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 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’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.

Cassava Republic was founded four years ago in Abuja, Nigeria, with the intention of introducing African readers to local writers too often celebrated only in Europe and America, and to encourage home-grown writing, “rooted in African experience in all its diversity, whether set in filthy-yet-sexy megacities such as Lagos, in little-known rural communities, in the recent past or indeed the near future.”

Cassava faces all the usual pressures of a small publisher in a developing industry: poor or almost total lack of design, typesetting and printing services, non-existent distribution channels, a lack of an established network of booksellers and readers. All their books are designed and typeset in the UK, despite the added costs this brings, and printed in India. Sales reps spend most of their time in coffeeshops and hairdressers, where the real book sales occur; traditional bookstores are dingy, unfriendly places which trade almost exclusively in the textbooks and government publications that make up the overwhelming majority of the African market.

Despite these challenges, Cassava has had a number of successes, not least with childrens’ books. Their specially-commissioned collection of stories by Fatima Akilu sets seven stories to accompany the United Nations’ 7 Millennium Development Goals. Many Nigerian children grow up without ever seeing a picture book; for most of those that do, the stories will be alien to them the characters will not look like them and their lives will not resemble theirs. Akilu’s stories give those children real empowerment—to girls as well as boys—as well as opening up the possibilities, for Cassava, or developing and licensing the characters further.

Internet access, while still in development in Nigeria, is expanding rapidly, thanks to physical infrastructure. Previously the whole country was served by a single government-funded undersea cable. A new, privately-owned cable landed just last week, promising to increase Nigeria’s connected bandwidth twentyfold, with several more cables due in the next few years. Over 1m Nigerians use Facebook, and Cassava are eager to exploit this increased connectivity to reach readers who have not yet explored local and Pan-African writing.

Contemporary Africa is particularly present in Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come To You By Chance, which tells the story of Kingsley, a young man eager to help his family and change the world. “When his once-proud family descends into poverty after his father falls ill, he is forced to turn to his mother’s infamous brother, Cash Daddy, who runs a successful empire of email scams relieving gullible Westerners of their hard earned money.” I can’t help (because I’m slightly obsessed) but be reminded of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center, because it points to a publishing model which engages with the lives of real, young people now, in their localities, rather than reaching out to a foreign audience, and in return, holds out the possibility of uncovering a wholly new and untapped market.

Like the small example of African Science Fiction, the future of all publishing in Africa promises new business models, new approaches to readers, and new literatures. What an exciting future.

My favourite work, however, was by David Rule from or-bits, whose obsessional diarising over six months produced a five volume, barely edited memoir, and who turns his and his friends’ half-remembered stories into brightly-coloured A4 pamphlets.

One of these single-issue reminiscences bears as its title a Google Street view link—the key to the story, but the uncovering of which requires the reader to type in a long string of near-random characters, which I described as an old-style programming exercise or computer game cheat code, and David described as a journey—long, frustrating, fraught with human error, but ultimately revelatory. I like.

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.

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.

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.

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.