The Future of Electronic Publishing

[Laer Carroll]

What is the future of electronic publishing? Let's take a systems engineering and science-fictional look at it. Let's look several years, even several decades or centuries ahead.

epub is low tech​

First, let's dispose of the idea that electronic publishing is high tech. It is not. PRINT publishing is high tech. I went into detail about "ppub" in a July thread: What is real high tech?

High tech means an enterprise that uses much technology. People tend to think of this in hardware terms. You can see hardware. You can't see software, which is why few people understand it. It is the highly complex but invisible logic behind what you see (and hear and feel and otherwise sense) displayed by hardware. People usually only notice it in the visible part of the user interface to a system.

Systems engineers creating a jet fighter or an automobile or a dish washer or an ereader spend much time dealing with software engineers. In some projects as much as or more time and money is spent on the software than the hardware. Much of that software budget is spent on finding and dealing with errors when a system malfunctions. Especially if failure means deaths and injuries and money and time lost.

Even more invisible to most people is peopleware, the third leg of systems engineering. Peopleware includes all the procedures and practices and standards people follow (or fail to follow, all too often) to make, for instance, a space ship work right. It includes formal PP&S written down in an organized way. This includes laws. Peopleware also includes lots of informal PP&S. Such as the way literary agents typically deal with submissions.

Bottom line: The more high tech a system is, the less visible it is.

ereaders a century (or millenium) from now​

Imagine an ereader a century or a millennium from now. It is made up of several thousand microscopic devices floating in the air all around you - NOT surgically embedded within you. (That would limit it too much.) Stuck like PostIt notes on the sides of your head are a couple of coin-sized neural links made of a material that is transparent - or maybe decoratively colored. (Again NOT surgically embedded in you. You simply reach up and peel off the neural links to replace them or take a vacation from linking.)

You want to read a book? Simply think of what you want, maybe in very general terms. "You know, Reader: that book about super coyotes in the Mars outback that I loved when I was a kid." An instant later several hundred ereader-units organize in a swarm. They bend ambient light to project into your eyes a translucent overlay of the first few paragraphs of the book over what you see of the beach you are lounging upon. You accept that as what you want (if it is) and lay back and begin reading.

And so on. You are creative. Imagine the rest!

ereaders a decade (or two) from now​

Now let's think maybe a couple of decades ahead. During each decade there is likely to be an order of magnitude improvement in parts of a system. Historical analysis suggests that most hardware systems get smaller, faster, and cheaper. (Or maybe larger. Examples include aircraft carriers, cruise ships, and super-tankers. They are the size of floating cities.)

Or if a kind of system can't get smaller, such as automobiles or houses, they get safer and more durable, versatile, and comfortable.

If a magnitude means cheaper, an ereader might get ten times cheaper in one decade and a hundred times cheaper in two. Imagine ereaders which are the size and weight of a piece of heavy copy paper. Powered by ambient light or by a few minutes in a microwave.

As readers become cheaper we will no longer have to choose between special-purpose systems like the Kindle and general-purpose systems like the iPad. In a decade or two we are likely to have a dozen (or several dozen) special-purpose ereaders scattered all over the house and in our vehicles. And a few (or a few dozen) tablet computers.

That's the hardware side. What of the software? For one thing, the user interface will get simpler - apparently. Actually it will be more complex and more versatile. It is just that that the sophistication will be less intrusive. This can be done in several way. One is by having multi-level menus. (But with no more than three levels; research has shown that more than that confuses people.) It can also be done by having software that adapts to your usage patterns. (This is a field that has been researched quite bit, but so far the research has been only applied in modest ways.)

Peopleware. Here is where much work still needs to be done in the next decade or two. Some companies which sell ereaders today still try to tie you to their hardware. More universal standards need to be adopted to combat this. (Already we are seeing some movement in this direction. Examples include Apple's support of the ePub and HTML5 standards - though in a two-steps forward and one-step backward manner.)

Another area is in copy protection. Today it is embodied in clumsy DRM (digital rights management), which seeks to restrict one's use to a particular machine. Or (as in the case of iTunes) five particular machines. Some viewers of the publishing industry want to do away with it altogether. This may be the way DRM goes; it is still too early to know.

Another peopleware area is in how the money paid for a particular work is divided up among authors, agents, publishers, and distributors. Currently some distributors want to use something called the agency model, and some publishers want another model.

impact on print publishing​

Books and other material published on paper will be affected by electronic publishing. But the death entirely of the print publishing industry will not happen in this century. People who predict such an outcome underestimate how cheap, versatile, and high-tech print publishing is. Partly this is because the software and peopleware of this (and all other) technologies is invisible.

Partly this is because few people have studied the sociology of science and technology, and how new knowledge and applications of scientific knowledge are born and strive with older ideas and technology for survival.

Horses were not replaced by horseless carriages quickly or easily. And there are still jobs that only a horse can do - especially when mounted by a rider with a cell or satellite phone, possibly eating freeze-dried food and drinking from vacuum bottles.

Stage plays have survived in various forms and flourish despite the success of TV and movies and videos. Indeed, the popular TV program "Glee" embeds within it playlets in musical form. This is because stage plays provide benefits other play forms cannot. One is the chance to interact with other people during intermissions and before and after plays. Another is that a play can be very cheap to put on compared to other play forms. They also provide apprenticeships for budding actors. And so on.

Too, print technology has benefits electronic "printing" does not. Among them, price.

Used paperbacks are $1-6 on average. New paperbacks you can get for $4-8 on average. And once you buy that paperback, that's all the cost you have to spend and unless you set it on fire or rip it to pieces, it will never not function. That's the incidental cost with e-books only after you've spent hundreds of dollars on electronic equipment and service. If you don't want to keep the print paperback, you can sell it.

Today's ereaders are also fragile, bulky, and slow.

True, epub has advantages ppub does not. Commentators on the subject often spend a lot time enumerating them. Rarely, however, do they talk about the advantages of the older publishing form. This is partly because news writers, obviously, get paid for writing about new developments. It is also because the advantages of print publlishing are like water to a fish: ppub is everywhere and has long been so. Further, it always more exciting to talk about strife than about cooperation.

Rarely does anyone point out that print and electronic publishing are synergistic. Often a book will get enough people excited enough about its content that producers will greenlight a movie based on it. It works the other way too. A movie can trigger a surge in the buying of the book on which the movie was based. Which in turn can lead readers to discover other books by the same author.

One of the exciting possibilities of ebooks is the ability, increasingly, to embed sound, paintings and photos, and video within the text. However, in the future it may be possible to embed into paper display devices which can reproduce sound and video. Print technology will not stand still while its rivals advance.

global reach of epublishing​

There is a large swath of population even in wealthy countries who don't own electronics to read e-books, who are not even on the Web. In fact, a lot of them are lucky if they can pay their electricity bill to keep their lights on. There is another wide swath that can manage to get on the Net one way or another -- public schools, public libraries, spending money for a cheap laptop and cheap server service or sponging off their neighbors' WiFi -- but can't afford to buy e-books and certainly not e-readers or iPads. Essentially, the e-book market is largely confined to maybe the top 20% of income earners in the States and less in other countries. ... Even if the price of e-readers and such drops to very low levels, e-books can't totally take over yet unless you rescue all the poor and provide them with electricity.

The low disposable income of potential users of ereaders will long limit how many people can and will get them and use them. Another is how many potential readers can actually read. In Afghanistan the literacy rate is only 20-25%. The Taliban like this because it keeps their fellows poor and ignorant. For this reason they destroy or threaten schools except for religious ones, which usually teach only rote verbal learning.

Ironically, the Taliban are themselves an unwitting force for literacy. They cannot avoid using cell phones, to remotely trigger bombs and coordinate their forces. Newer phones include keyboards for instant messaging. IM is useful because messages can be composed while the phone is not transmitting. Then the text message can be squirted out (or received) in a tiny window of time. This hampers enemies monitoring electronic communications. But to text message one must be able to read and write, and it is almost impossible to curtail dissemination of knowledge.

Electronic publishing will continue to expand and mature. It is the (or A) wave of the future. But at the same time print publishing is likely to develop in unexpected ways. Perhaps we should remember Mark Twain's rejoinder when told he had died.

 

[Hobbit]

Another great post, Laer.

One of the points that you raised I found especially interesting: that the tech will get smaller, less intrusive/obvious.

As a counterpoint with ebooks, however, I would suggest that for many the limitation of the ebook is that people want a reader to be the same size as (or close to) the size and dimensions of a book.

They want their reader to be paperback-sized.

Unlike other apps, reading an ebook on a smaller and smaller screen does not appeal. I've tried it.

I think that this may therefore mean that until us oldies can get around the idea that we like our readers book shaped and sized, it may not change in that aspect further.

Or have I got that wrong?

What do others think?

Mark

 

[Sparrow]

I've worked in commercial printing for most of my life now, and it is as you say, hi-tech... in the extreme. What takes me a shift to produce would take a room full of highly skilled people to do just fifteen years ago. And everything I do registers on press and can be changed in an instant. What was done with light is now done with a insanely fast and fine tuned laser. When the client makes changes or whatever I'm doing to a job, it's all dynamic, indeed we can be working on the same job at the same time within the same computer app from thousands of miles apart... everything updates throughout the system. It won't be long until we skip the plating part of the process... the job will go directly to the press cylinders.


I don't imagine ereaders and the whole sudset of technologies will last beyond the next century, leastwise in a form we would recognize. Personally I think of ereaders/tablets as very crude devices and little more than dumbed-down computers. They are static and not capable of very much. I would look forward to the outlawed books in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a living book that is never the same twice.

 

[N. E. White]

They bend ambient light to project into your eyes a translucent overlay of the first few paragraphs of the book over what you see of the beach you are lounging upon. You accept that as what you want (if it is) and lay back and begin reading.

Oooooh, I want one of those. Yes, please.

 

[kmtolan]

Tablets will become as powerful as most desktop computers simply because technology's advance is inexorable. The medium will eventually not be the issue at all. The ideal form factor will happen, and convergence will make an electronic book available across the spectrum. It is already well underway.

The affect on the publishing industry can be viewed in the same manner as the electronically delivered song has had its affect on the music industry. The change will be significant. Oh, hardback books won't go away, but your mass market paperbacks certainly can count their days. Those who want to hide their heads in the sands of denial - well, the music industry had those folks too. They are not around anymore.

There are more opportunities to be published today, thanks to e-books, then there ever has in the past.

Kerry

 

[Laer Carroll]

tech diversifies as it advances

The sociology of science and technology is an academic discipline that got its start in the 1970s. One of the findings is that a technology diversifies as it matures.

Thus we have many form factors for the distribution of print, not one ideal one. For every situation has different requirements. Rather than compromising on one inefficient everything-to-everyone model, we get hundreds if not thousands of alternatives for any one kind of tech.

Examples show up in wheeled vehicles. In size, for instance, we range from roller-skates and skate boards to multi-ton tanks to railroad trains. The power source may be muscles, gasoline engines (which come in diesel and the regular type), electric, steam, and potentially nuclear. (The Hammer's Slammers futuristic tanks used nuclear power plants.)

Where convergence exists it usually shows up behind the scenes, invisible. This then affects the hardware. We have VHS rather than Betamax tapes, for instance. This was a conflict, not between hardware implementations, but between standards - peopleware.

 

[mickyg]

I'm also interested in the short term effects of e-readers and in particular how publishers deal with electronic media and piracy.

I think it's fair to say that the music industry has failed to properly address these issues and its painfully clear that they are applying old school business models to new school tech.

Publishers should have been spending their time coming up with viable alternative solutions to combat piracy but I'm not confident that they have. The sometimes high prices of ebooks is proof that they don't fully understand the needs and wants of their target audience.

I love ebooks, and would never give up my Nook, but I certainly don't want them to go down the path of music, where record companies have created too many excuses for people to 'acquire' products illegally. Because once it starts, it grows in the general collective conciousness like a monster and becomes very hard to eradicate.

 

[Window Bar]

The future of the eBook: Better Security?

Assuming that compression of files continues to advance, we may come to a time that bandwidth is not an issue; an eventuality that would make eBooks somewhat (not fully) immune to piracy. Rather than "selling" someone an eBook via a download, the customer could acquire an access code that would allow thirty days access to the file for online reading ... but no downloads. Of course the tech-savvy pirates can pilfer around the edges, but it would be a slightly more secure model

 

[Loerwyn]

I'm not sure about e-books, to be honest, as I'm quite skeptical about them. I think there's only so far they can take the e-book format in the next few years short of revolutionary technology. What Hobbit said is part of what I feel about it, and I feel that books are so well ingrained into our culture and world that the thought of e-books taking over is alien and strange.

What I think will happen is something that's happened with gaming, a more youthful medium. A good number of smaller titles (Equivalent to unsigned authors or ones with very small publishers) will be released in e-book only form with the bigger titles and publishers still putting out physical copies.

Books are kinda strange in that I think they've been part of everyone's normal life (In some form) for many, many years. Music has only been available in a viable physical form for, what, 50-60 years? It's still in the phase of transitioning to digital and I think it could easily take another 5-10 years before your jack-of-all-trades stores such as Tesco or Walmart stop stocking them (Or stock just the budget CD packs) because they won't be printed. Films and telvision are a younger medium still in regards to physical form, and I've not really seen much of a shift towards them truly being digital. Some films come with a free digital copy for one's iPod or other device, but I think physical copies will exist for a while to come.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was, but I think that the e-book market will hit a barrier in the near future and it'll take a long while before it over comes said barrier. People like physical books too much, whether it's the weight, the collectability, getting a book signed, the infamous new book smell - Anything, really.

They'll take over one day, I'm certain, but I do agree with you that it won't be this century.

 

[mickyg]

They'll take over one day, I'm certain, but I do agree with you that it won't be this century.

I dunno, a century is a long time. Things move fast these days. To stimulate some debate:

I think there's only so far they can take the e-book format in the next few years short of revolutionary technology.

Exactly how much further do you think they need to be taken? I believe that the best e-reader would be nothing more than that. I don't need iPads or Nook2's with 8 hour battery life and new fandangled features. I just need a device that simulates reading a real book.

With colour, touch capable e-ink screens on the horizon I don't think we need anything more than that at this stage. Anything more could have a detrimental effect to the target audience in my opinion.

A good number of smaller titles (Equivalent to unsigned authors or ones with very small publishers) will be released in e-book only form with the bigger titles and publishers still putting out physical copies.

I can half agree with this, but I believe that all books will be released as e-books, with only hardcover, limited edition and signed copies being released in limited numbers as physical copies.

Books are kinda strange in that I think they've been part of everyone's normal life (In some form) for many, many years. Music has only been available in a viable physical form for, what, 50-60 years? It's still in the phase of transitioning to digital and I think it could easily take another 5-10 years before your jack-of-all-trades stores such as Tesco or Walmart stop stocking them (Or stock just the budget CD packs) because they won't be printed. Films and telvision are a younger medium still in regards to physical form, and I've not really seen much of a shift towards them truly being digital. Some films come with a free digital copy for one's iPod or other device, but I think physical copies will exist for a while to come.

I think in these cases other technological advances go hand in hand. And in both of these examples it is internet and bandwidth. Although I don't want to make statements without supporting facts, I think it is clear that CDs are dying, if not dead. I personally have not seen a music CD for at least the last six months, and I'm sure if I asked other people in my age bracket (under 30) they would say the same. Sure, Walmart still sells them, but I don't think that should be used as an indicator for general adoption.

And as far as movies go, I believe it is simply a case of not having the infrastructure to support going digital. That is changing, though, and when everyone has super fast internet and massive storage then goodbye physical media.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was, but I think that the e-book market will hit a barrier in the near future and it'll take a long while before it over comes said barrier. People like physical books too much, whether it's the weight, the collectability, getting a book signed, the infamous new book smell - Anything, really.

The thing is though, for every reason to stick with physical copies there's an argument to be said for e-books. Not having to keep shelves of books, ease of access, the ability to connect and purchase books remotely, the ability to have thousands of books on one device, the list goes on.

I can only speak for my experience and that of my close friends, but we all made the jump to e-readers and I'll never go back. I read a lot of books, and after my first book I was completely comfortable with the new device and now it feels as natural to me as my books did. For me, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Maybe they should release an e-book cover that smells like an old book

I think the biggest thing here is whether or not the new youth adopt these devices. Because at the end of the day, it is the younger generations that often dictate the success of new technologies. If they embrace it then I think e-books will be the dominant format in a decade, two at most.

Please note that I don't have many facts to back up my beliefs, only my personal experiences and those of my peers.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

My fear is that what happened to music thanks to the internet will happen to books. If e-books come out at the same time as print books, the sale of print books will plummet, as pirating becomes a factor. Then 99% of authors, me included, will be doomed.

 

[kmtolan]

My fear is that what happened to music thanks to the internet will happen to books. If e-books come out at the same time as print books, the sale of print books will plummet, as pirating becomes a factor. Then 99% of authors, me included, will be doomed.

If e-books come out along with the print book, the majority of those stealing it would not have bothered buying the print or e-book to begin with. If you combat this by "windowing" the e-book for a later release, or worse still, ask nearly the same price for it, that factor changes and fans who would have bought the e-book would indeed jump on board with the pirates.

Most independent publishers, including mine, have little to be concerned about as the print version is always an after-release and the e-book is kept down to a low cost - usually around six dollars.

I think that 99% of the authors probably don't make enough to live on anyway, so don't quit your day job (grin).

Kerry (who still makes sales despite the pirates)

 

[warfitz45]

My fear is that what happened to music thanks to the internet will happen to books. If e-books come out at the same time as print books, the sale of print books will plummet, as pirating becomes a factor. Then 99% of authors, me included, will be doomed.

Though not as widespread, this is already occurring w/ sites uploading comic books (I know) and books (I believe) to read as pdfs (or some similar reading program). I'm not sure who it is, and I doubt people would have the inkling to put The Stand in as a pdf, but I believe it's already present. If anything, I believe that publishers moving to this route will allow those of us who refuse to steal words (or music) an option that is more economical than buying a $20 hardback.

If I am asked to spend $5-$10 for a new e-pub, especially if the book ins't something I collect but is more akin to "throwaway fiction" that I'll read once and then move on to my next book, I'm more likely to plop that smaller amount down as opposed to stealing it.

Of course, this is from someone who doesn't steal creative endeavors anyway! Heck, I do make copies of my CDs, but only to be "beat up copies" in my car so that my originals stay in pristine condition.


wf

 

[KatG]

My fear is that what happened to music thanks to the internet will happen to books. If e-books come out at the same time as print books, the sale of print books will plummet, as pirating becomes a factor. Then 99% of authors, me included, will be doomed.

Oh come on, Stephen. E-books are already coming out at the same time as print books and the sales of books have not plummeted. E-books make up only 4% of the market. Even when the e-books and e-readers were not a very viable market -- less than 1% of the market six years ago -- pirating was already going on, and this did not cause print sales to plummet either. The economy did, and wholesale vendor issues, but then it always does. Before the Internet, massive pirating of of print titles was already going on, particularly in Asia. So while it's a problem and some people do it, the principal markets are largely unaffected. And the music industry is just fine, with 70% of its sales still in CD's and a healthy, legal singles market on the Internet. A lot of the sales we're getting from e-books are additional sales, not in place of print sales.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Oh come on, Stephen. E-books are already coming out at the same time as print books and the sales of books have not plummeted. E-books make up only 4% of the market. Even when the e-books and e-readers were not a very viable market -- less than 1% of the market six years ago -- pirating was already going on, and this did not cause print sales to plummet either. The economy did, and wholesale vendor issues, but then it always does. Before the Internet, massive pirating of of print titles was already going on, particularly in Asia. So while it's a problem and some people do it, the principal markets are largely unaffected. And the music industry is just fine, with 70% of its sales still in CD's and a healthy, legal singles market on the Internet. A lot of the sales we're getting from e-books are additional sales, not in place of print sales.

Firstly, it won't be long before the sales of books plummet - betcha!
Secondly, the music industry is not fine, if you have no large-scale following or aren't a brand new band, you're sunk. The middle ground of music has been decimated by the arrival of the internet. I suspect the same will happen to the book world.

 

[KatG]

Firstly, it won't be long before the sales of books plummet - betcha!
Secondly, the music industry is not fine, if you have no large-scale following or aren't a brand new band, you're sunk. The middle ground of music has been decimated by the arrival of the internet. I suspect the same will happen to the book world.

I don't for the same reason I usually give -- the music business and the book business, especially the fiction part, are not at all alike. In terms of scale, money, business operations, sorting factors, revenue streams, international issues, customers' buying criteria, completely different type of products, contractually, audience demographics, wholesale distributors, retail sales, inventory and accounting, warehousing and shipping, electronics and electronic production, media coverage, social status, multi-platform marketing, cross-industry development, copyrighting, etc., the music business and the book business have nothing in common. Music performers and book authors are two entirely different species. The relationship between musicians and customers and authors and customers is completely different. Musicians -- and companies working with them, many, many more companies than work with publishers -- have an infinite number of commercial options compared to books, especially fiction books. If you're looking at music, you're looking at the wrong target. Magazines are the closest to books, and even there they are two completely different animals who just happen to sometimes share editors and wholesale vendors.

Books is a tiny market. It will always be a relatively tiny market compared to other things. It works on very tiny profit margins with minimal growth each year. In recessions, it has drops, which it absorbs better than a lot of other bigger, higher profile industries. It is largely inured to changes in technology, although it does sometimes use technology. It does not have to have large successes and it doesn't have large plunges either. For about six hundred years.

You, as an author, do have to worry about things. One thing is that individual titles sell fewer copies overall than they used to. A bestseller hardcover gets on the top parts of lists with 100,000 copies instead of 200,000. A book that sells 10,000 copies is thought to be doing pretty well, when it would have been 25,000 twenty years back. This is not because the book market has gotten smaller -- it's gotten bigger and there are more titles and people who read. And authors who used to never get foreign sales at all because they were mid-list are now getting foreign sales that often bring in more than their domestic ones as publishing grows more international. But there are issues ever since the collapse of the wholesale market in the 1990's and the narrowing of the retail market and the inability of other online vendors to challenge Amazon for market share. And this has put the squeeze on mid-list authors, but mid-list authors always get squeezed, especially in an economic downturn, well before the Internet existed. The mid-list authors still have now, thanks to the Internet, about a thousand more ways to market their work and reach best potential readers than they've had before.

The wholesale market is very slowly improving. The retail market got worse as the superchains over expanded and faltered, closing stores when the economy got bad, but there are signs that this is starting to stabilizing and quite a few independent bookstores are doing well. There are more vendors than there used to be only a few years back. WalMart, Target and Barnes & Noble are cutting into Amazon's online selling dominance with books and other things and the rapid changes in online retail may create a much larger online market than we've had so far. E-books is very, very tiny, but it's growth is so delicious that it's getting books more media attention than it's had in decades. People who never usually read and never walk into a bookstore are buying e-books for their new toys. Over time, as the market gets established, e-books should substantially increase your sales and bring more attention to your print ones. While the ultimate fate of physical print is up in the air, it will be still the substantial market for another twenty years.

E-piracy, which you're worried about, was a flourishing market already around 1994, in the early days of scanners and the Internet. It's going to continue to exist, especially while the retail market is barely going. But it's less of an issue for books because books are not as salable a piracy product as other things like music, films and games. (That's why the retail e-book market took so long to actually get anyone interested in developing it, and the iPad was not about books.) Only a small percentage of people compared to other entertainment products are going to bother to purchase illegal e-books or download them illegally for free, and this number is much less in the main Western retail world than in Asia, Russia, etc., and it will drop as legal e-books grow.

I can't tell you what's going to happen for mid-list authors because it depends a lot on the economy. But book sales are not going to plummet unless we have a second Great Recession in the U.S. and elsewhere, in which case everything will plummet and it won't be piracy's fault.

 

[Laer Carroll]

Multimedia stories

This came from the companion thread What is the future of print technology? But it more properly belongs here, the electronic publishing thread.

It's perhaps decades in the future, maybe not, but I think those books we all love so much will be transformed into a multimedia experience... some children's books already use this technology to great effect. Yes, they are quite cumbersome and very limited, but they do talk and interact with the reader. Why I like ereaders is because they're a hub for reading material... juice the things up and they become a multimedia machine-- much like our gaming consoles. Imagine a book as a game cassette or a dvd, and would be wirelessly linked to the publisher.

I think this is indeed the wave of the future - or A wave. But as you surmise it won't be soon or quick.

Why? Most people have little idea how much work goes into creating even a very limited multimedia experience.

I do. Before I became a software engineer I got a degree in film/TV production, intending to be a movie director. An infant son and a wife with cancer prevented that. Before that I was an enthusiastic amateur painter and photographer.

Firstly, besides the author, you have to have a painter/photographer. And they cannot simply be skilled and expert. They have to be creative and have imagination equally as great as yours. Otherwise the graphics person's lame efforts will drag down your book, be it ever so wonderful.

And if you are a gifted wordsmith like your favorite authors, you don't need a graphics person. You can in a few sentences give your readers images they will never forget. Because they and you collaborated to create them in their imaginations.

Want video in your electro-book? Do you have any idea how hard it is to do GOOD video? Very. Though many people do manage it. Some of the stuff on YouTube is wonderful. On the other hand, for every Wonderful there's a hundred Craps.

Want to do interactive? Oh, my aching head. I've actually helped create interactive web sites for Boeing. (Helped; it took over a dozen highly trained people. Months.) Still possible, of course, especially as interactive know-how trickles down to enthusiastic amateurs, with the consequent improvement in software tools ala PhotoShop and Web Builder.

I fully intend for my future published books (assuming there ever are any) to someday become multimedia experiences. I've already done a lot of groundwork. Look at my ConfederationTales web site as a start.

For my ShapechangerTales site I spent two weeks in Ireland last year taking photos of the places where my heroine traveled. It cost $7000. (It also gave me more grey - erh, silver - hairs. Imagine driving on the LEFT side of the road. Expecting any instant to meet a two-story tall tractor or tour bus. On a twisty turny road that looked like this.)

But all that media work I do in my spare time. I must focus on the core work, the text that makes all the other work mean something. Like the Harry Potter multimedia empire it all starts with a story.

 

[KatG]

Some interesting news on this front -- RIM/Blackberry is coming out with its small tablet computer, Play Book, and it looks like they are planning to make it relatively cheap. Motorola, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard are all rolling out tablet computers now that the iPad has proved there's a market for them between the smart phones and the netbooks/laptops. The iPad's sales actually dropped below expectations after its enormous debut, but it's been sufficiently successful as a product model.

So I suspect that the Kindle and the Nook in their next top line incarnations are not only going to have to be in color, but more multi-functional with video. And there is no hope at all that Amazon is holding on to its 90%-80% share of the e-book market for much longer. In trying to aggressively place itself out in front on e-readers during the time when there wasn't any real competition, Amazon has gotten itself into a bit of a hard place because it sells print books at wholesale prices and Apple et. al. do not, so not a price problem for their customers on e-books, and online retailers like WalMart and Target do, locking Amazon into price wars on print books that then effect their e-book market during the transitional stage. Effectively, they're hoisted on their own petard because they tried to use their print model of taking big losses for artificially low prices on the new, vastly more complicated e-book market. But they did get the Kindle established as a leading brand, and they are easy to buy from, so they'll continue to have a viable, growing market for their e-books. But I suspect their control of 19% of the print market as the dominant on-line bookseller is probably going to slip a good bit over the next few years.

Meanwhile the electronics firms are also amping up their smartphones with more laptoppy keyboards and features, (see RIM's the Torch,) so they'll essentially be tiny laptop/tablets. The younger set will therefore likely use smartphones and small tablets for, well, pretty much everything, including e-books. What my daughter does now with her iPod Nano is actually pretty amazing.

And the electronic-print bundling on textbooks is apparently going extremely well, so that is going to drift more and more into retail, first in children's and non-fiction, then maybe adult fiction.

 

[Sparrow]

This came from the companion thread What is the future of print technology? But it more properly belongs here, the electronic publishing thread.



I think this is indeed the wave of the future - or A wave. But as you surmise it won't be soon or quick.

Why? Most people have little idea how much work goes into creating even a very limited multimedia experience.

I think you're probably too hooked into the word "multimedia"... what I meant to say is that a book would have passages or portholes into the virtual world of the story. I first ran into this idea while reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It was the ultimate book, dangerous and subversive, and outlawed.

Being a software engineer you know what a "game engine" is.
Once a company developes its game engine they essentially put various shells over it (different video games)... one game might be about killing zombies, another might be riding colorful ponies through rainbow dust, or whatever. But it's the same game engine. If you supply a software engine with the book you could let readers build on the book, get inside the story and expand it.

 

[KatG]

So what you are saying is you want to have book games? Don't they already have those? Not book game adaptations, I mean necessarily, but games where there is a basic story that the player can then direct in plot options he wants?