Static Books Are Dead:
I Can’t Believe I Wrote One!
Can You Dig It? by Pop Will Eat Itself
(embedding, ironically enough, not working for me.)
Recently, my agent told me that my next book would go to a kindle publisher and I have to say I was a little crushed. It was like hearing your movie is going “straight to video” and I felt sad that I wouldn’t have something to store in my basement.
However, my excitement mounted considerably when I began to examine the kindle publishing paradigm.
* “publishing” (per se) costs next to nothing.
* the publisher’s role is to market the book, not print & distribute it.
* the split can be MUCH better – you write, publishers market & the split with some is 50-50, from what I’m hearing.
But it gets a GREAT DEAL better than that.
Question: What can you do on the web and in a blog that you can’t do in a “book“?
Answer: *EMBED MEDIA* and this is the reality of Kindle that makes Amazon the Gutenberg of our time. (/hyperbole)
Kindle won’t – or soon won’t be – static – particularly those models armed with on-board wi-fi connections, which ups the ante of author “experience control.” Want a reader to “hear” the song your character is listening to? In a static book, you plug in the lyrics and hope for the best. In a Kindle book, you embed the file, or the video if you want them to see it – or just pull it off web on the fly.
We’re already doing this on websites and blogs all the time – it’s automatic to most of us – the difference is that a Kindle “title” will be a hypermedia “authored experience” that will contain text, sound, chats, videos, you name it, to tell its story in a linear *and* non-linear fashion.
The major obstacle to this phenomenon? Copyright & DRM, of course. In the case of music & video, the RIAA needs to step up to the plate and offer a blanket licensing agreement to EMbook publishers and creators – or they can stamp their feet and watch in horror as their media enhances the literature of the 21st century – with or without a license, because the bootleg market will just be completely out of control. (I’m in Asia – you tell me about “copyright control” and I’ll just giggle at you.)
As for me, my only regret now in publishing a Kindle book is that I didn’t write to the medium in the first place. That was then – this is now – the new one will *totally* take advantage of the format.
caveats: 1) because of tl;dr, this is truncated from the original idea, which came to me in tonglen meditation in a rush. 2) these things need a name – there’s a contest. we’ll start with EMbooks (for Embedded Media book.) 3) I use “Kindle” like kleenex – this concept is not device dependent. see #2. 4) this article is rife with error. Have at it.
Tags: author, Book, economics, hypermedia, publishing, tl;dr, writer, writing
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Share This Course. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 25th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Got a comment off-blog from a dear friend (Canton Becker) who too busy working on my new website to post here:
“Not off base, just about 2 years into the future. However if you don’t expect your book in printed form to be a best seller, then viability is actually *better* on electronic.
Two notes:
* feel good about killing fewer trees. you didn’t mention that
* make sure that publishing on kindle doesn’t exclude you from being purchasable / published on Apple’s tablet computer, which comes out in less than a week and will be the kindle killer. Your audience in particular will be buying iSlates, not kindles.”
[Reply]
January 27th, 2010 at 10:53 am
It has really awesome potential, and things can get really weird at this juncture. A lot of our cognitive habits have anchors in body movements. How much of modern, narrative consciousness comes from penmanship and flipping pages in a light trance state? We live in interesting times my friend, and I think e-publishing will treat you well.
Do you think that LonelyGirl15 is a precursor to the narrative style your discussing?
[Reply]
January 28th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
A Letter to Bruce Nussbaum, author of the Business Week column Nussbaum On Design, in response to the new column titled “The Tablet as Totem: Is Steve Jobs Our Moses?” January 26, 2010, located here:
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2010/01/the_tablet_is_s.html
Bruce:
As always, appreciate your ability to be on top of the latest trends in the way Gen Y (or whatever we are) is using the new technologies to further erode the ability of capitalism to make money from information exchange. I think you understand this implicitly, but to unpack what I mean, I suggest you read the following excellent polemic from Kevin Kelly, which is now two years old but Kelly has always been way ahead of the curve. (Economics of Increasing Returns, etc.)
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
In the meantime, I invite you to check out a proposal I wrote about the future of literature that the Tablet, iSlate, or whatever its called is going to enable through its technological capacities. It’s called “Static Books Are Dead: Can’t Believe I Wrote One!”
I wrote the piece for an innovative online collaborative project called Share This Book, spearheaded by Australian techno-futurist Mark Pesce, which attempts to create an online book written by 60 or so different collaborators. We’re using a vast array of tools to create this thing, including Google Wave, and its entirely possible that it will simply be released as a totally free e-book, because, well, Information Wants to Be Free, still and all, despite out best efforts to contain it and make a bit of scratch out of creating it.
ps: I just found out from the NYT that the thing is called iPad. Excellent. Whatever you call it, it will change the way we view a thing we used to call “a book.”
http://www.sharethiscourse.org/?p=800
much love,
gregoryp(tm)
[Reply]
January 30th, 2010 at 3:17 am
Thanks. Although, this tablet still appears way to large to eat, to me, but, soon… I imagine, with luck, the book may fit on the palm of the tongue.
[Reply]
February 7th, 2010 at 2:41 am
An interesting manifesto from an emerging e-press called Stay Thirsty Media:
http://staythirstymedia.com/bookpublishing/
By the way – is this course/project dead? What happened, really?
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February 9th, 2010 at 4:25 am
I just got my Amazon Kindle from amazon.com and all I want to say is goodbye to paper but I think the iPad will be kill the Kindle from Amazon
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February 9th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Laser printed A4 pages are my last preference for a reading medium. Particularly using flourescent lighting sources. Whereas I happily read ebooks from Gutenburg on my iPhone using the Stanza app.
And the paperback is just such a natural way to consume words.
The iPad certainly promises a rather slick reading experience.
But whether paper, e-ink, screen or tablecloth, the thing about the book is the journey. It is a linear narrative.
If the thought ‘I want to see how it ends’ doesn’t arise, can it really qualify as a book?
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February 9th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
All that I can say at the moment is this – exploded narrative will have BOTH. A linear story and a rich multimedia experience. Like the web that we create in our own minds when we’re researching a topic that interests us, using a start-point and an end point and with lots of stray thoughts and strange directions and weird tangents along the way. Like a choose your-own adventure book, sorta – where will you choose to linger?
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Sylvano Reply:
February 11th, 2010 at 10:59 pm
@Gregory Pleshaw, In the same way you throw up the question of what these things may be called (EM books, etc) there is the question of what kind of writer we are speaking of. We have book authors, script writers, poets, PR consultants, journalists, bloggers, reporters, etc.
What kind of authorial beast is now emerging?
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February 12th, 2010 at 2:37 am
Me. (giggle)
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