So why is there so much doom and gloom, instead of excitement, from so many in the industry? The problem is one of economics, yes, but I think the real problem is a lack of imagination. Too many professionals–publishers, agents, authors, technologists, journalists, economic types (but maybe not real economists)–see ebooks and epublishing as building off of the current publishing model. Instead, they should be thinking of epublishing as disruptive. To put it another way (and to borrow/misuse terms from biology), epublishing is not the next stage in a gradual evolutionary path for the industry; instead, it’s an example of punctuated evolution–that is, the industry has been in stasis for a long time, changing little, and now is beginning to undergo a dramatic mutation to a form that’s more suitable to the new market environment. Publishing in the future will look so different as to seem like a new species, I predict.

Framing the topic like this raises a question: what will make it so dramatically different, then? How is epublishing really that different from physical publishing? If it’s truly disruptive, it had better possess some unique characteristics that have never before been seen in publishing.

That’s where I come in! As a hypothetical Future Published Author, I take a keen interest in trying to come up with new schemes to publish and sell books, so I think I can help provide some of that imaginative power for the FUD crowd that sees the future and only sees death.
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In the apparent war between publishers/authors and readers (and no, there shouldn’t be a war between us, but that’s what seems to happen in times of innovation), Amazon has again forsaken us. By “us,” I mean readers, and by “forsaken” I mean that Amazon gave in to the Authors Guild regarding the ‘read it now” function of the Kindle 2. From now on, authors and publishers can disable the feature on any titles they choose.

I bet Amazon could have won any lawsuit, just like Google could have won the copyright lawsuit that the Authors Guild brought against them a few years ago over their library scanning project, but Amazon doesn’t seem to want a fight. I get that. On the other hand, it’s infuriating to watch this group of 8,000 or so members strip out functionality that they don’t legally have any right to touch.

I hope someone quickly develops a way to block those crippled ebooks from searches on Amazon’s store. If they want to sell reduced-funtionality versions of their books, there should be an easy way to filter them out so readers don’t have to bother with them ever again.

“Amazon lets publishers and writers disable Kindle 2’s read-aloud feature” [Los Angeles Times]

Here are a couple of Kindle screens I made using Wordle’s free word cloud web-app. To be honest, I’m still undecided about whether the cartoons add too much clutter, but I thought these two were fun regardless considering the subject matter.

Make your own text-based screensavers at Wordle.net.

Thomas K. wrote, “Is there any chance you just might find a picture good enough for our kindle of Jane Austen?”