As I wrote in the last post, in just the last five years, we’ve seen the rise of Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google Books, ebooks 2.0, YouTube, Flash, massively multiplayer games, iPhones and apps, the institutionalization of open source and XML standards, and plenty, plenty more.

Let’s imagine five years ahead, and let’s think about how to position Canadian publishing optimally for that future. I invite supposition, theorizing, and even pull-from-the-air hypothesizing, in the comments.

It’s a fool’s game, predicting the future. And at the risk of becoming Moliere’s “knowledgeable fool” (“A knowledgeable fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool”)—I’ve been trying to forecast the next five years for the last, oh, twenty years.

I’ve done all right, being mostly correct on the things that matter.
I’ve also been wrong (about how quickly micropayment systems would be accepted, for example), but on the main I’m not embarrassed by my past prognostications.

If the last five years brought us such incredible, surprising bounty, then what must the next five years bring? At base, we will have the compound-interest effect making a hockey-stick rise in terms of digital connectedness, making five years from now disruptively different.

Here’s a few of the things that seem clear:

* We’ll have 1000 to 10,000 times more documents available for free on the World Wide Web than we have today. Consequently, certified quality and substantiveness (as defined culturally and algorithmically) will be ever more cherished.

* Ubiquitous information: you will connect with the Web in a way that allows you constant access to “your world”—your library, your house, your friends, your virtual portable personalized digital reality. It can be presented on your phone, on your laptop, on hotel widescreen TVs, in library kiosks, in Starbucks and in Chapters.

* The distinction between “work” and “life” will have continued to dissolve; that said, avatars that pleasantly say “I’m off the grid until about 4:00” to anyone trying to contact you, will have become a signal of sanity.

* Micropayments will have finally become institutionalized (which I first erroneously predicted as a near-future inevitability in 1996 [Google “michael jensen” micropayments]). But by now (2014), tossing a digital dime or a virtual quarter into someone’s virtual hat, to access (or reward) something of value, will be trivial and accepted—in fact, the information economy will be turning to depend on these transactions.

* Increasing intersection between gameworlds and other virtual worlds (think frequent flyer miles as viable currency to buy a battle-axe in a medieval massively multiplayer online game) mean that APIs, digital transactions, automated access systems, and currency-neutral pricing models will be normalized.

* A functionally borderless digital environment predominates—in which tribes, communities, groups, causes, and the like wax and wane transnationally, based on brief, or enduring, interests. Think a potentially transitory, virtual association, the SESO, the “Society for the Exploration of Something or Other.” These communities accrue link/search collections of resources—for free and potentially for pay—that become “vertical aggregations of the community of knowledge” about the thing they’re interested in.

What should a publisher do in such a borderless, ubiquitous, always-on, micropayment world do?

* Design flexible systems that don’t depend on a particular format of sale.

* Design niche-based marketing systems that attend to communities of practice and interest.

* Presume that contractual agreements can be arranged which preclude any interruption between interested audience and intellectual content (the only question is who gets what share of what money).

* Engage in every rational vertical market who asks—presuming at least 50% share in digital nickels.

* Resign ourselves to a low price for an ebook (currently “$9.99” is the sweet spot) compared to a p-book—but make up for it in volume and lower distribution costs.

Let me be clear: we will have to do this AND continue to do what we’ve always done, during this transitional half-decade.

US and Canadian publishers will, in 2014, still be making at least a third of our income from print sales, and probably more than half. But an increasing (and obviously inevitably increasing) proportion of our sales will be digital, through a complicated compilation of micropayment aggregations via multiple vendors, single-chapters-for-a-dime sites, online specialist libraries, Google Libraries subscriptions, direct e-book sales, aggregation e-book sales, and open-access-leading-to-sales systems.

“Export” of Canadian ebooks will be technically trivial five years hence—*if* you’re ready as a publisher. “Ready” presumes that you have 20% to 40% of your entire list (or at least the last 10 years of your list) available in ebook format, and that you are flexible and adventuresome with your e-titles.

Think I’m crazy, or even just mistaken?

Write about it in the comments.

It was just five years ago that Google Book Search (then Google Print) terrified publishers. Four years ago, blogs moved into the mainstream, cell phones became cheap devices, and YouTube arrived on the scene.

In just the last three years, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter, the massive expansion of Facebook, and the establishment of open standards for epubs.

In just the last *two years,* we’ve watched the arrival of the Kindle, the Sony e-book reader, and other reading devices, with excitement and with trepidation.

Trepidation because we’ve also watched the downward spiral of newspapers, the transformation of the music industry’s business models, the decline of the independent bookstore, and a radical disruption in what we believed to be fundamentals of our economy.

What’s a publisher to do?

I don’t have “The Answer,” because we’re moving into a richly complex world of publishing biodiversity, of microniches, vertical markets, specialty collections, micromarketing to micromarkets, and much more.

What works for a publisher like mine won’t necessarily work for a publisher like yours; the marketing for this book won’t necessarily work for that book.

That was always true, when you get right down to it—but after 20+ years in publishing, I can honestly say that the signs of a “new marketplace” have never been so clear.

So what I’ll be doing in the following months is posting a series of meditations on how societal, economic, and environmental pressures are changing the publishing marketplace. I’ll explore how the changing habits of US consumers may indicate new opportunities, and investigate some specific examples. I’ll postulate some possible near-future scenarios. I’ll frame some discussions regarding the US marketplace for Canadian products.

I’ll be looking for engagement and comment from the thoughtful among you (that means *you*).

Since nobody has “The Answer,” I’m hopeful that with the AECB’s new website and blog, this community can grow into a conversation around these topics—because the more we can help each other understand the problems and the possibilities, the better we’ll all do, in the new information economy.

As a New Canadian (I became a permanent resident two years ago), I’ve got a dog in this fight—that is, I want to be sure that Canadian publishers prosper in the digital information economy, because I’ll be part of it.

We’ve got a rocky and complex road ahead of us in the next five to ten years—as new habits, new technologies, new environmental threats, new borderlessness, and new presumptions about the world unfold. I hope that the work we do now, in discussions amongst ourselves, can help devise sensible strategies to prepare for it.

I’ll not call for online discussion yet—that will begin with the next post—but please prepare yourself: I hope in the months ahead to have robust discussions about our visions of the future of Canadian publishing, the future of publishing in general, and the future that we will call “the present” in the years ahead.

It’s one of the questions I ask my “Electronic Publishing: Theory & Practice” graduate students, at George Washington University. In this course, each student develops what I term a “deep niche” site—some sub-sub-specialty site that interests them—promotes it in a variety of venues and through a variety of methods, and attends closely to traffic and user patterns, as they make changes over eight weeks.

A few of the take-aways my students get from this half-semester course: a) it’s hard to get traffic; b) it’s hard to keep a site fresh; c) it’s hard to promote, even via Google Adwords; d) it’s really hard to get people to come *back* to your site; e) it’s *especially* hard to get people to *link* to your site.

The last two items are what this post is about. At the heart of user loyalty is the quid pro quo.

A user/customer must get something, to keep coming back. That something can be intellectual stimulation, novelty, humor, insight, wisdom, or a fun-fact-to-know-‘n’-tell. It can be a style that appeals, or a surprise that keeps on giving. It can be a document to be read later, or a great bargain. It can be a fashion tip, or a koan.

For publishers like us, it requires more than a dry description of a book, or a pretty picture of the cover. If we expect a user to be more than a one-time visitor—to be a deep reader.

As I wrote in the earlier “Real Readers Reading,” we want to attract the kind of reader who will be engaged in our kind of content, want to buy the highest quality version, and come back to buy again. These readers can (and should) be anywhere: Edmonton and Winnepeg, Amsterdam and London, Lagos and Pretoria. What distinguishes them is their appreciation of the long form work, and their interest in ideas. And, of course, their facility with English and French.

These are readers who will be unimpressed with promotional copy: they want to browse the book to see if they care about it. They will have no interest in bothering their friends with a Twitter tweet saying “come look at this advertisement.” But they may link to a sample passage and tweet “just bought this book because of this prose.” They are very considerate consumers.

To attract repeat visitors, you have to *keep on quid pro-ing that quo.* Meaning, you have to provide them with continuing value. They want to know that you publish other stuff they might care about (as a *reader*). But if you’re only self-promoting (“you can buy this other stuff”), you may not get them to return. Instead, “Sample these other books” is likely to be the appropriate message for the “deep reader.”

To do a little math: if you’re a publisher site able to attract 5,000 visitors a day, you’re doing pretty well. The Web’s growth has been attenuating and diluting the pool. (Note: Many sites I know have been seeing decreasing raw visitors, and increasing proportions of “conversions” of visitor-to-purchaser. That indicates that the right people are finding these sites increasingly effectively.) With 5000 visitors a day, a reasonable goal might be to get 10% to come back, 1% to give you their email address, and 0.3% to purchase: that would be 500 to return, 50 to give you their email address, and 15 to purchase.

This doesn’t seem like a lot, but these are *deep readers,* exactly the audience every publisher wants. They’re the most likely group to buy more of your stuff. How do we get and keep them?

By providing them with that quid pro quo I’ve been talking about: content, value, humor, quips, quotes, reviews, more content. Something they can sink their teeth into. Something they can *read.*

They’re *readers* after all. Give them what they want, and they might come back. Who knows, they might even buy something.

a) to be read,
b) to be respected, and
c) to at least enhance their income, by writing.

If that’s the case, then the equation of old—that a), b), and c) required a publisher—is no longer the case.

This has, I’m sorry to say, profound consequences for publishers. For the next two years, it may not matter dramatically. But two to five years out, it will matter significantly.

I’m worried about the value-adding intermediaries (aka publishers). Consequently I’m worried about *dis*intermediators. These are the web-based, print-on-demand, metadata-providing, ISBN-providing, insert-into-Amazon-servicing, epub-on-demand-selling, publisher-free and development-free publishers. 

Today, it’s easy to dismiss the options authors have—Lulu.com, or Wowio.com, or even Amazon and Lightningsource—as also-rans, or as niche, nearly-vanity publishing.

But that’s not unlike the newspaper industry thinking of Craigslist as “a classified ad web site,” or Yahoo thinking of Google as “just a search engine.”

In part because of Craiglist and Google, newspapers are failing, even closing. Because revenue has declined, investigative journalism is threatened.

It didn’t take a big loss of newspapers’ income stream to endanger their existence. Were publishers—a thin-margin enterprise—to lose 20-30% of their income, they’d lose a great deal of their financial resilience.

I think of it as a big-player problem, or as (yet another variant of) the 80/20 Pareto Principle (the long tail). 80% of income tends to come from 20% of our books. We wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time.

This is just generally true in publishing—and if your publishing outfit has a different ratio, I’d like to hear it.

Given this general trend, it’s a signal weakness: the top 20% of authors, the top 20% of our publications, top 20% of our quality, is exactly what could most easily do without us.

The products could, even 80% (even 20%) of the time, sell themselves *enough*—reach enough of an audience, sell enough directly (without a majority of the income going to the publisher), and make enough of an “authority splash” in terms of publicity and blog noise, to make the publisher (perhaps 80% of the time) unnecessary.

This leaves us only with the 80% of the published content that produces 20% of the revenue.

Our challenge as publishers is to find ways to add substantive value: better promotion, better metadata, better Web presence, better integration into aggregators, better quality reading experience, better composition, better indexing, better blurbing, better print distribution, better insertion into aggregations, better long-tail promotion, better authority, better library adoption, better classroom adoption…. the list goes on, of course.

But the key point here is that if we are not attentive to the things we do best—and attentive to the new things we *could* do— we will not distinguish ourselves from the “raw intermediators” who could easily skim the cream from the top.

Se can be anywhere—which is really at the heart of this post. In fact, it’s likely se is *not* in Canada.

In a world of 1 billion Web-enabled people, Canada represents only 28 million of them—the highest penetration per capita of any top market, but still only 1.9% of total world users (http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm).

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian writer and freedom advocate, has used a great analogy. He knows that his work won’t appeal to everyone. But he makes his entire ouvre free and completely open and reusable (even translatable) because he understands that.

His analogy was of a tremendously thin, worldwide layer of paint, tenuously connected, with three molecules in Yellow Knife, a lot of molecules in Ottowa, a few molecules in Zanzibar, a few molecules in the Internet-connected aircraft carrier in the North Sea, a few molecules in Toledo….

This layer of paint was his readership, and correspondingly, his market. For him, openness is a means of finding his market.

He knows that people who read one or two things of his, and *really like it*, are his market. They are his “real readers,” not unlike Kevin Kelly’s “1000 true fans” (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php), a seminal essay on niche audiences in the Web-abundance world, Doctorow is trying to find his audience by taking advantage of the possibilities of communities, cohorts, Vonnegut’s “karasses,” and other descriptors of collections of like-minded individuals.

“Real readers” in general are a small percentage of readers; “real readers” of your particular kind of publication are a smaller percentage of that share. Our challenge is to find the real readers and attract them.

I almost wrote “and monetize them,” but I think that’s shortsighted, not to mention jargonish. Doctorow hopes that free readers end up, at some point, purchasing something from him: his time talking at a conference; his time writing a commissioned piece; his time serving on a board; his time consulting on a project; or his product, a book he’s published; his product, a website he’s producing…. he’s looking at the next decade and beyond, rather than trying to maximize a specific publication’s profitability.

For his publisher, this means that they are the intermediary of a print product almost exclusively (apart from aggregators like GBS, Amazon, and others); it’s in their interest to keep him in their fold, because of his strategy.

This “real reader” (the author of this post), will buy any fiction Doctorow publishes in print—because I want to own it in that format. I’m willing to pay the premium for the work in my format of choice, for his kind of fiction. For other people, the ascii-printed or digital version is sufficient (especially if you’re on an aircraft carrier for months at a time).

But many a Navy private will end up buying something else Doctorow has written, in print, next time se has shore leave.

That’s that thin coat of paint he talks about—building an audience. For a publication, or for an author; for a book, or for a press.

We need to be thinking of the 98.1% of the Web audience that is *not* Canadian—perhaps 432 million of whom are English speakers, 63 million French speakers—and how to reach the thin coat of paint that cares about our kinds of publications: our “real readers.”

For any single publication, Doctorow’s open approach is daunting, and full of fear of sales cannibalism, and lost individual sales. But as an overall longterm strategy (for an author, and for a publisher who keeps the author), it’s very smart.

Authors want to be read. Readers want to read. Our job (if we’re not to be a barrier, a topic of a later post) is to find a sustainable strategy that facilitates that relationship.

Search engines like Google are just programs that operate on sets of rules. These rulesets, and the program code that implement them, are generally called “algorithms”—and they determine the “relevance” of a document, in the eyes of the search results.

How does a search engine bring your book’s catalog page to the first page of its results?

If I could tell you with certainty, I’d be a jillionaire, but only for the next moment. Google’s algorithms are intentionally varied, week to week and day to day, in their constant struggle to do three things: improve the user experience, foil the cheaters, and make money for themselves and others with advertising.

Cheaters are the companies that build what’s been estimated to be more than a third of the volume of Web pages—pages that are produced just to promote other pages, or to just be magnets for pages with ads. Any joker with a bit of programming expertise can produce 10,000 pages in a weekend, each with 1000 words from the dictionary, and each with a bunch of advertising on them, or a bunch of links to a particular page to raise its “rank” in Google.

Google wants to ignore those pages—they have no value, irritate us, and make us try Yahoo instead. The challenge is that there are valuable pages that look kind of similar to the above.

Improving the user experience and foiling the cheaters are part and parcel: Google wants us to find the thing we want, the most truly relevant information, on the first page, ideally as the very first item, and not have a bunch of dreck returned that we end up going to. It’s in their interest to ensure this, to continue to make a ton of money from of a billion tiny transactions.

So how do we position our Web pages to be juicy to Google? By leveraging what we have: quality.

Google is unique in having Google Book Search to work with. What they have done is harvest the cream of the publishing crop, the stuff that was considered worthy of publishing risk, and considered worthy by libraries. That means they have millions of books’ worth of text they can process, to learn the language of substance and quality.

They know more than anyone about Web pages—their statistical analysis has a resource set unmatched anywhere else—and so they can learn a great deal about substance, quality, context, and purpose.

We, as generally small publishers, don’t have the resources to hire SEO experts, to hire Web specialists, to commission consultants. But we do have quality content, written by professional writers in one form or another.

Our quality comes in our use of language, in our titling of things, in our human involvement in the content of our books, our Web pages, our promotional material. And in our understanding of what constitutes significance, in the publishing world.

These elements are likely to be ever-more key, as Google refines its algorithms. It’s in their interest to locate our material when someone wants to find, well,  something like our material. It’s our job to be sure that we are “as much what we are” as possible.

This goes against traditional, mechanical “SEO,” I should note. It’s important to have key terms in your text, key terms in your HTML titles, links to other pages, links from other pages, more text than images, and the like….

But I’m trying to think two years down the road, when Google’s relevance systems are even more refined, and better informed than they even are now. In two years, they’ll have learned even better how to attend to grammar, and author intent, and user habits, and salesmanship, and mechanical SEO; they’ll have learned even better how quality material tends to structure itself, and point to each other; they’ll have learned even better what constitutes textual quality.

A catalog page isn’t just an advertisement for a book; it’s an invitation to humans—and importantly, to algorithms—to understand your intent. Humans want to know all you have to tell; algorithms are increasingly understanding what humans want to find, and how to avoid what’s been designed just for algorithms.

So try to use those elements of quality consciously, as you think about your Web pages. Try to include all the blurbs, reviews, and supplementary substantive text about your books, on the catalog page for that book. They were written by quality writers. Have a “sample” page that has much of the catalog page’s content on it, as well as a chapter from the book, to be sure you have substantive content for the algorithms to process. Give those algorithms what they will be increasingly be hungry for: quality prose.

The idea had many goals: collecting our diverse array of books in a centralized location would facilitate discovery (this was pre-Google); allowing Presses who did not have technical staff to begin to tiptoe into the Internet; promoting the scholarly output of the member presses; and lots more.

It was a success for its time—though there were substantial roadblocks, because most small- to mid-sized presses still didn’t have databases, or still were led by directors who hoped “this internet thing” was “just a fad.”

There was a small listing fee per book (under a dollar), depending on the amount of work required to standardize the data, and many presses couldn’t figure out if this was a marketing expense, or overhead, or what. Nonetheless, a majority of the AAUP membership had books in this “union catalog,” and traffic was substantial (for the time).

And then along came Amazon, and Google, and the desire for individual presses to have direct control over their own Web look and feel. The drive to have a collective presence waned, and the project was mothballed.

Interestingly, discussions are beginning again within the AAUP community about reviving it, especially as now most of the presses have fairly straightforward standards-based data feeds, cover images are already online, etc.—the whole process would be much more simple, and the benefits fairly clear. The scholarly publishing universe is fairly small in relative terms, and the kind of collective promotion made possible by a collective online catalog seem increasingly obvious to many—especially if the price is low).

The AECB publishes Rights Canada, its joint paper-based catalog, and has an online catalog/database. What its online version does not yet do (based on my explorations) is contain all the books from its member publishers, nor link directly to the publisher’s page, nor link to any “buy now” sort of tool, nor routinely include descriptive copy, nor present much in the way of “related titles,” except in one particular category.

All of these would take a bit more marketing attention from the member publishers, and would necessitate a different pricing model from the organization for online inclusion, not to mention some increased effort by the AECB.

Links to the publisher’s book-specific Web pages (provided by the publisher), and publishers’ active participation in enriching the online catalog, could encourage ebook purchases, and facilitate Canadiana in general. It would not replace anyone’s own Website, but could be a traffic-driver and promotion tool for every member’s publications.

Further, since 2004, we have been making full-book PDFs of all of our reports freely available (in English) to developing countries.

On the one hand, this seems absurd: why give away PDFs for free? Isn’t that ensuring that there’s no market for our publications?

On the other hand, it is very rational: we are required by our institution to be equally committed to *dissemination* as we are to *financial sustainability*—even though we’re expected to be self-sustaining through sales.

We have made our publications available to developing countries freely because we have control of our systems. We have servers we control (http://www.nap.edu); we have tremendous traffic (~1.5 million visitors per month) that we attend to on a daily basis. Because we control our own servers (as opposed to using a Digital Asset Distributor, or other aggregator), we can control the options available to users.

We use a service called GeoIP (at a nominal expense) to discriminate between developing and non-developing nations. We recognize, via the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the Web browser (and GeoIP’s database that correlates IP address to country), the locale of the requesting browser. If it’s in, say, Senegal, then we adapt our Web pages’ presentation in response to that fact. If the reader’s in Senegal, then we say (in essence) “You may download the full PDF of this publication, if you give us your email info.”  If it’s from France, we say (in essence) “PDF, epub, or Kindle, US $29.95.”

Part of the logic behind this choice is a rational response to that 50% “dissemination” mission we were given. The other is that we know that the developing world is a *really tiny market* for us. The cost of goodwill, in any developing country, is nearly as little as the cost of a space ad in a journal.

The lessons for Canadian Francophone publishers seem to me evident: take advantage of this period (2009 - 2011) to build brand, build goodwill, build a list of email addresses of people who care about your kind of publishing.

The economic drivers are clear: currently, scholars in most developing countries still have to pay for Internet access “by the minute” – either out of their own pocket, or that of the university. Further, the economics of the countries means that most book purchases are made by an individual, not a department or university; they are rarely affordable.

This means that, by hardly threatening our bottom line (since these countries provide 0.1% of our sales), we can, almost risk-free:

a) provide valued content to valued readers;
b) make some friends in terms of brand;
c) develop an email list of those non-US friends;
d) build a market for later e-formats, which some might pay for
e) virally promote our enterprise among those with whom this publication is shared.
f) encourage, if even slightly, purchase of a print book

The key, to my mind, is recognizing that the next two to three years are, in overall terms, *just the beginning* of a worldwide marketplace for ebooks. In that sense, our job as publishers is to nurture that market for the long term.

Canada, after France, is the country with the largest Francophone publishing enterprise in the world.

The overall French-speaking population is greater than 300 million worldwide, with only 60 million in France, and another 8 to 10 million in Canada.

What are the drawbacks to spending the next two to three years *building a market* for less than 0.1% of our potential income, by providing free access (with email) to readers in Francophone developing countries?

I think the drawbacks are small indeed, and the benefits legion. I’d say the same thing is true regarding English publications as well, but that’s a larger market, and might require more daring.

Well, as both a futurist, a technologist, and a sometime geek, let me take a few minutes to differ on that score. There are places where XML workflow makes a lot of sense—journals, or newspapers, or other “throughput” publishers. But for book publishers, there may be a different equation.

A few hundred dollars to an offshore vendor can transform a final PDF of a book into an archival-quality TEI-Lite XML form, an .epub ebook format, and almost any other format you’d want. One has to stop and do some math, before going too far down the path of revolutionizing your workflow processes.

At the National Academies Press, we publish about 180 books a year. While we have been revisiting this “XML workflow” question every 18 months or so for about five years, we have yet to come to a conclusion that it makes sense. We currently send our PDFs to an offshore service upon release, and in a few weeks receive back several versions of the book in XML (and HTML) formats.

The full costs of changing to “XML workflow” include the cost of training (not just compositors, but editors) in a new process and workflow; the cost of transformation and disruption (it’s not a switch that can be clicked, but rather a fundamental process change); the cost of frustration (which is never free); not to mention the substantial cost of new software.

The touted benefits of a full XML workflow generally fall into the category of “better chunks” (being able to sell chapters, repurpose content, or license items, more easily); of getting editorial participation via mark-up early in the process; of being able to have quasi-composition ahead of final composition; of intersecting with “content management systems” that allow easier handling of many documents.

But unless you’re a book publisher who produces more than a 300 books a year, or who have a real market in realtime-licensing of content upon release, or who can justify the cost and disruption in other ways, then it’s probably best to just wait for awhile – wait for the XML workflow to make sense financially, and wait a bit for the XML and the epub version of the books.

Two to three weeks of waiting, and a few hundred dollars per title, is not a dramatic penalty to pay for avoiding the pain of a learning curve whose benefits may be small.

Computers hate exceptions. A software program is happiest when it knows what to expect, and gets just what it expected. Many a “blue screen of death” on a computer comes with the message “uncaught exception found” – because the computer doesn’t know what to do with the exception.

What does that have to do with publishing? Well, it has affected our databases (because database designers tend to presume a constrained list of options), affected our designs (because we want our books to “stand out” in some way, and *not* be template-limited), and affected our thinking about XML and presentation.

The challenge of fitting our exception-riddled publications into a relatively standardized model of presentation (in .epub format, for example) is substantial—yet we can’t afford to have a second form of composition to “design just for the ebook.”

Part of our constraints also come from our “expectation of perfection.” Because book publishing is a capital-heavy process, and because once printed, it can’t be changed, we developed a culture of perfection: no typos, no grammatical errors, no going-back-and-fixing.

The digital world is, and is likely to remain, pretty forgiving. Yes, if I pay for an ebook, I expect high quality—but if I have to scroll around to view that table, or see ugly whitespace around a drop-cap, it’s okay.

So finding ways of accepting imperfection in our digital representations of our books, and of recognizing that we *can* go back and fix something that was missed the first time—may mean the difference between an affordable production process and one that is too expensive. As they say, 99% of the cost of perfection lies in achieving the last 1%.

I’m not saying that we should be sloppy – but if we philosophically accept that our e-books will not look like our p-books, and that those ebooks are more about the content than the presentation, we may save ourselves some heartburn, and a few bucks as well.

Note: not every book makes a good ebook, and design-heavy publications in particular are unlikely to be satisfactory in an ebook format. But shifting the scale of what variance is acceptable may mean that we can reach more readers in the digital environment.