We need to talk about something. It’s quite serious. It affects a lot of people. And I genuinely believe it costs the book industry millions of dollarpounds every year, in addition to incalculable personal misery. We need to talk about book guilt.

When I created bkkeepr, it had (still does) three commands: start, finish and bookmark. I assumed a happy, linear model of reading. You start a book; you finish a book. Simple, right?

But almost immediately I started getting feature requests: with one, overwhelmingly popular one: abandon.

The problem was that when you started a book, and until you officially finished it, that book stayed on your “unfinished books” list. And some of these books were not unfinished but abandoned, and people were unhappy with marking their books “finished” just to get them off the list…

This is one kind of book guilt. Book guilt seems to affect a huge number of people, presenting in a number of different ways. The most common form, and perhaps the most damaging, is the unfinished book.

When someone with a bad case fails to finish a book, they don’t start a new one; they go into a holding pattern, crippled by guilt over their failure and unable to let go and start over. All reading stops. People have confessed to me that it’s been months since they last picked up a book, because they still haven’t finished the last one.

Attitudes to the unfinished book take many forms. Multiple book readers—those comfortable having more than one book on the stack at the same time—are less susceptible; the single book reader tends to fall into one of three categories: those who happily chuck and move on, those who grind joylessly through to the bitter end, and those who agonise and go nowhere. All three tend towards the absolutist in their behaviour, unless something happens to break the cycle; the latter two are undoubtedly damaging.

I frequently have several books on the go at the same time, and until recently I’ve suffered pretty heavy pangs of book guilt. The practice, no doubt common, of stacking the un- and partly-read next to the bed doesn’t help. It’s taken a long hard look at myself to be able to say: “you’re not enjoying this book. Move on. Read something else. It’s OK. You’re allowed. You don’t have to finish it.”

I don’t think the publishing industry realises how much money it’s losing to book guilt. Guilty readers don’t buy new books. This is a serious issue. It requires evangelism. Customers need to be unstuck.

The stack, the physical object, plays a big part in this paralysis. I don’t think we’ll ever entirely lose our propensity for book guilt, this Protestant reading ethic. But perhaps the ebook may change its effects slightly.

It’s easy to forget you’re supposed to be reading something when it’s buried in a device. This can be bad, but it might also help. I want help assuaging my guilt. Most ereaders allow you to “archive” a book at the touch of a button. Perhaps they should just fade away the longer they remain unopened. I want other, quick options to move on when this one isn’t working. I want helpful pokes to get on with my life, and ebook readers that allow me to forget as well as to remember.

I want to read more books that I actually enjoy. I want everyone to. Let’s start by saying it all together: “I don’t have to finish this book.“

I say ephemeralisation rather than digitisation because it’s not just a physical transformation we’re going through, it’s a cognitive one. I’ve been repeating Walter Pater’s famous quote in my head a lot: “all art aspires to the condition of music”. Pater argued that “For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.” One way of seeing this ‘condition’ of music is that it is abstract, it is all around us, it is ever-present and always available, but intangible. Literature, cloud-based or electronically present, accessible on this or that device, encountered in differing forms and extractions, quoted and misquoted, has been separated from the physical book, with all the dissonance this implies.

Anyway. Covers.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” has never been more true. This is not good:

But this is the way most of us see covers now: as blurred little icons; nothing like the designer / art director / marketing dept. envisaged, and no use for their intended purpose.

This particularly sprung to mind this week with the arrival of Andrew Wylie’s Odyssey Editions, an ebook-only classics imprint designed and built by my old employer Enhanced Editions. The covers are, of course, beautiful:

The covers are typographic, and hark back in particular to the famous Pelican cover for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, where the text starts on the front cover. But it struck me that they are not covers in any traditional sense: they have nothing to cover. They are icons. Signifiers. And more crucially, they’re not there to sell the book directly; they are marketing material separated from the point-of-sale.

Cover art only sells physical books. In an ideal world we would get rid of cover art altogether. This is probably what JD Salinger desired, in his refusal to countenance any imagery at all on his book covers (a request that continues to be honoured, notably in Hamish Hamilton and Seb Lester’s beautiful new editions).

If we’re going to continue to use “covers” as marketing material, which presumably we will as long as digital texts have physical counterparts, we need to recognise that their reproduction is out of our control: they will be copied, linked, and reposted, at different resolutions and sizes (there’s long been a muttering desire from publishers for the ability to supply Amazon with different covers for different size displays: this is one option, but not one Amazon seems happy with). We might also recognise that there are potentially many different jobs for the cover to do.

What do covers do now? They appeal aesthetically (something hard to do at 120 pixels high). They give space to blurbs and plaudits (it’s OK, we’re not space-limited any more). And they recommend (this is why all thriller covers look the same; why there is a blood-spattered crime vernacular; why every historical novel features a bodice and ruched velvet).

Text-based covers are one approach. Alongside Odyssey’s, I’ve long been a fan of Melville House’s novella series, and Reclam‘s uncompromising non-fiction:

This is recommendation through publisher branding: possibly the strongest icon-based approached.

But could we represent this recommendation somehow? Is there a better way? I’m not sure, but I like, for example, Stefanie Posavec and and Greg McInerny‘s “representations” of OK Go’s album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”, which formed that record’s cover art:

I know I’ve been talking a lot about visualisation lately, and perhaps it’s a passing thing. But it feels like we’re missing an opportunity here, before book jackets go the way of album covers. To encode some of our knowledge of books in a way that’s both attractive and useful to readers. To remake the cover in the service of the digital book. Representation and recommendation are two possible approaches. What others are there?

For me, technology, literature and sex are all bound up together, and this entanglement can be traced back to a single book: JC Herz’s Surfing on the Internet (Little, Brown; 1994). An exploration of the early net, a travelogue, an explicator of MUDs and MOOs, of chatrooms and founding memes; what was still, then, the Information Superhighway. I read the book in, I think, 1995. Within a month, I had a 28.8 modem and a Compuserve account. It’s probably impossible to underestimate the impact of this book on my life.

Surfing on the Internet was the first book I read to address sexuality in a way that I understood it: queer, fluid and exciting, and it pointed to a place where others could be found and it could be experienced: the internet. Yahoo Groups, in the form of the much missed #UKyoungandgaybutnotcamp2, in turn provided the venue for my coming out, as newly technologically enabled networks like it did and will continue to do for subsequent gay generations.

So, “Homo Computers”, an event at the Southbank Centre last week exploring gay geekdom and produced by the usually excellent House of Homosexual Culture, should have been spot on—but it rather missed the mark. Andrew Hodges, the primary biographer of Alan Turing, managed to dance around the subject, failing to illuminate Turing’s sexuality or usefully explicate his work. Likewise, David Baker, managing editor of Wired UK, assessed the impact of technology on gay lives without once speaking directly to sexuality. His points about the flexibility of modern working lives increasing opportunity made sense, but they seemed to apply to anyone (and if not to anyone, then, worse, only to metropolitan media gays). His final tale was, he admitted, apocryphal: that Turing’s suicide, with a cyanide-laced apple, was the inspiration for the technology company’s logo. A terrible and unworthy thought.

Gay lives are important; what gay people do is important—vitally important to other gay people in particular—and denying the impact of their sexuality is discriminatory, stupid and wrong-headed. To pretend that Turing’s sexuality had no impact on his work is ridiculous. It shaped his philosophical outlook following the early death of his first love, and it embedded him in the homosexual subculture of Cambridge in the 1930s. His oppression robbed Britain, and the world, of one of its finest minds. List-making of ‘gay’ heroes from Leonardo da Vinci to Oscar Wilde is less fashionable now that it once was, perhaps because its purpose—to support, validate and educate young, questioning gay people—has in large part been taken up and democratised by the internet. But it is no less necessary.

There’s a disconnect here, which Chris and I have been trying to unpick since. Confusion was a problem: the House of Homosexual Culture is usually about aspects of obviously queer culture, with a camp edge. This event was part of both the London Literature Festival and the Royal Society’s Festival of Science. And such a mixed heritage led it to both fall back on stereotypes (“gays don’t do maths and science”) and to shy away from the seedier aspects.

And the seedy aspects are important, I believe. Chris has been writing about Grindr, and exploring its data, and investigating academic approaches to sexual and social networks. I’ve previously addressed aspects of this over at Bookkake in Sotadic and Other Zones (on Burton, Grindr and the sexual applications of mapping technologies), and Throwing a little fleshlight on the matter (on LoveHoney and OKCupid). There’s an absence of investigation into this, it seems, in part due to the inherently discreet and closed nature of these networks. AshleyMadison.com alone has over 6 million users. And nobody talks about Flickr.

Much of this work is being done by academics, and is extremely valuable, but to a technologist’s eye, much of it lacks technical understanding. As Chris says, “Facebook and Twitter don’t know how lucky they are to have people like danah boyd digging into why and how people are using such things, and importantly making this information accessible and understandable to wider audiences.” We should be doing more of this, on our own terms.

*

One of the odd things about Surfing on the Internet, now, is its long transcriptions of chatlogs and MUD explorations—but it shouldn’t feel odd. Surfing… is a book not about the internet itself, but about our experience of it, an experience that takes place in a torrent of information that we construct, all the time, into narrative. (Remind me to talk about walking and storytelling through Wikipedia some time.) I’ve lamented the absences of such narratives from literature for some time.

I would, however, highlight two recent books which have addressed this (yes, both are written by friends. It’s how it works.) Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun (Granta, 2010) delves into the strangely queer history of the British far right skinhead movements. It makes for frequently uncomfortable moments, and doesn’t shy away from seediness. In particular, it addresses the darker corners of online gay sexuality, of personal ads, no-strings sex, and fetishism, as something intricately connected to gay modes of living.

What is occurring here is the rejection in literature of the techno-deterministic assumptions currently being attacked in polemic by Clay Shirky:

“Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I’m saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it’s because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don’t cause them.”

In this case, as gay men are being increasingly enabled to activate latent desires, so literature is enabled to address new narrative experiences, the fragmented, always-on, holographically-distributed society of interests and attention we now inhabit.

The other work of importance here is Stewart Home’s Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (BookWorks, 2010), which I’ve written about previously. Home’s work takes the form of a narrative frequently and incessantly interrupted by spam-like texts: “The secret to a perfect climax. She wants to be penetrated and taken harder, longer and tighter. Define your masculine identity. Click now for great deals.” Words that are in this context shocking, yet, if all our reading is taken as one sheet, form a great part of our modern, daily literatures.

Even before Home’s wider theme—the misogyny, cliquishness and institutionalisation of the art world—is taken into account, what we’re seeing here is the most realist rendering possible of actual life. In an article in the Sunday Times (thankfully reproduced, without paywall, here), Tom McCarthy laments, or perhaps rages against, the increasingly current idea that the “realism” of novels is equated with self-expression and is only to be found in “this kind of vanity mirror where liberal culture can see itself reflected back”, or worse, in the rejection of fiction entirely as espoused by David Shields. If we are to understand ourselves we will do it through narrative. If we are engaged with technology, we should take up those tools too, as ways of understanding, without prejudice.

I’ve written about Metronome Press before, in a series of articles at the old STML Litblog in 2005 – 2006. If you recall, the Metronome series commissioned contemporary artists to write novels, presented as much as art pieces or artefacts as well as traditionally published books. At least one of the authors, Tom McCarthy, has gone on to considerable success in the mainstream.

What I most liked about Metronome back then was twofold: the unashamed presentation of such work as “art”, and the appropriation of the mundane apparatus of the art world for the funding, distribution and publicity of literature.

Metronome’s paperback series was sponsored by a series of patrons who were named in the back of the book. These included private individuals and arts organisations, private as well as state (being based in France, there’s rather more scope for the latter than in our own, arts-impoverished corporate politics). And the works were very clearly curated, emerging from a personal relationship between curator (editor) and artist (writer), in the service of a commission. (The exception being Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young And Evil, an immaculate resurrection of a text first published in 1933.)

Curation, commission, patronage: terms rarely heard in literature, and literature is the worse for it.

One attempt to change this has been going for a while now, and has just released three new works, bringing the series total to seven: Bookworks‘ exemplary Semina series. I’ve written about Semina before too, but it bears repeating for this occasion. The text of the original call for submissions makes the series’ intentions clear:

Semina takes its inspiration from a series of nine loose-leaf magazines issued by Californian beat artist Wallace Berman in the 1950s and 1960s. We are looking for artists and writers interested in experimental prose fiction, who transgress all the boundaries separating art and literature. Think of the ways in which Paul Gilroy theorised the history of modernism through the rubric of the Black Atlantic, W.E.B. Du Bois and double-consciousness, and the inescapable links between race and class: Anthony Joseph, Kathy Acker, Amiri Baraka, Samuel R. Delany, Darius James, Ishmael Reed, Ann Quin, Clarence Cooper Jr, Claude Cahun etc. Above all we’re looking for artists and writers willing to take risks with their prose and who demonstrate total disregard for the conventions that structure received ideas about fiction. [...]

Editing is expected to be a collaborative process between the editors and the commissioned artist/author, with the aim of producing a text sympathetic to the ambitions of the series. The editors would expect to work closely with the commissioned artist/author on any redrafts and revisions. You will be consulted at each stage of the process and expected to help take decisions about the way in which the work is presented in book form.

The series has already produced at least one masterpiece, in the form of Bridget Penney’s Index. Penney is exactly the kind of writer best served by the curatorial/patronage approach: previously published (by Polygon, in 1991) but little known outside enthusiastic artistic circles. The work was completed over a number of years, and brought to publication with the encouragement of series editor Stewart Home (a conversation between the two is available on Home’s site).

The three new novels released this week are The Dark Object by Katrina Palmer, HOE #999 by Jarett Kobek, and Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie by Home himself, a sample of which can be found in Wednesday’s Mattins.

A new work by Home is always cause for celebration. I was lucky enough to publish his last book, Memphis Underground, in 2007, but this isn’t log-rolling: I’ve been a fan of his work for much longer than that. Home is one of a class of writers fated to stay with each of his publishers only briefly, badly served and frequently misunderstood by critics; yet, he continues to produce work and to see it published (even when, as has happened, he resorts to trickery in the small ads), while moving (un)easily between the worlds of literature and art. Such a position makes him eminently suited to the position granted him by Semina: editor, curator, contributor and collaborator.

The type of work produced by Semina, and Metronome before it, and their inspirations before that, will never reach a mass audience, and they should not have to. But their literature is vital, buoying up and sustaining a complacent and frequently dull literary culture. We could learn much from the auteurs of the art world.

Firstly, here’s what I do:

• I dog-ear a lot. I dog-ear every page that has something interesting on it (which is not always obvious when I return to it), and I dog-ear my last position in the book. Top corner. Sometimes I try to make the dog-ear point to the exact place in the text I’m referring to, but this doesn’t really work.
• I was using bkkeepr for a while, and I’m really pleased to see that lots of people still are (especially this, which I’ve mentioned before). But it’s a bit shonky (sorry) and really needs more love than I can give it right now to make it a lot more efficient.
• I photograph pages and add them to Flickr. I really like this, actually, but it’s only suitable for some quotes. Most stuff doesn’t make it there, but it’s a surprisingly frictionless process from iPhone to the web.
• I keep what I now realise is a commonplace book. A constant stream of notebooks—except most of my own notes go straight onto a keyboard these days (and thence to an SVN repository, but that’s a different article), so the books are where everyone else’s notes go: notes on talks, and pages copied out of books. A lot of these. This is how I think.
• There are quite a lot of post-it notes around my house, too. “Quite” might be understating it.

Alex, ingeniously, has two types of dog-ear: one in the top corner for location (stack pointer) and one in the bottom corner for interesting books (bookmarks)—I think that’s right.

Russell currently sends quotes to Flickr and his blog from Instapaper, using the latter’s nifty send-quote-to-Tumblr feature. This is a bit like my Flickr technique, and while I want to look at how people interact with physical books, this quoting behaviour is still important.

Both of these activities enable, as they do for me, blogging all dog-eared pages (hat-tip to Mike), which feels like a new thing. Public commonplace books.

Other people use marginalia much more extensively. Underlining too. Ed Champion recently presented a nice cross-section. If there isn’t a Tumblr dedicated to found marginalia already, there really needs to be.

Someone I know always writes their name in the front of each of their books. I’d like to do this but I haven’t so far and bibliomania would mean I’d have to go back and do all of them and I simply do not have enough arms. My father always tucks newspaper reviews into his books—such reviews being the primary way he comes to books in the first place. Another relative writes their own short reviews on the frontispiece immediately they finish a book (this moment, immediately after turning the last page, is so charged with meaning I’m going to have to go on and on about it another time).

Working on a recent project, we came up with an inevitably incomplete typology of bookmarks, not including the progress mark, which goes something like this:

• Pointer: a bookmark with no additional content. Underlining. A bare quote.
• Note: a bookmark with some additional content. Marginalia. Adding something to the text, alongside it.
• Reference: a bookmark with a link to some other content. Adding something to the text, pointing elsewhere.

This seems simple, but it’s quite key, with regard to inline bookmarking. Then there’s the more general stuff associated with the whole text, or groups of texts. But lets start with this.

What do you do? What are your bookmarking strategies and techniques? What do your books look like when you’re done, and how do you collect this information (if you do)?

On the panel with me were Chris Heathcote, Michal Migurski, Ben Terret and our moderator Molly Wright Steenson. Chris has written up his introduction and Ben has written up Newspaper Club’s excellent contribution. I did “the books bit” and my notes are below.

I introduced myself as a traditional publisher who has spent some time experimenting with the form of the physical book. Projects like the DIY Classic Notebooks and the My Life In Tweets led to a few key realisations.

Lulu, and in fact any manufacturing process hooked up to the internet, has made the creation of physical things really rather simple. If you can think of it, you can probably get it made to your own designs in a way that used to be limited to specialised craftspeople – what I call the Internet as Cornucopia Machine. Real things in the real world have a different (different, not +ve or -ve) value to digital assets, and have a different capacity to surprise and delight. And physical instantiations of the digital can be both archives and souvenirs (you can’t really have digital souvenirs – a thought I’m going to unpack a bit more at a later date).

These experimentations with the form of the book led directly to the SXSW fieldnotes I made for myself and others attending the festival, and illustrate another couple of points.

[Photo by Russell]

The fieldnotes are undoubtedly the most practical of these book-shaped objects that I’ve made so far. They are books for doing but they are also books for thinking. I made them to assist with two parallel tasks: the job of being-at-sxsw and the job of talking-at-sxsw. Producing them produced this talk.

Another thing that I need to go into at a later date is the way these physical objects degrade gracefully and show the signs of their use. I know there’s a lot of theory out there about making marks and leaving a trace and if anyone has any good pointers on some interesting places to start, do leave a comment. But I’ll just say one thing about that for now: books are souvenirs of themselves.

The big revelation with the fieldnotes, however, was time.

As I translated between these different formats – taking information from the web, structuring it and formatting it for print – I realised that what I was doing was wrangling this information not only into a different physical format, but a different temporal, or time-based, one.

These artefacts occupy not only space, but time. Different media occupy different times: the traditional newspaper lasts a day, and the internet is rapidly becoming the medium of “forever”. We used to think books were the forever medium, but the fieldnotes were designed expressly to last a week.

I used Mattins as an example of this too: a 5 minute podcast can be considered a different temporal format to a half-hour programme. And when you print out a Google Map you’re doing the same thing: turning a digital asset into a physical object to serve a brief purpose in time.

So how do we design and build things, physical or digital, that have a temporal format? In an (allegedly) information-rich, attention-poor cultural economy, how do we take account of and design for time?

The other major point I tried to make in my presentation was about change and turmoil in these media.

Paul Levinson wrote in The Soft Edge that “When a new medium triumphs over an older medium in a given function, that does not mean that the older medium will shrivel up and die. Rather, the old medium may be pushed into a niche in which it can perform better than the new medium and where it will therefore survive, albeit as something different from what it was before the new medium arrived. The key is whether the old medium is able to hit upon an already extant human need or perceptual mode.”

He’s talking about radio and television here, but the example I like better is painting. When Pisarro and Monet and Renoir and Cezanne saw photography coming along, they didn’t go “Well, bugger this then, I’ll go become a lawyer,” they came up with Impressionism which led onto Modernism and pretty much the entirety of 20th Century culture.

My point is that digital is not occluding and killing print, it is freeing up physical media to play a different role, to fulfill different needs and address different perceptual modes.

There followed a goodly discussion within the panel and with the audience, of which I can remember very little. There should be a podcast at some point, so I’ll link to that when it becomes available. The podcast is here (the scrum at the beginning is us throwing sweets to the audience). Two things I would like to say however.

One is to re-raise the question that I snuck in during a lull, and which I’d cut out from my original presentation as being off-topic. The “internet as forever medium” idea is just as flawed as any previous “forever medium”. For example, we lost a quantifiable percentage of all human knowledge in the repeated sackings and burnings of the Library of Alexandria between the first and the fifth centuries ACE. This will of course happen again, repeatedly.

With this in mind, I asked a couple of people how they thought the internet would end. Annalee Newitz, editor of io9, thought, characteristically, that it would be destroyed by a solar flare. And Russell Davies, equally characteristically, said that people would “probably just get bored with it”.

So the question is: what could we do with the internet when everyone gets bored of it? What perceptual need will it fill when we evolve another, higher forever medium? The answer(s) to that might be enlightening.

Secondly, at some point in the Q&A I made a statement about the costs of the physical book that was quite wrong. I said that the physical production of the book was only about 5% of its total cost when, as I should have known having made the point in this post some time ago, it’s more like 10%, with another 5% for the costs of physical distribution. A few people on Twitter rightly called me on this, but lots of people were asking questions and it’s quite scary having to think fast on a panel in front of a large audience, so there you go. I think my point still stands, which I think was something to do with ebook pricing.

Also: the value of a book is not entirely in the object, or in the time those who created spent with it, but in the time you spend with it. But that is another thought for another post. Thanks again to my co-panellists and to everyone who came. See you again soon, I hope.

So, I’m off to the SXSW Interactive festival in a couple of days, where I’ll be going to lots of talks, meeting people, and appearing on a panel. You should come to that if you’re around on Tuesday. It should be fun.

The panel’s about post-digital design, or what we could and should be thinking about when we can blend physical and digital formats in new and interesting ways. As part of my own preparations and thinking, I (surprise!) made a book.

The idea is, it’s a book to last you the week, through SXSW. A one-time pad for the festival. Customisable. Personal. Travel and accommodation details. You’re probably going to need those a lot:

Maps of Austin – different scales, and several basic grid plans. Useful for scribbling directions on, as well as navigation.

Planning diary. Schedule. All the talks that are happening, alongside your maps and diary. (Yup, that’s what the XML was for.)

I’ve never been to Austin or Texas before, so I stuck Wikipedia’s entry on Austin in there, and the Lonely Planet chapter on Texas (which you can buy and download here – nice). I did get in touch with Lonely Planet to discuss licensing this properly, but we ran out of time. One of the reasons this book is not for sale.

Finally, I wanted to use the book as my notebook for the conference – trying to avoid carrying around a guidebook, and a programme, and a schedule, and notes. (Remember the DIY Classic Notebooks?) There are 70-odd blank pages at the back, together with some helpful suggestions on what to write if you get bored or distracted.

That’s it. Pulled together in a few hours at the last minute despite planning it for ages. HTML -> XML -> InDesign for the talks schedule. Simple PDF resizing for the LP section. Basic-as layout for the rest, with some running heads and page numbers to minimise endless searching. Printed 10 through Lulu – £5 a pop, plus £25 to expedite shipping (because I left it until the last possible moment). Arrived in 4 working days. Done.

More photos at Flickr. More thoughts at SXSW and after. Do drop me a line if you’re going to be around.

[This article is now available in Belorussian, provided by ucallweconn]

Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*.

About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know about authors and writing, and editing and publishing, and bookselling and reading. We know and understand the long-form narrative and its place between people, and in society. And I’m more comfortable with Apple getting in on the act than I am about Amazon, because Apple aren’t in the content game, and Amazon definitely are. And if Apple swoop in and solve ebook distribution like they solved (legal, paid-for, mainstream) music distribution with iTunes, then great. Amazon are having a pretty good crack at that with Kindle too, but I’d like to see more involvement from someone without such an aggressive history of pressuring publishers until their bones show (although I’m under no illusions), and Apple have a history of producing devices and interfaces that make people go “Oh, OK. I get it now. Neat.” Amazon are also showing signs of a more open, mulitplatform approach (iPhone app, epub, etc) but that’s another conversation.

Publishers have been confused about their roles for some time. And I’m trying very hard not to be inconsistent on this, because I’ve spent several years urging publishers to get on board with new technologies and try new things, but equally I hope there’s space for a lot of publishers to get back to concentrating on what they do best: acquiring, editing, producing and publishing books. I’d like to have seen more happen in the last few years, but if it hasn’t, we should probably stop scrambling to get on the latest bandwagon (vanilla Books-as-Apps, I’m looking at you), and concentrate on the basics: ebook production, metadata, integrated marketing, quality and consideration. There is a lot to be done, but this or that device will never be the be-all-and-end-all of the future of publishing.

Quote above from Alex Petridis’ review of the decade in music from Monday’s Guardian.

And it strikes me that this is increasingly true of the publishing business too, and perhaps it is something we should be concerned about. My own approach has always been: literature first, technology second. What are the needs of writers and readers, and how can publishers use technology to address these needs?

Increasingly, we seem to be flailing about in a sea of formats, models, and philosophical digressions into the meaning of publishing when what we should be saying is: we have writers, we have readers: how do we serve both sides of what we do?

The recent decision by Simon & Schuster and Hachette to hold back ebook publishing until four months after hardback (admirably, as always, investigated by Booksquare) is a good example of this. Technology allows us to serve readers and writers better than this, but the move is all about serving publishers themselves. “We’re doing this to preserve our industry,” says David Young (Hachette chief) but if all our efforts are spent fulminating over and attempting to corral technology, we’re going to lose sight of what our industry actually does.

I’ve long been a fan of Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials magazine, an occasional, elegant, high quality and free literary journal – except that I have a huge problem with its attitude.

Five Dials is only available as a PDF, intended, say HH, to be “downloaded, printed out and enjoyed (we hope) away from the computer”. Well, bah. Not only do I think it disingenuous to use the internet for your distribution while so pompously thumbing your nose at it, PDFs are horrible on screen, and I don’t have a printer capable of rendering them any better, nor the funds to print 60 page magazines regularly. (HH even included a bizarre, fake reader’s letter to this effect, without explanation, in the first issue.)

But, but, but. It is full of lovely stuff. So I did what any literary geek would do, and printed it properly, as a nicely-bound anthology.

You might notice I’ve been using Lulu a lot recently – for this, and the Bookkake furniture manuals, and some other things… In this case, it was particularly easy, as Lulu has a default, perfect-bound A4 template, so it was just a matter of uploading each PDF issue in order, slapping a cover together, and for £8.80 (£5.81 + P&P), I have my own Five Dials anthology of the first eight issues. (Although it took three weeks to arrive… My only beef with Lulu is their fulfillment, which even without an unexplained stall and a support request, as happened in this case, delivery time is rarely less than a fortnight for standard orders. That, and the lack of an API.)

So, yay, I have a lovely bog-side coffee-table anthology to dip into over the Christmas period.

Hey Hamish Hamilton – how about offering this yourself? Keep the free pdfs, but offer a simple POD anthology once every year or so?

Or, you know, pay a decent web designer half what you must be paying your (highly skilled) illustrator/typesetter/designer for Five Dials, and actually publish on the web? We do read on it too – and there are a lot of us who’d genuinely appreciate it.

Inspired by the Japanese iPhone/Book mashup that appeared in the Stop Press links recently, I made this rough concept of an in-book mobile app, riffing on ideas of the “enhanced edition“.

Imagine if when you got a book, you also got a mobile app that contained the footnotes and index, supporting material and the searchable text. The app sits inside the book itself. Search the app for “Leonardo da Vinci” and it points you to the relevant pages in the book. Supplementary material is accessed by typing in the page you’re on in the book. It includes biographical information, galleries of high-resolution, zoomable images. Take notes, save and email them. Find other readers nearby. Annotate the text, and keep those annotations in the right place – connected to the book itself, but accessible anywhere. For series books the possibilities are even bigger: linking a collection via a digital index and archive. And its updatable: the author can add in material to the book indefinitely after publication – and pitch their next one when it comes out.

Back in March, I launched a little site called Quietube, which is basically a little bookmarklet allowing you to watch YouTube videos without all the comments, ads and so on (original booktwo post is here).

Well, it turned out to be very popular, currently edging towards two million views, with a daily average of 10 to 20 thousand visits. These are not small numbers.

However, looking at the logs, it became clear that these visits were coming from unexpected sources. The vast majority of visits are from the Gulf region. A few weeks ago (a fairly typical week of 115,438 visits), 74,983 were from Saudi Arabia, 10,367 from Kuwait, 4,383 from the UAE, with Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt all in the top ten.

Wondering what was going on, I took a look at the top ranked videos for that week:

• #1: http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMkfTot5Q0w&feature=sub
• #2: http://quietube.com/v.php/http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5dt-WREldg&feature=related
• #4: http://quietube.com/v.php/http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT91-g9AE4g
• #6: http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcciNlpvXTM
• #7: http://quietube.com/v.php/youtube.com/watch?v=3b0BixzZmVo
• #8: http://quietube.com/v.php/http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z58Aplho6tY
• #10: http://quietube.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz0ogl5r9_8

Short version: they’re all in Arabic. (#3 and #5 were both: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZKZs0c2R5s – Make of that what you will. #9 is the Quietube homepage. )

Not knowing Arabic, I contacted a friend who does. Turns out they’re a range of religious and secular programmes from a range of channels – including a clip from Faraj al-Farj, the Saudi version of Candid Camera – all fairly standard stuff.

I was particularly interested that the vast, vast majority of identifiable inbound links seemed to originate from private email accounts – Hotmail, Yahoo and Google Mail in particular.

It also turns out that YouTube is quite heavily censored in the Middle East (observation from a range of news reports – I’d be interested in seeing a proper report on this), and people are using Quietube to get round this.

So it turns out, I think I accidentally created a YouTube proxy being used by tens of thousands of people in the Middle East. I’m not sure if I should be writing about it, but if it’s that easy to do, I’m sure others can do it too. It’s just a matter of embedding the video elsewhere, and it shows how extraordinarily flexible the digital systems we build are. Information does indeed want to be free.

The internet is a wondrous thing.