I’m very pleased to announce that all five Bookkake titles are now available direct from Apple’s iBookstore, and several are available on the Kindle. In addition, all Artists’ eBooks titles are also available free in the iBookstore.

This has not been the simplest process, but I think it’s really important to make ebooks available in as wide a number of ways as possible, and in particular in ways that make it easy for people to find them—an issue I recently addressed in the discussion of Tony Blair’s multiformat memoir.

Initially, I made ebook editions of all Bookkake titles available for free. This was in part because I wanted to see what would happen, but also because I was dissatisfied with then-current ebook distribution and display systems. Times have changed, and so in making these books available more easily, I’ve also removed the free ebooks. Bookkake has always been an experiment, and I’m looking forward to seeing the response to more easily available, if priced, editions.

Artists’ eBooks is similarly experimental, and the free ebooks are still available from the website, as well as available as free downloads for iPhone/iPad users in the iBookstore.

With respect to the process, here’s how it breaks down:

To get books into the iBookstore directly (as opposed to going through an aggregator) you need an account with iTunes Connect, which in turn requires a US Tax ID, a non-trivial process that required some very complicated forms and quite a lot of time on the phone to someone in an IRS office, somewhere in the Midwest.

When you’ve got this, you upload your files—a slightly modified ePub format, which Lisa has covered in detail over at Threepress—via Apple’s iTunes Producer application. This part is pretty straightforward, once you’ve worked out the formatting kinks, but then the fun starts.

Submitted books are “under review” for about a week on average. And then, in my case, they’re all marked “Withdrawn from sale”. And that’s it: no message, no feedback, no information. So you email Apple, several times, and after a week to ten days you get an email from someone telling you what’s wrong—in the first case, it was cover images at the wrong resolution. So you resubmit, wait out the review period, and then repeat the whole process again, several times, for a series of very minor but critical issues.

The upshot is that it’s taken almost two months to get all the books submitted correctly—only a couple of hours of actual work, but a lot of waiting and sending emails and hoping. Still, the books are now available (search iBooks for Bookkake, Artists’ eBooks or any of the authors or titles), and Apple support staff have promised that they’re aware of and looking into the notification system. It’s a new programme, and this sort of thing will undoubtedly improve, if not, as we’ve seen with the App Store, ever be fully transparent.

The Kindle application process has been simpler, if slightly less successful. Although some have reported difficulties, Amazon’s Digital Text Platform happily converted my existing ePub files to Kindle platform, and made them available very quickly—although I’ve been unable to convince them of the rights status of a couple of the titles, so only three are available. Still.

I happen to like both reading experiences very much, and will be writing more about them soon. Both stores are OK, but it’s very annoying you can’t link directly to products in the iBookstore [Update: see comments] as you can for the Kindle store (or, indeed, for iTunes).

Please, go read the Artists’ eBooks titles if you’re interested, and the Bookkake titles if you’re so inclined, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

I’m very pleased to announce two new Artists’ eBooks: Niven Govinden’s L’histoire de Bexhill Baudelaire and Kenji Siratori’s Guerilla Sex Generation.

L’histoire de Bexhill Baudelaire includes links to YouTube videos which comprise the book’s soundtrack. I’ve been a fan of Niven’s work for some time, and he approached me to see if there was something we could do with one of his stories. While the limitations of the ebook format – discussed below – didn’t allow the full expression of the ideas we had, I’m pleased to get a soundtrack in there.

Guerilla Sex Generation includes an introduction to Siratori’s work by the Iranian theorist Reza Negarastani. Siratori’s writing was one of the main inspirations for Bookkake and I’m pleased to be able to finally publish some of his works – in such a suitable format – as well as that of Negarastani, who I first commissioned at 3:AM a number of years ago.

Both eBooks can be downloaded from the Artists’ eBooks site.

And now I really must declare the thing that’s been bothering me most since I started this exploration of ePub: the key finding.

ePub is rubbish for anything that’s not a book. And by book, I mean a traditional, packaged, fixed, unchanging, single-vision book. And while that’s fine (even obvious), it seems… a pity.

ePub is basically a restricted set of XHTML. That’s all, wrapped up in a package which can be protected with DRM (and we’re not getting into that here). It’s basically a collection of saved, unconnected webpages – but webpages you have less control over than the real web. You can’t embed stuff from elsewhere, for example, as I wanted to do with Bexhill Baudelaire.

Sharing, embedding, extending, is what gives promise to the networked book. Without it, we are reduced to linking out, which, while more simple for the reader on a digital device, is really no different to giving a source in a footnote in a printed book. In a closed container, we deny everything that the possibilities of electronic books bring; we’re limited to the syntax of the static web page and the boundaries of the printed book.

Which is fine for the translation of the traditional book into a digital format if that’s all you want to do. But it really underlines that ePub is a format designed for publishers and retailers first, and readers second: closed, protective, inflexible. Which is, y’know, fine… but. But but but.

I’m pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at www.artistsebooks.org.

eBooks, as we’ve been saying for some time, have massive potential to revolutionise not only how we read, but what we read. The incorporation of audio and video, the possibilities for curation, quotation, linking and sharing, the vast scope of low-to-no-cost distribution and the low barriers to entry should excite us all.

In particular, I’m fascinated to see how artists and writers respond to these new opportunites, platforms and technologies. It was in conversation with the writer Tony White that the idea for Artists’ eBooks first surfaced, and I’m very pleased and grateful that Tony has allowed three new short stories to form the opening line-up at Artists’ eBooks.

These stories, part of Tony’s ongoing “Balkanizing Bloomsbury” series, were written using a process which included cutting-up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a number of sources including travel writing, Hague tribunal transcripts and mass media texts, to create completely new works of fiction which explore ideas of European identity. Each comes complete with notes on the text and links to the sources – allowing readers to explore beyond the boundaries of the traditional text, in ways unique to the eBook format.

This is but one example of the many conceivable routes the project could go down. We have more titles coming in the near future, and we’re very interested in hearing from artists and writers who would like advice, assistance, and collaborators to help them explore this territory. But for now, please visit the site, download the books – and send us your feedback.

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I’ll do a follow-up post at a later date about the ebooks, strategy and so on, but I’m indebted to Liza Daly at Threepress for some invaluable advice on ebook production. I also urge you to read Tony White’s other work if you haven’t: his widely acclaimed novel Foxy-T remains one of my personal favourites.

My question is: how do you track, monitor and analyse downloads? Particularly of free ebooks?

Imagine this scenario: there’s a free ebook. It’s hosted in one place, and there’s a single addressable URL to access it. This will probably be a pointer, rather than a direct link to the actual file. This means the file can be delivered, but some analytic measure can also be triggered: recording number of downloads and their point of origin.

Yes, it’s perfectly possible someone will repost the file elsewhere, and this will be untrackable. Without imposing arcane and nasty DRM, we will have to ignore this. We’re also ignoring official (and presumably paid-for and therefore separately tracked) downloads avilable via eBook vendors elsewhere.

We’re talking about a single, canonical, trackable address for a single eBook. Are people doing this? How? Thoughts and answers in the comments, please.

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Associated with this, I’ve been thinking a lot about artists’ books. That is, works of art in the form of a book. Ready-mades. Uniques (although the term doesn’t apply in this context). And Zines.

I’m thinking of things like the work of Mark Pawson, and Book Works. And the whole history of artists’ books.

I think there are opportunities and affordances for doing things in the eBook space, with artists. Distribution. Links. Algorithmic transformations.

So, in the tradition of marking out the territory via the strategy of buying domain names, I’ve registered artists ebooks .org. There’s not much there yet. Consider it a starting point.

Thoughts welcome.