booktwo.org

Things Magazine just pointed to the growing cult of book covers online - Flickr groups for good looking books, old paperbacks, graphics and more, and similar projects like their own, wonderful Pelican Project. There are also plenty of blogs dedicated to the subject, and Penguin have spent the last couple of year deliberately turning them into a fetish item.

But why? Only today we learn that books are the number one internet product, and the weighting of book covers on ecommerce sites has long mystified me. We’re still selling books by the cover, even though their original purpose was only ever to attract the eye in the physical bookshop; online, they become pixelated blurs, lacking any of the distinctions of colour and typography that obsess designers. The covers are no longer representative.

Even actual ebooks are still represented by “covers”. It’s not unique - this continued reliance on a visual signifier for a virtual product is paralleled in Apple’s iTunes store and, particularly, Coverflow, and you see it too in the ‘boxing’ of downloadable software.

We say, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but we always do. The web, and particularly the rise of the ebook, should allow us to make better, more informed judgements about what we buy and read - or at least, that judgement should be based on the skill of the writer, and not the illustrator. You don’t buy shoes for the box, do you?

Is there a better way of communicating content?

So, I signed up for Blog Action Day, and then promptly forgot about it. It was yesterday. Here’s what I’d planned to talk about, with a lot less research than the original idea. Sorry about that:

I’m pretty angry about the environmental state of publishing. We are not, by any extent of the imagination, a green industry.

Let’s start with returns. Returns are the process by which booksellers can return unsold stock to the publishers. It’s been around for a while, but publishers don’t like to talk about the actual figures. Some have admitted that return rates have topped 50%, and the numbers have been rising for some time.

What does that mean? It means that half of all books printed in the UK are never read. And they’re not redistributed either, but returned to the publishers or otherwise disposed of, usually pulped or simply placed in landfill.

Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement last year (behind a paywall, I’m afraid) environmental scientist and author David Reay wrote:

What with production and transport, the average paperback has eaten its way through 4.5kWh of energy by the time it gets to a reader. In terms of climate impact, this is equivalent to about 3kg of carbon dioxide emissions for every glossy new textbook. So, for a print run of 10,000, there is a cost of 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide not mentioned on the dust jackets. But this is a best-case scenario. The sale-or-return system virtually guarantees that the damage is much more severe. If half the books delivered to bookshops then have to be trucked back to the publisher and pulped, there’s yet another great belch of greenhouse gases to ultimately heat up the cheeks of both publisher and author…

Assume that the average print run for those 200,000 titles is just 1,000 copies. That’s 200 million books coming off the presses in a year - 600,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and, even if we assume very low return rates, enough pulped book to fill the dining hall at Hogwart’s several times over.

In terms of its contribution to global warming, UK publishing in effect puts an extra 100,000 cars on our roads. Our esteemed seats of learning are a sizeable cog in this engine: the average undergraduate buys at least three volumes per course, while most academic offices are crammed from floor to ceiling with dusty tomes…

On top of that, only a tiny fraction of books are printed on recycled paper - or even FSC-certified sustainable pulp. Note the total absence of firm, quantifiable commitments from UK publishers to Greenpeace’s Book Campaign, compared to Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Germany…

No one in publishing wants returns. But until publishers can agree on a few things - any thing - they remain in hock to the booksellers, who use the returns system to facilitate their pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap attitude to literature. Returns are bad for the environment, and they’re poisonous to literature. They also run down publishers’ profits and take out money that could be used for good initiatives, like real, achievable commitments to sustainable/recycled paper stocks.

This being booktwo, I’m forced to point out that ebooks would go a long way to helping with some of these issues (although by no means all). But ebooks are a way off. We can do things now. Print less books, and force the retailers to order responsibly. This means selling through their existing stock, and not returning books from one branch while ordering from another, which I’ve seen countless times. In the long term, invest in ebooks. Take this seriously. Sort it out.

Image of book in landfill by Wader, under Creative Commons license.

I was quite interested when I heard about StoryCode.co.uk (via Zero Influence - there’s a .com version too). At first sight, I thought it might be a newer, better version of WhichBook.net: a way of classifying books to create a more accurate “If you liked this, you’ll love…” recommendations system. The advantage it has on WhichBook is to encourage visitors to “code” books they’ve read, which are then added to the system along with the data - a great advance on using professionals behind the scenes to classify books, which has only managed a couple of hundred titles in several years for WhichBook, and is all very good and user-generated and modern.

That’s as far as it goes, however, because instead of allowing users any flexibility in how they describe the book, all literary opinion is forced onto a selection of 50 or so sliders, which veer from the confusing, to the pointless, to the incompetent. Confusing example: “Is the story mostly aimed at a mainstream audience or a literary audience?” (Mainstream → Literary) excludes half of the fiction I read. Pointless example: “How much did the atmosphere of the story feel like one you could experience in everyday life or is it more exotic or surreal?” (Everyday → Exotic) might work for actually surreal books, but for most novels, the answer depends on the reader, not the story—but the program won’t know this. Incompetent example: the ‘Plot Type’ category. To what extent is the book a “Rags to Riches” story (None → Plenty), a “Pact with the Devil” story (None → Plenty), a “Brain Vs Brawn” story (None → Plenty)—these aren’t sliding scales, they’re either/or. The results are meaningless. Try it yourself, and see if the results aren’t suspiciously vague (short version: if you put in a thriller, you get a broad selection of thrillers out).

This annoys me because something so long planned - ten years in the making - with a variety of book and web industry heavyweights behind it (see the About page) really should be better than this. It annoys me that something with such a strong and correct rallying call—”inspired by the belief that the Book Trade, locally and globally, is failing it’s readers in the search for new stories and that the power of the internet and the passion of book lovers everywhere can combine into a unique service”—should result in something so poorly thought out.

Digital recommendation systems have come a long way in the last few years, and there are a number of really important lessons which have been completely ignored by StoryCode. The one they get right is user-generation, but they’ve failed to see that for user data to be valuable, it has to be ambient: Last.fm and LibraryThing don’t ask you a bunch of equivocal questions that are highly dependent on the individuals situation and whim: they just see what you’re into, and run with it. It’s powerful, and it works (why do you think CBS bought Last.fm for a small fortune, or Abe Books bought a chunk of LT—particularly when Amazon’s recommendation system is so rubbish).

The second and equally important lesson is that individuals describe things in many different ways—so let them. Tagging, while rapidly becoming a web cliché, works because it is the most flexible system possible, generating reams of long tail classification data that is individually specific but universally applicable. Tagging also provides another incredibly important feature that StoryCode has missed: an incentive to participate. Through tags, individuals handcode their own dataset; my delicious tags for example, allow me to find almost any half-remembered link I’ve ever saved with a couple of terms which are meaningful to me. LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror reveals real things about your reading habits. With StoryCode, there’s no long-term incentive to participate, and mass use is what drives these systems.

So, another book industry initiative fails to learn some of the basic lessons of the internet. We shouldn’t be surprised, but how much time and effort is being wasted here?

Oh yeah, and it doesn’t validate. I’m going to start some kind of button system for lit sites that don’t use web standards. We’re all about standards in literature, spelling, punctuation, typography - we have to get the code right too.

Matt Webb, of Schulze and Webb, gives this explanation, which pretty much nails it:

A book is designed and manufactured… We discover a book, somehow. We wish for it. We select it, maybe out of a possible half dozen alternatives. We purchase it, then show it off. We discuss it, reviewing it if it’s great or if it’s terrible. We might sell it on.

A bookstore on the street, a traditional bookstore, now seems quite inadequate. Or at least, inadequate before they started doing evening book talks, supporting book clubs and having employee recommendations. But inadequate—it’s really only optimised for purchase.

Amazon’s success could be seen less about the convenience of being online, and more about the fact it is present in more of your moments of engagement with a book.

Amazon understand that we live alongside books. We cross paths with them at all of these points. If Amazon can be present in more of those, we like Amazon more, we encounter them more, and they do better.

Anyone want to argue with that? There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in making sure Amazon doesn’t become the next Tesco/Wal-Mart and control every aspect of our lives (The Book Depository’s redesign is a small step in the right direction), but if you want to understand why traditional bookshops are failing, why in response publishers are being squeezed until the juice runs clear, and why Amazon seems to have so effortlessly inserted itself into the world; well, there you go.

This quote comes from a talk on Interaction Design. You can read the whole thing here. It’ll explain the picture at the top, too (which is Matt’s).

Why am I reading blogs and wikis and transcripts about Interaction Design and Planning and hacking (the good kind) so much lately? Well, it’s because I’m no longer involved in the acquisition, manufacture and distribution of books - publishing’s industrial age - and I’m trying to understand how we create, connect to and communicate literature - particularly, without just creating more ads. Book 2.0 is now my day job.

Once again, I point back towards booktwo’s opening statement, which I always re-read when I’m not sure what I’m doing. The need to think clearly and openly about these issues, and break from the past. Lagerfeld’s dictum: “Throw everything away!” I’m not quite going to do that, but I admire the sentiment.

“If some Javanese sorcerer or Native American shaman possesses some precious fragment I need for my own “medicine pouch,” should I sneer & quote Bakunin’s line about stringing up priests with bankers’ guts? or should I remember that anarchy knows no dogma, that Chaos cannot be mapped–& help myself to anything not nailed down?” - Hakim Bey