Digital publishing is the new big thing, the future of the book, the change coming, and also the big scary storm cloud in the distance for many publishers. Today I spent the day at the Melbourne Writers Festival following the digital publishing program. Unfortunately I missed the first session on The State of Digital Publishing with Bob Stein, Victoria Nash and Elizabeth Weiss, because it was sold-out before I had money in my bank account. From what I heard people loved and wanted more Bob Stein, who they did see at the final keynote address.
The Eco Reader
My first session E-reader: Show and Tell, gave me a first-hand look at e-reader devices. As an electronic replacement of the paper book they serve their function quite well. The e-paper technology gives a page that looks like a book and makes it easy to read, because it doesn’t use a backlight like a computer screen or an iPhone. Once the page it set on the screen, the text will remain on the page, until the page is turned. For these reasons the battery life is phenomenal. Richard Siegersma tells us that this will provide 7,000 turns of a page. The audience were intrigued by the devices, until someone asked ‘Does it come in colour?’ and the response of ‘No’ caused the audience to sigh will a big ‘Owwww’. After mentioning the price tag for one of the ebooks was over one grand, they again let out a disheartened sigh. The e-readers are currently marketed toward readers of fiction and travellers, as 16 levels of grey doesn’t really work for picture books or educational books. Siegersma presented his company’s own ebook reader, the Eco Reader, without the session turning into an infomercial. He hopes this device will become the standard e-reader for Australians.
In the Digital Workflow session, Victoria Nash from MacMillian discusses electronic publishing, comparing it to the production of printed books. She says publishers are still scared by e-publishing. On e-readers Nash says they are still new, in their infancy and asks ‘Who buys the first thing? I don’t’. The publishing process changes in one major aspect when moving to an electronic model, the Typesetter and Printer of the printed book is replaced by the Conversion House. The conversion of books is ‘the boring part’ that publishers don’t have to really know about, but one main standard that they are being converted to is the open standard ePub available with Adobe DE. The XML metadata is also a boring and tedious part of the process, but critical for publishers. Another aspect publishers have to look at is DRM. Nash says many authors demand DRM and she usually uses restrictions that prevent the ebook from being copied or printed. After the session I feed my stomach, but miss a session by education publishers.
The marketing panel
Onto Marketing in The Info Age, with Brett Osmand, Adam Noonan and Jessa Crispin, who tell us about connecting with consumers, or rather reader communities. Osmand says people are 3 times more likely to be influenced by their peers than any other form of review. Some of his marketing strategies at Random House include a Brisingr community and the James Patterson Airbourne collaboration. He says they ‘are not creating communities, merely tapping into them’. Noonan mentions the Fear of Google (FOG) that publishers are experiencing and talks about search engine optimisation (SEO) as an important part of marketing. His strategies at Lonely Planet involve building communities, such as the Thorntree travellers community and the BlogSherpa site that aggregates external blogs. Noonan says incubate your own community or tap into an existing community. Lastly Crispin talks about the Bookslut webzine, which she considers to be a community among its own writers, but doesn’t really open itself up to external communities. She says publishers have tried to use Bookslut as a marketing tool, but publicity people can be annoying and bloggers are often too personality driven and sceptical to deal with those people. An hour was not long enough for this session.
Matthew Cashmore
I don’t really care much about iPhones, but Matthew Cashmore’s session on iPhone Apps: The Future’s Here got me interested. Lonely Planet have put many of their phrase books and city guides on the iPhone and Cashmore shows a simple demonstration that does show that this is the future. The Lonely Planet phrase books and guides are not just books transferred to an electronic format, they are full-blown applications. The main difference from the printed version is the capabilities of search and GPS — ‘they know where you are’. The phrase books have spoken audio of phrases and a text search function. The city guides have Lonely Planet maps that link to the iPhone’s GPS to show you the important features of the city and how far you are located from them. The narrative is still important to the guide, words are linked and phone numbers are linked, which mean that you can call local hotels or restaurant with a simple touch. Cashmore is a funny guy and his session was quite enjoyable.
The digital rights management panel
Digital Rights Management is something that usually makes me want to yell ‘Let the words be free, yo!’, but it wasn’t like that. DRM in this case doesn’t refer to the electronic tool that locks up devices, but to authors rights in the digital domain. Sophie Hamley, Elizabeth Weiss and Zoe Rodriquez talk about digital rights in the publishing world. Hamley says authors often know more about digital rights than publishers and may go to different companies like Amazon. Often contracts are not designed for digital rights. Weiss says contracts should be separated along the distinction of ebook and electronic rights. She says authors are often receiving 15-25% of the net receipt of what the publishers receive from the sale of an ebook. Publishers must insist on ebook rights, otherwise the industry continues to think they are not worth bothering about. Rodriquez says that Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) has been given the responsibility of disseminating the outcome of the Google settlement to Australian publishers and writers. Works created before 9 January 2009 that have been scanned by Google are included in the settlement. While the Berne Convention gives global copyright, the settlement is conducted in American courts, so this means it may effect only rights within America.
Bob Stein
The Future of the Book is discussed in Bob Stein’s keynote address. He talks about the book as user-driven media, a narrative that the reader controls. He was experimenting with New Media way back in the eighties, with what we are familiar with today. His experiments with narratives and commenting alongside change the reader experience by bringing the author and reader together. Stein’s collaborations work within classrooms, small groups and when an author is present. He says reading has become a social experience. The World of Warcraft can be seen be seen as a new book form with the gamers writing their own narrative in a world created by an author, with its rules and character options written by the author. The future of the book is a collaboration between the author and readers, and is not a fixed printed edition, after edition, but seen as a flowing river of narrative. Most of his discussion can be read from an article in The Age. In criticism, his presentation was his own history of thinking about new ways of thinking about the future of the book and much of the social media technologies that now exist may override this thinking. It follows a linear chronological narrative, so I wonder if he is overlooking the tree-structured paths that hyperlnking take, which I believe would take a large part in the future of the book. Also, the idea of the social collaborative element, is not valid for those who don’t want to participate and remain in isolation with a single narrative.
Today’s panels were wonderfully hosted by Kate Eltham. It was an excellent day at the Melbourne Writers Festival. I’m attending a festival party on Saturday that should be very interesting. That’s all from me, over and out.
