Everybody knows by now that authors have to take responsibility for promoting their books. You can’t just leave that task to the publisher. Of course, every author wants people talking about their book. Many of our clients mention that they want a viral marketing campaign. A lot of blogs out there talk about Internet marketing but one of the sites I enjoy the most is Web Ink Now by David Meerman Scott.

David has several books and some great free e-books on the topics of PR and viral marketing. His latest book is World Wide Rave:

A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. Whether you’re located in San Francisco, Dubai, or Reykjavík, it’s when global communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It’s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. And it’s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.

He’s come across a really great method for getting people on the Web to talk about his book. According to David, “Your challenge: Creating triggers that get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories.” ….and, so here’s me promoting the poster of David’s book in Buenos Aires.

Regular readers will not that I continue to push back against the dire warnings that e-books will replace print books. My resistance comes not because I’m a bookman (which I’m not) but because sweeping, generalized statement leave out so much.

Everyone points to how cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, but there are so many examples where a new technology did not replace previous methods. Yes, e-books will shift print books, publishing, and booksellers in new directions but that doesn’t mean the eradication of print.

In the 1800s the public lecture was a popular and effective way to convey information. Radio did not entirely replace the gathering of individuals to hear someone speak. Cinema did not replace theater. DVD replaced VHS but not movie theaters. MP3s replaced CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks, & vinyl but none of that replace live concerts.

Moving-going, attending concerts and lectures: those are all communal activities but reading is not. In that way, reading is more akin to the solitary viewing of a movie at home or listening to music on an iPod. Yet, when we go to the movies, or sit through the performance of an opera, we process that experience in solitary ways, as individuals. Part of our sensory experience may feed from the audience (particularly at a rock concert) but much of our pleasure at enjoying movies in a theater or a classical concert stems from the environment of the theater and other perceptions. Who is not annoyed at that guy talking two rows over? (And, honestly, I do have to say that I can think of very few lectures that I have enjoyed in person. For that, please, please just give me the lecture on YouTube.)

There are ways that we interact with books through typography, design, and the format of print itself that are so successful that it’s practically transparent to most. For many books – and I don’t say all – print will remain the most effective medium because the book itself has a form that suits our senses.

In a decade or two from now, with advances in digital displays, this will certainly change but I still doubt that even by 2025 we will have seen the complete absence of print books. I know I must sound like a Luddite to all those who are convinced that everyone – right now – should be reading books on their iPhones.

What I do expect is that digital media will create new forms of interacting with a large body of textual and image-based material (the common ingredients of books), ways that go far beyond what we see with the current generation of e-book reading devices. Yet, the capabilities of rich Internet-based digital media have been with us for more than a decade now and, honestly, we’ve not seen a very significant shift towards utilizing this new media in creative and impactful ways. For that, I do blame academia and publishing. There’s a lot more that needs to be done and it will probably come about with the generation that was born into a world where digital media is not considered “new”.

We need to learn what it means to write with digital media.
We need to learn what it means to read a digital text that is not an e-facsimile of a book.

I spent most days between 1990 and 2005 thinking about the future of libraries. My career then focused on the planning, development, and management of digital libraries. A major topic for librarians throughout the 1990s was understanding the future role of libraries, partly by attempting to understanding what business were libraries really in. Much of the current discussion regarding e-books and publishing parallels these same concerns for libraries.

Indeed, many may think that libraries are in even more perilous condition than publishing and booksellers. But, at least at the academic library level with which I am most familiar, that is far from true. Academic librarianship – which has the clear purpose of serving the research and educational mission of its parent college or university – benefited from strong professional leadership that shared a common concern for shaping a strategic response to the emerging digital landscape.

Why are academic libraries not endangered? While not everyone is onboard, it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of the leadership in academic libraries share a common understanding:
* Libraries are not buildings.
* Libraries are not warehouses of books.
* Libraries provide a service to the academic community, which includes the provision of books (print as well as digital resources) but also includes other services (e.g., training in information literacy and digital media).
* Libraries have long known that no library can afford a book collection that meets the needs of everyone, which led to resource sharing agreements such as interlibrary loan and cooperative collection development among institutions.

Libraries realized that they serve the information needs of students and faculty regardless of media. An essential part of that service is “library as place”, providing a space for students to study, work collaboratively, and – yes – even socialize.

I could go on and on about strategic issues for academic libraries, but that’s not the purpose here.

Publishers – unlike academic librarians – don’t share a common vision or even goal. The variety of publishers mean that there’s no solution that fits the entire industry. Some publishers will determine that they are, indeed, in the information industry. Other publishers rightly will decide that they are, indeed, in the book business. Yes, the publishing of print books will survive throughout our lifetimes, but – of course – it’s will be very different for certain classes of publishers.

Even when I was a librarian I didn’t mind people writing in books. (Okay, not with big yellow highlighters but pencil or even ink doesn’t annoy me as long as the book is not a special edition.)

What I liked is seeing what others marked as particularly important. Perhaps that was a section I needed to pay more attention.

Annotating text is a good way of reading a book closely. (Of course, not all books deserve a close reading.) But those little gestures from readers past are helpful in browsing through an online edition, too, as seen in this snapshot from a title in Google Books (Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New by Walter Crane ).

At over 350 pages, having a filter of sorts helps to absorb the book quickly.

Collaborative tools for e-books have long been a desired feature by many of us in the digital library community, but there are a lot of underlying technical issues regarding interoperability. Then there’s also the issue of just exactly whose markings and annotations do readers want to see….surely, not everybody’s. Then again, for the many scholarly titles out there….we have to admit…that there’s not many readers for those books in the first place, so perhaps the anonymous marks of a stranger may help rather than hinder.

One of the annoyances of buying books when living abroad is that you may only find the export edition, which is a mass market paperback. If you’re familiar with buying literary fiction in the U.S. as larger-sized trade paperback, then it’s a rather odd sight to see novels by Ondaatje or Pamuk sold in mass market paperback edition. Another term I’ve recently seen for these books: open market editions.

I assume publishers do this small-sized edition out of some slightly lower cost in shipping to far flung places of the world like Argentina? I can think of absolutely no other reason for doing so.

I’ll resort to buying a book in this export edition if it’s my only option. Fortunately, I don’t come across those export editions too often.

But this is another category where having a Kindle or some other e-book reading device might help. A particular problem from a readability perspective with these export editions is that the page layout is not modified for the smaller form factor. The text is simply shrunk down to a smaller size. Somewhere the whole relationship between typography and readability went out the window with these editions.