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.

There’s a bit of talk lately about Penguin’s enhanced e-books, which provides the inclusion of additional material as supplements to the book. But this still follows a very print-oriented model.

If I want to learn more about a classic text while using a computing device, then I would really prefer for the material to be presented in a way that leverages multimedia rather than simply reading more and more text. Sell me an e-book that includes extensive commentary in audio, video, and with superb graphic renderings related to the book’s content and I will gladly pay $20 or more (perhaps a lot more, depending upon content) for that title.

Penguin’s enhanced e-books are designed around the limitations of today’s e-book reading devices. All of us who work with technology know that this is a rapidly moving target and that these devices will evolve significantly over the next few years. And, also, there’s already an intriguing device that many people are very excited about that currently can support these truly enhanced, e-books: it’s called a computer.

How to develop the enhanced content for e-books?

Creating this advanced level of supplementary content is a very complex (and expensive) production. (Then again, simply publishing a book is itself already a complex and expensive production of editing, layout, printing, etc.; publishers already have a lot of expertise in efficient content development that can be utilized for these tasks.)

However, an option for publishers that don’t want to create this material in-house is to partner with universities to produce digital content. Universities are filled with academic specialists on every topic along with librarians, digital media specialists, and professionals who really understand how to use technology to enhance learning. And, after all, isn’t reading closely related to learning?

Publishers can provide grants to universities for producing the enhanced digital content. In turn, the enhanced e-books can be licensed for free use by academic institutions while publishers recoup the costs by selling the enhanced e-books to the public.

Of course, universities should already be developing such content as part of their own digital scholarship initiatives. When I was directing the digital library initiatives at the University of Miami, I formed a series of projects that provided funding to faculty for producing digital content. That was several years ago now, and things in academia move slowly (perhaps almost as slowly as in publishing!)

There’s actually a great opportunity here for university presses, which should – but seemingly seldom – be closely coordinated with digital media specialists at their universities. Indeed, there’s no reason why universities – which are always looking for new revenue sources – to be producing such enhanced versions of classic titles already in the public domain.

Then again, there might be entirely new firms specializing in enhanced content for digital media publishing that will emerge, either selling the fully enhanced e-books to the public or licensing the material to other publishers.

A significant problem I see with the current debate on e-books is that it views books as being only text. Don’t let the limitations of today’s Kindle and other e-book readers determine the future of e-books.

Again, a reference to my librarian days: I was fond of saying that in the future we will stop referring to digital libraries as digital libraries but instead someday just call them libraries. Likewise, someday we will stop referring to digital books as e-books and simply call them books.

It’s fun to watch the birth of a brand new blog, and a promising new blog is Kristin Lawrence on scholarly publishing.

In a post titled on text taking precedence, she writes

Moving to a text-takes-precedence model, where design gives way to an XML style sheet and printing is offered only on demand and serves just to hold the book together, means we have to focus on content and use and search, not aesthetics.

This reminds me a lot of my days in academic libraries. But over the last few years I’ve come to a rather opposite conclusion. For 15 years I specialized in digital libraries, which primarily is focused on content and search retrieval.

After a move to South America I got involved with book design. For so long I tried to convince myself that the text-takes-precedence model had to work since, after all, that was the basis of everything I valued in developing digital libraries. But I always felt that something was missing and that was largely the aesthetics of digital content.

Most people involved in developing digital libraries and scholarly publishing are programmers, project managers, and administrators. Occasionally, someone in that crew will have learned a few things about Photoshop and labeled himself a graphic designer.

(And I will be the first to admit that I am no graphic designer but I do work with one).

If the future of publishing scholarly monographs is to store the content in XML and generate end-products in various formats via styles sheets, then it’s imperative that those involved in scholarly publishing connect with those who can bring quality design to those style sheets.

These days there are a ton of professional designers well versed in crafting great designs with style sheets. It can be done and it’s vital that individuals within the scholarly community don’t let programmers and administrators convince them that aesthetics does not matter.

This is a post I’ve had in draft mode for a while but haven’t had the time to finish. This morning I saw a couple of articles that reminded me I needed to finish this post. The two articles that made me come back to this topic: How to Beat the Long Tail which links to Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans.

Joe Wikert posted an interview with Jeff Gomez, author of Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age that raises several good points including a future where the notion of what it means to be published is going to change. Gomez says, “The Internet is the best thing that has ever happened to the midlist author.”

Then I saw a comment to Joe’s interview where someone said, “who ever made money selling fiction on the web? (Nobody, that’s who)”.

What are some ways in which the fiction writer can leverage the Web in order to support a life of writing?

I’ve been thinking that a writer could earn a sustainable income by direct sales to loyal readers, either through books – digital downloads or POD – or even through a membership site.

Membership? Have a favorite writer? Not a lot of writers get very far in their blogging because – I suspect – they feel that blogging takes away from their real writing. But many writers craft essays, columns, and stories for publication. What if the author’s own membership site became an outlet for that creative content?

As an avid reader and follower of contemporary fiction I would gladly pay $50 a year (possibly more) for access to writings by my favorite writer. Make that writers. There’s certainly a limit on the number of writers I would support with an annual contribution but I spend a lot of money on books anyway.

How many loyal fans does it take for the writer to earn a sustainable income, either through selling direct or opting for some type of membership site? Do the math.

Keven Kelly writes

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

It’s not a matter of if but when writers will break away from publishers and go independent.

It has not yet happened because most fiction writers are not net savvy or entrepreneurial.

Not just for loyal fans:

A writer also could use online products, either free digital downloads, or a membership site to attract new readers. For instance, I’ve recently developed an interest in Will Self. Since it’s not so easy for me to get his books down here in Buenos Aires, I would consider subscribing on a trial basis to get access to more of his writings, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. Then I might be converted into a loyal fan.

A team is needed:

Of course, most writers are not going to be able to handle the slightest technical aspects of implementing such an online campaign, though a few will do so. And writers always will need editors and designers (your online site has to look good if you’re asking people to give you money). But there are plenty of ways to contract with those professionals. In the future publishers will need to shift towards providing that type of team to writers and managing an author’s online presence. If publishers don’t, then others will step in and do so.

I have many more thoughts on this topic but for now you should go read 1,000 True Fans.