Joe Konrath’s scenario of the future, where an ebook can fluidly move across devices while being consumed in a variety of ways throughout the day, inspired me to write my own user experience scenario.

Below is a look at what kind of person might buy a personalized anthology, how a retailer might offer the service, and what it might cost. When it comes to personalized anthologies, the technology and the content already exist; it just requires some large-scale cooperation among retailers, publishers, and authors, which may take some years to work out.

Portrait of a niche consumer

Jane just found out her grandfather has Alzheimer’s disease, and now everything has changed. For the rest of her life, she’s going to pay a little more attention to mentions of the disease in the news, and she’s going to instantly feel a connection to others when they disclose that they know someone with Alzheimer’s. When she reads or hears about some suggestion, however unverified, that a particular substance or food or activity might impact the disease, she’s going to consider whether to incorporate that info into her own worldview. Her superstitions and fears will change.

And–however crass this sounds–she’s permanently changed as a consumer, too. Before, Jane had little interest in recreational consumption of Alzheimer’s related content, by which I mean things like feature articles, short stories, novels, memoirs, and non fiction works. She may have read the occasional work, but because she was interested in the author, or other aspects of the story, or because it was the trendy thing to do. Now, Jane wants to read about the disease for personal reasons. As her grandfather worsens, she wants anything she can get her hands on regarding treatments, managing the patient, preserving mental health of the caregivers, and so on; after he passes on and as her own children grow up and have children, she’s going to want to know more about how families deal with it from a generational perspective, as well as how medical treatments continue to evolve. Some day, unfortunately, she may even want to read more about it to help herself.

About six months after her world has changed, Jane logs onto a retailer’s website, navigates to the ebook section, and enters the word “alzheimers.” The first result isn’t a book at all, but an invitation from the retailer:

Jane clicks “yes” and she’s taken to a “My Anthology” page. For the rest of her time assembling this product–about half an hour total–she never leaves this page; search results and customization choices are all handled here, up to the “buy it now” button that debits her account and sends the ebook to her device.

The consumer as editor, with a little help from robots

Jane’s original search term, “alzheimers,” is used to generate a “greatest hits” list of content: a couple of chapters from celebrity memoirs, an Alice Munro short story, two long-form articles from the New Yorker, and two “living with Alzheimer’s” workbooks that are available for purchase on a chapter-by-chapter basis. These have been selected based on criteria like user reviews, critical reviews, frequency of use in other user anthologies, frequency in traditional anthologies, and when possible by some sort of editorial curating paid for by the retailer.

Jane’s first choice is the Munro short story. The retailer lets her know that the story has been made into a movie, and that there is a lot of supplemental content available regarding critical reactions to the movie. The retailer presents this extra material in two groups: content that emphasizes the subject matter of the movie, and content that’s about the movie itself or about moviemaking. For the second group, Jane clicks a button that says “This is off-topic for my anthology,” and the retailer’s AI uses that data to refine future suggestions (i.e., no more movie criticism unless there’s a strong correlation to the primary topic).

As always with digital content, there are too many choices. Jane clicks the “help me decide,” button, and the retailer selects two pieces about the movie adaptation. Item 1 is an interview with the director and actors about their emotional reactions to the subject matter; item 2 is a personal essay about the movie from a viewer whose wife died of Alzheimer’s. Jane clicks the second item and it’s added to her list. And so on–gradually she builds up a collection of Alzhheimer’s-related writing.

About 20 minutes into the experience, after selecting approximately 10 pieces, Jane grows tired of cherry-picking content. She clicks a button that tells the retailer to finish up her collection. The retailer asks for some parameters: how long do you want the anthology to be? do you prefer shorter or longer pieces? personal stories or “big picture” overviews? more fiction, more nonfiction, no fiction? are you okay with including content that was previously published online but not in print? do you want poems? Then it generates a list of candidates, and Jane scrolls through and edits it down.

She looks at her table of contents: it’s arranged under Fiction, Non-Fiction, and News categories (a couple of the articles she selected make up the News group). She rearranges the content manually and creates new headers: Personal Stories, Medicine & Science, and Everything Else. Those make more sense to her. In all, she’s got 15 different items in the collection. Total number of words: 55,000. The anthology costs $12.99. Jane pays for it and it shows up on her ereader about 30 seconds later.

How do you price carved-up content?

Almost all of these items aren’t available for sale individually; Jane would have to buy the collection of short stories to read the one about Alzheimer’s, and the chapters she selected from those “caring for the sick” workbooks are only available if you buy the whole workbook. The New Yorker articles aren’t for sale on the website at all, except in this anthology format. The point behind selling custom anthologies is to use the benefits of digital publishing to create a new distribution channel: if you throw your content in with other content that shares the same theme or subject matter, you can create a mass large enough to attract a purchaser, and then you can all split the profits.

But how do you price such anthologies? Some publishers and authors are going to want $5 per item, and some are going to want $1. Some pieces will be 22,000 word novellas that took 6 months to write, some will be 10,000 word articles that required huge amounts of research, and some will be 800 word diary-like entries harvested from blogs or online journals. It doesn’t seem fair to split profits up equally by simple inclusion in an anthology, but it seems foolish to split profits based on word count or popularity too.

The fairest solution is probably to let publishers price content themselves, but within specific guidelines, and with a huge amount of education and guidance provided by the retailer. Otherwise, certain publishers and authors will instinctively price their content out of reach of the majority of customers, which ultimately hurts the retailer’s ability to offer an affordable and high-quality service in the first place.

Customized anthologies are a good example of how digital publishing might differ from traditional publishing; in this case, the book doesn’t even exist until the customer imagines what it will look like. But one important thing to note is that this doesn’t minimize the role of publishers, editors, or authors, because they are all still needed to create and shape the content in the first place. This is purely a secondary market, a way to take existing products and sell access to subsections on demand. Publishers can tap backlists to generate revenue, authors can find new readers and monetize old short stories and essays, and educators can create affordable collections for classes.

From the consumer’s perspective, of course, it’s just a more convenient way to find stuff you really want to read. Believe me, if I could create my own 12-story anthology of gay zombie cyberpunk short fiction, I would have already done it. Well, to be realistic, that anthology would probably only contain 2 or 3 stories, but you get my point.

(Photo: Sapphireblue)