Vanessa at The Rough Draft is offended by the disillusionment in the publishing industry lately:

The fact that publishing is dying is not new. It’s been dying practically since the printing press was invented. Critics have come out almost every year since, say the 1890s declaring the novel is dead, that no one reads anymore. For some reason, everyone loves to declare such apocalyptic extinctions even though the business is still chugging along. When were there ever more than a distinct elite few writing books, reading them and talking about it?

I think she’s got a point there: when has publishing been anything but a marginal industry? The entire industry has a market capitalization of $34 billion — barely half of Apple Computer. Bill Gates could purchase the entire publishing industry and have enough change leftover to buy out Sergey Brin’s share in Google.

Okay, we’ve established that the publishing industry is dinky. But even tiny things can have a future. Could Vanessa find a future in publishing? Let’s look at what’s involved:

There will always be a need for editors. There will definitely be a need for marketers and salespeople for published work. There will be a need for designers and other production people.

Printers? Maybe they’ll end up declining a bit, but paper remains an awfully convenient and cheap way to present information.

Bookstores? They could possibly decline more, but I could also imagine Barnes and Noble progressively expanding its coffee shop with digital tools for disseminating e-books. They could end up all right.

But what about publishers themselves — basically a financial pool for getting all the above professionals together with writers?

One advantage publishers have is inertia. Self-publishing, though it’s gained traction recently, is still considered a last resort of the incompetent and unconnected. Saying you’ve published a blook with Lulu is still orders of magnitude less impressive than mentioning your new novel will be out with Harper next month. Publishers are the ultimate arbiters of taste.

So who is poised to take that role away from publishers? Blogs? Certainly the A-list bloggers could help publicize a self-published e-book, but no one mistakes an Insta-endorsement for the cachet of a imprint of a respected publishing house. Amazon? Will the largest Internet retailer assume the role of a publishing house? It’s certainly trying, by buying print-on-demand technology. I still can’t imagine the New York Review of Books sorting through thousands of POD titles at Amazon to select what to review, though. Maybe if Amazon started hiring editors to do that job, selecting an A-list of books to promote more prominently, then reviewers would begin to take it seriously. Barnes and Noble could do the same thing. But then Vanessa could just grab a job over at Amazon.

Even so, what print on demand won’t accomplish is getting people to write books. Sure, there are thousands of wannabe authors, scrambling to get published. The public has an insatiable demand for books from people who don’t want to be authors: famous people like actors, athletes, presidents, and business leaders. Those books get published because publishers give them hefty advances and hire ghost writers to do most of the work. If Amazon got into that business, we wouldn’t really be talking about print on demand, because they’d need to sell tens of thousands of copies to make a profit. Amazon would be just another publisher. Another huge portion of the publishing industry is textbooks — and trust me, qualified professors are not exactly banging down the doors of the publishers begging to write the next Intro to Accounting. These people need cash, in advance, in order to be coaxed into writing — and publishers are competing with other (much bigger) industries, who like to hire these same people as consultants. Very few people are interested in writing print-on-demand textbooks, and those who are, aren’t writing books that anyone will be interested in buying.

One thing I could imagine happening is mass-market novelists moving to self-publishing. What if John Grisham started self-publishing? He’s already got a reputation as a writer, so he doesn’t really need the publisher’s publicity engine. Instead of making 15 percent per copy, he could be getting 50 percent or more. If his next book sold a million copies, he could take home $15 million. If we’re talking about e-books, he could take home upwards of 85 percent — give a little commission to e-tailers like Amazon, and pocket the rest.

If publishers lost this gravy train and had to settle for mid-market writers, I wonder if the industry could get squeezed away from both sides — by Joe Blogger at Lulu, and by John Grisham at Amazon. Perhaps eventually, there wouldn’t be anything left for the major publishers except celebrity bios and textbooks.

Then I really do wonder if Vanessa will still want to be working for them.

Scott Esposito is responding to a Michael Blowhard post on the future of long prose narrative. I’ve written about this before, but not in the way these guys are. Michael is speculating that the long prose narrative will be history someday — that the novel will have come and gone as a genre. Scott, perhaps not surprisingly, thinks a bit differently. He suggests that the novel is a welcome respite from the high-speed, plugged-in society we’re living in.

I’m going to argue something slightly different: that the novel is already history. The novel is certainly no longer the mass-media entertainment, the way it was in the 19th century. People still buy and read novels, certainly, and occasionally a book comes out that strikes a nerve and really gets people talking — a Harry Potter, or a Da Vinci Code. But even a mega-blockbuster like Da Vinci only sells around 35 million copies worldwide. There are literally hundreds of movies with this many viewers. Even a midlist film like Vanilla Sky grosses over $200 million worldwide, corresponding to roughly 30 million screenings. But by only counting viewers in theaters, we’re barely getting started. There are DVD sales, rentals, screenings on HBO, and finally regular TV. I haven’t been able to locate the statistics, but I do recall reading that Hollywood now makes more on DVD sales than it does on box office. Even an average film has many, many more viewers than a “blockbuster” novel.

What’s the best hope for a novel writer to really hit it big time? Selling the film rights. Many novelists make more on film rights than on book sales — even when the movie never gets made. Novels may be feeders for true mass-media entertainment, but they are no mass-media entertainment themselves.

This is not to say that novels aren’t worthwhile. Of course they are. And just as I enjoy reading the occasional epic poem even though no one writes them any more, so there will always be novel readers. The question is, how long will it be before we have no more professional novel writers? Michael Blowhard estimates that there may now be fewer than 200 full-time writers of extended prose narrative. Is it possible that in, say, 50 years, that number will have dwindled down to zero?

With the ease of self-publishing, especially with the rise of e-books, what we might see is something like an eBay class of writers, making money off of blogads, audiobooks, podcasts, you name it. They’ll be patching together income in drips and drabs, rather than garnering giant publishing contracts. Nearly all of them will have day jobs. Will what they produce look like a novel? Perhaps some of the time, but it will most certainly depend on what makes the most money. Maybe short stories, or series, or something else entirely, will be more marketable in podcast or e-book form than the traditional 300-page novel.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t know. Did epic poetry fans lament the rise of the novel? Change is inevitable, especially when the technology for delivering literature is undergoing a radical transformation. Will literature itself disappear? Maybe if you’re defining it solely as novels. Literature, however, predates the novel. It’s a more encompassing term that perhaps should be expanded to include all narrative forms, including film (obviously literature comprises more than just narrative, but certainly narrative is a significant, if not the most significant portion of all literature).

So the hallowed novel is perhaps doomed to be replaced entirely by flashier stuff — movies, music, video games, podcasts. An abomination? Remember what preceded it: the “literature” of the ancient Greeks was epic poetry, memorized and performed to music. “Drama” was musical theatre, perhaps more like opera or a Broadway show than a “serious” play. Maybe what we’re really doing, with our iPods, our cell phones, our laptops, our PSPs, is simply returning to our roots.

The design for the Moby Blook is beginning to take shape. It doesn’t quite work for a short story, though: the little running headers at the top of each page now just repeat the title of the story, but in a novel they’ll give chapter numbers and titles. The first page in each chapter will have a big heading, like the first post in the Bartleby Blog. Make sense?

I’m still seeking volunteers to turn my whale white. Also, obviously the navigation area in the right hand column will have to improve, and I’ll need to do something about the situation that occurs when the browser window is stretched wider than 800 pixels.

There’s been a good deal of confusion in the comments about the purpose of the Moby Blook, probably mostly because I have a better idea in my head of what this is all about than I’ve ever expressed here.

Let me see if I can lay out my thinking about the blook in a little more organized fashion. I’ve spent a lot of time here at Word Munger musing about e-books. I’ve suggested that the computer monitor doesn’t quite have the resolution necessary, that computers aren’t portable enough, that most of the portable devices so far devised to present e-books have serious interface problems.

Then it hit me: I probably spend at least 2 or 3 hours a day reading blogs, on the very same computer monitor I’m complaining about so ceaselessly. Blogs have solved many of the navigation problems that plague, say, PDF readers. So why not use a blog format to present an e-book?

Several commenters have pointed out that blogs are already being used to host books, most notably the Samuel Pepys Diary and Dracula. Though these are admirable efforts, they still are basically just applying twenty-first-century technology to an ancient tradition: the journal format.

What I’m trying to do is somewhat different — I’m conducting an experiment to see if the blog form can be easily adapted by someone with rather modest technical and design skills (me!) into a superior interface for navigating e-books. And not just journals, but any book designed to be read from front to back (or in any other order).

I’m not attempting to create the definitive Moby Dick e-text, or any sort of concordance to the book, but just seeing if I can create a simple but usable interface for grappling with a serious text.

Some side benefits of the project could be that others will read the blook along with me, and add their own comments alongside my own. Another potential benefit might be the development of a teaching tool: I could distribute a “clean” copy of the blook, when complete, so teachers could use it in class and have an untrammeled forum for their students to comment on and discuss.

But mainly I want to develop a template that anyone could use to create their own blooks, for any number of possible uses. Any other ideas?

I was wavering yesterday on whether to predict the book’s demise in 20 or 30 years. I decided to go for it, and chose 20. What the heck, let’s be controversial!

Scott Esposito called me on it right away. I was asking for that, I suppose. I should probably clarify. I’m not predicting the complete demise of the printed book. Of course people will still want books. People still own horses, over 100 years after the introduction of the automobile. Collecting books will be more like a hobby, like buying old ’78s, or, yes, horses. People will buy books more for their significance as objects than for the information they contain. There are still going to be printed books, but they will be an insignificant part of the market compared to the sum of their replacements. What will be difficult is quantifying exactly what those replacements are.

Here’s an interesting question: what proportion of the reading Americans do today is done on printed paper, compared to electronic texts? I would say that I personally have already crossed the fifty percent threshold — I do more than half my reading on the computer. I wonder how many others are like me? This is not to say that I never read printed text. When I’m reading something especially difficult, even if it’s a PDF, I’ll print it out. This allows me to take notes more easily and take advantage of the increased legibility of paper. If I have a choice of an online versus paper text, I invariably choose the paper version for the same reason: I read my Atlantic Monthly in print, even though my subscription also entitles me to read the online version. Certainly in 20 years, we’ll have cheap electronic displays that are better than an inkjet printout, so my proportion of print reading will decrease even more.

In 20 years, my kids will be in their 30s — a generation raised on electronic textbooks, who don’t know a world without the World Wide Web. Do you think they would prefer a printout to an e-text? The median age worldwide today is 26. That means that half the world was born after the personal computer was invented and under age 14 when the Web was invented. In 20 years, no one under 50 will remember a time without the Internet.

My 11-year-old daughter groans when a research assignment requires her to use a book as a source. She barely knows how to find a book in the library, but she’s a whiz with Google. The problem with books, she points out, is that it’s hard to get the pictures from books into your PowerPoint presentations. This is a child whose computer time is limited to 1 hour a day.

There are some caveats. People may cling to paper books to avoid DRM, much the same way many people don’t buy music from iTunes or Napster because of the copy protection involved. It’s much easier to share a book today than it is to share a song from iTunes. However, if eBook readers are literally $20, I could imagine people sharing books by simply trading the readers themselves.

I think the practicality argument will eventually lose out. Even though cell phones are a pain in the neck, with all the recharging and hidden costs, with the gaps in service, with incompatibility with this or that computer, people still say they can’t live without them. People are unbelievably tolerant about the limitations of their technology.

For that matter, people are incredibly tolerant of poorly designed books. People buy books with running heads that offer no information other than the book’s title. They buy books without indexes, with illegible typefaces, with quarter-inch margins, with bindings that fall apart or make it impossible to hold the book open without a vise-like grip. And don’t even get me started on bad kerning, bad hyphenation, let alone bad proofreading. I just finished reading a book called The Design of Everyday Things. It was all about how badly most things are designed. The book’s title had been changed from The Psychology of Everyday Things. Guess what? No one had bothered to change the book’s dozens of internal references to its own title.

The standard that e-books will have to meet to exceed ordinary books is actually quite low. The problem for e-books is much more likely to come from other genres: from television, from movies, from video games. They will have to be more than edutainment, which has been said to “combine the entertainment value of a bad lecture with the educational value of a bad game.”

Here are a couple ideas that just might work. What if every e-book combined the printed transcript with an audiobook? That way, you could start reading the text in “print” form, and then seamlessly move to the audio version when you need to drive to work, or weed the garden. This would give texts a huge advantage over other forms of entertainment, because they would be substantially more portable. As I noted in my review of the audiobook version of The Outlaw Sea, listening to an audiobook when you’re not doing something else is rather boring — it proceeds too slowly to maintain interest. If you could switch back and forth between the two versions as necessary, this problem would go away.

Or how about a different form factor for bedtime reading? There’s nothing more relaxing than reading a book before going to sleep — except trying to figure out a comfortable position to hold the book and still be able to read it. How about a hands-free display integrated into “eyeglasses,” allowing a reader to assume any position while reading?

Something I’ve mentioned before is an e-coffee table book. It would have to be clearly not a computer, because looking on someone else’s computer is sort of like opening up the medicine cabinet in the bathroom of a friend. In addition to the traditional professional photography accompanied by sparse narrative, it could also include the host’s vacation pictures, and perhaps also control the home audio system.

These are just a few ideas for ways that e-books may begin to filter into our lives over the course of the next 20 years. I still have more to say about all this, so stay tuned.

If:book and the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book have done a lot of hard thinking about what books will look like in future. Dozens of litblogs offer book reviews, forums for discussing books, and pithy little witticisms about books. One of the most successful Web sites ever is a book store.

Yet the book is in danger, we are told. Kids today have no patience for books; they’re obsessed with video games, with movies, with pornography.

There is no doubt in my mind that physical, bound books will disappear, probably within the next 20 years. As soon as it is cheaper to produce books electronically, paper books will go away. And that moment is fast approaching. Listen, if we can have a $100 laptop within 5 years, we’ll certainly have a $20 e-book reader in 20. When the electronics cost less than the paper, you can say goodbye to paper.

The real question is, with this change in book technology, how will the nature of books change? Because, again, there is no doubt that they will change.

As I have said before, some books have already disappeared. Encyclopedias are gone, and dictionaries aren’t going to be far behind. Textbooks will be next. My kids haul 15 pounds of books to and from school every day. When my son enters the ninth grade in a year and a half, he will be given a 7-pound laptop computer containing all his texts, and he will have no more textbooks. His school has a “special” laptop program, but I suspect by the time he enters college, this type of thing won’t be so special, and many, if not all of his college courses will be taught using e-texts.

Some changes will be positive. You need only take a look at Cognitive Daily to see that many of the topics we cover there would be difficult to present in a typical book. An e-book would have none of those difficulties. I was surprised to learn (via Brad DeLong) of the popularity of an outfit called The Teaching Company. Why would anyone pay $500 for a DVD of a lecture series when they could buy a $20 book covering the same material (it turns out, most people wait for the “sales” when the DVDs cost more like $100, but the question still applies)? The answer is that the DVDs contain demos: audio demos for music classes, interactive demos for physics classes, etcetera. They are multimedia, just like an e-book.

In this sense, what we may start to find is that a technology like TiVo is going to be part of what ends up replacing books. I just finished watching the History Channel’s excellent program on FDR. A 4-hour TV show covers almost as much information as a short book, but I doubt I would ever have purchased a book about FDR. I also doubt I would have watched the live broadcast. TiVo allowed me to treat the program like a book, watching it over a period of several days, pausing whenever I needed to answer the phone or refill my glass of wine. Eventually TiVo (or its descendents) won’t just record shows that happen to be broadcast: it will allow me to search an online catalog and download the shows I want to see, anytime. Someone who then learned about the FDR show could find it online and download it for a buck or two, instead of spending $20 on the equivalent book. It will be difficult for print books to compete.

It’s a mistake to think of an e-book as simply an electronic version of a printed book. “E-books” are going to appear — and have already appeared — in a variety of forms, for a variety of audiences. The real question is what is going to happen to the sustained narrative form. A 300-page book takes me about 10 hours to read (if I’m reading carefully). Will we want our information in 10-hour chunks, or some other size? Maybe 4 hours (like the FDR program) will be more like what we want, or maybe that’s how the economics will work out: maybe people will only be willing to pay $2 or $3 for an e-book, and so from a publishing perspective that only works out to a 4-hour book.

I have a lot more to say about this topic, so for now I’ll have to wrap this post up. Look for several more posts on this topic in the next few days.

Hard to believe, isn’t it? Just one year ago, Word Munger was a tiny babe, almost too fragile to hold in your arms. That’s right, Word Munger sprouted into existence one year ago today. It’s a very merry Word Birthday today, and to celebrate, I’m going to use a tactic mastered by sitcoms the world over: a retrospective episode.

So what wise words did I utter that first day? Be amazed. No, not at the lame-o welcome post, at the comment spam. The next day I wondered whether I should post pictures of my kids online. I concluded that it was probably an irrational fear, but that maybe I shouldn’t be sharing my kids with all the stalkers and riff-raff that would naturally be attracted to my musings about the latest e-book reader. Of course, it didn’t take me long to blow that.

Abortion has been a recurring topic here on Word Munger. A recurring theme of my discussion has been the idea that I wouldn’t make much of a pro-choice advocate.

Another topic I just can’t seem to stop yakking about is e-books. You’d think I could just write a post or two about them and then leave them alone, but somehow, I always come back to the topic. Am I destined to become some sort of e-brarian in a future life? Could there really be that much to say about e-books? Why, if I don’t read a lot of books, am I so obsessed with e-books? Would I suddenly read more if I had a better e-book reader? Stay tuned to Word Munger, because if the past is any indication, you’ll hear a lot more about e-books in the future.

I’ve also written a lot about writing over the past year. A common theme in this topic is my own lack of writing ability. There’s been a bit of self-promotion tossed into the mix, along with a touch of literary posturing.

My travel has been another topic of interest to me. If you weren’t interested, too bad, because that’s what I was writing about.

And what’s with all this writing about technology? If I wasn’t writing about my new computer, I was writing software reviews (this incidentally was the most visited post on Word Munger — ever — thanks to a link from MacBytes). And, of course, the fact that I’m not a designer never stopped me from ranting about design.

I’ve also done my fair share of writing about my neighborhood. It’s … shall we say … suburban. That’s right, folks, my kids are growing up in the kind of place we city kids used to always make fun of. They’re reliant on their parents for every little thing, because even the nearest grocery store is sixteen miles away in a strip mall. Forget about going to the movies on your own, or riding a bus … anywhere. And of course, like any suburbanite, I’m obsessed with my lawn (a man’s gotta have one vice, okay? At least I don’t own an SUV).

Satire has been a feature of Word Munger since before the beginning. That’s right, before there was Word Munger, there was Word Munger, the all-satire, all-the-time predecessor to the Word Munger Blog. I like satire, but eventually it wore on me, and I stopped promising it every Friday. Don’t give up, satire fans, every once in a while I’ll whip up some for you. In the meantime, there’s always Michael Berube.

In these past twelve months, I admit to having done just a bit of writing about Social Security. I even got a comment from the blogosphere’s most famous economist, Brad DeLong.

One topic I never enjoy visiting is my own stupidity. Typically this has to do with my reading an article too fast and then exploding into a rant about what I thought I just read. This post is probably the worst example of it. I’m impressed that Tom Maguire took my idiocy as well as he did.

I have written a few posts about my lack of religious faith. Some are intended to be funny, but others are quite serious. My son Jim, who my wife is attempting to raise as a Presbyterian, read that last one and told me he agreed with it. Uh-oh.

All in all, it’s been a good year. I’ve enjoyed it, so I’ll probably stick around for another one. See you in the blogosphere.

Okay, I’m starting to get really sick of the repeated dronings from all around the Internet about how computers are such a different medium from X, Y, or Z. My particular area of expertise is books. I’ve worked in the book industry, on and off, for 14 years, so I think I know a bit about books. And of course, I’ve talked a lot about books here. I don’t like to bring in a lot of scholarly hoo-ha to my conversations online, but I have done some of the “medium is the message/massage” reading as well. I know my McCluhan and my Ong — maybe not as well as the true disciples, but well enough that I think I understand the point.

Yes, oral culture is different from written culture, and written culture is different from print culture, and print culture is different from TV culture, which is different from Net culture. This does NOT mean that a work in one medium cannot be transferred to another without transforming its meaning. If I read a newspaper article online, I’ve read it just as much as if I saw it in print. If I see a movie on DVD, I’ve seen the movie. McCluhan goes into a lot of jibjaw about how TV is different from film, because of how the television image is generated one dot at a time and a film gets displayed frame by frame. To a certain extent this is true, but we don’t retain each individual dot in our memories — it’s quickly transformed into a much more compact representation. Each individual is going to have a slightly different memory of a film they saw, but that memory is affected by many things besides the medium they used to view it — the time of day, the other distractions in the room, the other films each person has seen. To suggest that the medium is the most important influence is simple-minded.

With e-books the distinction between the “medium” of a print book and an e-text is even more strained. Yes, the resolution of a computer monitor is different from a printed page. But most books today are written on computers. Does the process of transforming that e-text into a printed book literally change its meaning? Yes, the reader may have different responses to a text depending on the context in which she reads it, but the medium on which the text is displayed is again a comparativley minor influence.

Will the internet transform literature? It already has. Writers like John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow published entire texts online to attract the notice of print publishers. Later these e-texts were transformed into successful print books. Bloggers get commissioned to write books based solely on the day-to-day rantings. Online writing groups allow writers from around the world to get together and rip each other’s work to shreds from thousands of miles away.

Even when books are published conventionally, the way we hear about them by “word of mouth” has been radically transformed. Amazon reviews have become a cottage industry. There are blogs solely devoted to book reviews, and blogs solely devoted to Amazon.

McLuhan was right in that the way we communicate with each other transforms culture. But we don’t discard older vestiges of our culture when a new medium comes along. Homer has been transformed from oral narrative to written text to print text to film to TV to online text and back to oral narrative. Yes, the message is slightly different each time, but the way we understand Homer has changed even more radically because of other changes that are happening around us all the time. This doesn’t mean we still can’t enjoy the works of Homer sung to the music of a lyre sitting next to a campfire — or even simulate that environment on our computer screens — we’ll just never experience it the same way the ancient Greeks did, because our culture is vastly different from theirs.

So asking whether e-books will “replace” print books is in many ways irrelevant. The internet has already had a huge impact on the way we communicate with each other. There will continue to be “books” — extended texts, whether electronic or printed — based on whether our culture still demands them, and I suspect it will, though I also suspect that the types of books we want will continue to change. Right now, the technology for presenting printed books is better than the technology for presenting e-books. That’s why we haven’t seen an explosion of e-books. As electronic display technology improves, more and more extended texts will published electronically. Will the meaning of those texts be changed by moving to a different medium? Not as much as the surrounding culture will have changed, and not for the same reasons.

Yesterday I discussed Umberto Eco’s lecture on the future of books from the perspective of whether e-books can replace traditional books. I think Eco rightly distinguishes between “books to read” and “books to consult,” with electronic books to consult likely replacing traditional ones, but traditional books to read maintaining long-term dominance over e-books.

However, I do think the “books to read” / “books to consult” dichotomy oversimplifies things. I might read a computer manual cover to cover, but I might also consult it for just the information I need. Ditto for many (most?) scholarly works. The argument against Google print has often been that it treats all books as if they were books to consult, and this is true, but we might also consult any book, even the quintessential “book to read.”

Eco makes another important point about e-texts. Often e-books have been hailed as a revolutionary new medium because of the infinite possibilities of hyperlinking. Eco argues that the hyperlinking in itself does nothing to expand the original text:

Now suppose that a finite and limited text is organised hypertextually by many links connecting given words with other words. In a dictionary or an encyclopaedia the word wolf is potentially connected to every other word that makes up part of its possible definition or description (wolf is connected to animal, to mammal to ferocious, to legs, to fur, to eyes, to woods, to the names of the countries in which wolves exist, etc.). In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf can be connected only with the textual sections in which it shows up or in which it is explicitly evoked. The series of possible links is finite and limited. How can hypertextual strategies be used to “open” up a finite and limited text?

Eco is saying that the value of a text comes precisely from the static arrangement of its words. In theory, anyone could have written Hamlet — the words were available to them — but Shakespeare did it first, so we value Shakespeare.

There was a lively discussion at Future of the Book a few days ago about whether a “networked book” was still a book. It is a “text,” but it is infinitely variable and constantly modifiable. Eco would say it is not a book, or even a text. A “text” is a fixed sequence of words. It might be modified — even Hamlet might — but it would no longer be the same text.

There is certainly an inclination among wiki members to preserve a version of their work. Wikipedia is planning a static, printed version, and other, smaller wiki projects have published versions of what they create. Is this because they have some notion that a static text is a different (better?) thing from a networked text?

There are some real benefits to “fixing” texts. I can remember (but I’m too lazy to look up) a significant online debate a year or so ago on whether it’s ethical to change a blog posting once it’s up. The consensus seemed to be that other than to correct typos, it was not. Why? Because others would respond to the original text, and they’d be made to look like idiots if the original was subsequently changed. My personal practice follows this consensus — it certainly seems like a reasonable approach. Larger revisions can be made in the comments section or in clearly marked updates.

We value fixity, but we hail the e-text as a “revolutionary” medium because of its maleability. However, it seems that maleability is not its true virtue: interactivity is. Paradoxically, maleability inhibits interactivity, so we typically form conventions to suppress the ill effects of maleability. And sure, I don’t modify my blog posts, but I respond to others in my posts, and others respond to mine in theirs. Later, I might write a new post synthesizing these thoughts. Still later, I might write a book that brings these thoughts together with newer (and older) ones. All these are good things. Which one is a book? Probably only the last.

Michael Lew points to this transcript of a lecture given by Umberto Eco on the future of books a couple years back. He makes some important observations about e-books:

[B]y inserting a micro- cassette in the book’s spine or by connecting it to the internet one can have a book printed out in front of us. Even in this case, however, we shall still have a book, though as different from our current ones as ours are different from old manuscripts on parchment, and as the first Shakespeare folio of 1623 is different from the last Penguin edition. Yet, up to now e-books have not proved to be commercially successful as their inventors hoped. I have been told that some hackers, grown up on computers and unused to browsing books, have finally read great literary masterpieces on e-books, but I think that the phenomenon remains very limited. In general, people seem to prefer the traditional way of reading a poem or a novel on printed paper. E-books will probably prove to be useful for consulting information, as happens with dictionaries or special documents. They will probably help students obliged to bring with them ten or more books when they go to school, but they will not substitute for other kinds of books that we love to read in bed before sleep, for example.

I think over the short term, Eco is absolutely right about this, and I want to make two important points about what he says. First, he argues that an e-book is still a book, just like a pulp paperback and a parchment scroll are. Some have argued that by computerizing text we have invented a new medium, inherently different from other media, but Eco argues that the two are the same thing. He also divides books into two categories, “books to consult,” like dictionaries and encyclopedias, and “books to read,” like novels and histories. He can see e-books taking over the “books to consult” market rapidly, as indeed they already have, but he suggests that paper books will be the preferred mode for “books to read.”

As an example, Eco points out that most of us can’t imagine editing a text without printing it out first. If we insist on printing things, that suggests that there really is a difference between print media and the electronic word. Here I have to agree: for any kind of extended writing, I do prefer a printout to a computer readout, but not for the reasons Eco gives. The problem with editing on a computer is that the spatial orientation of the text changes as I make edits. If I add a paragraph to page 4, then what was once on page 7 is now on page 8. It’s disorienting! With a printed manuscript, everything stays where it was until I print it again. I can write in all sorts of comments on the margins, and I still have the visual cues of the printed text to help me see what else needs to be done. Now I can imagine a computer interface that would allow me to edit in the same way on a computer, but I probably wouldn’t use it. Why? Because the old way of editing works just fine, and the new way would require me to learn a whole new set of commands just to use it.

For reading a book, however, I’m not sure Eco’s argument applies. The main reasons to use electronic versions of paper books are to save space and to make distribution cheaper. If I had an e-book reader that was as easy on the eyes as paper and as easy to carry as a typical printed hardback, then if it was cheaper than printed books, I’d use it for reading nearly every sort of book. The only type of book I might want read the old fashioned way is one I want to make exensive notes in. However, even in this case, I think the inconveniences of making computerized notes are outweighed by their advantages, so I might be willing to learn a new interface in order to make my notes electronically.

I have a lot more to say about Eco, but no more time today, so I think I’ll finish this post tomorrow.

There are bookstores that sell books by the inch. In the 19th century, many households had faux bookcases, with no books, just the spines. Even today, I have an antique room divider painted with trompe l’oeil books. The New York Review of Books has over a hundred thousand subscribers. Are all those people reading it to decide what to read, or to convey the impression of being well-read?

Do we value books because of the knowledge they contain, or because of the status they confer on us as readers?

Over at Future of the Book, Ben Vershbow is speculating about what the ideal e-book will look like. There are some important ergonomic and aesthetic factors defining e-books, but I think the social factors might be the most important of all.

College students use textbooks as tools to help them get the grades they need to graduate. When they’re done with them, they sell the books. No one is impressed with a shelf full of textbooks. What they keep are “status books” like Joyce’s Ulysses or the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Encyclopedia Brittanica used to be a status book, but now people in the know just buy the CD — or use Wikipedia. Printed Brittanicas clog the wastebins of Goodwill stores across the nation.

How will a collection of e-books convey status? It can’t, unless it gives us the knowledge we need to demonstrate that status, or the means for us to give the impression of status. Since most of us read in private, an e-book reader has a tough time fitting the bill.

That suggests to me that the first successful e-books will be ones that convey must-have knowledge. In fact, they already exist: CD encyclopedias are those books. They just seem like a failure compared to the cash-cows that print encyclopedias once were. What will be the next successful e-genre? Probably not pulp fiction; even a cheap $200 e-book reader won’t compete with $6.99 Wal-Mart impulse buy. Maybe it will be the New York Review of Books.

Another possibility might be the e-coffee table book: a $500 tablet that takes a prominent place in the center of the living room. It could definitely be a conversation piece. If it was a dedicated e-book, unlike a laptop, it wouldn’t seem like invading your hosts’ privacy to pick it up while they’re in the kitchen mixing your martinis — just to see what the up-and-coming urbanite browses in her/his spare time.

In that case, the e-books themselves would have to be top-scale as well. They’d need to be professionally designed and produced, with informative text and plenty of pictures. But they’d also need to be accessible: as easy to enter into as flipping open a traditional coffee-table book. No complex navigation; just a touch screen and an easy way to flip from page to page. Scroll bars, the kind that work fine for computer windows, are too ungainly for e-books. What about some sort of external toggle wheel, or even the scroll wheel like on an iPod?

They’d also need to give their owners a reason to forego the standard-issue coffee table book. Some additional functionality, perhaps? Could they also be the control center for the home entertainment system? Could they tie into family photos and basic internet functions such as shopping and checking e-mail? Would they work as video phones? Perhaps they could also serve as visual art: a virtual koi pond, or a fantastic landscape.

Books are status symbols; e-books won’t take their place until they confer the same status.

There’s a great new organization and blog forming, focused on the “Future of the Book.” It’s a fabulously interesting question, of course, to ponder what’s going to happen to books in the digital age, and it’s a great idea to put some minds together and try to not only speculate but also to shape that future.

So far, I think books have proven remarkably resilient. Five years ago, I began preparing my publishing service business (which I’ve since sold) for that future by moving away from book design and towards Web design (the lousy design of this site notwithstanding). Looking back now, I think we would have been better off staying with books. I’m not a big reader of books, spending more and more of my leisure reading time online, but I do love their physicality. I enjoy the feeling of progress as I flip page after page, moving through a complex plot or argument. The Future of the Book begins to examine how (or whether) to duplicate that experience in a digital environment.

I was surprised to see just one article on the blog about Google Print and Google’s new library initiative, this one concerned with the commercialization of libraries. This is a significant question, no doubt, as we begin to wonder what sort of bias a commercial library service will add to the process of library research.

Of course, libraries are already commercialized in that the products they loan are commercial products. Books are published with the intention of making a profit — many of them with libraries in mind as their sole customers. Journals accept advertising. What’s the difference between seeing a Google ad framing the book page you’re viewing and seeing a print ad in a journal?

What I see as a bigger question, however, is what Google Print does to the process of reading a book. As the service works now, I can only read three pages in either direction from the text I’ve searched for. If I want to read more, I can do a new search, but there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to “find” the exact page I’m looking for — after all, I don’t know what words are on it. There’s no way to flip through the entire text, the way I can when I pick up a book in the library to see if it’s worth reading. I can search for terms in the seven pages I’ve been provided, to see if they come up again in other spots in the book, but I never learn of interesting tangents I might never have imagined, several chapters down the road.

Google, of course, offers links to Amazon and other places that will be happy to sell you the book in question (as long as it’s in print or used copies are available), but at that point, why bother with Google in the first place? Many student researchers won’t have the patience to wait several days for a book to arrive in the mail (or the budget to afford it). Or you could head on down to the library to pick up the book there (if it’s available). The promise of Google is to unlock information that it never occured to human indexers to tabulate: some interesting observations about jazz in a psychology text, or a part of a chapter about the Pope in a book on 15th century British history. If it never occurs to the researcher to rifle through the right book, the information will not be found.

I don’t think there’s much doubt, either, what Google’s ultimate intention is. They don’t just plan on linking to Amazon.com — they plan to sell you those public-domain and out-of-print books themselves. If they can coordinate with e-book manufacturers (and they will), they’ll charge you to download the books so that you can browse them more effectively. As e-books become more powerful, we will be able to browse through them as easily as we can with paper books. Will this “commercialization” be a bad thing? Not if it makes books as searchable as the Web, but as tangible and legible as old-fashioned paper books.

The bigger question is, when that day arrives, will anyone still be interested in reading them?

Yesterday I wrote about what e-books will not be. Today I’m going to write about what they might be.

Before we get to that, let’s think more about what they won’t be. They won’t be movies. The book fills a different role than passive entertainment such as film. They won’t be blogs. People like the narrative aspect of books; they want something meaty, a story that they can follow along with. They won’t be simple text dumps like you find on Project Gutenberg. If people didn’t want their books to look pretty, there wouldn’t be such a job title as Book Designer, and publishers wouldn’t spend thousands of dollars on the look and feel of each text they print. They won’t be “interactive fiction.” People want to be told a story, they don’t want to make it up themselves.

Most importantly, however, they won’t simply be electronic versions of printed books. The modern book evolved to be what it is because of limitations in the medium itself. Change the medium, and you’ll change the genre, too. Publishers want their books to have a certain heft to them, in order to match customers’ perception of what a “book” is. If a book runs shorter than expected, they’ll set it in a larger font and use thicker paper to make customers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. Longer books get smaller type and thinner paper; they all end up about the same size. E-books won’t suffer this limitation: with e-books it’s both easier and more difficult to tell how long they are. You can easily do a word count to get a precise length (something that’s a bit more laborious with a printed book), but you can’t get a general “feel” for how big an e-book is. No longer is “heft” an important consideration.

A more relevant factor will be memory — since readers will have a finite amount of space, e-books that use memory efficiently will at least initially be preferred. Huge image, movie, and sound files will detract from a book’s value because they will be seen as space-hogs. Instead, a few tasteful graphics or an impressive look and feel will be more significant.

I’ve speculated in the past that e-books will spell doom to publishers, because the initial investment to publish an e-book will be so much less than a print book. The way publishers might compete, however, is by producing glitzier, higher production value e-books. Most authors are not prepared to produce flashy, graphics-laden texts. On the other hand, another alternative could be that authors, artists, and designers would work together to produce e-texts that compete with commercial publishers. Since they can save on printing/distribution costs, this might be a viable option; certainly more viable than today’s expensive self-publishing.

I see a future without publishers as a hopeful one, where the barriers to entry are not as high, and hard work and creativity are rewarded. Another possibility is for commercial publishers and media outlets to impose the same old system on the new medium. The least likely future for e-books is that they will fill the same role in our society as printed books do now.

There’s a really great article over at Gizmodo about e-books. I think it’s completely wrong, but it’s great to see that someone’s been doing some serious thinking about e-books.

Why is it wrong? Here’s a five-second summary of the article:

• E-books haven’t been successful yet because there hasn’t been a really good e-book reader
• Sony’s new Librie is a good e-book reader, but its arcane DRM has crippled it
• Not all DRM is bad, and for e-books to be successful, DRM must be included
• Once someone gets both DRM and the physical e-books right, e-books and print books will peacefully coexist for years to come

Here’s where I disagree. E-books combine two incredibly disruptive technologies: ease of distribution of information and ease of access to information. They add a third — the back-breaker: convenience. DRM cripples the first two. Sony’s Librie cripples the third as well by making books “disappear” two months after you “buy” them. I think e-book readers are going to be successful when they stop thinking of themselves as e-book readers. What people want is a powerful, portable, Web-surfing machine that’s easier on the eyes than a traditional computer interface.

Once people can carry around their Web browser as easily as they can a book, they will start to use the Web in ways they had never imagined. Instead of relying on those blue highway signs, they’ll find their favorite restaurants with the portable surfing device, on the road. They’ll sketch pictures and upload them to their private Web space. They’ll even start to use them to read longer, more involved texts: books. E-books will evolve the same way the Web itself has evolved. The first successful e-books will be amateur efforts, written by tinkerers just exploring the new medium. Next, classic, copyright-free texts will be transferred to the new format. Finally, gingerly, traditional publishers will get involved as they see the potential for their market to get sapped away by a bunch of amateurs. By this time, e-books will already have evolved into a new medium. Will people want e-books in 300-page chunks, the same way they like their novels? Probably not. Will they want pictures, or sound, or more interactivity than traditional books offer? Probably.

There’s no telling exactly what this new medium will look like, but there’s no doubt that it will not look like today’s traditional, published book. I’ll speculate more about it in a later article.

The news a couple weeks ago about the release of Sony’s new ebook reader has aroused only a touch of speculation. Instead of focusing, like I did, on how the technology will transform publishing (if it has any effect at all), most of the articles I’ve found on the topic tend to center on how publishing companies will be able to use the technology to cut costs:

E-paper could save newspapers a bundle on printing and distribution. In 10 years 12 percent of newspapers could be published on e-paper, says Harald Ritter, technology chief for Ifra, the publisher’s group; eventually they’ll all follow suit, just as the recording industry dropped vinyl. “In 20 to 30 years we will see newspaper publishers abandon print for economic reasons,” says Roger Fidler, director of the Center for Cyber Information at Kent State University.

Wow! Newspapers will save a bundle? Gosh! Let me be the first in line to buy a $400 reader so newspapers can save a bundle! A better question is this: what will a newspaper be when it no longer involves paper? Will the 2034 equivalent of a “newspaper” even exist? Why should it? The reason they exist now is because they are a cheap way to distribute news. Surely with technology like e-books, we can come up with an even cheaper way.

Of course, newspapers aren’t really my thing. I write books. In fact, I’ve just written one, and all this talk of e-books has gotten me to thinking about how I might want to distribute it. Do I really need a publisher? As I pointed out before, the main purpose of publishers is to help authors defray the cost of printing. Once printing is out of the picture, the cost of “publishing” is trivial. Why couldn’t I, for example, distribute my book from an online store? You send me $3, I e-mail you the file, ready for downloading to your e-book reader.

But how would anyone hear about it? How would I get the word out? I could do the same thing “real” publishers do: hire a publicist. Or I could try to do publicity on my own, sending out press releases and offers to do radio interviews. I’d even have a “hook,” since I’m trying out a novel form of book distribution.

I could try other methods: Maybe distribute the first three or four chapters for free, then ask for money once I get readers “hooked.” I could distribute the whole thing free and ask for payment on the honor system. I could try any number of means to get my book out there, and I suspect that’s exactly what most authors will be doing as soon as we see a widespread distribution of e-book readers. Meanwhile, publishers, instead of counting how much money they’ve saved, will be trying to figure out why they exist at all.

This article describes Sony’s latest effort to produce a truly usable e-book. Based on the optimistic marketing-ese in the article, it sounds like they finally might have done it.

The reader uses new e-paper technology, where no energy is required to power the monitor itself; instead, “e-ink” is used: the reader physically changes the state of the pixels. Imagine a giant grid with covered with ping-pong balls painted black on one side and white on the other. You can flip any of the balls at any time to create a black or white “pixel,” but once you’ve created your image, no additional energy is required. At 170 DPI, the resolution of the monitor is more than double that of a typical computer monitor, and the readout is as clear as if it was printed on a sheet of paper.

In short, if we are to believe their adspeak, Sony appears to have produced the Holy Grail of e-books. Now what does this mean for the future of books?

First of all, it has shifted the burden of the initial capital expenditure for making a book. In the old style of publishing, the publisher was responsible for the major capital outlays involved in the publication process. The Big One has always been printing costs: if you want to have a reasonable per-unit publishing cost, you have to print a lot of books-typically at least 5,000. This might bring your per-unit cost down to, say $3 per copy, for a $15,000 initial investment. Once you’re spending that kind of money, you want to make sure your final product looks good, so you spend another $15,000 or so hiring designers and typographers to prepare the book for printing. Now you’re spending some serious money, so you’ll need an editor to make sure the content you’re producing isn’t tripe. Add another $15,000. Once you’ve spent that much, you’ll need to add money in the budget to market the book when it’s printed. Easily another $15,000, give or take. So an absolute bargain basement book costs at least $60,000 before we even begin thinking about paying the author!

In the new e-book model, the publisher never has to make that initial $15,000 investment for printing. Since the publisher never had to invest anything, suddenly editors, designers, and typographers don’t seem so important-there’s no investment to protect. If there’s no investment, then why bother with marketing either? If a book catches on, there’s free money for everyone; if it doesn’t, no one’s lost anything, so it doesn’t matter. In fact, the publisher itself doesn’t matter: the publisher was only there to cover the large initial investment. No investment, no publisher!

So, who now takes the place of the publisher? The reader, of course! It’s the reader who has to make the initial investment in an e-book reading machine, which is what made all this possible. But why would the reader buy the e-book machine if there’s no assurance from publishers that high-quality books will be available? Publishers are caught in a catch-22 here. They’d like nothing better than to shunt printing costs onto their customers, but once e-book readers are widespread, no one will need publishers. I suspect publishers will try to do the same thing the recording industry is doing with music: act as if the new medium doesn’t exist while simultaneously trying to profit from it.

In fact, the publishing industry is actually in a worse position than the recording industry. Once we have a truly viable electronic replacement for books, the publisher’s role will be reduced to near zero. At least with the recording industry, someone has to pay for the expense of producing the music, and studio space doesn’t come cheap these days. By contrast, anyone who can run a word processor can make a book, and if they have talent as a writer, the quality of the design, typography, even the proofreading becomes a distant second in terms of what really matters to readers.

The publishing industry will hold on valiantly for a few years, maybe even a few decades, but it will inevitably become a shadow of its former self. The key to writing a best seller will be publicity, and publishers will be no more than glorified publicists, not the arbiters of taste and culture that they claim to be today.