While J.K. Rowling disses e-books, others in the book establishment are catching on.
From Jeff Gomez, an Internet marketer for Holtzbrinck, owner of St. Martin’s Press and other major imprints such as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, comes a blog with the tantalizing title of Print Is Dead.
Jeff himself is author or coauthor of four novels and other dead-tree books. And, no, he does not think that all p-books will instantly vanish. Instead he’s saying that “our current notions of what constitutes a ‘book’ is certainly up for a major examination.”
Updating “book”
His thoughts certainly jibe with mine and those of my friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Among other capabilities, the institute’s Sophie program will let users create their own networked books and will allow goodies such as multimedia and annotations to appear inside books.
Jeff’s latest p-book, also called Print is Dead—let’s hope an e-book, too, will be on the way!—will appear late this year from Palgrave Macmillan, a Holtzbrinck arm.
What interactivity could have done for my laptop guide from St. M’s
Among Holtzbrinck’s other houses, as noted, is St. Martin’s Press, which eons ago published a book of mine, The Complete Laptop Computer Guide.
I can remember Harry Welsh, a kindly systems man at the Washington Post, putting out a bulletin to Post reporters from India to Mexico, asking for their tips for my “Electronic Traveler chapter.” I lucked out. But what if blogging and a truly popular Internet had existed at the time for consumers, not just closed-gardens like CompuServe? How much better a book I’d have written with more input from laptop users. And then what if a Sophie-style program had been around to incorporate readers’ comments and so on once The Complete Laptop Computer Guide had appeared? Imagine all the value added to the book and the possibilities of new business models such as subscription fees for people who wanted access to exclusive forums in the guide with detailed updates.
Read/write as applied to books
This is Web 2.0 as applied to books, and I wish Jeff all kinds of luck—both with his book and with his e-book evangelization efforts within Holtzbrinck, which, alas, as reported in Wikipedia, ordered TOR last year to suspend an e-book initiative because the books lacked DRM. Hey, that was the company, so don’t beat up on Jeff. Going by Steve Jobs’ recent thoughts on DRM (thanks for the link, Obelisk), maybe Holtzbrinck, one of the better conglomerates, will reconsider.
Detail: I believe in both interactivity and freedom from interactivity. What works for a romance novel or a nonfiction book won’t necessarily work for John Updike, who, by the way, is a Farrar author [correction: nope, it’s Knopf].
Related: Jeff’s recent posts such as Would you like to read a game? The real future of the book , Priming Publishers: More lessons from the music industry and Like a Foolscrap: no eBook for Potter. Jeff’s blog started last year, and I’m delighted to have caught up with it.
And also of interest: Future of the Book’s observation’s on Net-related experiments from Farrar Straus and Giroux.
Tip to Jeff, Holtzbrinck’s rep to the IDPF: The right e-book standards will go a long way in promoting such wrinkles as annotated books and interbook linking. I fervently hope that the IDPF will pay attention to the OpenReader specs. Maybe IDPF can incorporate them into future e-book standards even if it apparently is too late for the moment. IDPF or an OASIS-blessed technical committee with major players involved should do the actual standards implementation since OpenReader lacks the proper resources for standards implementation and enforcement.
Update, 11:45 a.m.: Just one missing quote mark caused some linking toward the end of this post to go awry. Problem should be fixed by now. No, if:book was not commenting on OpenReader but rather on the Farrar experiment. Don’t you hate it when link problems actually cause misleading information to be appear?
hi
did this catch your attention?
“value added”, “possibilities of new business models”
indeed as “live-tree” books become more open and a sort-of living document there is value for the consumer in a subscription based model.
This could provide the much lacking incentive for people to purchase non-DRM books as opposed from downloading them from P2P networks and what not.
I hope this and the so called “social DRM” that Bill McCoy mentioned in his blogpost will help eliminate DRM.
ps
the 2 strongest points against DRM:
1., it will never ever work properly
2., it punishes the “good guys”
Hi, Tamas. I think both you and Bill are on the right track. “Social DRM” will not gum up gizmos the way the usual variety would. May publishers pay attention!
David