E-Ink for Magazine Covers…and Books?

This week, the New York Times reported on a unique application of E-Ink technology to magazine covers in an article titled News Flash From the Cover of Esquire: Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too.

According to the article, an upcoming issue of Esquire will include (on only 1 in 7 of the total copies printed):

“An electronic cover, using admittedly rudimentary technology, that will flash ‘the 21st Century Begins Now,’ when it appears on newsstands in September.”

The first thought that comes to my mind after reading the article is…so what? Does it add anything meaningful to the information presented? Will it make people more likely to take it off the magazine rack and consider buying it? Or will they just pick it up, marvel at the hi-tech nonsense, and put it back?

Actually, although I haven’t seen it, it brings to mind those extremely annoying websites that like to have flashing headlines or blurbs or whatever. I am more likely to surf right on past those when I encounter them. They are irritating.

The article notes that those special issues will have to be shipped in refrigerated trucks to preserve battery life. And, even then, the batteries are only expected to last 90 days, after which you will have the usual static cover. But maybe they’ll start putting something interesting and useful on the cover and add a connection so you can plug it into a wall outlet and recharge it.

I’m still not sure how much of a draw that would be…but stranger things have happened with hi-tech gimmicks that seemed essentially useless.

Can book covers be far behind?

What Makes a Good E-Book?

No, I’m not talking about the content. I will stipulate at the outset that an e-book, like any other book, should contain solid content that is well written.

I’m more interested in the mechanics of the book. The reading experience, if you will.

I suspect the answer is different for fiction and for nonfiction.

For fiction, I see no downside to just converting the already typeset book directly into a downloadable PDF file, using the same fonts and font sizes and the same page size and layout. After all, once you open it in Adobe Reader, you can zoom in or out to create a font size that’s comfortable for you and the monitor you’re using.

For nonfiction, I can see justification for doing something different and, as appropriate, adding some inherent interactivity. Seems we should consider such things as:

• Changing the format to landscape rather than the more traditional portrait format (after all, monitors tend to be wider than they are tall)
• Changing a single-column layout to a multi-column layout (keeps the reading line lengths reasonable despite the wider landscape format - long line lengths tend to decrease comprehension and reading speed)
• Adding live hyperlinks for external references (making further research easier for the reader)
• Incorporating a hyperlinked table of contents and setting up the file so it opens with two side-by-side windows — hot-linked bookmarks and the book text
• Adding audio clips (to let the author add explanatory background)
• Adding video clips (to help explain the concepts or add information not available in the print edition)

I’m sure there are other possibilities for enhancing e-books, and all of the above are probably not appropriate, or necessary, for every nonfiction e-book.

Let’s hear what you think by taking a moment to answer the question below. Remember, I’m assuming the content is worthwhile and well written. Feel free to add your comments (either to this blog post or directly in the poll response). And the poll allows you to add some other criteria, if you wish.

Print on Demand or Digital Printing?

Maybe I’m tilting at windmills, but the trend to subsidy publishers usurping the terms print-on-demand, POD, and self-publishing really annoys me. I realize that words change meaning over time through the preponderance of common usage, but that does not excuse companies who improperly seize on already defined terminology with the clear intent to mislead the unwary.

Print-on-demand (POD) is nothing more than the use of digital printing technology to print books as needed, usually as they are ordered. It can also legitimately be used for very short print runs (less than 100 copies, also usually using digital printing). Dan Poynter prefers to call the second situation print quantity needed (PQN).

Digital book printing refers to the use on toner-based printing equipment, which can be likened to a very-high-end desktop laser printer coupled with book assembly and binding equipment. Because it requires only the digital files for the cover and the interior and almost no other set up costs to start printing a particular book, the unit cost to print a book decreases very little with larger quantities. However, unit cost tends to be significantly higher than the same book printed using more traditional offset printing at some quantity between 500 and 1,000 copies. (More on offset printing in a future post.)

Self-publishing is a very simple concept. It means that the author is also the publisher, responsible for writing, editing, design, layout, typesetting, marketing, promotion, distribution, sales, and order fulfillment. And the author must own the ISBN, since the owner of the ISBN is the publisher of record in all industry databases. Now, the author/self-publisher can contract out any or all of the publishing responsibilities but remains responsible for all of them. If the would-be self-publisher buys an ISBN from a company other than R. R. Bowker (the only legal U.S. ISBN agency) or one of its designated agents, he is not self-publishing no matter how much of the rest of the self-publishing responsibilities he retains.

Subsidy publishing (sometimes called vanity publishing) means that the author is underwriting the costs of publishing her book by somebody else! A subsidy publisher generates the majority of its revenue by selling books and services to authors, very little by selling books to the book trade, and even less by selling books directly to consumers.

Before the advent of digital book printing technology, subsidy publishers required authors to pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for large offset print runs (thousands of copies). Now, virtually all subsidy publishers use digital printing technology and require somewhat less up-front payments by authors. However, since they are paying high per-copy printing costs and tacking on their profit margin, the author pays a lot more for each copy than he would if he contracted directly with a digital printer.

But make no mistake — the author is still subsidizes the entire publication process, whether through up-front fees or through very high unit costs.

Since subsidy publishing has a negative connotation, most of these companies have taken to calling themselves “POD publishers” or “self-publishing companies.” The first is accurate but misleading. The second is an oxymoron — either you are publishing yourself under your own name or you are being published by somebody else — and is, in my opinion, unethical.

It is possible to use some of the self-annointed “self-publishing companies” to actually self-publish a book under your own imprint with an ISBN from a block of ISBNs you purchase from Bowker (with a publisher prefix that points to you or your company as the publisher of record). However, your unit costs will be higher than if you contracted for digital printing directly with a printer.

I would like to use the terms print-on-demand (POD) and self-publishing to mean what they should mean but, thanks to those damn subsidy publishers, I have to resort to saying digital printing and true self-publishing to clarify my intent.

Pox on all those “self-publishing companies” making money off hopes and dreams all-too-often dashed on the reefs of publishing realities.

Should You Use a Thesaurus?

When it comes to finding just the right word or phrase, there seem to be two kinds of writers:

• Those who quickly grab a thesaurus
• Those who spurn the thesaurus as a sort of linguistic crutch (or a way to cheat)

I’ve never understood the disdain that many writers profess for one of the most thought provoking tools on any writer’s bookshelf. However, I’ve always suspected that those writers are actually closet thesaurus-cruisers, anyway.

For those who really, truly bypass using a thesaurus, I have to wonder if they’ve ever used the original, grandaddy of thesauri — the Roget’s International Thesaurus (currently in its 6th edition). There are many different versions of English language thesauri, and they all tend to have their own ways of helping you find the right word.

Personally, I find too many thesauri are organized like a dictionary, something that overlooks the basic concept behind Peter Roget’s original design. The HarperCollins version (see the link in the paragraph above) stays true to Roget’s design…and is far better for doing so.

The book’s cover notes that it contains “more than 1,070 different categories in this comprehensive, up to date thesaurus contains 325,000 synonyms, antonyms, and related words and phrases, as well as the latest slang and commonly used foreign terms.”

You can launch directly into the subject listings split into 15 classes (”The Body and the Senses” to “Science and Technology”) and 1075 categories (”Birth” to “Space Travel”). Or you can use the alphabetical index in the back to look up a word and see where related suggestions can be found.

For example, in the subject listings under the class WIND, you find 25 categories — 19 for nouns (air current, wind god, puff, breez…blower, and fan), 2 verb categories (blow and sigh), and 4 adjective categories (windy, stormy, windblown, and anemological). These listings consume two full columns and include gems like (to select just a few of the dozens of offerings):

• “scolding winds” (Shakespeare)
• geostrophic wind
• snow eater
• hyperboreal blast
• vortex
• blowpipe
• whisper
• tempestuous
• windswept

If you look up “wind” in the alphabetical index, you will be referred to 11 different class/subject headings:

• breathing
• swiftness
• current
• bull
• wind instrument
• belch
• fart
• fatigue
• blare
• air
• blow a horn

And under each of those referenced headings you will find a whole range of possibilities, some only vaguely related to “wind” but all spurs to the imagination and creativity.

Sure, the book is over 1200 pages but any wordsmith worth the label “writer” can find something of value, sometimes just be flipping to a page at random to see where it leads.

A really good thesaurus is not a crutch, just a tool. And one no writer should be without.

Future of E-Books

This post’s title makes it sound like I’m about to gaze into my crystal ball and tell you what I see. Unfortunately, my crystal ball has been clouded for far too long, at least on the subject of where publishing, and the e-book market in particular, is heading. Instead, here are some thoughts that have tumbled out of my fevered cranium.

First, as Brian noted in his comment yesterday, statistics are slippery little devils that can, all too often, be manipulated to support a preconceived notion. That stats I quoted about e-book sales as they relate to sales of other book formats are, however, accurate…as far as they go, which may not be very far. After all, they are derived from reported sales of only 78 members of the AAP. And they address only revenue, ignoring sales unit volume that might be more interesting (since e-books typically sell for less than the same book in printed form).

Also, we must remember that the total e-bookmarket is not only growing steadily — currently far faster than sales for other formats — but is doubtless vastly underreported. A significant number of e-book sales pass completely under the book industry’s radar, never having been sold in print form nor reported to any agency compiling stats. It is difficult to estimate how many e-books (from how-to pamphlets to long-form novels) have been sold directly from the authors’ websites. Not that that difficulty has stopped a lot of folks from making those estimates, anyway.

I don’t know if e-books, whether delivered to a Kindle or a Sony reader or even a cell phone, represent the wave of the future. One thing I do know is that publishing is evolving. The bigger the publisher the more institutional resistance there is to that evolution.

Over the past decade, digital printing technology has brought true just-in-time inventory management to book publishing. Perhaps the new Espresson Book Machine will bring that capability right into the bookstore or even to your own desktop. Amazon’s Kindle certainly seems to have sparked an upsurge in e-book sales, although reliable stats are difficult to derive (Jeff Bezos remains tight-lipped on actual numbers).

And the ubiquitous World Wide Web itself has radically affected the way information is distributed, presented, and processed.

I am in no way suggesting that e-books represent the ultimate form of publishing. I am, however, suggesting that publishers — especially small and micro-publishers — should be prepared to let their customers choose how they want book content delivered. I firmly believe that the more options we present, the more sales we can gain. We are, in my opinion, in the information business not the book publishing business, if we want to survive.

At Slipdown Mountain Publications LLC, we began offering some of our books as e-books in January. Currently, we offer six Kindle editions and four PDF editions, in addition to our print book editions. For the January-June period, customer purchases of Kindle and PDF editions have accounted for 11% of total unit sales and 8% of total revenue.

Evaluating sales from comparable periods in previous years, I believe those e-book sales were in addition to, not instead of, print book sales. If we can consistently pull in almost 10% more revenue for such a small investment, I can see no downside to making them available. Once we have the print edition edited and prepped for the printer, converting it to an e-book format is quick and easy (whether Kindle or PDF).

Whether e-books are the wave of the future is not something I worry about. I will try to ride this wave as far as it will take us. If something else crops up that is as easy to implement and may provide yet another alternative for customers, we’ll give it a try.

If it doesn’t work, we can always stop. So, what’s the downside?