Who hasn’t read a story where you wished you could actually be inside it? See the landscape for yourself, see how the light falls, how the air smells, how the noise overwhelms you, and see exactly how tall that building was that Spiderman just scaled. It’s not that we don’t trust the author and their powers of description, it’s just we want to be there not just read about it, and ultimately we want to tell our own stories of what it was like.

I’ve been obsessing over the idea for a while. Just how could you do it? Then I heard Simon Groth from if:book Australia talk about an app that was under development. The story came in locked segments and, if you wanted to unlock the next bit of the story, you had to be in the place where it happens. Say for example the next bit of the story happened in a train station. You don’t have to be at the exact station in the story (e.g. Grand Central Train Station in NYC) to unlock the next bit, you just have to be in a train station somewhere. As long as there’s a Thomas the Tank Engine near you, you can merrily read away. It was reasoned that being in the right atmosphere made it feel more real.

While that is one of the most awesome ideas to come out of this digital era, I did not have a million dollars to spend developing an app. In fact, if I had a million dollars I would assuredly have quit my job and be writing in a villa in Italy right about now. So my next question was, how could a normal person do this? Then I realised I wouldn’t just want to move from place to place following the story of another character. I wanted to call the shots. I wanted the options. I wanted to choose my own adventure!

After six months of pondering, Adelaide: Choose Your Own Adventure was born. The project involved the world’s first (yes, I Googled it) Choose Your Own Adventure event. Rather than reading the CYOA in printed book form, the project placed QR codes around Adelaide city that you could scan with your smart phone. The code links you to the next part of the adventure where you can choose from several options to continue the story. Each new part of the story took place in the location of the QR code, showcasing Adelaide city landmarks in a whole new way. The adventure started from a single point in Rundle Mall during Adelaide Writers’ Week then branched off into three separate stories by three authors: A comic alien invasion of Victoria Square (Emily Craven), a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery in the East End (Henry Nicholls), and a dark thriller where the city facades came to life around you (Ben Mylius). The first QR code poster of the adventure is below (To scan it download a QR app for free from your Apple or Android app stores):

What truly fascinates me about the variety of projects in this new age is exactly how they came about. What ideas bubbled up to make it all come together? Because the more you know about other people’s creative process, the more ammunition you have to throw of your own shackles of impossibility and create something really interesting. Here was my thought process for ACYOA:

PROCESS 1

Ignite curiosity.

How cool would it be if I was actually in the story? No, not like a picture book. Actually there!

PROCESS 2

Attend an e-book seminar, do your own research, attend a three day internet marketing seminar that has nothing to do with publishing or books… at all, start a blog (http://ebookrevolution.blogspot.com) about ebooks/author marketing/connecting writers-readers.

After if:book’s wonderful ebook publishing seminars with Mark Coker from Smashwords, I set about learning all I could about everything digital. My father was setting up an online training business for hairdressers at the time and dragged me along to an internet marketing seminar. It was one of the most fascinating seminars of my life. Focusing mainly on making money online, the tools that were being used by the big players were all common sense techniques that could be applied to selling anything, including books.  As a way to sort it out in my head I started a blog, running it over 31 days with a new concept from the seminars being explored each day. I also signed up for the mailing lists of several experts and companies.

PROCESS 3

Read the emails you signed up for.

It was the email on how to use QR codes that set me off.  A QR code is a 2D barcode, generally square in shape that can be read by barcode apps on smart phones. You may have seen them on various promotional posters, on the side of Pepsi cans or on ads in the subway. When someone scans the barcode with their phone it takes them to a website.  They are mainly used by marketers to promote a company. But they have so much more potential. For this project, the website contains the stories for each step of the Adventure. They are a fantastic little invention and easy to use on so many creative levels.

But, in my mind, the best thing with a QR code is the story can be a long as you like because it doesn’t have to be printed. If you are really daring you can merge it with YouTube videos and music, which you would never have been able to print on a mere poster.

PROCESS 4

Mix up your reading.

I remember choose your own adventures from when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure I still have a Star Wars one tucked away in a closet somewhere. It was a little too serious for my taste and I always died within the hour. How much fun can you have when you are dead? Last year I thought I’d switch from novels to short story reading for a while. One of my favourite authors, Garth Nix, had a collection called Across the Wall, and low and behold there was a choose your own adventure called Down to the Scum Quarter.  It is hilarious, and if you die, you die with tears of laughter.

As fate would have it, I was tackling QR codes at the same time.

And the rest, as they would say, is a dark alien invasion Sherlock Holmes thriller.

Part Two

Writing a choose your own adventure, not as easy you my might think.

Adelaide: Choose Your Own Adventure is on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/AdelaideAdventure). Emily is super keen to write the next adventure, so if you want your city to become its own story, get in touch.

Last week the US Department of Justice sued Apple and five major publishers for price-fixing ebooks. Simon and Schuster, Hachette and HarperCollins agreed to settle, which meant terminating their contracts with Apple and allowing retailers to sell titles for a discounted price – a return to more of a wholesale pricing strategy. Penguin and Macmillan will fight the case with Apple.

Amazon already sells the most e-books. With Amazon also able to dictate the minimum price, they stand to gain control of the e-book market with monopolistic potential. Charlie Stross explains how this is bad for other retailers, publishers and ultimately – consumers:

Monopsony is a market form in which only one buyer faces many sellers. It is an example of imperfect competition, similar to a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. As the only or majority purchaser of a good or service, the “monopsonist” may dictate terms to its suppliers in the same manner that a monopolist controls the market for its buyers.

Monopsonies suck for their suppliers because the suppliers are systematically starved of profits by the middle-men running the monopsony. Which can lead to suppliers going bust, and a reduction in the diversity and quality of goods available (via the monopsony) to consumers…

And the peculiar evil genius of Amazon is that Amazon seems to be trying to simultaneously establish a wholesale monopsony and a retail monopoly in the ebook sector.

Despite the potential for Amazon to completely eliminate Apple as a competitor, Nick Wingfield writes in The New York Times that Apple wouldn’t lose much of their $2 billion in revenue made in Internet sales over the holiday quarter (only about 4% of their total company sales).

However, the overwhelming thoughts are that this change could cause significant damage to the ebook market. The Wall Street Journal reported a 6.4% loss in market value felt by Barnes and Noble just a day after the settlement.

An important factor for publishers to consider is Digital Rights Management (DRM), the technology intended to stop ebook piracy. Amazon’s DRM standards also prevents Kindles from reading ebooks purchased from other bookstores besides its own.

Stross goes on to suggest a radical step for publishes to take – eliminate DRM on their ebooks and devalue Amazon’s exclusive selling ability.

If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011…

On Paid Content, the founders of independent bookstore Emily Books agree that piracy is a secondary threat compared to Amazon’s potential to hurt the industry and have already implemented this strategy:

Emily Books has gotten around this problem, so far, by selling great books published by smaller companies who either agree with us about DRM’s uselessness or can’t afford to care about it. And we’ve experienced exactly zero problems with piracy so far.

Image courtesy of kodomut CC BY 2.0

There have been a couple of 24-Hour Books. The first was in 2009 and the most recent was this year, both organised from the UK and involving if:book London. Each project is different in its focus and end product, but the common thread between them is the use of the timeframe to demonstrate the capabilities and explore the possibilities of working in a digital environment. In every case, we’re hoping to produce something unique to its process, something that couldn’t be reproduced in a more traditional environment.

Collaboration

Our pithy reasons for doing this are “because we can” and “because it’ll be fun”. As slight as that sounds, in most cases that was enough convince some of Australia’s best writers to get involved. What we hope to achieve is an exploration of how a digital process informs and influences collaborative writing and editing in a combination of face-to-face and screen-to-screen.

There are really three collaborations taking place: author to author, author to editor, and book to audience. As we write, updates will be made accessible on the web, the audience will be able to see the work unfolding on screen and interact with it via comments. Comments and suggestions will be filtered back to the authors, potentially influencing the direction of the story.

Print/Digital

The final product for the project will be available in both digital and print. By insisting on a print edition, we hope to remind everyone that digital and print is not an either/or prospect and that the same process can produce a text in whatever medium readers want.

The Book is a Data Set

Finally, because we’re using a database to store the work in progress, we hope to finish the project with a complete record of the book’s creation, from the first word of the first draft to the final edit before publication. We hope to be able to explore this data in more detail through the rest of the year, exploring how many ways a book’s data can be represented.

The Final Product

The book will freely available to read on the web and freely downloadable in digital formats for the 24 hours that follow the project. After that, it will make its way into the retail environment in both print and digital. Any income from the book will be evenly distributed between the writers and lead editor. If:book’s goals for the project are experimental, not commercial.

Collaboration and data is really at the centre of the project (the timeframe is really just a convenient way to get both). Digital and online writing tools are at heart collaborative tools. Every blogging platform is built to handle multiple authors and editors (our tech for the project is based on a blogging tool). Although collaborative writing often lies at the heart of other media like film, it’s relatively underexplored in narrative fiction. I suspect writers are far more gregarious than popular perception would have you believe. Writers love working together and bouncing ideas off each other and this is the kind of atmosphere we hope to generate.

In this case, the digital environment is merely a system to help us navigate a more traditional idea of collaboration: writers physically together and discussing their stories. Where digital really comes into its own is the ability for collaboration to go much much wider. Opening the text up as it unfolds allows us to seek feedback on the fly. Sure, we’ll have no filter and no idea whether such feedback will be constructive or even welcome, but hey that’s the web for you. Digital writing is expected to be flexible: bloggers respond to their readers, readers expect to be heard and acknowledged. Why should we be any different just because we’re writing in a different form?

Image courtesy of Tim Green aka atoach CC BY 2.0

To consider the future of books, we must imagine the future of media. We must imagine the future of the web. And for that we must lift the veil and step into the post-digital.

Hyperconnectedness

In Greg Bear’s seminal science fiction story Blood Music, biotechnologist Virgil has developed ‘noocytes’, simple biological computers based on his lymphocytes. His employer is nervous about the dangers of his research and so orders Virgil to destroy his work. Virgil injects himself with the noocytes in order to smuggle them out of the laboratory and continue his work elsewhere. But inside Virgil, these biological machines quickly multiply and evolve. They form a self-aware network, a nanoscale civilization that transforms Virgil and others as well. The noocytes are useful. They can fix myopia and high blood pressure. They can create useful mutations that enhance human abilities. But they are also utterly uncaring of the sovereignty of each human being they have colonized, and end up assimiliating the entire biosphere of North America into a single networked organism 7000km wide.

Unlike the noocytes, the internet hasn’t yet managed to fix my short-sightedness. But it can be thought of as a kind of single networked entity, and one that is quickly colonizing our physical lives.

Last year, Guardian reporter Oliver Burkeman observed this at SXSWi 2011 and said ‘the internet is over’. I prefer the term post-digital, an existence in which the boundary between our physical lives and our digital lives is becoming transparent and permeable and will, quite soon, I think disappear altogether. In a post-digital world we will experience ubiquitous computing and hyper-connectedness. [Link: http://bit.ly/HBwafA]

We can already see this emerging around us as the internet moves to mobile devices, tablets and smartphones that we carry around in our pockets. But even in a society with a high penetration of smartphones, as Australia is, the internet is still inside the device. It’s separated from our physical existence. We think of “going online” and “using the internet” as almost like another country that we visit. But in another decade or two, this may look more like wearable technology and bio-implants, where the internet is more of us.

A post-digital world has no edges

Our concept of books and book retail is defined by its boundaries. A book is a bounded thing, whether as a print artefact, an app or an electronic file. It is discrete, transferrable, finite.

However, just like the colonization of Virgil by the noocytes, when the web is the world there are no edges. Anything can be a node on the network: a human, an advertising billboard, a train, a tree. When the web is the world, a link between any two nodes on the network can be some type of transaction: a commercial sale, a social exchange, a transfer of knowledge. When the web is the world, there are no edges placing boundaries around time, physical space or memory.

Within this context, a bookstore can be a physical bricks-and-mortar location on a busy high street that has existed for fifty years, but a bookstore can also be a dinner party, or a conversation between two co-workers or an aeroplane mid-flight. Physical location places no limitation at all on our ability to find, access, pay for, talk about, share content. This confounds not just booksellers, but also publishers who have built their business models on trading publishing rights for various geographic regions and formats.

In the post-digital world, even the individual book’s boundedness blurs and dissipates at the edges. When books and reading are networked, then words can connect with each other. In his keynote address at O’Reilly Tools of Change in 2009, Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive said:

…an environment of participatory engagement is emerging across books. Digital words can be described by other words, joined across books, linked with data. 

Publishing as a service

If the idea of ‘boundedness’ loses relevance, what happens to the traditional structures that hold up publishing?

For one thing, we may discover that opening our books to the network creates infinitely more possibilities for the discovery, sale and sharing of them. Just as the noocytes set about improving, scaffolding, linking and strengthening cells inside Virgil, readers and fans are capable of doing the same for our networked literature.

Canadian author William Gibson saw this in action when he published his novel Spook Country:

…every text today has a kind of spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it. …When I published Pattern Recognition within a few months there was someone who started a Web site. People were compiling Googled references to every term and every place in the book. It has photographs of just about every locale in the book — a massive site that was compiled by volunteer effort. But it took a couple of years to come together. With Spook Country the same thing was up on the Web before the book was published.” [link: http://wapo.st/HsWcg7]

New startups like Small Demons seek ways to commercialise this kind of service.

In the unbounded networked reality of books, the most valuable service a publisher can provide is not to make whole books available to the world, but to create new and interesting relationships between things on the network: between words and other words, between books and other books, and between readers.

But none of this has to happen exclusively in the strange foreign country of the internet, an other-place where we “go online”. When the web is the world, these relationships exist seamlessly and indistinguishably between digital and physical things too. A non-fiction text that is discussed by a class of secondary school students in a shared physical space (the classroom) and shared time (third period – Modern History) may be annotated by other readers, now and in the future, here and elsewhere, who contribute to the very same discussion. In such an environment, the value from the publisher is not in providing the original text, but in creating services, tools and platforms that make it easier for this distributed, networked, asynchronous conversation to flow.

Other structures of traditional publishing also melt and shift in a networked world. If books are not containered ‘things’ – be they physical or digital – our existing understanding of concepts like stock, retail, returns, distribution, rights, licences and even authorship are all challenged.

The smart publishers today talk about the format-neutral workflow. They have realized that creating a thing, to be converted into another thing, is an inefficient way to serve up content to a very large number of people who wish to exercise their personal choice over how, when and in what format they experience books.

But as the web becomes the world, the publishing of the future needs not only to be container-neutral, but containerless. Not a manufacturer of the telephone or even the wireless signal, but the 1930s radio operator constantly plugging and replugging wires to put people in contact with one another. The post-digital concierge who creates meaningful experiences by connecting us with ourselves.

This means the publishers selling e-books with Apple would have their pricing policy changed from the current agency model to one benefiting the e-book retailer competition – e.g. Amazon. Initially reported by The Wall Street Journal, Apple’s current pricing model with publishers is explained:

As Apple prepared to introduce its first iPad, the late Steve Jobs, then its chief executive, suggested moving to an “agency model,” under which the publishers would set the price of the book and Apple would take a 30% cut. Apple also stipulated that publishers couldn’t let rival retailers sell the same book at a lower price.

This contract Apple had with publishers is believed to be in violation of antitrust laws. In Wired, an IP and antitrust attorney outlines why:

1. Whether and how the agency model applies to virtual goods;
2. Whether Apple and publishers engaged in a “hub-and-spoke” conspiracy or simply “conscious parallelism”;
3. The status of the “most-favored nation” clause, common to many legal contracts today, which Apple used to ensure that books could not be sold elsewhere at a lower price than in the iBooks store.

The New York Times have reported the latest possible outcomes coming from inside sources:

One publishing executive with knowledge of the situation, who insisted on anonymity so as not to upset continuing negotiations, said that investigators had expressed interest in finding ways to augment the current system, known as the agency model, and not discard it entirely.

If that system were to disappear, it would be a boon to Amazon, said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change, adding that it would be “essentially bad news for just about everybody else in the book business.”

The merits for authors, publishers, retailers and readers can be argued in all directions. Would Amazon’s dominance be beneficial for the digital publishing industry? According to Bloomberg, Amazon currently have 58% of e-book sales compared to Apple’s 9%.

Agency pricing was implemented to establish a higher price for e-books for the sake of retaining the publisher’s name. In O’Reilly, Joe Wikert considers an all-wholesale pricing model in digital publishing:

Think of the premium products you’ve bought or admired. Oftentimes, their prices are higher than most of the competition’s. What would happen if those prices were suddenly significantly reduced? Would those products retain the full value of their premium brand? Highly unlikely. And shouldn’t the owner of that brand have a say in what price is associated with it? Again, it’s OK for a short-term loss-leader model, but I’m talking about selling something at or below cost for years and years, not just for a day or two. Over time, the value of that brand is affected. That’s why I think publishers should definitely have the option to go with the agency model so they can manage retail prices and not let their brand lose value.

The outcomes from this case will no doubt change the e-book market and will likely incur soon. Watch this space.

In The Telegraph, Jo-Jo Moyes reports the sales trends of e-books and how the platform’s mass yet edgy appeal is making reading sexy again. The outrageously clear resolution, ergonomic casing and generically trendy look of the latest tablets now have an influence on the author’s work.

E-books may be changing the way we read – and even write. I’m not the only women’s commercial fiction author experiencing an upsurge in the number of male readers. Freed from the trauma of publicly reading a book with a “girlie” cover, men are widening their choices. And one told me that his wife now feels free to read thriller writer Lee Child on her e-reader.

A wider audience is not the only aspect to take into consideration when publishing an e-book, Jo-Jo Moyes also gives evidence of Amazon’s free 10% sample changing the narrative arc of a book. Authors are reportedly inserting a cliffhanger right before the reader is prompted to buy now.

In The Atlantic, Alan Jacobs explores the possibilities of Amazon’s e-book releases further, elaborating how the Kindle’s memory function of knowing where the reader dropped off can provide valuable information to editors and publishers.

Here’s the value: if a significant percentage of readers are running out of steam at the same point in a book, then perhaps the text needs to be sent back to the author for tweaking… Unhappy readers of the first edition can be informed that there’s a freely downloadable New and Improved Version, which may induce them to give the book another try.

Will Alan Jacobs’ relsease early, iterate often theory transfer from software to books? In a way, digital publisher Coliloquay is already doing it.

Andrew Losowsky in The Huffington Post explains how Coliloquy leverages Amazon’s e-reader data to recreate choose your own adventure style fiction titles.

What most people haven’t realized is that the technology works two ways — as you make a choice in the story, Coliloquy’s books read you back. They send anonymized data about your decision, as well as about how often you have read a particular chapter, and which characters you have followed the most. They are the first third-party publisher to receive such data from Amazon. They surely won’t be the last.

Imaage courtesy of kodomut CC BY 2.0

‘Agile’ was the buzzword at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference in New York this February. (While there, I also ate a fantastic catfish po’boy at the Delta Grill in Hell’s Kitchen, but that’s for another blog entirely!)

So what is ‘agile’? Borrowed from 1970s software developers and espoused by Kristen McLean (Bookigee), agile methodology transforms publishing processes in several major ways, for example:

• Iterative releases (which start small, then repeat and build) of minimum viable publishing products means that publishers can start with manageable modules of content, and build them in connection with readers, rather than relying on a business model that requires investing years on the gamble of a book (especially by debut authors). We are already seeing this with blogs becoming books.
• Paying as much attention to forward data (such as where an author’s friends/followers are concentrated) as to follow data (like sales) increases publishers’ trend prediction accuracy. If they are not already, publishers will routinely check their marketing strategies match each author’s centres of popularity.
• Flexible, multi-skilled production teams allow publishers to combine expertise from digital, marketing, and editorial departments—as well as  working with authors—to effectively plan and craft content for emerging markets. Sound decisions around what platform and device an author’s content works best on (e.g. book as app) will rely on having all the information on the table.

At TOC and also the small event held the day before, Book^2Camp, another dominant conversation was the ongoing discussion (and hand-wringing) about the value and power of publisher brand. Changes in the book supply chain mean that publishers are now driven to develop direct relationships with readers, rather than with their traditional ‘customers’, booksellers. In response to this challenge, there has been much debate about publisher brand and community building, leading to a race to capture readership loyalty online through publisher-led sites such as Authonomy and Book Country.

These conversations—agile methodology and publisher brand—have emerged as separate responses to what are perceived as different challenges for publishing: adaptations in workflow versus ways to support and drive sales. But I believe these two conversations are in fact the same conversation. By embracing effective changes to workflow, publishers will also find meaningful ways of building relationships with readers based on a detailed understanding of the contexts in which potential customers engage with content.

Agile fiction?

For works of non-fiction, agile is a no-brainer. Blogs, articles, social media, crowd-sourcing, subscriptions: there are many different modules of non-fiction content that can be developed and released into the public sphere to create engagement, feedback, and income, before and around committing to a book-length project. US educational publisher Kaplan has been an early adopter of agile, and is reporting healthy results in both sales and productivity. Harvard Community Press leverages online conversations for agile content development in their successful cookbook line. The Onion’s Digital Director Baratunde Thurston’s debut book How To Be Black models crowdsourcing, collaboration, and iteration in developing great non-fiction content and audience connection—Baratunde constantly tweaked the direction of his book based on conversations with his editor, his blog and Twitter followers, and his fellow comedians.

Baratunde Thurston keynoting TOC

The big question seems to be: can fiction content be agile, too? McLean leans towards no, while others such as Todd Sattersten (Every Book is a Startup) argue it is, or can be.

Readers of fiction usually do not want to read a great book in the rough: they want the polished, finished product. And writers of fiction usually do not want readers peeping over their digital shoulder as they write. Author and digital crusader Max Barry, after a day writing in view of a real-life public at Melbourne Writers Festival, says it felt like ‘the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, which is something about forgetting the rest of the world exists. It’s hard to be creative and self-conscious’.

There is also a concern that community engagement in the development of fiction content will turn every project into a crowd-sourced mishmash reflecting the lowest common denominator. Snakes on a Plane, anyone?

However, two strands of thought provide potential avenues for the agile development and distribution of fiction content.

As has been observed, there are lessons to be learned from that great author and innovator, Charles Dickens. Dickens serialised. There is some evidence that he incorporated reader feedback into the direction of his stories. He identified that the American market was pirating his work, and toured extensively to support local booksellers who gave him an income stream.

Subscription-based short fiction is a great option for the working writer in the current market—to write this blog post, I am stealing time from my frantic novella-writing schedule to enter the Griffith Review: The Novella Project, and I have just had a novelette published in The Review of Australian Fiction.

New tools allow readers to discover, explore, and extend fiction content beyond the bindings. It has become the professional duty of every author to maintain an authentic and inviting presence in social media, but there are now ways of slicing and dicing content, rather than persona, to connect with readers. Pappus from Serendipite Studios allows authors to easily render shareable microblogs based on comments and discussions around buyable versions of their completed works. The Small Demons Storyverse allows fans to find and amplify content based on personal tastes/obsessions.

Access to the user data from such sites would provide powerful trend prediction tools for any fiction publisher planning their list.

Community development

The romance market demonstrates how the iteration of fiction underpins success in online publishing models. The groundbreaking Carina Press uncovers and builds profitable niche markets such as male/male romance (by women for women) as readers explore and converge on new content. The Writer’s Coffee Shop has lifted the profile of fan fic through the recent success of Fifty Shades, developed in the context of reader votes and feedback.

Heroes and Heartbreakers online community is fostered through innovative real-time responses to social media conversations, filtered through a well-developed genre lens. But manager Liz Edelstein shocked the Tools of Change audience this year when she stated that Macmillan’s ‘end goal is to get as many quality email addresses as possible’. Apart from the ethical concerns this raises, brand-driven community building that relies on the commodification of identity smacks of ‘push marketing’ in an environment where pull is king.

Even micro-calibrated e-newsletters languish unopened while potential customers are busy sharing their likes on Pinterest Books Worth Reading boards and earning Kobo reader badges. Context data produced from interactions around all stages of reader engagement is a rich and largely untapped source for both trend analysis and pull marketing.

Agile methodologies and community development go hand in hand. Building readership means looking past the creation of yet another brand-led ‘community’. Instead, it is vital the whole publishing team—from creatives to techs to editors to publicists—work collaboratively to source, develop, and sell content, based on a rich and emergent understanding of potential readerships.

As Bookigee’s MacLean is fond of saying, ‘The culture of reading is not in trouble, but our current business model is.’ Agile methodologies for developing and releasing content provide authentic, creative solutions for authors and publishers to secure audience share in an evolving market.

Rather than reading the Adventure in printed book form, our project will place QR codes around Adelaide city that you can scan with your smart phone. The code links you to the next part of the adventure where you can choose from several options to continue the story. Each new part of the story takes place in the location of the QR code, showcasing Adelaide city landmarks in a whole new way!

The adventure will start from a single point in Rundle Mall at the Dymocks store front during Adelaide Writers’ Week (3rd – 9th of March) and then branch off into three separate stories. Take part in the comedic alien invasion of Victoria Square, accidentally find yourself involved in a Sherlock Holmes style mystery, or step into a dark thriller and avoid the city as it comes to life around you.

To help you make it to the end, there are discounts to local stores for each person who finishes a branch as well as the chance to win the grand prize which includes Dymocks vouchers, iTunes store vouchers and more!

Project Background

At the end of 2011 Emily Craven approached if:book Australia about creating a treasure hunt around Adelaide city during Writers’ Week as part of the 2012 Adelaide Festival (March 3rd-8th 2012). The choose-your-own-adventure stories were envisioned to be accessed through QR codes printed on posters.

A QR code is a 2D barcode, generally square in shape that can be read by barcode apps on smart phones. You may have seen them on various promotional posters, on the side of Pepsi cans or on ads in the subway. When someone scans the barcode with their phone it takes them to a website. For this project, the website contains the stories for each step of the Adventure.

Readers in Adelaide can start adventuring from tomorrow, 3rd March at Dymocks, Rundle Mall.

And everyone can show the project some love at its Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/AdelaideAdventure

Though his argument buys somewhat into the notion that ‘only one shall survive’, Tim Parks at the New York Review of Books mounts a splendid case in favour of ebooks over print. This article  has been passed around quite a bit in the last week and for good reason. Really, the only significant thing we can add to this is: ‘what he said…’

E-Books Can’t Burn

Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end.

Not that we want to flog the #LudditeFranzen meme into the ground, but perhaps the most cutting of all retorts came from Frank Coelho of Diesel ebooks.

An Open Letter (and a Challenge) to Jonathan Franzen

In fact, we must apologize to you for actually carrying and selling (quite briskly we might add) your books in digital format. We can only theorize that you accept the revenue reluctantly, and that you must be quite conflicted about your role in the unleashing of such unspeakable evil upon the planet.

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference flew by while many of us slept last week, but details have trickled out via Twitter and various blogs. Calvin Reid at Publisher’s Weekly offered a quick round up which included a few details from LeVar Burton’s keynote presentation on the importance of science fiction.

TOC 2012: LeVar Burton, Libraries and The Bookstore of the Future

Burton, who is heading a startup multimedia children’s publishing venture called RRKidz that is based on his work hosting PBS’s Reading Rainbow program for many years, delivered an inspirational keynote speech focused on the role of reading—in particular science fiction—in his own life. Describing the impact of the science fiction—what he called the power of “what if” —Burton said the genre offered him “a process of imagining a world we’d like to see and explore,” emphasizing that reading was an “elemental” force in his home growing up.

And finally, a piece (actually a whole chunk) of good advice from a magician named Teller (the usually silent half of Penn & Teller). Originally an email to a struggling fellow magician, Teller’s advice is applicable equally to any creative enterprise and is worth reading in full. It’s both funny and true.

14 years ago: the day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic

I should be a film editor.  I’m a magician.  And if I’m good, it’s because I should be a film editor.  Bach should have written opera or plays.  But instead, he worked in eighteenth-century counterpoint.  That’s why his counterpoints have so much more point than other contrapuntalists.  They have passion and plot.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, should have been a musician, writing counterpoint.  That’s why his plays stand out from the others through their plot and music.

Image by Allie Osmar Siarto (CC BY_NC 2.0)

9 writers.

1 book.

On 11 June 2012, if:book Australia will challenge a team of writers and editors to collaborate, write, and publish a book in a single 24-hour period.

At midday, nine writers (including Nick Earls, Steven Amsterdam, Krissy Kneen, and P.M. Newton) will gather at the State Library of Queensland and begin writing furiously. Their stories will be written live on the day, with work in progress posted online to allow readers to watch the story unfold and to submit ideas, suggestions and contributions across media. As the stories are completed, a team of bleary-eyed editors will take the text from manuscript to a book.

On the 12 June (at midday of course), the finished book will be available in both digital and print with a launch in the following days.

Digital tools  have already made a tremendous impact on the process of writing and reading. We’re used to thinking about text written for screens, such as blogs, as instant publishing platforms: the act of making writing public is as simple as clicking a button literally marked ‘Publish’. Digital writing is also designed as a collaborative environment: writers, editors, designers, and even audience are all invited to take part in the creation of a complete document.

But what if we apply these concepts to making and reading books? Not just books for screens, but for ink and paper too?

How far can you push the technology? How far can you take the book?

if:book Australia presents: The 24-Hour Book

When
11 – 12 June 2012

Where
Watch the story unfold at futureofthebook.org.au

Who

• Nick Earls
• Steven Amsterdam
• Krissy Kneen
• P.M. Newton
• Geoff Lemon
• Rjurik Davidson
• Christopher Currie
• Angela Slatter
• Simon Groth
• Keith Stevenson (Editor)

Stay tuned to if:book Australia for more details in the coming months.