booktwo.org

I’m currently reading a book in three formats at once. I’ve got a nice paperback copy for bed and sofa reading. I’ve got an ebook formatted for my mobile phone for tubes and buses. And I’ve got a free audiobook—an MP3 also on my mobile phone—for when I’m cycling along the canal to work in the mornings. (I could also read by email and RSS, if desired).

None of this is perfect. The pbook is an old photostat copy - it was cheap, but it’s poorly set, there are a lot of (uncorrectable) typos and there’s little metacontent (e.g. a good, contextual introduction - a real value-add in pbooks). The ebook is fine but very limited, and I keep pressing the wrong button and skipping to the wrong place (despite now being quoted on their homepage, I’m not an unqualified fan of booksinmyphone). And the audiobook is too quiet and read in a fairly toneless Californian voice, which just doesn’t suit the text. Nevertheless.

What does this tell us? Well, firstly, that the old idea of the ‘book’ as distinct, inviolable, physical entity is well and truly gone - we’ve had ‘audiobooks’ for decades, for starters. Many audiobooks typically outsell the hardback editions of their print counterparts, and while this market has yet to really break through into mp3s, Amazon’s acquisition of Audible and increased iTunes support will change this eventually. The main issue at the moment, as with ebooks, is pricing.

The other thing I think we need to pay more attention to is interoperability (? right word) between formats, because these aren’t going to stop multiplying. I don’t just mean making ebooks platform-independent, I mean building structures that make skipping between formats easy. Yesterday’s proposal contains the germ of this, but really a universally agreed mark-up language for texts to allow direct-linking at a line-by-line level is necessary.

Which isn’t going to happen, of course—imagine creating a mark-up language for all the different versions of Shakespeare’s texts alone—but it’s fun to think about. And possibly create things now that will help.

So, I just finished reading a novel on my phone. Stepping up to the plate, I downloaded Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which is a blast, by the way) from booksinmyphone.com and gave it a go.

And you know what? It was great. It was easy to read. It didn’t strain my eyes. It slipped into my pocket when I changed tube trains and it jumped straight back to the right place when I slid it open again. Alex has a few good points on problems with booksinmyphone’s interface, but overall the experience was a joy. I was done in a couple of days - slightly above average for me.

I recently had a go at reading Charles Stross’ Accelerando in the ebook version - a similarly great, near-future novel - and gave up about half way and tracked down a paper copy. And in hindsight, the reason was obvious: I was reading it off a laptop. That’s miserable. Put it on a phone, and it immediately becomes wieldable.

My phone is a Nokia N95. It fits in the hand, but has a nice big screen (pictured right, courtesy, again, of Alex) - about 40mm x 55mm. Comparing that to the 100mm x 160mm block of text you get on the average B-Format paperback page means you get about a third of the line length, and a third of the page height. But once again - it really didn’t seem to affect my reading. I even found myself reading it in bed, even when I’d only started out of necessity when I found myself on a bus without a book.

Does that imply it was better? Well, I’m not going to go that far - yet. My paper books don’t run out of batteries, for starters, and the platform is still suffering from format fatigue (Mobipocket has the best range, but they’re still priced too high, and the free stuff doesn’t cut it), but I’ll definitely be reading more this way. And with the recent news that cellphone novels - books not only read but written on mobiles - are beating out the bestsellers in Japan, I’m not the only one.

I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.
—Kurt Vonnegut, in his very last interview (via Iain Tait).

Vonnegut is of course, as ever, spot on. The novel as we understand it today hasn’t been with us very long (Wikipedia has a wonderfully dense page on the subject, I prefer Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a reasonable birth date), yet it is the point on which all debates about the future of literature turn; specifically, it is what we usually mean when we talk about “the book”.

It’s also what we mean when we discuss the ebook. Take legendary book designer Chip Kidd’s response to the Kindle:

PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept? The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. [Source]

Well that’s just bullshit, frankly. Books are not born as ‘things’ either, but you can understand a designer of physical things choosing this side to shout about. Many books have already stopped being ‘things’ and migrated to the virtual: Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia is not a book, but it was, really: it’s form comes from a book, from all encyclopædias, but it has evolved off the page. Likewise many, many STM titles, likewise many journals, likewise much poetry and short fiction. But the novel as object has a stranglehold on our imaginations.

Which is fine. Novels are great. And right now, there is no device which betters the traditional book in delivering it. Except, it saddens me that a designer of Kidd’s stature can’t see that the page is a screen. The uniqueness of the novel lies in that effort, that performance of the reader that Vonnegut talks about, not in a mode of reproduction. Bar a small number of extreme experimentalists (I’m thinking B.S. Johnson, and similar), the physical book has shaped the novel for the last 300 years - we are approaching a point where this will no longer be true. And I think that’s pretty exciting - elitist, performative novel-lover that I am.

So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it.

There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to be near a computer. Online back-up of your books is very smart - one customer losing their whole library after dropping one of these in the bath would pretty much kill it. The big page-turner paddles on the side will be good for peoples’ frequently contorted, curled-up-on-the-sofa reading positions, and the dog-ear bookmark is nice and friendly, although the purists will probably hate it.

But there’s a lot not to like, even beyond the let’s-party-like-it’s-1989 styling. E-ink just still isn’t good enough: there’s the ‘black flash’ as you turn the page, and the snail-like refresh speed means they’ve had to put in that scroll-wheel barometer thing in the side, which is not good. The whole feeds thing is a misnomer: you have to pick ‘your feeds’ from an Amazon-approved list (currently numbering 308), which is great if you just want Boing Boing and the NYT, but pretty rubbish if your tastes are more eclectic - and you don’t want to pay 99 cents for the privilege (is that a one-off or a subscription?). And the killer for me is that you can only read your own documents by emailing them to Amazon, who’ll convert them and add them to the Kindle ‘for a small fee’. Whoa. That’s just stupid. It’s also such a waste of the rather clever connectivity hardware they’ve packed in there.

Still, Amazon aren’t making this for me - they’re making it for regular, heavy readers, who are book- and not computer-focussed, which is an excellent decision - they will certainly please more people - and explains the video endorsements from Toni Morrison, James Patterson and others. It’s not for techies. We’ll see if the $400 price tag is attractive to non-techies.

It is, without doubt, the best ebook reader out there because it has the iTunes-like connection to all the books you can get, built in. That’s the USP. But I still don’t think we’re going to see mass ebook take-up any time soon, not until e-ink improves and we sort out a format that can move seamlessly between different devices, like mp3. If I can read it on this, I should be able to read it on my laptop, phone and even TV too.

And could someone please explain why they used ‘profligate’ (adj. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute, recklessly prodigal or extravagant.) as their example word from the dictionary? Reminds me of this story.

UPDATE: For more on the Kindle, you could do worse than Buzzfeed’s roundup.

Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes:

The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working with and exploring the potential of their new Diffusion ebook generator.

These stories have been created by cutting up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a variety of sources to create completely new works. This process mines a particular seam of Balkanist fantasy in English language literature and media; ranging from E.M.Forster to contemporary free-sheet the London Paper. Alongside each story is full bibliographical information relating to the research process. In addition, these resources are also collected in a separate bibliography which will be refreshed and added-to each time a new work is uploaded.

Diffusion is a project to create an online ebook generator which people can use to produce small editions of their work. The term ebook is somewhat misleading as the final product is in fact a paper book, albeit one that can be quickly and reasonably easily assembled from an electronic file: the ebook engine generates a 4-up pdf that is printed and assembled into a chapbook:

The project is a direct response to the increasing difficulties of getting short and niche works into the bookshops, and the generator will shortly be made publicly available to all. All the titles are free to download.

It’s a good idea and a pretty good implementation, although it took me a couple of tries to get to grips with the assembly, largely because my printer chopped off the page numbers (suggestion: put these at the top of the minipages, not the bottom corner), and the instructions are not very clear (there are better ones on the site, but I only found these later). Anyway, it’s the new sharing age, so (largely inspired by Common Craft) I made my own instruction/demo:

P.S. Ooh, there’s some Stewart Home too!

Citing the crucial need to access records on nuclear waste storage, or census returns, in five, 10 or even 100 years’ time, [Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives] said: “This is a critical issue for us, and for UK society as a whole. We assume our personal records are secure, we expect our pensions to be paid, but anyone with a floppy disc even three or four years old is already having a hard time finding a computer that will open it.” [Source]

This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and pertinent articles I’ve seen in the papers for a while: National Archive project to avert digital dark age.

First of all, it makes me nervous that Microsoft is a verbose partner in this. Isn’t the reliance on one or two companies’ proprietary formats what got us into this mess in the first place? MS are renowned for their distaste for open and accessible formats (witness their approach to web standards embodied in Internet Explorer, or the furore over the BBC’s MS-powered iPlayer), so while it is probably necessary that they should be involved to rescue these files, let’s hope the Archives have learnt their lesson and are moving towards the use of open, extensible, standards-based code.

I’m going to point again to this article about validation, because I think it says a lot of things very well about the importance of using this kind of code:

This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out it’s early versions. Because that’s what we need the code to do: this code is for recording what we think. There are no paper backups of the web. Every day we put more on it that we’re not putting in our traditional medias. If we don’t use extensible code, then our current history evaporates with the next minor tech change. We’ve never had this problem before. Before a mark on a page could go centuries; there’d always be daylight to read it by. This is a new problem and it required a new solution. [Source]

This is as important in publishing as it is in other fields. As we move inevitably towards ebooks and beyond, it’s very easy to imagine a situation, twenty, thirty years from now when a decade-old literary work becomes inaccessible because it was composed on a computer, revised on others, and encoded in an obsolete, proprietary format for distribution - and never once written down on paper.

The solution, I’m afraid, is not to write everything down on paper - there’s too much of it now, and it’s wasteful and irresponsible to boot - but to make sure that we use the best, most open, most public formats right now, for everything we do.

Large sections of the music industry are already moving away from DRM-based systems (e.g. the latest version of iTunes) and publishers should take note, and not go down the bad old routes, which, experience is beginning to show, don’t help anyone in the long run. The International Digital Publishing Forum published the latest version of their XML-based Open eBook Publication Structure Specification at the end of last year, and it scored its first victory a few weeks back with its inclusion in the new Adobe Digital Editions (although this still lays open the possibility of DRM).

Yes, we need to find ways to make sure that authors and others are paid for their work, but we also need to make sure that their works - as well as those pension records and that nuclear waste data - are accessible to future generations. We owe them that.

Image detail from Illuminated by Chronicity, reproduced under CC Licence.

With new technology comes the need to rethink certain conventions. The above is clipped from a Macmillan ebook (link), and while I don’t wish to do anyone in particular down, and the technology is young, I think it speaks to a disparity in the understanding of ebooks: they are not simply paper books, scanned page by page and uploaded - or at least, they have the potential to be so much more.

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I’ve written about Google Book Search before, but it’s time to do so again - particularly after their PR barrage at the London Book Fair, some aspects of which I wrote up at the time.

For a while now, I’ve been broadly in favour of GBS, at least in as much as it’s forcing publishers to look seriously at digitisation strategies and becoming the driving force for change within the industry. Google’s PR drive has also stepped up a notch, with their flacks becoming increasingly informed about the book trade, a number of high-profile panels at book events, and a rapidly growing number of publishers coming on board. At the LBF, they convinced a fair number more.

So now, as is my wont, I’m the one getting nervous. This isn’t contrariness. I want digitisation to succeed, but I’ve got some worries about GBS, based on two main observations: Google Book Search isn’t the same as Google Web Search, and Google, if not actually, intentionally lying, is certainly wilfully misleading publishers about its intentions.

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With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see what it actually was.

After a short time playing around with it, I pretty much gave up. I’d show you the result, but I can’t figure out how to show it off as there’s no documentation and everything I did manage to do (which wasn’t much) I learnt from this video demo (uploaded to YouTube for ease of viewing, from this source). There’s something in the menus about ‘publish book for Apache server’, but that spewed out a bunch of files with no information on what to do with them.

Here’s some screenshots of the interface, the only useful menu, and the ‘halo’ tool configuration:

I’m not sure what’s being created here. Is this a standalone document creator? There’s very little you can do to your content once it’s in Sophie, so you need external text and image editors for most things (for example, I couldn’t work out how to search-and-replace the incorrectly-encoded apostrophes in my Gutenberg source text). Most of the tools are very simple, but then so are the results - this looks like a CD-ROM creator circa 1993. Because, er, that’s what it is…

Sophie’s either sixteen years in the making or nearly three depending on whether you go back to the beginning or not. The beginning was at The Voyager Company, an early electronic publisher … Back in 1992 Voyager released the Expanded Books Toolkit which enabled people to make simple e-books without any programming… Shortly thereafter, Voyager Japan released T-2 which has gone on to become the leading ebook software in its home country. In 1996 a group of Voyager employees formed Night Kitchen with the intent of creating an authoring/reading environment that would extend the Expanded Books Toolkit concept to include rich media. The result TK3 never officially came to market… The Mellon Foundation approached some of the TK3 team and asked them to build a new multimedia authoring program which would be open-source and would extend TK3 by enabling time-based events… That became Sophie. [Source]

Can you imagine the code? It’s clearly inspired by existing rich media applications such as Flash, but it’s target users - the technologically unskilled - don’t use such applications. How are they supposed to get their heads around concepts such as ‘flows’, ‘timelines’ and different server versions? And if they do get that, why aren’t they using the existing apps?

It’s all very disappointing, and I think if:book know it, which is why they haven’t supported or trumpeted this release in any way. But if they’re looking for feedback, here’s some, and we hope it’s constructive:

• Figure out what it’s really for - “Sophie’s raison d’être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming.” Can we get some examples? Are these just tarted-up ebooks, or something more?
• Figure out who wants it - who are these sophisticated but unskilled users? I regularly use Adobe and ex-Macromedia products including Flash, Photoshop, InDesign etc., but I had a hard time figuring out Sophie.
• Make it stand out - I don’t know what differentiates it from other media creation tools. Where’s the killer feature?
• Really open source it - We found the developer site, but there doesn’t appear to much of a community here. The source forge lists about thirty developers, but only about five seem to have done much. What’s going on?
• Smarten it up and Speed it up - it looks terrible and handles worse.

The potential is all there for… something, but I don’t think anyone, least of all its creators, know what. if:book is an academic, not a technical organisation - sorry guys, but I think you’d agree - and this project seems somewhat directionless. As an example, take the comments on the release notice - while there are some questions about the source, most want a long-winded discussion about the theoretical nature of the book.

Yes, this is an alpha release, but it’s still startlingly naked. We need some good examples of what this can do, and at least some basic documentation, to get any kind of a handle on what’s going on.

[UPDATE: Lots of discussion in the comments. Please read on…]

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).