Emdashery Blog

Harry Potter kills books?

The death of books. We've heard it before. Advancing technology will make the paper-based, hold-in-your-hand book a thing of the past. Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics takes a look at the effect of the last Harry Potter book showing up online for free four days before its official release. Is the end near?

"The pirating of a blockbuster novel onto the peer-to-peer networks is one of those seminal moments that is supposed to herald a new era, wherein the old way (books) is cleared out by the new way (computers, e-books) and the days of paperbacks and hard-bound volumes become marginalized to the sentimental periphery of culture along with vinyl records and postcards.

"But the book world is a hard target for digital technology. If anything, the Harry Potter piracy should serve as an interesting anomaly. Whereas digital music, mail and now cinema are quickly changing the landscape of communication and entertainment, digital books seem to have had a much slower evolution. If digital novel sharing marks the death of books, I assure you it will be a long, slow death."

Here's the whole article... Warning, however, don't even read the article's first sentence if you haven't finished The Deathly Hallows but plan to.

Sony Reader still winning customers--

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools has a write-up on the Sony Reader--Sony's electronic book device. The reader displays books that are in ebook format--specifically PDF, TXT and RTF formats.

The Sony Reader is a portable, unobtrusive paperback-sized handheld device for reading eBooks. I've carried it on several plane trips and car trips and have found it be quite convenient and functional. In fact, I generally have it with me all the time, so I'm never without a book (or 40). Having it has encouraged me to read the types of books I might not consider otherwise due to space constraints around my home or simply not wishing to carry around a physical book that could potentially get damaged during transport. The books I usually read tend to be technical or reference books, but I've particularly enjoyed reading some classics and contemporary fiction on the Reader.

An new electronic medium that creates new customers. That's often how it works. I'm still far too cheap to lay down the $350 purchase price. But I don't think this is a passing fad, so I know my time will come.

Read the full review here...

What will books look like in the future?--

A recent Shelf Awareness offers a summary of points made from the Making Information Pay seminary held by the Book Industry Study Group. As emerging technology continues to change the publishing industry, some people will bemoan that consumers aren't reading like they used to. In fact, consumers are not reading less, necessarily, but they are reading differently.

Although e-books are nowhere near achieving their potential, there are many other digital opportunities, mostly on the Web and cell phones and iPods, that continue to grow and evolve. Publishers who aren't ready for those and unforeseen opportunities--such as by not digitizing their books, for example--will lose out. As Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Co., put it: "The day will come when you should have done it last week."

Consumers are reading more and more online and want pieces of information, not full texts. As a result, making chapters and other parts of traditional books available is more important. "Consumers don't want to read a whole finance book when they're only concerned with mortgages," Nicole Poindexter of Hachette Group said. "New media is radically changing content. In the past, readers just took content as it was presented." Now, she added, "consumers create content."

Poindexter pointed out, too, that the next generation of readers are digital natives and to an extent will bypass books. "We'll have no chance to control our content unless we take action now to digitize it and be proactive."

As digital natives increase their share of the consumer marketplace, I wonder what new content products will emerge to serve their needs. What will books of the future look like? And how will we need to write them?

Simon Spurrier: giving away a book--

More on free book give-aways in hopes of inspiring future sales...

Headline Publishing Group is giving away a digital download of Simon Spurrier's new novel--Contract. It will be available online for six weeks--with each section available for a limited period. For those who like his work, a limited edition hardback will then be available to buy from the Web site.

The look of books in the future--

Google's efforts to digitize every printed letter in the world--or something to that effect--has the Economist wondering what books will look like in the future.

IN SECRET locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google, the world's largest web-search company...

...a conservative estimate has Google digitising at least 10m books a year. The total number of titles in existence is estimated to be about 65m.

Google's is not the only project of its kind. The Internet Archive, for instance, is a non-profit organisation founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a San Francisco idealist who wants to re-create a modern Library of Alexandria containing all public-domain texts and videos. Amazon has been scanning books, as have Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google's biggest rivals in web-search, and individual libraries around the world. Eager not to be left out, publishers are also doing the same. But Google's effort, in scale and ambition, is off the charts.

Our curiosity about the future of books leads to many questions--and ultimately to one final question: the last one below:

As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise. How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology "unbind" books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?

Most of us wonder what books will look like. But technology will explode the variety of delivery. The better question might be: what will commercial reading look like in the future? We can only begin to fathom the answers...

Here's the complete article...

Turning the pages online--

This is a cool innovation. Novelist Dale Moses is providing his horror novel, He Still Watches, online for free as he writes it. But it's not just any old e-book in Word or Adobe format, it's an actual book with flipping pages and bookmarks. And he's not going broke because he's giving away the book for free. He has sponsors who advertise at the bottom of each page.

Here's more:

This is a free online horror novel in progress, being created one page per day and posted once a week online in order to bring readers back repeatedly, and offering graphic advertising spots on each and every one of those pages. This gains wonderful exposure for the advertisers, and a free reading experience for the horror reading public worldwide. This is your chance to follow a novel being created! It's a revolution in self-publishing that is sure to change the way you view novels.

Check it out here...

Does self-publishing hurt your cred?--

Robert Bly asks the question and gets plenty of answers--most of which are "yes." Maybe that's still the case, but probably less so than in the past, and more so than in the near future.

Harry Potter and the Printed Book Only--

Harry Potter isn't quite ready for the digital book age. J.K. Rowling has nixed any possibility of making her last book in the Harry Potter series available in e-book form. Concerns over piracy are still a major factor in limiting the growth of e-books, as they were for Rowling and her publishers. But Rowling, who wrote all the books in longhand, also prefers her readers to experience the stories from the printed page of a book. You can read more here...

More on Google--

Here's a Business Week article on Google's attempt to create an iTunes-like program for e-books (see previous post). It takes a more skeptical look and addresses some of the hurdles Google faces.

Could Google resurrect the e-book?--

Google is working with some top publishers to mass market and deliver e-books in the same way Apple provides music to its iPods. The e-book concept has been a dud so far, but this could give it a major boost.

The internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry.

With 380m people using Google each month, the move would give a significant boost to the development of e-books and have a big impact on the publishing industry and book retailers.

Read more here...