booktwo.org

I was invited to participate in a discussion convened by the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE) on the subject of future publishing. Unfortunately I can’t attend, but I highly recommend going if you can - it’s a very interesting panel who should have plenty to say. Details follow:

Educating the Next Generation - Convergent Media and Publishing

23rd November 6.30pm - 8pm
Venue: Kings Lecture Theatre, Strand Campus, King’s College London

Educating the Next Generation - Convergent Media and Publishing will focus on how new technologies and converging media platforms are changing the nature of publishing. It brings together a high-profile panel of writers, publishers and IP specialists who will discuss the following questions:

• Should the publishing industry be excited or threatened by future changes in technology and distribution?
• What are the technological advances that could impact on the industry over the next 10 years?
• What are the implications for authors, publishers and retailers in terms of intellectual property and copyright?
• What skills might students aiming to work in publishing, and indeed writers themselves, need to think about developing for the future?

Speakers are: Tony White (writer and Arts Council England), Simon Worthington (Metamute), Dr Rosemary Bechler, (writer and The British Council), Scott Pack (The Friday Project) and Dr Uma Suthersanen (Queen Mary, University of London). It will be chaired by Dr Sadie Plant.

To book a place for this event, please visit www.lcace.org.uk/events

Educating The Next Generation is an ongoing series of debates organised by LCACE in collaboration with our partners. The aim of the series is to give students and researchers interested in particular aspects of the cultural industries an opportunity to find out about the challenges and changes occurring within those sectors now. They are also designed to enable networking between Higher Education and the cultural industries.

This event is produced by LCACE in association with Borders.

I’m going to be away for the next two weeks, so I’m afraid there will be a little hiatus in posting. Normal service will be resumed from December 5th.

Yesterday I was given a fascinating demonstration of ICUE, an application which allows ebooks purchased from the ICUE store to be read on a mobile phone. There are three reading modes: a simple down-scrolling page, a sideways-scrolling ticker, and ‘flicker’, which flashes a single word at a time, at a speed of your choosing. The latter is surprisingly comprehensible, and apparently allows much faster reading than a person’s norm.

According to Managing Director Jane Tappuni, ICUE is popular with lots of people who wouldn’t normally be big readers; kids especially. She made the good point that while for many adults, reading off a screen is difficult and annoying, for many kids it’s all they’ve ever known. There’s very little difference between reading an ICUE ebook and reading a text message, and a good mobile phone reader may have great benefits for general literacy. A friend also made the good point - which applies to ebooks in general - that those deterred by thick, heavy or intimidating-looking books are less likely to be deterred by an electronic file.

The ICUE store currently contains a few hundred books, most of which are in the public domain but there is intended to be an increasing number of frontlist titles from major publishers. The bookstore is a bit of a chore to use, but the download is a fairly hassle-free procedure. There’s also a list of books available on the website, although here again the organisation is fairly poor, and there are no blurbs or other information about the books. At £4.50 the books are not cheap - ebooks of many of these titles are available elsewhere, significantly cheaper if not entirely free - but future new releases should provide better value, and it will be interesting to see whether a proposed, linked charity [PDF Press Release] does encourage schools to provide or even pay for text books for their students.

Unfortunately the downloaded books can only be read with the ICUE application - they can’t be transferred to a Sony Reader or onto your computer for example - nor can you read third-party files, which is a pity. That’s because ICUE books are stored in a proprietary format, which ICUE refers to as mBooks, something regular readers will know we’re generally opposed to. But if it gets kids reading, we can’t but applaud. I’m going to download a couple of titles and see if it improves my night bus reading; it’s certainly easier than cramming a paperback into your pocket.

Back in the UK, Charles Leadbeater’s next book is available online for comment. We-think is less immersive than other network book projects, but it’s great that Profile, joint small publisher of the year, have allowed this to go ahead - most publishers shy away from releasing content free.

We-think is about the power of mass creativity, charting the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning. The website interface does not make dipping into the book very easy, sticking to a more linear style - there’s also a Wiki version - but it does make commenting on it very easy. We particularly like the fact that commentators seem to be line editing the book as well as commenting on its content. Oh, if people would that for my books.

Over at Planned Obsolescence, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has put out a call for contributions to making MediaCommons, the Institute for the Future of the Book’s latest project. There’s lots of ideas here, not least In Media Res, initially described, and then hastily retracted, as ‘YouTube for Scholars’. Every week, scholars upload media clips and an accompanying criticism, creating a discussion around media that goes somewhat further than the usual video sharing flame wars. Go join the debate.

We quite clearly can’t get enough of McKenzie Wark (not least because he just dropped by to tell us about an older network book project, Speed Factory), and he’s recently been interviewed at Creative Commons.

As well as quoting Laurence Sterne, always a good sign, he notes that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (which we like almost as much as Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life) has been available for free online for years, but the print edition still sells well too. Giving away content for free is the great taboo of the publishing world (see Google Book Search &c.), but for those who’ve actually done it (Charles Stross’ Hugo-nominated Accelerando is a good example), it seems to give a boost.

The most important point from Wark’s interview, however, seems to be that it is not only technology which will take us to the next level. As well as the tools, we need “new cultural, social, and literary conventions. We need to relearn how to read and write.”

As accessibility is the watchword of the web standards movement, it’s kind of depressing to hear that traditional publishing is serving the blind and partially sighted community so badly: research for the Royal National Institute of the Blind found only twelve per cent of maths and eight per cent of science GCSE textbooks were available in a format which could be used be visually-impaired children.

The RNIB has led accessibility programmes for years - notably Daisy - and I happen to know it’s currently at work on a new XML-based standard for transferring all newly published material to accessible formats. While this represents a massive challenge - not least persuading publishers to supply data in whatever format they come up with - it also shows the massive benefits of digitisation: true access for all.

More: RNIB Web Access Centre Blog, Right to Read Campaign.

Last week, John Naughton, journalist, technologist, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and author of A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet, gave an electrifying address to the Society of Editors conference, in which he attacked their newspapers’ demonisation of youth and technology. It’s reprinted in full in The Observer, but here are some choice moments:

The novelist William Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’, and he’s as sharp as a razor. He also said: ‘The future is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed.’ As it happens, I think he’s right and I’m not sure it’s good news for those of us who work in the newspaper industry. Because if the future is already here, then the only inference one can draw is that our industry hasn’t been paying much attention to it.

‘The future is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed.’ - That should be shouted from the rooftops of the publishing world. Head over to the Mobileread forums or witness the huge take-up of Sony’s Reader, the first truly decent ebook reader, if you don’t believe it. People want this technology, and they’ll hack it themselves if good formats aren’t provided for them.

… in any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren’t interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears - still - from the newspaper industry is that there’s something wrong with the customers. And what one finds, on closer examination, is that the industry seems determined either to insult or to ignore them.

Not quite any other industry. As the publishing industry continues to churn out so-called literary works, cookie-cutter thrillers and minor celeb memoirs between hard covers and relegates alternate forms - poetry, novellas, short stories and anything genuinely challenging - to an undersold hinterland, we hear much of literacy programmes, ‘quick reads’ promotions and price-slashing, but little examination of whether the industry itself is shutting out readers.

These kids have been socially conditioned in a universe that runs parallel to the one inhabited by most folks in the media business. They’ve been playing computer games of mind-blowing complexity forever. They’re resourceful, knowledgeable and natural users of computer and communications technology. They’re Digital Natives - accustomed to creating content of their own - and publishing it. (Remember the motto of YouTube: ‘Broadcast yourself!’)

…

Now look round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

Substitute ‘publishing house’ for ‘newsroom’ and I think you can see where we’re going with this. The business of literature needs to fully engage with new platforms for writing and new opportunities for collaboration and promotion if there is not going to be a total generational divergence in literary culture. Just as newspapers are developing significant online presences as their paper sales fall, so publishers should be investigating new models for composition and acquisition.

You can read plenty more from John, our favourite kind of polymath, on his website and his blog.

Back in the summer, I visited the Royal College of Art’s 2006 Summer Show (a longer review of which can be found over at Tom Coates’ plasticbag.org). One project that caught my eye was Manolis Kelaidis’ blueBook project, part of the Industrial Design Engineering strand. Manolis was kind enough to send me some more material relating to the project.

As digital media in the form of portable devices, touch-screens and pervasive wireless networks offer new possibilities for interaction, the traditional book starts to look rather featureless when compared to electronic versions. But the traditional book has many advantages too - not least the comfort of tradition itself. The blueBook aims to find a compromise between these two objects, between the digital and the physical.

The blueBook created at the RCA and pictured here is a traditional book over-printed with conductive ink. This conductive ink creates hyperlinks on the page which, when touched by the reader, activates a processor concealed in the cover of the book. This processor then connects via bluetooth to a nearby computer, triggering different actions.

For example, a children’s book on animals might activate sounds and videos on a screen when the printed picture of the animal is touched. Reference books may contain inline glossaries linked to Wikipedia or Google. Keywords in novels trigger incidental music. Buttons on academic papers connect to discussion forums or send feedback to the author.

Admittedly, most of these tasks are or can be done entirely in software by true ebooks, negating the (currently) high costs of printing in conductive ink and binding circuitry and processors into a physical book. But the blueBook does provide a bridge - for children, for the elderly, for those less comfortable with new technology - to ease the transition from the printed to the digitised book. Such devices are going to be much in demand, and the cost of their production is dropping rapidly.

Manolis has now graduated and is looking into ways to develop and commercialise the book, and tells me he has been talking to major publishers who seem very interested in the idea. He is also working on a tentative business plan for a company that would develop and design such books. However, it looks like that mass-production could take some time so the next stage is likely to be a short-run, specific-application implementation of the technology. We look forward to seeing where this goes.

Nicholas Evans was the blueBook’s graphic designer and it was produced by Book Works. You can see more images in the booktwo Flickr stream. Manolis Kelaidis can be contacted at manokel at gmail.com.

For me, there’s a few answers to that - the most important one being: very rarely from a high street bookseller. I don’t see why anyone would. On the rare occasions when I want a newly-released book, and I’m not just rooting around in a second-hand shop, my first choice would be to buy it online, where it’s bound to be cheaper. Actually, that’s a lie. My first choice is usually to write to the publisher and ask for a review copy. Failing that, I wait for the paperback, and then buy it online. Only when in a hurry - usually, I have forgotten someone’s birthday - do I shop at high street stores.

I’m obviously not alone in this - but there’s a lot of people who don’t go into bookstores at all, online or off, and publishers are chasing new ways to get to their wallets according to the NY Times (link behind irritating registration) and The Guardian (free version). Books in the US have been turning up at grocers, clothing stores, cattle auctions and elsewhere. In an extreme version, Penguin has been putting its books on QVC - well, a guide to making McDonald’s hamburgers in your own home: unlikely to be a big seller at Hatchards. Abby Hoffman, VP of Chronicle, says “Anyplace that sells merchandise is a place to sell books.” Which is a long way from the “books are not cans of beans” reaction of most traditional publishers to the encroachment of multiple retailers into bookselling.

This is an distribution problem: getting books into the hands of people who do not visit bookshops. Publishers are clearly spending a lot of time, effort and money on finding new ways to do the same old thing: selling hard copy, pre-printed tomes. And will all that effort be wasted when books become available on demand from the machine in the bar or corner shop, or for download? Not entirely - but they’ll have to go even further afield. Like governments skimping on technology which would educate and enable their citizens, publishers are doing a disservice to readers by not investing in and advancing new distribution models and instead continuing to fight over the last few scraps of traditional retail space.

Currently all over the blogs: think tank calls for ‘private right to copy’. If you didn’t know already, every time you rip a CD to your computer, and then copy that MP3 to your portable player, you’re breaking several copyright laws. Clearly these laws are out of date and ineffectual, but that doesn’t stop the various industry bodies involved from pushing to tighten them up rather than rewrite them.

The news now, of course, is all about music, but the same arguments apply to books. Soon, ebooks will allow you to ‘rip’ your books to other portable devices, or back them up on a secure hard drive. Current copyright law forbids this, but it can’t possibly stay that way. At the moment, only one industry, music, is really fighting this, but film and TV are quickly catching up, and books will follow. Will the smart publishers find new and innovative ways to sell their books, or will they fight the same, desperate, hopeless rearguard action as the other entertainment industries? My money is on the latter, but it leaves room for some interesting projects in the intervening space.