The new volume, again on the right, is much whiter. It’s only when you compare standard books with really white paper that you realise they’re usually a bit yellow, slightly textured. You might think that having whiter, smoother paper is an improvement. It’s cleaner, brighter, more contrasty, but… it feels cheap. The paper is smooth and crisp, like the kind of paper you buy in reams to feed through your temperamental inkjet printer. [...] Then there’s the printing. Like the cover, there’s something slightly off about it. Not only does the paper look like slick office paper, but the printing looks like it’s been churned through an office photocopier. It looks like a photocopy of the original.

… and there’s a lot more. But his point is a wider one, and bears repeating:

When publishers appear to love their own books so little, when they’re apparently happy to pass off a print-on-demand photocopy of a book as a full-price volume, it’s hard for the reader in turn to feel much love for these gradually disappearing objects.

I want to love books, but if the publisher treats them merely as interchangeable units, where the details don’t matter so long as the bits, the “content”, is conveyed as cheaply as possible, then we may be falling out of love.

I wrote about the shoddy use of POD back in 2008. Well look, the customers have noticed.

And, just as they’ve noticed this, so they’ve noticed the increased tendency of books to fall apart because they’re glued rather than stitched, and they’re starting to notice how badly-produced most ebooks are: poor OCR, bad proofing, little error correction, little or no attention to typography.

The publishing industry is happy to crow about how much it loves books, but it doesn’t often look like that to the consumer. Technologies which should be attracting more readers are being badly used to make a fast buck, and putting them off. If we lose the trust of readers, at this most critical of junctures, we will never regain it.

Photograph by Phil Gyford, licensed under Creative Commons.

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 won’t get into the politics here, because this isn’t the venue, but since the lying, warmongering scum former Prime Minister Tony Blair is all over the news today, I thought I’d look around to see where and how his book is available.

A Journey is officially released in hardback today, with the RRP of £25 in the UK. you can order it direct from the publisher Random House’s ecommerce site rbooks.co.uk for £22.50. You don’t want to though, because Amazon’s doing it for £12.50, as is Waterstone’s online, while WH Smith’s are offering on the high street for just £9.30, as part of a buy-one-get-one-half-price deal.

Random House in the US, where the book is released tomorrow, have the hardcover listed at $35. Again, a poor choice when Amazon have it for $21, and Barnes and Noble for just $18.90.

All these retailers note there’s also an unabridged CD audiobook, typically for around $10 / £5 more than the printed book. (Read by Blair himself! What more could you want?). Audible has a slightly cheaper download version for $22.33. But more interesting is what’s happening with ebooks.

Random House US pegs its in-house ebook price to the hardback: $35. Good luck there. So does Random House UK – in fact, the ebook is slightly more expensive than the hardback, at £22.98. The UK site is also good enough to clearly state that:

This ebook is only available for download in the UK and is not compatible with mobile devices such as the iPhone, iTouch, iPad and Google’s Android.

Which is odd because it’s an epub file and we can only guess at what crippling technology they’ve applied if that’s really the case – or indeed, what they do expect us to read it with. Of course, this is all part of Random’s ongoing spat with Apple, which means the book isn’t and won’t be available from the iBooks store at all.

Good news for Amazon then, who get an effective monopoly on the reasonably-priced ebook: just £6.50, providing you own a Kindle [edit: or, as has been pointed out, any device with a Kindle app, including iPhone and iPad].

I can’t find any other sources for the ebook, which only highlights their true lack of support from publishers and retailers. We’re still without any good source of price comparison or dedicated ebook sales such as exist in Europe. But I’d be interested to hear of more.

We’re also forced to question why publishers continue to attempt their own direct online sales; while there was a brief window when they could and should have attempted such a thing properly, and had the chance to head off the crippling discounts available online, it has now passed. That this failure was more down to an inability to work together than to any lack of will is moot; the badly constructed, barely functional and comically overpriced sites that they now maintain at some expense are not only a waste of time and money, but put themselves in the worst light at a time when publishers really need to be building better public-facing brand identities.

If you’re tempted to buy any of these formats, might I suggest you just read the newspapers or wait a bit and borrow somebody else’s or your local library’s copy, and donate the money directly to Save The Children, Iraqi LGBT, Help for Heroes, or wherever your conscience prompts.

Anyway, next week I’ll be publishing my own book about Iraq. More on that soon.

I’ll be further exploring the Bookleteer API in a future post. The code for the experiments can be found on the Bookleteer blog.

One of the subjects that came up in my thinking for SXSW, and which I mentioned briefly, was the question of souvenirs. I said then that I don’t think digital does souvenirs—I can’t think of examples of what I consider to be real souvenirs which are not discrete and tangible. And as more of our activity takes place in the realm of the virtual and the digital, there’s a growing disparity between our experience, and our records of that experience.

These records—souvenirs—are important because they serve as touchstones, aides memoires, and visual quantifiers. They remind us of where we’ve been, keep experiences in our minds, enable us to learn from them through reinforcement.

Russell Davies has written about “the way we use these little objects to say stuff about ourselves. And, in saying those things, to understand ourselves.” And in response to a brief on that topic he set last year to the Interaction Design students at the AHO Institute of Design, Svein Inge Bjørkhaug came up with a system of physical blocks that represent your activity online:

[Photo by jørngeorg on Flickr]

Your computer activity is monitored and every week you’re sent a little collection of these blocks. Quite soon, this becomes a very real representation of a virtual activity, and a set of objects to be reckoned with.

I was reminded of this project when thinking through my previous assertion that books are souvenirs of themselves. When people complain that they don’t want to read ebooks, I think a lot of this is due not to the reading experience itself—as everyone discovers eventually, the format disappears when you get stuck into a good story—but due to the other affordances the book offers.

Because the life of a traditional book is not just in the reading of it. It’s more like this:

And there’s a cognitive dissonance going on with ebooks, that they don’t fulfill those other cases, as well as the general problem of the tracelessness of electronic reading.

There’s another intersection here as well: the social timeline of the book—the reviews you read before you buy it and the conversations you have with your friends about it and so on. This line crosses the one above at the point of reading—which is also where Bkkeepr sits.

So it seemed natural to use Bkkeepr as the platform for experimenting with Bookleteer’s API, which allows automated access to its Diffusion eBook and Storycube generators.

For a while I’ve been meaning to add the ability to auto-generate inserts (or perhaps Moo stickers) that put your bkkeepr data back into the real world, and into your books once you’ve finished them:

Bkkeepr is intended to eventually (cough) evolve into a scrobbling-type service not just for the books you read, but for the ebooks you read too. And it makes sense that Bkkeepr should therefore supply you with the souvenirs of this experience too:

These cubes are auto-generated from Bkkeepr data using the Bookleteer Storycube API, currently in private beta. The Storycube API takes a set of images and returns a net in pdf format (there are more pictures of the cubes and the process at Flickr):

They represent a couple of months reading, and while I own physical copies of these titles, the intention is to stand for the ebooks I also consume, but which leave no physical trace on my shelves, and thus too easily slip from memory:

You can see how an avid ebook reader would quickly amass sets of these, which could line up along shelves vacated by the absence of physical books.

I like the bookcubes very much as physical instantiations of a virtual activity. However, as avatars for ebooks, they do strike me as a bit obvious (as well as fiddly). I think it’s probably possible to do better.

Other examples of physical souvenirs, alongside Svein Inge Bjørkhaug’s above, include the Sound Advice project, or RIG’s datadecs. These seem more abstract and less representational than getting stuck in the same book jacket trap all over again. (It still bothers me that we use book covers as the main symbol for books bought online, and even for ebooks.)

I noticed in Apple’s iBooks demo that there’s a progress bar on every page of the book:

Which is good and something I’ve argued for for a while (it’s quite prominent in Enhanced Editions) because a sense of progress is important when you’re reading a long-form piece. And perhaps this approach is applicable to a couple of other bookish problems: how do you represent the book when it doesn’t have a cover and is no longer an advert for itself, and how do you make the invisible value of a book – the time spent on it by writers and editors – visible and thus communicate that value?

Can we include metadata about the creation of the book into the book itself? (And while I’m showing and thinking with paper books and pencils here, I’m talking about ebooks.) Could the book contain the details of how long the author spent working on it, even embed its own, dated changelog?

And we’re getting into the realms of data visualisation here too, like Stefanie Posavec’s visualisations of On The Road: could we use representations not only of the text, but also of the author’s energy, to sell the book—representations which evolve further and merge with the experience of the reader to create souvenirs? Digital abstraction and re-instantiation beats tired physical nostalgia.

That is what I have been thinking about lately. Many thanks to Bookleteer for providing me with the tools to do so. I’ll be exploring their Diffusion eBooks next.

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.

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.

During the talk, one particularly vocal member of the audience took issue with ebooks in general (standard trigger question: “will they smell like real books?”) and stated that vinyl was on the way back. I countered that, well, no it wasn’t – it has a growing status among collectors, but I wouldn’t stake my house on it. I stand by that, but I’m as pleased as anyone to see that David Sedaris (yes, I’m a fan) is releasing an abridged audiobook on vinyl:

“Albums are enjoying something of a renaissance, posting $57 million in sales in 2008, more than double the previous year and the best for the format since 1990, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The format is so rare for audiobooks, however, that the Audiobook Publishers Association has never even tracked its sales. But Maja Thomas, senior vice president for digital and audio publishing at the Hachette Book Group, said she was drawn to the idea precisely because it was quirky. Mr. Sedaris’s ‘audience is very attuned to irony and is going to find this funny,’ Ms. Thomas said. The 31-minute album, which will be released on Jan. 5 and cost $24.98, will include only two of the five essays on the CD version of the audiobook, but will feature a code enabling purchasers to digitally download the entire program.” [Source: NYTimes]

Ms. Thomas is not wrong about Sedaris’ demographic, but I’m particularly intrigued by the addition of a code allowing purchasers to download the entire audiobook in digital format. This is a brilliant idea (assuming it’s for no extra cost, and not a mere discount), and one I’ve been suggesting to publishers for some time.

If we really want to grow the market for electronic books – as well as audiobooks – in order that, in future, this market is controlled by publishers and not by a third party (in the way that Apple has effectively taken control of the music market from record labels), the bundling of digital versions with physical copies is a very smart way to go. Imagine if every book you bought came with that sort of code to download the ebook. Sceptical consumers could try out the new technologies at no risk – and no extra cost to the publishers – and, who knows, perhaps they might actually like them.

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.

*

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.

*

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.

At the weekend, the fruits of several months of work at Apt finally hit the App Store in the form of Enhanced Editions‘ first title: The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave.

Enhanced Editions ebooks are a different breed to most, as our mission is to work closely with publishers to obtain the best material, and take advantage of every possible benefit of the ereading experience. This means taking every feature you’ve come to expect from good ereaders – including bookmarking, full-text search, adjustable fonts and type sizes, night mode, tilt scrolling (on the iPhone) and so on – and adding exclusive additional content, and the real coup: full text-to-audiobook synchronisation. The latter means you can switch between the text and the audio without losing your place, and we hope it’ll get people excited, and prove that ebooks really can go to new places, over and above the physical book.

For my part, I’ve written a number of posts over at the Enhanced Editions blog explaining some of the thinking behind the design and user experience, such as serif vs sans-serif and audiobook integration. Other members of the team have also written about designing icons for the iPhone and our attitude to DRM.

We’ve been working on Enhanced Editions for just over a year, and it’s been great to have been part of the team, and great to have produced an app we’re proud of. There’s more to come here – and we should really talk about ebook pricing and convergence at some point – but until Obama arrives, go check out Bunny Munro in the App Store now.

*

P.S. The trailer’s another fine job by our friends at Asylum Films, who made 25th Estate: This Is Where We Live.

Shared bookmarks are one of the primary drivers of conversation and socialisation on the web. Simple pointers to information are the basic currency of networked communication, and one of the most desirable functions of the future book. But, in the book, they’re pretty hard to achieve.

I’ve hit this problem already on bkkeepr, and that’s just with physical books. If two people are reading the same book in two different editions (hardback or paperback, modern or ancient, even in different translations) then the same text doesn’t occur on the same page. (This is one of the main reasons bkkeepr bases itself on ISBNs rather than titles or “works”, but it’s unwieldy and has been, mostly rightly, criticised.)

The problem gets harder with ebooks. My Sony Reader lets me bookmark pages, but there’s no way to transfer or even translate these to another epub reader, let alone another format or edition. I’ve been lurking on the epub-interop group for a while, which has been considering this issue, as well as things like reliable identifiers for epub books, and just keeping your place in different editions (a subset of the bookmark problem).

So, to first principles: a bookmark is a location, right? But it’s a location in an existing text, and the problem comes down to defining a location in a text that moves about, covers different numbers of pages, appears in different formats. But here’s the rub: it’s always the text. (Well, not exactly, but we’ll come to that later.)

I do something quite similar a lot, when I’ve read a newspaper or journal article offline, and want to find the online version. I just pick a string of words from the text, that feels like it contains a reasonably-unique (don’t pick me up on that, you know what I mean) set of words or phrasing, and google it in quotes. Works a charm.

Going further, it seems likely you can bookmark anything given a string of sufficient length to be unique (I’m getting something in the back of my head about whole files, and the best model of something being itself, but we’ll ignore that).

This is where an idea I’ve been toying with for a while comes in: do we need a Gracenote / MusicBrainz for books? A big database containing everything – or at least some kind of hash of everything, a set of unique signatures for each book? Could you be able to take a string-of-a-certain length from anything, submit it to this DB, and get back a title, like holding your phone to the music with Shazam?

… although I’m realising that Google Book Search is pretty much working on that – and it has an API, so. I might put a wrapper on that. (The geek version of a donk.) Unless someone has already… ? (For more on Google Book Search and unique strings, see Dance of the Concords.)

So if you have a string of sufficient length, you’d get a single result, and be able to find the bookmark in a text, even if you didn’t know what the text was before. That’s quite interesting, and new. I think.

There are serious issues with this approach of course, not least that books are edited and do change more than just their page numbering over the course of time, but some kind of clever, fuzzy search or simple string-lengthening might deal with this. And then there are translations: could you bookmark cross-language in this fashion, given a sufficiently clever translation engine?

Thoughts?

Photo of bookmarks by FlickrJunkie, used under Creative Commons.