The first thing or two about e-books

The first thing about e-books, electronic books, is that you can deliver them electronically.

So this leads into all kinds of issues —

• pricing
• on-line distribution
• e-book reading systems
• design, of the books and of the reading system
• no-quality-loss electronic copying
• DRM
• piracy

and so on.

The publishing industry — and by this I mean all the stakeholders, publishers per se, editors, writers, agents, booksellers — are interested in keeping things as close to the current situation as possible. The worst thing that could happen from their perspective (at least to half these people) is that something like the great video ripoff of the 1970s would occur, when the actors and directors — the creative people who made the movies — did not share in the huge money that studios as distributors raked in when the video market came into existence. The writers and agents of course identify with the actors, but the publishers and booksellers don't want to be shut out any more than the writers, and are deathly afraid that a single misstep could spell disaster.

Consequently what we've seen over the last five or six years has been a tendency to treat e-books as a fourth format to release books in, acknowledging that there are clearly circumstances when an e-book fits the bill and neither a hardcover nor a trade paperback nor a mass-market paperback do. Everyone is comfortable with this perspective, particularly because royalties can be placed in a range that alarms no one, and really there have been technical and legal challenges aplenty to deal with. Of course, the minuscule number of e-books sold and read has also made everyone feel there's no rush to settle things.

All the issues being dealt with by publishers, editors, writers, agents, booksellers — and their lawyers! — stem from being able to deliver a book to a customer electronically. Some of those people are glad the market hasn't taken off, because then they might be more in the circumstance of the record and movie industries in relation to electronic copying and sharing (so-called piracy). [1]

Most everyone you talk to believes that solving these issues — by making cheap e-book readers, getting e-books in the hands of students, digitizing vast libraries of existing books — will somehow keep the genie in the publishing bottle and prevent it going the way of the typesetting business, which in the course of about eight years after the appearance of PostScript composition found 90 percent of its practitioners closing their doors. From that experience in the late 1980's and early 1990s, we in publishing know that technology is no respecter of market position and status and reputation. Everyone is learning the lesson of the last war, as it were, and making sure that they take advantage of technology and not ignore it.

But what all this overlooks is that e-books are being read on a device — an e-book reader, a Palm or a PocketPC, or maybe a laptop — that incorporates a computer. And no one is making books that take advantage of this.

In part this is because book publishers are firm in their decision not to become more like CD-ROM publishers. An e-book is a book; an interactive CD-ROM is not. You can't take a print book and readily (that is, cheaply) transform it into a CD-ROM adventure or interactive reference. [2]

As Bill Hill has pointed out in The Magic of Reading, we change a book's design at our peril. [3] Hill says everything on a book page from font design to margins has settled there from centuries of fine-tuning to humankind's physiological preferences. You can see what he means by comparing the design of Adobe's Acrobat Reader, which has literally dozens of controls all jammed into the default interface, with that of MS Reader, which has one visible control. [4]

So if we believe Bill Hill, then we really don't want to invent a new information vehicle, something that's not a book, but want as much as possible to keep the book experience on our electronic reading systems. There are plenty of ways to do that and still take advantage of that computer under the hood

For instance, any print book explaining a dynamic process can't hold a candle to an electronic book that simply illustrates the process in action. Here is a page taken from Garry Kasparov's On My Great Predecessors [5].

And here, by contrast, is a chess game whose process is clearly shown (click on "play" or ">":

This is taken from Der Alte Goniff, a chess blog written by Ed Gaillard. Note that the size of the board and of the commentary are relatively small here and that its design could be easily altered to fit the dimensions of the reading system. Where the print book is limited to showing the pieces at a few stages of the game, and must indicate the change in state by placing slightly changed images near to each other, the electronic illustration shows the board after every move.

Of course, every how-to book from re-wiring your house to learning to juggle would benefit similarly.

A textbook could record your answers to the questions at the end of the chapter and email them to the instructor.

A music theory book explaining Wagner could illustrate the themes being discussed by playing them.

A character's name in a science-fiction novel could be pronounced.

OK, maybe some of these are trivial uses. And something suggested to me recently by David Rothman — that a guidebook could connect with GPS data to display information about the sites you are passing when walking down a street in New York, or London, or Paris, or Tokyo — maybe takes you out of the realm of a basic e-book and into a specialized travel device.

But the point is to look at the limitations of a print book and, without changing the essence of the material being presented, then to release the e-book from those limits.

That's what we should be talking about when we speak about the future of e-books, or rather when we speak about e-books in our future. Answer this question: What can an e-book do that you can't do on paper?, and you've at least got your head around the real benefits that we could see.

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[1] Recall that in the 19th century, people who opposed slavery were attacked as thieves wanting to steal a slave-owner's "property." The "intellectual property" scheme currently supported by our laws is, in my mind, based on flimsier rationales than that for slavery.

[2] It's not just a matter of adding in a few videos and songs — books and CD-ROMs are radically different formats. Perhaps in the future some specially-designed websites will transform easily into CD-ROM publications, if that medium survives at all. (Or perhaps the fact that the experience can be replicated online means there won't be sufficient market to support CD-ROM sales; it's a dying sector now already.)

[3] Hill is the mastermind behind Microsoft's Reader software and also its sub-pixel font hinting technology, which has migrated from the e-book reader to the browser and word-processing software. The Magic of Reading is available in MS Reader format at Slate or in Word format at the Poynter Institute.

[4] This isn't from a conservative aesthetic — "let's make it look more like a book because change is bad" — but from an exhaustively researched recognition that changing the reading interface will result in poorer results, either in entertainment or information delivery (in other words, change is bad.)

[5] Page 361. Part of the Everyman Chess Series published in the U.K. by Gloucester Publishers and in the U.S. by Globe Pequot Press.