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?

What to do during the long wait from acceptance to print--

The New York Times is writing again on the advantages of podcasting. I posted before on authors releasing their books straight to audio via podcasts. Now, authors are using podcasts to stay connected with "readers" while they wait for the book to come out.

When you are a budding author and you appear on television, it is sure to enhance book sales.

But what do you do if your book is not even written, never mind in stores?

For Mignon Fogarty, who is host of a popular podcast called Grammar Girl, the answer is to scramble to record a short audiobook in just a few days between the time the show tapes and is shown.

Waiting for her book to come out next year, Ms. Fogarty released an audiobook which climbed to the top of iTunes’ best-selling books list.

Ms. Fogarty’s feat comes at a time when Henry Holt and other presses are rethinking their audiobook divisions, which have negligible marketing budgets and typically ride on the coattails of the hardcovers. Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press.

Read the whole thing here...

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...

Medieval helpdesk--

Today, writers sometimes feel both excited and overwhelmed by the changes in technology. Present advancements are dramatically changing the many ways words are published. It's easy to think that this is a new development and to look back on the sweet and simple ways of the past. But the past was filled with its confounding changes as well. Just check out this video for proof...

(Thank you to Dale Moses for helping me find this video again...)

An amazing and enduring device--

The digital age has provided us many new ways to enjoy a book--an electronic reader, an e-book, or a podcast, for example. But none may have the enduring qualities of the Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device (aka "BOOK").

The Librarian Yellow Pages offers a overview of this amazing device in its LYP Newsletter:

It's a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's so easy to use even a child can operate it. Just lift its cover. Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere--even sitting in an armchair by the fire--yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM.

With all the latest advancements, its important to remember that simple works. Read more about the BOOK here...

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...

Can you hear me now?--

I've spoken with several people recently who expressed an interest in distributing their book via a podcast--an audio book that would be disemminated through the internet. That's becoming more commonplace today, but what was significant was an audio podcast was the first step in publishing they were considering--before seeking a traditional publisher or even before self-publishing it in book or e-book form.

It turns out that "going first to podcast" is a growing trend. This New York Times article lists several examples of people doing just that. One example is Scott Sigler who writes science-fiction horror novels:

Several times a week Mr. Sigler, 37, steps into a walk-in closet in his San Francisco home. He reads into a microphone that connects to his computer via a sound mixer. Hanging shirts envelop him, masking ambient sound.

After being snubbed by publishers for years, Mr. Sigler began recording his first book, “EarthCore,” in 2005. He offered it as a podcast in 22 episodes (roughly 45 minutes each) that he posted online and sent free to subscribers for downloading. Before long, Mr. Sigler had 5,000 listeners; by the time he finished releasing his second novel, “Ancestor,” last January, he had 30,000, as he does for “The Rookie,” which is playing now.

By establishing a track record with readers listeners, Mr. Sigler eventually landed a publisher for several of his books.

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...