Digital Bibliography

Here’s a the trailer for the book that got me interested in the first place:

And here’s his own introduction to the project:

And finally, an excerpt -from and link-to his interview in the New York Times:

It was hardly an original idea: it’s a technique that has, in different ways, been practiced for as long as there has been writing — perhaps most brilliantly by Tom Phillips in his magnum opus, “A Humument.” But I was more interested in subtracting than adding, and also in creating a book with a three-dimensional life. On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t forget it has a body.

Read an interview with Paul Saffo this morning (in Bill Moggridge’s Designing Media). He offers three ways that our media experiences are transitioning from “mass” to “personal.” And I wanted to take a second to think through these aspects of media experience specifically in terms of how readers experiences of books might be changing. Here are what he sees as the levels of difference (as paraphrased by Moggridge):

1. The nature of the experience. With mass media, you watch, but with personal media, you participate.

2. The location. Mass media came into our living rooms, but you carry personal media with you everywhere you go.

3. The nature of the dominant players. Mass media was the world of the few and the large—the big Hollywood producers, the big TV networks, and the widely circulated newspapers and magazines—but the personal media world is dominated by the many and the small.

So how can we rethink the book through the lenses of these changes?

1. Consumption vs. participation. This one is tough for me. It seems that part of what makes a book a book is its immutability. Not necessarily static. Books can have had still images for a long time. And there’s really no reason to think that including moving images would make a text less book-like. But I have to be careful here to differentiate between participate and interact. People have always interacted with books. Trading them. Turning the pages. Scribbling marginalia. Garishly highlighting. Even collecting. But I don’t think this is what Saffo has in mind when he mentions participation. I think he’s alluding to the social aspects of new media. The ability to participate on discussion boards, to share links, to contribute image and video to different sites. Mostly, I think this sort of work happens out side the scope of what constitutes a book. Discussions or reviews OF books, not as part of the books themselves. And marginalia and commentary could be added to a text, but “sharing” those sorts of markings wasn’t part of book culture. But now, with the Kindle, it’s possible to share these markings as part of the text itself. Not something surrounding it, or on top of it, but embedded within. I’ve tried it, both with the comments on and with the comments off (there’s gotta be a safe-sex joke in there somewhere), and I gotta say that it’s a feature I think could become very, very useful. For instance, what if, instead of only being able to choose between EVERYONE’s commenting/highlighting, you could choose a set of readers whose comments you’d like to have access to. You could choose classmates/students in a given section of a course. Maybe you’re reading The Tipping Point, and you’d really like to see only the comments of people who work in the fashion industry or web design. Wow. I could really get excited about this sort of functionality in our books. It’s already sort of available for websites. But it’s still got a long way to go.

2. Living Room vs. mobile. This transition is the toughest to think about in terms of digital books, I think. Mostly because the book’s mobility is one of its primary strengths as a cultural phenomenon. The rise of the printing press allowed for information not only to be reproducible, but made it far more portable. Books produced in bulk were less expensive to produce and less expensive to distribute. So there were more books, in more places, accessible to more people. That’s an oversimplification, sure, but it’s still a useful observation. The important note here is to understand the ways that digital books might be MORE portable than print books. Here, I’m thinking about ebooks again. Reading Jonathan Saffron Foer’s new book? Is it easier or more affordable to bring the print version? It’s kind of a wash, mostly hinging on how you feel about e-ink and the feel of paper between your fingers. I think the real deal breaker here is to not ask the question at the level of a single book, but to think in terms of shopping and a personal library. Instead of the living room vs. mobile, for books, the transition from brick-and-mortar bookstore (or even mail-order books) to electronic browsing and delivery is important. Readers have access to a wider selection with tools that might be more precise in suggesting books relevant to their interests or tastes. And the speed at which a reader can gain access is very different, too. Seconds instead of hours or days. I’m not just thinking of this in terms of convenience, either. I’m thinking that just like any other form of communication, the effectiveness with which texts circulate (that is their overall impact on the reader and the world at large) is largely dependent on the context in which they are consumed. More control over where and when you read a text, how quickly and conveniently you can locate it and access it, have profound affects on your experience of the text. This same concept can be applied to personal libraries either accessible via mobile device or carried on the devices themselves. Maybe you want access to a book you already own, just get it through your virtual bookshelf. These functionalities are already available on the Nook, Kindle, and Google platforms.

3. Large vs. small publishers. This is the transition I know the least about. I do know that there are lots of tools available for the production of ebooks. Whether you want to produce a PDF, ePub, Mobi, AMZ, or whatever you’re thinking suits your text best, there are tools available. And they’re getting more accessible all the time. Which has the potential to cut out the publishes all together, which intern will affect the ways that distributors do business. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are already setting up systems for people to offer their own texts directly through Amazon and B&N’s sites. This phenomenon is going to effectively increase the number of books available to readers. But more isn’t necessarily better. People will still value quality content. And as Google has shown us, people will still want help find that quality content in ways that are relevant to them. There’s a LOT that still has to be figured out here, but clearly, the small publishers are going to end up playing a much bigger role. Especially as individual authors acquire the increasingly accessible skill sets necessary to produce and circulate their texts.

NOTE: Now that I’m looking back at this entry, I’m noticing that I don’t really have much to say about the Google ebooks store. Maybe it’s most appropriate to just suggest that the points I’m making above apply to Google’s business plan just as much as the examples I’ve offered.

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(“Carrying Books” by garryknight via Flicker. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.)

We are suffering under an avalanche of books. And I don’t choose the word “avalanche” capriciously. I mean it. I think for all of us, there’s at least some anxiety to the book buying experience. That is, the wanting-then-searching-then-finding-then-choosing-then-buying-then-reading experience. The book business is complicated industry, and its marketing aspects might be the most difficult to understand and the most important to a satisfying user experience. How do you find the book you’re looking for? How do you know it’s the best available text for your purposes? (Is it the most recent? Best researched? Most entertaining? It it written in the style you’re after? How does it compare to others like it? Is it a good price?) And another question, what I think is actually the most important part of reading as a culturally-productive social activity, is the experience of finding the “right” book that you weren’t even looking for.

Amazon is really good at everything I’ve just mentioned. Better than anyone else for the last 15 years. That’s what’s made them so successful. But that success is based on two factors: reduced distribution costs because of the efficiencies of scale, and access to a database that allows them to be very smart about creating the illusion that they’re offering you the cheapest, most relevant books in response to your search.

Their advantages in distribution and pricing of physical books is still unchallenged. Barnes and Noble has the advantage of brick-and-mortar stores which appeal to people who want a more tactile shopping experience, but those stores are as much a fiscal liability as they are an advantage. More importantly, though, is the recent trend over the last several years toward ebooks. And Amazon has dominated that landscape by leveraging its dominant position in the physical book market. Not only has Amazon been the most visible and most trafficked option for buying books of any sort, they’ve also had access to the most comprehensive information. That is, they’ve had by far the best database of consumers’ book-buying-and-reading habits.

But Google is going to change all that. I’m suggesting that Google already has as a good a database as Amazon for ebook sales. That would be wrong. Even if they did have that database, they wouldn’t have Amazon’s experience or market share to know how to take advantage of it. But that database and market experience are the only two things Amazon has going for it, and those will likely evaporate eventually. Here’s why…

Google can connect its ebook store to almost anything you do on the web. It’s ubiquitous. Anything you search for, Google can suggest an ebook. If you’re looking up information on Spielberg films, it can suggest which ebooks might help you in that experience. Looking for information on training your dog? No matter what you’re looking for, Google can suggest a book or even user-generated reading lists on the subject. This is the exact function Google has always been designed to do. Connecting people with the information they want. But up until now, that information has been largely limited to websites. Read: information that is often relatively shallow compared that the sort of information traditionally found in long-form, print books. Could Google Ebooks make the web a richer place to find information? You could argue that Amazon already made this available. Sure. But that used to require a relatively circuitous path, via Amazon’s pages (not its database), that would then require an entirely new search within Amazon’s database. Google Ebooks could facilitate a much more seamless relationship between the web, apps, and ebooks.

My second point is related to the first point. Amazon is great at suggesting a book when it know the book you’re already interested it. And a large part of its business strategy has been to extend this database-driven, suggestion-retailing model beyond the relationships between books. Now when you’re shopping for a book on landscaping, Amazon is particularly good at recommending a hedge-trimmer or a DVD from HGTV. This is one of the reasons I love Amazon so much. They understand how to make my life more efficient. They’ve learned those techniques by keeping track of buying habits. Google has the ability to take this same retailing concept to the next magnitude of scale because they easily have the best databases and best information processing track record on the planet. It’s not even close.

For now, Google doesn’t really know what it’s doing in terms of making an intuitive buying experience, but it’s going to learn very, very quickly. And as it does. It’s going to be extremely good for the quality of content we encounter everyday on the web, and we’re going to find that our experience of buying and reading books, albeit ebooks, will be better than ever.