My favorite ones are the incredibly cheap, “I just don’t care” solutions, like the baggie, the paper envelope, the Crown Royal whiskey pouch, and — this one makes me laugh every time I see it — the magazine-and-rubber-band case. On her Flickr page, magazine case creator Becky writes that it was “good enough for getting to and from the gym.” Ahh, good enough! That’s practically my mantra for home craft projects.

(In Becky’s defense, her duct tape case is actually pretty cool looking.)

More seriously, most of the ideas fall into either repurposing old hardcovers or day planners, or creating your own from scratch using cardboard with fabric, leather or vinyl. For sleeves and soft cases, if you already know how to sew or crochet you can knock out a nice looking number in no time.

Making your own case really is fairly easy, and once you’re done you’ll have the benefit of extra protection and privacy, and the pleasure of knowing that you made it yourself.

“50 Kindle Covers You Can Make Yourself” [Ebookcases.org via Teleread]

Take for example a book on American politics, not because that kind of book is fun to read, but because such a book always has two characteristics: a strong point of view that practically begs for counter arguments, and debatable errors either in actual facts or in the interpretation of them.

With Public Notes, now a noted public figure of an opposing political bent can read and annotate a Kindle edition of a new book by someone on the other side of the argument, and the reading public can tune into that person’s highlights and notes from within the original text.

It’s a virtual annotated edition, and one that only exists temporarily. The author of the notes can remove them or disable public access to them at any time, or a reader can choose not to follow their annotations the same way I don’t follow certain celebs on Twitter.

Earlier this week I was laughing to myself about how much fun it would be to add funny or satirical notes to someone’s book, but the big problem was that almost nobody would want to read my notes.

But if Glenn Beck were to annotate Rachel Maddow’s book, and Rachel Maddow were to annotate his, I bet you’d have a considerable amount of interest from consumers. You’d probably sell more of each book to readers who would normally avoid your book.

For now, this seems more compelling to me with nonfiction categories like politics, memoirs and media/journalism criticism. But I can imagine too that public annotations from authors could be used by publishers as a sort of “blurb on steroids” — the key difference being that annotations are actually added content, and therefore added value, that only Kindle editions can currently offer. [Edit: For example, imagine seeing a tweet that says John Hodgman has added hilarious annotations to Jay-Z's "Decoded" -- for a select few, this meta-entertainment would justify the purchase of the Kindle edition over another edition.]

And then there’s the possible bad news: will publishers and authors freak out over this? Do they understand its potential? Will the Authors Guild, or some executive, or a famous author accuse Amazon of producing new works, and therefore infringing on copyright? My guess is yes, and like text-to-speech the feature may get hobbled before it can really take off.

But since I think this can sell more books in the end, I’m hoping that everyone involved on the publishing side of the business embraces it wholeheartedly. And, while I’m blue-skying this stuff, that Amazon hasn’t managed to somehow patent it.

Update: This post was picked up by Teleread, and in the discussion over there the author Michael W. Perry lists some other ways public notes could be interestingly used:

• to provide academic annotations for popular fiction (in his example, dates throughout the Lord of the Rings books);
• to provide author asides and explanations, e.g. in mystery novels;
• to create stopgap corrections or explanations between editions, so that authors are able to engage in an ongoing dialogue of sorts with their readers.

He also notes that ideally, high value public notes could be turned into a bonus feature that you’d pay for, so that in turn the author is compensated.

(Photo: romana klee)

The story I bought is essentially unreadable for now, because it’s been “dehydrated”: there are just uniform placeholder terms where proper nouns and unique descriptions should be. But I knew this when I bought it. I launch a simple, open source program built to handle complex search-and-replace functions, and it connects to a public domain website where various templates are stored. From that site it retrieves a “Harry Potter” template that a fan has made, and uses it to replace all the placeholders with names and places from Rowling’s saga, then produces a final .epub file.

Now I’ve got a new, unauthorized Harry Potter book.

Because lots of people use this system, the markup language is fairly uniform and growing more so, and it therefore produces a largely error-free final version. There are a couple of errors big enough to impact readability, and later when I have time I report them as bugs to the template website, so that someone else with more time or interest than I have can make adjustments to the template, or so the author can see them and correct her original text.

A wholly formed and unauthorized Harry Potter novel would clearly be a violation of U.S. copyright law, but the process is decentralized so that neither the author of the new work nor the template website is responsible for the final creation of the infringing work. In fact, other templates are available that would turn the story into a brand new work with original characters and places, or that would let a reader personalize it with friends and local places. If you’re feeling perverse, you can apply a Vampire Chronicles template and giggle at Lestat, Louis and Claudia as mystery solving young wizards vampires.

I’m not sure it could be done today. It might be too complicated to implement a markup language that would decisively erase any infringing content but allow accurate replacement from any number of third-party templates. It might demand a strict writing style or format that would prove too limiting artistically. It might simply be considered too deliberately infringing in intent to survive legal scrutiny, especially in countries like the U.S. where copyright power rests in the hands of large corporations who have an interest in locking away content forever. On the other hand, BitTorrent has legitimate uses and has managed to survive these many Internet years.

But my intent is to point out that there are existing and undiscovered applications of technology that will completely explode the existing copyright regime. It might come much sooner than we think, and make the ebook explosion look like a firecracker.

I’m a little surprised that original authors haven’t already started engaging directly with fanfic authors to extend their own fictional series, although I suppose the looming shadow of the Copyright Specter tends to sour most of those sorts of relationships before they can be developed. (Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson come the closest with The Mongoliad, but their terms of service force you to transfer away all rights for anything you contribute, which reduces the collaboration back to the zero sum game of the status quo.)

Am I really advocating for advances in copyright infringement? I think so; after growing up in a world where the majority of my shared public culture is under corporate lock and key, I’ve started to become a copyright punk.

I’m against the current implementation of copyright law for cultural reasons, because I think it’s reached a point where it’s become detrimental to our shared heritage. There are millions of humans who will be born, grow up, produce new creative works on the shoulders of past artists, and die, all while “Gone with the Wind” remains under copyright and locked out of the public domain.* In 2007 a filmmaker can create an original work that incorporates 80-year-old public domain blues recordings, then be unable to sell her film because of licensing issues for the underlying compositions. Other songs disappear entirely because copyright forbids distribution, even though the rights holders abandon those works and fail to properly preserve them. TV shows and movies don’t use the Happy Birthday song because of a (disputed) copyright claim on it, so a living artifact of our present culture regularly fails to be accurately represented or preserved in other works. And right now, a fanfic sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye” (set 60 years later but using the same character) can’t be published in the U.S. because J. D. Salinger successfully sued to prevent it.

If some person or group can manage to bypass copyright by pushing the actual act of infringement to the private citizen level, where no company (hopefully) has the right to witness or record it, then it could be truly disruptive. The next move in the copyright wars would be for corporations to buy legislation that makes the necessary software illegal, but in the end that might be a good thing: I remain hopeful that the more abusive copyright law becomes, the higher the likelihood that it will finally trigger some badly needed restructuring.

 
* Alice Randall’s “The Wind Done Gone,” published in 2001, retold the events of Mitchell’s novel from the point of view of a slave, but Randall had to remove all direct references to Mitchell’s world and still had to appeal an injunction before she could finally publish the book. It made it to print in part because the publisher incorrectly categorizes it as a parody. (Return to the text.)

(Photo: erichhh)

What makes Harkaway’s ideas even more valuable, in my opinion, is that they’re not limited in scope to just the big publishers. Anyone who publishes, including self-starting indies and small niche presses, can and should take note.

Here’s what he suggests, although the paraphrased explanations that follow should be blamed on me:

1. Make your content available. Don’t window the digital release in a misguided attempt to boost hardcover sales; you’re wasting opportunities to sell to new consumers who wouldn’t or can’t buy the hardback.
2. Price wisely and think in tiers. Don’t charge a premium price for a substandard (i.e., typo-ridden or image-lacking) digital version. At the same time, add value incrementally to digital versions so that you can segment them into different price points. First, this will help you give the consumer the option to spend as much as he’s willing to spend (always a good thing for profits). Second, this will give you a way to “window” digital content in a useful way, by letting you release differently priced versions of digital content to correlate with the traditional release schedule.
3. Don’t cheat customers. Harkaway doesn’t quite use such strong language–he says customers don’t want to pay twice for the same content. But ultimately it comes down to feeling cheated as a consumer: if you paid for something, you don’t want to have to buy it again, and then again, each time you want to consume it on a different platform. Here’s an idea: if you really do want to charge a consumer on a per-platform basis, then you must drop the price to a “rental” level as an acknowledgement of how limited the access is that you’re selling.
4. Skip DRM. It adds cost to your production budget. It creates potential situations where your customer will feel cheated. It’s arguably ineffective. The people telling you that you need it are frequently the ones who are selling it. Most of the arguments for it are based on emotion, not business intelligence. If it’s too late for you–because there are higher-ups or board members who insist on it and are too slow/scared/suspicious to try something new, then at least start pushing for an exit strategy.

“DRM is not all that” [Futurebook]
“The Rules Of Harkaway Club: everything I think I know about ebooks, but probably don’t” [Futurebook]
www.nickharkaway.com

(Photo: Sapphireblue)

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)

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.

Will any of these ideas come to pass? Possibly not, and almost certainly not in the exact forms I’ve described below, because who knows how many important details I’m overlooking. But these are just rough notes pulled from my head over a cup of coffee on Sunday afternoon as I sit in a Starbucks. I think it’s worth noting that almost everyone here has either a laptop open, or an iPhone next to them, or both. A few even have physical books or newspapers with them, as if to prove that physical print is not dead, but is also no longer triumphant.

A special note: many of these suggestions will be heresy to readers, authors, and publishers. I shrug at you, which is not the same as disagreeing. These ideas are based on the assumption that an author is in the content-creation business, not that the author is an artist who is producing art. This doesn’t mean writing can’t be art, of course, but since most writing-as-art is not necessarily profitable, and is especially not profit-driven, I’m not allowing it to influence my ideas below.

A second special note: many of these suggestions are intended to solve the problem of perceived value: how can an ebook cost the same as, or even more than, a physical book if the consumer doesn’t receive a physical object to own after purchase?

Some ideas about
the future of digital publishing

Manipulating authorship on demand

• Customized and personalized texts. When a customer buys an ebook, he can choose to personalize it in certain ways, including changing the name of the hero or the villain or of secondary characters. Simple search-and-replace customizations require no human interaction at all, leaving the author and his agents free to work on creating more meaningful value.
• Can there be more precise customization? For the premium cost of an ebook, a customer can submit a photograph and complete a short survey. A real person on the other end will evaluate this data and use it to complete a profile that can be digitally combined with a book, provided the book is prepared ahead of time with specific passages marked up in order to facilitate this more complex search-and-replace.
• Books can be published without final chapters. Imagine a mystery novel where the identity of the killer is withheld until a certain date, in order to get readers to speculate and even vote on what happened. The final chapter may be unwritten at the time of publishing, in fact, only to be finished after readers voice speculation or opinions.
• Books can be republished with new endings; authors can rewrite sections of a book and republish it as a new version, not to simply sell more books but to update locations, or refine what a character’s intentions are, or to simply take the ending in a novel new direction as a sort of postmodern approach to the novel and authorship.

Redefining what makes a “book”

• Short stories and novellas can be sold individually. (See Stephen King’s Ur for the Amazon Kindle Store.)
• Anthologies on-demand. Say you love horror fiction, especially horror fiction about zombies, and especially horror fiction about zombies and teenagers. A publishing house can offer you the opportunity to assemble on-the-fly a collection of stories in that specific sub-genre. The publisher makes recommendations of related material as well–zombies with college students, teens with undead-but-not-zombies. Publishers can work out content sharing arrangements with other publishers so that each publisher has access to a larger content library. Authors prepare stories in specific genres as requested by publishers, or simply write what they want and submit it to the publisher’s content library, and are paid an exclusivity license and royalties for each book-on-demand their stories appear in.
• Non-fiction books can be updated frequently, following the same model as software. That is, between editions there can be a dozen or more smaller updates: Edition 1.1, 1.2, 1.3; Edition 2.0, 2.1, etc. This is especially valuable for manuals and computer resources, as well as catalogues.
• Digests can be sold around specific topics. Following a model similar to Google News Alerts combined with the “Best [xx] Writing Of [xxxx]“, readers can subscribe to topic digests for recurring fees, or for a flat annual subscription, and receive 4-8 collections annually of all journalism, essays, short stories, studies, journal articles, etc. on a topic. These digests can be curated by experts in some cases, to add additional unique value.
• Fiction or essays about current or recent events can be produced quickly, formatted quickly, and pushed to digital stores within a week of the event. Topics like teen celebrities, sci-tech that’s in vogue because of a certain movie marketing push, essays based on last week’s D.C. scandal, can all become fodder for books or mini-books.
• Long-form articles from magazines and newspapers can be sold individually for smallish amounts–say, $1. As an example, several of Seymour Hersh’s pieces for The New Yorker on topics like Gauntanamo Bay and Iran could have been sold to interested readers who don’t wish to subscribe to The New Yorker itself.
• Reference works can be sold piecemeal–a book on book proposals, for example, can sell just the generic intro and the chapter on cookbook proposals.

Modifying the publisher/author/public relationship

• Publishing houses can offer repackaged publishing services to authors. Instead of an author relying solely on the publisher for all aspects of the process–approval, editing, marketing, printing, shipping, bookkeeping–authors and their agents can hire, or enter an agreement with, publishing houses to provide specific services. If you’e an established author, you bring your own favorite editor into the mix, or hire the editor from the publisher (editors can be free agents or in exclusive contracts with publishers based on their fame within the industry). You negotiate with the publisher to provide marketing or book assembly and preparation for all forms of printing.

  You arrange your own publishing deals through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, using on-demand publishing facilities. Or you create an LLC and find financing to pay for bulk publishing. A publisher can take on this risk for a royalty, or can provide a package of services and offer to finance it for either a royalty or repayment with interest.

  Some authors may choose to bypass physical printing altogether, and to also bypass in-house marketing for third-party marketing from ad or publicity agencies.

  The point: publishing houses may change so that they provide a service to authors and the public by being a mediator between the two–but they are no longer the gatekeepers. In fact, depending on the ability of the author to finance the process, they may no longer own the book at all. Existing publishers may refuse to transition away from owning content, but startup companies can provide these services (editors can leave existing publishers and form their own companies with marketers and agents, in fact) and replace publishing houses as mediators.

• A reader can commission a work from an author. No, it will not be cheap, but it can be affordable as a unique “life event” gift (e.g. anniversaries, births) if an author creates templates–an anniversary template, a birth template, a Christmas template–and then customizes them. This requires real writing, not simply search-and-replace as above, but it doesn’t require the same amount of labor as writing an original work from scratch–the story’s theme is already created, as is the basic length and most of the plot. The author uses his template and customizes it with information from the customer. The author can also farm out customization assignments to ghostwriters while retaining creative control over the finished work.
• An author’s readers can help determine the components of an author’s next work, and follow along with frequent updates from the author, as well as certain chapters shared for feedback. (Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail followed this model in many ways, although the finished work remained identical to other traditional published works.) In particular, this deep level of customer interaction guarantees a small but confirmed amount of presales, to help the author budget resources for the duration of writing the book.
• Authors can sell subscriptions to their output: everything *but* novels are pushed directly to subscribers, while novels are sold at a discount. This sort of subscription model can help support authors who aren’t prolific in the traditional sense of pushing out a novel every 14 months, but who still produce substantive writing in the form of letters, essays, articles, and unpublished shorts works.

Adding value over static physical versions

• New books can come with notes, email exchanges, and rough drafts; more work is required to format the material for the digital edition, but theoretically the book can add thousands of extra pages without increasing the distribution cost compared to physical printings. Authors can adapt character studies or removed chapters into stand-alone short stories or short-shorts and publish in an appendix. Special editions can include 3-5 short stories from other authors over related subjects–this can also introduce authors to new readers.
• Epilogues can be added months later, intentionally.
• Serial works can be sold as works in progress, either for a flat “novel” fee or in chunks, or on a subscription basis.

# # #

A lot of these ideas require a shift in the relationship between the audience and the producer(s), and I think that’s a very good thing. Currently, most audience feedback is collected indirectly from sales figures or market research; there’s almost no true dialogue taking place between the content creators and the consumers. One aspect of the future of publishing is that publishers will ask their customers to engage more directly with them and with authors, which I think will influence publishing in ways I haven’t imagined yet.

Another shift implied by the ideas above is the transformation to a sort of bespoke publishing industry, where mass customization is, if not the norm, then a significant percentage of the marketplace. In general, I think mass customization and bespoke products are the next stage in industrial manufacturing, using digital technology alongside industrial technology to return the value of human-to-human services to the market, but at a mass level.

The world beyond traditional
publishing houses

Maybe none of these ideas will come to pass, but I can already say with confidence that if I were to publish a new novel today, the only reason I would even consider going through a publisher is that they currently control access to printing, shipping, editorial, and marketing services.

If I would be willing to forego physical printing–or relegate that to an on-demand status to save time and money–and could hire my own editorial and marketing experts, there would be no reason to go through a publisher at all. I could retain all rights to my work, distribute it as I see fit, and partner with an agent or lawyer to work out licensing agreements should the need arise.

Without the imprimatur of a publisher my book would lack credibility, but with the cooperation of published authors who are respected in the marketplace, I could load up a book with blurbs and recommendations that would help signal to consumers that I’m a risk worth taking–and with discounts, freebies, and samples, I could lower the risk even more.

I am not describing a DIY amateur publishing world, but one in which authors work with other authors, with the assistance of expert agents, editors, and reviewers, to help sell books. The current employees of publishing houses would still be working in the industry, but perhaps not for the current publishing houses any more. And most important, authors and readers–the two crucial components of the industry–would have more freedom than ever before to produce and consume the written word.

(Robot drawing: clickclickclickclick)

Well, of course, the answer is a solid yes, because I truly believe this is the beginning of an evolution in publishing. Even though I grow tired of all the doom and gloom from old-school professionals, I’m grateful (and excited) to be witness to such a transformative event as this.