booktwo.org

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.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a panel at the Frontline Club on the future of publishing. It was an interesting evening, and I spoke alongside Tom Tivnan of the Bookseller and Chris Finnamore, test editor at WIRED. The whole thing’s now online if you’re so inclined:

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.

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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.

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.

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

A couple of months ago, I drew this on the back of an envelope:

That’s pretty much the best representation I could come up with of what I do. I encompasses all my major projects of the last few years: this site; Bookkake, my print-on-demand, experimental small publisher; bkkeepr, the web app for tracking your reading and bookmarking on the go; London Lit Plus, the open-source literature festival which ran in 2007 and 2008; Cooking With Booze; many smaller projects, and of course my work with Snowbooks and Apt.

I’ve just left my full-time position at Apt, although I will continue to work with Peter Collingridge and many of our collaborators on a range of projects, not least the much-loved Bookseer and the forthcoming and hugely exciting Enhanced Editions, which we hope, Apple willing, will invigorate and expand the provision of quality ebooks on the iPhone and other platforms (there’s more in this weekend’s Observer).

The last couple of years at Apt have been a very enjoyable and fruitful time, working on a number of hugely rewarding projects from across the publishing world. These have included the launch of Granta.com and websites for Portobello Books and Pictures; the multi-award winning This Is Where We Live film for HarperCollins; Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook online reading group; Coversourcing, the open design competition for Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing; and much more besides.

It’s been an absolute privilege to work with Peter, our clients, and our collaborators; I’m incredibly grateful to all of them and it won’t be the last you see from us, but it’s time to move on, and I’m going it alone with a number of interesting proposals and projects in the pipeline, of which more will be revealed in the coming months.

It is, as the old curse goes, interesting times. When booktwo.org launched in October 2006, it did so because of a perceived lack of action and initiative in the publishing industry in relation to ebooks and the possibilities of online and electronic reading. As the scope of the site has widened, so has the outlook of the publishing industry, and you can now find CEOs talking openly about ebooks at book fairs and business meetings, and ereaders in high street stores. This is exciting, and also a sign that it’s time to find a new schtick: when the big boys gear up, most of the interesting battles have already been fought. There’s a lot still to be done, but the wheels are definitely and irreversibly in motion.

So, as I kick-start my own wheels, I’m interested in what other people are doing as well. I’m available for some freelance work, and if you’re still not sure what it is I do, you can check out my CV and my portfolio. If what you’re doing is book-related, technology-led (or not), online or off, and you’d be interested in collaborating, please get in touch.

Here’s to books, and the future.

Amazon have just announced AmazonEncore: “a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.” They’re now a publisher.

It’s been a while coming, but some of us have been predicting this move for some time: Amazon have finally made it to the penultimate step on the publishing chain. I say penultimate, because although they are now, by any definition, a publisher, they still appear to be cherry-picking from existing books rather than seeking out their own authors.

Their opening salvo comes in the form of Legacy, a YA fantasy novel by sixteen-year-old novelist Cayla Kluver. Legacy was originally published by Winsconsin-based Forsooth Publishing, in paperback in April 2008, when it garnered 5-star reviews and generated a teen cult. Amazon have noticed this, so they’ve bought the rights, and are putting out a hardback, Kindle and audio editions across their channels, as well as swinging the full weight of their not inconsiderable publicity machine behind it.

This is all very interesting, and we’ll see where they go next. Knowing Amazon: upwards and outwards. Those who suggest they’ll just keep picking stuff up from the little guys hasn’t been paying attention. In the last five years Amazon have, in addition to dominating online bookselling, bought a book social network, a major print-on-demand supplier, a complete end-to-end self-publishing system, pretty much the entire used books marketplace, the biggest audiobook distributor, the best iPhone ereader, and designed, built and delivered the only truly mass-market dedicated ereading device, with a proprietary format that sets them up to be the iTunes of eBooks.*

It’s big, it’s scary, it’s Amazon. But the publishing industry is under so many different pressures at the moment, this is unlikely to be as big as it could be: Amazon don’t want to annoy their major suppliers, not too much, and not yet. They will though, and by that point, they’ll be past caring. Like Google with their ebooks programme, they’ve been given so much leeway for so long, they think they can do whatever they like, and chances are, they’re right.

Still, look on the bright side: what this does suggest is that while corporate publishers will be – are – fighting for their lives, there’s still a lot of scope for the little guys, the ones who’ve always found the interesting stuff first. AmazonEncore, as it stands now, is a very good way of making out on a little book with a lot of promise, as Ms Kluver and Forsooth have been the first to find out. Here’s hoping.

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* Updated this list as people remind me about all the other stuff Amazon own…

P.S. Amusingly though, the first result for “kindle” on amazon.co.uk is the Sony Reader.

I’ve been thinking about “Free” again, in the context of, well, art. Specifically books of course, but lets look again at some other spheres of free.

With all the discussion of what Free means, we haven’t been talking a lot about perfectly viable models of Free that are happening right now. Newspapers and music occur to me as the big ones.

I don’t know if the Metro, London Lite and thelondonpaper are profitable or sustainable. But they do seem to be working right now. And this is pretty interesting. So’s the fact that increasing numbers of people get their news free – via the web, including from papers that put out a paid-for, paper version. The model is in part and in some cases subsidised by “real” paper sales, but it’s intended to be ad-supported. The same model that underpins the new music models of Last.fm and Spotify. Plus some subscriptions, but the ads are really what’s going to make or break it.

The content here, whether it’s news reporting or ‘art’, is separable from the physical thing. Once digitised, the reproduction cost tends to zero, and the true value is unquanitifiable. Therefore, it’s hard to charge for. If you try, people will route around it. For anything non-physical, that doesn’t occupy a visible, allotted time (service) or space (object), you no longer have a “right” to charge. It exists now; it is out there; it no longer belongs to you. Its aura, as Walter Benjamin described it, has been separated from the act of creation, and is mediated between the creator, the viewer, the culture and the cultural lineage.

The pressure to charge for these things – the resistance to Free – comes from current producers of things whose value no longer rests with their production. Worse, the less visible things that they do that do have value – editing, marketing, distributing – serve only to highlight the thing, making more people want it for Free.

Merlin Mann makes the follow-up point well in this article:

In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman really need the mixed basket of theoretical benefits that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and flexibility? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

And in this, we know that we don’t have to worry about art itself. Passion has always been a reliable substitute for money. The drop in perceived value isn’t about to stop the thing being produced. Lit, art, music: we’ll still have these things, but produced for different reasons, and to different purposes. (In part, what Tom says: “Being interesting is as important as being useful. Making things that delight and inspire is as important as creating value. Old systems are crumbling; the best you can do is be nimble, smart and make some trouble.” TMFHWOTI bears this out.)

Back to the point: what can be charged for, then? One thing is reliability. I don’t mean reliable quality, because God knows we can’t guarantee that. But reliability in time. Current-ness. Being, reliably, of the moment. I think subscription models – the old-fashioned Singles Club system – serials, pamphlets, the old Dickens-style stuff, might come in handy here.

The freesheets aren’t just selling space to their advertisers, they’re buying readers with utility. They’re there not just where you need them, but when. Spotify and last.fm do the same thing. We’re wandering into ad-supported territory again, and I’m not sure that’s the right route for books, but it might be possible to recreate value through the same kinds of utility. Interesting utility.

Last night’s Analysis on Radio 4 heard from, among others, a University lecturer who “bans” her first-year students from using Wikipedia and Google (I’ve lost the name, sorry). That’s not good – but her point is a point: they have libraries and books and peer-reviewed journals that contain a better class of information than you’ll find – for now – through skimming search engines and Wikis. It is a challenge, and it’s a challenge that speaks to the same kind of utility, the need for good stuff, now.

When Walter Benjamin talked of the “parasitical dependence on ritual” he meant the old order of cultural production and criticism. But if we can build new rituals, engage in new ways, encourage new behaviours and interests, and above all engage with, rather than fight, Free we may discover new values too.

And that’s where I’ve got with that, really.

As a little end-of-year project, I’ve just launched jocelynbrooke.com, a site dedicated to the life and work of English writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908—1966). I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Brooke in the last few months, and have begun a small campaign to revive his reputation.

Brooke’s writing, which clusters in the decades around the Second World War, is unique in English letters. I’ve managed to amass an almost complete set of his books with a particular penchant for the Kafkaesque Image of a Drawn Sword and the angst-ridden The Scapegoat, and extending to his delightful botanical treatise The Flower in Season, and his extraordinary Surrealist work of 1956 The Crisis in Bulgaria, or, Ibsen to the Rescue! His semi-autobiographical novels are works of a rare quality, combining a deliberately Proustian longing for things past with a very English melancholy and sense of place, and a sensual quality that feels quite out of its time, and which is deeply rooted in his private and currently little known life. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Brooke’s works are currently in a kind of limbo. I approached the agents for Brooke’s estate several months ago with a view to acquiring the rights to republish several of his works, as some of the lead titles of a new imprint launching later this year. Although I was initially informed the rights were available, it subsequently appeared that Faber, in the form of their ‘Finds’ POD imprint – who are already republishing Brooke’s Military Orchid trilogy – have expressed an interest in the other books as well.

While I’m pleased that anyone is interested in republishing these works, anyone who knows my opinion of Faber Finds won’t be surprised that I’m deeply opposed to this – and not for entirely selfish reasons. Faber Finds, while a great way to get little-known works back into print, does no promotion of the titles on its list, and there is no way that Brooke will find a new audience through this method. As time passes, it becomes harder and harder to revive a writer’s reputation, but it can be done: see the recent renaissances of B.S. Johnson and Julian Maclaren-Ross. For this to happen to Brooke, he needs to be republished properly, and promoted.

Conflicts between long-tail POD databases like Faber Finds and true classics republication are only going to increase, and Brooke’s agents are currently considering their position on POD and the way they license rights. I hope I get the opportunity to work with and increase the readership of Brooke’s outstanding work, and in the mean time I’ll crack on with jocelynbrooke.com.

Happy New Year.

“How do you make a small fortune in publishing?”
“Start with a large fortune.”

First of all, I must apologise for over a month’s silence here at booktwo.org. I have, as I promised, been working on something, and it’s finally available for inspection. I hope you won’t mind me discussing it here: certain aspects of it are certainly germane.

The project is Bookkake, an entirely print-on-demand, and web-oriented, publisher. For those of delicate tastes, be warned that the initial books are all of a somewhat physical nature that is not unrelated to their status as literature, and the name is a direct reference to a sex act. There are reasons for all of these things.

Bookkake has been in development for over a year and a half. As well as a personal project in which I take much pride, it is also intended to be a model for how small, independent and risk-taking publishers (and even some big ones) can survive in the current times. With past and recent events including the near-destruction of Dedalus Books and the absorption and subsequent emasculation of Serpent’s Tail, we’re serious about making sure that voices like these survive.

I was assisted by a small grant from Arts Council England which helped with some of the set-up costs (and it should be pointed out, was in no way of the scale to trouble organisations suffering their own funding cuts), but contrary to the old saw above, Bookkake is not in the fortune-building or the fortune-breaking business. Print-on-demand and direct sales mean that we cut out much of the warehousing, distribution, and discounting costs that are currently causing so much trouble in the trade. Order a book from the Bookkake website and it is printed and shipped directly to you.

I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to address many of the doubts surrounding print-on-demand, and I’m more than aware that I have a lot to live up to following my recent criticisms of Faber Finds, among others. But I’ve done this in a number of ways: individual covers with a unified design theme, resetting the books in modern, digital-suited type and typography, and commissioning new introductions to each one, from established writers. I’m not saying this just to promote the books (although I’m hardly likely to shy away from it), but because this is the way great literature should be treated, and new advances in technology are not excuses to promote cheaper editions.

I also feel justified in using the term ‘great literature’ because Bookkake’s opening list is one of classics: five titles that have been acclaimed elsewhere and long before I came onto the scene. This is partly a simple financial decision – the works are out of copyright, so Bookkake does not have to pay royalties to the long-dead authors – and partly thematic. The works represent the kind of works I wish to continue to publish: mould-breaking, exciting, and unafraid. I am already working on the second set of titles, which will include original works by current authors, but I love these ones too: I don’t believe any but the most closed and conservative can fail to enjoy, and be moved by, John Cleland’s immortal Fanny Hill, Hazlitt’s impassioned Liber Amoris, or even Guillaume Apollinaire’s hilarious Memoirs of a Young Rakehell.

At the moment the books are only available in the UK available in the UK and the US, and there are no shipping fees. There are also no special discounts available to the larger retailers, nor blanket guarantees of sale-or-return, terms which will not endear me to many bookshops, but are changes I have been urging on the trade, with good reason, for some time. I hope the more enlightened retailers will see their way to making deals which benefit both sides. The website, which is at the core of my approach, comes with extensive extracts, high-resolution covers, all the social media dooh-dahs and, most notably I think, entirely free ebook editions of every title. The latter is probably the most significant choice I’ve taken, but I firmly believe that by supplying interesting readers with the best version of what they can get elsewhere for free, I’ll be rewarded with customer appreciation and loyalty.

So Bookkake is a project born almost entirely of booktwo, and of my desire to see publishing move with technology and survive as the guardian and helpmate of literature. But it’s also another product of my own ongoing, irresponsible, ever-growing and never-sated love affair with books. I can’t stop reading them, cherishing them, and trying to work with them, and I hope you’ll continue with me on this journey as many of you have here at booktwo.org and previously at STML.

I will be continuing to blog here, I hope, although I will also be blogging full-time (such as that is) at the new Bookkake blog, mostly about literature, past and present, with an emphasis on forgotten writers, censorship and sexuality, as well as reflections on publishing at the sharp end. All of these are still extra-curricular activities outside my day job, so I can’t promise anything, although subscribers to the RSS feed will continue to find links of interest to me and perhaps to you on the subjects of literature, technology and the future of publishing.

Wish me luck.

I’ve wanted for some time to create a simple infographic of where a book’s cover price goes, and the Observer published a nice one in their Book of Books a few months ago. The figures made sense, so I’ve created a similar one here, in colour.

The Observer’s figures were based on a notional £20 hardback book, from which I’ve extracted the percentages, which in my experience hold fairly true across standard formats for traditionally produced books in the major bookshops. So for a £10 paperback, the retailers will take anything between a 40% to a 60% discount (and guess who’s trying for more), and the author can expect to see about a quid, depending on their terms.

I think this illustration serves a number of purposes, not least to illustrate the mark-up taken by the retailers. There’s some justification for this by bricks-and-mortar stores, with huge overheads, but I’m yet to hear a decent one for internet retailers, who don’t have shop rents to pay – their motivation, of course, is simply to undercut the high street. Publishers are giving away huge sums in their failure to compete on direct sales – and they’re going to struggle to justify high ebook prices too.