I have been working on an essay that I would love to get your feedback on. -Todd
Stephen Colbert opened his show on October 25th, 2011 with the normal exuberance we've come to expect. He bragged about his special early access to the iPhone, the iPad, and the iV (a product that feeds the Internet directly into your arm and assured us a short wait of six moths before its release). The release of the Walter Issacson’s Steve Jobs would be no different as he pulled the 600 page biography from behind the desk, but Colbert immediately became perplexed.
The single finger touchscreen swipe on the cover didn’t turn pages. When he turned the book upside down, the picture didn’t reorient. Colbert complained there was no place to plug in his headphones so he could listen to it. And then he tried to activate the voice recognition by touching the bottom of the cover, “Tell me about Steve Jobs. Where is the nearest church or camera store?” He ended the segment saying everything was fine because the device would be soon released with “a revolutionary softcover.” The jokes played well to the geekish sensibilities of studio audience, but I am not sure even the show’s writers knew how well the sketch described the confused state of book publishing.
Steve Jobs the book will serve as a prominent road marker on the path from atoms to bits. Could Colbert have made a better choice? The decision for Simon & Schuster to hold the digital release two weeks to match the physical release even after the death of Jobs is a story worthy of a Harvard Business School case. And at the same time, the fact that the majority of people will still use paper to read the story of the individual who did more to bring computers to desks, laps, and palms of individuals around the world should not be lost.
Colbert’s poking fun at the Issacson biography repeats again a meme that we in the publishing industry should be gravely concerned about—our customers don’t know what a book is anymore.
***
In July 2011, I published an experimental project with O’Reilly called Every Book Is a Startup. The project was meant to poke at the boundaries of traditional publishing. The book was created around the idea that new material could be released over time. Readers would be encouraged to give feedback continually about the new material. The pricing was dynamic, increasing slowly to match the amount of the material available released, but once purchased, a customer received all future updates for free.
We are only using one distribution point at the start of the project, oreilly.com, because the distribution system for electronic books is not designed to allow an ebook to be updated and released again. You might remember one of the side effects of the Amazon’s 2009 recall of 1984 was that after the book was restored to their system, customers found their bookmarks and notes has disappeared.
We unfortunately found the same problem with our release strategy. Wonderful publishing startups like Readmill and SocialBook that have created the possibility for readers using epub files to highlight important passages and share those with others back through the web, but when a reader of Every Book Is A Startup loaded a new edition, their digital artifacts suffer the same fate as the readers of 1984, the loss of their old thoughts as I presented them with my new ones.
I have been hesitant to call Every Book Is A Startup a book because of the expectations people hold for a book: a finished work, written from a position of singular authority, available in some way in a physical form. What I never expected was how strongly the qualities of a book would be brought forward from the physical to the digital. Digital books carry forward the same atomic quality of immutability that physical books have. As I reached out to my colleagues in the working in the world of ebooks, the consensus was that no one had considered a reality where an author given the digital ability to distribute directly and virtually cost free would consider updating their work and the consequences that might have.
Bits and atoms don’t behave the same way, but we have built the next step forward in publishing like they do.
***
Book publishing seems to be living in its own era of the horseless carriage, a time when we try to explain today by using yesterday’s words. The trouble to this point is that a book is a book is a book. That word connects form and format as it has for 550 years. Those concepts need to be separated so we can build systems and infrastructure that supports the technology of today. Rather than saying what it is, maybe we take a page from history and say what it is not.
I declare that we are living in an era of the paperless book.
Do you have any idea what that means?
Perfect. Let’s go figure it out.
