In this essay I will describe the current developments in ebooks and then extend them to what I see as their logical unfolding.  These ideas can be encompassed by saying that ebooks will demand new forms of marketing and that the fanbase will actively participate in the creation and dissemination of a writer’s products. But before I reach the work of the two Ne(i)(a)ls I have to first take a detour through the world of Manga and the discussions of Lawrence Lessig on read/write culture.

Daniel Pink, who has recently published Drive wrote an impressive article on Manga back in 1997. Pink describes the Manga industry in Japan and the unspoken agreement Manga publishers have reached with the prolific and amateur writers groups(dojinshi) that base their own Manga on commercial, copyrighted works. It may best here to quote Pink’s work.

However, because permitting — let alone encouraging — dojinshi runs afoul of copyright law, the agreement remains implicit: The publishers avert their eyes, and the dojinshi creators resist going too far. This anmoku no ryokai business model helps rescue the manga industrial complex in at least three ways.

First, and most obviously, it’s a customer care program. The dojinshi devotees are manga’s fiercest fans. “We’re not denying the viability or importance of intellectual property,” says Kazuhiko Torishima, an executive at the publishing behemoth Shueisha. “But when the numbers speak, you have to listen.”

Second, as Takeda put it at Super Comic City, “this is the soil for new talent.” While most dojinshi creators have no aspirations to become manga superstars, several artists have used the comic markets to springboard into mainstream success. The best example is Clamp, which began as a circle of a dozen college women selling self-published work at comics markets in the Kansai region. Today, Clamp’s members are manga rock stars; they have sold close to 100 million books worldwide.

Third, the anmoku no ryokai arrangement provides publishers with extremely cheap market research. To learn what’s hot and what’s not, a media company could spend lots of money commissioning polls and conducting focus groups. Or for a few bucks it could buy a Super Comic City catalog and spend two days watching 96,000 of its best customers browse, gossip, and buy in real time. These settings often provide early warnings of the shifting fan zeitgeist. For instance, a few years ago several circles that had been creating dojinshi for the series Prince of Tennis switched to Bleach, an indication that one title was falling out of favor and another was on the rise. “The publishers are seeing the market in action,” Ichikawa says. “They’re seeing the successes and the failures. They’re seeing the trends.”

Taking care of customers. Finding new talent. Getting free market research. That’s a pretty potent trio of advantages for any business. Trouble is, to derive these advantages the manga industry must ignore the law. And this is where it gets weird. Unlike, say, an industrial company that might increase profits if it skirts environmental regulations imposed to safeguard the public interest, the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.

This odd situation exposes the conflict between what Stanford law professor (and Wired contributor) Lawrence Lessig calls the “read only” culture and the “read/write” culture. Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture. They prohibit me from running an issue of Captain America through a Xerox DocuColor machine and selling copies on the street. The moral and business logic of this sort of restriction is unassailable. By merely photocopying someone else’s work, I’m not creating anything new. And my cheap reproductions would be unfairly harming the commercial interests of Marvel Comics.

But as Lessig and others have argued, and as the dojinshi markets amply confirm, that same copyright regime can be inadequate, and even detrimental, in a read/write culture. Amateur manga remixers aren’t merely replicating someone else’s work. They’re creating something original. And in doing so, they may well be helping, not hindering, the commercial interests of the copyright holders. Yet they’re treated no differently from me and my hypothetical Captain America photocopies. The result is a misalignment between the emerging imperatives of smart business and the lagging sensibilities of old laws.

Read More http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-11/ff_manga?currentPage=all#ixzz0pXLEYZ1a

Ironically this directly parallels Disney’s fight with the Air Pirates of the 1970′s. However, in that situation Disney fought to prevent others from using their characters for counter-culture comics, and eventually won concessions from congress with the Copyright Extension act of 1998 (sponsored by Sonny Bono). This act has extended copyright owner control and ultimately led to the DMCA which has further alienated consumers of copyrighted products. It has done so by creating an antagonistic relationship between producers and consumers. And it may well be what prevents publishers from staying viable in a read/write marketplace. Authors- as exemplified by Stephenson and Gaiman- are already adapting to the potential for read/write creation inherent in the ebook market, so I have no concern for their ability to prosper in these new markets.

Neil Gaiman:

Neil Gaiman’s foray into the ebook world seems to have increased his sales, and made him realize that the reader can become your best collaborator if he/she is given the chance. This article in Boing Boing from 2008 suggest that in independent stores the sales of all of his books increased because he was giving away his book American Gods.
This presents one of our first tenants of the ebook market.  The ebook calls for a new form of marketing and writing. That marketing and writing process must be not only innovative but inclusive. It makes the reader an active participant in the marketing and the creation process. The reader becomes a vested stakeholder, or a co-creator if you will.

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/11/neil-gaiman-giving-a.html

Gaiman has participated in the creation of Charlie Orr’s Hypothetical Library project (as have many other authors) by freely writing a “flapcopy” for a book he will never write.

Below I am linking to the blog for this project, and I want to make sure to make clear that the final work is a collaboration of Charles Orr and Jeff Gray. And if he will be kind enough to speak to me I would like to follow this post with a future post about Mr Orr’s work, because I see his work as a perfect example of the collaborative creation that I describe.

http://hypolib.typepad.com/the-hypothetical-library/2010/05/neil-gaiman.html

Neal Stephenson:

Neal Stephenson has extended himself into the world of games/ebooks by becoming the Chairman of Subutai Corporation. He has become the architect of a storyline and a business model that may very well lead to the transformation and/or demise of publishing as we know it. Stephenson created an amazing world in his Baroque Cycle and now he appears poised to leverage it for a very interesting project.

The Mongoliad is a new kind of serialized novel, created by Neal Stephenson, and written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other great authors. It will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.

http://mongoliad.com/

He will collaboratively work with other well known authors to expand and rewrite scenes and eras from his works. The goal is to more accurately portray the period and battles therein. These will be developed as ebooks and applications for tablets. And it seems as if Stephenson and Subutai are also planning to extend their work into movies, music, and other projects. As Subutai’s CEO claims

Because the project is multimedia and serial, the many authors will be contributing content to the novel as it develops. The public won’t be able to submit text for the novel, Bornstein said, but will be able to contribute to the larger world of movies, music, pictures, and more that Subutai is building around the work of the famous authors.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Mongoliad/122174191143710?ref=ts

Subutai Corporation probably takes its name from the historical figure.
Subutai,  a great general of Genghis Khan, is best known for his use of the Siege Engine¹ and Su for incorporating conquered peoples into his military forces.

This is of note because I think Stephenson’s business model may very well storm the defenses of publishing houses, incorporate the new forms of collaborative writing to expand ebook publishing models; and, it will do so by making the fanbase participating authors creating Lessig’s “read/write culture” on a massive scale. And it also clearly illustrates a few of the other ideas I posited in this new printing model. The authors and even a professional editor have signed onto the project. One could argue that Subutai is serving as the publisher here, but I think their role is more technical (military arts, and technology) than a traditional publisher.

If the venture is successful, I would expect many other authors and publishers to follow suit (first the visionary, technically inclined, and later the trend followers). And if I were a traditional publisher I would be hiring a whole new set of talent that might give me an edge in the coming paradigm shift.

1 A siege engine is a device that is designed to break or circumvent city walls and other fortifications in siege warfare.

Link to apple self-publishing platform.

https://itunesconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa/wo/0.0.0.5.7.7.1]

Barnes and Noble has recently announced their Pubit publishing platform to compete with Amazon’s DTP. Details are still sketchy but from the announcement it seems they are trying to create an epress much like Amazon’s digital text platform.  Since Amazon finally has a competitor in this space, I thought it would be worthwhile to see what challenges this publishing model will present and what benefits it might provide. I recognize there are other companies that are publishing ebooks, but Amazon was the first to create an end to end creation, distribution, and consumption platform.

As I see it the challenges are threefold- infrastructure, quality, and search.  And the benefits are twofold- inverting the publishing model, and reinventing the publishing house.

First the infrastructure:

Both Barnes and Noble are adept at the :book as object model”. This model which has slowly developed over the last 10-15 years and it goes like this. These two online firms play intermediary between the producer/publisher and the reader/consumer. This business model is sound. There are specific tangible costs to infrastructure. Brick and mortar building for storage, inventory costs, shipping costs, and of course the corresponding talent, and IT costs to make it all function correctly.

The new model requires a completely new infrastructure and Amazon is much more capable of building this infrastructure than is B&N. Our new publishing model requires massive data storage and redundancy systems for stability and the high priced IT talent to keep it all working and improving. Amazon’s AWS and S3 services positions it to really be the dominant player in this arena. Amazon can rely on their unused data capacity and IT talent to support this infrastructure so they will clearly have an advantage. Barnes and Noble are undertaking a massive infrastructure cost here. It is one think to create an online store, and something else entirely to create a new publishing model and distribution method.  Their attempt at doing so will drag down profits for years to come.

I will revisit the infrastructure required later, since the infrastructure required will change after I’ve addressed a few other points in this discussion .

Second quality:

The quality of an e-book can be measured on many levels. For the consumer, quality refers to the quality of the writing, the knowledge of the writer, and production quality of an ebook. For the epress quality is accessibility, and marketability of the ebook. And for the writer quality will refer to the accessibility of the work, the quality of the publishing process and the quality or appeal of the device or software that will be used to read the work. And of course all of these quality measurements will affect sales, marketability, and the viability of the publishing model.

Consumer

The challenge that will vex both Amazon and B&N’s self-publishing efforts will be quality of the material.  Quality is a human judgement and though algorithms can quantify, using algorithms to rate quality of writing is a much more difficult task. Let’s take something as simple as grammar usage. You can use a machine to identify proper grammar, but proper grammar does not equate to quality writing.  Any number of great books play with verb tense or use vernacular speech.  So this means that there will have to be someone, or many individuals, working on discerning the quality of the writing. Most consumers will not buy a book if they realize what they are buying is the ramblings of an individual that is better suited to a vanity press. So the epress will have to manage the writing quality to improve profits.

The consumer will also have to discern the quality of the non-fiction author. By this I don’t mean the author’s writing abilities, but rather their knowledge on a subject. An author might be a great writer, but that doesn’t mean he/she can do research, or has any knowledge about a subject. So as a reader I would be looking to identify the author’s expertise in a field. This vetting process is usually performed by the publisher (e.g. fact checking and publishing contracts), but in our new model the publisher will not be the filter of written works, they are merely a conduit. So our new model will inundate readers with choices but not help readers to discern the quality of the materials.  Though Amazon’s rating system is a step in that direction there is no way to be sure that the author has sufficient knowledge to write a book because others liked it. So an epress should really consider some vetting process for non-fiction works to keep the quality of the books higher.

The last consumer expectation of quality that will affect sales is the production quality. Consumers will not buy poorly designed or produced ebooks.  The “early adopters” of the book will surely squelch sales through their ratings.  And if there is a trial as most ebooks have, the trial will lapse without converting into a sale. So for an epress to be successful they must manage the production quality of the books. Amazon seems to be doing this for established presses by helping in the conversion process, but I wonder if they have something in the works for the self-publisher. Having tools to evaluate your own material-like Kindle preview–are great but it doesn’t mean this will improve quality. “You can lead a camel to water but you can’t make him drink.”  So without some higher bar to entry or some incentive to care about quality (a higher search results position perhaps) these self-publishing platforms will always disappoint the readers production expectations.

Epress

The epress quality requirements will be very different from the readers. Sales is the name of the game and quality does not equate to sales.  So we have a second form of quality that must be considered and that is marketability of a product. Quantifying of marketability and the marketing of ebooks will become a highly developed science over the coming years and that is a discussion for another time. But suffice it to say to epresses will have to identify books and authors that will sell well out of a “bit” slush pile.  And those books that have the best chance of selling will take time and qualified experts to find.  So we are talking here about hiring a pool of “Subject matter experts” to find these books or writing code that will help to surface what someone wants in a ranked order. And these search results must help them find the “best” results for quality (production, writing, and expertise) that have the highest likelihood of being converted into sales. An epress may currently rely on the impulse buyer for a significant portion of sales, but that will change as ereaders become more ubiquitous.

Writer

The quality expectations of a writer will be far beyond what Amazon or B&N can provide. Every writer (myself included) writes because they feel that what they think and write will have value to others. As a writer “you birth” words.  Hokey I know, but what I am trying to convey is the attachment writers have to their own writing.  So they are usually reticent to cut words, or revise large portions of their works. Traditionally editors address this problem and they have the leverage of a publishing contract to do so.  Leaving a writer to decide what  is valuable writing will not work. There are a good number of writers that will continue to seek feedback and improve their writing, but there are many others that will upload their writing without substantial editing to “preserve the integrity of the work”. Though this is not an expectation of quality from the writer I start with it here because it will frame my discussion about the writer’s expectations(I have discussed building an infrastructure for improving the quality of materials in an essay I called Cloud and Crowd editing)

As a writer it will be difficult to understand ranking in search results. There will always be writers that feel their works should rank higher than they do or will feel that the search mechanisms are flawed because their works do not come up at all. So this expectation of quality by the writer will affect the submissions to the platform.  And thus it will affect sales and customer satisfaction. And to address the problem the the epress will need to spend more on infrastructure and IT talent.

The other expectations are that the platform will be easy to use and that finished works on the ereader or application will be of high quality.  The writer will expect a “quality” experience.  I may spend four years writing a novel, but I will want to publish it to the world in four minutes. So the interface for the writer will have to be simple to use, and the resulting ebook will have to be of high quality. Amazon’s publishing platform is fairly simple to use, but they have had some issues with the ensuring publishers have the appropriate copyright clearances. And that problem will be compounded as they move into worldwide markets (but that is a discussion for another time and that issue does not really affect the author).   The resulting ebook quality can vary depending on the users ability and understanding of html tags.

And the last issue in the writer perception of quality has to do with the reading device or application. If a writer produces a high quality ebook file then the reader will have a high quality reading experience, right? Unfortunately it is not that simplistic. The device design and the functionality of the application will affect the reading experience. So this will be a similar expectation that the consumer/reader will have, but since they already own the device or use the application they have accepted its quirks. The writer on the other hand may decide that the application or device lowers the perceived value of their work.  And in this race to be the dominant ereader/publishing platform accessibility to an audience will have an effect on the quality of the offerings and thus the profits.

Search

This is probably the category that will establish Amazon as a market leader. Unless B&N heavily invests in search technologies and ranking systems, or makes a strategic alliance with another company, they will have a difficult time competing with Amazon in this area. And as the volume of self-published works grows they will become more difficult to sell unless the reader can find what they want.  The search will be a huge factor and Amazon’s ranking system and search capabilities give them an advantage. But it will not keep them the edge for long.  What I as a reader might want to know can partially be gleaned from Amazon rankings (e.g. do others like it, storyline, genre. . ) but it will not provide the reader a good way of judging production quality, writing style.  Though this might be accessible from a download Amazon and other companies may soon move to javascript excerting so when a consumer hovers they can read a few randomly selected paragraphs, or view a few pages.  This at least would prevent the reader from downloading something they aren’t interested in.  I’m sure far better programmers, and thinkers are working on this problem. If they are not then someone is not paying attention. Currently ranking and customer comments will suffice, but there will need to be better ways of surfacing and critiquing ebooks as the volume grows.

Benefits

Inverting the publishing model

In an earlier post I discussed my belief that this new publishing platform would lead to an inversion of the publishing model. Companies like Amazon will eventually find authors that are selling and negotiate deals to get hard copy books published via on-demand (most likely) or through a traditional publisher. For the issues I believe this will cause and the benefits that are inherent to those models please see that post.  I would just like to add here that there will be significant profits and incentives inherent in an inverted publishing model. Less risk and less money tied up in inventory will make epublishing a much more profitable venture than the traditional publishing house could ever realize.

Reinventing the publishing house

In an earlier post I also addressed this issue, but I’d like to focus on the benefit that it will add to the epresses and self-publishing ventures. Their overhead will be much lower and their costs for development will be much lower as they develop skills and tools to help self-publishers.  There will be significant costs early on to streamline processes and reach an economy of scale, but that investment will be quickly repaid in sales by providing consumers with depth and breadth of choices. There will be many that participate just for the chance to be involved in choosing their favorite authors.  And if these self-publishing schemes bring in enough money it also allows the epress to take larger risks in other publishing ventures (the long tail of the market if you will). Translating literatures or printing marginally successful works as ebooks or hard copies can easily be supported by blockbuster professionally developed publisher ebooks and the occasional success in the self-publishing model. And for every success of an unknown there will be a huge number of new submissions as writers of every ilk try their luck at the ebook lottery.

Detriments to this new model

Of course there are inherent detriments to this new model. Creating an epress identity will be difficult. For example for many years Knopf books was known for printing high quality hard-bound books and their willingness to take risks on international or non-mainstream writers. This type of niche publishing will probably  be a casualty. The new metrics will allow large companies to find the right formula to sell more books so there will be less incentive to specialize. Imprints will probably stick around though since it will be one of the few ways that a publisher can categorize their own offerings.

Conclusion

The sheer volume of new writing will tax the tried and true formula of publishing. Amazon and B&N will open the floodgates and inundate readers with material.  But even if they tried, they would have a hard time retaining the quality literature that many publishers achieve. So the new measure of an ebook retailer/epress  will be its filtering mechanisms. The company that best surfaces high-quality and marketable literature will sell the most books.

And as I stated at the beginning I will return to a quick discussion of infrastructure. Throughput of works, storage, search, and deployment will all depend on infrastructure and resources. Prior to launching this type of platform there will be significant investment to ensure that the service works and that it is scalable. If the service is a failure a company is out their initial investment and nothing more (though that will probably be significant). But if a company is successful then they must balance the services and expectations of their stakeholders (publishers, writers, consumers, copyright holders. . .) while at the same time continuing their investment in infrastructure and innovation.

To be successful epresses will have to contend with a volume of writing never before addressed in any significant way by a publisher. Besides filtering they will have to scale an infrastructure and hire individuals able to create mechanisms that please customers, writers, and publishers. These infrastructures will have to retain a semblance of even-handedness while at the same time helping a reader to find quality writing which of course means ranking or judging the works. And of course as they do this they will constantly have to make sure they do not become a victim of their own success. They must achieve a balance between investment, and profits while simultaneously achieving a balance between quality and selection. Needless to say it is a huge feat to achieve, and though these two companies are innovating the epress, they will not be the only ones. My bet is Kobo will announce a similar venture in the future, and others will surely follow.

In my lifetime I have watched the desktop publishing revolution supplant 5 centuries of technology in just a few years. Photography was eliminated from the printing process and metal plates gave way to plastic straight-to-plate technologies. Typesetting as an art has given way to typesetting as a desktop publishing process. Electronic fonts and desktop publishing has opened new avenues of distribution and lowered production costs through print on demand services. And all of this is great but is the loss worth the added value. And are the problems surmountable on ereaders?

In this article I will quickly examine the function of Electronic fonts and discuss the potential that ereaders have to enhance the economic value of literature and other “printed” materials. I will also address one of the largest selling points of ereaders- reflowable text- and its effect on typography.

Unicode Fonts and Ereader language support

One of the largest challenges that has developed for font design is unicode support. Fonts now must not only support content in English or Western-European character sets but also RTL languages, East asian scripts, and even African dialects. This is a much larger technical challenge than was faced by earlier type designers. The best designers for these type of fonts are of course the companies that must utilize them. And I believe these font innovations will be adapted in the next few development cycles for ereaders to expand the market for these devices.

Apple has adapted True Type font into its own specification that it calls Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). AAT is the backbone of the Apple Unicode font strategy and it is probably the basis for its Ipad font support. The Ipad supports English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Russian.

http://developer.apple.com/fonts/

This is an impressive start but I believe there are some indications that Amazon will soon unleash font support for 40+ languages.

Microsoft in conjunction with Adobe has adapted Apple’s truetype font innovations. Open Type can contain thousands of characters for every font.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/microsoft-amazon-patent-deal-covers-kindle-linux.ars

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontinfo/en/

I think that Microsoft’s recent patent deal with Amazon may very well include licensing OpenType for the Kindle 3. Such a move would truly open the Kindle and Amazon’s publishing platform (Digital Text Publishing) for worldwide use. Currently Amazon lists 19 languages on DTP (Afrikaans, Albanian, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish). Noticeably absent from the list is East Asian, and Bidirectional languages. Kindle 3 may introduce this support and thus expand Kindle to worldwide audiences.

I think the Kindle 3 will provide expanded font choices, and language support for East Asian and Right-to-left scripts.  It may or may not include a color screen, or video applications. Amazon’s main focus will be on improving the display capabilities for text and international scripts.  I think the device will be redesigned to support an array of character sets IME (input method editors are) and updated rendering to handle contest sensitive glyph shaping. Also the buttons and UI will be redesigned to satisfy the issues with text to speech menus, and international markets.

Reflowable text and dictionary is an obstacle to unicode support

Reflowable text has been a boon for the Kindle. It has made the device desirable among the elderly and vision-impaired since the font can be increased and the text automatically flows to fit the screen. To understand how this is a challenge to global markets we need to examine a few issues that arise for non-English users.

First not all languages are easily wrapped- Some languages most notably east Asian languages there are no spaces to indicate where a break might happen or breaks are based on syllables rather than word breaks. And other western European languages have special rules for breaking text, or identifying whether or not hyphenation is possible and in what situations it can be used. All of these add complexity to the process of rendering and reflowing text.

“English, Greek, Hindi, and Russian text wraps whole words onto the next line. Thai is wrapped on a word basis, but a dictionary or other mechanism is needed to detect word boundaries, since they are not separated by spaces. Arabic and Hebrew do the same, but the text wraps to the right. Wrapping of embedded Latin text produces a special effect that will be described later.Chinese, Japanese and Korean all wrap on a character by character basis, subject to the rules that will be described later. Korean is sometimes wrapped on a word basis, but it is more common these days to wrap on a character basis, despite the fact that Korean words are separated by spaces.(Rishida-part 5)

Hypenation and justification- German issue- inter-word spacing implies emphasis so not common. Other languages allow no hyphenation, hyphenation at the end of syllables or require only certain parts of speech are hyphenated or hyphenation follow specific rules.

Most of the issues facing ereader makers have been addressed by the W3, Unicode consortium and software developers  for general operating systems, and word processing programs. But apparently these new ereader devices have not or cannot implement these methods.

Below is a primer from the Unicode group that identifies some of the major issues and how they have been addressed in software. I would recommend starting at part 1, but the link I give below skips to the discussion most relevant to our needs.

Most east Asian Scripts use a grid-like layout with the current reader screens this is possible and should be a slight adjustment to the software.

Spacing and font size is another issue that must be addressed for east asian characters- They often need much larger font sizes to be readable. This means devices will need larger screens.  Otherwise the user will be forced to click many more times when using different scripts.

Radicals and dictionaries- In Chinese, Japanese and Korean Radicals or common elements serve as the basis of dictionary and glossary ordering. Radicals are essentially building blocks of Kanji Characters. Unicode has grouped these characters as a set for use in UTF character encoding.

http://rishida.net/docs/unicode-tutorial/part5

IME’s and internationalizing readers

For ereader devices to be truly international many will have to be redesigned with an eye towards marketizing the product for international release. The buttons would have to include recognizable and world-neutral icons rather than text, and input method editors that will allow East Asian languages to be input easily must be added. Apple’s ipad may have a jump start on these issues since it is keyless and utilizing TrueType however, due to their recent postponement of international shipping these features will not be tested in the wild any time soon.

Kindle vs. Ipad

Each of these devices as a reader are only as good as their content agreements.  They will need to have a broad variety of content at competitive prices to be successful. Apple seems to be taking a value-added approach by making newspapers and magazines interactive and visually based. “Living books” for an interactive age so to speak. Their largest problem is to make clear that the Ipad is a reader as well as everything else.

Amazon on the other hand is trying to turn their device into an epublishing platform.  Their biggest challenge will be to keep the quality of publications high, and make their library of growing content accessible to consumers. If you can’t find it, you can’t buy it!

It should be noted that the Kindle has already been hacked to display unicode fonts and the Ipad has this feature built in. So much of what follows may soon be moot.

The Kindle 2 has not allowed for a large variety of font choice. This strategy makes the wrapping and line-breaks easier, but it limits user choice.  Kindle 2 also depends in Amazon’s proprietary mobipocket format .azw. The current incarnation of AZW does not support unicode even though mobipocket does. If Amazon hopes to retain its ground against the onslaught of the Ipad and other ereader devices this should be rectified in the Kindle 3.

The Apple Ipad allows for a fairly large number of font choices. If this report is correct there are 44 font faces, and 109 font styles to choose from. And this list may give us hints as to the scripts Apple may soon adopt. The languages not yet supported that have fonts on the Ipad that will render them are Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, and Simplified Chinese.http://www.michaelcritz.com/2010/04/02/fonts-for-ipad-iphone/

This post was just a quick look at the issues facing unicode readers and a quick review of the strategy being implemented by the two main competitors in the field. It is a subject I will return as the technology and the strategies mature.

]]> http://pcerda.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/will-ereaders-kill-typography/feed/ 0 pcerda http://pcerda.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/text-to-speech-do-you-want-ebert-reading-to-you-and-can-he-roll-his-rs/ http://pcerda.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/text-to-speech-do-you-want-ebert-reading-to-you-and-can-he-roll-his-rs/#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:26:28 +0000 pcerda http://pcerda.wordpress.com/?p=114 ]]> Text-to-speech(TTS)  is one of the experimental features added to the Kindle 2 and it caused a huge controversy. In this post I will discuss the controversy and  examine some of the more innovative players in text-to-speech technology.

Upon the release of the Kindle 2 the Author’s guild protested to Amazon that the feature would break the copyright of their members and perhaps cut into the sales of Audio books. The accusation seems a bit ludicrous if you compare the text to speech feature to dramatic readings of audio books, but I think the Author’s guild was trying to stake a claim against future technologies rather than Kindle 2′s TTS function.  Rather than have a messy fight over the issue, Amazon acquiesced and allowed the feature to be shut off by the copyright holder. So Amazon avoided the controversy but another controversy developed over TTS very soon thereafter.

Nine disability organizations wrote the six largest publishers arguing to retain the TTS feature. These letters can be seen at the link below.

http://www.icdri.org/legal/Kindle_Issues.htm

The controversy deepened when the DOJ got involved and asked 3 of the 6 universities in Amazon pilot to cease testing the Kindle DX for adoption. These universities were asked to not promote, purchase, or recommend the Kindle DX or any other ereader until the device was fully accessible for the blind.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/January/10-crt-030.html

Of course this presents a real problem for Amazon and any other company wanting to adopt TTS features to ereader devices.  The TTS feature has to have a dedicated button or a voice command that will start the feature. This will mean redesigning the product and perhaps increase manufacturing costs. It will be redesigned, but how will the larger controversy with the Author’s guild be resolved so that accessibility is ensured for these newly designed text to speech readers?  I think that this the issue to watch over the next few months and one I will take up more in depth as it develops.  But for now I’d like to focus on text to speech and where I think it could develop.

The Technology

Text-to-Speech technology is still relatively young. But the field is growing. There are many more companies focusing on Text to speech than there were just a few years ago. And Voice XML and Speech languages are becoming standardized for code.  Though the computer generated voices sound more life-like they are still in need of work. The overwhelming problem is that these systems lack the ability to inflect languages well. This leaves the systems unable to represent human emotions in speech, and thus unable to perform literature well.  So at present these systems are not a threat to audio books, but I think they could be.

Polygot TTS

My interest is in the more obscure Text to speech that allows for multiple languages to be spoken. Unfortunately these are all fairly bad. You can make your computer sound unnatural and robotic in Spanish, hindi, German, French and many other languages.  But none of these text to speech tools have made it into ereader devices just yet and we are all probably better off for it.

Just for fun I tested the Kindle’s text to speech feature with a Spanish text and it did horribly- as expected.  It made me wonder if Amazon had thought about licensing a text to speech product that would allow the TTS feature to read in a variety of languages and dialects for different locales.  Or if they just decided that it was not worth pursuing the technology for the Global edition.

The most innovative company in Text to Speech

There are a few companies that are really innovating in the text to speech field, and among them is a standout called Cereproc.  Cereproc is innovative to say the least. They are working on the largest problem of text to speech which is inflection of the automated voice. This makes their voices sound much more “alive” than other TTS technologies. And they have really invested in non-English speech patterns which would be great for ereaders or other worldwide TTS application. But their most interesting innovation they are working on is capturing the speech patterns of celebrities. And their recent efforts to give Roger Ebert his voice back- described in the NPR link below, may really shift the business model for Text to speech and bring to fruition the Author Guild’s worst nightmare. The Cereproc site also computer-generated examples of GW Bush and President Obama that sound pretty good.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124087291

http://www.cereproc.com/products/voices

http://www.idyacy.com/cgi-bin/bushomatic.cgi

Future uses

I can see many future uses for text to speech technology. Some are enabling like TTS for the disabled, but others are quite silly like having Dr. Seuss read your children the cat in the hat at bedtime. And I think that there may be room for a much wider adoption if celebrity voices are offered like Itunes tracks for the Kindle and other ereaders.That may very well be a new feature added in future readers. Buy the device get four celebrity voices and download more at a ridiculously low price.

I wonder if this might also change the advertising, animation, and video game voiceover market. It would start out innocently enough- dead actors could once again do VO for animated movies. Paul Lynde could come back and play Templeton for a Charlotte’s Web 2. Then live actors would use it to get more VO jobs and never actually have to record the audio. Of course there would have to be a significant discount if a company used the computer generated John Madden or Tiger Woods rather than the real person. And soon studios and video game makers would begin to curtail the use of real voice actors altogether.  Why would they bother hiring actors of they could get good quality TTS for the price of the software. No more time would be wasted editing audio recordings, or coaching voice talents.

The author’s guild may be right. In a few years these computer generated voices, especially the ones based on human voice patterns, may supplant the audio book market and many other VO actor roles.  If given the choice between a dramatic reading of William S. Burroughs reading me Naked Lunch or the voice actor the publisher chose to read the book, I’d choose Burrough’s no doubt.

As I discussed in a few prior posts Intellectual Property and copyright will be at the center of ereader and ebook market issues as ereader sales and use grows.  Let’s face it the underlying implications for works entering the public domain, and used book markets are huge.  Compound that with the draconian stance that I expect publishers to take on “protecting” their copyright through more restrictive electronic means and these groups are sure to squelch their markets.

First Public domain and used books:  There is currently no viable method for measuring the starting point of electronic publication.  Works entering public domain are all decided by their publication date so what if the book is only “printed” electronically? When does the copyright expire?  Also there is a huge group of works in electronic form that have entered the public domain in some countries but not in others, but no company has yet found a way to address copyright issues surrounding these public domain works. This problem has already arisen for Amazon in their unfortuate PR faux pas around the copyright of George Orwell works.  So how will ebook sellers address this issue?

Copyright

And of course copyright and public domain issues are even compounded further by the treaties, agreements, and country-specific copyright processes set into place throughout the world.  Google has attempted to address this issue via IP address identification. Amazon has mostly addressed the issue through the sale country of their device. This mandates a country specific Kindle store and restricts the device to that country’s content and copyright laws. But this doesn’t address a much larger problem.

I don’t feel the country where you buy the ereader should not mandate the country and the copyright under which you can purchase content. What if I buy my ereader device in the US, but I am a businessman whose first language is German or Arabic? Should I be restricted by the copyright laws and content choices of the US? Or should I be allowed to purchase content in the country and language of my choosing, following the copyright that is mandated by that particular product.

The solution I imagine is twofold one a customer choice, and the other a device design method. First the customer should be allowed to choose at least two (maybe as many as five languages) that they will be reading on their device.  This should be a changeable selection so that if I decide to use my device to learn Portuguese and Chinese I can download from the appropriate stores, under the appropriate copyright. This also ensures a worldwide secondary market for devices that can be sold and re-registered in different countries.

The second solution is a change to these devices.  It will have to identify a purchasing country, and allow the user to choose and set priorities for choosing which country and copyright method to abide by.  If it were me I would solve this with multiple UI settings. One for GPS-Enabled location, and a priority of reading language setting.  If all the stores in my chosen languages returned book results I would be able to choose the best price, and most favorable copyright in my language of choice. This would solve the problem from the users perspective but it does present a separate problem for the ebook retailer.The eretailer now has a more difficult time protecting the convoluted copyrights for a book in each country.

To solve the copyright issues that arise from this, I would place the onus on the copyright holder.  Only books that have addressed the copyright conundrum could be displayed in multiple languages and country-specific online stores.  And perhaps addressing this would give publishers/copyright holders  a few extra percentage points in their royalties. With the established copyright problems, and DMCA, and WIPO efforts that give copyright holders added clout to sue, it seems like the those copyright holders might be in the best position to elicit clearer understandings from Intellectual Property organizations and governments worldwide.  So it will be up to ebook retailers to convince copyright holders this problem is worth addressing. Once these copyright understandings are established, it frees the ebook retailers to focus on the business of selling books.

Public Domain

One of the more interesting dilemmas for ebook retailers and ereader sellers will be public domain materials and library materials. Public domain and library borrowing materials will be a large driving factor for ereader adoption and every ereader maker is actively addressing what this means.

For the public domain documents Archive.org has become a very large player.  They have listed over 1.5 million volumes from worldwide public domain collections. They also recently struck a deal with Kobo.com to list the 1.5 million volumes they have in Kobo’s ebook retailer database. Archive has also been kind enough to address the issue of public domain books themselves by creating a beta program that automatically converts the public domain books from their linked collections to PDF, B/W PDF, EPUB (beta), Kindle (beta), Daisy (beta),  Full Text, and  DjVu formats.  Whether or not these ereader makers and ebook retailers fully incorporate archive’s database into their offerings remains to be seen. But many, especially Amazon and Apple, will have to respond to Kobo’s initiative if they want stay competitive.

One of the more interesting controversies in public domain is exemplified by Amazon’s George Orwell fiasco. If one believes Mobilereference’s account at the below link, the issue of posting Australian Public domain material in the US Kindle store was a Mobipocket automation failure. Either way the Kindle store had for sale material licensed to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the United States. The controversy raises an interesting issue. What can be done with Public domain materials that are still licensed under copyright in one country but are considered public domain in another country? I think the solution to this issue will directly affect the rate of adoption of ereaders and the ebooks they utilize.

http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php?topic=13014.0

(Update Amazon has made its first move into offering free ebooks by striking a deal with the British Library for 19th ebooks http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/goodnight-gutenberg/2010/02/08/british-library-gets-publishing-biz-amazon)

Library usage

Amazon has been recently put in the unenviable position of regulating university and college libraries use of their product.  The Kindle has been lent by libraries with legally purchased books.  And each of those libraries must get Amazon approval for lending the device. The easiest way for Amazon to solve the issue would be for them to strike a deal with Overdrive as Sony has done. This allows overdrive to add Kindle books to their collections that libraries loan from, and makes the kindle or one of its applications for reading Kindle books more appealing to large lending institutions and many other individuals. I think one of the strong adoption considerations for ereaders will be whether or not devices support library lending. And since Overdrive is the main supplier of ebooks to libraries, Amazon would be better off if they struck the deal and adapted the reader to support these filetypes.  I believe many ereader manufacturers will make that deal soon and if Amazon does not want to miss out, they should as well.

Proprietary formats

Another restricting factor for ereader adoption will be the proprietary file formats and proprietary DRM being placed on many of the epub open standard ebook formats.  The justification for this prorietary layer is of course Intellectual property protections. However, the result will be to lock consumers into a specific ereader, and a particular online ebook retailer. Though this will not slow the ereader growth as much as other factors, I think this issue will eventually need to be addressed by a consortium of ereader and ebook sellers for the good of the market.

This snapshot is an attempt to consider many of the factors that will affect the growth of ebook sales and ereader adoption. It will be a subject I return to again and again as things develop and the market matures.

The argument seems to be that this unauthorized “distribution” was justification for the WIPO and the DMCA, and EU’s Copyright directive.

But the WIPO, and subsequent DMCA and the EU Copyright Directive may have given copyright holders too much cause for litigation and too little real protection. The EU’s Copyright directive is less defined than the DMCA to allow member states more leeway in its implementation, but this makes it potentially more restrictive. Both these laws allow Copyright holders absolute and eternal control over their content and gives them the justification to sue violators.  But it also ensures that the market for these products is severely limited.

Aside from the obvious depletion of content entering the public domain these acts completely restricted the consumers rights, and may have completely altered the landscape of “fair use” and “public domain”.  And in doing so they may have undermined the perceived value of digital products.

The copyright issue has progressed much farther in music, and film than it has in ebooks. But I think a quick look at the strategies of these two industries is instructive for the nascent ebook industry.  It is safe to say that the music and film industries have taken a litigious stance and justified it with these three pieces of legislation. They seem to have identified every customer as a potential offender and every legal “licensee” as a potential pirate.  In doing so they have turned the consumer against them.  And I think this has really affected their businesses.  It is evident in the music industry where CD sales have dropped off continually and many well-established artists are striking out on their own.  I think it is less clear in the film industry  where first run movies can still gross $1 billion. However, DVD sales are down.

And unfortunately the music and film industry have used this to prove that pirating is up.  It is probably true that the availability of exact copies, and inexpensive distribution has prompted more people to break copyright. These enabling technologies have made the issue more visible. I was always free to make an analog copy of a movie, lend it to a friend, or make a tape of copyrighted music and give it away. And this was understood by copyright holders as illegal but unavoidable. But the new technologies have made it much easier for copyright holders to identify violators and pursue them. They will continue to beat grandmas, and elementary kids in the courts and win exorbitant settlements from individuals, but this will just ensure lower sales and larger losses.  Their litigious strategy has alienated consumers and will probably drive more of them to download illegally.

I’d like to examine some of the technology copyright holders have utilized to protect their copyright and denigrate the value of their product.  And later I hope to examine what can be done to solve this problem.

In the list below I list the most commons means of addressing Copyright in digital products.  Some may refer to these as Digital Rights technologies. I am listing them separately here so that it is clear how they are used and what results they may have on product viability.

Watermarks- On documents and artwork watermarks are used to retain information about the copyright owner, distributor, and purchaser.

DRM- Examples: Windows Protected media path, and Apple’s fairplay systemThese systems restrict the use of the digital product to particular devices, software, and individuals. They often link to online registries or databases to ensure “proper use” of files.

Alternative Copyright- Creative Commons. An alternative copyright system being used to make use, licensing, and “mixing” of content easier and clearer between users.

Machine Copyright- ACAP, and Google’s new patent for content restriction.

ACAP- Automated Content Access control. System using Robots.txt format being promoted by a publishing consortium to clearly identify rights, promote digital business models, and protect content. Though Version 1.1 was just released and they were advised by many search engines Google’s patent announcement today puts into question the viability of their system.

Google content filter patent- The filter system described in the granted patent says that text/book content would be limited, or restricted depending on user location, permissions granted to the content, content type, and security status of user. This is interesting and will solve some copyright issues but I think it presents many other problems.

Proprietary formats- Proprietary formats ( all have them) or .epub files with proprietary DRM have become common way of locking consumers into a device or software product.

So what does all of this mean for ebooks?  In the next post I will explore this question in detail.

The glossy ads of ereader device makers would have you believe that they will usher in a new era of reading.  They claim their devices will revitalize newspapers, magazines, and textbooks by transforming them into multimedia formats of Potter-esque perfection.  And that vision may someday be realized, but only if ereader companies and ebook sellers either help publishers to create materials, or if they go into the business of publishing in these new multimedia formats themselves.

Though there are two diverging philosophies on ereader design they will quickly converge into one.  Apple represents the Swiss Army knife of ereaders- a multimedia tablet- rather than an ereader.  Apple is betting that multimedia will revitalize reading, newspapers, and magazines and that these new multimedia versions will once again make these media profitable.  The effects on reading are somewhat detrimental but not really considered by Apple.

On the other hand, Amazon has created an “invisible” device that most preserves the reading experience.  This may be rethought in the aftermath of Apple’s announcement, but the Kindle has brought some interesting innovations to reading since its introduction. The three most prevalent innovations are instant access to new reading materials, portability allowed by large storage, and resizeable text.

So how do these visions of reading affect the textbook market?  The early textbook market for these devices will be higher education because of the cost, and the consumer base for these books.  Though Amazon was recently forced to stop their trial in the college textbook market, much can be learned from this program.

Amazon appeared to target the price and physical size of textbooks as the selling point in their trials. It was a good strategy since textbooks can cost students up to $2000 per year.

Apple on the other hand will probably run its first trial program around interactivity and the HTML5 capabilities for multimedia. The ipad will not support flash and for etextbook publishers that may be a  problem.  Apple seems to make two underlying assumptions that I think might be false.  The first assumption is that college students will spend more for textbooks with interactive multimedia features.  If college students are given the alternative of a text and static image textbook for a lower price I think that would be a more a attractive option than a multimedia textbook.

The second assumption that Apple makes I think is an even larger problem.  Apple seems to be assuming that etextbook publishers will be able to churn out high quality interactive textbooks that will drive college adoption of their device and the proprietary formatted ebooks that play on them.

THE ETEXTBOOK REALITY

1) Few publishers have the vision or technical prowess to produce interactive texkbooks.  These people are steeped in a 500 year old tradition of producing books. All of the interactive books I’ve seen from publishers are just electronic versions of a book. The most innovative thing you can find are voiceover, or flash-based books that allow you to turn virtual pages. So they will probably not reinvent the book and reading.  Even if they can create specifications that will allow professional designers to be innovative, the cost of hiring experts will greatly increase ebook production costs.

2) Those few publishers that have the technical prowess to produce innovative products depend on Flash.  And currently there are not robust and reliable tools to do conversions of  large quantities of publishers Flash-based existing product lines. So Apple’s vision of reading will have to be quickly followed by a major investment in internal or external development teams at publishing houses.

3) Publishers have built their highest margins on almost annual editions of high-priced textbooks.  Thus publishers will not easily lower their list prices on books for the sciences.  Instead they will leverage the lower production costs offered by text-based etextbook publishing workflows to increase their profits, and prices for ebooks (licensed, DRMed, and proprietarily formatted computer files) will remain high.  And since these files cannot be resold they will remain thoroughly unattractive to students. And lastly the costs of producing innovations in textbooks through multimedia will greatly increase ebook development overhead for publishers which of course makes it less desirable for them.

Though I think college students will eventually be a large market for ebooks due to the ebook’s convenience and possibly lower price; I think this market will take serious innovations to fully develop.  There will have to be a trading and sales channels for used ebooks.  To jumpstart these markets, publishers might sell revision packs.  As a used ebook is turned in, the student could get a lower price on the newer version and there might be an easy way to add just the new content as is done with software updates.

Another thing that might work is subsidies on the ereader prices for students and faculty. What is the incentive for someone to buy a device that chains you to proprietary files and prevents the resale and sharing capabilities of a physical book?  Currently the only selling factor in this market is weight and possibly price (which will entirely depend on the publishers understanding of this new market).  And  I don’t think that is enough to build a market on.

As I said in previous posts self-publishing direct to ereaders will change the type and volume of content available to readers.  I have also argued that this will quickly lead to an “unbundling” of traditional publishing services and create an open market where these services are available piecemeal from freelancers. But what I would like to examine is how that market may develop and eventually lead to the establishment  of epresses.

What I envision is a marketplace which will quickly develop into a combination of Craigslist and Linkedin. The market will probably function and develop in the following manner. In the early phase of this marketplace an author can place an ad for editing, marketing, SEO services or whatever services she deems necessary to prepare the manuscript for e-distribution.  Freelancers will post their services, resumes, specializations, and samples for authors to peruse and choose from.  This will be the earliest stage of unbundled publishing services.

As the freelancers complete projects they will earn positive and negative reviews, and a ranking system will develop.  I imagine the ranking will cover quality, genre, completion rate, cost, and other factors of interest to authors. This ranking system will control the second phase of Epress development.  The relationships and rankings will ultimately lead  designers, SEO specialists, editors, and others to work together on many projects, and take the bulk of the work as long as they can retain high quality, and ratings from users.

The last and most developed phase of the unbundled service rankings, and relationships will coalesce into new companies. These epresses will specialize in ebook development, editing, and preparation. However, they will also have an infrastructure to carry the books to their physical distribution when deemed worthwhile.  The companies will be made of geographically disparate freelancers with highly specialized skills. I can imagine that some freelancers in the early stages will help develop quite a few of these epresses and that the model will continue to be refined.

If the larger publishers do not yet understand the threat that this new, and as yet undeveloped model presents they will soon enough.  Imagine a press that can develop and distribute books in any language, and any format, in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost that is taken by traditional publishers.

The large percentage of the book publishing market controlled by six publishers will quickly dissipate under the landslide of books that will come from a web press model.