Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  In fact, some books already exist only in electronic format and offer things that print books can’t, like the ability to be updated every few days. For a number of years, Kindle’s number-one bestseller was a guide to Kindle in ebook-only format by an author who self-published it with Amazon. The author, Stephen Windwalker, updated his book a couple of times a week. Purchasers could redownload the updates at no charge, so they could always have a fresh copy on hand.

  This is something that Walt Whitman dreamed about. He revised his greatest collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, nine times in his lifetime, constantly editing and constantly changing the order of poems, adding new ones, and refreshing old ones. He printed this book time and time again at his own expense, which left him broke and barely able to support himself. Even when he was near death, he was only concerned with proofreading his “deathbed” edition. With ebooks, every author can be his or her own Walt Whitman, constantly reclaiming his or her own work by revising it and redistributing it.

  Admittedly, today’s distribution network for content updates needs to be improved. As a reader, for example, I have no way of knowing whether a new version of a given book is available on my e-reader. We need a distribution mechanism that works like blogs do to push out updates as they become available and then notify us of them. I’m thinking in particular of the way that the iPad and iPhone show a “badge” on the icon of every application to indicate if there’s an update or if I have new email or if someone tagged me on Facebook. The same idea could apply to ebook content.

  This is the great thing about where we are right now. I’m not speaking as a pie-in-the-sky futurist but as someone who sees technological inevitability. Nimble authors and publishers are able to move fast to take advantage of new ebook features—like animation, interactivity, live chat, location tracking, quizzes, and recipe calculators—that are gradually being added on top of existing features. People in publishing who are smart enough to leap on this accumulation of features are finding themselves with hits, because these features aren’t just snazzy eye candy to the digerati, passing memes of the day that get touted in the blogosphere and in some article in Wired magazine. These features work because that’s how people want to consume information, and they want it all in one convenient package.

  But this can only happen if authors and their publishers fully embrace the potential that the ebook revolution presents. I’d like to say that all of them have the potential to grasp it. But as I traveled the country, meeting with publishers, authors, and others to evangelize for Kindle, I began to see that this was not true. Some did not get it at all, and you could sense it in everything they said and did about ebooks. But thankfully, others did. These are the companies that I think will not only survive but thrive in the world after the revolution, while the others will look around in wonder at how quickly their once-mighty empires fell.

  Bookmark: Inscriptions

  I was a bookish kid. I’d blow my weekly allowance at a bookstore at the local mall every Saturday. That’s when the mall’s courts and hallways were occupied by people selling secondhand books. They’d set up shop in front of the comic store and the Orange Julius store, not far from the Spaceport Arcade, where you could always hear the eight-bit battle cries of Donkey Kong. Because the books were used, they were often cheap. Hours after entering the mall, I’d emerge into daylight again with a stuffed knapsack, sometimes too heavy for me to carry on my back. I’d drag it along the sidewalk to my mom’s car like a refugee fleeing a burning library, ash and sparks in the wind behind me, determined to save as much culture as I could.

  Among all these books, I’d often find inscriptions on the first or second page to boys and girls I’d never met from aunts and uncles of all stripes and sizes. The inscriptions were often inked—sometimes with a bold hand, sometimes a frail one—and were usually to commemorate an event. A birthday, an anniversary, or (more darkly) a divorce or bereavement.

  Inscriptions are a more personal, lasting kind of autograph. When an author autographs your book, he’s often sitting at a table at a book-signing event, working in a rote, mechanical way and hoping to sell enough books by the end of the day to justify his time. It’s vaguely mercantile. But inscriptions are the life-soul of families and can often last longer than the families themselves.

  For example, there’s a collection of inscribed Bibles at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Stuck in Dallas for a day due to a long layover, I chanced a trip to SMU and was lucky to peruse its carefully preserved Bibles and see the aging ink in them. Some of these Bibles date back to the 1700s and served in their time as birth records. Frontier families in Texas recorded the names and birth dates of their children, generation after generation. The Bibles give a sense of frontier life, of families living far from hospitals and churches, far from the society of anything but cattle and wolves and the hope for a better life in days to come.

  Humble inscriptions are important parts of family history. And yet, if and when my own descendants try to reconstruct their family tree, they’ll be stumped by digital books. Because you see, digital books can’t have inscriptions. I can’t give my girlfriend a digital book and write a note on the front page. Digital books are an extinction event for inscriptions. It’s like what happened with the dinosaurs. Though they ruled the world, once the extinction event happened 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs died off, and there were no more dinosaur bones in the fossil record. Thus it is with digital books. In the digital fossil record, there won’t be any more traces of inscriptions.

  It’s almost impossible to trace the life history of a digital good. If you download music illegally from the internet, you have no way of knowing who else owned the music file. It could have changed hands a thousand times, ricocheting from Russia to Serbia to France to the United States, from PC to Mac, from one BitTorrent client to another. Despite its travel, the file is still pristine, original, and untrammeled.

  Imagine what a digital passport would look like if it could accompany such a file, stamped and counter-stamped with so many international visas! Unless you crack the file open and re-author it, you can’t put your mark on a digital good. Could you modify an ebook and inscribe it? Yes. Assuming you can crack the ebook open, you can use any number of tools to add a page to an ebook, but doing so is a hurdle. Actually, it’s more like trying to jump over a hurdle while racing uphill in a clown suit and scuba flippers. It’s so hard as to make the effort pointless.

  I think we’ve lost something with ebooks in not being able to inscribe them or trace their histories. We’ve lost a way of learning about ourselves and our families. But then, perhaps this loss is compensated for by the rise in social networks, where one day your great-grandkids will be able to download all your tweets and Facebook posts.

  Will there be tools to allow you to inscribe ebooks one day? If so, they’ll need to be provided by the retailers and others who control the reading experience of books, and that means Apple, Amazon, and others. You’ll need to rely on these retailers staying in business so that the inscriptions you author stay in their clouds. Once these clouds collapse, the inscriptions will likely be lost forever, unless a company one day provides the service of printing ebooks onto paper and binding them as regular old books.

  I can imagine a retro company in Portland or Brooklyn doing this, a company run by hipsters in prim mustaches and fedoras, a boutique company that prints ebooks onto paper in the same way that other Brooklyn boutiques publish print magazines as clay tablets.

  Each family has its own story, often partly inscribed in the pages of its books. Does your family have a book with an important inscription? A family Bible? Is a chapter of your own history preserved between the brittle pages of an old book? Care to share your story?

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/11.html

  Innovators and Laggards: The New Face of Publishing

  The biggest revolutionaries in the ebook revolution aren’t the retailers or authors—or even the publishers. They’re the readers
, the ones who took a leap of faith and bought the first Kindles or who plunked down six hundred dollars on the first iPads. They’re the innovators and early adopters who told their friends and families how good ebooks were, how readable they were, and who bought up ebooks like crazy.

  You have to ask yourself, of course, why people bought ebooks in the first place. To be fair, e-readers are sexy, and they’re great gadgets. And when innovators get their hands on a great new gadget, there’s often a lot of cachet that goes with it, which others adopt. You see the same thing all the time in fashion design and technology—this trickle-down effect of social mores and conventions, fads, trends, and gadgets. But one thing that is different about ebooks is what I call “reader’s guilt.”

  While MP3 players and airplane-friendly DVD players are neat, most of the music or videos we consume are for entertainment purposes. But books are different. You spent years with them in school. You’ve likely been taught how important they are, and you suspect in a kind of hangdog, guilty way that you should be reading more often than you really do. That’s reader’s guilt. And that’s partly why some users—maybe even you—voraciously buy ebooks. You feel like you ought to. This nagging, guilty feeling may encourage you to give in and buy a Nook.

  And let’s face it, we have every right to feel guilty for not reading as much as we ought to. According to studies funded by the National Education Association and publisher advocacy groups, the U.S. population is fragmented into two equal groups: half the population reads, and the rest don’t read. We’re a nation of readers and nonreaders. According to these studies, 33 percent of high school graduates who don’t go on to college never read another book for the rest of their lives, and 42 percent of college graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Sadly, 80 percent of U.S. families didn’t buy or read any books last year.

  These numbers scare publishers, of course.

  When it comes to ebooks, there are two kinds of publishers: innovators and laggards. During my time as Kindle’s technology evangelist, I met plenty of both.

  In my travels, I found that, in general, the most innovative, flexible, and successful publishers in the book market were the small and midsized ones. They’re the ones that have the most to gain, the ones that are willing to take the largest risks. But they’re not so small that taking a risk with technology will bankrupt them. I’m thinking in particular about my own publisher, Sourcebooks, a company I first visited years ago when I was managing Amazon’s audio and video ebooks.

  Sourcebooks was the first publisher to include CDs and DVDs with their print books, bundled as companions to the content. The idea that you could read the poetry of Sylvia Plath or T.S. Eliot and also hear them reciting their own poetry caused a stir when it was first launched ten years ago. Not only was Sourcebooks first to combine text and audio in print, but they also were the first to make the same move with ebooks. I remember working with them to get recordings of poetry slams digitized or videos by Johnny Cash that could be embedded and then seen in an ebook as it was read.

  Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah runs the company with as much attention to detail as Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. And yet, unlike them, she’s nimble enough to adapt quickly and seek inspiration where she least expects it. She’s brazen and no-nonsense, the kind of person who’d run a saloon in the Wild West gold rush of ebooks. (Full disclosure: because of their talent for innovation, Sourcebooks was the first publisher that came to mind when it came time for me to pitch this book.)

  Based outside Chicago, Sourcebooks has three or four hands in different technology pies, building out enhanced ebooks that seamlessly integrate video and audio with reading and dazzling storytelling, as well as interactive children’s books that personalize the reading experience for each child.

  Bill, another innovative publisher I know, runs a company that makes travel guides. He totally gets the future of books, even though he seems like a classic old-school publisher. He enunciates clearly, thinks through every word and nuance, and speaks as if he learned rhetoric in college, clearly a dying art. I could sit for hours listening to him in his conference room, which is lined with travel guides to places as remote as Baja and Bali.

  I’m not sure what’s more exotic, all those travel guides and the worlds they represent, or this voice of grandeur from publishing’s past, when publishers were not only eloquent but understood their financial models and kept up to date with technology. That’s dizzyingly difficult and complex for most publishers today, considering how overwhelmed they are by all the new pricing models and gadgetry available.

  When I talk to Bill about the travel guides of the future and how reading will change, we agree that there will be guidebooks that blur the lines between reading about a place and experiencing it more tangibly, even from another location.

  Publishers like Dominique and Bill are looking at creating ebooks that are more like digital applications, because those ebooks can do more than traditional books or even regular ebooks. They see ebooks as interactive and engaging products, with enough narrative or nonfictional glue to bind everything together.

  These kinds of ebooks are expensive to make, so you’re not likely to see a lot of them, at least initially. Ebooks as applications are sexy, but like the sexiest of creatures, their beauty soon fades. What looks really hot now with all of its techno-trickery will, of necessity, become obsolete in a few years. That’s the way of applications. I challenge you to find a computer that will load and run software you bought ten or twenty years ago. Even if you could find the software in CD or downloadable form, the computer’s hardware and operating systems will have changed so much in the intervening years that you’d be hard-pressed to get the application running.

  This fast pace of innovation is a problem with technology in general. For example, I found a digital tape of some of the earliest writing I did as a kid, from when I’d visit my father’s newspaper and write stories on the newspaper mainframe. These stories were backed up onto tape spools, which I have now. But I’ve searched far and wide, and the only place I can find that has a working reader for this kind of tape is a computer museum in Germany for technology that was still working twenty years ago.

  Technology ages. Fast.

  The shelf life of an ebook application is only a few years at best. And an Android ebook app has a different kind of code than an Apple ebook app. They’re written in different languages, and you have to pay engineers tens of thousands of dollars to port them from one platform to another. Today’s hot application becomes yesterday’s fossil in the blink of an eye.

  Take a look at the fossils in the Burgess Shale Formation, a strip of ancient rock in the Canadian Rockies. These are fossils of creatures that lived 500 million years ago and can’t be found anymore on our planet. Some look like winged lobsters or walking accordions with poisonous spines, like manta rays with parrot’s beaks or five-eyed worms the size of elephant snouts. They’re creatures with body plans so bizarre and befuddling that we’d be terrified if we saw any of them crawling along the sidewalk. But it’s through these bizarre bursts of evolution that nature experiments and selects which creatures will survive and move into another era.

  Even so, I’m not faulting publishers in these halcyon, gold-rush days of ebooks for innovating and plunking down $50,000 or more to build each interactive ebook application (and that’s what they often cost). They’re expensive, and everyone from publisher to author tightens their belts on royalties to make these applications happen. But even if publishers don’t see immediate profit from ebook apps, the experiences they gain are essential for evolving into the future. In times like this, when the pace of evolution is fast enough to be called a revolution, there are massive changes and die-offs, and the nimble will inherit the earth. The survivors will be those who are agile enough to scamper between the legs of the bigger dinosaurs, avoiding them as they fall.

  I’ve spoken of innovators, but the publishing world has plenty of laggards, as well, including som
e of the biggest names in the game. While they were once the industry darlings, many of the bigger, more established New York publishers are now the dinosaurs.

  Walking into the New York offices of a Big Five publisher is like stepping back in time. Or like stepping onto the set of Mad Men. Even when you’re out for lunch with the presidents and general managers, you’re often in a vermouth-fogged version of the 1950s and ’60s, where deals are decided over lunch or sometimes by the quality of your suit tie or class ring.

  Success slows some publishers down, making it hard for them to take risks. And just as Amazon is wary of innovating too fast or leaking its secrets, top New York publishers likewise can be very cagey and secretive. I know of one publisher, for example, who paid for a vice president to rent an apartment for a month and lock herself in there, in total secret, with the manuscript of a forthcoming blockbuster book. The vice president had a month to format the manuscript as an ebook by hand. The publisher didn’t want to risk giving outside conversion houses the digital manuscript, for fear it might leak.

  But all the secrets come out once a year when all the retailers and publishers gather at a trade show called BookExpo America.

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  April showers bring May flowers, along with rants from publishers at BookExpo America in New York, the nation’s largest book event. I’d fly there every May to represent Amazon in talking to publishers about ebooks and innovation. My meetings with publishers outside Amazon’s walled garden weren’t all pleasant exchanges of ideas and innovation, though. In fact, more often than not, I’d find myself getting yelled at and treated like I was an invading Vandal or Hun.

  On one particular day, for example, I was in a basement somewhere in New York City, and a senior vice president of Disney books was screaming at me.