The class this year was team-taught. In the first class, a colleague of mine and I overviewed the “Big Ideas” that we’d be covering in this “Fundamentals of Electronic Publishing” course, among them:

It’s the content not the container
Disintermediation/Decentralization
The end of tyranny of time and space
Scarcity vs. abundance
Value-add through structure and metadata Changes of channels Programmable “smart” content Changes in user expectations Dominance of “standards”

In the second class, I was outlining the changes in the world of publishing of the last 25 years: of going from an information economy of scarcity to one of abundance; from one of defined “channels” to one of interconnected communities; from a rich, biodiverse world of independent bookstores to a virtual monoculture of Barnes & Noble and a threatened Borders; from a robust library economy to one where the entire Philadelphia library system might have closed because of the mayor’s “Plan C” budget in harsh economic times; from a “turn it on”
relationship to technology, to an “always on” relationship to technology.

One of my students raised his hand and asked an important question: is this an evolution or a revolution?

My answer at the time was fairly instant: this is a revolution, because it no longer plays by the rules of its predecessor paradigm.
And in revolutions, the old paradigms get washed away.

I told the story of my multiple visits to Prague, post-Revolution, from 1990-1994, helping publishers understand what (at the time) was “the digital revolution”: desktop computers.

What I saw in 1990 in Czechoslovakia was a well-subsidized publishing culture that produced a rich publishing and reading popular culture.
A variety of visible and invisible translation, print run, distribution, or office expense subsidies made the process of publishing very cheap. In 1990, just about every hardhat and shopkeeper and working human I saw on the tram, the metro, the bus stops, was reading a book. Books were cheap and plentiful.

That was operating on a small-language-nation, social-subsidy publishing paradigm. Subsidies for Czech publishing, because of its small market, was seen by the state to be required, to maintain high national literacy and intellectual vigor.

Naive, robust neo-capitalism changed that. By 1993 and 1994, publishing subsidies had disappeared in all sectors.

And by 1995, a book resided in the hands of only around 10% of the people I saw on the tram, the subway, the bus stop.

It’s a lesson I’ve taken to heart (and written about elsewhere): that revolutions—whether political, cultural, or technological—have unexpected consequences, and that it’s up to us to try to aim them in the best directions. That social goods which we’ve come to expect, aren’t necessarily givens. And that four to five years can radically disrupt particular markets.

After the class, I was chatting with my co-instructor, who comes from the hypercommercial publishing sector. He said to me: “What you say about small language markets requiring subsidies makes sense, but in the English marketplace? What would subsidies subsidize? Who really cares if a publisher goes out of business? The cream will always rise to the top one way or another, after all, right?”

He was talking about a publishing revolution within a cultural revolution—which once started, iterates into some sort of weird fractal system of evolutions happening within revolutions, which ends up…  looking a lot like the workings of an ecosystem. Evolutionary pressures within a changing environment, in the end.

So maybe it’s evolutionary after all, not “merely” a revolution. *Some* of the old rules still apply: know your audience, know your market, promote to the interested, ensure high quality, follow your mission.

To get philosophical: every day’s weather pattern is a revolution (not following the patterns of the previous day) of temperature, wind, sun, rain… which occurs within a season that may be a tiny revolution of its own, within a year that is likely unlike any other in recent biological memory….

But flora and fauna evolve and prosper within that ever-changing, but pattern-persistent, ecosystem, especially if they’re resilient and flexible.

Thus, our jobs as publishers is to be sure we build genetic resilience into our DNA, so that we can survive revolution after evolution after revolution, within the patterns of the changing cultural, political, economic, and technical ecosystem.

Part of it is the ease of add-on: “For an extra 10%, you can have the digital form, too.” Another part is the pleasurable immediacy of getting the digital instantly, while knowing that the “real” print version is coming.

So far, I know of no instance of someone cancelling a print order after placing an order for a bundle and receiving a digital file. The publishers who sell bundles—O’Reilly, my own National Academies Press, and others—soon discover that the bundle is often the preferred mode, sometimes outselling either option even combined.

Selling a “bundle” presupposes, of course, that a Canadian publisher could sell directly to a US customer from their own website—something that few currently do.  That market niche is worth exploring in other venues, however, by expressing your desire for bundle sales from any distributor who enables individual sales.

As I’ve said elsewhere, finding ways to “upsell”—even upselling something that just adds a wee premium to an existing premium product—is a big part of finding ways to stay solvent in the new information-abundant society.

I’m a longstanding, hardcore laptop user whose first, twenty years ago, was a two-floppy no-hard-drive Toshiba. I probably won’t be one of the “tablet majority” ... except on plane flights, or except when I’m having a videochat with a colleague, or except when I’m reading a long ebook.

I expect to have a laptop (for my serious writing, serious email, serious programming, serious work), as well as a tablet (for most of my other digital engagement).

In the States, it’s not just the geeky early adopters who will go for the tablets. In fact, for geeks, they’re not optimal tools. But Apple, Microsoft, HP, Google, and other manufacturers hustling onto the tablet bandwagon, will be promoting tablets not as Microsoft Office machines (though they will function for that); not as database-entry devices (though, in a pinch, they’ll also function for that).

Instead, the promotion is going to be for entertainment, enjoyment, and interaction. The tablets will be promoted for chatting with your kids or grandkids from 2000 km away, and watching their videos. For tweeting about something you just saw on the tablet. For drawing, annotating, mapping, photo-ing, audio-booking, and (more to the point) for reading.

That promotion will encourage a relationship with the device—one that is very different from the clumsiness of a laptop, and that is more akin to the friendly, cuddly warmth people feel toward their iPhones.

If Canadian publishers’ books are absent from that environment, we’ll disappear from many markets, because other forms of distraction and enlightenment will replace what we do. When an existing niche is sparsely filled, after all, it gets filled by other things.

In the big media markets of the US, the tablets will rule the kingdom of onscreen reading—not as a tyranny, but as a preference, and in addition to other “work” devices.

Apple’s 25-second ad, first shown during the Oscar broadcast (http://www.apple.com/ipad/gallery/#hardware06) made me want the iPad in a way that Steve Jobs, and the breathless reportage of the much-vaunted announcement, simply didn’t. The ad is fabulous propaganda, which Apple does better than anyone.

The other tablet manufacturers, interface providers, and business-model participants will have some real difficulty competing with an integrated device such as the iPad, but even more, will have trouble competing on desirability. What the ad communicated was the seeming consistency, as well as the breadth, of its information-engagement touchscreen interface.

Another tablet may have a quality Web browsing experience, but won’t have the iBookstore; another tablet may have a great touchscreen experience, but won’t have the ability to have an App store; another tablet may have Google Book Search built-in, but won’t have Mac-like email and scheduling.

The integrated package means that we, as publishers, will need to take the iPad and iBookstore very seriously (as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others will or should).

I suspect, as Apple rolls out its iPad in the States and in Canada (in April, they promise), that the iBookstore market, by Q4 2010, will be a growing, vibrant one. If the iPhone is any indication, iPad owners will be comparing the books they have on their iBookshelf, and buying books from the iBookstore just to have them.

Please note: Apple’s iBookstore will only accept ebooks in .epub format, not PDF—so now is a good time to be initiating your .epub experiments.

InDesign, and a few other professional typesetting/formatting systems can produce simple ebooks fairly easily, but I wanted to understand a bit more deeply what it entailed, hands-on.

The first time doing anything is the hardest, of course, and while I’d overseen the production of ebooks, I’d not gotten in with nuts, code, and bits for years. I tried out a number of awkward free systems, and built my own files from scratch.

So far, the best tool right now for experimenting with ebooks is probably Calibre—an opensource and free ebook management (but not editing) system.

Calibre reads many file formats, and can also export many formats—which means you can take a well-formed HTML file, read it into the system, add metadata to it, view it within the (forgiving) Calibre reading software, and then save as an .epub format file, one functionally ready for pulling into an ebook reader.

I say “functionally” because ebook-reading software (not the format itself) is at a similar stage of development to what browsers were back in 2000—when Netscape displayed the same Web page differently from Internet Explorer, or other internet browsers.

Today, the same file that renders well in Calibre or Adobe Editions may not render well in a Sony Reader, or on an iPod with Stanza. Text-wraps around pictures, for example, don’t translate, nor do most typographic niceties. I tried a variety of experiments to test the boundaries.

With the .epub I was producing, I ended up having to rethink how to represent the pictures-and-captions that littered the text, even to the extent of moving their placement, in order to achieve a sort of lowest-common-denominator, very-simple linear presentation—a poor cousin to the print experience.

That will evolve, of course—ebook reader software will improve, and become more consistent across devices—but for now, as you experiment with digital export, choose a few straightforward texts, get someone on staff to experiment with Calibre, and then try reading it into whatever ebook reader and software that you have available.

Lowest common denominator simplifying may not be optimal, but at least you won’t have grumpy customers.

What it all means is both small and huge.

On the one hand, tablets may become the perfect reading device—with processor smarts, page-turning grace, color, multimedia capabilities, likely (eventual) 3-D display capabilities, and an Amazon-Killer App with a business model, the iBookstore or other ebook stores, thrown in.

Yet that’s the small meaning.

The larger meaning has to do with a transformation of technology into consumer commodity. Steve Jobs didn’t talk about the gigahertz, about pixels, about storage. He didn’t announce a new operating system, or the implementation of Apple’s new chip, or the SDK or the API.

Instead, it was about coolness, and sexiness, and a lush reading experience.

Of course it also means that Apple is trying to define the landscape of the next few years, and that they’re asserting that their vision of computing is the right one. Whether it works or not will be seen around Christmas, 2010… but regardless, what Apple has done is frame the discussion, and massively raised the profile, of digital publishing, simply by bringing out a cool, sexy bit of proprietary hardware that is not about the hardware, but about the experience.

This first iPad version is a placeholder—the even better versions will be released rapidly, by Apple and others, with cameras, multitasking, phone, and 3-D videoconferencing, over the next year or two.

But Apple has made the digital-product experience luscious, and attractive—which is likely to be good for most quality publishing.

Watching to see the uptake of this mode of invisible, nongeeky computing, and the iBookstore in particular, may indicate how rapidly we need to ramp up our ebook offerings for export to the world market.

Consequently every coffee table and settee had some kind of recent intellectual apparatus: The New York Review of Books, the New York Times sections in all their literate forms, clippings from papers and magazines, and small stacks of intelligent, thoughtful journals.

I reveled in all that paper.

The printed matter allowed a kind of browsing I’ve done too little of, of late. I’ve been shifting gradually toward the digital-only for more than two decades, and now do virtually all of my professional browsing online.

But among that printed material, I was able to enter the world of letters again. Of literate bon mots, and pithy quotes. Of implicitly demonstrating how well-read one is, not how well one can Google. Of thoughtful, researched conclusions; of thoughtful, deep expertise in matters literary and philosophical.

It’s something I realized I’d been missing, online. Sure, there are marvels of analysis available digitally—and most of what was on that paper at my father-in-law’s is also available in digital form. But I’ve had no online hours that provided anything as distilled as the material I could randomly pick up around his house to read. I could delve, and browse, and read in-depth, and skim, and discover—and almost *everything* I picked up was interesting. It had been pre-distilled, pre-limited… it was only the good stuff. Even the ads were interesting—reminders of quality intellectual content from publishers of quality.

That whole ecosystem is something we may be losing,  because competition for online eyeballs doesn’t encourage textual constraints. And economic constraints make buying ads in the NYRB, or the NYT Book Review, or Harper’s, increasingly difficult to justify. And fewer people are willing to subscribe to paper artifacts every year. And book review sections are disappearing throughout the country, and literary reviews are in decline, and independent bookstores, like the main one in Lincoln, are closing nationwide.

My father-in-law often resold books he chose not to review to the community’s secondhand and independent bookstores, much to my chagrin as a publisher. But that’s part of the ecosystem too—and a way of giving books a longer life. Without that segment of the ecosystem, there’s less of an incentive for him to write reviews, since such writing pays piddling amounts….

The entire publishing ecosystem is tattering, because the new ecosystem of glibness, volume, repetition, search engine optimization, element-based monetization, transitory reputation, personal brand, virus-of-the-moment, and utter surfeit of raw material changes the nature of the competition. In that ecosystem, I must judge whether an article is worth reading… by reading it. In the old paper-based one, I could almost be sure an article was at least worthwhile.

I hope the best of what I experienced in my father-in-law’s literary space can be part of the human experience, as we shift to a mostly-digital intellectual ecosystem—characteristics such as assured quality, concentrated value, and distilled expertise. That runs counter to today’s Web rhythms, even as it runs parallel to what many people want.

However, the Web’s rhythms wax and wane, and it may be that—not unlike the decline of blogging (because there’s too much out there already)—curated content will make a resurgence in response to overabundance of information and underabundance of time.

As the flood of barely curated content becomes overbearing, we may shift back to where editorial oversight is valued again. If so, the products will still be increasingly electronic—but people will be more willing to pay for the value of curation. And we as publishers will still be able to pay our salaries.

My father-in-law’s children all went in together to get him a new Mac Cube to replace the clunker he’d been experiencing the Web through. So who knows—perhaps next Christmas there won’t be so much paper clutter around the house. But for him, I doubt it.

E-books became for the first time more substantial than print for a major publisher (O’Reilly), late in the year. Amazon reported bigger e-book sales than p-book sales in the few days before Christmas.

Much humming and humbugging was made about data points, advances, and what they did or didn’t signify… there was much sound and fury, perhaps signifying something (but nobody’s sure just what, yet).

Sometimes change simply signifies change. We have yet to see what the landscape will be for book publishers—because the book-publishing (and book-exporting) ecosystem is still exceedingly unsettled. Will it settle in 2010? I suspect not.

Instead, 2010 will see continuing experimentation, exploration/ exploitation of new markets, and attempts to retain old markets. Being willing to experiment is the only way to stay with the waves of change.

2010 will be an interesting year—and thoughtful perspectives will likely often be drowned out by breathless next-now-next reportage.

Here are a few key articles that can help with developing “thoughtful perspective,” well worth rereading. If you haven’t read these yet, they’re a great way to start the year—pertinent to the future of publishing either directly or indirectly:

A smart, canny, nuanced analysis of ebooks as a cultural artifact, with imperatives of their own:

Wall Street Journal:
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write by Steven Johnson
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html

Two of the most influential and connected members of the new media environment, on the megatrends of the Web and society. These themes are what we as publishers must compete with, as well as work within:

Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle
Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On
http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194

And finally, Canada’s digital conscience, Cory Doctorow, in his seminal presentation to Microsoft Research on Digital Rights Management. Five years old, and still fresh and pertinent, true, and pretty much undeniable:
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Smashwords is a self-publishing and small-publisher-assistance site that uses “affiliate” promotion, and distributes and sells only ebooks. It’s a hands-off intermediary, a “non-publisher publisher,” that presumes authorial promotion and engagement—Smashwords just provides a platform for distribution and sales, somewhat like other “new intermediaries” (like Scribd and others).

For trade publishers, the following explanation from the founder should be food for thought:

—extract—
“Smashwords pays authors [or publishers] up to 85% of the net proceeds from the sale of their works. Net proceeds to author = (sales price minus PayPal payment processing fees)*.85. Authors receive 70.5% for affiliate sales. Our generous royalties mean if an author has a book they might otherwise publish via a traditional commercial publishers as a $8.00 mass market paperback with a 40 cent royalty, they could publish the same book at Smashwords as an ebook and earn $6.45, or 16 times more.  Or, they could price their ebook on Smashwords for $4.00 and make nearly 8 times the per unit amount of selling a traditionally published print book. The economics are equally advantageous for publishers.”
—/extract—

Further:

—extract—
“It’s free to publish on Smashwords. There are no hidden fees. We earn our revenue by taking a cut of all net sales on the site. The cut is 15% of the net for sales at Smashwords.com or on Stanza, 15% of the net proceeds from our retail partners, and 18.5% for sales that were originated by affiliate marketers.  If your book is purchased via one of the major online retailers we distribute to, you can expect your royalty to be approximately 42 percent (or higher) of the suggested list price you determine.”
—/extract—

Currently, then, as a publisher, you could use Smashwords as a distributor to Amazon, Shortcovers, B&N, and others, for very little besides a bit of up-front investment in .epub format. Smashwords eschews Digital Rights Management, though the “partners” could add a DRM envelope.

Thus, by using Smashwords to export and distribute e-versions of your publications, you could point directly to Smashwords from your own website, and get a higher rate of return per sale than via Amazon.

And while that’s great (and worth exploring further), Smashwords also is an indicator of a new pressure in the publishing ecosystem: the non-publisher publisher.

As Mark Coker, Smashwords founder, writes elsewhere:

—extract—
“Any self-published author or small publisher, anywhere in the world, now has the opportunity to instantly publish their book at Smashwords and reach a worldwide audience, and all at no cost.

“In the next few years as ebooks rise to account for an ever-increasing percentage of all book sales, more and more authors—including big name authors—will starting asking themselves, ‘What can a publisher do for me that I can’t do for myself?’”
—extract—

What a publisher can “do” is selective acquisition, promotion/marketing, quality assurance, and much more, of course. But especially with the organizational “partnerships” being made between digital players, and the substantially higher royalties paid directly to authors, for trade publishing in particular, Smashwords represents a new kind of competitor, appealing directly to authors (meanwhile Amazon is promoting a similar author-publishes service as well).

Should we be taking advantage of this opportunity, by using these “non-publisher publishers” as e-book resellers—or should we do our best to delegitimize this threat by treating it as “self-publishing,” and avoid conferring status to them by listing “real” publishers’ work on them?

Your answer to that question will vary depending on how you publish, what you publish, and what your publishing mission is—but regardless, “non-publisher publishers” are venues to watch.

What that means to Canadian publishers is that the toe of their stocking may be squarish this Christmas. And by January they’ll have hands-on experience. And by February they’ll be wanting to get their books into Kindle format right away.

Amazon Kindle is a tiny market compared to print, but the Kindle is still (for now) the biggest digital marketplace around.

Getting into it is pretty simple, especially for publishers of fiction and other text-heavy books. For anything with tables, graphs, images, or complex typography, wait for a year or two. But for long-form and short-form text, it’s worth the investment of a little time and effort.

Surprisingly little.

Amazon provides a Quick Start guide for publishers—and also provides free code-translation and light editing tools to make it relatively easy for publishers to upload and publish a Kindle-ready publication, particularly if you have anyone on staff who understands HTML.

In a few years, Kindle may be the Laserdisk of ebooks—but that’s a few years off. Now’s a good time to get your feet wet with a book or two whose rights are clear, and perhaps whose first-blush sales have peaked.

You then can begin to experiment with the expanding export markets (100 non-US countries) as well as the new Canadian market for Kindle publications—and experiment with methods of promoting the Kindle versions, from your own site, your authors’ sites, and in other venues.

You’ll get hands-on experience, not only with Kindle and its marketplace, but the experience of having a Kindle ebook or two that you can show off to authors and friends.