As usual, Liza Daly is on the case taking a deep look at the kind of ePub file that Pages generates, and the news looks pretty good. I also went in and did some fooling around myself last night, and was very happy to discover that Pages will export ePub files with video and audio, using the appropriate HTML5 tags.

Granted, since these tags aren’t part of the ePub spec, the files don’t pass ePubCheck, but neither do the multimedia-enhanced ePub files that are currently being sold on the iBookstore. Pages doesn’t seem to do any media encoding or compression, which is to be expected, but it also means that multimedia-enhanced ePub files generated by Pages aren’t quite ready for prime time. Aside from that, as Liza points out, Pages is using <div> tags instead of <p> tags, which is baaaaaad, and the CSS styles could stand to be a bit more human-firendly (why not simply pick up the names of the Pages text styles they’re based on?). There’s also some awkward funkiness going on with how Pages is generating a cover, but I’m not sure if that’s due to my lack of Pages-fu. But in general they’re close. Damn close.

As I tweeted last night, Apple has (unsurprisingly) just outdone Amazon in a very important space: content creation. Creating Mobi files for Amazon’s Kindle platform is a huge pain compared to simply clicking about in Pages. Next up, I’m going to play with running some Pages-generated ePub files through Kindlegen, and see what happens.

It’s gonna be a fun weekend.

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***

If you’re not certain of what branding is, I can assure you that you see it each and every day. On your commute, online, in the paper, you’ll see advertising for brands that you know, love and despise, from Verizon to Johnson & Johnson to…HarperCollins? No, perhaps not.

I’m of the belief that publisher or imprint specific branding would be not only fairly fruitless for trade publishers but also hugely time consuming and a financial drain. Branding, specifically online branding, works in niches that allow you to reach specific communities. A branding campaign needs a defined target or it is destined to fail.

Branding for trade book publishers is different from most major brands with big advertising budgets. Publishers have relied on grassroots branding like the book tour to get both the name of the author and the press out into the communities for decades. Smaller store turnouts combined with the smaller number of independent bookstores have made launch tours for new authors few and far between. Compounded with shrinking book review pages, publicists are seeking new forums for their books. Many pursue online media and that has thrown publicity right into marketing and corporate branding. Publicity, marketing and branding have often overlapped and are even synonymous at some major trade houses because they rely heavily on individual authors and books and not the true brand.

The abundance of publisher Facebook pages, blogs and Twitter feeds suggest that publishers want to go direct to consumers, but many are not reaching that audience at all. Some market research on the bigger imprints’ Facebook pages would likely report that their “fans” are already in the industry (or want to be). Pantheon has 724 followers this morning. Sixty-five of those followers are publishing people that I know personally. That’s a hefty percentage. And that’s a lot of effort expended to get those 700 fans, a minimum of 10% of which are in the industry.

This begs the question: can the general consumer be made intimately aware of the differences between a book from Knopf and one from Free Press? If they’re aware of the difference will they choose one over the other? Will the knowledge that Knopf is more liberal and more literary than Free Press impact the book buying decision? I think it very well could, but what would it take for the general consumer to recognize that name? There are a select few consumers who know these names and link consumer confidence with them, but they are not the majority of readers.

So we need to reach a new group of readers. I don’t think our reading public is spending hours watching TV each day. However, targeted TV ads could work in the right markets using the right TV programs. Slate tested an interesting TV ad experiment recently. It’s not out of the question, but it can be strategically limiting financially and production-wise. (I’m not intentionally leaving out radio but NPR ads are frequently used by publishers and are nothing new.)

A complete rebrand (design, web, social media, events, corporate promotion) could be effective for publishers who want to invest in widely branding their operation. HarperStudio is a good test case for branding on a smaller scale. As a publisher who uses its employees to speak on behalf of the publisher and brand the imprint, it’s gotten a lot of play since its inception in early 2008. But tying yourself to one or two strong personalities can leave you vulnerable: consider recent reports talking of its demise with the departure of publisher/founder Bob Miller, whose picture, as of this writing, still smiles from the top of their Web site. I don’t think anyone would disagree that in two years HarperStudio has built a brand for itself effectively within the industry but has it sold more product because of that branding? Has it gained recognition in the wider world? Difficult questions to answer from the outside but I would assume no. You can see answers to those questions here.

Whether publishers are looking for readers interested in general fiction or specialized professional books, readers are on the web. Finding those interested in a certain subject or genre isn’t rocket science but it does take some trial and error and a willingness to work to build solid relationships. Attempting to make an impression on the “general reader,” who is just as likely to pick up fiction as they are biography, would require a far reaching online (or broadcast or print) campaign. It would take an immense amount of resources to reach such a broad group of active readers on the internet. And this essentially ignores the competition issue, would Random House permit an extensive branding campaign for one imprint to the detriment of its other imprints? Sensibly, I would think not. They could rebrand RH as a whole but I doubt rebranding all of the imprints into Random House would be welcome or really an option.

Online promotion is critical in a rapidly changing book market. Opinions differ on how to foster brand and book/author awareness, but the need for it is no less necessary for specific publishers. The rise of “wireless reading” (ebooks, pdas, netbooks, iphones) and the intense use of social media makes this an interesting time for branding digitally. Facebook and Twitter are being used to brand, but they can dilute a brand if they are not excellently maintained with new content and ideas that add information not just repeat it in this sphere. Chelsea Green has a substantial Twitter feed with weekly contests that create viral marketing for their books. They have a niche and are informative, active and engaged with their readers.

Crossover experimentation with branding and marketing on the web is relatively inexpensive compared to the print and broadcast ads of recent decades and still largely underexploited, finding the right mix could create success. Tor.com would be an excellent example of tapping into a publisher’s core market effectively online.

A comprehensive online branding campaign can be pursued by any size publisher with a thoughtful strategy targeting the right audience firmly behind it. It can be the right course of action for specialized publishers, but in my opinion general trade publishers are chasing rainbows in this sphere.

^{The opinions expressed here are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Oxford University Press.}

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To back up this claim, let’s start by defining “brand” and “value.”

In strict economic terms, a brand is simply the premium I’m willing to pay for an item based on the logo attached to the item. Put another way, there are “store brand” items at your local grocery store than contain precisely the same ingredients as the “name brands.” In some cases, these store brands are bottled or packaged by the same local distributor — using exactly the same products — as the name brands. Yet the name brands continue to sell, and profitably so, because consumers are willing to pay a premium price for the name brand packaging on essentially the same product. The difference in price between the name brand and the store brand is the brand value.

Value, separate from a brand, is the monetary worth a consumer places on a product or service.  It doesn’t matter how much it costs to create, market, or distribute a product. All that really matters is the value a consumer places on the product. If you want a sale, the price of your product better be lower than the consumer’s value of the product. Not equal. Lower. That way the consumer perceives he is getting a deal, and that he is receiving value for his money.

So what does any of this have to do with e-books?

For starters, e-book pricing is viewed by many consumers as wildly out of step with the perceived value of the product. No matter how you parse the numbers or sketch out production costs or trot out sob stories of how scandalously little money the average writer makes, consumers simply don’t perceive an intangible good as having the same value as a tangible good. Thus, if you want e-books to sell, you simply can’t price them the same as physical books. It doesn’t matter if it’s reasonable. It doesn’t matter if it’s fair. To turn a profit in a competitive market economy, a producer is obligated to deliver a product at a price lower than the perceived consumer value. If Producer A (in this case established publishing houses) can’t do it, Producer B (some new e-book publisher, like maybe Amazon itself ) will do so.

More to the point, e-books aren’t just intangible goods, they’re infinite goods. Once the first e-book is produced, every subsequent copy has a production and distribution cost at or near zero. As such, many consumers’ perceived value of an infinite good is zero. Just ask the music or newspaper industries exactly how much the average consumer is willing to pay for the electronic versions of their products.

Which brings us back to brand. If the value of a brand is how much extra a consumer is willing to pay for a product over a differently branded equivalent item, then the only value an infinite good has is its brand value. All things being equal, the consumer thinks the cost of an e-book should be at or near zero.  If you want to charge a price higher than zero, you better have a brand that creates value in the mind of the consumer.

So how does a brand create value separate and above the value of an equivalent product?

Well, as old-school marketers will tell you, a brand is a promise, and a great brand is a promise kept. What does your brand promise, and do you keep that promise?

Apple manages to actually sell digital content by promising ease of use (and a certain amount of Apple-hipster conspicuous consumption). The Wall Street Journal maintains one of the few successful online newspaper paywalls by promising incredibly serious, incredibly respected content (and a certain amount of snobbish rich-investor conspicuous consumption).

In the publishing space, the author’s brand is infinitely more important than the publisher’s brand. I’m going to read Charles Stross novels no matter who publishes them (and in fact Stross has a bibliography that spans multiple publishers). But the author’s brand is usually associated with story content. I buy Charles Stross novels because I like high-concept science fiction with an unflinching density of ideas and an unforgiving expectation from the reader. The Stross brand promises that and, so far, has unswervingly delivered. So what can a publisher’s brand promise?

Off the cuff, a publisher’s brand can promise that the author will be getting a serious cut of the profits from the price of the e-book I’m paying. I care about the author, and I’ll respect a brand that cares about the author, too. A brand can also promise cross-platform compatibility free of annoying DRM, spyware, and the like. A publisher’s brand can promise impeccable editing and typesetting, such that reading is a physically pleasant experience. A publisher’s brand can promise beautifully and meticulously curated backmatter and bonus materials — precisely the sort of stuff e-books can offer that physical books can’t. A publisher’s brand can promise extraordinary original cover art — which was purchased at a fair rate from the cover artist.

There’s also the (not so) novel notion of a brand that is a signpost of a community. John Scalzi is  bankable brand, in no small part because he is the arbiter of a not inconsiderable online community from his website, The Whatever. Yes, Scalzi writes good books, but he also has a built-in audience ready to consume what he produces. Brands can have communities, too. (Just ask Apple.) And if you use all the considerable social media tools that help you build a community, you are cultivating a buying audience. Authors certainly should cultivate a community-centric brand, but publishers can, too.

And all of that is before we even mention the publisher’s original — and still most important — role: Content gatekeeper. As the barrier to entry for e-publishing diminishes, and the near-zero-price market for e-books flourishes, publishers have no choice but to become a signifier of quality and type of content. When blogging first emerged, simply having a blog was enough. Now that anyone can have a blog inside of five minutes, brand-name, high-quality blogs are of significant value. The same value-progression is likely in the e-book market.

What sort of content does your brand of e-book promise? Is it near-future hard sci-fi? Is it urban fantasy that unfailing passes the Bechdel test? Is it a (not at all fictionalized) common-man memoir? Is it a salacious celebrity biography with an emphasis on titillating detail? Figure it out (and launch a new brand-explicit imprint, if you have to), then start cultivating a roster of best-possible content that matches your self-described brand.

Whatever your brand promise, it is only by establishing that promise, advertising it, delivering it, and maintaining it that any publisher has any hope of actually charging for e-books.

At least, that’s my take. I’d love to hear a difference of opinion.

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Dear Publishing Industry,

While surfing this vast space known as the internet, I came across something that I believe once belonged to you. I recognized them because they seem to be very interested in technical books, science fiction, Manga, sex (both the how-to and erotica varieties), business and various other related genres. I believe you call them “The Male Demographic.”

It seems that they outgrew the centuries old dead-treehouse that you built for them, and have found a new place where they have been able to grow and flourish, a place that seems rather comfortable for them. They have had plenty of time to mark their territory, to revel in the possibilities of their new home, and have taken steps to make that home a place that is welcoming and pleasant. Now, I know they’ve visited the old dead-treehouse of yours on occasion, but it seems that they’ve felt neglected since you continued your publishing energies in the old house, rather than visiting them in the new, roomier, digital house.

Despite your neglect, they are still very loyal. So loyal, in fact, that they go through great efforts to preserve and share their love for the written word. They do this despite the fact that many of the books they pass around can’t be found in digital formats otherwise, and in many cases are considered “out of print” in the old dead-treehouse.

Personally, I find their loyalty commendable, and even a little misplaced. Especially considering your recent efforts to leash, collar, and cage them. They understand that while you are finally ready to move towards the digital house, you haven’t quite figured out all the nuances. They recognize that you think you must put your foot down and mark the boundaries of the house. But your collars chafe and your leashes choke whenever they try to move.

While they hold out hope that you will actually notice that they have been here for some time, that they might actually be able to offer up some advice about how to navigate the digital house without knocking it down, I can’t help but think they are being overly optimistic.

Sincerely,
Mr. Eighteen T. McThirtyfive

P.S.- These “anti-piracy” firms you hire to bring your lost demographic home- well, let’s just say they should stop lacing their treats with cyanide and razorblades. It isn’t very nice.

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a McGraw-Hill Professional book in which the first letter of every paragraph appears on a line by itself. Thus:

T
he quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Hella annoying. And there was an egregious typo in the book, repeated three times in one paragraph.

So she’s set up a web form for people to log their ebook tales of woe: the E-book Abomination Index submission form.

Due to the mass-production, assembly line, and outsourced nature of ebook production at the big publishing houses, and due to the fact that, until the Kindle-fueled exponential growth in ebook sales last year, eBooks were seen as a very, very, very small source of revenue (practically negligible), there’s been little to no effort to internally police the quality of electronic books coming out of the big six publishers.

With the increasing popularity of the Kindle, and the imminent arrival of Apple’s iPad, ebooks are about to gain some serious k-points in readers’ mindshare—not to mention marketshare vis a vis their print coutnerparts. Not monitoring quality, and letting errors like these reach the end user gives validity to the accusations that some in the very zealous, very vocal, but very under-informed and up to now very small eBook enthusiast community have been making for years about the big publishers: that they don’t give two shits about readers in general and eBook readers in particular, and—in some extreme cases—that the big six are somehow out to actively sabotage the burgeoning ebook market, and that they should respond in kind.

Both charges are patently false, of course, and my serious issues with the zealots in the ebook enthusiast community could be the subject of not one, but many additional posts. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re entirely wrong—to the best of their ability they’re interpreting the message that publishers are inadvertently putting out there. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case, for every “we’re interested in eBooks” platitude that publishers put forth with their words, there’s twenty such cases where their actions (or lack thereof) communicate a different story.

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1. Warner Bros. : Netflix as Random House : _______
a. library
b. Amazon
c. GooglePrint
d. all of the above

2. DVDs : movielovers as ebooks : _______.
a. booklovers
b. cheap people
c. misunderstood
d. all of the above

(My answers at the end)

Both of these analogies are problematic on several levels. For starters, Warner Bros. and Random House are not made equal and neither are Netflix and Amazon but Warner Bros. and Random House are both grasping for something within their content distribution  and that is the seed for this post.

The movie and publishing businesses could not be more different. But they have both, along with music, found themselves in a tricky, new, digital situation of content distribution in the past decade. Publishing is the stuffy older cousin to both music and movies. It has always been the quintessential “gentleman’s” business. For decades (in some cases centuries) the pursuit of scholarly and literary excellence was sought after and profits deemed not entirely necessary. In my tenure, I have worked at all types of publishers, a few of the “big six,” an indy publisher and a university press. They all function in fairly similar ways with, of course, marked differences in how they meet their ends. But with the decline of the independent bookstore and the rise of chains and Amazon, the digital revolution, and ultimately the “Great Recession” a fundamental change has occurred: the way consumers consume.

We have not entered a new marketplace, we are in the thick of it, and publishing is just joining the party after resisting for so very long. Ami posted here about the three jobs publishers need to fill this year. The reality is publishers needed to fill those positions five years ago and won’t fill them for another two in any real numbers. We continue to struggle, several steps behind the real technology game as have our film and music counterparts.

On January 6, 2010 Netflix and Warner Bros. announced in a joint press release that they would delay new releases of Warner Bros. DVDs and BlueRay discs for 28 days on Netflix. It is my guess that Warner Bros implemented a certain amount of arm twisting here. And it seems likely that a similar arrangement must be in the works with Blockbuster but no mention of that was made in the release. I believe this has some telling correlations for how publishers handle ebook publishing.

First of all, Netflix is an excellent business model and one publishers should be paying more attention to across all publishing platforms. But Warner Bros., like several publishers of late, has decided that they are missing out on sales because of the availability of their DVDs as rentals. Why this wasn’t a problem back in the Blockbuster heyday is beyond my understanding but movie rentals, not unlike library lending (which is simply funded by our tax dollars as opposed to a subscription model), has been around for ages and it’s never been a problem until now. So you ask what does this have to do with digital content strategy? Everything!

I know all the arguments, I’ve read Jonathan Galassi’s op-ed in the New York Times (which in a nutshell argues that publishers are contributors to books and should have some right to the edited work that they marketed, publicized, designed—but this is all fodder for another post…), and I know many in the industry vehemently disagree with me. But in my opinion, an ebook is a mass market paperback, plain and simple. You’re not going to put it on your bookshelf and save it, you can’t get it signed by the author (without getting snickered at) and chances are you want to leave it on a park bench or pass it along to a friend. So what is an ebook worth and what is the benefit of delaying its release?

Mass market paperbacks don’t publish at the same time as the hardcover. That’s true. But not all books make it to mass market paperback status: Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, Anne McCaffrey, these are the bread and butter of the mass market format. To the contrary, every book has the potential to be an ebook—from the scholarly monograph to genre fiction—so it is a completely different animal. As are the aforementioned modern day consumers. Convenience, impulse buys, easy access and above all, price are the order of the day to consumers in our recessionary economy. We don’t see as many movies in the theaters, we never buy actual CDs anymore, and book sales are declining. We all know it, no matter how hard we try to ignore the facts. Amazon has a strategy of $9.99 for bestsellers but I’ve frequently seen ebooks priced higher than their hardcover counterparts, I’m guessing at publisher list price, not Amazon’s. And every publisher has a different strategy.

I think it’s high time to come up with a group strategy.

We’re not dealing with a bookstore here, this is Amazon, and they care little about the health and welfare of the publishing world. We contribute product to one very small segment of a retail giant, no matter what their humble beginnings were. They care about selling Kindles, launching a new reading platform and giving consumers what they want—cheap content—in the most convenient, impulse-buying and lucrative way possible. Not unlike the time it takes you to purchase a song from the iTunes store for $.99, at $9.99 I don’t labor over the decision to buy a Kindle copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (but then again, Amazon has the hardcover discounted from $29.95 to $12.00). For your typical (non-Dan Brown) book at $27.95 I can easily wait for the paperback to come out, I have a million other things to read. Your hardcore fan on the other hand, wants it as soon as possible, can’t wait to have it. He wants to have it signed and will likely buy the Kindle edition too (if it’s available before he’s cracked the spine on the $27.95 copy or borrowed it from the library). That is all to say, that certain books warrant a delayed e-release and will lose significant hardcover sales to a digital edition but these are in no way the majority of books being published.

It’s a fine line for consumers. I know I won’t buy a DVD until I’ve seen the movie. Even say Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which I’m pretty much guaranteed to love. If I haven’t seen it in the theaters I’m going to get it from Netflix and then think about buying it. Either way you slice it, a content provider is delaying my purchase of a movie or book by delaying its “e-release.” Will I wait six months to buy a Dan Brown book as publishers change their ebook release schedules? Yeah, probably. Or maybe there will be something else I’d rather spend my $9.99 on when the time comes, or the pile on my virtual nightstand is already just a bit too deep to bother or even better I’ll just wait for the mass market paperback to come out for $6.95 in another six months which I can at least pass along. The fact is publishers are losing out on some sales whether they are hardcover or ebook by staggering release dates for the same content.

I may still buy my DVD from Warner Bros. but they now have to wait another 28 days for me to get my disc from NetFlix, watch it, order from Amazon… Same goes for readers. I won’t bother buying a hardcover unless it’s a book I have to have in my library, in which case, I want a reading copy anyway. Whether it is an ebook or a crummy little paperback is just a matter of what’s available to me at the moment I’m looking to buy.

So where do we go from here?

We start a real, constructive cross-publisher conversation, do some market research, talk to a futurist (or Dionne Warwick) and move forward! The indecision is getting us nowhere. Why not try a new innovative discussion and come to some concrete strategies for ebook pricing and release dates? Sounds simple right? I know it’s not simple, but it is a place to start.

Sarah’s analogy answers: 1. d; 2. a.

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Question 2: “Did you know a lot of people buy ebooks and then don’t finish them?”

Believe me, I’m not disputing the point: it’s a fact that people buy ebooks they don’t finish. It’s also a fact that people buy plenty of *physical* books that they don’t finish—my reading history is littered with quality (and not-so-quality) books I never could quite seal the deal on.

But, for the sake of argument, even if publishing were somehow able to prove that people abandon more ebooks that physical books, isn’t that kind of a weird platform to build a marketing strategy around? New plan, editors: you only need to read the first seven chapters in any book before buying! Designers, just slap those last 100 pages on there in Courier typeface! It’s a TIME SAVER.

This comment tends to come up in those ebook meetings where most of the discussion revolves around anecdotes. It’s kind of a problem the industry has: notoriously low salaries, coupled with the reluctance/inability of major publishing houses to invest in new technology for their staff, means that many people haven’t actually used these devices in any meaningful way for commercial reading, generally through no fault of their own. These devices are expensive in and of themselves, and if you work in publishing, using one of them for your pleasure reading also short circuits one of the perks of the business: free books. It can be an expensive experiment for someone in the lower ranks of a big house.

This creates the sort of environment where any kind of consumer ebook experience is interesting, but ultimately difficult for people in house to agree on how to act upon. I think one takeaway from the statement ‘people don’t finish all of their ebooks,’ is that there’s potentially a market for shorter content in ebook format. I’m certainly not the first person to say this, but as a short story addict, it’s a concept I’d love to see more people experiment with.

What other ebook anecdotes are you hearing, and do you think they provide a useful roadmap for a new way of selling or marketing?

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Question 1: “How will people get their ebooks signed?”

As far as I can tell, the logic behind this question seems to go like this: authors have always signed books, and readers have always come to events to get their books signed, therefore not being able to do that = huge problem.

Here’s the logic I’d love to see people using: instead of wondering how we can adapt an older model to suit new technology, maybe we should think about what getting a book signed represents to a consumer, and see if there’s a way an ereader could make it better.

I’m not big on signed books, so it’s possible I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that they tap into a few different things: the impulse to memorialize an event, the collecting jones, and also the desire to have a unique experience directly with the author. Why else stand in line for an hour with your name spelled out on a post-it note waiting for Salman Rushdie to scrawl his signature and your name in Shalimar the Clown? (←An actual unfulfilling personal experience I’d prefer to not relive.)

We can make this a different encounter. It’s a paradigm shift. Instead of forcing people to wait in line hoping to get some small face time with an author, maybe everyone who attends the reading gets a recording of the event immediately following. Maybe the author is excited enough about being sent on tour that he writes an additional story with the book’s characters, available exclusively to those who show up at his appearances. Maybe a risk-taker even releases the first chapter of her upcoming work-in-progress and an email address where comments can be sent.

The suggestions above aren’t meant to be definitive, and more importantly, they aren’t meant to be changes that need to happen overnight. I mean for them to be examples of the ways in which we can reconsider the signing experience wholesale, instead of merely adapting old practices.

What ways would you be excited to see the signing experience change?

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1
Hello, all, I’m Pablo.
At the last Pecha Kucha, during BEA in February of last year, I spoke a bit about where the book could be going in the future, and about how publishers need to stay on top of the ball in order to avoid being left behind by forward-thinking people in other industries looking to exploit authors’ intellectual property and expand what a book means.

2
Otherwise, they may be eclipsed by more nimble, agile publishers or production houses, using approaches to media development and media dissemination born of the internet, the film industry and of tech companies, and lacking all the heavy baggage that plagues legacy corporate publishing.
Now, I love printed books. I’m a bookmaker, and a collector. And I think printed books will still be around for a long, long time, but they will be beautiful objects.

3
Similar to vinyl records and box sets: low-production-run, beautifully designed, premium-priced collectors items. This will allow publishers to stop throwing money away on expensive and wasteful manufacturing and distribution processes, and instead spend some of that money making a better-quality product, for a larger margin, with a more discerning reader in mind.
These are the books that fans will want to get signed.

4
I also said that books as physical objects are nothing more than containers for information. In the digital landscape, it really doesn’t matter what the container for that information is, as long as it’s appropriate to the information being conveyed, and it offers a comfortable and enjoyable user experience, on the reader’s terms.

5
In the end, I called for publishers to be more like multimedia producers, as Richard Nash recently did in an editorial in Publishing Perspectives, and Ami did on our blog, The New Sleekness, and to involve developers and designers in the initial stages of the editorial process, in order to determine what the best vehicle for a particular author’s voice is.

6
I’m not talking about so-called “enhanced ebooks”. What legacy publishers are calling “enhanced ebooks” are simply ePub files with additional textual material added to them—usually as an afterthought and as a marketing tool for selling the print edition or for advancing a business agenda.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very ad hoc and short-sighted application of technology.

7
ePub is a fine format, and one that we’ll be using as a base for many many applications. But I’d like to see publishers move beyond ePub, into the world of the wildly different media-consumption devices coming onto the market, each with different displays, capabilities, and features.
Publishers need to start looking at computing platforms as a whole, instead of limiting themselves to specific file formats or devices. They need to be developing content for mainstream platforms like these.

8
So in the spirit of Digital Book World, today I’d like to talk about concrete examples of this approach to publishing.
All the examples I’ll mention here are either a work-in-progress, a practical exercise, or somehow not-quite-there-yet, and each has their flaws. But in some way these ideas embrace the right approach: a disregard of the old tropes of physical publishing, and an embrace of new modes of delivery, always in service of the core of what the work itself is meant to be.
So let’s get started.

9
First up: Shadow Unit
Author Emma Bull had the jones to write a TV show.
So she did, with the help of some pals, like WIll Shetterly, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear.
They created a series bible, came up with a ‘broadcast schedule’, and started writing episodes.

10
They put it all up online for people to read, along with extras like character livejournals, production notes, music playlists, ‘cut’ scenes, fake websites, short pieces of background writing, and a Wiki to keep track of it all. They are in the process of writing season three. They release ‘DVD extras’ for each season once it’s done, and post those, as well.

11
There is a dedicated fan community around shadowunit.org, where people write fan fiction, interact with the creators, and eagerly wait for the next episode of Shadow Unit, the best television show that never existed.
Shadow Unit is essentially a group of authors following their muse to the best of their capacity, and putting their work out there for a receptive fanbase. Who’s to say that a savvy publisher can’t approach the Shadow Unit crew and propose to fund their TV show, to bring it to life as a webseries?

12
Next up, this is Red Light Properties by Dan Goldman, published by Tor.com. I’m partial to this one.
Dan and I had worked previously on a comic for Tor.com, and when he proposed a story about a jewish/cuban real estate broker/psychedelic exorcist in Miami I jumped at the chance to publish something long-form with him.

13-14 (Screencast)
Dan came up with an interesting way to present comics on a website, a way in which he could control the pacing of the story in a way, but at the same time create an interface that the user could manipulate themselves.
So he split the pages of his comic into discreet panels and word balloons, and we developed a comics viewer which allows the reader to control the experience panel-by-panel.
It just went live this past week, so you can check it out on Tor.com. Now, there’s more to this than just a plug.
Part of the philosophy behind Dan’s approach to his comics is to try to make them as universally available as possible, and that means, among other things, viewing a comic on whatever screen the reader wants to use.

15 (Video)
As I was getting the raw artwork for his comics, I decided to take this to its ultimate conclusion and try a little experiment: I put all the consecutive images in my Apple TV and got an instant slide show. I could now read Dan’s comic from my couch. It was a crude approach, but a very nice experience once it was set up. I wish I could read Batman like this.

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Finally, we have Level 26 by Anthony Zuiker, published by Dutton Books
Now, what this lacks in polish it makes up for in execution. Level 26 is a novel, a social network, and a series of inter-chapter videos called ‘cyber-bridges’, which is an unfortunate name if I ever heard one.
But the interesting part isn’t what this is, it’s how it’s delivered.

17-18 (Screencast)
As an iTunes download, you get a DVD-like experience where you can view stills, view artwork, get more info about the authors, and of course, read the book, with these ‘cyber-bridges’ integrated into the flow of the novel in a relatively linear way.
You can also watch this on an Apple TV, of course, which gives you the same couch-reading experience that I was going for with the Dan’s comic on my TV. Now as a designer, I cringe at the typographic and readability issues with Level 26, but as I said, what’s important here isn’t the particular execution, it’s the overall approach.

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The publisher has leveraged the huge installed base and multimedia capability of iTunes and the iPhone when delivering the book to the public, and eliminated the need for additional barriers to entry, like a dedicated eReader or special software.
It also meets readers in a space where they’re already at; after all, pretty much everyone has iTunes on their computer these days. I can’t help but think that this is a good strategy for attracting new readers, or for facilitating author discovery.

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These are all the seeds of what’s possible. It’s up to publishers to take advantage of the opportunity to shepherd authors’ ideas—that crucial information they’re trying to communicate—into whatever device, format, or mechanism is best suited to the idea, and to get it onto the devices and platforms that are popular with readers.
To limit ourselves to just words on a page, or on a screen, is to limit the expression of the core product that this industry is based on. There’s no reason to think that our readers are going to sit around and wait for us to catch up with them, publishers need to take the initiative and innovate.

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