Playing to Strengths3 November 2003 Last week I asked what factors needed to be considered when pricing ebooks. In a capitalist system, there need be no direct link between the price of a product and the cost of production, but rather the price is set based on ehat the public is willing to pay. The price of ebooks should reflect their value to consumers, rather than some fixed percentage above what they cost to make. I was surprised to find one reader comment rather vehemently that ebooks have no value over print and that neither he nor anyone he knew would read them at any price. He stated that ebooks were all but unreadable (on his monochrome Handspring Visor) and that print was superior in every way. As it happened, I'd already been thinking about the idea that ebooks were wasting the potential of a new medium by trying to emulate something they weren't: print. There's an interesting parallel in the beginning of Rand's The Fountainhead between Roark's refusal to approach architecture as it had always been done and my approach to publishing. Roark's critique of the Parthenon -- that it stunk because it used marble for architectural features invented for wood rather than building in new forms emphasizing the advantages of marble -- mirrors my own ideas that ebooks are a new medium, different from but equal to print. A story should be told in whatever medium best suits it. Action and dialogue work best in screenplays. Internal monologue and description fit novels. A quick exploration of an idea fits short stories. What makes a story ideal for ebooks? The first thing that springs to mind is multimedia. Ebooks seem tailor-made for stories enhanced by sound, music and even short video. One of my readers even suggested building off the DVD model and creating "DVBs", or Digital Versatile Books, that could be read like ebooks or listened to a la Audible, and allow the user to switch between reading modes at a whim. Listen while shaving and showering, read while eating breakfast, listen in the car on the way to work, read on breaks, etc. Like DVDs, DVBs could also hold annotations, deleted scenes, and other material the author used in developing the book. While DVBs are a wonderful idea, they're still a ways out. The storage capacity and processing power to render such versatile books hasn't yet made it to portable devices. But this is certainly something to strive for in the future. One aspect of DVBs that we can do today is hypertext, both annotations and choose-your-own-adventure style fiction. I just picked up the Annotated Special Edition of Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Not only was the original ebook release of AFUtD the very first ebook I purchased from Palm Digital (way back when they were Peanut Press), but I somehow ended up with two copies of it in paperback. Why did I purchase it a fourth time? Because this version includes hypertext notes showing the writing process Vinge went through while working on the book. Through these notes the reader sees how things changed from the original drafts, meets characters discarded before publication and gets a sense of what it takes to string an Hugo and Nebula-winning novel together. It's not much of a stretch to see how these sorts of notes might appeal to hardcore bibliophiles. My mother has never read an ebook, not even those written by yours truly, although she reads dozens of paperbacks and hardcovers every year. But if she could look over the virtual shoulder of King, Grisham and Turow, she might give ebooks a try. A more extreme version of hypertext allows the reader to decide the course of the story by making choices as they read. Such interactive fiction is usually told in present tense, second person narrative ("You walk into a room to find a green chicken munching a lit cigar...") and is reminiscent of adventure video games, but with better graphics (the imagination is the ultimate canvas) and no need for fast reflexes. Widely branched storylines lend a great deal of "rereadability" since the story never has to have the same plot twice. Branching hypertext is a really neat idea, and I'd love to experiment with it at some point, but I'm a pretty linear storyteller at heart. So again, what can ebooks do that would be difficult, impractical or downright impossible in print? A while back, I wrote about writing in comics instead of prose. That didn't work out as well as I might have hoped. Like many Americans raised in our Instant Gratification culture, I tend to be a bit impatient. I wanted results and I wanted them fast. While I'm a pretty fast writer, I'm a slow artist. I figured on doing 133 illustrations per issue, 22 6-panel pages and a cover. My writing partner and I were working on a multi-arc story that would span at least 70-ish issues, and at my rate of doing one panel a week, I'd be long dead before finishing it. Rather than gamble that I'd have an L. Ron Hubbard-like ability to keep producing after death, I decided to look into other options. It occurred to me that one of the things I loved most about comics was the serialization, the idea that each issue, while a complete story unto itself, was also a link in an ongoing story arc. This is also, in large part, what drew me to Babylon 5: a grand, sweeping epic told in regular, easy-to-digest episodes. And then it hit me. We don't see a lot of episodic fiction in print.There are the occasional sample chapters of a novel serialized in a magazine, but no ongoing stories. Even magazines that print nothing but short fiction almost never have an ongoing or even multi-part series following the same story. In print, ongoing continuity seems to be almost exclusively the domain of comics. Why is that? A big part of it is that it's difficult for most people to follow an ongoing print continuity. In today's fast paced society, it's hard to remember to read something on a regular basis. Without a regular audience to follow it, an ongoing story is pointless. At least, it is in print. Distribute a serial epic in email or as downloadable ebooks with emailed reminders that it's time to get the latest installment, and you might have something. A few epublishers have experimented with the idea of distributing ebooks one chapter at a time via email, and they've met with moderate success. I have to wonder if they went far enough. I think there's something to the idea of setting up a website where you can publish one short story after another after another, each of them a complete story but part of a larger whole. Keeping "back issues" available on a web site would make it easy for new readers to get up to speed, and email reminders about the latest installment keeps regular readers coming back for more. This is a publishing model that worked for Dickens, and in small part worked for King in The Green Mile, but I really think it can come into its own in ebooks. It gives authors a way to build a (hopefully paying) community of their fans, and it gives readers a story they can read in small chunks when they have time. Ebooks have a lot of opportunities to set themselves apart from print, doing things that print can't do. If these capabilities are explored and advanced, ebooks could easily go from "you can read books on that thing?" obscurity to the "separate but equal" status enjoyed by audiobooks. So what have I missed? What other things make ebooks unique among publishing media? What other new territories can ebooks claim? Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |