Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks

Mac Slocum
May 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

O'Reilly author and New York Times columnist David Pogue points the way to an April post from author Steven Poole that offers an interesting look at the arguments and counter-arguments surrounding free digital books.

Last year, Poole ran his own experiment with free PDFs of his book Trigger Happy. The result: it was a "pretty good publicity stunt," but it didn't yield any notable revenue.

Although I didn't do it for the money, I was also, of course, interested in testing the idea of giving stuff away and allowing people freely to express their appreciation. So I put a PayPal button below the download. Is this, as some people say, an exciting new internet-age business model for writers and other creative types? Er, not really. The proportion of people who left a tip after downloading Trigger Happy was 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%.

Despite meager returns, Poole says the current separation between electronic and print books makes the free digital avenue wortwhile:

... the happy truth is that right now, electronic downloads don't cannibalize printed sales; if anything, they encourage them. In fact, I would gladly give away my newer book, Unspeak, in the same format right now, except that I am contractually obliged to wait until next year to do so.

But -- and this is a big but -- Poole says if/when digital delivery overtakes print as the dominant delivery mechanism, the upside of free drops precipitously:

Giving away your work in the same format in which you hope to sell it is a dangerous game, if that's how you hope to make a living.

Poole's points on both sides of the debate are well put. This is a daunting and exciting time for content creators. It's an odd period that's marked by legitmate revenue concerns as well as new opportunities to build a following. Poole's post does a nice job capturing these dueling perspectives; the entire piece is worth a read.

UPDATE: Mike Masnick at TechDirt has posted a detailed rebuttal to Pogue (and Poole) on the subject:

Just because "give it away and pray" isn't a workable business model, that doesn't mean that there aren't business models that do work. Hopefully, Poole and Pogue will eventually recognize that they're dismissing the wrong thing. They shouldn't be complaining about free (or making misleading accusations about those who simply recognize the economic forces at work) -- they should be complaining about a failure to put in place a real business model to take advantage of what will be free.

Related Stories:

• TechDirt: "'Give It Away And Pray' Isn't A Business Model... But It Doesn't Mean That 'Free' Doesn't Work"
• Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns about File Sharing and "Piracy"
• BitTorrent as a Book Publicity Tool
• Piracy is Progressive Taxation ...
• How Do Publishers and Authors Get Paid in a "Free" World?

Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games

Liza Daly
May 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Publishers are experimenting with an emerging form of interactive entertainment known as Alternate Reality Games (ARG). ARGs are mediated by the Web but they also extend into the real world, with players traveling to physical places and interacting with game characters via email, text messaging, Twitter, and even "old-fashioned" telephones.

I spoke to the founders of ARG design firm Fourth Wall Studios, the company that created the first publishing ARG, Cathy's Book. I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers.

Q: Do you think the high level of engagement required of an ARG limits the audience? Is there such a thing as a "casual" ARG, that can be enjoyed in the spare moments between soccer practice and dinner time?

A: Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Designer: ARGs up until now have been like rock concerts. Thousands (if not millions) of people come together at one point in time to collectively experience something incredible. They have a good time, sing along, maybe buy a t-shirt, but when they go home to tell their friends about it, there's no action their friends can take other than to hope they don't miss the next one. The traditional ARG is an experience that exists between the start and end date of the campaign, and if you weren't there at the right time, you simply miss out.

To continue the metaphor, think of our games [at Fourth Wall] as ARG "albums" instead of concerts: something you can play when, where, and how you want. Ultimately, it is only through this "album" approach that this new form of entertainment is going to evolve into a mainstream genre of storytelling.

Q: Many ARGs have been developed as promotional tools for other media: music releases, films, TV series, video games, and now books. Is there a perception that ARGs have to be in support of something else, rather than entertainment themselves?

A: Elan Lee: ARGs have had their roots in marketing because frankly, at this early stage, that's a great place to find money. Marketers have a tougher job every day of finding ways to get their message heard above the noise, and they have a lot of money to throw at the problem. It's a great situation for both sides: marketers get to engage their audience in a way that attracts, involves, and maintains an audience around a product. ARGs benefit in that we get to run wild and ground-breaking experiments as we birth this new art form.

Also, at least in the case of Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero and Cathy's Book, the ARG elements were not conceived as marketing, but as an inextricable part of the content. An album or a book was the spine of the experience, but the work of art itself was conceived as an interactive multimedia whole.

Q: Cathy's Book was targeted at a young adult (YA) audience. Do you think YA is a strong market for this kind of interactive entertainment? Would it be possible to engage even younger children?

A: Sean Stewart, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Creative: Cathy's Book and the new hardcover, Cathy's Key, are designed to be first and foremost a fun (and funny) adventure story. We've added a lot of "fourth wall" elements -- you can call Cathy's phone number and leave her a message, investigate clues she doesn't have time to investigate or write to email addresses you find in the book and see what responses come back to you. Cathy even hosts a gallery where readers can submit their own artwork -- the best of which will be published in the paperback of Cathy's Key. The basic impulse behind this series is to make books -- a traditionally passive, solitary activity -- something with an active, social component as well.

"Fourth Wall" fiction -- experiences that play out at least partly over your browser, your phone, your life -- feels somehow very right for this new age; it's a kind of storytelling that arises naturally from the world of three-way calls, instant messenger, text messaging, and shooting a friend an email with a link to something cool you saw on the Web. To that extent, it's going to feel the most natural to the people most comfortable with that kind of wired world.

When I was in New York last year, meeting with the publisher of Cathy's Book, my 12-year-old daughter emailed me a PowerPoint slide deck, complete with music and animations, explaining why I should get her a Mac laptop for Christmas. Yeah, I think her generation finds interactive entertainment more natural than mine. And yes, I think it would be not only possible, but really effective to build interactive, exploratory stories for even younger kids -- but to do that, we need to get away from the traditional ARGs willingness to be confusing. Most people like to have some clue what the heck they are supposed to do next. It won't surprise you to learn that this is another crucial design issue Fourth Wall Studios has set out to solve.

Q: Reading is usually a solitary pursuit, but there's an almost universal desire to "live" in some genres, whether it's idealized period romances, spy novels, or detective stories (murder mystery parties, especially popular in the 1980s, illustrate this). How important are traditional fiction genres in ARG? Can there be an element of role-playing involved? Are there genres that haven't been explored yet that have potential?

A: Sean Stewart: The first paid writing I ever did, actually, was for live action role playing games and murder mystery dinner parties in the '80s. I never would have guessed that writing for those things would turn out to be extremely important training for me, but in fact the intersection of writing and theater, where you try to find ways for the audience to participate in the story, lies at the heart, I think, of the next evolution in storytelling.

We believe that immersing yourself in a world is a fundamental part of what makes fiction fun. Any time I follow a character -- whether in a Jane Austen novel or a "Matrix" movie -- I am imagining what that must be like. One of the biggest pay-offs in an ARG is that you don't just imagine a fictional world, as in a book, or see it, as in a movie: you actually inhabit it. When I read a Harry Potter novel, I get to go to Hogwarts vicariously; when I play an ARG, I get to go myself. I am finding Web sites on my browser, I am talking to characters on my phone: the world of the fiction has reached out to me.

That proposition, by the way, shouldn't be limited by genre. ARGs have often had a thriller/science fiction slant to them, but even inside our games we've done romantic comedies, spy plots, documentary-style slice-of-life experiences, tragedies, and even Westerns. Fourth-wall fiction isn't about a given genre: it's a set of tools and approaches for letting the audience participate in any kind of story.

Q: What happens when the game is over? Is it possible to package up an ARG as a complete work (whether online or in print) to be experienced linearly? Or is the experience meaningless without real-time participation?

A: Elan Lee: Here's where I'm going to try to get as much mileage out of the "rock concert" metaphor as I can. There is no denying the electric energy present at a concert and there is absolutely no substitute for "being there." However, there are only so many available seats per venue, and only so many venues you can play before exhaustion sets in (both for the artist and the audience). For ARGs to evolve into a mainstream form of entertainment, they must create their own version of "albums" to complement the "concert." Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we have to find a way to put a package around these things and call it a day; I only suggest that both pieces of the experience must exist for the real potential of the form to be realized.

Related Stories:

• What Makes a Collaborative Writing Project Successful?
• Nabokov's Final Novel: The Perfect Mash-Up Source
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?

What Makes a Collaborative Writing Project Successful?

Liza Daly
May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Penguin's collaborative writing experiment A Million Penguins was launched in February 2007 and completed in March 2007. This month saw its final scholarly assessment published in a research report out of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

The results? Terrible, according to Gawker, echoing a consensus that the project failed as literature. As a study of online behavior, though, it's quite fascinating, and the research paper describes examples of all types of user contributions, from the grandiose and self-serving to the quietly constructive.

But if "every book needs its author," game-like fiction has been shown to be more amenable to collaboration. Each of Penguin's We Tell Stories pieces was co-written by interactive developers and a novelist. This month, the Guardian has launched a participatory interactive fiction project.

Although technically a type of computer game, interactive fiction has a long association with print authors, starting with the commercially successful adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984). In 2003 Adam Cadre (Ready, Okay!, HarperCollins, 2000) wrote the game Narcolepsy incorporating 12 dream sequences written by different authors (of which I was one). In a more experimental vein, the recent UpRightDown project released its first story, which generated submissions in multiple media, including some interactive works.

One lesson from these experiments is that while a work of fiction may not need a single author, it does need a single editor or authority to weave together disparate contributions and reject the obvious vandals. A unified final work has the potential to be a marketable product rather than a research project. (On the other hand, if the printed German Wikipedia sells, all bets are off.) Scale is important as well: two or even three dozen contributors are probably manageable; A Million Penguins had 1,700.

The Guardian's interactive fiction project is being managed using wiki software at textadventure.org.uk. The organizers are soliciting both programmers and non-technical writers. It is scheduled to run through at least the end of May.

Related Stories:

• Q&A; with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner
• German Wikipedia Coming in Book Form
• Nabokov's Final Novel: The Perfect Mash-Up Source
• Experimenting for the Sake of Experimenting
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?

EPUB Creation Just Got Simpler

Keith Fahlgren
May 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

BookGlutton announced last week that it had developed a Web-based (X)HTML to EPUB conversion form (and API). The form itself accepts HTML or XHTML documents and returns an .epub file (in a couple of seconds) for download. While it doesn't yet support images or CSS stylesheets, it sounds like these features are coming. My handful of tests of the tool have all "just worked." I grabbed HTML files I found on the Web and an HTML version of a recent O'Reilly title and all were happily accepted. The resulting .epub file opened fine in Adobe Digital Editions and was readable.

The impact of this sort of easy-to-use form is huge, as so many content creation tools already support (X)HTML output in some way, from Word to OpenOffice.org to DocBook to Dreamweaver. It should be the first step in lowering the barrier to entry to creating EPUB documents. Bob DuCharme had already showed technical experts how to create .epub files with nothing but free tools and I'm hopeful that the Save as DAISY output from Word will help create more accessible documents, but there's nothing like a simple Web form to bring a complicated standard to the masses.

That said, the lack of CSS and image support really makes this more of a proof-of-concept than a real tool today, unless you're only interested in reading narrative text. With that in mind, let's give it a shot (in Firefox, on my Mac):

1. Find Wikipedia's article on E-book.

2. Save As: Web Page, HTML only (so you don't bother with the images or CSS):

   

3. Now take that HTML file from your computer and feed it right back to the BookGlutton form:

   

4. Hit convert, then open the resulting .epub in Adobe Digital Editions:

   

Here's the resulting .epub, for the lazy: wikipedia_on_E-book.epub. I also tried two other samples: the 3rd chapter from Word Hacks (word_hacks_chapter_3.epub) and the Ebook Format Primer from the TOC blog (ebook-format-primer.epub).

So, given our three samples, what are the current drawbacks? Well, as I mentioned before, the lack of images and CSS supprt as the two obvious ones, especially for the book content (which had images, unlike the blog post). There's also the all-too-common drawback of HTML from the wild-wild Web being rather funky. You can see an example of that sort of oddness on the first page of the Wikipedia sample in Digital Editions (which is including some JavaScript code meant to be executed by the browser) :

// document.writeln("\x3cp\x3e\x3ca href=\"https://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration\"
blah blah blah

...but that stuff is ignorable and could be removed from the HTML if one cared. Another concern is that while the internal linking (from the Contents, for example) works, some of the external links back to other parts of Wikipedia don't. Linking is a major advantage of ebooks, so this is a sad one, though this is a common web problem and not really BookGlutton's fault. My final complaint has to do with special characters (n spaces), which seem to have gotten messed up in the book content (look around the "Figure" references). That said, the blog post looks pretty nice, once you find it a little later in the document.

Although at this stage it's just a prototype, BookGlutton's work might encourage the re-use of existing content published on the Web packaged as an ebook. This type of thing should significantly increase the number of .epub files ready to go into (format-friendly) ebook devices and create more pressure on ebook device manufacturers to support EPUB.

It's time for the "regular" folks to step out of the woodwork and give this EPUB thing a try!

Related Stories:

• Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free
• Ebook Format Primer
• Keep Your Eye on the epub Ball (But Do Play Nice)
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free

Andrew Savikas
May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Today brought news of the release of a "Save to Daisy" add-in for Microsoft Word, and while a new Word add-in wouldn't normally be news for publishers, there's a bit more to this story.

Among the benefits of distributing content digitally is that it ostensibly makes the content more accessible to alternate reading devices. It's not difficult to see how -- compared to a printed page -- text marked up for computers to read (think HTML) would be much easier for a computer to read to a human (like Braille readers or text-to-speech). Indeed, for some time now we've offered audio versions of many O'Reilly articles and blogs (including this one). But in reality, format diffusion and DRM has often frustrated accessibility efforts (and by extension, consumers).

The industry migration toward EPUB has the potential to address this -- any (non-DRM) EPUB file should in theory be readable by a variety of accessibility devices, with no added conversion cost or delay.

But first there's a shift that needs to happen, and that's a shift on the part of publishers from building books primarily intended to be consumed in print to building books that are intended to be consumed digitally. When we first learned of the "Export to EPUB" feature in InDesign, there was premature optimism internally that it was the answer to a lot of questions about how to present some of our most popular content in a more digital-friendly form. The reality though is that simply exporting EPUB from InDesign files designed for print created essentially useless output. Our contacts at Adobe helped clarify that a huge part of getting good EPUB out of InDesign is about designing the content with that format in mind -- something very few designers are doing yet that I'm aware of. There's a serious education issue here, in that most people who hear that InDesign can export to EPUB assume it's as easy as "Save as..." and it's not. For example:

... when threading together text fields, they will always be exported in the correct order. However, they will also always be in one flow. All of the layout editing that you have done to place the text boxes with respect to each other or the page is discarded. You will have to style the layout of the EPUB manually, after export.

There's growing inertia behind EPUB (I like to refer to it as the "mp3 of ebooks"), and when ebooks become a primary delivery format, rather than a secondary one, expect to see much more content available in an inherently accessible way. Here's hoping the next version of Word includes "Save as EPUB" from the start. (For now you can try the free DAISY pipeline to convert those exported DAISY Word files into EPUB.)

Related links:

• New DAISY Pipeline Released
• Ebook Format Primer
• Keep Your Eye on the epub Ball (But Do Play Nice)