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In what should be the last of the round-ups of the Google Unbound conference, but probably won’t be, some more commentators:

• Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it? by Stephen Leavitt at the Freakonomics blog
• Quit Marketing By the Book - a comprehensive write-up by Rebecca Lieb at Clickz.com
• How to be Cory Doctorow - Seth Godin’s notes from the conference
• ZDNet’s Report
• “Interesting bit of media industry theater” - if:book’s Ben Vershbow at the conference

I’ll stop now.

Today’s Guardian has a short piece with more Google follow-upping:

The iPod has done it with music, Flickr has done it with photos, MySpace has done it with bands and Saatchi is doing it with paintings. The question is: can Google do the same thing with books by creating an international online market place for them enabling readers to download volumes in their entirety - at a price of course - to their iPods, Blackberrys or smartphones?

Luckily, the Guardian’s Vic Keegan is more clued-up than Bryan Appleyard - for example, he’s been trying out iCUE too. He’s also the man behind Shakespeare’s Monkey, he’s active in Second Life, and, at the risk of stalking, he uses Flickr, so he’s rather better qualified to talk about all this.

According to a Guardian column from a couple of weeks back, which I can’t locate online, he also released a book of poems (which may or may not be this one) inside Second Life recently. If anyone can find out any more about this, I’d be very grateful.

[UPDATE:] Thank you, Mr Keegan (see the comments).

Lots of recent activity in the British press concerning future books: last weekend’s Sunday Times contained not one but two pieces on the subject.

The first piece, Google plots e-books coup, reports on the Google Unbound conference we mentioned last week. Unfortunately, it’s all fairly techless, reporting that “the internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry” (er, Gutenberg?) and “commuters in Japan were already reading entire novels on their mobile phones” - something some of us have been doing for a while in this country too (see iCUE).

It does, however, contain a nice quote from if:book’s Ben Vershbow: “Google seems to be simultaneously petting the industry and saying everything is going to be all right if they just let everything go, but at the same time telling them: ‘We have you guys up against the wall’.”

Serial crank Bryan Appleyard then takes up the story in Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book? Despite some cogent analysis of the Google/Publisher fight - with special mention going to Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for his work highlighting the inherent cultural and corporate bias of Google, which makes it far less neutral an information dealer than it would like to present itself as - Appleyard can’t help the hyperbole: “We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last 500 years.”

Coming off the back of several paras about academic textbooks, this is unfortunate. Most of the debate about book digitisation is framed in terms of poor authors, starving in garrets, unable to make a penny because of evil copyright-infringers. But the vast, vast majority of digitised content is academic and/or technical; it’s being put out there to help people learn more, better, and more easily; to improve the world. Such works are pure information - their format is simply not important. The heft of a good novel may be pleasing to the bibliophile, but few would go so far as to say they must have the latest X-thousand-page volume of the International Journal of Electrical Engineering in hardback.

Appleyard draws the distinction, with John Sutherland, between the algorithmic search engine and the wisdom of the human-made index. But in the end he totally misunderstands the nature of information, arguing that it is a separate quality to ‘knowledge’, instead of its central, essential building block:

[...] David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services said, “Ultimately it’s not up to Google or the publishers to decide how books will be read.

“It’s the readers who will have the final say.”

No, it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or, ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn’t educate and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become.

“The net doesn’t educate”? If Appleyard means by the above that teachers must do more to help pupils learn to navigate the new digital libraries, to harness the flow of information themselves and to make their own judgements about the quality of information, then he is correct. But they’ve been doing that for centuries too, and as resources like Moodle (and Sloodle), the Million Book Project and the now entirely digital Open University show, they are embracing the new mediums with much more enthusiasm than doomsaying journalists.

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[Update 23/01/07] More evidence of naysaying, or just lazy journalism: Contrary to Appleyard’s assertion that Google Unbound was “an invitation-only conference”, registration was open to all, and rapidly filled up.

Kim White over at the Institute for the Future of the Book has a great post about the sea change coming to books. Alongside screen technology (e-ink, &c.) and the breakdown of the traditional author/reader divide (the networked book, &c.), White identifies another key factor in the evolution of the book: 3D visualisation.

As we’ve said many times over, Book 2.0 only needs to look enough like Book 1.0 to kill it, then it could look like anything. This is why we’re interested in technologies like Second Life that - once you get past the smut and avvie bling - offer us new ways to interact with information. Literature itself has been breaking non-linear ground for some time, so to eschew the possibilities of more dimensions that new technology offers seems needlessly restrictive - but then all new technologies need to be introduced slowly.

One of my favourite books, Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, describes an alien language with thirty-six letters, in which it is possible to speak in emotional aggregates - “one word, one sound, represents a whole complex of ideas and associations and feelings.” If English words are circles on a piece of paper, then the metalanguage consists of bubbles floating in space. Written language evolved as a way of recording information, but the technology (sharp rock/flat rock, and their ongoing equivalents) was limited. With limitless technology, will not only literature, but the very language evolve?

Best bookish news from this years CES show in Las Vegas: iriver, best known for their pretty iPod competitors, have announced a rather pretty ebook. A direct competitor to the Sony Reader, iriver’s ebook takes the looking-like-a-pbook game to the next level: two facing e-ink ‘pages’, both touch-sensitive for easy page turning. It takes AAA batteries for what iriver claims will be up to six months use, and to top it all off it comes handsomely bound in leather.

The prototype E-BOOk (which is apparently the annoyingly capitalised name) runs Adobe Reader LE - a mobile version of the ubiquitous pdf-reading software for phones and small devices such as ebooks. As mentioned before, we’re not all that keen on pdf for its restrictions and potentially disastrous DRM, but the consumer will decide. There’s not much else known about the device as yet - including how its e-ink screen refresh compares with that of the Sony - but it’s another step towards the deadly mimic.

Images, Via Engadget.

Via MobileRead, an extraordinary visualisation of the possibilities of e-ink by a London-based designer. Instead of book pages however, vast expanses of the London Underground are papered over:

For a higher-res version, see Alex Griffin’s website (under Design > E*Ink).

This looks like it should be very interesting:

Six centuries ago, a German metalworker tinkered with a wine press, metal alloys and oil based ink, perfecting one of history’s great inventions: the printing press. With the rise of mass publishing, more people than ever were able to access information. Books proliferated. Today, digital technology offers a similar opportunity, and the Internet now represents a powerful platform for promoting and distributing books. Online book sales alone account for nearly four billion dollars in annual US sales—almost 15% of the entire book business. [More]

If anyone is going, I’d love to hear more. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow is speaking, so we can hopefully expect to hear more there soon.

The Poetry Archive is a fantastic example of what the connected, high-speed web can do for literature. Inspired by a meeting in 1999 between the UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and the recording producer Richard Carrington, it provides recordings of English-language poets reading their own works.

It’s a wonderful idea, exactly the sort of thing a Poet Laureate should be coming up with and promoting, and exactly the kind of resource that the Internet can handle so well. The archive is quite small at the moment (not to mention mostly male and entirely white, which seems pretty unforgiveable), but can grow forever, and hopefully new features will be added with more content. It would be good, for example, to be able to embed poems, like YouTube videos, in other pages - imagine opening up a MySpace profile, for example, and hearing not The Horrors or somesuch, but Allen Ginsberg intoning Howl?

I tried to hack the extensive javascript used to play the recordings, but did not succeed. If anyone finds a way to stream the files directly from the site, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll just link to a couple of personal favourites: here’s Louis MacNiece reading his dark, depths-of-the-war, Prayer before Birth, and Don Paterson’s lovely Scottish brogue in The Lover.

I got very excited when I saw a quote from Tristan Tzara on the rotating front page too (”Poetry shakes the laughter out of the apple tree”), but alas, no Tzara yet. There’s some great files on him at ubuweb however:

L’amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer

From the Guardian: “Touchstone, an imprint of the publishers Simon & Schuster, yesterday launched First Chapters, a competition designed to find writing talent through the internet. It is inviting unpublished authors to submit the first three chapters of a manuscript to the scrutiny of the voting public. The winner’s book will be published and distributed by Touchstone and the author will enjoy a $5,000 (£2,575) cash prize.”

As publishers seek ever new ways to attract an audience, such gimmicks as this seem increasingly common - the UK’s Richard & Judy show’s How to get Published was a talent show for rejected authors, while their publisher partner Macmillan’s New Writing programme picked up where R&J left off, releasing a slew of underperforming titles with little editorial interference, publicity or marketing spend.

In this case, the competition is being organised through Gather.com, a social networking site described variously as ‘myspace for adults’ and ‘myspace for the middle-aged’, but undoubtedly one closer to the book-buying demographic than the original itself. The problem with such competitions is that they are, by and large, picking over that which has already been turned down by agents and publishers all over town, feeding upon the mistaken notion that everyone can write a book while duping the authors they claim to be supporting with low royalties and little support. Unlike Pop Idol and its various incarnations, where even the reediest boy or girl from the street can be made to sound like Cher with a bit of studio trickery, bad writing is harder to disguise, which explains the somewhat underwhelming reviews given to the R&J-winning The Olive Readers, despite beating off some 46,000 other titles to win publication.

Publishers, forced by the market to release ever greater numbers of books in the hope that some of them - even a few of them - will actually make money, need gimmicks like these to fill shelf space and round up a hefty number of readers who aren’t merely consumers but wannabe producers - you can bet that most of The Olive Readers 12,000 or so buyers were contest entrants themselves (which begs the question, what about the other 34,000? 12,000 is not a lot of sales for a book tied to R&J, currently the biggest driver of book sales in the UK). These open competitions do not help the industry, which preserves what little cachet it has by giving the impression it knows what good literature is without having to ask; they don’t help readers, who just get one more, frequently poor, title to consider among the hundreds published every week; and they certainly don’t help authors, who are given a false sense of validation by being the best of a mixed bunch, and are then hung out to dry by publishers who don’t want to spend money to support a book already looked down upon by reviewers, critics and a good chunk of the reading public as just one step up from self-published.

There are ways to make this work better though, and as the current publishing industry crumbles beneath the user-generated, digitally-printed, directly-distributed onslaught, new ways will be found to assess, promote, and recognise great literature without the imprimatur of a great publisher, perhaps involving some of the technologies I discussed last time, perhaps not. But either way, Pop Idol is not - we hope and believe - the future of literature.

A very Happy New Year to all Book Two readers. I hope you had a good one and are all ready to look to the future once again. Christmas was not a good time for the UK book trade and I’ll be talking some more about this later, but in the meantime I’m flagging up an upcoming conference I’ll be attending, which isn’t all about books, but perhaps it should be.

Carson Workshop’s Future of Web Apps is in London in February. Now in its second year (details of past events here), FOWA brings together the people behind such Web 2.0 goodness as Flickr, Digg, Techcrunch, Amazon Web Services, Last.fm and many more - essentially, all the parts of the web that a lot of people seem to think are “the future”. I think there will be some good people to talk to… I’ve been particularly inspired by Tom Coates’ reports on past events.

It’s profoundly interesting to me that while reading must be one of the most pervasive activities on the planet – more so than photography, or even listening to music, which are where the most successful – and hyped – Web 2.0 apps have come from so far, there’s no truly dynamic, creative stuff out there for readers and writers. This is even more bizarre considering one of the biggest players in the game started out as a bookseller.

The Front List is a half-move in this direction: a place where writers read, rate and comment on each others work, and the best manuscripts rise to the top to be perused by agents and publishers - except in this case it’s a closed system, and not a terribly welcoming one for those not participating directly - unlike Flickr, which anyone can browse and enjoy. This interactivity is the key component of Web 2.0, the social web, whatever you want to call it.

Writing is a historically, and sometimes necessarily, solitary practice, but it doesn’t need to be. Communities such as WriteWords have existed for ages, proving that writers like - in fact, frequently crave - feedback on their work. An interactive environment such as Flickr or even YouTube is ideal for moving this beyond the circle of other writers to a wider audience.

The most obvious reason for this omission is that while people happily watch movies, look at photos, or listen to music on their computers, few of them read there - at least not for extended periods of time, the kinds of time required to read a long story or even a novel. But this is changing, with ereaders and non-glare screens and web-accessibility on everything from mobile phones to fridges (really). The book is dead. Where’s Book 2.0?