Digital Textbooks Go Straight From Scientists to Students by Dave Mosher

FLOW isn’t the first or most feature-rich publication tool, nor is Cachalot the slickest interactive textbook on the market (a market in which Apple just announced its interest). But Johnston’s title is an easy-to-update, “good-enough” product that didn’t require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget.

Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society by Anita Singh

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.

Hey, you know what? You can read a paperback in the bath. And on the beach. [Ed]

No More E-Books Vs. Print Books Arguments, OK? by Jonathan Segura

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It’s not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats!Crazy, right?

Blogging Is Dead… Here We Go Again by Mitch Joel

Blogging is only dead if you’re a brand trying to use a Blog as an extension of your advertising or as a way to attempt to control your corporate messaging by using it to humanize the tone. For the rest of us, a Blog is freedom of expression.

Apple’s behavior is a modern, sophisticated version of the “embrace, extend, and extinguish” behavior that got Microsoft in so much trouble in the 1990s: Enter a product category supporting a widely used standard, extend that standard with proprietary capabilities, and then use those differences to disadvantage competitors. (The strategy is even more effective if you have a dominant market position in another, related category that you can use for leverage. Think Windows in the 1990s, iPad in 2012.) If you read, write, or publish digital books, you should be concerned.

How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books

Then I had an unsettling thought. There comes a time in any Apple demonstration where they begin talking about the value of the thing they’re showing off. It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the old infomercial schtick: ‘How much would you expect to pay?’ So when that moment arrived for iBooks Author, only one thing came to mind: Please don’t tell me it’s free. I said it over and over: ‘Don’t say it’s free!’

You’ve changed, man

There’s an interesting court case about to erupt into much greater visibility that could ultimately have a big impact on digital book publishing. At its heart are issues involving digital First Sale, Fair Use, and an old friend before the courts, whether copying in RAM constitutes a copyright-infringing reproduction.

Digital media: can’t give it away

Most e-books are just HTML. While this is probably obvious to technical people, most people don’t have a clue and don’t care. I find it interesting that we live in a world where 3 year olds know how to navigate a smart phone, yet most elementary kids have a very rudimentary understanding of computers and how to use them. Still, they can master the basic concepts of XML (or HTML) and CSS relatively quickly.

E-books: It’s Just Text

In short, piracy is certainly one problem in a world filled with problems. But politicians and journalists seem to have been persuaded to take it largely on faith that it’s a uniquely dire and pressing problem that demands dramatic remedies with little time for deliberation. On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy

After capping off 2011 with the publication of our first ebook title, here are a few highlights of what have planned for 2012.

Creating Your Own Ebook (Workshops)

In partnership with the Australian Society of Authors, if:book will be running a two day workshop in the mainland capitals throughout the year taking you through the nuts and bolts of creating your own ebook. Presented by if:book’s Kate Eltham or Simon Groth, the workshops will provide hands on knowledge and skills to help authors navigate the digital waters.

The Amplified Author

The Amplified Author will be expanded this year in a suite of online resources including articles, videos, and templates designed to respond to the most common request from if:book’s audience , namely resources for specific skills and knowledge development in digital content creation.

The 24-Hour Book

Based on a project from if:book UK, the 24-Hour Book challenges writers, editors and audience to write and publish a book in a single 24-hour period.

The project will commission a series of short fiction pieces from leading Australian authors around a central location in an Australian city. The pieces will be written live on the day, with work in progress posted online to allow participants to observe the story as it unfolds and to submit ideas, suggestions and contributions across media.

The book will be completed at the 24-Hour mark and available in electronic and print.

The 24-Hour Book will launch in June.

Bookcamp 2012: the Emerging Future

if:book held 2011’s Bookcamp as a one-day unconference within the Melbourne Writers Festival. The event gathered more than 80 authors, typographers, gamers, booksellers, publishers and geeks to consider how storytelling can be supported or transformed by new media. The resulting discussion, captured via Twitter, included other participants not in attendance has been made available via the if:book digital platform. To follow on from the success of the event, if:book’s 2012 unconference will focus on young writers

In 2012, the theme for Bookcamp will be “the emerging future” and will invite emerging artists, publishers, and geeks to discuss the impact and possibilities of emerging technologies and media on stories and storytelling. How will the coming generation of writers and artists find and engage with audiences? How are they using the tools and platforms already at their disposal?

Bookcamp will happen in September.

Throughout 2011, if:book Australia (the Institute for the Future of the Book in Australia) commissioned essays from ten Australian writers on the future of writing and reading in a future tilted towards the digital. Each writer drew on his or her experience in fields diverse as publishing, transmedia, gaming, and comics to observe the changes taking place in ‘books’ and discussing where this might lead for authors, readers, and reading culture. High Tech Hand Made is the result.

The collection is available in epub, Kindle, and PDF formats. Licensed under Creative Commons, it is free to download and share.

Find it here.

In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame, Claude Frollo looks from a book to the cathedral and says, ‘Ceci tuera cela.’ (‘This will kill that’). Apparently we’ve never been all that good with pluralism (witness the seemingly endless moaning that digital is killing print, regardless of how little hard evidence emerges to support such a position).

The reference to Hugo comes via Books in Browsers speaker, Corey Pressman, who naturally begged to differ when it comes to print and digital books. This does not replace that. This actually does a pretty crappy job of replacing that, because paper and screens do subtly different jobs: one houses fixed text and images, the other is fluid.

One of the reasons we are constantly drawn into direct comparisons or value statements is because digital books are in their first fledgling form where they imitate their direct predecessor. Print books had the same period of adolescence where they mimicked the form and style of handwritten codices. There’s even a word for these early books: incunabula. Go and have a look. Incunabula look like handwritten books because, in the sixteenth century, that’s what books were supposed to look like. That’s how they worked. Even the most basic conventional features of contemporary books—Roman typefaces, page numbers, and tables of contents—had to be inventedfor print books and it took a long time. From the first moveable type books, the era of incunabula continued for another fifty years.

Pressman’s point was that we are now in an age of digital incunabula: fluid, connected devices that house fixed text that ignores its own surroundings. Our digital incunabula even have little ‘page turn’ animations, sometimes with sound effects to make us feel comfortable with the transition (until it irritates us to the point of distraction). The features and norms of these connected books are yet to settle, but it seems clear that it won’t take fifty years this time for new conventions to emerge.

As Craig Mod said shortly after Pressman, beautiful design comes from an awareness of the container and an awareness of content. Though they are converging (Kindle Fire and Kobo Vox), containers are still pretty much all over the place, so what does great design incontent mean?

For a conference about the future, I spent a lot of time at Books in Browsers thinking of the past: from the many references to early printing to the academics grappling with digitising medieval codices (complete with centuries of annotations) to the idea that an interconnected book is not a new concept, but rather a tradition as old as books themselves.

Umberto Eco is best known for his novel The Name of the Rose, but a but he’s also an academic and professor of semiotics. In his bookReflections on The Name of the Rose (I know, very meta), he talked about the need for a mask when writing as a fourteenth century monk (with my emphasis).

I set about reading and re-reading medieval chroniclers, to acquire their rhythm and their innocence. They would speak for me and I would be freed from suspicion. Freed from suspicion, but not from the echoes of intertextuality. Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books and every story tells a story that has already been told… My story then could only begin with a discovered manuscript and even this would be (naturally) a quotation.

One of the fundamental differences between ordinary text and networked text is the hyperlink. Though we think of it now as pretty old hat, the concept that any word, phrase or block of text can serve as a direct launch to another document is still pretty mind-blowing. It’s the thing that has inspired us to ‘surf’ text, an entirely new skill that still causes worrywarts to fret and wring their hands (as thoughevery time we learn something new it pushes some old stuff out of our brains). In an ideally hyperlinked world, every word or phrase would link out to something else both relevant  and of interest. Everything that can be referenced will be referenced.

But what if that were applied to books? If books always speak of other books and every story is a retelling, is it possible to identify those links and catalogue them?

You know here I’m going with this. Not only is it possible, but some rather impressive people who shared the Books in Browsers stage have already been doing it and they already have a working prototype. It’s called Small Demons and it works on what they call the Story Graph. Every reference, whether to books, films, music, places, people or cultural artefacts and objects are collected and stored in a database where they can be cross referenced to any other book that features the same things.

So your favourite book has a killer robot driving instructor who travels back in time for some reason? Small Demons will find links to other books that refer to the same firearms the robot jams in its victims’ faces or the robot’s preferred brand of car. Okay, possibly a bad example.

As a reader, you can follow your own tangential journey through any number of titles and genres, discovering stories at every turn. Clicking around in Small Demons is at once delightful and vaguely unsettling: at one point I hopped through a series of crime novels that refer to God. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it reminds me of jumping through Wikipedia or bloghopping where you’re free to follow your own bizarre path: To Kill a Mockingbird is referenced in Nick Hornsby’s A Long Way Down which also references Rolls Royce which is also referenced in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which partly takes place in London, also the setting for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time which references Star Wars which…

Even though it’s only in small scale beta, it’s no great stretch to imagine what is possible when the number of books grows.

Algorithms that attempt to predict what readers will like have been notoriously hit-and-miss affairs. Even Amazon, who presumably have spent considerable time and money on this, offer suggestions that seem like little more than stabs in the dark. If you’ve ever bought a gift from Amazon, you’ll know the pain of suddenly being bombarded by inappropriate assumptions about your taste. As the ABC’s Mark Colvin recently tweeted:

I’ve bought more than 30 books from amazon for kindle in the last few months. Their prediction algorithm still has NO idea what I like.

Discovery will only become more important in coming years. one thing we can say with certainty about the future is that it will be very very crowded. Writers everywhere (both of the commercially and independently published variety) will jostle for the limited attention of readers. Readers will be overwhelmed by the volume of writing available (if they’re not already) and wonder where to start. Noise is one of my primary concerns at if:book. With more books in the market all with seemingly endless tails, readers need a way to filter out the noise and find not only the books they already know, but a means to discover new titles and new authors.

Small Demons has the potential to cut through the noise, to allow readers to discover new works based not on people’s spending habits, but on the content of the books themselves and the context in which they exist. For writers, the advantage of a project like Small Demons is that they need only do what they have always done. If the act of storytelling draws on a tradition that has always been, in a sense, networked, then the technology merely ramps up and extends that network, updating it to a simple click through.

We’ve already seen what is possible when readers begin using technology to network, discuss, and share (and I’ve documented my misgivings about the potential for endless chatter). What really excites me is what happens when the books themselves break out of their container and begin chattering to each other. In their own quiet way, naturally.

______________________

For no apparent reason, I would like to point out that this post references Victor Hugo, Umberto Eco, sixteenth century publishing, and two episodes of the Simpsons.

The panellists were from diverse backgrounds – Ahmed Maaty (Egypt), Ibrahim Jrady (Syria) and Fadhel Thamer (Iraq) – and the discussion broad-ranging. The panel was both enlightening and frustrating. It was fascinating to gain a new cultural perspective on a topic that is so prevalent in the West. But, ultimately, the panel seemed to fetishise the ‘paper book’ overall and pass the buck to the ‘new generation’ to solve the challenges of  new technology.

A caveat: the panel was in Arabic and I listened in through an interpretor, so some of the points in the complex discussion may have gotten lost in translation.

Fadhel Thamer spoke about facing the internet era and how the ‘old generation’ have avoided keeping pace with new technologies. However, the internet can no longer be avoided.

He noted the importance of panels like this, discussing technology and creative writing, and spoke about ‘the new creativity’: new modes of production across all kinds of narrative, including theatre. Despite a general wariness about the change in the literary landscape, he thinks it is vital to explore and embrace the possibilities as young people are increasingly choosing computers over books. ‘The new generation don’t like paper books,’ Thamer said, ‘they like the internet and computers. You can’t impose print so how can we as writers and publishers cope with this?’

One option is to look at books and find new ways to make them appealing. Interactive and collective writing is an option, as is writing poems and novels in digital formats. Thamer noted the excellent opportunities for discussion that digital writing creates, and how a blog with comments can be a place to develop and distribute a point of view. In narrative, a potential growth area is in metafiction or metanarrative works that integrate new technologies and are appealing to readers who are comfortable in the digital environment.

Ahmed Maaty questioned whether the book is losing importance and if we will need to change poetry and novels as we know them. Citing the changes in technology across the ages – from cave drawings to the printing press to the internet – he noted that, now as then, ‘what is important is the story, and the opinions’. As he eloquently added:  ‘poems are not only poems when they are written in certain ways, they are poems when they touch our souls’.

Although initially concerned about the thought of technology violating private lives, he now sees the value in the internet as a tool for communication. Despite this promising opening, Maaty then spent a long time talking about the potential problems of digital writing. He fears for the increasing lack of connection between people that the internet era represents, and spoke at length about problems with intellectual property rights and writers making less money from rights and content because all the information is free. He said:

‘There has been a revolution in information giving but (paper) books lead to intellectual communication and discussions between people; technology has weakened the emotional humanitarianism between people.’

Maaty clearly fetishises print, stating, in an argument that readers of this site will be familiar with: ‘What is good about books is we can hug books, we can read them in bed’. Although a frustrating argument (digital publishing is not, after all, a zero sum game where ebooks will necessarily replace all print books), it made me smile to hear that this sentimental idea is echoed around the world.

Ibrahim Jrady, too, started with a promising premise, initially speaking on creativity. He noted that is is not the form that makes us artists, but the act of creating. However, he then posed the questions, ‘Is new technology better than paper books? Can the internet topple print?’, and answered them with a resounding ‘No’.

He cited the fact that bestselling writers of paper books are still the most read authors, the ingrained habit of reading print, and the beauty of having books and libraries in our homes. However, he thinks that young people won’t be into print books because they have never had an attachment to them, and so the question will be how to make the two forms complementary.

Jrady did, however, point out the problem with the panel; that they were all ‘old generation’. As an audience member it was frustrating to hear from a panel of middle aged male academics; I was longing to hear from a writer or publisher who was embracing the opportunities of digital publishing rather than studying them.

A more diverse perspective did come from the audience. A young female teacher commented that, rather than isolating people, reading digital books in her classroom encouraged sharing ideas, increasing the amount of discussion about the texts happening among the students.

Another audience member commented that technology is a reality which is past the point of discussion, an issue with which we have to deal practically. ‘What we need is to put an end to technological illiteracy,’ he said, noting that none of the panellists had thought to use any media, such as powerpoint, in their presentations. He spoke about the digital opportunities within the Arab world, and how publishers should be thinking about how to use the digital space to promote local authors and writers.

A final comment from the audience spoke about the possibilities of narratives in the digital space, and how new technologies can create vital spaces for limitless creativity and freedom.

From the tone of the audience comments, it seemed that many people felt the disconnect between the realities of what is actually happening in the digital space and the panel’s adversorial discussion about the battle between print and digital (a feeling that Australian audiences at some ‘future book’ events might be familiar with!).

Digital publishing in the Arab world is far less developed than in Australia, but it is interesting to note the similarities in how the industry is developing in this part of the world. Advances in digital creativity also seems to be writer- and reader- rather than publisher-driven, with industry discourse and publishers struggling to keep up. Although the uptake of creative technology is in its early stages, there are writers blogging and self-publishing in the UAE; however, there are currently few publishing houses creating ebooks and no Arabic ebooks available at all. As in Australia, there is a feeling of frustration that the infrastructure (funding bodies, major publishing houses, etc) is being slow to catch up with what is happening in the arena of new digital art forms.

There was one line of discussion among the panellists that celebrated the digital: that the internet poses amazing possibilities for increasing freedom of expression and political activism. ‘No one imagined that this electronic game could lead to revolutions in the Arab world,’ Thamer said.

Agreeing, Jrady noted that, ‘The internet positive for the Arab people because they are seeking freedom and the internet is a space of freedom. Young people are expressing their opinions online.’

With the recent events of the Arab Spring, in the Middle East there are more people than ever getting online to connect and commentate. In Australia there was a definite surge in creative digital output concurrent with increasing technical literacy that came with the large uptake of social media sites such as Facebook and then Twitter. As more became comfortable with reading and communicating online, publishers and creators alike saw the possibilities of digital writing, which has led to an increase in blogging, ebook publishing and the like. An increasing digital literacy in the Arab world, coupled with the democratic political possibilities of the online space, will no doubt lead to a similar situation, where more writers and publishers will use available technology to disseminate their work.

I think it’s important for Australia keep an eye on how diverse markets are tackling these issues – that is, not just looking to the US and Europe – to ensure that we can can continue to grow our digital industries as strategically and successfully as possible on both a local and global scale.

Lisa Dempster is the Director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival and author of Neon Pilgrim. She blogs at www.lisadempster.com.au.

I tried hard to keep live tweeting from the event (via the @ifbookaus account), but alas I’m no @ebookish (forever now known as The Thumbs of Fury). I was reduced to desperately taking notes and occasionally copy-and-pasting in the Twitter app.

The event itself is organised by the awesome Peter Brantley and hosted at the Internet Archive. Books in Browsers is a small event attended by some of the finest people at the techie end of publishing (and me). Because of its size and the quality of its attendees, there was no need to waste time on discussions of paper versus screen or on the relative merits of digital workflows. It was like a welcome homecoming.

The first day hit the ground running with an overview of the changes to the epub 3 standard. Oh yeah, not for the faint-hearted. The first day’s  discussion though revolved mostly around the concept of social reading, in other words the idea that you can share your thoughts, comments and other annotations on the text you’re reading with others. The magic of digital means that you can read a text with others regardless of distance or time. Such annotations can build over time to form a complex metatext that not only supports but also may shed new light on the original work.

At a big-picture-macro-level, I get social reading and I understand why it’s important to get right and why so many people are making it the centre of what they do. Books have always been social. The web has always been social, even before social media. Books don’t exist in a vacuum, they are shared and discussed and pored over and quoted from. Well a lot of them are. What social media has done is take our naturally gregarious instinct to a global scale. For good or ill, we’re just playing out our regular lives on a grander scale. Social reading merely brings the same grandness to the experience of reading. Bob Stein probably put it most succinctly:

The internet was specifically created to enable people to work and play with other people. Social reading is not an add on; it’s a foundation in the new media ecology.

So I get it.

But, as a writer, I have misgivings. Junking up texts with asides is not my idea of a welcome change. Any social reading platform worth its salt includes the ability to switch off the chatter, but there’s something unsettling about the chatter’s presence, lurking under the surface of the text, just waiting for the right moment to drown it out. What will readers value more: the text itself or the banter from the peanut gallery? Depends on the reader. Depends on the text. And, naturally, I have a vested interest in maintaining the clarity of the authorial voice. How could I not?

Worse, as a reader, I find the whole concept of social reading slightly nauseating. I love long-form narrative. I read a lot of it. And I don’t tweet about it or blog about it. This is something I’ve only just realised. I don’t talk about the content of the books I read all that often (especially fiction). I talk about books in general, of course. That’s my job. But I don’t talk about the stories or the characters or anything else much about what I read. I don’t annotate my books and I feel no desire to do so. What I think and what I feel as I’m reading is the experience of reading and whatever I recall of that later on is worthy enough.

When I read, when I read deep immersive texts, I’m gone. I’m wherever the story has taken me. Interrupt me when this happens (either electronically or IRL) and I’ll start getting crabby at you. This is my story. Go get your own.

Now, I might be an abnormal reader. I probably am, actually. And I’m aware that I sound like a curmudgeonly old git. But I suspect there’s an important point buried in the mild vitriol. We read different kinds of texts in different ways and not all books are a form of escapism.

Case in point is my own Off the Record. Two of the most common responses Sean and I have had to this book are as follows:

• “I’d forgotten about how much I love this or that band”
• “I just want to listen to the music I’m reading about”

If you haven’t read it, Off the Record is equal parts nostalgia, rock and roll, and time capsule. It’s writing begging to be discussed, annotated, and augmented.

Simply put, it’s not long-form narrative.

All of which is my long-winded acknowledgement that although social reading will undoubtedly become an essential feature of stories and other texts in coming years, remember that not all reads are the same. Don’t treat them as such.

People talking about books is one thing, but I think perhaps the most exciting find of Books in Browsers 2011 is what happens when books start talking to each other.

I’ll cover that in the next post.

Image of the Presidio taken not during the BiB conference.

“There were days when the Red Crescent was begging for volunteers to help in taking the bodies of dead people off the city street and bury them properly. The hospital grounds have been turned to burial grounds [sic]…”

It was in 2003 that a fascination with the possibilities of a new contribution to journalism was born for me out of the words of Salam al-Janabi, known to all his readers at the time as Salem Pax. Salam was an English speaking blogger whose blog Where is Raed? became a testament to the limitations of traditional ways of reporting and revealed the possibilities that online publishing tools brought to journalism. Each day, I couldn’t log on to the internet fast enough, dial-up screeching my impatience, to see what had happened overnight. I was fixated. And excited.

Disquiet had begun settling on reports coming out of Iraq; questions were emerging on online forums about US government motives and the information being fed to audiences by The New York Times. And then there was Salam writing a blog for his friend Raed about what was going on during the invasion of Iraq: sometimes eloquent, sometimes observational, sometimes clumsily written, but always compelling. It was an insight into a situation that might have reached a limited audience months later, but online it reached a mass audience as it happened.

Consequently, it was later revealed that reports filed by Judith Miller for The New York Times about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, often quoting unnamed US officials as sources, appeared to be fabricated. Whether this was deliberate or not has not yet been fully established. It was a front page article of Miller’s that reported Iraq had “stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and…embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb,” that was cited by Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld as reasons to go to war. It was a report later proven to be false.

In a poetic full-circle Salam eventually landed up writing for The Guardian, which also published a book based on “Where is Raed?” under the title The Baghdad Blog. That’s not to say that his posts were not to be viewed without question; there were many at the time, as there should have been. In the beginning, Salam was writing under a pseudonym and it wasn’t until May 2003 that The Guardian tracked him down and verified his identity.

But this isn’t a story about the death of traditional news organisations or even their perceived political biases, but rather the moment where the impact of a single blogger made a lot of people sit up and notice a powerful shift in news distribution.

Dan Gillmor, technology writer and author of We the Media, called this the end of “big media”, which “treated news as a lecture”. Tomorrow’s news reporting, he said, would be more of a conversation than a seminar. The London bombings confirmed this news evolution for many. Helen Boaden, BBC director of News, saw her newsroom inundated with pictures only minutes after the bombing. “The long -predicted democratisation of media had become a reality, as ordinary members of the public turned photographers and reporters,” she said.

Fast forward to 2011. I was captivated, like many, by the recent events in Egypt. Late one night I came across the stream of a twitterer going by the handle @bloggerseif. I think I found his tweets from Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who did an amazing job of creating a “curated” twitter stream of all that was going on. That’s another story in itself. But that night, it was Ali Seif’s tweets that made the whole situation real for me. In the chaos of the night, his often disjointed and emotive tweets, told the story of a small child they found; lost among the chaos in Tehran square. They had no way of knowing if the baby’s parents were alive, or even who he was. I think he could only say his name. I was captivated. Amazingly, they located the child’s parents the next day. It was hugely emotional to read, but I felt like I had some insight (and empathy!) to the bigger picture through the live and raw tweets of Ali Sief and the plight of this lost child that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the revolution around them.

These days, we almost take the changes in news reporting for granted. But what has become glaringly obvious is that the media is not dying. It’s flourishing. At no other time in history have we had access to so much information. And we are creating it at an amazing rate. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. In digital terms that’s something like five exabytes of data. And it’s early days.

With this evolution has come a new set of challenges. How do we sort through all this information? How do media companies survive? Can they adapt at a rate fast enough to keep up with the erosion of their business model? How do we keep public interest journalism in the forefront of the day’s news when the news cycle has shrunk and important issues fleet in and out in a day? George Megalogenis, in Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the end of the reform era, his Quarterly essay from 2010, says: “There is no tolerance for a long argument anymore because the public has been taught that every new day carries the promise of a blizzard of unique content.” This highlights the next problem, payment. News is, after all a short-term commodity. The question about whether people will pay for online news is still pretty untested, but I do think there is a working model in there somewhere. The New York Times Co. for example, turned a third-quarter profit and now has 324,000 paid digital subscribers, after launching their paywall in March 2011.

So, there is light. News organisations, often large corporate entities, have needed to learn how to experiment and respond to their audience at a scale and speed they have never had to before. By and large though, they are trying. In Australia, a recent collaboration between a grassroots site Our Say that asks people to vote on issues they see as important and The Age, saw readers vote for questions they wanted answered on climate change. The top questions were then investigated and reported back to The Age audience.

Media companies are just not able to take their audience for granted any longer. An increase in competition has meant they’re under greater pressure to create compelling content; a better-connected audience has meant that they cannot get away with mistakes and fabrications; better communication through social networks like Twitter has meant journalists are “on the ground” where the audience is. These are all great things for news and I’d say, despite all the challenges, we are in the golden era of journalism.

We are no longer confined by necessities like printing presses or media licenses to participate in news creation. You don’t need to understand HTML or any technical aspects to publish news to an audience. While journalists working in media companies have been traditionally resistant to these changes, more and more are embracing social media, mostly because it’s hard to deny its importance as a tool, both as a form of news publication and news gathering.

Ultimately, the news is good for news.

Bronwen Clune is founder and CEO of Norg Media, a company dedicated to creating people powered news sites around the world. Bronwen launched Norg in 2006 with what she says was a very “green” outlook on how the web worked. Not one to sit on the sidelines and very much in awe of the changes she saw it bringing to media, she wanted to explore that for herself. After somewhat of an epiphany and an intense few months of idea-jamming, she launched her vision for a future news organisation.

Image Fort Wayne Newspapers by Jon B. Sweren.

Burger Force is the story of a pop culture detective agency located beneath a fast food takeaway. To avoid drawing it, I have combined film and photography techniques with sequential art storytelling to bring you the world’s first professionally cast comic.

The equipment at my disposal – even in my relatively impoverished state – is favoured by many of the stars of ‘the big two’ (Marvel and DC). To produce an issue of Burger Force, I take photographs of real people and places then transform those photographs into line art via Photoshop.  I design the pages and add fonts in Illustrator then assemble those pages in InDesign. From this point I produce a flash file to upload to the website at www.burgerforce.com and a pdf that I email to my printing company.  It is feasible to produce a physical copy of the comic courtesy of advances in digital printing and the subsequent affordability of a small press run [1].

Accessible and affordable technology has removed so many of the hurdles to comic book production that a number of owner/creators are eschewing, even leaving, traditional publishers.  Scott Kurtz, of PvP webcomic fame, recently wrote about his decision to leave Image Comics:

…I now do all pre-production on the books myself. All Image really does for me at this point is [send] it to the printer. So every time I print a collection and do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to sales of the book, Image still gets a fee and Diamond still gets a hefty cut despite not working at all for the benefit of the book as far as sales in stores go.

Monopoly comics distributor Diamond is the long term nemesis of comic book publishers, pocketing up to 60% of the cover price of a comic.  Publishers who make individual arrangements with comic book stores can negotiate that percentage to a more civil 20-40%.  Those offering direct sales from their website have only their payment provider to satisfy.

Diamond is presently facing a strong challenge to their distribution hegemony in the form of digital comic sales.  While comic publishers have previously experimented with micro-payments, subscriptions and some forms of digital distribution, the advent of iOS devices such as the iPad and iPhone is truly changing the distribution landscape. Sales of digital comics increased over 1000% in 2010. The dominant digital distribution platform, ComiXology, was the second highest grossing iPad application at the time of writing [2].

Digital sales have several advantages over print for comic book publishers.  Production costs are lower, distribution is simple and the comics have a much longer shelf life.  Popular digital sales options for independent publishers include selling downloadable pdfs from their website and making their comics available in the form of an application from the Apple store (at a cost of 30% of the cover price).  ComiXology is presently developing a kit that will allow independent publishers to be included on their popular platform (at the cost of 35% of the cover price).  Other online distributors will presumably follow suit.  E-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle are not currently popular with comic publishers due to poorer screen display and the introduction of digital delivery fees per megabyte that penalise graphic file sizes (in addition to charging 35% of the cover price).

The appeal of digital comics to consumers is clear.  The shops are always open, they never run out of stock and the comic shop guy isn’t going to question their choices.  Rare and previously out of print publications can be accessed with a few clicks and they don’t take up much space or start to smell.  Digital distribution platforms such as Graphic.ly have sought to further the appeal of digital comics by offering bonus content such as commentary tracks and a feature that allows users to remove the colour from a comic and inspect the inks beneath [3]. Graphic.ly also attempts to mimic the ‘community’ experience of a comic shop by incorporating discussion boards and user recommendations on their site.

The rise in popularity of digital comics is a concern for brick and mortar comic stores, but it is not necessarily the end of printed comics. Some comics don’t translate as seamlessly to digital as music, movies, and text-based books. There are certain paper and design aesthetics that are better appreciated in print.  Collectors will still want their signed, limited editions and variant covers, along with the potential to resell their collection at a profit.  They also want genuine ownership.

Unlike digital purchases of movie and music files, customers do not own the digital comics they have bought from most publishers.  They have merely purchased the right to view them on a licensed device.  As the comics are frequently in proprietary formats, the customer’s ability to view their purchases exists only as long as the platform is in operation. In many cases, the customer must also be online to view their purchase. Digital is, nevertheless, the only growth area in comic sales.

No single issue print title exceeded 100 000 in print sales in August of 2011. This is quite a decline from the golden days of the sixties when the top selling titles exceeded 1 000 000 in sales. Digital sales, ‘trade waiters’, the global financial crisis and the closure of physical comic stores (along with the demise of comic friendly chains like Borders) are all factors in the decline of single issue sales of printed comics [4]. Piracy is another.  Scanned copies of most comics can be found on pirate sites hours after official release.  As with most forms of piracy, examples can be found in support of ‘piracy as promotion’.  The creators of the spelunking comic Underground saw a massive spike in their website stats and etsy sales after their comic was illegally posted on 4chan [5].

In a bid to deter piracy, publishers have banned together to have pirate sites such as Htmlcomics shut down. They have also been inspired to provide appealing legal alternatives, including the recent shift to ‘day and date’ publishing, whereby comics can be downloaded digitally the day they are released in stores.  There has been a general reluctance to follow the music industry initiative of including free (or even discounted) digital versions of a product with the purchase of a physical version.

With even the pirates pitching in, marketing is relatively easy and affordable in the age of Web 2.0.  Budget friendly online marketing/ fan-relationship-building opportunities include facebook, twitter, blogs, and forums.   Ryan North of ‘Dinosaur Comics’ and his associates used social media with such panache that their ‘Dinosaur Comics’ inspired anthology, Machine of Death, debuted at #1 on the Amazon best seller list. The charmingly chaotic webcomic Axe Cop went viral just days after appearing online, the website receiving nearly 750 000 unique visits within the month. When heroic marketing feats such as this can be achieved independently, owner/creators have further incentive to question the economic sense of handing a large slice of the profits and a cut of the merchandising to a publisher.

With marketing easier and cheaper than ever before it helps to have an angle to cut through through the white noise.  Burger Force has one, incidentally.  Some of the best looking people in the world are in this thing.  They also happen to be very, very good at what they do.  The actors involved frequently appear in major theatrical productions around Australia and in the performance groups Polytoxic and Briefs.  Basically, it’s a comic with very good acting.  But the real innovation?  It’s now less creepy than ever before to have a crush on a comic book character.  Maybe you really will meet one of the stars of this comic and fall in love.  You should probably buy a copy and get started on that journey.  How about a t-shirt?

Merchandising and IPR are frequently more profitable for comic book publishers than actual comic sales. Most publishers have a combination of posters, t-shirts and the like for sale on their websites or through nerd-friendly websites such as Topatoco.  At the top end of town, film and television adaptions of properties such as Thor, Scott Pilgrim Vs the World and The Walking Dead have spawned video games, action figures, soundtracks and more.  Even when the film is a box office disappointment, the flow on effects for comic book sales and associated merchandise can be significant.

So how does a comic make money in the absence of Hollywood or viral success? My strategy, which isn’t for everyone, is not to try.  I make Burger Force available for free online and the margins are very tight on the physical copies.  I figure the most important thing at this stage is for people to be aware that it exists. If they don’t have pay for it, they might read it.  If they read it, they might like it.  Word of mouth is quite a large part of my advertising budget.  It may not always be this way.  I rather hope it isn’t.  I have deferred fees and residuals to pay.

One of the advantages of being small is that you are nimble.  As an owner/creator in the digital age, I can make changes to the website, the availability of the comics and my marketing strategy with relative ease.  Should Burger Force become an overnight sensation years from now, I’ll imagine I’ll negotiate that with some combination of a camera, a computer, a graphics tablet, an internet connection and the Adobe Creative Suite.

Images:

Lisa Fa’alafi as ORIANA

Janis McGavin as ALEX

Yalin Ozucelik as MERCURY

Remy Hii as COLE

Mark Whittaker as FANCY JAMES

Leah Shelton as CILLA

[1]
I have explored Print on Demand options, but the pricing is generally higher and the quality less consistent.

[2]
The first week of September, 2011. ComiXology contains content from over 40 publishers including ‘the big two’.

[3]
Graphic.ly is the second largest digital comics distributor behind ComiXology.

[4]
Trade waiters prefer their stories to be collected into a bookshelf-worthy edition to purchasing single issues of comics, or ‘floppies’.

[5]
This dwarfed the spike their site received when the comic was promoted on the popular blog ‘Boing Boing’. See also this.

No seriously. They have the whole demand scale figured out. Not only do they mass produce paperback copies of their stories, but they have television shows, movies, yearly conventions in every major city in the world. They have lunch boxes. They have toy figurines of the hero, the sidekick, the villain, the villain’s hairless cat, and let’s not forget the sidekick’s landlady. And depending on when they’re made, how rare they are, and whether or not the buyer has resisted temptation and left the figure in its original packaging, the villain’s hairless cat may go for several hundred dollars when first sold and several thousand dollars years later. This, my friends, is marketing genius: realising that the money is not in the paper bound book, but in the other entertainment opportunities we can provide the audience based on the story.

Indie publisher Richard Nash talks most eloquently on writers needing to expand their scope from the novel to further interactive opportunities like workshops, Q&A sessions, memorabilia, exclusive dinner parties, your own board game or selection of swim wear (well you never know) and endless other possible endeavours depending on your genre.

Larry Correia, author of the Monster Hunter International Series, encourages the design of military style patches for various teams in his series. He also offers for sale not only signed books from him but patches of his own design as well.

A German art student, Benjamin Harff, made a beautiful hand-illuminated and bound copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, an enhanced version of the book that many Tolkien fans would give their pet orc for.

Slowly, authors are coming to the realisation that they can create a fever around their work by allowing it to move outside the written word. One such author is Garth Nix, a world renowned fantasy author with books published in Australia, US, UK and a dozen others. Like many well known authors, he could have just stuck to his paperbacks. But clearly Garth is also a savvy business person and saw the opportunity to deliver something more to his fan base. Garth is best known for his Abhorsen (or Old Kingdom) Trilogy and he has leveraged the books’ popularity to create another sought-after product.

In these books there are necromancers who raise and control the Dead using seven named bells. These evil necromancers and Dead themselves are opposed by a family called the Abhorsens who use their own versions of the bells to make sure the Dead stay in Death and do not trespass into life. I thought it would be great to have silver charm versions of these seven bells.

bellcharms.com

Garth has created sterling silver bell charms for a charm bracelet based on the core idea in his fantasy series. Each ‘bell’ has its own individual mark (each bell has its own name) and you can choose from not one, but three different finishes: ‘Bright’, which is brightly polished; ‘Ancient’, which is a duller finish; and ‘Black Handle’ for those evil necromancer types. Garth has further increased the rarity (and hence the value) of these charms by identifying whether the charm was done in the first casting or in later castings, making the former more valuable, especially over time. Unintentionally (but effectively), Garth built up the excitement of his readers by announcing his intention almost a year before the charms were finally ready. Furthermore, within the website he refers people to buy his books if they want more information about the bells and their uses, ensuring further sales of his novels as well.

So if comic book publishers are selling action figures (or very expensive evil cats), illustrators are making works of art and fantasy authors are forging bells out of silver, what could you create from your words?

Image Roy Lichtenstein: House I (1996/1998) by Ed Uthman