OK, so first of all: this isn’t an article about whether or not ebooks are a good thing. But I was thinking this morning about the now hackneyed idea that we’re moments away from an ‘iPod moment for ebooks’, and trying once again to work out why I think this is so very wrong. I’ve concluded that it’s because of the physical qualities of books. But not in the way you’d think.
No discussion of the future of the book is complete without someone saying, as if they’d thought of it first, ‘But books are tactile and sensory as well as intellectual, what about the feel and smell?’. Yeah, I like to read in the bath, I like to scribble in the margins, etc. This discussion has been extensively rehearsed, by people much smarter than me, so let’s sidestep this issue for a moment. But the physicality of books impacts on their contents, too, and it is this that makes the iPod a misleading comparison for the kind of content that might work on an e-reader.
Let’s look at books for a moment. While in the early Wild West publishing days of the 18th-century print boom works were produced in a bewildering array of formats (elephant folio, pamphlet, poster, flyer, handout along with more familiar books) in today’s mature publishing industry there is an inverse correlation between the size of the print run and the variation in the book’s dimensions. In other words, the more mass-market a book, the more likely it will be to conform to the average book dimensions: 110-135mm wide, by 178-216mm high. This is the easiest size to produce inexpensively, and sell at a price point the market will bear.
Length is determined as well, by manufacturing constraints at the top end, and the fixed overheads of printing at the bottom. Bookshops are crammed with full-length books whose contents could just as well be communicated in a short essay, or even in the title alone: I’m thinking of Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway, but a glance at the self-help or business shelves of your local bookshop will show you plenty more. And yet to make economic sense they have to be padded out for publication in ‘proper’ book size. But to conclude from this (as many unwittingly do) that long-form books are necessarily the best, rather than just the most familiar, way of communicating ideas is mistaken; and to assume that this practice will transplant to e-readers, imagined as a kind of iPod for these long-form essays, is just wrong.
Look at the Web. The attention economy at its most feral. Whatever you’re writing, there is always better, more engaging, more pornographic or immediately relevant content only a click away. If I make this article too long you won’t finish it. In terms of print tradition, long-form writing is best; but online, brevity really is the soul of wit. Or, rather, the soul of not being ignored. Does this mean that – on the assumption that long-form is intrinsically good – the Web is ruining our ability to think deeply? Birkerts’ recent Atlantic article ‘Resisting the Kindle’ (see Bob’s post below) rehearses, after a fashion, some of these concerns; but a counter-perspective might argue simply that, without the physical constraints of print publishing, we are experimenting with new ways to communicate.
I read books, read blogs, I twitter compulsively. I use these different formats for different kinds of experience. I see no contradiction: what I’m getting at here is that the e-reader is being treated as though it is a viable vehicle for long-form writing, in a way that ignores the essential fact that long-form writing and reading is rooted in paper, and book manufacturing.
So, back to the ‘iPod for reading’ metaphor. Its proponents generally don’t dig deeper than ‘here is a small square device for storing and consuming lots of music’. The implication is that we can hop blithely from that to ‘here is a small square device for storing and consuming lots of text’. Regardless of stirring promises of e-books containing audio, video, fancy schmancy links and so on, the common understanding – and, indeed, the hope of the publishing industry – remains that this is a digital device for reading long-form texts. But this ignores the effect that iPods – or, more generally, mp3s – are having on how music is distributed. Once sold as albums, whether on LPs or CDs, music is increasingly sold by the micro-unit – a single song. A unit of content typically around 3 or 4 minutes long rather than 60-75 minutes.
It makes economic sense to sell LPs or CDs at a runtime of 60-odd minutes. It makes economic sense to sell books of around 80,000 words. But music for iPods can be sold song by song. So, extrapolating from this to an iPod for reading, what is the written equivalent of a single song? In a word (or 300), belles lettres.
And the Web is full of belles lettres. Now and then in my wanderings around the Web, I come across something and think ‘That’s a really important essay’. And I worry about the ability of the Web to take care of it for me: link rot always sets in eventually, Wayback Machine or no. I can’t print it all out. So how do I keep such articles? I would welcome a device designed for downloading and archiving essays I think are important, a virtual library device for the belles lettres of today.
Armed with such a device, creating playlists, mashups, collages of our favourite short works, we might become a generation of digital Montaignes, annotating and expanding our collective discourse. Blogging is already, in effect, the re-emergence of belles lettres; and while blog posts are typically written for the moment, a device that could earn the blogger a small sum (and the cachet of being considered worthy of archiving) for every essay downloaded might well inspire a renaissance in short work written for a longer lifespan.
As a device for consuming a kind of writing – long-form – developed within the constraints of physical print, e-readers are a niche product. Reading a long-form book on an e-reader is a bit like teleconferencing: it’s OK as far as it goes, but the meeting format evolved from haptic, as much as informational, constraints and still works better that way. There may be people out there who listen to entire albums, from start to finish, one at a time, on their iPods; I’m willing to bet there will a few who will enjoy slogging through long-form writings, one at a time, on a digital device. I don’t see it going mainstream. But a device for collating and archiving good, important, digital short writing? I want one.
So, please, can we forget about the handful of eccentrics who want to ruin their eyes wading through War and Peace on a tiny LCD screen. Instead, let’s bring on the real iPod for reading: something that lets me download, archive, tag annotate, share, playlist and categorise short-form works that would otherwise disappear into the link-rot mulch of yesterday’s Web. Let’s figure out a business model, an iTunes for micro-articles. Let’s take short-form digital writing seriously.
(Cross-posted from sebastianmary.com)
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Have you ever looked at Instapaper? http://www.instapaper.com
It’s a service that lets you save any kind of online post or article to your account on their site (no more link rot problems). From there, you can send it to a Kindle. It’s amazing and seems like just what you are asking for – sans the micropayment scheme. I blogged about it more the other day at: http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=775
-Aaron
I have to say, I am always bemused at people who insist that people won’t read long texts on computer. I’m part of a community (media fanfiction writers), which has been reading long texts on screens for approximately fifteen years. Admittedly, the texts we want to read, extended riffs on our favorite television shows that do things we’ll never see on television, are not available in market and have limited circulation as diy zines. I’m not saying that there aren’t those who wouldn’t prefer to get their fanfiction in trade paperbacks, but rather, if the only place to get the writing you want is online, the length of that writing can be 100k words or more, and still get read.
That being said, my experiences in the world of fanfiction do bear out that one of the great things about reading texts on screens is that length is not dictated by publishing constraints, but rather that writers can find the length appropriate for (a) their skills and (b) their message. And many more people have short stories or essays in their souls than have novels or whole books of non-fiction.
Continuing on, however, I have great doubts about iTunes (and any other payment model which posits that everyone who reads an article, views a video, hears a song online) as a future payment model for authors, no matter the length or form of their work. I suspect that we have a much better chance of re-inventing patronage, and, for people (or aggregators) who gain a reputation for very high quality, subscriptions, than actually getting iTunes for words going, in large part because there are so many people, a non-negligible percentage of whom are talented, offering words, video, and music for no cost. Clay Shirky wrote about this recently: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/why-itunes-is-not-a-workable-model-for-the-news-business/ and http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/.
I recommend to you to this nice recent interview Stephen Fry did for the BBC, musing on whither the Internet, social net, Twitter net and all that: Stephen Fry: The Internet and me
Regarding the books debate he says:
“Very often people oddly put books against the Internet… Books should not be seen as threatened by the rise of the computer
It took a very long time for a technology to arise, making impressions on wax tablets and staining papyrus and so on, and then illuminating manuscripts; and eventually, thanks to Gutenberg of course, movable type and print was disseminated at great speed.
But it was a technology. And it seems to me that books are a marvellous and absolutely new way in the human race – I mean they’re only five hundred years old, if that – of telling stories.
And we love them. I love them. You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.”
the container does sometimes mold the contents.
and yes, the packaging can impact on the product.
and it’s absolutely true that paper-book as object
has influenced the book as we’ve come to know it,
and continues to influence the things authors write.
indeed, word-count is what most contracts specify…
that’s how deeply embedded in the infrastructure it is.
but what we have learned — from this influence —
is that there is some real _value_ in the long-form.
do all books _need_ to be close to 200 pages long?
certainly not, that’s ridiculous. they’ll vary greatly.
but _some_ books must be 200 pages long, or 300,
because that’s how many pages the story requires.
that’s how many pages the idea takes to explain…
that’s how many pages the dramatic arc demands…
it wasn’t simply “a matter of packaging” that books
end up at that length. it can also be the book itself.
what’s wonderful about “an ipod for books” is that
you can hold a _library_ in the palm of your hand…
and that library, as well as each individual book in it,
weighs just ounces, even if it’s an encyclopedia that
would take an entire bookshelf were it printed out…
the “attention economy” of the web is _not_ a call
for the elimination of long texts, and it would be a
gross disservice to humanity to think of it as such.
it just means that if you’re gonna be long, you had
_better_be_worth_it_…
> Once sold as albums, whether on LPs or CDs,
> music is increasingly sold by the micro-unit –
> a single song. A unit of content typically around
> 3 or 4 minutes long rather than 60-75 minutes.
this is a stupid comparison.
the organic unit for (most of the rock) music
(to which this statement of yours applies) _is_
the song. when you go to a concert, the band
plays _songs_, almost never in the sequence
that was on the album.
indeed, singles used to be the consumer staple.
it was the recording companies that changed it.
(it was the beatles that _introduced_ the change,
with “sgt. pepper”, which they conceived as a unit.
gotta give brian wilson credit too, for “pet sounds”.
but it was the _capitolists_ that said “aha, that will
give us a chance to up-sell people a larger package”
that made the change stick… in other words, it was
_business_ that made that change, for the most part,
not something that was inherent in the music itself.)
and furthermore, this up-sell trick was their downfall.
because it wasn’t too long — a few decades — before
that packaging decision led to huge consumer ripoffs.
“albums” were created that had just a few “killers”,
often just one or two songs, with the rest as “fillers”.
customers would have _preferred_ to buy the songs,
but they didn’t have that option. so we felt cheated.
i don’t think it’s overstating things to say that this
feeling that the recording companies were _thieves_
who were _ripping_off_ us consumers was the most
compelling reason that people felt little compunction
about “stealing” songs once they got their chance…
we felt we’d been ripped off by the record companies,
and this was our chance to retaliate, so people _did_,
and didn’t feel bad about it. indeed, to the contrary,
they felt _justified_, because _justice_ had been done.
the thieves had been punished, as fairness requires…
> It makes economic sense to sell LPs
> or CDs at a runtime of 60-odd minutes.
that reasoning is circular.
it made just as much “economic sense” to sell singles,
at a runtime of 3 minutes/side. it made _more_ sense,
from the standpoint of the “product”, for that matter…
but the industry wanted to up-sell — just like coca-cola
is always increasing the size of the sodas that it sells —
so they did a changeover. because they were in control.
but from the standpoint of the music? 3-minute songs.
except if you’re talking classical music, where it’s longer.
if you really wanna pursue this “length” topic in detail,
that iteration from long-form operas and symphonies
to the 3-minute song would be interesting to pursue.
because _that_ change, i’d say, was artistically driven.
and that leads me right into my major point of response
— that artists should be wholly unconcerned with length.
write the story — the idea — the point — and write it
“right” — as best as you can — “correctly” — all while
totally oblivious to length. do not be concerned, at all,
that someone might not read it “because it’s too long”.
it’s _unimportant_ that such people won’t read the thing,
because they aren’t willing to take the time to understand
it _properly_, so you wouldn’t have reached them anyway.
if it’s well-written, the people who _need_ to read it _will_.
they will not care that it’s “too long”. in fact, they will be
_sad_ when it comes to an end, because they _enjoyed_ it,
the secret same as it ever was: “leave ’em wanting more.”
conversely, don’t worry that the thing is “too short” either.
make it exactly the right length, and then stop. if you try
to “stretch” it, to make it feel “more substantial”, you will
be ruining it, diluting it, making it _less_ special not more.
and when readers get to the end of it, they will resent you,
for wasting their time. don’t waste their time. big no-no.
now for the part of the post that i agree with…
a machine that helps collect online articles (short or long)
would be very cool. (the micropayments idea has the same
problems in this arena as in all other ones, so i’ll ignore it.
i myself love micropayments, if you could make ’em work.)
the problem is not so much that this hard for a device to do,
but rather that our web-content format doesn’t facilitate it…
the web is not now remix-friendly, for a number of reasons.
take this web-page as an example to illustrate the problems.
first, many web-pages have a whole bunch of crap on them.
if i wanted to grab this essay, i’d also get all the other stuff
(i.e., the crap) that’s running down the right side of the page.
add up the k.b. and you’ll see there’s more crap than content.
so one thing you’d want is for your remixer to dump the crap.
unfortunately, it’s not all that easy to tell which parts are crap,
and which parts you’ll wanna keep. and sometimes there will
be no answer. for instance, are comments crap? or not-crap?
the second problem is that the underlying code varies widely.
if you crawl around in the .html for a large number of pages,
you’ll find an amazingly confusing variety of code represented.
even a simple layout can be accomplished many different ways,
and the complex layouts?, well, you will just be flabbergasted…
and that’s just the code that “validates”. thrown in the stuff
that doesn’t “validate” — which is probably most of the web —
and you’ll rapidly realize you’ve run into a very solid brick wall.
so you would basically need to keep each page self-contained,
with its idiosyncratic .html code and .css files and all that rot,
because reconciling their inconsistencies will just be impossible.
(and speaking of “rot”, i’m reminded of links. do you pull in
the linked pages as well? because if you don’t, you will find
you come to some dead-ends rather quickly. but if you _do_
pull in the links, you’ll find you fill up your storage very fast.)
of course, if you can’t mish and mash all the pages together,
but only keep them as self-contained units, that’s less good.
plus, of course, since you’d basically be limited to the .html,
you’re gonna be viewing all of this content in a scrolling-field,
since that’s what browsers do. e-book programmers, though,
have long known that a _paginated_ representation is superior.
(look at the tools bob has made, and you’ll see what he thinks.)
in sum, it is _possible_ to do what you want, even right now,
but the realization of the idea in today’s world will certainly fall
far short of the idealized version of the idea, which is very cool,
and something i have not heard anybody say quite so succintly,
including myself, and i’ve been honed in on remixing for a while,
so congratulations on bringing this up to the conscious level…
-bowerbird
p.s. “capitolists” was a deliberate typo to make a pun.
p.p.s. yes, i’ve known for a long time that my comments are
“too long for the web”, but guess what, i don’t write to length.
I’m not sure that Birkert’s article is saying that the web is ruining our ability to think deeply. I believe that he is talking about de-contextualization of information and how it effects one’s understanding about the relationships between ideas conceptually and historically. This is different than the ability to think deeply.
I feel like your counter-argument that, “without the physical constraints of print publishing, we are experimenting with new ways to communicate,” ignores a subtle point in Birkert’s essay, when he says, “our devices set the pace.”
You/we are not really experimenting with anything, we are being experimented with. The kindle, the iPhone, these are both products. They are devices that shape how we access data on a giant network, which was itself designed with specific intentions. In fact these two examples are very constraining in the freedom they give you in regards to extending the device and digital rights management.
Maybe it’s me, but I’m not really connecting all the threads in this article. Are you trying to say that books are not going away for long-form writing?
can i agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of your argument and still argue that i can imagine an electronic reader which provides a decent reading experience for long-form novels and non-fiction?
i said:
> something i have not heard
> anybody say quite so succintly,
aaron said:
> instapaper
i knew when i was writing that passage that
it was gonna blow up on me, and as soon as
i hit “submit”, i remembered about instapaper.
and readdle, and all the other variants out there.
but they are all subject to the problems i noted,
where each page stands as independent entity,
rather than being mashed into a coherent whole…
still, they are a start…
which just goes to show that “the ipod for books”
will be… wait for it… you guessed it… an iphone…
-bowerbird
A thoughtful piece but rather too wide ranging to be truly useful – scattergun.
On the subject of “length” – I give you –
“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal
It is worth checking out the “length” of a few of the great novels of the 20th century: Camus’ The Outsider, Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, and finally Beckett’s Imagination, Dead Imagine.
I try to keep my own creative pieces to 90 pages or less as a matter of Pascalian rigour.
Since you’ve already written about Ray Johnson’s A BOOK ABOUT DEATH, this global “book” project, inspired by Ray’s work, has just launched :
http://abookaboutdeath.blogspot.com/
It would be great to have your participation. Exhibition at The Emily Harvey Foundation gallery space in NYC, 10 September. Information on the blog and on FaceBook (group: A BOOK ABOUT DEATH).
Best,
Matthew
On the subject of instapaper, I thought this was a brilliant reverse-engineering:
http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2009/03/instapaper-analogue-edition
Save the web articles you want to read to pdf, collect a bunch, send to a print-on-demand printer and turn them into a book. Read at your leisure.
david said:
> http://blog.thoughtwax.com/2009/03/instapaper-analogue-edition
brilliant. yes yes yes.
even better, make this an _intentional_public_ act.
adopt a curational mindset when selecting articles,
and make the product publicly purchasable at lulu.
(a search did not locate it, so i assume it’s private.)
moreover, make the _electronic_ version cost-free,
and set browsing to full-and-free. this lets people
explore the book to assess their interest in buying…
one commenter at that site implied that the authors
are getting rooked by this. kinda hard to shake off
that “property” perspective, isn’t it? these articles
were on the web, available cost-free to the public,
so anyone could print them using their own printer,
so it’s no different to have lulu print them for you…
what you _will_ wanna do, however, in consideration
of the authors, is to include the u.r.l. to their blogs…
in addition, i’d assume that you will price the book
fairly. i think it’s fine to give yourself a bit of profit,
to offset curation, cleaning, assembly, and upload,
but don’t make it so much profit that the _authors_
come to feel that you are profiting at their expense.
$2 is probably right. (that way, you can point out
to people that an even split between say, 10 authors,
would net each 20 cents, to put it into perspective.
or, having seen how small their payment would be,
perhaps you could raise the price just a little more
and actually _send_ those authors “their fair share”?
for them, it’s found money, and the fact you paid it
without telling ’em, and with no hassling from them,
will probably catch ’em off-guard, and be appreciated.)
one more thing…
haven’t priced either, so can’t say how they compare,
but if you’re gonna do something like this, i would
suggest that you look at magcloud.com. the paper
might not be as good — or might be better! — but
you should consider whether a magazine would be a
more-appropriate vehicle for accomplishing the goal.
print-on-demand will become extremely interesting,
in an ever-accelerating manner, in the coming years.
-bowerbird
I like the idea you are putting forward for short-form content, but what I am really waiting for is the reader than can make length irrelevant. For me, the biggest upside to an iPod for music is that I am not constrained by length. I can listen to a single song by Radiohead right now and later I can listen to every album the Beatles ever produced, in order, all without changing a disc or a tape.
The iPod/Kindle etc. allows this same type of access to print. I would like to see a device that makes switching between forms of print as seamless as the iPod does for music, where my only constraint is how much I can read in the time that I have free. Once this happens, I can see the lines between short and long form writing breaking down, as they really would not matter anymore.
I bought an iPod Touch in February, replacing both my Nano and a Moleskine notebook as the contents of my front left pants pocket.
At first, I wrestled with the various PDFs and HTML pages that I downloaded. But then I tried Stanza. And after I got used to it, a funny thing happened — the iPod disappeared. Having had the experience, I must reiterate a fact that many others have already noted over the years: the key attribute of a book is that it disappears. When this happens, the reader is liberated, able to engage in the solitude of his or her personal universe with the thoughts of the author, brought to life on the page.
I find a delicious irony in the fact that this disappearing act occurred for me while reading Jane Eyre, a book that I stubbornly refused to open when assigned it in 8th-grade English. On the heels of this experience, I would like to say two things.
First, Mrs. Scott, wherever you are: you were probably the best teacher I ever had; Jane Eyre is a great novel; and I’m sorry it took me so long to get to it!
Secondly, now that I have had this experience, I have downloaded, oh, 60 or 70 books of varying kinds from Project Gutenburg, including quite a few “cheap novels,” such as — yes — War and Peace. Engrossed as I am in my current read, I can’t wait to get started on them. And the great thing is that I can do that when and wherever I want to, since, to borrow a phrase, I now have books in my pocket like grains of sand.
Epigrams and belles lettres are wonderful things and I read them whenever I can, on paper or on my computer screen. It would be really great to be able to have them in my pocket, too. But there are times when you really want a deep yarn. I have probably read The Lord of the Rings a dozen times, in various paperback editions. But the next time I pick it up, it may well be housed in silver and glass.