Continuing books I would never buy in print if I had a Kindle and books I would always buy in print even if I had a Kindle.
If I really, really like reading a particular title as an e-book, then I very well could be tempted to buy a print copy of that book, too.
While I seldom read books-in-print from a library, I have been known to buy books that I’ve already borrowed from the library and read. One example that comes to mind is Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman. (Oddly, that book appears not to be in-print in the U.S. but has been relaunched in the U.K. by Simon and Schuster. I wonder what the story is behind that.)
If I really, really enjoyed a particular e-book, then there’s a very good chance that I would acquire a print copy especially if the print version had a nice design…..just like all those people who bought a hardcopy of the newspaper after Obama’s election victory…..sometimes you want the print, too.
Continuing yesterday’s examination of my book buying habits if I had a Kindle.
There are certain types of books that I always will want to have in print, regardless of how much I use digital technologies. These may be books I love, either because of the author or the experience of reading the book left such a strong impression that I want to have the book on my shelf. (Somehow having an image of the book cover on a virtual bookshelf just doesn’t give me the same feeling).
First and most definitively – any novel by Coetzee, Ondaatje, or Pamuk.
I noticed that none of Coetzee is available in Kindle, while only a few works by either Ondaatje or Pamuk are available in Kindle.
Followed by most literary fiction. While I rarely read a novel more than once, I like having a good collection of literary fiction. (Notice from yesterday’s post that I don’t care if I have a collection of good mystery/detective/suspense fiction though I also enjoy reading those books.)
Basically, with buying and keeping print books I’m looking for quality writing whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. There’s a lot of historical non-fiction that I also would consider as preferable for print as well as contemporary non-fiction such as as books by Oliver Sacks.
Tomorrow, books I might buy both in print and as e-book if I had a Kindle.
Skewing the whole topic of e-books is the general assumption that everyone’s reading habits are the same.
It’s true that commercial genre fiction sells more than literary fiction. In looking over my bookshelf, there are some books I cherish because I value the author and really just want to have the book. Other books I enjoy reading (or didn’t like as much as I thought) and end up mostly selling those to used bookstores. It’s the latter type of book that I would end up likely to buy if I had an e-book reading device.
So, here’s a short list of the type of books I would likely never buy in print if I had a Kindle (or the Sony reader, etc.):
You may notice some type of theme here …. mystery/detective fiction, non-fiction about current events (especially politics or functioning of the U.S. government). On a related note, I would never buy any of those books in hardcover either, preferring mostly to wait a year until the paperback came out.
Tomorrow, a post about books I would always buy in print even if I had a Kindle.
With all the interest over publishers producing e-books for mobile devices (ranging from Kindle, Sony’s e-book reader, cell phones, and other e-book readers) you would think that a publisher would have produced a book on designing e-books for mobile devices. But I can’t find one. Am I missing something?
Maybe part of the problem is that most e-books aficionados at this stage seem to feel that book design, layout, and typography are irrelevant in an e-book world. They say, “Those are things best left to the user to control.” Of course, for years we’ve heard the same argument applied to Web sites. And, yet, there are many books about Web site design. There’s even a very good book on Mobile Web Design.
Perhaps there should be a book on mobile e-book design. Or, does e-book design really differ that much from Web site design?
Let’s examine some of the assumptions and concepts guiding the current incarnation of e-books for mobile devices.
The User Selects
This is what some call the “leave it to the reader” approach. The philosophy that the reader knows best what works for his eyes with regards to control of font size, typefaces, etc. Of course, good Web design allows a reader to increase text size to a certain extent but Web designers provide a starting point by selecting typefaces & font size that form part of a site’s specific design.
And there’s CSS
When knowledgeable e-book enthusiasts are asked about design limitations with regards to the emerging e-book standard, ePub, there’s invariably the glowing statement, “But you can use CSS to format the e-book as you desire.” ….the sound of tires screeching…. Anyone who has used CSS extensively can tell you that CSS can be a complex and challenging beast, particularly in the ways that different browsers support CSS. Will that be any different with the variety of mobile e-book devices? Heck, even Kindle doesn’t support ePub. And do all ePub devices behave the same with regards to display?
CSS does allow for remarkable functionality and I’m a great fan of CSS, though certainly no master of CSS. (Actually, I think there’s only a hundred or so CSS masters in existence on this planet.) I enjoy working with CSS, and it might be fun to play around and see just how far we can take e-book design in a direction that provides a great reading experience for the user. But that also takes a lot of work, which leads to the next topic.
The content conversion cost factor
There is a cost factor for publishers to convert content into an e-book format for mobile devices. Incidentally, it must be noted that there is not a cost factor for converting content into PDF since (for most publishers) PDF is already a by-product of the book design process. That’s an important factor and something that we’ll revisit later.
Certainly an e-book can be created without a lot of fuss, but how good does it really look? And does that really matter? After all, I remember in the mid-1990s that there were people who preferred surfing the Web with their terminal-screen Lynx browsers. There are always many people who are happy with whatever.
But there are many people who want their books (even their e-books) to look great. That’s an important factor to these readers. Some e-book fanatics will say that those people just need to get over their nostalgia for print and get on with the times. But the people who care about the look-and-feel of books are also people who buy a lot of books. That’s a market segment that publishers might care a lot about.
So how do publishers cost-effectively convert into formats both acceptable to Kindle (which can’t be ignored) and other e-book reading devices?
Is this 1993?
At this stage of the e-book technology life cycle (and I think we’re still in the early years of these products), perhaps publishers can just convert to an acceptable e-book format for books that are text only and realize that further conversions will be necessary down the road.
Can someone point me to a Web site from 1993 that is still available? Well, here’s a Web site I created in 1993.
You know what? I bet that site might look really good on some of these small, portable devices that we’re using for reading e-books today.
What about e-books in 2023?
Web site design has come a long way in 15 years. So has technology. In 1993 I remember that one of my colleagues had an Apple Newton. He was so cool.
Only a fool would believe that today’s Kindle and similar devices for reading e-books will not change significantly over the next 15 years. What will e-books and reading devices be like in 2023? No one really knows but there are bound to be some exciting developments with both e-ink and display screens that will further revolutionize the way that we read e-books.
What happens when…
What happens when there is a tablet-sized display supporting e-ink? Or, when mini-notebook computers with tablet screens reach a low-cost point? Or perhaps even flexible tablet-sized e-ink screens? Technological advances might very well surpass today’s limitations.
Tablet size…. What would happen to the e-book market if a thin, light-weight tablet device (either e-ink or LCD display) with a 12″ screen became affordable? Is this likely by 2023? Is anyone betting against it?
When type of device comes onto the market, it will truly revolutionize digital publishing.
But if you have a reading device with such a large screen, then do you need an e-book format that is based on reflow? Or, will that old by-product of print publishing – PDF with all its advanced layout that retains the “high fidelity” of a printed book – be the most common format for e-books? Which format will be chosen by people who buy a lot of books?
Likewise, such a device will change the way people read other materials, especially Web sites, and offer new opportunities for re-crafting what we now call a book. In this scenario, a book is no different than a Web site. And book design is no different than Web site design.
But monetizing a Web site is difficult and publishers certainly yet haven’t figured out how to package and monetize content as Web site, so that’s a big challenge for publishers. But with the prevalence of large-screen e-book reading devices that can support PDF, then many publishers can happily remain in the book selling business even when most books are digital.
Of course, there will always be some people who prefer to read only on a smaller device. That market will not go away, but if the Kindle of 2023 has a color 12″ screen….
Of course, by that time, perhaps Amazon will have bought Sony or some other hardware manufacturer and the Kindle has morphed into a general purpose, always wireless, portable PC.
All this effort today…
Technology forecasting is always prone to errors and everyone knows that you really can’t plan for more than two or three years out (and often not that). But technology management is a lot about strategy.
Getting books into a standard XML-based format such as ePub might be a good strategy for certain publishers. For other publishers, I’m not so sure. And I say that based on years of experience in working with markup languages, going back to the days of SGML. This post already has gotten too long, so I’ll address those issues in another post as well as further examining some of the topics covered here.
Don’t get me wrong…I have nothing against today’s generation of e-book reading devices. But that’s not the entire future of e-books.
Everybody’s talking about the proposed Google copyright settlement with publishers over Google’s massive digitizing project. The best summary are at The Millions, which examines how the Google settlement can change the literary landscape, and at EFF, which offers a readers guide to the issue.
I’ve certainly not read the whole thing, which comes out to hundreds of pages. But what’s troubling me about the whole thing continues to be that access to the digitized material within Google Book Search is restricted outside the U.S.; even though many countries have much less restrictive copyright laws than the U.S., Google seemingly throws up a blanket wall denying access to non-U.S. users to full content. The cumbersome solution is to go through a proxy server that mimics a U.S. IP address.
Google already considers any book published before 1923 as out of copyright and offers a PDF download of those books. But that PDF download link of pre-1923 titles is magically hidden if you access Google Book Search from many (most? all?) countries outside the United States. I know that is true for Argentina (despite copyright in Argentina only extends 50 years after the death of the author) and I’ve read that access is not available in Australia. There must be many more countries in this list.
With the new copyright settlement, Google will make available access to books still in copyright but out-of-print. As a former librarian, I applaud that strategy. (Publishers have a legitimate concern, but – really – publishers should have been out in front of digital access to out-of-print titles much earlier anyway.) Google will provide subscription-based institutional access to this resource (which I suspect will cost a pretty penny) and individuals can purchase the rights to access the books online.
The section of the agreement titled Other Potential Commercial Uses offers insight into future, and it looks to be a very bright future:
In the future, Google and the Registry may agree to develop other Access Uses, including consumer subscriptions (similar in concept to the institutional subscriptions); print on demand Books; custom publishing (per-page pricing of content for course packets or other forms of custom publishing for the educational and professional markets); PDF downloads (consumers would be able to download a PDF version of a Book); and summaries, abstracts or compilations of Books. Rightsholders will be notified, either directly or through the Registry’s website, of all new commercial uses that Google is authorized to make, and will have an opportunity at any time to exclude their Books from any or all of these uses.
It’s unclear to me whether any of this will be accessible to international users. I fear that it may not, particularly since even now not even public domain books are accessible everywhere via Google Book Search outside the U.S.
A serious need
There is a serious need, particularly in developing countries, for access to information – especially scholarly books and research. Already, an enormous amounts of research material and scholarship is cut off from the most of the world. Online access to books – whether for free or fee – is a significant need for readers in every country. If Google can’t make that happen, then individual publishers need to do so.
Meanwhile, those of us down here in the Southern Cone and elsewhere will continue to hunt for U.S.-based proxy servers to access that restricted content. But that only works for those of us with the technological wits to do so.
