While I’m not crazy about being sold washing detergent with my War and Peace, I see no reason not to have ads in some ebooks, and I would rate the odds of it happening at 100% …

As with online book reviews that link to an online retailer (with affiliate fees), there is no reason an ebook about, say, rugby shouldn’t link to somewhere where I can buy tickets for the World Cup. If it’s a proper ebook – I mean, not just a book I can read on a digital device, but a proper ebook that is cloud-based and dynamically updated – then the link/interaction will point to 2011 tickets today, and in 4 years it will point to 2015 World Cup tickets. If I am reading about knitting I may well want to buy needles, and there’s no reason an ebook that makes me want to buy knitting needles shouldn’t help me do that (and make some money for the publisher, as well as the needle-maker, in the mean time).

As my friend Alistair Croll says: Buying a book is an expression of serious interest in a certain topic, and there is all sorts of valuable business to be done when people have expressed clear interest in a topic.

Certainly the level of engagement, and value of the average eyeball reading a book far outweighs the value of an average eyeball on a webpage. Digital books will and should allow any number of commercially valuable interactions – not just display ads. Or perhaps not display ads at all.

Doing this in a way that does not distract from the book itself will be the trick, but good design, and the powerful nature of new reading platforms means that doing this right is easily imaginable. If I can toggle night-reading on my Kobo for iPad, I can toggle ads.So ads needn’t distract from reading – they could be just another layer to which a book is connected.

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

Five years later, it seems as if the answer is: yes. [more...]

And some interesting notes about how you can buy:
* Premium digital ($7.99)
* CD + Premium digital ($12.99)
* Vinyl + premium digital ($24.99)
All orders come with non-premium digital (ie in lossy m4a format) … with “visuals for each song, lyrics & contextual hyperlinks.”

Finally, you get one of 8 covers … randomly assigned.

In short:
- low quality digital is the baseline
- and it’s implied that if you want that for free you can find it
- everything else is a bundle of some sort: digital + something
- high quality digital, and physical copies are premium products
- a kind of customization: only 1 in 8 purchasers will have the same cover as you.

The digital is almost a give-away, everything else you are paying because you care enough to have something more substantial.

I suspect the big problem in the book business is that most books aren’t worth caring about enough to want a memento. So the real problem in publishing is not so much the shake-up of digital, but rather that consumers (and publishers) just don’t care that much about the majority of books that are published and bought.

…We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is a whole other article to write about the business implications of these numbers, but I’m interested here in some ideas about how our info systems might manage this huge pile of books. That is, how are people going to sift through all these books to find what they want?…

[link...]

As we discussed how things would play out, it was decided that I would be the prophet of doom – describing why everything has changed, and no writer can afford to ignore the web; while Jenny would follow-up with a concrete overview of the things writers should be doing on the web.

My – minimalist – slides are below, and I’ll give a tiny bit of context below that.

Here are my Four Reasons to Be Worried, and One Reason to Be Optimistic about Publishing:

Worry number one:
There are so many damn books published every year.

[Context: from 2002, number of titles published in the USA has stayed roughly constant, oscillating between 250,000 and 280,000. Which is an astramoical number of books. But in that period, a couple of things have happened: works of "literature" have increased from ~6,000 titles to roughly 9,000 titles, without any detectable increase in readership of literature. Secondly, the number of print-on-demand, self-published books was on the order of 25,000 in 2002. By 2008 that number was 285,000 - outstripping the number of traditionally-published books. In 2009, the number of self-published titles reached an astonishing 750,000; so there were more than 1 million books published in the USA in 2009. And that's ignoring all the stuff published without ISBNs.

Compared to the rest of the world, I am a relatively heavy reader: I read perhaps 25 books a year. So there are at least 999,975 books published every year that I don't read. There is a massive glut of books for people to read, and your book is one in a million.]

Worry number two:
Publishers can’t support all those damn books.

[Context: most publishers have tried to address this glut in supply by doing something counterintuitive: they've started publishing more books. Publishing is a lottery business: most books don't break even, and a tiny percentage are the big hits (Harry Potter) that actually finance the industry. No one really knows what the next big hit is, so the theory goes: if you double the number of books you are publishing, you double your chances of having a big hit.

But even if publishers are not publishing more books, they aren't swimming in cash either. Most writers think they are being neglected by their publishers, but the truth is everyone I know in publishing tells me that with the web etc. they have to work twice as hard as they used to, but they are still selling the same number of books.

Whether there are villains or heroes, I don't know, but I do know this: publishers have less time than they used to for editorial and marketing, except for a tiny handful of successful authors. Most writers are not in that tiny handful; and the tiny handful might not have to worry about the web all that much. The rest of us do.]

Worry number three:
Readers don’t have any damn time to read books anymore.

[Context: It used to be that books competed against radio, TV, bridge and cocktail parties, baseball and square-dances. Now they compete against all that, plus Youtube and Twitter, and the blogs, and Facebook and World of Warcraft and Chatroulette, and Xbox, and Wii, and and and... The competition for readers' leisure time is fierce, and writers and publishers need to do everything they can to make sure that readers will choose to read when they have a choice.]

Worry number four:
Prices are collapsing. Damn.

[Context: There will be lots of debates about ebook pricing and cost structures and hardcover sales and Amazon and 9.99 and all the rest. The debates will rage on with different theories about how much a book should cost, where the costs are (advances and editorial and marketing), and where they aren't (printing and distribution). But in the end, readers don't care about any of that: they will vote with their walltes. If you can spend $8.99/month for unlimited movie downloads from Netflix -- in the US -- then spending $27.99 on a hardcover of a book you aren't sure you're going to like starts to seem a bit dear. Not to mention the quadrupling of the number of available books, and the plentiful ways you can spend your time without paying a cent online, or elsewhere.

The price of most books will drop, because books are "leisure time items" and we have a massive massive glut of leisure time choices. The pressures will be different in different sectors of the publishing business, but the short, medium and long-term trend is this: down.

No matter what you think the value of books, or literature, or your writing, you cannot fight against physics, and when you have a glut of supply, prices drop.]

Reasons for optimism, numbers one two and three:
There are more people writing and more people reading than ever before and you can reach all of them on the web.

[Context: And, after all this bad news, here is the good news: there are more readers, and more writers than ever before in the history of the universe. People who love books love them as dearly as ever. And the web gives every author the ability to connect with those readers, with other writers, with the people who love what they do in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. The business side of all this will evolve, but we are about to enter a golden age of writing -- perhaps we are already there -- and that is something to celebrate].

That is, what three books have you read about computers and culture that have stood the test of time, and deserve to be read, or reread again?

I’ll get the ball rolling, with three that have had a profound impact on my thinking:
* Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
* Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
* Programming the Uviverse, by Seth Lloyd

If you have suggestions, why not post comments here, or Tweet with the hashtag: #digitalculturebooks.

I just published my thoughts about this on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog. The key points are:

The key insights behind Book Oven were the following:

* publishing a book is (almost always) a collaborative enterprise
* online tools (should) make collaboration on making books easy(er)
* if you build a “book” in the cloud, using structured mark-up, then expression of that book in various forms (print, epub, pdf, mobipocket, html, etc), on various devices (including paper & print) becomes arbitrary, and should be nearly trivial
* further, if the “book” exists in the cloud, then the range of things that can be done with this “book” multiplies significantly
* if a system built on these ideals is implemented well, it will be transformative, both for professional publishing workflows, and for the emergence of a new grassroots of indie publishing.

I am still deeply committed to this vision. But I have shifted towards a belief that the above-described platform should be open source. Or at least, an open source version of such should exist.

And:

WordPress, it seems, is an ideal candidate as a platform on which to build an open source, online, webby, book-publishing system. There may be other likely candidates, but WordPress has the following characteristic which suggest to me that it is an excellent place to start:

* it is a familiar and comfortable tool to most writers and publishers who are at all engaged online
* it is a stable platform that can handle just about any scale of traffic you can throw at it (the New York Times, for instance, runs on a heavily-hacked version of WordPress)
* it is open source
* through its plugin architecture, it is infinitely extensible
* through its template architecture, it is infinitely stylable
* through WordPress Mu, it isinfinitely scalable it has a huge, world-wide community of committed developers
* existing plugins and plugin suites already achieve much of what would bewanted in a WordPress-based book publishing system.

And elaborating more fully, here is a list of plugins such a system would need:

1. robust version control
2. digress.it (based on the old commentpress)- to allow para by para commenting for editors, and later, if desired, for readers
3. wordpress –> epub conversion
4. wordpress –> ~LaTeX –> print-ready pdf conversion (or similar)
5. wordpress –> InDesign-compliant mark-up conversion
6. book-friendly front-end template(s) (including Table of Contents, Title page etc)
7. generation of a download/(sales?) page that lists available formats (epub, html, pdf etc)
8. table of contents generator
9. a book metadata generation/management tool (ONYX, OPDS compliant?)
10. …etc.

This list of plugins can continue, subject to the interest of developers, and the needs of users of such a system.

You can read the whole thing here.

And props to John Maxwell and his students at the Simon Fraser Masters of Publishing Program for actually building a protoype and publishing a book with it. Also, do head over to Leanpub.com and see another implementation of something similar.

The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.

Anyone interested in media should watch and listen:

[link]

Follow us on Twitter: @bookcampto
Hashtag: #bcto2010
Web site: http://bookcampto.pbworks.com

BOOKCAMPTORONTO: TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:

ROOM ONE:

9:30 Launching a Digital Business from Inside a Print Business
* Sulemaan Ahmed (Director of Digital Marketing, Harlequin)
* Jenny Bullough (Manager, Digital Content Harlequin)

10:30 Reading is Everywhere
* Michael Serbinis (CEO, Kobo)

11:30 Distribution for Everyone
* Allen Lau (CEO, Wattpad)

2:00 When CanLit Becomes GlobalLit
* Sarah MacLachlan (Publisher, Anansi)
* Michael Tamblyn (EVP Content, Sales & Merchandising, Kobo)

3:00 Data-geek Extravaganza! Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bibliographic Metadata.
* Julia Horel-O’Brien (General Manager, LitDistCo)
* Meghan MacDonald (Project Coordinator, BookNet Canada).

4:00 Building Communities
* Tan Light (Coordinator, Digital Sales and Marketing, Random House)
* Meg Mathur (Online Merchandising Manager, Indigo)

ROOM TWO:

9:30 The (Shifting) Role of Design in Publishing
* Ingrid Paulson (Ingrid Paulson Design)

10:30 But Is It Art?
* Kelsey Blackwell (StudioBlackwell)

11:30 Obscure Objects of Desire
* Neil Stewart (Anstey Book Binding)
* Aurelie Collings (Folded&Gathered Books)

2:00 From Letterpress to XHTML
* Scott Boms (Principal, Wishingline)
* Joe Clark (journalist, author, and web accessibility consultant)

3:00 The Book of MPub
* John Maxwell (et al.), SFU/Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing

4:00 Venturing Beyond the Text
* Ian Barker (CEO, Symtext) & TBA

ROOM THREE:

9:30 eBooks in Education and Academia — the glacial revolution
* John Dupuis (York University)
* Evan Leibovitch (York University)

10:30 Writing about Writing
* Stuart Woods (Editor, Quill & Quire)
* Amy Logan-Holmes (Executive Director, OpenBook Toronto)
* Conan Tobias (Taddle Creek)

11:30 Where are you at? Geolocating Lit
* Ashleigh Gardener, (Digital Manager, Dundurn Press)

2:00 Leaping off the Page: Transmedia Storytelling
* Mark Leslie Lefebvre (Titles Bookstore)
* Jill Golick (consultant, screenwriter, creative producer)

3:00 Unleashing Your Inner Reader
* Marichka Melnyk (CBC Radio, CanadaReads)

4:00 The sBook
* Bob Logan, Greg Van Alstyne, Peter Jones and friends -sLab at OCAD

ROOM FOUR:

9:30 Literate Video Games
* Tim Maly (Founder, Capybara Games) & TBA

10:30 What Does the Writer Want?
* Nichole McGill (author)

11:30 A Bucket of Cold Water – a Digital Reality Check
* Denise Bukowski (The Bukowski Agency)

2:00 Writers from the sidelines: challenges and successes
* Khadija I

3:00 The Onset of Exhaustion: Publishing in 2010
* Alana Wilcox (Editor-in-Chief, Coach House Books)

4:00 Going Alone: Educating the Market
* K Sawyer Paul (Gredunza Press)
* Eisee Sylvester (Gredunza Press)

ROOM FIVE: HANDS-ON WORKSHOPS

9:30 Digital Do-Dads: Digital Reading Devices
* Mark Pavlidis & TBA

10:30 Making Books into Audio
* Miette (miettecast.com)

11:30 Video and Books
* Ian Daffern (IDFACTORY)

2:00 Print-on-Demand Workshop
* Rob Clements, Lightning Source Inc.

3:00 Pimping Your Book
* Ian Paul Marshall (Book Marketing & Toronto Writers Mastermind)