• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• A Big Boost to Books as Apps?

I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me):

Books are not applications, or software. They are words.

I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy because a lot of book apps (such as booksinmyphone‘s Java apps) are really just wrappers for the text.

But by creating multiple versions of books – rather than agreeing on a single format (e.g. but not necessarily, ePub) and building separate software to display that – we’re heading down a road of locked-down, device-specific book technology that is antithetical to the nature of the medium, and costly to publishers. If only those publishers that can afford to spend the time (not necessarily money, the time alone has a cost) creating huge ranges of different applications can get their books onto the marketplace, it won’t be the rosy future for niche literature that some versions of the ebook story predict.

The sheer replication involved – reproducing the same lines of code over and over again for each book in a library – bothers even my low sense of efficiency and programmatic elegance too.

Of course, this development is not of the choosing of anyone in books. It’s a short-termist, technological hack, to get books onto closed platforms like the iPhone and other smart phones, and in large part it’s caused by the development of the App Store, which provides us with a sneaky way of getting book texts onto phones while there’s no equivalent of the iTunes Store for text files. But I’d much rather see a Book Store selling files to be read by standalone ereader apps than this glut of mini-apps.

Such a path would not prevent publishers building their own, branded and self-promoting, ereader apps, as I’ve previously suggested, but it would massively widen the interoperability of ebooks and ereaders, which readers will only thank us for. Perhaps we should be looking at some other hacks instead?

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.