Tag Archives: publishing

The mistake of ‘enhancing’ novels

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(This is the second post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

A novel does not benefit from a host of videos of talking heads, interactive maps, or the kind of gunk that clutters up most DVD extras. A novel is not a movie. The film production and marketing process lends itself towards the whole DVD extras phenomenon. You have dozens of unused scenes, a special effects team, the filming crew, and an army of people performing various roles. The stars are loved by millions. The movie’s launch and its production are events. Even a bog-standard TV series has buy-in from society at large and a wealth of collateral material that is rare in publishing.

A novel is just one person sitting in a room for what is sometimes years, occasionally talking to a couple of other people, with an itty-bitty burst of social activity towards the end. Some of them may launch with a bang but the revenue curve for most novels bears no resemblance to that of either a successful or unsuccessful movie.

Moreover, the interactive content most publishers have bundled with their ‘enhanced’ novels is hideously misplaced. They are marketing assets locked in a sealed, unseen, container.

All those talking head videos? Put them on the website. That interactive map of the fantasy world? Website. Unused scenes? Website. Those commentary bits on the author’s manuscript?

You guessed it. Put it on the website.

The core value of a movie is spectacle. (Obviously, I’m talking here about the US-oriented movie industry, not the form. The cinematic medium is capable of considerable nuance and subtlety. Hollywood, however, isn’t.)

Extras feed into and complement the spectacle. The selling point of a novel—even the cheap-o, sleazy, low-brow ones—is to disappear into a new world for hours on end. Marketing assets help readers discover novels to step into—explore the feel of it before they commit to reading. They don’t add any value when fused into the body of the novel like a malignant tumour. There they become a distraction.

Book apps, where you take a linear novel or piece of narrative writing and pin interactivity on it like a tail on a cartoon donkey, don’t make sense. They make slightly more sense for non-fiction titles (hence iBooks Author’s focus on textbooks and the like) but even there the costs often outweigh the benefits.

If we are looking for publishing titles—or even new ideas that have no print history—that would benefit the most from being digital—the most logical ones to look at are titles that are confined and limited by print.

A book that works great in print, that is adapted perfectly to its form, is exactly the worst candidate for digital. It’d suffer from high expectations on the part of the readers (because the print version was great) but it would also see little improvement in digital. Because it was already good.

This is the quintessential lose-lose double whammy. Like an author whose skills have managed to attract an audience that consists mostly of expert readers, you’ve navigated yourself into a scenario where you’re surrounded by passionate people with high expectations and both the capacity and motivation to outline, in public, your every single fault. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, your audience will find reasons hate you.

Instead of enhancing novels, what we should be looking at are titles and types of books that are a little bit awkward in print, ones that are useful and loved because of their subject matter, but have never had a chance to bloom due to the limitations of the printed form.

Those are the ones worth ‘enhancing’.

Stumbling into publishing

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(This is the second Stumbling into Publishing post.)

If it looks like I have focus, that’s just because every hour, every minute, every second of every day, I feel lost.

I eye the world seeking sense and finding patterns in the same way a man on a sinking ship eyes the horizon desperately for sight of land.

I’d like to call it curiosity but it really is more than that; deeper and more obsessive. As I’ve grown older I’ve learned how to direct my fixations a little bit better, but I still sometimes fixate on a trivial subject and end up spending a weekend researching what is known about the Antarctic climate during the Paleocene for absolutely no reason whatsoever instead of doing whatever it is normal people do on weekends. (I wouldn’t know. Haven’t met a normal person in years except in passing. No idea what they actually do on weekends. Wouldn’t know where to start. I’m assuming there are social rituals involved as well as misdirected sexual anxiety. There always are.)

Still, I’m not as bad as I was ten years ago; one time I lost a couple of weeks fixating on the subject of dyspraxia for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

One tactic that has always worked well for me, to direct my focus and to work my way through by obsessions, is to write about them. It’s a way of processing. Sometimes that writing is non-fiction. Sometimes it isn’t. (The other thing, doncha know?) Sometimes that writing goes onto a blog somewhere. Mostly, over the past year, that writing hasn’t gone anywhere, just stayed in my Dropbox drafts folder.

I hope to make the reasons for that clear over the course of this series of blog posts and, by writing about it, process them, and learn.

The beginning is never where it starts. It’s in the instincts of most writers to begin where the story starts. Because you have a clear picture of the course of events—the progression of fact A to fact B all the way to fact Z—your instinct is to present everything to the reader so that they can see the beauty of the whole like you do.

But they won’t. They never will. They never see the beauty because they don’t care like you do. You see how glorious it is, the intricacies, and you feel in your bones how much it matters, because you care. You have to make them care. And that’s why you never begin where it starts. You begin where it gets interesting, where the emotions of the story are clear. You begin at the point when everything that is at stake can be taken in at a glance. They might not understand it all yet, but they can see it, like a grand emotional snapshot of the story’s landscape.

Only then, after you’ve drawn them in, after they have bought into the stakes—been touched by the emotions—only then can you show them how it all started.

And with that, everything unfolds in their mind. They see it like you do. They feel it like you do. They care like you do. The story has become a part of their world and they can’t breath without finding out, like you do, why it matters.

Back in 2009 before I had published my first blog post on baldurbjarnason.com—a year earlier—I began work on a plan to self-publish a series of novellas. I hadn’t decided what to publish; I just knew I would never publish any of the fiction I’d written before 2009. I decided I’d have to start from scratch with new stories and a new world. I’d have to figure out all of the details about how everything works in ebook publishing and production. I needed a lens, an angle that would let me approach, understand, and process what was going on in digital publishing. The project did that.

A project’s failure is found in its genesis. If it can’t be traced to a fundamental part of the project’s initial design then you can still find hints of it mixed in with the scattered and random jottings and outline that served as the first vestiges of a plan—like a haunting vision serving to onlookers and in your hindsight as foreshadowing.

All of my projects fail. Not necessarily because they are bad. Nor do they always fail to meet what I and others expect of them. Actually, they usually meet expectations.

(Have I told you that I have a reputation for pessimism?)

They fail because at the end of it, I know better. I can see all the incorrect turns, all the mistakes, all of the things that were simply wrong, even though I can’t articulate exactly why. They just are. I’ve found the patterns I’m looking for and they are irregular, broken, uneven, and so utterly human. All I can do after that is accept failure and aim to do better.

Hence this series of blog posts. They’ll be sporadic—mixed in with posts on other subjects—and it’ll probably be a long while before I feel done with the issue. I plan to go over what I learned over the last four years writing and preparing a series of novellas, self-publishing them, the mistakes I made, the emotional roadblocks I hit, the wrong turns that caused me to burn out on posting things on the web, the gaps that put me in a holding pattern, and the realisations that finally brought the sight of land on the horizon into focus.

The publishing industry’s new product categories

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(This is the first post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.)

A while back it was popular at many of the bigger publishers out there to release apps that they called ‘enhanced ebooks’. Some of them were branded as ‘book apps’, but that name too suffers from the same basic idiocy.

Enhanced ebooks is quite possibly the worst possible name that anybody could have thought of for a piece of media. It misses out on the one thing that is that particular genre’s greatest strength: it isn’t a book, not in any way shape or form. It’s an app.

And by virtue of being an app, it can have a structure and form that is entirely unlike the book, gaining in the process the business model flexibility that ebooks don’t have.

The state of play

The publishing industry has a set of standard bling that they use in place of interactivity whenever they implement something ‘enhanced’ or app-like. (Video, maps, slideshows, 3D widget crap, etc..)

Some of these approaches are confusing to say the least. Others are just plain dumb.

Commercial interactive textual content is a genre without direction. Everybody seems to be throwing stuff randomly against the wall to see what sticks.

Which would be fine if they didn’t keep picking up the spaghetti strands that didn’t stick just to try them again.

—Maybe I didn’t throw it hard enough?

Or, you just picked the wrong thing to throw.

—No, really. Jack over there is doing the same thing. I can’t let him get a lead in case this turns out to be a big market. I just need to throw harder.

No, you really don’t. Jack is making a mistake.

—Are you absolutely certain he’s making a mistake?

No, of course not. It’s impossible to be certain here, there are too many unknowns.

—Ah, so he could be right! Okay. I’ll try my best to throw harder next time. [Bends to pick up a cluster of spaghetti strands that hadn’t stuck to the wall and pitches it at the wall again.]

Nobody wants to be left behind so they all run as fast as they can in the wrong direction.

What to do, what to do?

Before you run, you first need a direction. Before you start an interactive project, you need to decide on what sort of project, and don’t just jump on whatever bandwagon you think others in the industry are on.

I don’t really care what your ‘why create’ reason is. As far as I’m concerned you don’t need a reason to create. But, if you want to create and if you want to do it on a regular basis, you need two prerequisites:

  1. You need projects you can figure out how to make.
  2. You need to have a sensible idea for how to fund project after project.

Costs and revenue. Two things that, at the very least, need to balance out.

If the projects are simple enough, then you can make them yourself and funding won’t be much of a problem. This lets you experiment and iterate your way towards discovering a genre, form, or medium you like.

But, a lot of the time you can’t do that. Especially not if the ‘you’ in that previous sentence is a corporation whose owners need it to stay relevant in a changing world.

There are three ways to slice the problem of deciding what to do.

  1. Look at the genres of interactive content (all of them, not just the crap publishers release). See if you find a few that inspire ideas.
  2. Look at the individual bits and features that make up the genres, go more granular than just looking at apps as a whole. Sometimes the approach and style is more important and inspiring than the whole.
  3. Look at your means and capabilities. It’s not a question of staying within your comfort zone but of making sure you don’t stray into mediocrity. If your ambitions vastly exceed your own capabilities, then you need a plan for how to grow them yourself, without outsourcing them to somebody who doesn’t give a damn and is just out for a buck.

(Yes, this is a lot of work even before you start planning the project. What did you expect?)

Finally, once you have a set of ideas and aspirational projects, you need to whittle them down, or at least prioritise them. That means you need to look at the cost-revenue balance for each one. And to do that you need to figure out the business model, often from scratch because, unlike print, interactive media doesn’t come with a business model attached.

The self-publisher’s perspective of the ebook market

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The writer Rosen Trevithick said this here thing:

For goodness sake Kobo, I took a risk publishing some of my titles with a relatively small eBook vendor. It took days to jump through your formatting hoops and I lost my bonuses for being exclusive to Amazon. I did this because I wanted to support an alternative to the market leader. You reward me by stabbing small publishing companies in the back. I’ll think twice about publishing with you in the future because you clearly aren’t ready to earn a larger share of the market.

Everything she says is true. But… I’d like to use this current crisis and her point about Kobo shafting small publishers as an excuse to look at what the ebook market looks like for a self- or small publisher.

  • Kobo’s search has always sucked (discoverability is non-existent) and they clearly have some sort of infrastructure problem (otherwise they’d have done the ‘purge’ the same way Amazon did, by flipping all suspect titles to Draft and forcing people to submit via a tighter process). They’re also clearly willing to completely shaft everybody using their self-serve publishing platform Writing Life whenever it suits them, PR-wise.
  • WH Smith. Non-existent as far as most self-publishers are concerned. No sales. No love. And now their site is shuttered.
  • Waterstones. Again, non-existent as far as most self-publishers are concerned. No sales. No love.
  • Foyles. Ditto.
  • Insert random bookstore’s Adobe DRM-based ebook platform. Ditto.
  • Feedbooks. Love the people behind Feedbooks but most self-publishers won’t even have heard about them, and you can only offer your stuff for free.
  • B&N Nook. Volatile as hell. Seems to be in terminal decline. Also unavailable to non-US self-publishers.
  • iBooks. A major hassle to use and submit. And, for most people I’ve spoken to, near non-existent sales.
  • Smashwords. Only really useful as a way to get into the above stores. Otherwise, meh.
  • Kindle. Stagnant platform. Almost all of the new features (series, Kindle Shorts, etc.) belong to Amazon Publishing and aren’t self-serve (and after the WH Smith porno brouhaha, two guesses as to why that is). But, it is where all of the sales are. And exclusivity offers several features that are likely to increase reach, visibility, and sales.

For those of us interested in a more open and varied ebook market, there is a singular harsh truth we must accept:

Amazon is playing the game better than the rest. That’s why they have the biggest share of the market.

I’d bet that even if Amazon abandoned discounts across the board, they’d still have their current marketshare simply because they seem to be doing a better job. Even their Kindle for iOS app has improved into borderline tolerability after the latest update.

So, if the EPUB crowd wants to compete, they need to up their game.

But, no. Instead they are either in a tailspin (B&N, WH Smith’s ecommerce side) or seem to be perpetually operating with all weapons set to ‘bland’ (Kobo, iBooks).

And, which is the fun bit, whenever something goes wrong, they don’t seem to hesitate to shaft the self-publisher.

So, I find it hard to blame any self-publisher who decides to go exclusive with Amazon. Nor do I blame any consumer who decides to buy a Kindle device or sticks to Kindle ebooks only. You don’t win customers by appealing to their charity. You have to give suppliers a reason to work with you, and buyers a reason to buy from you.

ETA: At the moment, the most sensible strategy for consumers is to buy from Amazon (and make DeDRMed backups if they are computer literate enough to Google and then use a drag and drop app). KF8 files convert nicely to EPUBs is you plan on moving to an EPUB-based platform in the future. At the same time the most sensible strategy for a small publisher is ‘it depends’.

Readmill versus Kindle – Readmill is worth the hassle

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Last week I decided to reread a couple of books in Readmill that I had previously read in the iOS Kindle app.

Let’s see how the two compare.

Kindle for iOS

It’s a turd. There’s no way to express just how awful that app is while still couching your annoyance in polite language.

It’s not awful. It’s fucking awful.

Of course, some of the annoyance stems from general Kindle awfulness such as frequent bugs in how the platform does sharing and general disregard for basic typography.

It was boring anyway

It’s completely unacceptable that a reading platform should drop the last few words off an even short passage, but that’s exactly what the Kindle does (for iOS at least).

  1. Highlight a passage.
  2. Go to kindle.amazon.com.
  3. Discover that the last few words of all of your highlights are missing.
  4. Swear like a sailor who has banged his knee.

Reloadarama.

It reloads and re-renders constantly. Which wouldn’t be so bad if re-rendering didn’t lose your history. This means you can’t go back from a link if you follow it and the app re-renders for some reason.

Imagine if Mobile Safari, in addition to having to frequently reload the page due to memory and caching problems, it lost all of your history in the process.

Then imagine that it does this every time you put down your iPad or switch between apps. Now you know what the Kindle app is like.

Finger-painting with overcooked pasta

Like other Kindles it repaginates on every link. Reading, navigating, and highlighting is like sieving cold overcooked pasta with your bare fingers.

The economy kind of pasta, the type you get almost for free from the bottom shelf in the supermarket. The kind that disintegrates when you put it in the pot. Not the nice wholewheat kind.

There is no consistency in position or rendering. This compromises the reader’s visual memory and is generally annoying. Like when you end up navigating back and forth a bit (y’know browsing the book) and then get back to your spot to get back to reading, it’s repaginated so nothing looks the same. Very annoying.

Crayon scribbles have better typography

The default stylesheet makes the default font (Georgia) look even more pedestrian and uninspired than it is normally. And it’s a very pedestrian typeface to begin with.

Of course, in leu of a considered default stylesheet with thought out proportions, line-height to font size ratio, indentation, and margins, we get escalating configurability.

The thing is, no matter how you tweak the line-height, margins, or which of the provided fonts you select, the app’s typography remains subpar. It just isn’t nice to read.

The font selection is crap and leaves out a host of interesting built in fonts. Providing better fonts would be a start.

Your finger is an error-prone highlighter

Swipe highlighting is a gimmick that results in having to repeatedly highlight, then delete highlight, then highlight, then delete, etc. to get it right. It’s incredibly error-prone because it doesn’t offer any method for adjusting the selection. The only advantage it offers is the ability to highlight across page boundaries which, frankly, is useful. But, surely, there’s some other way of accomplishing that without taking away the ability to adjust your selection?

Swipe highlighting: rubbish gimmick that disregards everything we know about usability.

Nobody wants to steal your stupid book

Copy-paste is disabled in the Kindle apps, both on iOS and Mac. Couple this with the kindle.amazon.com bug above and this means there is no way for you to easily quote a passage without having to retype parts of it.

Why the hell do you need to disable copying and pasting? What the fuck is wrong with people?

Note to authors and publishers:

Quoting your books is a good thing.

It spreads the word. Gets you new readers. You know, all good stuff. You should be furious that Amazon is disabling copying and pasting. In doing so it’s just rounded all of your marketing staff out back and shot them in the head. You don’t want to be beholden to Amazon’s whims for marketing for the rest of your careers, do you?

Note: this isn’t a question of DRM. Even Copy-paste isn’t enabled in any title in the Kindle app, not even in the DRM-free titles.

No polish, because you know that old saying about turds and polish, right?

Kindle iOS really lets you down on the small details. For example, magnification when you highlight/select is blurry on retina devices.

There’s also this curious item in the settings called ‘Publisher Font’. The fun part is that it doesn’t seem to do a thing other than switch the font to Georgia no matter the ebook or whether it has a font embedded or not. The app doesn’t seem to support embedded fonts so that can’t be what that menu item is for. Why they ship it broken like this is beyond me.

Don’t get me started on the UI in general…

And then there are the odd updates like the one that removed margins show that the main reason why the Kindle for iOS developers add configurability is that they don’t have a clue what sane defaults would look like.

Their development process seems to look like this:

  1. Make a change to the defaults that a first year BA student in design would know is dumb.
  2. Witness a massive backlash from readers.
  3. Think that nobody can be pleased and ‘fix’ it by adding configurability without even trying to understand the underlying problem.

In short: Kindle for iOS sucks.

Readmill

In comparison, Readmill is a joy. The default font is an excellent, beautiful, choice—looks like a custom typeface, not one of the platform’s built-ins. It’s the only iOS reading app where I prefer the default font over a good embedded font.

It automatically adjusts the margins when you resize the text so that the width of the text-column never gets unreadably wide or narrow.

The typography in terms of font sizes, line height, and margins are all inter-connected that way to maintain optimal readability at all font-sizes. The result is an app that is a joy to read.

Quote, share, discuss—it’s all good

  • Here we have none of that nonsense of disabling copy-paste.
  • Everything regarding highlights, notes, online sharing (twitter, facebook, wordpress), and discussions is top-notch.
  • Highlights navigation, both in-app and on the web is dramatically nicer. The Highlights sidebar is a nice touch.

UI niceties

The Readmill chrome is nice enough for you to sometimes page through an ebook and forget it is there as you get engrossed in the book. This while still being usable and accessible. There is no higher compliment for an ereader UI.

Being able to swipe up or down to adjust brightness is a nice touch. You could live without it, but after getting used to it you don’t want to.

The page number indicator is a nice and simple way of showing your progress through the book. Since the ebook is rendered as pages it makes sense to count your progress in those pages. No needless reinvention of the wheel like the Kindle’s opaque location numbers.

The only thing missing is the iBooks-style “X pages left in this chapter” which I’ve found very useful. Of course, Kindle doesn’t have any progress indicator when the chrome is minimised and an opaque, inaccessible, one when the chrome is visible and in the way.

It is slightly annoying that after you press a link you have to switch the UI chrome on to find the back link. In theory that should be simple to fix. No reason not to show the back link in some way even when the chrome is switched off.

Sidebar on configurability

A love of preference toggles and configurability is an endemic among the engineeringly minded. It’s easy to see why: they don’t mind the cognitive overhead because it fits in with how they approach all of their problems.

Having some preference toggles is a good thing. But when you add toggles and sliders for margins, font size, indentation, and more, you escalate the complexity that users need to to tackle in your app.

A reader who wants to increase the font size will now have to deal with all of those other settings because they are interrelated. Font size, line height, and margins are all cogs in the same typography machine. Change one thing and you affect the other. So a simple task to change the font size can easily become a multi-minute odyssey among a forest of buttons, toggles, and sliders.

People are also very bad at assessing their own needs. A common ailment among my relatives is a tendency for muscle, joint, and other physical aches and pains due to bad ergonomics. (A curse that I thankfully am free of.) What makes the problem worse is that they used to be bad at figuring out how they should sit, what chairs they should be using, how to use their tools, etc.. They needed to be told, by an expert. Even then, following that advice was often uncomfortable at first, even though it helped address the problem in the long run. Without expert guidance, most people will choose ergonomics and positions that will actively harm them in the long run.

The same applies to reading system configurability. People will most of the time choose settings that will make them read slower and remember less.

Finally, by adding all of those preference toggles to your reading app you have turned it into a design tool. By letting the reader control all of the variables you have forced them to become a typographer and designer. They end up having to take on all of the complexity of designing an entire ebook for themselves.

Moreover, it’s a crap design tool. I know a couple of things about designing for reading and I can’t for the life of me get an optimal reading experience out of the Kindle app or Marvin (an otherwise excellent app). I can never get the proportions right between the width of the text-column, typeface, line height, and font size. I can get those apps to be readable, sure, but never optimal.

The only design configuration a reading app should have are font size, inversion (switching to light on dark), and contrast. These toggles are based on physical reader needs. Some eyes just work differently from others. They aren’t preferences but requirements for a section of your readership.

Everything else should be controlled by the system and derived from the variables the reader does control. That way you give them an optimal reading experience without excluding anybody.

Which means that the only thing missing from Readmill is a contrast slider.

API

The idea of having an API for my reading platform of choice is intriguing. It means that the platform owner doesn’t have to solve all of the issues the readers have. In theory, that should mean that I could put together a script that exports my Readmill highlights and notes into a usable format for writing. And that means that all sorts of apps out there will and have been rolling out Readmill features. It promises to increase the benefit I gain from the platform immensely.

Here come the downsides

Readmill’s single biggest flaw is the absence of anything resembling library management. Your books are presented in a very nice looking list that you can filter to show only finished books or those you’re currently reading.

Of course, Kindle for iOS’s library management is also rubbish for largely the same reason. You only have a list of your stuff that you can filter in rather limited ways.

Both apps need collections. They need the ability to browse the book by author. And because Readmill also supports PDFs you need to be able to filter by file type. Browsing by subject matter would also be nice, but the general quality of ebook metadata might not be up to snuff for that to work. Of course, if there was an app out there that used ebook metadata in interesting ways in its library UI, then maybe publishers would be more motivated to put in the effort to make it nice.

One serious annoyance is that sometimes Readmill will get the metadata seriously wrong (like marking all volumes of a book volume 1). Without an ability to correct that metadata in the app (while sending the correction upstream as a suggestion, of course) few people are going to bother to tell Readmill about errors when they happen.

Most people’s routine is a bit like this:

  1. Load the ebook into Readmill either via a ‘Send to Readmill’ button or opening it directly using the app on the device.
  2. See that the service seems to give some of the ebooks the wrong title.
  3. Either ignore the error and read on or switch to another app in frustration.

Very few are going to bother with going to the Readmill website, navigate to the book page and make a ‘suggestion’ there. Readers need to be able to correct a book’s title in-app

Finally, none of the major ebook vendors, at least those with any selection to speak of, offer direct Readmill integration. Why Kobo doesn’t let you set it up so that all of your purchases get automatically added to Readmill is beyond me.

The thing everybody does wrong

All highlights lose all formatting and don’t include images. This is the case for all ebook reading systems today. I know this is a difficult technical problem (well, so I’m told) but this is essential for any book that isn’t a prose novel. Formatting for many titles is integral to their meaning. Changing a list into a jumbled paragraph can render a highlight unreadable and this happens all too frequently.

Conclusion: Readmill is worth the hassle

Even without the social features or the highlighting features, Readmill’s UI, design, and typography are enough to make it, in my opinion, the best ebook reading app available for iOS devices.

When you add the platform’s general features such as social sharing, discussions, and an API, then it becomes an unbeatable choice. It’s so good that it’s worth whatever hassle you have to go through to get your ebooks into it. Even if that means using a notoriously crap application to convert your existing library to DRM-free epubs. Even if that means having to manually download the Adobe DRM files from Kobo to upload into Readmill whenever you buy an ebook.

I’ll put up with all sorts of nonsense now when I’m trying to get ebooks to read because reading in Readmill is nice enough to be worth the hassle.

Readmill is, quite simply, the benchmark for all future ebook reading apps.

Proprietary ebook formats versus DRM

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Micah made this here statement on Twitter the other day, articulating neatly what a lot of us have been thinking for a while now:

Very true.

It’s something that has bothered me for years and years. I spent years arguing against the use of proprietary formats in interactive media academia (they were unnaturally fond of what was then Macromedia Director). Then proprietary ebook formats became my bugaboo. But tilting at windmills hasn’t gotten me anything but heartache and a reputation for being a bit of a jerk. I’ve now accepted the fact that proprietary formats are always going to be with us. If it doesn’t bother the buyer it doesn’t bother the buyer, simple as that. But I’ve often tried to figure out a good framework for discussing and analysing this dynamic between proprietary and standard formats. What’s the best way to think about this and find a way to combat proprietary formats?

One angle is that standardisation lowers cost for producers and lets them make more interesting products, but that’s not likely to sway Amazon who value the flexibility and power of an owned format and don’t bear the costs of production. And customers generally don’t care since they might not even benefit at all from lower production costs (some producers would just use the opportunity to increase their margins).

The other angle is interoperability and modularity, which increases the flexibility and value of the ecosystem as a whole. But that also changes the power dynamic in the ecosystem in less than predictable ways, something that the big dogs in the system won’t like. When you’re the biggest there’s no such thing as good unpredictable change. Amazon’s system is mostly vertically integrated anyway, leaving little room for interop. And many opportunities for really lucrative interoperability have been throttled in the crib by Apple’s stringent iOS policies. (Why ebook vendors aren’t doing more interesting things on Android where they aren’t held back by the platform owner’s policies is beyond me, but that’s a blog post for a different day.)

Then I stumbled upon the super obvious way to look at the problem. So obvious that it’s embarrassing that I haven’t pursued it as a serious argument before. Yeah, I know, I can be thick sometimes.

I didn’t hit upon it directly, but Micah’s above tweet did remind me of something I’d just read. From The Technique of the Novel – A Handbook on the Craft of the Long Narrative by Thomas H. Uzzell:

Ask any novelist in trouble with his plot what he intends the effect to be and he will answer something like this: “I intend to show that love between two such people is impossible.” This is material, not effect. Effect would be, say, the pathos or tragedy felt by the reader in a narrative about two people vainly attempting happiness in marriage. Amateurs in any art talk in terms of materials; professionals, in terms of effects.

Effects are subjective experiences; materials are objective experiences. Effect is response; materials are stimulus. Effects are the emotional qualities of things.

It’s features versus benefits all over again. In this context the materials the novelist uses are the features and the effects on the reader are the benefits. A writer should not think in terms of the materials (what you write) but in terms of the effects (how the writing affects the reader).

It’s ties into an adage from marketing, features are meaningless to the buyer, they need to be told how they benefit. But if there’s one thing I learned from my friends in marketing back in my software days it’s that this principle applies everywhere. No marketer can gloss up a Frankenstein monster app pieced together out of departmental hobby horses. Most software is a confusing turd made out of disparate components by a bunch of socially inept developers who can’t think in terms of user benefit. Moreover, they don’t really care about the user. Most developers think in terms of abstract beauty of the code and architecture, conceptual integrity of the components, and of ticking of checkboxes in a feature list. They don’t give a toss about the experience unless you can itemise it as a development checklist.

Bringing this back to ebooks…

Those who are trying to shift the market away from proprietary formats can’t try and market their way out of the problem. A tactic used by some is to harangue critics like me for pointing out important flaws in the EPUB ecosystem, but silencing critics won’t address the flaws. It will not change the fact that as a whole, the EPUB ecosystem offers readers fewer benefits than the Kindle ecosystem.

Offering equal benefits will not be enough to sway consumers. To change the status quo you need to outclass Amazon massively in benefits.

And in case you were wondering, Readium SDK is a feature, not a benefit. It’s what you do with it is what’s going to count.

My suggestion is simple: focus on the benefits Amazon can’t replicate.

If a reading app feature turns out to be a competitive advantage, Amazon is likely to copy it with ease.

Rendering or interactivity features aren’t likely to make a difference because sensible publishers will focus on making their titles cross-platform compatible. Amazon’s rendering and interactivity features are going to dominate as the lowest common denominator.

You can’t beat Amazon on selection or price. The Kindle’s ease of use is going to be hard to top. Their customer service is far above what others offer.

The one thing the EPUB ecosystem can offer that Amazon can’t, is tight interoperability between unrelated ebook vendors, services, and reading apps.

That’s it. That’s your only card to play.

  • A major retailer could implement Readmill’s Oauth integration API. Imagine buying an ebook from B&N, Kobo, or Google and having it automatically load into your Readmill library. Awesome, right? It would be even better if your Kobo library automatically synced your purchases with your Readmill library and vice versa. You wouldn’t even need new standards to do this, just the will to implement.
  • Apple could change its policies to allow in-app ebook browsing and purchase and enable more integration and interoperability in ebook reading apps.
  • We need a high quality web-based ebook reading app integrates with a host of relevant services. Most attempts I’ve seen to date are buggy, unusable, bare-bones, or half-arsed.
  • Apple could implement something like Readmill’s Oauth API, letting retailers securely send ebooks to iBooks. Or, again, better yet if they implement a library syncing API.
  • App developers could standardise rendering, including how overrides behave and how pagination affects existing web standards.

Basically, what I want is for the EPUB side of the ebook market to put their money where their mouth is. So far, they only seem to support EPUB because it isn’t Amazon and don’t take any advantage of the biggest benefits of standardisation. Namely, interoperability and modularity.

As I said, the one major advantage of a standard format is interoperability. The obsession ebook vendors have with silos and their antipathy towards easy interop is crippling their only competitive advantage over Amazon, the one big thing they can use to increase the benefit a reader gets from their ecosystem. Being able to easily mix and match reading apps with retail services and have them integrate tightly is something Amazon can’t replicate.

Copying Amazon’s vertically integrated stack when your only sensible strategy is interoperability is, quite frankly, insane.

With the way B&N, Kobo, Google, and Apple have been behaving, it’s a miracle that Amazon still doesn’t own more than 80% of the market.

Then again, what little headway they have made was largely due to illegal collusion.

B&N, Kobo, Google, and Apple separately can never compete with Amazon on price or range.

If I could hook all of their ebook retail services to Readmill so that all of my purchases are automatically added to my library, then I, as a consumer, can begin to treat them as a single market. Not having to worry about whether any given ebookstore is compatible with my chosen reading app makes me less resistant to try them all. Impulse purchases become more likely.

Together they can offer a competitive price and range. A book that isn’t available in Kobo might be available in B&N, Google Play, or the iBookstore. Proper interoperability will convert more readers away from the Kindle and so increase EPUB sales, to everybody’s benefit.

And, as I’ve been saying, the benefit is what counts.

Publishing has catered to dumb for a long while

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The following is from The Technique of the Novel – A Handbook on the Craft of the Long Narrative, originally written in 1947:

Why aren’t novels better? It is surprising that they are not worse. Real profits are made in the publishing business by employing highly talented individuals who understand, intuitively in most cases, I believe, the dumb yearnings of dumb people and devise products to please them and keep them dumb and happy. Most books of fiction are written solely to entertain. Where one novel educates or enlarges the mental horizon of the reader, a hundred confirm his prejudices and exploit his ignorance. If novelists as a whole made even a beginning at telling what they know to be true, the book publishing business would collapse. (Thomas H. Uzzell – The Technique of the Novel – A Handbook on the Craft of the Long Narrative)

The more things change, etc., etc.

Why disruption goes unchecked

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Good advice goes counter to established common sense

A few months ago, while I was filling an unexpected surplus of free time, I asked myself the following question:

—Hypothetically, what would your advice be if a medium-to-large publishing company came to you asking how they should handle the shift to digital?

On face value, this is an easy question with an easy answer because the literature and research tells us exactly what they should do.

Kevin Charman-Anderson, in an excellent blog post on the impact of digital on news organisations, outlines the answer neatly:

In April, I heard Gilbert speak at the International Symposium of Online Journalism in Austin about how he has applied the insights from the Innovator’s Dilemma to the Deseret News in Utah, and he laid out why integration was absolutely the wrong approach to disruption.

“In industries that are being disrupted, 9 percent of companies make it,” he said. Of the 9 percent that made it, 100 percent had set up a separate disruptive business unit.

Clayton Christensen, Clark Gilbert, and a host of others have established with a fair amount of certainty that there is only really one effective way to respond to a disruptive innovation. The incumbent needs to create a new business unit that is insulated from the rest of the company. The reason for the need for insulation is that existing business values are exactly what prevents the company from responding adequately to a disruptive innovation. The company prioritises existing business relationships over unproven new ones and existing processes over those with little testing and so, unless the new business unit is properly protected from the legacy business, the incumbent’s response to the disruption will always be compromised.

The problem, obviously, is the same issue that holds back every incumbent response to disruptive innovations: the best tactics for the new context go counter to common sense established in the old context.

A few examples from publishing:

  • Separating digital from the rest feels like spinning paperbacks back out into their on business units, a step back in the ladder of progress.
  • Having a firewall between print production and ebook production might compromise quality and result in an ebook that’s out of sync in some way with the print product.
  • Print and ebooks should be a part of a unified strategy. Ebook pricing should be set with print in mind.
  • ‘We tried separating ebooks out from print—we outsourced it to a company in India. It didn’t work.’
  • ‘We’re getting the hang of producing ebooks. Our QA processes hold them to a higher standard than anybody else. Our processes are top notch and well integrated into our Indesign process.’

The problem with all of these responses is that they assume that ebooks are the disruptive innovation and the extent of how book publishing will be affected by digital. I don’t think they are—not if you take them on their own. Digital on the whole—the web, apps and ebooks—are the disruption. (Yes, this is a refinement on my earlier thoughts on the issue based on feedback and pushback I’ve received.) Only focusing on ebooks is like facing an army and thinking you can pick which soldier you want to fight while ignoring the rest.

I think the web and apps are going to be more disruptive in the long run than ebooks. Today, they are targeting the low end and less profitable niches in publishing:

  • Subscription sites for specialised, high value, fields (photography, wine-tasting, investment).
  • The integration of tools with content (e.g. birdwatching apps, travel guide apps).
  • Niche artists that use Mike Masnick’s Connect with Fans and then give them a Reason to Buy (e.g. Thrillbent and too many web cartoonists and musicians to count).

Most of these tactics start with little to no investment and then iterate in response to feedback from their customers. These new entrants also sometimes combine approaches, e.g. both a subscription site and an app, both free website (CwF) and ebooks (RtB). They are often considered to be low quality, unprofessional, or even just plain rubbish by the publishing industry.

This should not be your response to the above list:

—None of those tactics work in my bit of the world so I’m safe

This should be your response:

—That’s a scary variety of approaches. Digital seems to come up with a tailored business model and approach for every market segment.

Don’t assume that the tactic a new digital competitor would use against your segment is going to be one of the existing ones.

Because that’s what digital has over print. There is no one fixed way that digital has to use to address a particular market segment. Print has only one solution for every problem: a book. In digital you can choose the most appropriate medium (ebook, web, app, all of the above) and the most effective business model. Publishers only offer two solutions (ebooks and print) and one business model (sell the damn thing).

This has already begun to affect existing publishers in minor ways. I know of one example where what was in my opinion the most effective tactic for that genre (subscription website) was taken off the table before the conversation even started. Why? Because one of the authors was already running a subscription website in that niche and they were doing it much much better on their own than the publisher ever would have.

Like I’ve said before:

It’s unrealistic to expect profitable niches to remain uncontested.

That competition won’t be coming from other publishers but from your own authors, self-published authors, web and app developers, tech companies, and specialists looking to capitalise on their expertise without involving a middleman.

They won’t be held back by established best practices and they won’t have to worry about complementing or integrating with a print process.

Aside on ebooks

The role of ebooks in this is, I think, going to be interesting. Ebooks are an excellent complementary product. They are relatively easy to produce as long as you don’t buy into existing tools within the publishing industry (namely Word and Indesign). Making an ebook can be incredibly easy if you aren’t making a print product in tandem (e.g. step one: write in Scrivener, step two: compile to ebook). They are cheap to distribute and sell (hosting is dirt cheap, most ecommerce solutions support them with ease, only four to five major ecommerce outlets). They make an excellent Reason to Buy for a variety of creators and fields.

However, they are extremely limited as a primary product. Their design capabilities will be limited for years to come, even if EPUB3 does get properly implemented. Apps and devices based on old versions of Adobe RMSDK will be around for years, if not a decade. Old Kindles will remain in substantial use for what will seem like an eternity. For a very long time it’s going to be very difficult for anybody to roll out an ebook with ambitious design and interactivity while still retaining the ebook’s biggest advantages (cheap production, wide reach). They are bound to one very limited business model (unit sales), one that seems to becoming less and less relevant in the digital age. They are bound by a tight vertical integration in separate stacks (the Kindle stack, Adobe stack, Readium SDK stack). Their silos prevent integration into other products, apps, or websites.

Even in the publishing industry context, ebooks add the most value when they complement something else:

  1. Print and ebook bundles.
  2. Synced ebooks and audiobooks.
  3. An economically efficient replacement to paperbacks that compliment hardcovers nicely, price-wise.

On the third point, the optimum for print would be a four-layered price stack:

  1. Expensive special edition hardcover.
  2. Just a hardcover.
  3. Hardcover plus ebook at the same price as a hardcover on its own.
  4. Just an ebook.

This would almost certainly result in a sales increase for hardcovers as the bundle would suck up a lot of ebook sales. The two layers above the bundle would make it look like a really, really good deal.

In short: ebooks are a complementary product that work best when the primary value is created elsewhere.

Edited to Add:

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote a blog post prompted by the same piece but focusing on the parallels between news media and the publishing industry. Recommended.

Make ebooks worth it

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Turns out this post is a part of an impromptu series of blog posts. Didn’t plan it this way:

  1. Ebook silos and missed opportunities
  2. Ebook silos, update
  3. Ebooks and cognitive mapping

There’s a theme been running through all my blog posts this week. In fact, a single theme runs through all of my writing on ebooks; the driving idea behind all of my thoughts on the subject.

And, no, it isn’t ‘behave like an arsehole to people and criticise everything.’

The idea is very very simple:

We have to make ebooks worth it.

Print has massive benefits that shouldn’t be discounted. Ebooks have massive downsides that shouldn’t be discounted. The web provides a lot of what ebooks purport to provide.

We are facing the very real risk of limiting ebooks to the role, market position, and capabilities of mass market paperbacks. Remove paperbacks. Add ebooks. Keep the overall system the same with few changes, maybe a bit of consolidation.

This is what a lot of people and companies in publishing want and it would be a tragedy of massive proportions; the biggest lost opportunity in the history of digital media.

Fortunately there’s still time, still a chance, or otherwise I would just shut up.

What would make ebooks worth it?

  • A diversity of new modes of reading.
  • A wealth of new tools for reading and writing that are impossible in print.
  • The ability to enable new modes of learning and skills development (just adding interactive quizzes is a massive bankruptcy of imagination).
  • Democratised tools of publishing. It’s still too difficult to create good looking ebooks and distribute them widely.
  • A more peer-like, less hierarchical, relationship between the reader and writer.
  • A more symmetrical relationship between reading and writing. Reading, annotations, quotes and more should feed directly into writing systems.
  • A greater variety of models for how we extract value from writing, from gift-giving (pay-what-you-want) to subscription to dynamic pricing (like automatically increasing or decreasing prices the more people buy to create either scarcity or abundance, depending on what you want).

It won’t be worth it if all ebooks end up capable of doing is replicate print books with a bit of added javascript and video bling.

It won’t be worth it if all of the platforms keep offering only one business model for ebooks.

It won’t be worth it if the platforms keep every reader’s contributions, notes, and highlights under lock and key.

It won’t be worth it if ebooks become a inferior, partially incompatible, fork of web standards chosen only by the publishing industry.

It won’t be worth it if people keep having to go back to print because ebooks don’t have the capabilities or affordances necessary.

It won’t be worth it if we all switch away from ebooks to the web in a couple of years time because they just don’t do what we need.

Ebooks are only worth the effort if they are equally capable to the web in a unique and complementary way.

Ebooks are only worth the effort if they become something more than what they replace.

Edited to add:

Of course ebooks as they currently exist are fine for many people. But those who assume that this is acceptable are also assuming a stable media industry. In entering the digital arena books (e- or not) are brought into direct competition with not only other time wasters (games, video, etc.) but other forms of reading, namely the web and apps.

If the ebook ecosystem cannot support a diversity of content and interfaces, the web and apps will step in to fill the gaps.

They have already begun to take over areas of specialised analysis. You currently can find wine-tasters, lens reviewers, and economists running subscription websites with writing, analysis, charts, and data that is usually unavailable in either print or ebook form.

It’s unrealistic to expect profitable niches to remain uncontested. During the print era, most of the world’s expertise on how to target print media was consolidated among the world’s publishers. But these same entities are, if anything, among the more clueless companies around when it comes to digital, the web, and apps.

So, in the long term I don’t think it’s a question of publishers holding us back but of them slowly being encircled and swamped by outside competitors, leaving only the subsidised and unprofitable uncontested.

Aside:

Many non-fiction titles that are written to help the reader solve a problem could be replaced with a well-designed tool (or an extension to an existing tool) that enables the reader to easily solve the problem directly. And if the tools developer does their job properly, the tool can be designed specifically to make skills development natural and easy. Imagine a book on photoshop replaced by a series of interactive tutorials built as a photoshop extension: learning takes place within the context where the skills are to be applied.

Ebooks and cognitive mapping

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The following series of tweets by @seriouspony (Kathy Sierra) tie into a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, namely cognitive mapping.

The problem

To quote Wikipedia:

A cognitive map (also: mental map or mental model) is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment.

The spatial environment in this case is the book itself. It is a three-dimensional object that lends itself very well to this kind of mental model.

Like so many other readers, cognitive mapping is a major part of how I remember what I read and it’s a technique that’s utterly useless when you’re reading an ebook. I read a book and a part of how I remember what I remember is spatial mapping. I remember roughly how far into the book the passage was and where on the page. Combined with copious usage of small post-its this makes it very easy to remember passages and reacquire them when needed.

I know that for a lot of other people (my students, for example, back when I was a teacher) cognitive mapping helps them keep track of the book’s ideas and argument as they go forward. Without it a lot of them lose the thread they are following through the book and, as Kathy put it, ‘fail to carry context forward’.

The other key to the memory puzzle is to stop on a regular basis, close the book, and think about what you’ve just read. Go over the salient points in your head and if you have that nagging feeling that there’s something you’re missing, go back and look for it. This tactic fortunately works for ebooks.

It’s not that I have problems remembering things. I can remember most things I read without any effort (much to my sister’s annoyance who says that I have a ‘glue-brain’). What these techniques help me to do is to contextualise the information. The cognitive map preserves for me the overall context of the book (where a passage appeared, where it was in the extended argument, what line of thinking preceded and succeeded it, etc.). Closing the book and going over the book’s points places the book’s ideas in my own intellectual context; I remember them better because I have connected them with my own preexisting ideas.

I rely on these techniques so much that when it comes to reading books that contain ideas I want to remember, I have become hesitant to read them as ebooks. For example, I’ve been reading through John Gray’s books lately (False Dawn, Straw Dogs, and Black Mass so far, all excellent, although Straw Dogs was the best of the three) and I made sure to buy them in print. I made the mistake of buying and reading Taleb’s Antifragile on the Kindle and will probably end up buying the print version and reading it again so that I can retain more of it.

I’ve actually done this several times: bought an ebook, read it, then bought it again in print to read properly. (Bundling would be awesome for me. Read the book in print and still have access to full-text search.)

It takes a lot to make a longterm ebook fanatic, one who genuinely loves the format, to lean towards print but, when it comes to remembering stuff, ebooks are for me a bit crippled. A good search facility in an ebook reading app helps to reacquire a passage you already remember but not for carrying context forward or remembering the passage’s context.

The solution

Kathy’s perspective on this is trying to figure out how to make awesome books and in that context she is absolutely right. New books intended to provoke skills development in the reader should be written to remove the need for techniques such as cognitive mapping. They should absolutely carry the context forward through writing and design. We know so much more now about how memory is formed, how skills are developed, and how the mind works than we used to and we have an obligation to use this knowledge to make new books better. There is no downside to that.

However…

(You knew there would be a however, right?)

We can’t rewrite old books. You can’t rewrite John Gray and add sections at the start of every chapter that carries context forward. You can’t add this stuff to Seneca or Schopenhauer. So, I have to respectfully disagree with Kathy on the need to find a tech solution. The point is that this isn’t an either-or choice. We both have the duty to make better books and content and we need to improve the experience for reading older books. Our duty to preserve existing thought is equal to our duty to make better books.

The problem is that I haven’t the faintest idea on how to address this in the ebook reading app. It’s a problem that requires a lot of research because our instincts on what helps memory formation are likely to lead the app developer astray.

ETA:

To those of you who doubt cognitive mapping in the print book context:

Have you never read through a book, then held it in your hands, recalled a passage, and been able to guess roughly where it is in the book, down to whether it was on the right hand or left hand page? And you’ve been able to do this without remembering what exactly the passage looked like?

That’s cognitive mapping. It isn’t an abstract phenomenon or an artificial mnemonic technique but a side effect of our interaction with a three-dimensional object. It’s an aid. Your memory isn’t crippled or compromised without it, but can and does improve recall and help you keep track of things as you read. Especially if you practice it deliberately and add aids such as small post-its regularly as you read. Those post-its aren’t just markers but also landmarks, you’re able to remember where a passage was in relation to its nearest post-it.

Also note that your memories in this case aren’t entirely visual, as in you don’t necessarily remember what the passage looked like. This is one of the many reasons why progress bars in ereaders can’t serve the same purpose. Those progress bars aren’t visible all of the time (so chances are with any given passage that the bar wasn’t visible when you read it) and even if it was, you aren’t likely to remember it unless you are one of those rare persons with extremely strong visual memory.