Thank goodness I was given a Kindle for Christmas two years ago. I say that because the three-day O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC2009) in NYC this week was all about digital publishing and I could smugly raise my hand when... Read the rest of this post
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By: Lynne W. Scanlon,
on 2/13/2009
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Sounds fabulous. I’d really like to attend, but it’s pricey and I’ve been caught in the downsizing frenzy.
Welcome back! And I’m looking forward to finding out more about the convention.
Yes, welcome back! It’s been too long. Lovely to read your characteristically upfront and unspun account - I often hear about the more sciencey end of these conferences so your perspective is particularly fresh (and funny)! More, soon, please.
eBooks or paper books, none of them will last forever.
Forgive me Lynne, but here in the cloister I’m not allowed to have a blog of my own. So, I’m using your subject matter (eBooks & the death of the paper book) and your informed blog to escape the silence and rant a little.
Most of today’s paper books are printed on rather inexpensive biodegradable paper using petroleum or soy inks. The bindings are soft and the glue is weak. They’re not made to last even part of a millennium let alone for the millennia. Remember the great libraries of Persia? They disappeared
E-books are no better. If only published electronically what device will they be read on a thousand years from now? What if there is a catastrophic event, natural or man made, and electronic knowledge is wiped from the earth? No hardware, no software, no nothing. Where will the survivors (and there always are some) go to learn.
My professional predecessors (monastic scribes), working alone in their screened carrels within the scriptorium, spent their entire lifetimes copying all of the major works of Western European and Islamic knowledge and (censored) scientific data available to them.
Because of its longer projected lifespan animal skins such as parchment and vellum replaced the less stable (and cheaper) papyrus as the writing medium of choice. Permanent ink was a careful mixture of Oak Gall, copperas and gum Arabic. This combination has lasted amazingly well for over 800 years. And, if your lingua franca includes Medieval Latin there are still tens-of-thousands of pages out there to be read if you can find them. (Think hidden in caves.)
You may want to become (like me) a proponent for putting all important works (sorry, “The Cure for Jet Lag” doesn’t qualify) on more stable substrates than paper, parchment, vellum or digits.
The first man made objects to leave the solar system, the two Pioneer spacecrafts contained a 6” x 9”plaque of gold-anodized aluminum, telling our friends out there who we were. This gold plated approach is far too expensive for this monumental project.
As the informed businessman said to Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) in the 1967 film “The Graduate”, “I just want to say one word to you, just one word- PLASTICS. “
I’m sure that the right plastic (they tell us it will be here forever) properly embossed, would provide the perfect (cheap) material for recording all of our important works. And, all of the world’s accumulated knowledge could probably be accomplished for less than the cost of the war in Iraq. Put it all in a cave and deeply carve directions to the site on various stone outcroppings throughout the world. Then sit back a couple of thousand years and wait.
Books are nice, the Kindle is cute and computers are great, but we need to store our knowledge on something permanent.
Lynne,
Great meeting you in person. My read of the grown-ups at the show (ie, people making a living publishing books) was that all the honor system and business-by-donation speakers left them cold. But I also had an epiphany on filling out the post-conference questionaire and seeing the questions on inspiration. It never crossed my mind that people might take three days out of their lives and go to a publishing conference in hopes of being inspired, but that does sem to be a large part of what O’Reilly is hoping to do with TOC. Maybe it works for employees who are locked up in cubicles all day, not my background so I can’t say.
Morris
The seminar sounded great, and like you said, it’s a good place to network.
Digital books and digital magazines like mine are the wave of the future. The economy has not even bottomed out yet, and cost need to be reduced on every level just for survival’s sake. For example, if I had to do a print version of our 50+ page magazine, I could never afford to do it.
Book publishers are thinking the same thing.
Nothing lasts forever…even burned DVD’s and CD’s have a shelf life. Hey *snort-giggle* even I’m not going to last forever. Thirty years ago the mediums in use were high tech compared to what we had fifty years ago.
Who knows…in fifteen years maybe we’ll be imprinting stuff inside crystals like StarTrek
As a publisher do you stick with just publishing seminars or do you go to book conferences like ThrillerFest at the Grand Hyatt in July?
Yes, tell us more, because you tell the truth so well.
In the 60s, the rebels were shouting for free speech. The Web geniuses like Cory D. are writing code, and most of their products are dedicated to “aggregation” — sucking in and republishing. “Content” is what costs money to produce. The idea is to start a business that sucks in everybody else’s “content.” Luckily, the Web content people, like the NYTimes, for instance, are starting, timidly, to talk in low tones about charging readers to read what they write and publish. As a hopeful Web publisher myself, I’m thinking about it myself. What have I got to lose. The aggregators “promoting” my content by republishing it. What a shame that would be.
Hi Lynne,
I’m thrilled you enjoyed the conference, and even more thrilled you’ve shared your experience with others on your blog. The amount of conversation that spilled out of the conference halls and onto twitter and the wider Web is what inspires us!
The crux of Cory’s keynote from where I was sitting was that publishers should demand the option to sell their works without DRM. For example, we at O’Reilly have years of sales data on dozens of titles demonstrating that neither selling without DRM nor even explicitly posting book content for free negatively affects our print sales (and more often actually improves them). That said, I recognize that’s a choice (as it should be) for each publisher to make on their own — provided the device maker or sales channel gives them that choice.
If you’d like to learn more about what’s behind our perspective on the issue, see Tim O’Reilly’s seminal Piracy is Progressive Taxation.
Thanks again for the feedback, we really do pay attention to it. See you next year!
Great meeting you at TOC!
The ideas around “free content” are far from finalized, and I agree with the huge number of speakers that DRM isn’t the answer to prevent theft– it may actually encourage it. What depresses me is that this theft is considered morally okay because it’s digital– can you imagine (as a colleague once said)– strolling into the local bookstore and taking a book off the shelf and walking out? Of course not– it’s just that the container for the content is “invisible” as digital that this gets excused and generally accepted.
But we cannot rage against the internet storm on this one. I think the answer lies not in DRM, but in pricing the content to match the convenience– very much the iTunes model where buying the content is more convenient than the effort to download free. Sure, the student with more time than money may still make that effort, but they always did– we called it copying tapes or borrowing from friends.
Another comment that got me thinking was Tim O’Reilly’s, the idea of the book as a souvenir. There are a lot of possibilities in that word. I need to think more about how this would work in the academic publishing world.
Cheers!
Oh, dear. Rage against Cory Doctorow all you want, but he’s right: DRM is a problem, not a solution.
First, it *doesn’t* protect you. Any DRM scheme is likely to be cracked about a day after it is released, and your precious material will appear in various illicit areas, ready for the taking. At least, you *hope* so. And why should you do that? Because it means someone cared enough about your stuff to *bother*.
Second, it provides an annoyance for your readers. The more effective the DRM is, the more annoying it will be. Pretty soon, you annoy the reader enough that they don’t buy.
Let’s get serious about the problem. Exactly how much money have you lost to piracy? I’ll bet right now you don’t *know*, and you *can’t* know, because there is no way to tell. If you think you are losing a lot of money to piracy, I’m sorry, but it may be wishful thinking. The vast majority of authors would *like* to be so popular that people will make a point of pirating their books.
Theft will always be with us. The retail trade calls it “shrinkage”, as does what it can to minimize it, but it’s an annoyance, not a disaster.
Instead of draconian measures to prevent theft, you are better advised to concentrate in increasing your *sales*. Provide real value for the money, price appropriately, and make it *as easy as possible* for the reader to give you money. The majority of the market will pay for value. Your challenge is to *provide* value, let the reader know that you exist and have stuff they will want to buy, and provide a simple means for them to do so.
Remember, you are competing for the reader’s discretionary *time*. The time they spend reading a book is time they could be spending doing any number of other things for fun. Your challenge is making reading your books preferable to watching TV, seeing a film, playing a game, or any of the other things people do for recreation.
I fear that the majority of authors who complain about piracy of their works as the reason for low income really need to consider the alternative: maybe they just haven’t written books that enough people want to read.
Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing(TM): Thanks for stopping by Dennis, and for taking the time to leave a comment. Personally, I have not lost a dime through stolen digital files. Why? Because I don’t intend to expose the entire book online. I did just put up a digital file of the jacket, front matter (testimonials & acknowledgments), and table of contents. We’ll see if that helps increase sales of the print version. I’m not sure 1% of the market is motivation enough for me to throw the entire book up. I do have a PDF ready to sell if and when I get ready. [Dennis is a Linux Adminstrator at The Feed Room.]