curly font murders Swear Not by the Moon in its bed before we ever get to the contrast and composition problems.

This isn't my best work, but it is a bit better.  At least you can read it.

The tapes and off-kilter type is very much a trend right now and it does look funky and youthful (I'm imagining this is a YA book). The font could be even clearer but I don't want to spend a lot of time on an example piece.

Note that I de-emphasized the author on this version just to make a point. Despite what our egos tell us, the least important part of a cover is the author's name. If you're not James Patterson or Steven King, your name isn't the prime selling point. It's a choice that not many are willing to take.

These aren't even extreme examples. Go through the lists of e-books uploaded by hopeful authors at any book site you care to name. You'll see every one of these problems and more that I haven't thought of.

The aesthetics of design are the work of a college degree and several library's worth of books.  Which is to say that they cannot be adequately encapsulated in a single blog post. So why bring it up at all? Because it's the place where so many small publishers and self-publishers fall short.

Book selling used to be all about getting booksellers to lay your book flat on a table or turned face out on a shelf. Give the book prominence of placement and the chance for the cover to work its wiles and you're halfway to a sale.  These days, it's all about clickable thumbnails.

A very basic understanding of graphic design is mandatory in that marketplace, but independent authors and small publishers the world over fail to fully appreciate the power of a thumbnail. If you don't believe me, go through the lists at your favorite online bookstore and pay attention to how many thumbnails are completely indiscernible.

Scott's First Rule of Design: "Possessing a copy of Photoshop does not make you a graphic designer any more than owning a stove makes me a chef."

I may be a foodie, I may even be an excellent cook, but it takes years of training, tasting, and all around hard work to become a chef. The best I can hope for is to be an enthusiastic amateur. And that's fine, but it doesn't mean I should open a restaurant. Technique is the product of training, taste is the product of training combined with experience. You cannot claim the funny hat without liberal helpings of both.

What you're going to turn out will be amateur work. That's okay. Make it the best amateur work you can. Honestly, you're ahead of the pack if your cover just doesn't actually deter sales.

Here are some very basic rules and/or guidelines:

1. Don't use Microsoft Word or Paint: MS Word & Paint are not adequate to the task. Your image will bust into pixels as you re-size it and you will be sad. Happily, you don't need the full Adobe Creative Suite. Photoshop "Elements" contains all the tools you're likely to need and only costs about $80.00. This is a business you're engaged in. Invest in your business.
2. Pixelation is bad. Work large and shrink it, don't work small and try to blow it up. While you're working, constantly apraise your image at every size it's likely to be viewed at. At art school, we were taught to think of every image as a postage stamp.
   
   
3. Use clear, strong, fonts in colors that contrast with their background. Keep it simple. Ornate fonts are your enemy and have to be applied very carefully if at all. If I can't read your title, the odds of me reading your book are diminished.
4. Learn the "Rule of Thirds" and stick to it. The Rule of Thirds is a quick way to attaining a decent level of composition and after awhile it becomes second nature -- without meaning to, I adhered to it even in the Swear Not By the Moon cover I posted above. The Wikipedia article on this topic really is pretty good. Click the link. Even professional designers and photographers only break the rule of thirds on purpose.
5. You do not have to use a photo. I see so may photos on book covers that I feel like someone, somewhere thinks it's a rule. It's not. Also, as we've seen, photos can complicate the legibility of your text. If you do want to use a photo, use your own if you can. Take the picture in the best possible lighting and at the largest format your camera allows.  Do not use a flash. Most bad digital photos can be made better simply by turning off the flash.
   
   If you feel you need to use someone else's photo, you need to familiarize yourself with licensing a fair use.  CreativeCommons.org is an excellent resource.  I urge you to use a photo that is in the Public Domain (the Library of Congress or Wikimedia Commons are excellent sources) or a Creative Commons image that the photographer licensed for commercial use.  If you don't, the image owner has every right to sue you.
6. Fonts belong to their designers. The same rules of photo and image licensing apply to fonts. When you choose a font, you must be sure you have permission to use it commercially. There are a lot of free fonts available. Shop around.  (Once again, the Creative Commons folks can help you out there. See above.)
   
   
7. The Three C's" Contrast, Clarity, and Composition. These are the three concerns you must always keep in mind as you're choosing every element of your design. As in storytelling, the parts are in service to the whole, not the other way around. I don't care how much you love the photo of the kids playing in the mud puddle, if it doesn't work, chuck it.
8. Go to a book store or a website that sells books and LOOK at the covers. Take note of what makes you want to click to see more and what doesn't. Go thou and do likewise.

---

[1] Source: Bowker: Making Information Pay 2009 -- GALLAGHER, KELLY (Bowker)

[2] “Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping” by Paco Underhill

Predation Nation? Amazon and Pubs Faceoff (Via NPR)

Map stars' homes, map Topeka, but map your story? :: Mindmapping & the Writer

I've never been a big fan of brainstorming in general. As everyone knows, brainstorming leads to flow charts, flow charts lead to outlining, and outlining leads to the dark side of the force.


I kid.  I know some people who love to do these things and I've seen writers cover walls with flowcharts and elaborate graphs and detailed outlines that are almost a novel in their own right. It's not for me, though, thanks. But I get brainstorming. I even understand all the geneology charts and whatnot if your story is complicated enough to warrant them.

To brainstorm is human; to really screw things up (or over-complicate them, which is the same thing in my book) requires a computer. Cue the rise of "mind mappping"  software.

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.

Why Don't I Self-Publish? (revisited)

I get this question a lot.  I'm betting just about every person cranking out stories is asked at some time or another why they don't "cut out the middle man" (actually, most of the editors I've met are women) and go it alone?  In fact, it was the first question I answered on this blog, a year ago next week.  Re-reading that, I find that even though the technology and the market have evolved, my position hasn't changed much.

In answer to a similar question, the always-brilliant John Scalzi wrote a short (and incredibly violent) play for three actors on why a writer would be insane to want a world where publishers were thrown aside in preference of a "Do it yourself" world.  Check it out at his blog "Whatever".

His wife reminds me of a certain engineer I know.

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.

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

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.

Read Related Posts:

March 2009 - Quotable Quandry April 2009 - What We Call the News

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

How E-Books Will Change Reading And Writing

I would have titled this "How E-Books Might Change Reading & Writing". Mainly because 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. Of course in that time, artists labored in relative isolation, without a mass media culture to feed them lines. For better or worse, it took almost three hundred years for the presses to move from what they began doing (religious works) to printing the endless Do it Yourself books of the Elizabethan era (yes, really) and eventually the surrealist adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Machiavelli's political advice column and eventually the exploits of Don Quixote and the printing of the Shakespearean canon. Even though we will undoubtedly move the same relative distance a hundred times as quickly as the renaissance writers did, I sincerely doubt we're out of the early stages of curiousity and exploration that meet a new medium. And I'm not sure anyone can say with any assurance that we've achieved any level of sophistication or seen more than the leading edge of what e-Books will really mean for the writer and the reader... not to mention their medium.

The Digital Divide... Is it separating readers and publishers?

From today's Washington Post.

E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry

By Marion Maneker

Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 27, 2009 "The evolution of publishing from print to digital has caused a schism in the reading world. There are now two constituencies: readers (and writers) on the one hand, and the publishing world on the other. And they don't want to hear each other. . ."

There's a Monster At the End of This Post

A mixed bag post, because I haven't done one in awhile... 


 Lost & Found I don't usually report on the whereabouts of missing library books or the people reluctant to return them and pony up the fine. Neither does the Times of London. Nevertheless, the Times reports that Harold Pinter's overdue library book was finally returned after 59 years. It wouldn't be that big a story, even considering the Nobel laureate status of the borrower, except that it happened to be a rare first edition of Samuel Beckett's Murphy and apparently Pinter had no intention of ever returning it. At that point, I think a man of lesser celebrity would be accused of stealing it rather than borrowing it. 

The bookseller handling the sale of the playwright's library returned it in order to buy it back so that Pinter's library would be complete and without the sort of provenance problems that crop up when one of the books in the collection didn't really belong to the man in whose home it resided. Read the whole tale, including the sort of oddly happy ending that could only occur in the bookworld at the Times website.

  Can I Make you a literary mix-tape? WIRED continued its coverage of the transition from ink to electrons with a profile of a grad student who MacGyvered his own book scanning equipment to digitize his textbooks and is now teaching others how to do the same. Now Daniel Reetz is at the eye of a copyright kerfuffle (which was inevitable) about whether or not what he's doing is a high crime or a misdemeanor. So the question is begged... since the inception of the computer, it's been possible to digitize your library either by laying the books on a scanner, photographing them or just typing them into a document file. There's even court precedent from the days of audio tapes that says you can copy your collection for personal use as long as you're not trying to profit. But those arguments got gutted in the Napster fight and are further eroded by decision after decision that creates a legal difference between the laws governing tangible copies and digital copies.

Right now, the world over, libraries are digitizing their collections, effectively turning them into e-Books. From national institutions like the Library of Congress and the British Library to the libraries of Harvard and Yale to the commercial ventures like Googlebooks and the Intenet Archive, the physical is being tranferred into a digital format. . . but who owns the bytes? Is it legal for me to copy my extensive library if I'm not doing so to turn a profit? I think it meet that we reflect on the outcome of the Pinter-Beckett affair and remember that the bookworld is a universe of its own creation where the outcomes that might be expected as we recall the chaos that surrounded the digital translation of music are not fait accompli.

  Digital Monsters There's no end of monsters on the internet. From the trolls that lurk beneath blogs and comment threads, spewing vitriol to the sort that players fight in online roleplaying games, and many others, the internet seems overrun by monsters of all sorts. So when I tell you that I am ecstatic to report one more monster on the internet, it may sound strange. That is, until I tell you that it's none other than the legendary blue monster that watched over my childhood... Grover. The Children's Television Workshop has put one of my favorite books of all time online as a free e-Book for new generations of parents and children to enjoy. There's a Monster at the End of This Book was more than a children's book, it was a watershed moment in my literary life. It's the first children's book I read (besides perhaps Where the Wild Things Are) that delivered something wholly different than everything else put in front of me. It's entry-level suspense fiction of the highest order with a twist ending sure to delight everyone. Re-reading it as an adult (or rather having Grover read it to me) was an eye-opener, and no lie.

 Now, I'm off to do some Christmas shopping. Good reading, everyone!

Sherman Alexie on Colbert

National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie rails against the e-Book and changes to the publishing industry to Stephen Colbert. Presented for your consideration.

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It's a good news/bad news thing... Other ways to consume books

Barnes & Noble's new "Nook" eReader has enjoyed so much buzz that WIRED is reporting that pre-orders of the Nook are so heavy that deliveries of stock to the stores to sell off the shelves is being delayed until early December when they will begin to trickle into the highest-volume stores. Sony is reporting similar 'problems' (if being too popular can really be referred to as a problem). WIRED's experts predict that supply chain problems for B&N and Sony plays into the hands of Kindle, which has had production up and running longer and reports no delays. I was commenting to The Engineer over the weekend that this Christmas didn't have a big Hot New Thing to anchor it. Reports are indicating that the digital transition forced most of the people that would have been buying big-ticket items like flatscreen TV's to buy early. This leaves tech stores holding the bag on Black Friday. Add to this the fact that this is the first Christmas that we have a full line of eReaders going head-to-head and we might just have found the tipping point for the e-Book. Whether the temporary sales advantage of the in-stock Kindle parlays into their continuing market domination remains to be seen. I'm put in mind of the somewhat artificial cache of finding a Wii last year and an Xbox 360 the year before and the Playstation 3 the year before that. It's possible that a supply chain kink can actually help the Nook and Sony eReaders in the long-term. For now, however, it's "Advantage: Kindle". What about you, dear readers? What's the hot new electronic widget for you this Yuletide season?

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines. Contact Information Email: swalkerperkins@gmail.com Blog: Pages to Type Before I Sleep

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On The Media - On Books & Publishing...

Typically extensive and thorough coverage, featuring the likes of Neil Gaiman. Takes an interesting tack. . .

eBook Update...

Always keeping an eye on the evolving eBook market (even during NaNoWriMo!) Sony says your books belong to you. Sony exec says: "Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. ... We're obligated to have DRM but we don't pull content back." via BoingBoing Meanwhile, GoogleBooks is trying to thread the needle of copyright law. Anti-trust investigations and myriad lawsuits levied against its deal with the Author's Guild. Resolves some concerns about access and restrictions that will be placed upon materials in their collection that are still covered under US Copyright law. Key also was the handling of funds belonging to 'orphan works' whose authors could not be located. via Yahoo! News & Reuters Independent Booksellers in the digital frontier. IndieBound has launched version 2.0 of their ebook app for the iPhone (and presumably for the Droid as soon as it occurs to them that people are buying the things...) You can get your eBooks and support the independent bookstores in one go. via IndieBound

Kinetic Convergence?

Text has danced for quite awhile. Watching a Powerpoint presentation is sometimes a jarring experience as the data points samba across the screen, blink in and out and sometimes hide as much as they reveal about the speakers' point. Sometimes I think we're probably better off without it. But moving text doesn't have to be bedlam. Last week when I was looking at people who stepped outside the normal venues for delivering text, I remembered this video by video blogger Alan Lafustka aka "Fallofautumndistro". Alan put up an animated video of the Kenneth Koch poem 'Social Life with Friends'. This kinetic poem is done very well (I think) and I love the poem, which fits my current mood. I don't necessarily agree that it has to be an either/or proposition -- in this and in all things, finding a workable balance is the key. The reason I bring this up is the notion of delivering a story as animated words, so called 'kinetic typography'. There are a number of these poems and snippets of books on YouTube and as is the nature of the Tube, they are executed with a widely varying degree of skill. As ever, finding the workable balance is the key. Moving text can give you a migraine or it can inform and illustrate what it's trying to get across to you. In the middle of the dust-up awhile back about Kindle's 'read to me' app I started thinking about the future intersection between text and speech. Some books simply cannot be brought across as audio books. If you've ever read 'House of Leaves' you'll know what I mean, but Danielewski's acid trip of a novel isn't alone in breaking free of the stereotypical typeblock. A few weeks ago, I took my nephews to a bookstore and read over their shoulders as they browsed. I was astounded by how much even the middle grade books were straining against the format. Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney especially seems to be ripe for a method of delivery that would blend animation and text. Not a full-on cartoon, but a kinetic book. Of course, your e-Reader would need a video card, but with Barnes & Noble's entry into the e-book world, we're on the doorstep of true convergence. One of the many possible definitions of "convergence", is a blend of the abilities of many gadgets into one omni-gadget. An iPhone, for instance. The new B&N site, along with the controversial Google Books site is already delivering content that doesn't require a specific e-reader in order to view it. That means you can read your e-book on a PDA, Blackberry, laptop or netbook. I'm typing this blogpost on an netbook that honestly doesn't outweigh an e-reader by that much and has the added benefit of allowing me to watch video as well as choose between working on my book or reading someone else's. I predict that at some point this force of 'convergence' will either eliminate the e-reader or force their creators to allow them to do more than just read books. As books take on new dimensions and text slips the physical restraints of ink on a page, the possibilities for a convergence of our own are virtually limitless. Words can dance, appear and disappear, and illustrations will no longer be forced into a static realm. And as the technologies and artforms converge, it will either be beautiful or absolute and unadulterated bedlam. I've prepared a Powerpoint presentation that shows why it will probably be a bit of both. . .

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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Three To Watch

Yesterday I asked if you could name some people who "live outside of the lines". Here are some of the people I see who are doing intriguing and risky things with their fiction, three authors who are (for better or worse) moving beyond the traditional definition of the novel. People whose innovative ideas will get across better than anything I can tell you about how crucial it has become for us to look beyond our imaginary walls -- to think outside the box. These are three people moving beyond the traditional definition of the book and taking full advantage of all that digital filmaking, websites and computer downloads can offer...

1. John Green is a young adult author I've mentioned here before. He writes smart fiction that challenges young readers and has the most loyal fanbase I've ever seen, mostly through the video blogging he does on YouTube. Green's a case study in so-called "Platform Building". That's innovative enough, but he is also re-defining what the novel is. John created something called This Is Not Tom, which is a novel posted for free on the website I just linked to, but in order to read it you have to solve a series of increasingly-difficult riddles and visual puzzles. The novel is free. But you have to solve a bunch of very difficult riddles in order to read it. So much of the writing trade is supposed to be about making it easier and easier for the reader to get through the book. Green is imposing obstacles between the reader and the book and it's working. As his story grows in astonishing directions, the readers are hooked and word is spreading. And at this point all I know is that that guy... well, he's not Tom.
2. Anthony Zuiker, creator of the hit television show(s) "CSI" is setting his creative sights on multimedia novels. "Zuiker said people's attention span was becoming shorter and shorter and that it was important to give people more options on how they consumed entertainment and books." (Reuters) I fear that this is a self-inflicted ailment and I'm not sure he's necessarily right when the younger generation of readers got their taste for the printed word by hefting the cinderblocks that JK Rowling calls novels. Regardless of the attention-span issue, Zuiker is making intriguing use of all the technological tools available to him and is betting that through shear audio/visual moxie, he can tell a compelling story that people will want to read and see. A story that crosses the bridge from just being a printed block of paper by having readers visit a website every twenty pages and typing a code into the site to view the next film clip related to the novel. How this all ties together and how the codes will be presented remains to be seen. I should hope by some logical storytelling mechanism they are inserted into the storyline.
3. Cory Doctorow. If you read Writer's Digest, there's a great interview with Cory this month that sort of outlines his philosophy and his view of how the novel is unfolding. While he's not writing novels in four dimensions like Green, Cory is a force in the movement to unleash the novel from the staid traditions of his forebears.. All of Cory's publishing contracts include the rights to distribute his works under a Creative Commons license for free download. Yes, as the books are selling on the store shelves, Cory is also giving them away. Your mother told you that if you give away the milk, they'll never buy the cow? Cory says your momma is wrong. In a move that essentially treats the electronic book as a marketing tool rather than a product, Doctorow is gambling that the people who read it for free will like the milk enough to come back and buy the cow. And so far he's right.

I don't know that any of these guys are necessarily right. I commonly tag these posts with "technophobia" because in some ways, that's exactly what's keeping a lot of us from doing what these three are doing. John Green's riddle novel is compelling, but is working in part because he has a devoted fanbase of self-proclaimed nerds who are willing to unravel the story rather than have it just laid out for them. All the same, he displays a deft hand with his subject, his format and his fans that we could all learn from. Zuiker's "digi-book" looks a little gimmicky from here, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of my time. If nothing else, we know he's capable of spinning a good story and he has always displayed a finely-tuned sense of his technologies. Cory Doctorow is as much an activist as he is a novelist. Much like Green, he enjoys a certain 'geek cache' and a devoted following of readers who make his business plan functional. Maybe the real lesson all of these guys are teaching us is how far you can stretch once you've created an audience that is willing to follow you down the rabbit hole. Or perhaps they are simply showing us that the walls that exist between page and screen are as imaginary as Les Nessman's office walls and we all need to be ready to write in a new cross between the two formats.