[W]hat I’m getting at here is that the e-reader is being treated as though it is a viable vehicle for long-form writing, in a way that ignores the essential fact that long-form writing and reading is rooted in paper, and book manufacturing.

So, back to the ‘iPod for reading’ metaphor. Its proponents generally don’t dig deeper than ‘here is a small square device for storing and consuming lots of music’. The implication is that we can hop blithely from that to ‘here is a small square device for storing and consuming lots of text’. Regardless of stirring promises of e-books containing audio, video, fancy schmancy links and so on, the common understanding – and, indeed, the hope of the publishing industry – remains that this is a digital device for reading long-form texts. But this ignores the effect that iPods – or, more generally, mp3s – are having on how music is distributed. Once sold as albums, whether on LPs or CDs, music is increasingly sold by the micro-unit – a single song. A unit of content typically around 3 or 4 minutes long rather than 60-75 minutes.

It makes economic sense to sell LPs or CDs at a runtime of 60-odd minutes. It makes economic sense to sell books of around 80,000 words. But music for iPods can be sold song by song. So, extrapolating from this to an iPod for reading, what is the written equivalent of a single song? In a word (or 300), belles lettres.

if a computer is going to hyphenate something, it needs to know what language the text is in. This is a job for metadata: electronic books could have an indicator of what language they’re in, and the reader application could hyphenate automatically. But that won’t always help: in the text on the Kindle screen, for example, der Depperte isn’t English and wouldn’t be recognized as such. A human compositor could catch that; a computer wouldn’t guess, and would have to default to not breaking it. The same problem will happen with proper names.

I can see why this is the case. It’s a difficult problem to solve, so, in that great tradition of computer programming, a solution becomes the solution because the problem-solvers aren’t end users themselves. I don’t think these e-book readers will take off until someone seriously studies the problems of reading on these things and takes the time and effort to offer some thoughtful solutions.

• What are the characteristics of a successful author in the era of the digital network?
• Ditto for readers: how do you account for the range of behaviors that comprise reading in the era of the digital network?
• What is the role of the publisher and the editor?
• What is the relationship between the professional (author) and the amateur (reader)?
• Do the answers to 1–4 afford a viable economic model?

His idea of a “dynamic network” allows for a number of possibilities, all with the goal of providing ways to “engage readers with the author’s conclusions at a deeper, more satisfying level.”

Stein goes on to describe some of the possibilities this idea allows, addressing the way this idea starts to lead to Wikipediaish sounding ideas by establishing the author’s role in tending a text of this sort over the long-term, rather than letting anyone and everyone take it over.

What I found most interesting was this anecdote about reading habits:

(an anecdotal report regarding reading in the networked era)

A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy’s reading behavior: “He’ll be reading a (printed) book. He’ll put the book down and go to the book’s website. Then, he’ll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He’ll put the book down again and google a query that’s occurred to him.” I’d like to suggest that we change our description of reading to include the full range of these activities, not just time spent looking at the printed page.

I find myself doing things like this quite frequently. (In part because I’m always frickin’ online. And even when I’m not, I’m checking my e-mail on my phone in a crippling OCD sort of way.) It’s interesting to me to think of ways in which, knowing that readers read like this, publishers can adjust and treat the internet as an active, vibrant addition to a published book. I’m not sure exactly how this would work, but at the current time, I think we mostly view printed books as the finished, complete product/work of art, which might not be the best way to look at things in the not-too-distant future.

Some of the implications Stein comes up with in relation to his main idea are pretty interesting:

f) So it turns out that far from becoming obsolete, publishers and editors in the networked era have a crucial role to play. The editor of the future is increasingly a producer, a role that includes signing up projects and overseeing all elements of production and distribution, and that of course includes building and nurturing communities of various demographics, size, and shape. Successful publishers will build brands around curatorial and community building know-how AND be really good at designing and developing the robust technical infrastructures that underlie a complex range of user experiences. [I know I’m using “publisher” to encompass an array of tasks and responsibilities, but I don’t think the short-hand does too much damage to the discussion].

In a way, that’s what we’ve been trying to do with this blog since the start. And in a way, community nurturing is what all good litblogs strive for.

g) Once there are roles for author/reader/editor/publisher, we can begin to assess who adds what kind of value, and when. From there we can begin to develop a business model. My sense is that this transitional period (5, 10, 50 years) will encompass a variety of monetizing schemes. People will buy subscriptions to works, to publishers, or to channels that aggregate works from different publishers. People might purchase access to specific titles for specific periods of time. We might see tiered access, where something is free in “read-only” form, but publishers charge for the links that take you OUT of the document or INTO the community. Smart experimenting and careful listening to users/readers/authors will be very important.

Monetization is always the big question and obstacle. This paragraph can be interpreted into a number of different actualities, but on a theoretical live, I’m attracted to the idea of a subscription sort of model. To me, subscriptions seem to favor small, well-branded publishers who have a strong vision, rather than the hodge-podge of books that large houses usually have to publish in order to survive.

The one area of his article that I don’t think is very cool is this part about the future of fiction:

When talking about some of these ideas with people, quite often the most passionate response is that “surely, you are not talking about fiction.” If by fiction we mean the four-hundred page novel then the answer is no, but in the long term arc of change I am imagining, novels will not continue to be the dominant form of fiction. My bet now is that to understand where fiction is going we should look at what’s happening with “video games.” World of Warcraft is an online game with ten million subscribers paying $15 per month to assemble themselves into guilds (teams) of thirty or more people who work together to accomplish the tasks and goals which make up the never-ending game. It’s not a big leap to think of the person who developed the game as an author whose art is conceiving, designing and building a virtual world in which players (readers) don’t merely watch or read the narrative as it unfolds — they construct it as they play. Indeed, from this perspective, extending the narrative is the essence of the game play.

No matter what happens with future technology and models and whatnot, I can’t imagine the bulk of readers ditching novels for videogames. (Or even more unlikely—authors deciding to stop writing novels.)

It is sort of cool to look at and play with, and does start to replicate the browsing experience one has in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop. Although all titles are purchased through Amazon, the selection is pretty crap, and, as Sebastian Mary astutely points out, pretty conventional and antithetical to the promise of the internet.

It’s debatable, though, whether this kind of heavily-mediated pseudo-serendipity, while a pleasant change from the messy Amazon experience, isn’t one metaphor too far. After all, how ‘serendipitous’ are the book thumbnails I find on its digitally-rendered ‘shelves’?

What concerns me is that, while this site provides something of the feel of browsing a bookstore, this is not only a superficial impression but reproduces the worst of the industrialized mainstream bookstores. The buying practices necessitated in order to keep a large bookstore financially viable these days have skewed the kinds of books that are deemed saleable profoundly; the redemptive promise of the Web was that the magical long tail might create markets for even those niche publications that have been edged out of mainstream publishing and book sales.

Duguid’s suggests not. The process of migrating analog works to the digital environment in a way that respects the orginals but fully integrates them into the networked world is trickier than simply scanning and dumping into a database. The Shandy study shows in detail how Google’s ambition to organizing the world’s books and making them universally accessible and useful (to slightly adapt Google’s mission statement) is being carried out in a hasty, slipshod manner, leading to a serious deficit in quality in what could eventually become, for better or worse, the world’s library.

As is so often the case, the devil is in the details, and it is precisely the details that Google seems to have overlooked, or rather sprinted past. Sloppy scanning and the blithe discarding of organizational and metadata schemes meticulously devised through centuries of librarianship, might indeed make the books “universally accessible” (or close to that) but the “and useful” part of the equation could go unrealized.

There are a lot of issues to debate in relation to this project, but if even 5% of the texts are as unreadable as those featured in Duguid’s article, I think this project will have problems.