Pretty exciting, right? This is but one of the things we’ve produced to celebrate the ebook publication of Thomas Pynchon’s entire catalog. (Here’s the New York Times announcement.)
And there’s more on the way, I just can’t talk about it right now.
Did I mention Pynchon’s my favorite author of all time? If you could distill mescaline into a book marketing campaign, I’m pretty sure this is what it would feel like.
Filed under industry, My Videos, penguin press
This was Jason Kottke’s quote in his roundup of Amazon and Microsoft’s holiday offerings. In short, it articulates perfectly the “good enough revolution” as coined by Wired last year: during a technological sea change, users’ values change with respect to the application of that technology. I.e. what we lose in audio fidelity with mp3s (versus CDs) is offset, happily, by instant and ubiquitous access.
So the question I’ve been thinking about it, What will the new values be for ebook reading?
Kottke seems to hit on this with Amazon’s cloud-based and device-agnostic approach:
“I never would have predicted it, but I am a firm convert to Kindle books…and I don’t even have a Kindle. The killer feature here is Amazon’s multi-platform support. I *love* reading books on the iPad at home but when I’m out and about, if I’ve got my iPhone in my pocket, I can read a book. The best book is the one that’s always with you.” -Jason Kottke
This quote will stay with me. At the risk of sounding naïve, it sheds light on an advantage to ebooks that’s not often discussed: you can take books everywhere. If you’re a mass market or trade paperback reader with a purse, this isn’t that revelatory. But if you’re like me, you leave books at home when going out on the weekend. Bars and restaurants are simply not conducive to schlepping books. In fact, I hate carrying anything when I go out. (I’m trying to figure out how I can combine my driver’s license, Visa, and subway card into one.)
Too often I’ve thought of ebooks as a complement to the print industry. But when I hear use cases like Kottke’s, it points to a new kind of reading experience, a greater engagement with books in one’s daily life. Again, I’m sure this has been obvious to others for a long time. I guess this was finally my lightbulb moment.
There’s still a pretty wide gap between what kinds of additional media readers would like in their ebooks and the ability to display said media. Chief among the reasons: most ebook readers just don’ have the capability. Kindle doesn’t support video, iBooks can’t play audio. (It can bounce you out to a YouTube clip, though.) Which is why so many publishers are still going the app route (Enhanced Editions, the much buzzed-about Alice in Wonderland).
I’m interested to see how they handle this with Sebastian Junger’s War, which will allegedly sport embedded video clips. This seems a natural fit: he’s accrued loads of footage from his documentary on the same subject. I also imagine many readers will want to experience the story in these multiple formats.
Here’s hoping the ereader software updates make this no-brainer possible.
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
At the august Instituto Cervantes on Friday I attended a panel titled “Blogs, Twitter, the Kindle: The Future of Reading.” As anyone who’s attended these kinds of panel can attest, it’s most difficult to determine the parameters of the discussion. You don’t want to veer off into apocalyptic pronouncements which kill the dialogue, nor do you want to get so technical (about things like foreign rights for European ebook markets) that you lose the audience.
Photograph © Beowulf Sheehan http://www.beowulfsheehan.com
Ben Schrank moderated admirably, and I enjoyed the panelists’ different perspectives: Thomas Pletzinger played the role of the young gun, approaching writing and technology without preconceived SOPs: “As a writer, you can have many jobs,” he said. He’s working on a novel, a screenplay, and an “audioplay.” He doesn’t see himself in solely the “book business,” in the one box called print books. His ideas can be dropped into multiple boxes. He also mentions that we’re a couple years away from the true interactivity ebook and iPad devices can offer. Right now we’re just scratching the surface.
Filed under ebooks, industry, reading, socialmedia
From my guest post at Digital Book World‘s blog:
A lot of the discussion about eBooks tends to frame the format in absolutist and misleading terms.
“It will destroy print.”
“It will devalue the book.”
We shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming a growing new format will upend the entire industry (remember the fear concerning audiobooks?). The format will dictate the content and this makes for one of the most exciting shifts in the industry since the rise of mass-market paperbacks.
I bring up mass-markets as an analogy and a precedent. Could you imagine pitching the concept to publishers? “It’s a smaller trim size, printed on cheap paper, and we’ll charge a third of the hardcover price. Yes, hardcovers are beautiful objects, but we think there’s a big opportunity here in treating our books as disposable commodities.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if industry pessimists back then expressed the same fears of cannibalized sales and devalued content that they do now regarding eBooks.
Mass-markets defined their own readership (at airports and supermarkets) and genres (commercial and genre fiction); you don’t see biographies or political nonfiction in this format. Of the current top 20 bestsellers on the New York Times’ Paperback Mass-Market Fiction list, 8 have never been published in hardcover (disregarding the large-print hardcovers for Snow Angels and Hot on Her Heels).
The eBook format is no different. After the digital transition, we’ll find that certain books fit an eBook audience, while others are meant for print. Personally, this year I purchased hardcovers that I would never buy as an eBook (Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice), and vice versa (Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction).
: : : : : : : :
