Charlie Stross on Common Misconceptions About Publishing: Ebooks

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html

by bensummers • 16 years ago

89 54 16 years ago

patio11• 16 years ago

I get this a lot from dedicated ebook readers: "I don't care about formatting and design in ebooks!"

I think this is a peculiar kind of brain damage or mental scarring...

As someone who shares this "brain damage", these lines puts me in the mood of a designer who, seeing objective statistical evidence that his redesign was outperformed by the older, uglier website, dismisses the metrics and rants about art for a few hours.

petercooper• 16 years ago

Except, the most significant layout and typography issues involved in book design and usability have been studied. A basic example would be in the use of fully justified text versus ragged right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286700 .. that topic not scream "design" to you, but it's all part of producing a high quality book. So are choosing the right typeface(s), the right text size(s), page layout, and more.

Authors and book designers who have high production values aren't all arty-farty designers who just want things to look cool. To many, just getting it right objectively (versus the subjectiveness of design as "art") is important, and there are ways and means of doing that. For example, the average Edward Tufte book shows a high level of attention to detail in matters of underlying design and usability, rather than pure aesthetics.

Readers should care about book formatting and design at a basic usability and readability level. You might not want pompously "designed" books, sure, but having easily read type in a usable layout is paramount (in the sense that a Web surfer wouldn't like to read beige text on a yellow background). Sadly, it seems not to be as big an issue as it could be as the jaw-droppingly bad typography on the Kindle demonstrates: http://redubllc.com/2009/01/a-typographic-critique-of-the-ki... - http://qwan.org/2009/05/17/kindle-typography-goes-craptacula... - http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/05/kindle-page-layout-and-ty... (and oh so many more)

ptomato• 16 years ago

Because performance metrics are the only things that matter.

RevRal• 16 years ago

Mostly because I can just throw them onto my portable device, I'll almost always prefer a plain text file over a pdf.

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

Defined "outperform." I love your writing, so I know you know better than that.

What if you get more signups for your email newsletter - but fewer conversions to customers down the line?

What if you make more sales, but they incur more support over the 12 mos? Or are simply more stupid/more annoying/more rude?

What if you make more sales, but they don't USE the product? Or use it effectively, to its fullest extent? (Whether or not they bug you about it.)

What if you just, flat out, get customers who don't support your values/the direction you want to take your business?

Science never stops.

More is not better, necessarily - call no man happy until he is dead, and call no additional customer good until the relationship is at its complete and utter end.

And just because people say they don't care about book design, doesn't mean that's actually how they behave. And just because they behave a certain way now, doesn't mean they wouldn't behave differently, offered a superior solution.

And just because they think they there's no difference, doesn't mean they don't actually experience the book better given (as another commentor said) a provably superior product in terms of readability.

Simplifying it as artsy fartsy prissiness, and wielding just-one-step "science" as a weapon, is doing everyone, and everything, a disfavor.

MWinther2• 16 years ago

I don't agree that the reason people think an e-book is worth less is overvaluating the cost of paper and ink. People feel that an e-book is worth less than a paper book because the physical experience of handling a book is worth more than the experience of reading a book on a computer or e-reader screen. The e-book has other advantages, but we're not used to those and thus it feels to many people like they're getting less.

Also, I believe that the author under-estimates other values inherent in a physical book, such as the ability to lend it to someone else, at least as long as DRM is the norm.

jacoblyles3• 16 years ago

I dislike the experience of reading a physical book. I tried to read a textbook while I ate lunch today but I couldn't because it kept flipping shut on me. Books require one hand (or a heavy object) to constantly hold them open in order for them to be readable unless you're in the middle section of the book. The alternative is to crease the spine, which will hurt the book's resale value.

So I gave up trying to read the book at lunch and read something on my iPhone instead.

Also, I dislike lugging around the bulk of books or multiple books. I really can't wait until someone releases an eInk reader that can handle academic books and PDFs. I might get impatient and buy an iPad.

But I suppose there are some people that fetishize the smell of wood pulp and who love signaling how smart they are to the world with shelves of impressive-looking unread books, and who therefore overlook a reading experience that is superior in every other way.

MWinther2• 16 years ago

I don't think people preferring reading physical books necessarily do so because it signals anything to anyone, just as people preferring the e-book experience don't necessarily do so because it signals that they're tech savvy and can afford new cool stuff.

mos12• 16 years ago

I'm a voracious reader, and have an iPad, a Kindle, and shelves of (mostly read) books.

Out-of-print -- with e-books, that means it's really out of print. With a traditional book, it means you need to talk to a used book store.

Used -- you can't save money by buying your e-books used. Nor can you sell them if you decide they have no further value to you.

Unanticipated Reading -- e-books are great for unanticipated delays where you brought an e-book device, but didn't bring a book.

Outdoor use -- you can take a paperback up a mountain, onto a lake, or into the jungle knowing that if it gets wet your losses are capped at $25, and if you fall down, it won't be damaged. With the e-book, a fall or weather could result in expensive damage.

Travel -- the paperback book doesn't need to be charged, doesn't need a power plug converter, works during takeoff and landing, and doesn't immediately mark you as a person who is worth robbing.

Portability -- you can carry a lot more e-books than books.

Search -- e-books are great for reference texts, where you intend to do a lot of searching for content, rather than linear reading. paper indexes are good, but not as powerful.

Markup -- e-books have a 'highlight' capability, and some note capabilities that seem like they'd work nicely in an academic context, but I generally prefer my system of post-it notes, scribbles in the margin, and underlines, which doesn't cleanly translate to e-books.

Disaster Recovery -- e-books are replaced from backups, or not at all. books are replaced by homeowners insurance payout.

Public Image -- my iPad and Kindle both mark me as an early adopter tech guy. a book likely says nothing about me, unless the person looking has an opinion about the title in question.

Permanence -- I'm relatively confident that my paper library will endure for as long as there's somebody who values the content of the books. I'm not confident my e-book library will be usable in 10 years. (between DRM, format incompatibility, and accidental data loss.)

Images -- books currently beat e-books pretty solidly when it comes to imagery. I can't really imagine getting a Photography book as an e-book at this point in time.

Visual ease -- e-books let you adjust the font, but paper books are often (though not always) easier to read.

----

Or maybe e-books are superior in every single way, and I only buy books to fetishize the smell of wood pulp, whilst filling shelves to signal to my wife, kids, pets and good friends that I'm intelligent.

sigh

EdwardCoffin4• 16 years ago

It's quite possible that sometime in the future, even the near future, an ebook library on a given subject will be the equal of a paper library on that same subject. Right now that is not the case for a significant number of domains, just because some of the important books in those domains are not yet available as electronic books.

Of course, if you regard books as fungible, this might not matter to you. For some of us, it is important to have a particular book, not just a substitute. For instance, if I want clarification in calculus, I want to refer to the particular calculus textbook I have spent a lot of time studying, not to a different text. If I read 20,000 leagues under the sea, I want to read one of the recent and competent translations to English, not one of the earlier ones that had mistaken conversions from metric to imperial and entire passages left out because they offended the translator. As far as I can tell, none of the Kindle nor Gutenberg versions of this book are one of the good translations. Similarly for Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: I want the Womersley edition, and that edition isn't currently available in an electronic format. If I'm discussing history with someone I might want to cite a passage out of one of the books I've read on the subject, a particular book, like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or From Dawn to Decadence. Neither of those are available as electronic books. Though I guess if I never read anything but electronic books, this would not be a problem: I wouldn't want to cite them because I wouldn't have read them.

Many books I care about probably will never be converted to ebooks. They aren't old enough to be classics, but not recent enough for the publishers to feel there would be a profit in reissuing them in a new format.

And of course there is the problem of DRM. There is then the possibility that a book you thought you owned has turned into a pumpkin because because the ebook reader refuses to show it to you unless it can talk with a license server that no longer exists, because the vendor you bought the book from has switched formats. This happened to me a few years ago with an Adobe eBook I purchased from Amazon: they dropped support (or Adobe dropped them, I'm not sure) when they switched to Kindle. The fact that the transition between possessing a working electronic book and possessing a non-working electronic book can happen silently; the only way you can be sure is to regularly open up the book and to test it every time you move to a new computer or even reinstall the operating system. This does not contribute to a feeling of confidence. Until the books I care about are available in some confidence-inspiring electronic format, I will retain my paper library, despite the inconvenience of storing and moving it. The inconveniences minor compared to the benefits I derive from it. I'm not sure whether one of these benefits might be signalling to the world how smart I am; nobody has ever commented on the matter in a positive way, thought a few acquaintances have expressed opinions similar to yours.

On the other hand, if all of the books you care about actually are available as eBooks and you have some confidence that the the ones you care about retaining will continue to be available (not turn into pumpkins), or if you regard reading as a simple pastime where you don't much care which book you read next and are willing to choose from those available in electronic form, then eBooks, as they currently stand, are great. They aren't for everyone though. Not yet.

abecedarius• 16 years ago

The experience of an average physical book has gotten worse in the past few decades. In the 80s your textbook would not have flipped shut. I'm not sure just when things went from a very occasional "What the hell? How can package this cheap crap in an attractive cover?" to making it the norm -- around 2000? But it's made me less willing to buy new books.

Combine that with DRM on ebooks, and the free web wins my time by default.

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

I value ebooks less than I otherwise would because the DRM makes them scarily impermanent. I have no faith at all that, five years from now, the ebook I buy today will still be readable. You might think I could replace my reader even if it died, but what if the reader's entire product line dies out? (That's not exactly a thought experiment: Every reader prior to the Kindle died out; the Newton died out; even very successful platforms like the Palm died out.) What if the software becomes extinct? What if the publisher goes bottom-up?

And given that the net cost of buying the book used, reading it, and then selling it used is so small (or even smaller, if it's the kind of book one can find at the library) it's hard to justify the ebook. Frankly, if it wasn't for the superior physical experience of carrying, handling, and storing an ebook nobody would bother with the things. Even the crappiest trade paperback I own has an order of magnitude longer shelf life than any DRM system.

EdwardCoffin4• 16 years ago

In 2006 I purchased from Amazon the special edition of Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", an Adobe eBook (the only way this special edition was available). Last year, when I went to have another look at the eBook on my latest computer (not the one I originally purchased the book on), I found that it no longer worked: I could not enable the book on my new computer because Amazon's license server for Adobe eBooks no longer worked. It took me several back-and-forth emails with Amazon's customer support to get someone to admit that once Amazon moved over to the Kindle, support for the Adobe ebooks went away (most of them didn't even seem to be aware that there were eBooks prior to the Kindle). I'd have settled for them replacing my eBook with the Kindle equivalent, but I don't own a Kindle. At the time there was no Kindle eBook reader for OS X. I eventually got a refund, but it took a lot of work to get them to even recognize that there was a problem. Additionally, I didn't want a refund, I wanted to read the special content in this special version of the book, one that is not available in paper. Given that experience, I'm a bit reluctant to purchase the Kindle version, even though there is apparently an OS X reader now.

I think the thing that most disturbs me about this whole incident is not just that a book I bought stopped working it is that I had no indication that it had become unavailable to me until the instant I went to re-read it. It had probably been inaccessible for months if not years without me knowing, with me thinking that I had the book ready for me to go read whenever I felt like, but when I went to check on something, it just didn't work. My shelves of paper books don't present me with that kind of problem.

rsaarelm• 16 years ago

I wonder how things would work if ebook publishers would drop the idea of owning books entirely, and just go subscription-based. You'd pay a monthly fee and have DRM'd access to all the books in the catalog. Stop paying the fee, access is gone. You wouldn't have local copies, except for caching, just books viewed from the publisher's server.

Now it would be no problem that the service might go out of business in a year and take the catalog out with it. You'd subscribe while it lasts, read all sorts of books you want to read but don't care to own, and then find a new service when the old one's gone.

joubert8• 16 years ago

That's why you should purchase an ebook reader based on epub, instead of proprietary formats.

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

That piece completely turns my intuition about how the writing world works on its head. I always thought that writers wrote books, editors trimmed them and publishers sold them.

I never thought that publishing an e-book required as much work as a 'regular' book, other than the removal of the printer, but it does make sense.

In a way it's a pity, but maybe this could be cured by writers hiring free-lance editors and marketing on a performance basis?

thunk• 16 years ago

I think the problem as it currently stands with hiring your own copy editors and marketers and cover artists etc. is the enormous amount of time you spend essentially replicating what publishers already do. That's a lot of time spent not writing, crammed into authors' already busy schedules, which means they put out fewer books, which means Bad. But I do think that's a huge opportunity for startups that ease the pain of decentrallized book production.

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

writers hiring free-lance editors and marketing on a performance basis?

This idea is a common trap for newbie writers. A very very common trap. To the point that there are an absolute plethora of scam artists lying in wait to "accept" your manuscript in exchange for a fee, "edit" it in exchange for another fee, send it to Lulu.com for you in exchange for a fee, get it listed by Amazon for a fee, and "market" it for a fee.

The non-solution of self-publishing was discussed at length during the "amazonfail" incident a few months back. Here's a novelist on the subject:

http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/563086.html

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

A bit like the music industry then, the people that 'nail' fresh meat arriving in Nashville.

joubert8• 16 years ago

Interesting. I wonder if it doesn't make sense then for an authhor and editor, when they work on an ebook together, share the revenue, instead of an upfront split? That way, both are incentivized to put the best work out there.

donaq• 16 years ago

My prediction is this: ebooks will kill the mass market paperback distribution channel.

Hmm. I usually prefer to read paperback novels than their ebook counterparts, the main reason being that there's a barrier to reading something I don't know about and then looking it up on wikipedia and hey, there goes 30 minutes of link following, after which there's a 50% chance I don't return to the book. I wonder how many readers are like me?

jbrennan2• 16 years ago

eBook readers have a clock and a dictionary. Paper is dead to me.

jteo• 16 years ago

You don't own a watch? =)

jbrennan2• 16 years ago

Not any more. Clock at the top of all my displays. If I'm not staring at a display doing work, I'm reading on my iPad or iPhone; clocks abound.

joubert8• 16 years ago

Even though editorial, typesetting, and publicity costs may be comparable between ebooks and physical books, the ebook medium overcomes the problem of inventory costs, which, I understand from author friends are substantial. Many books go out of print every year because, although there are still willing buyers, the cost of producing lower volumes and keeping warehouses stocked outweighs the benefits in the traditional book publishing model.

I'm also surprised the author of this piece implies (?) the cost of setting up and maintaining a physical press is basically zero. Swish offices on 6th Ave would possibly also be less necessary in an ebook-dominated world where there is a more direct line between authors and their readers (customers).

URSpider942• 16 years ago

There are a lot of data points on the web for these costs, here's one example: http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost...

So, for a mass-market hardback book, printing costs represent about 10% of the list price, less than just about any other component. Certainly, eliminating the printing costs alone would not knock a dramatic amount off of the consumer price of the book, assuming, that is, that book pricing is based on a "cost-plus" model, which it clearly is not.

URSpider942• 16 years ago

There is an interesting meta-discussion going on here, over whether content curators add value. Most of the hackers that I've met tend to believe that they would prefer to latch onto a raw content stream, then filter and format it to their liking. No surprise -- that is the way of hackers, after all.

However, I do think that it's a conceptual mistake to assume that the public at large would like to filter their own content. Even music sales, which are pretty far down the road towards an openly accessible market, are still driven by the major and minor labels. For books, I see an even stronger incentive to keep paying others to filter our content. Reading is a big investment, time-wise -- when people curl up with a book, e- or paper, they want to know that it's going to be worth their time. And, yes, they probably want it to be nicely typeset and proofread as well.

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

As Shirky writes, abundance breaks more things than scarcity. Books included.

In the age of constant, uninterrupted information, quality filters will be king. That's why people want news readers that automatically bubble up good shit (badly). That's why people follow others on Twitter who give good link. That's why, in theory, we use HN.

joubert8• 16 years ago

I think there are many books out there that aren't exactly masterpieces, put out there by big publishers. Conversely, works that are big commercial successes were for a long time shunned by publishers (JK Rowling).

Perhaps user reviews & ratings, and previewing books would be a good enough filter? I mean people can already publish anything they want for free online, and non-techies seem perfectly capable in filtering out.

icefox• 16 years ago

Publishing is an industry full of turmoil at the moment it seems like, what opportunities are being presented as a result of this?

ahk4• 16 years ago

Authors like Stross or Scalzi need to see this bit about "Learned Helplessness" here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Their attitude of publishers being all-powerful is one that needs to die.

EdwardCoffin4• 16 years ago

I'm not sure how to interpret this. I get the sense that you believe that Stross and Scalzi are rationalizing what you believe is learned helplessness on their part? If so, that isn't what I believe they are saying. I think that Stross is mostly expressing that publishers contribute significantly more to the bookmaking process than most people think, and that these contributions are actually useful.

ahk4• 16 years ago

What they have said and are saying is that the publishers are so powerful that they, the content creators, don't even get a say in setting prices or demanding better returns, because that's the way it's always been done.

Any requests to them to stand up for their readers (like the recent pubisher price control mechanisms on ebooks or DRM schemes or region controls) results in a "Haha, you're kidding right? We have zero control over what the publishers do with our output".

I'm saying, the publishers have nowhere to go if you dont write the books. The relationship is a total inverse of what it should be. Even music artists, normally thought to be clueless/careless on real world matters, are already taking big stances on DRM and their ability to distribute/sell etc and sticking up for their fans. The writers' backwardness (and plain old ludditism) in this regard is mighty strange.

Raphael• 16 years ago

He forgot my favorite book formats of all, HTML and plain text.

joubert8• 16 years ago

Epub, arguably the universal ebook format, is really just a fancy zip-based Package of html resources. IBM has a nice guide for hackers about creating an epub file: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-epubtut/in...

ableal• 16 years ago

Two mostly factual items:

- E-ink readers seem to be coming down in price - Borders will be selling the 6 inch Kobo for 150 USD ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328438 ). There are also various recent, cheaper, models with 5-inch e-ink screens, but same 800x600 pixels, which I think will do fine for fiction.

- Elsewhere in these comments, jacoblyles said "I really can't wait until someone releases an eInk reader that can handle academic books and PDFs". In my opinion, the 10-inch e-ink readers do an acceptable job. I have a KindleDX, and PDFs of books, papers and theses can be read sequentially fine. Skipping around and jotting annotations are not so convenient ...

Handy overview of devices: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

I have the Kindle DX also, and it's too low contrast and the type on most academic papers (that I read) is far too small.

I'm 25, so it's not as if it's my eyesight that's the problem.

On the other hand, reading them on my iPad with a tool like iAnnotate, I can not only make the text bigger, but mark the PDFs up with highlights, boxes, and notes (which are PDF format standards -- not special to the app itself). And transfer them over wifi.

Charlie Stross on Common Misconceptions About Publishing: Ebooks

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