These days, I’m still buying long players. Mostly I get them from the US because, even with exorbitant postage, it’s still cheaper than buying them locally. Where I can, I buy them directly from the artists. And when I take delivery of them, I frequently find a surprise card hidden inside with a code to download the same album as mp3 files for free.

The overall package is more expensive than a CD or just downloading the files, but not a lot more and the perceived value is much greater: the sound and packaging of the vinyl (see, I’m not immune to object fetishisation) at home and the convenience of digital songs to drop onto my phone when out and about. Really, it just updates what I used to do, which was make tapes of the records I bought to listen to on my Walkman.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve often thought the same approach would be a good one for print books: buy the paperback or hardcover and receive a code to download an epub file. And it seems I’m not the only one who’s made this connection. Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows) posted exactly these thoughts to his blog a few weeks ago.

Don’t you hate it when a better writer elegantly articulates what you’ve been merely grunting about for ages?

Though he notes a few (extremely minor) difficulties in putting such a plan into action, Carr frames the idea as a way to help publishers and physical bookstores broach the divide between physical and digital and annoy Amazon in the process. It’s no panacea for the digital age, just a way for the old guard to engage in a little of their own industry disruption.

I’m not so sure it could achieve such disruptive heights; even Carr’s modest goals still seem a bit far fetched. Vinyl in 2012 is, after all, an incredibly niche market. The Economist last year predicted US sales of 4 million, a far cry from the global sales of 1 billion estimated for 1981, and only 1% of overall sales. To put that in context, five times as many cassette singles were shifted in 1988 than LPs last year. But vinyl’s popularity is increasing with listeners who actively engage with artists. Musicians themselves play up to this, ensuring that the vinyl editions of their work are of high quality and deliciously collectible. This is certainly a great technique for writers to employ (and many do to great success), but it’s not (nor is it intended to be) a replacement for an entire industry.

The broader context of change in writing and reading doesn’t fit into a neat print/ebook dichotomy.

Nevertheless, I’m glad someone of Carr’s influence has brought up the idea of bundling free ebooks with print purchases, because such a discussion might convince publishers large and small to experiment with the idea.

Experimentation of any kind is valuable and welcome at this point. But really, my reasons for encouraging this idea are entirely selfish. I suspect the way I listen to music now is very similar to the way I would like to read. I just haven’t had the opportunity yet. This is really the reason I’ve resisted making this point earlier. One of my pet hates is people who opine how books should be made based on  how they personally like to read. Jonathan Franzen went so far as to claim ebooks were destructive to society, based on little more than his own distaste and a bit of creative hyperbole.

So I’m breaking my rule just this once, suggesting that print/digital bundling would be a great idea, based on nothing more than my own preference. Well, mine and Nicholas Carr’s.

So that makes two of us.

The culture at Apple is described as “the polar opposite of Google’s,” and one small but noteworthy difference between the two rival companies lies in lunch. Unlike at Google, where lunch is free, Apple employees must pay for their “quite good and reasonably priced” lunch at the company cafeteria. There is one exception: new employees are given free lunch during their first-day orientation.

At first, I was astounded that this would be considered in any way remarkable—so unlike Google, apart from your first day, Apple is just like every other employer in the world—but a picture of the company’s mindset emerged from this strange and kind of stalkish anecdote. Any largesse is short-lived at best. You know you’re going to have to pay for those sandwiches, right?

Apparently this was still in the back of my mind when I sat down early Friday morning to watch Apple’s Phil Schiller take the stage. Schiller duly proved the rumour-mongers right when he unveiled the first major revision to iBooks, Apple’s ereader app for the iPad, and iBooks Author, a new authoring tool to create media-rich electronic books.

But first an admission. While I’ve never considered myself an Apple advocate (I really couldn’t care less what technology you might choose to use), I have been a pretty solid user of Apple’s stuff since I ditched my Dad’s grumbling Windows 95 oatmeal box and crossed over to a translucent blue iMac way back when. I’ve never looked back really. While its aesthetics are nice, what really sets a Mac apart is in the thought given to every part of the experience from the software and its integration to the  the and so on. It’s the same philosophy of control they applied to the iPod and subsequent iOS devices to great success. But at what point does such control become restrictive instead of assistive?

So the guys at Apple make their presentation and I watched along at an ungodly Australian hour. On the whole, I really liked what I saw. The interactive features iBooks incorporates makes good on the promise of what electronic publishing can achieve.

And iBooks Author is a great application. So many of the niggly problems with putting together interactive ebooks is taken care of and made easy. At last we can create books that are aware of the device in which they reside. We can be confident of what a book will look like and how it will behave. The ability to design an ebook properly using the kind of simple and intuitive interface we have come to expect from our software is long overdue and the kind of thing Apple does with incredible style. I watched them drop images into free-flowing text. I watched image galleries, three-dimensional objects, even straight up html integrate seamlessly into the book. And I thought this is exactly what has been needed in ebook development for years.

Then I had an unsettling thought. There comes a time in any Apple demonstration where they begin talking about the value of the thing they’re showing off. It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the old infomercial schtick: ‘How much would you expect to pay?’ So when that moment arrived for iBooks Author, only one thing came to mind: Please don’t tell me it’s free. I said it over and over: ‘Don’t say it’s free!’

Then a little sparkly animation crossed the screen, revealing the word I had dreaded: Free.

Remember, your first is free, but thereafter you must pay for your “quite good and reasonably priced” services. And indeed, this is what we find in the End User Licence Agreement (EULA).

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

•  (i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
• (ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or
  service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including
without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you mayincur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.

You can create what you like in iBooks Author and you can distribute in any way you like as long as it’s free. If you want to charge for it, you have to sell it through Apple and solely through Apple. And if they refuse to sell your work for whatever reason, stiff.

In other creative environments, it works like this: professional creative software is pricey and feature packed, but the results of your work are yours and yours alone to do with as you wish including sell it in whatever way you choose. That’s how Final Cut works in filmmaking, that’s how Pro Tools works in music. That’s why I was hoping iBooks Author would have a price tag. Pay for the software; what you do with it is your own business.

This EULA is an attempt to change the game, to tilt the ebook market in Apple’s favour at the expense of their competitors and authors be damned. Imagine if Microsoft had distributed Word for free, then claimed a piece of the action on every document ever created, just so they could stick it to WordPerfect.

Now, you might wish to point out at this stage that an iBooks file could only realistically be sold in the iBookstore anyway. Other ereaders and tablets just don’t have the capabilities to display these books properly so why quibble? But that’s shortsighted. Devices can catch up for starters. And what if you wanted to sell books yourself through your own web site, you know, independently. At the very least an author should be granted the option of distributing their work however they choose and making their work available on as many devices as possible.

You might also wish to point out that Apple aren’t trying to claim the content of the books, just the format. The author is free to reformat the text in as many ways he or she pleases as long as it wasn’t made using iBooks Author. But that does mean the author is surrendering any creativity inherent in the design or layout of the book. That the supremely design-conscious Apple would so breezily dismiss the creativity of book design would seem to betray a serious lack of insight at best. In any case it’s just a shitty way to treat creative professionals.

I spent much of the weekend fuming and I’m glad I waited a few days to post this. A lot of that initial anger has given way to a kind of resigned sadness. As many a great man has said: “You’ve changed, man. It used to be about the music.”

A wonderfully simple and intuitive tool has been created to help authors and designers create ebooks that can truly fulfill the promise of electronic texts and yet I worry about the consequences should it succeed. Really, I hope it fails, at least in its current form.

How depressing is that?

Originally posted at the if:book web site, the articles have now been compiled (some updated) into a single volume under the title Hand Made High Tech with an introduction by me and a brilliant cover design by Daniel Neville.

It’s free to download in any format or to read online. If you have any interest in books and publishing futures, it’s worth a read. Check it out.

The reference to Hugo comes via Books in Browsers speaker, Corey Pressman, who naturally begged to differ when it comes to print and digital books. This does not replace that. This actually does a pretty crappy job of replacing that, because paper and screens do subtly different jobs: one houses fixed text and images, the other is fluid.

One of the reasons we are constantly drawn into direct comparisons or value statements is because digital books are in their first fledgling form where they imitate their direct predecessor. Print books had the same period of adolescence where they mimicked the form and style of handwritten codices. There’s even a word for these early books: incunabula. Go and have a look. Incunabula look like handwritten books because, in the sixteenth century, that’s what books were supposed to look like. That’s how they worked. Even the most basic conventional features of contemporary books—Roman typefaces, page numbers, and tables of contents—had to be invented for print books and it took a long time. From the first moveable type books, the era of incunabula continued for another fifty years.

Pressman’s point was that we are now in an age of digital incunabula: fluid, connected devices that house fixed text that ignores its own surroundings. Our digital incunabula even have little ‘page turn’ animations, sometimes with sound effects to make us feel comfortable with the transition (until it irritates us to the point of distraction). The features and norms of these connected books are yet to settle, but it seems clear that it won’t take fifty years this time for new conventions to emerge.

As Craig Mod said shortly after Pressman, beautiful design comes from an awareness of the container and an awareness of content. Though they are converging (Kindle Fire and Kobo Vox), containers are still pretty much all over the place, so what does great design in content mean?

For a conference about the future, I spent a lot of time at Books in Browsers thinking of the past: from the many references to early printing to the academics grappling with digitising medieval codices (complete with centuries of annotations) to the idea that an interconnected book is not a new concept, but rather a tradition as old as books themselves.

Umberto Eco is best known for his novel The Name of the Rose, but a but he’s also an academic and professor of semiotics. In his book Reflections on The Name of the Rose (I know, very meta), he talked about the need for a mask when writing as a fourteenth century monk (with my emphasis).

I set about reading and re-reading medieval chroniclers, to acquire their rhythm and their innocence. They would speak for me and I would be freed from suspicion. Freed from suspicion, but not from the echoes of intertextuality. Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books and every story tells a story that has already been told… My story then could only begin with a discovered manuscript and even this would be (naturally) a quotation.

One of the fundamental differences between ordinary text and networked text is the hyperlink. Though we think of it now as pretty old hat, the concept that any word, phrase or block of text can serve as a direct launch to another document is still pretty mind-blowing. It’s the thing that has inspired us to ‘surf’ text, an entirely new skill that still causes worrywarts to fret and wring their hands (as though every time we learn something new it pushes some old stuff out of our brains). In an ideally hyperlinked world, every word or phrase would link out to something else both relevant  and of interest. Everything that can be referenced will be referenced.

But what if that were applied to books? If books always speak of other books and every story is a retelling, is it possible to identify those links and catalogue them?

You know here I’m going with this. Not only is it possible, but some rather impressive people who shared the Books in Browsers stage have already been doing it and they already have a working prototype. It’s called Small Demons and it works on what they call the Story Graph. Every reference, whether to books, films, music, places, people or cultural artefacts and objects are collected and stored in a database where they can be cross referenced to any other book that features the same things.

So your favourite book has a killer robot driving instructor who travels back in time for some reason? Small Demons will find links to other books that refer to the same firearms the robot jams in its victims’ faces or the robot’s preferred brand of car. Okay, possibly a bad example.

As a reader, you can follow your own tangential journey through any number of titles and genres, discovering stories at every turn. Clicking around in Small Demons is at once delightful and vaguely unsettling: at one point I hopped through a series of crime novels that refer to God. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it reminds me of jumping through Wikipedia or bloghopping where you’re free to follow your own bizarre path: To Kill a Mockingbird is referenced in Nick Hornsby’s A Long Way Down which also references Rolls Royce which is also referenced in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which partly takes place in London, also the setting for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time which references Star Wars which…

Even though it’s only in small scale beta, it’s no great stretch to imagine what is possible when the number of books grows.

Algorithms that attempt to predict what readers will like have been notoriously hit-and-miss affairs. Even Amazon, who presumably have spent considerable time and money on this, offer suggestions that seem like little more than stabs in the dark. If you’ve ever bought a gift from Amazon, you’ll know the pain of suddenly being bombarded by inappropriate assumptions about your taste. As the ABC’s Mark Colvin recently tweeted:

I’ve bought more than 30 books from amazon for kindle in the last few months. Their prediction algorithm still has NO idea what I like.

Discovery will only become more important in coming years. one thing we can say with certainty about the future is that it will be very very crowded. Writers everywhere (both of the commercially and independently published variety) will jostle for the limited attention of readers. Readers will be overwhelmed by the volume of writing available (if they’re not already) and wonder where to start. Noise is one of my primary concerns at if:book. With more books in the market all with seemingly endless tails, readers need a way to filter out the noise and find not only the books they already know, but a means to discover new titles and new authors.

Small Demons has the potential to cut through the noise, to allow readers to discover new works based not on people’s spending habits, but on the content of the books themselves and the context in which they exist. For writers, the advantage of a project like Small Demons is that they need only do what they have always done. If the act of storytelling draws on a tradition that has always been, in a sense, networked, then the technology merely ramps up and extends that network, updating it to a simple click through.

We’ve already seen what is possible when readers begin using technology to network, discuss, and share (and I’ve documented my misgivings about the potential for endless chatter). What really excites me is what happens when the books themselves break out of their container and begin chattering to each other. In their own quiet way, naturally.

______________________

For no apparent reason, I would like to point out that this post references Victor Hugo, Umberto Eco, sixteenth century publishing, and two episodes of the Simpsons.

I tried hard to keep live tweeting from the event (via the @ifbookaus account), but alas I’m no @ebookish (forever now known as The Thumbs of Fury). I was reduced to desperately taking notes and occasionally copy-and-pasting in the Twitter app.

The event itself is organised by the awesome Peter Brantley and hosted at the Internet Archive. Books in Browsers is a small event attended by some of the finest people at the techie end of publishing (and me). Because of its size and the quality of its attendees, there was no need to waste time arseing around discussions of paper versus screen or on the relative merits of digital workflows. It was like a welcome homecoming.

The first day hit the ground running with an overview of the changes to the epub 3 standard. Oh yeah, not for the faint-hearted. The first day’s  discussion though revolved mostly around the concept of social reading, in other words the idea that you can share your thoughts, comments and other annotations on the text you’re reading with others. The magic of digital means that you can read a text with others regardless of distance or time. Such annotations can build over time to form a complex metatext that not only supports but also may shed new light on the original work.

At a big-picture-macro-level, I get social reading and I understand why it’s important to get right and why so many people are making it the centre of what they do. Books have always been social. The web has always been social, even before social media. Books don’t exist in a vacuum, they are shared and discussed and pored over and quoted from. Well a lot of them are. What social media has done is take our naturally gregarious instinct to a global scale. For good or ill, we’re just playing out our regular lives on a grander scale. Social reading merely brings the same grandness to the experience of reading. Bob Stein probably put it most succinctly:

The internet was specifically created to enable people to work and play with other people. Social reading is not an add on; it’s a foundation in the new media ecology.

So I get it.

But, as a writer, I have misgivings. Junking up texts with asides is not my idea of a welcome change. Any social reading platform worth its salt includes the ability to switch off the chatter, but there’s something unsettling about the chatter’s presence, lurking under the surface of the text, just waiting for the right moment to drown it out. What will readers value more: the text itself or the banter from the peanut gallery? Depends on the reader. Depends on the text. And, naturally, I have a vested interest in maintaining the clarity of the authorial voice. How could I not?

Worse, as a reader, I find the whole concept of social reading slightly nauseating. I love long-form narrative. I read a lot of it. And I don’t tweet about it or blog about it. This is something I’ve only just realised. I don’t talk about the content of the books I read all that often (especially fiction). I talk about books in general, of course. That’s my job. But I don’t talk about the stories or the characters or anything else much about what I read. I don’t annotate my books and I feel no desire to do so. What I think and what I feel as I’m reading is the experience of reading and whatever I recall of that later on is worthy enough.

When I read, when I read deep immersive texts, I’m gone. I’m wherever the story has taken me. Interrupt me when this happens (either electronically or IRL) and I’ll start getting crabby at you. This is my story. Go get your own.

Now, I might be an abnormal reader. I probably am, actually. And I’m aware that I sound like a curmudgeonly old git. But I suspect there’s an important point buried in the mild vitriol. We read different kinds of texts in different ways and not all books are a form of escapism.

Case in point is my own Off the Record. Two of the most common responses Sean and I have had to this book are as follows:

• “I’d forgotten about how much I love this or that band”
• “I just want to listen to the music I’m reading about”

If you haven’t read it (why haven’t you read it? go and buy it now, then come back…I’ll wait), Off the Record is packed with short articles, equal parts nostalgia, rock and roll, and time capsule. It’s writing begging to be discussed, annotated, and augmented.

Simply put, it’s not long-form narrative.

All of which is my long-winded acknowledgement that although social reading will undoubtedly become an essential feature of stories and other texts in coming years, remember that not all reads are the same. Don’t treat them as such.

People talking about books is one thing, but I think perhaps the most exciting find of Books in Browsers 2011 is what happens when books start talking to each other.

I’ll cover that in the next post.

The article from the interview is published over at TOM Magazine, but I thought I’d add a few choice quotes from Quan that didn’t make it into the final text and that have some relevance to writing and publishing.

On working from home:

We did an EP in the studio and we just weren’t particularly blown away by the sound quality or the experience and we were left wondering why we spent the money. The technology has grown so quickly, you can’t tell where things are recorded any more. It’s really about getting the performances down. There are better producers and better mixers out there, but then 90% of the people don’t care as long as it’s a good song. Home is the ideal environment to record in for the both cost and control. As long as you have deadlines, then I think it’s a really great way of doing things.

On the influence of digital and the subsequent need for ‘artefacts’ among fans:

The reality now is that there’s less panic about selling the physical form than there used to be. It’s more that these are limited edition artefact for fans who need the thing in their hands and it’s really great to see the artwork in multiple forms. It’s great for an artist to see. If you want the artefact, then we’re happy for you to support us. But we’re also happy for you to have the music for free if that’s what you want. That is the state of affairs right now. Data is uncontrollable, take it if you want it, download it if you feel like it. Come to the live shows (which is how we survive right now). That’s the state of affairs.

Does that mean anything? Probably not, except that any mention of dead things in discussion of digital publishing will likely make the headline.

So the first piece was for The Book Shed, which is a UK-based blog so a bit of discussion around what’s happening on this side of the English-speaking market world was in order. So in bumbles the Minister for Small Business:

Everyone tells me the book is dead. I’d love to declare the death of premature declarations of death. But, sadly, I cannot.

In this line of work, it is sometimes difficult to avoid grand sweeping pronouncements. I understand that. When someone asks you a question on book futures and the truth takes twenty minutes just to get a sense of the industry’s complexity, it’s tempting to dismiss them with the equivalent of “Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own”, just so you can get to lunch on time.

“Look, the book’s dead, alright? Where are those sandwiches?”

Though expedient, such statements are, of course, completely ridiculous (except the bit about the sandwiches). After all, the book has been in its death throes since the nineteenth century. The latest high profile talker to succumb to the ridiculous isAustralian Commonwealth Minister for Small Business, Senator Nick Sherry.

“I think in five years, other than a few specialty bookshops in capital cities, you will not see a book store. They will cease to exist.”

Call me cynical (please do), but I thought politicians weren’t supposed to say what they think. Independent booksellers account for up to 20% of the Australian trade, a much higher percentage than most other English language markets, and so represent a significant achievement for small business in this country. I guess we should just consider ourselves lucky Mr Sherry is not Minister for Health.

Read the full text here.

Zing! I wanted to continue with an imagined conversation with Nick Sherry, Minister for Health…

Minister: Why are we spending money on these people? It’s not like they’re still alive.

Aide: But they are alive. They’re walking around, working, even paying taxes.

Minister: You can’t fool me. I know dead.

But it was starting to turn into a pale mirror image of Monty Python’s parrot sketch.

The second piece for SPUNC was on why those lovely scallywags called literary journals should not fear pixels, but instead use them to broaden their audience and influence.

She adjusted her glasses and took a deep breath as silence descended on the room. Her eyes were red, but dry, her chest swelled and her jaw set: bring it on. When she spoke, her voice was cracking but not cracked. She talked about her love of the printed page, of the bound volume. She pointed to many examples of print culture declining in the news world—closure of news rooms, consolidation of mastheads, low revenues. She talked of print being under attack, and of its advocates being proudly out of step with the zeitgeist. She talked of being in the minority and of being right.

‘If you’re here to convince us to go digital, you can get the hell out.’

She didn’t say that directly to me, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t squirm.

The occasion was a gathering of small publishers and the speaker in question published and produced a small literary journal. As a writer with many contributions to small literary journals over the years, I felt strange and uncomfortable to be considered, even briefly, an antagonist to the little magazine. Really, I am heartened to hear that small publishers have no intention of walking away from their print editions, but I hope the speaker in question was kidding with all that digital stuff.

Though tempting, wholesale comparison with other industries are rarely of much use in divining the future of publishing. Even between forms of publishing, such comparisons are awkward and ill fitting.

Newspapers were always in the business of selling advertising. I assume, technically, they still are. They don’t compete for eyeballs with books or literary journals. Increasingly, they compete now with news aggregators, friend recommendations, RSS feeds, and user-generated content, all of it fuelled by the free exchange of information established in the world wide web’s DNA (and by the news’s own cut-and-paste advertising-funded approach to the web for the last fifteen years). Newspapers traditionally had to be both comprehensive and timely, two things the ubiquitous and space-generous world wide web does far more efficiently and often for free. That’s not to say newspapers have no place, but they have had to scramble to define what the printed edition brings to the table that a digital edition cannot. I’m still not sure they’ve solved that particular problem, especially when we see paywalls going up around the world.

And it’s not like the advent of digital is anything new for journal publishers. I loved publishers who insisted (in recent years on their web sites no less) that submissions were sent in hard copy only until they realised they actually wanted to publish the piece. Then the writer received a polite email requesting a Word document. Most new journals and a few older ones have now dispensed even with that, preferring email or web uploads for their submissions process. Today’s aspiring writers will never know the uniquely pitying smiles of post office workers recognising the signs of a serial submitter.

Read the full text here.

Oh those pitying smiles of the lovely people at Red Hill post office. One of them once wished me luck. Sadly, I can’t remember if it made any difference.

Speaking of literary journals, another non-fiction piece of mine is set to be published in the next (Septemeber) edition of Meanjin. More on that soon.

Needless to say, it wasn’t an entirely serious speech. But, at its core, it does have a serious message: the radical transformation at the heart of publishing presents an opportunity for everyone involved in bookishness: from writers to publishers to readers. Morose pining for an idealised past (that never existed) is not the way to face the necessary challenges.

At least that’s what I think.

Chugalug.

Simon Groth from if:book Australia on Vimeo.

Saccades was really my test case for this novel. The idea was to iron out any kinks and make Here Today as seamless a process as possible. It hasn’t worked out that way. Actually, Here Today has been an incredibly long and arduous process. Where the attitude behind Saccades had a suck-it-and-see approach with cheerful abandon, Here Today has been bogged down in the arduous process of making sure everything is right. I’ve been through about eighteen versions of the cover and obsessed over every instance of italics in the text. And that’s just for the print version. All those ebook editions need a patient hand, especially now I know much more about ereaders and their various eccentricities.

I’ll post more (much more) about Here Today when it’s released at the end of this month.

As my daughter used to say, ‘I’m very exciting!’