It seems we’ve been thinking about ereaders all wrong. Along with thinking about ebooks all wrong. Actually, I shouldn’t say “all wrong” since we’ve had a lot of “right” in there, collectively speaking (and any new ventures are built on the mounds of failed attempts). But let’s start with the ebooks, and move on to the ereaders, and why the past, as much if not more than, the future, will drive the ereader.

Follow me below the fold, along with a hat-tip to Jane at Dear Author’s Sunday EBook News article, which prompted me to ask Mr. Xandra, “why don’t we use the Kindle more?” To which he replied, “Because I read PDFs, and it sucks at rendering PDFs.”

E-books

We think of ebooks in terms that reference paperback books, hardback books, reading on a screen versus on a page, and we price accordingly (and inaccurately, because let’s face it, the perception of the cost of printing a book is far higher than it actually is, and that indicates there’s still an unconscious value placed on the physical object that is the paper and pasteboard and ink of a book). What we don’t do enough, is think of ebooks in terms of Electronic Media for Entertainment Purposes. Paper books compete with other physical media, and have an unique set of environmental factors that works both for and against them. Ebooks, on the other hand, compete with other electronic entertainment, and have a completely different set of environmental factors working for and against them and in relation to the other competing electronic entertainment.

E-Readers

Ereaders are physical devices, first and foremost. This presents its own unique set of environmental factors affecting them. Among them are price, portability, and usability (and the restrictions thereon). Not the least of influencing factors, however, is Purpose.

A smartphone fulfills a utility purpose–it calls other phones and receives calls from other phones. It provides a link to others on a mobile basis. It has a primary use that is considered on some scale of necessity–it is a utility. The apps and crap are just cake around the primary utility.

An mp3 player is an entertainment device that fulfills an entertainment purpose. It plays music for the listener to enjoy. Podcasts and such have grown up around it, sure, but it’s primary function is that of an entertainment device.

Customarily, you pay more for a phone than a music player, but which one are you more apt to ensure that you take along? Which one do you find more use–utility–for?

Now consider the Ereader. Its entertainment purpose exists in competition with other entertainment devices that are priced WAAAAY lower–and do WAAAAY more–for the money. The answer here is not to load up the ereader with more stuff to do on it–then it becomes a jack of all trades, but master of none, and people will choose the device that has an intended purpose over one that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.

The answer, then, is to find a UTILITY for the device. People shell out 400 bucks for an iPhone not because of the apps–but because of the phone. IT CALLS PEOPLE (and yes, they also shell out because the applebot religion requires them to pilgrimage to the Shrine of Jobs, but that’s entirely beside the point). It is a utility.

E-reader Utility

The Ereader, too, has a utility–but it’s not been accurately glommed onto yet. This is one of those chicken-and-egg things, and we’re in a period of transition–the demand has to drive the supply, and the supply is geared towards early adopters, which usually means there’s more entertainment than utility (early PC development went this way–one of the first things people replied when asked the question of “What do you do with it?” was “You could play games with it.”) We’re human beings, and we play to discover and create–that’s not a bad thing, just something that doesn’t get as much props as it ought. Our earliest learning is through play, and that doesn’t go away when we learn to feed ourselves and walk upright and sass our parents.

But the turning point is approaching. There are enough adopters to allow the technology to seep into collective consciousness. E-reading has become something more people now understand than don’t. At this point, utility steps in, for the alert thinker.

Once upon a time, the internet was the playground of military and gubmint workers, and academicans (and it looked like it, too. Webpages were default battleship gray). But when enough civilians opened it up, the internet became useful to more than just a handful of contractors or students with access to university technology. It changed the way the private sector did business. It changed the way business did business. Nowadays, you won’t find a company that isn’t somehow connected to the internet and using it for some aspect of its business. And those businesses employ tools whose first utility is accessing the internet.

Think about a parallel to ereading. Reading on a screen is becoming an acceptable way to read (it was before, too, but now more people are recognizing it as such). It is becoming acceptable enough, to enough people, that the ereader now has a potential UTILITY in industry. If it does the right thing to make itself useful.

The iPad is a 500-buck toy right now. The ereader that will win will not be the ereader that can shop at a store, or even two stores, anywhere. It will be the ereader that can render the quatra-quinta-sexta-septa-octabytes of legacy information now in print, but ready to move to digital by a quick scan-and-PDF.

It will be the ereader that can connect to the company intranet and download the last week’s TPS reports (or last decade’s) which are still formatted for 8.5×11 or A4 paper, not the one that can act like a Jump to Conclusions mat game.

It will be the ereader that can take scanned chapters of texts, documents, and legacy tomes that only now exist in paper format, but will be digitized by scan-and-PDF because it’s faster and cheaper to do than to scan and convert something that may be layout-dependent.

It will be the ereader that can interact with the form that still needs a paper copy in existence somewhere.

But Why Focus On the Past? Digital is the Future!

One simple reason. There’s still a hell of a lot of paper out there. Sure, much of it is probably useless crap office memos. Much of it is old tax forms or legacy documentation for equipment no longer in existence. But a lot more of it is just in printed form because it was the best form at the time. Millions of books, documents, papers, letters, libraries full of paper communication. Most of it will not be suitable for translation into a digital-native format (and it also limits the utility of digital-native formats if they have to adhere to print-legacy standards–why not just split the two formats and let digital be digital, but let print be print, archived digitally?). PDF effectively bridges that gap.

Yeah, But Aren’t You the Queen of Open-Source? Isn’t PDF Adobe’s Product?

Yeah, I get that. But as it exists now, PDFs can be created with other products besides Adobe products. PDF readers other than Adobe’s can render PDF documents. The horse is out of the barn and jumped the walled garden to the fields outside. There are legalities to consider, but they go beyond the scope of this already-sprawling post.

An ereader that can read the past, is the one that’ll win out in the future.

But I did figure that the six of you who might be looking for an update of what life’s been like on Planet X(andra).

It’s been hot and muggy, and overscheduled with activities to stave off school-age boredom, spliced between moments of ten-minute writing sprints, stolen from the jaws of inactivity and enervation. Now, in between this, I have been attempting to follow the progress of the ebook/epublishing world, along with traditional publishing’s almost-certainly-imminent demise (you know, the same one that’s been predicted for almost a century, video killed the radio star and all that), and I’ve come up with some interesting observations:

• Writers are still worried about the effect of ebook/digital edition piracy.
• Publishers are more worried, but less inclined to look at the underlying cause, or solutions that don’t involve going head to head with end-users.
• Readers are still irritated that they can’t get their reading material at the price they want to pay for it, when they want it, and in the format in which they want to read it.
• It’s still a hell of a lot of work to write a book.
• It’s still a hell of a lot of work to get anyone to care that you’ve written a book.
• It’s still a hell of a lot of work to do anything in 140 characters or less.

Coming soon, I’ll be making an announcement about where my career is going (not that you care) and where I’m taking my writing (that, you might care a little bit more about). In the meantime, I’m writing, I’m creating, and I’m kinda melting a little. Wear your sunscreen when you go out, and always remember to keep drinking water. Much like plot points, it keeps the wheels turning.

All writing is not the same writing, either.  I’ve spent time recently with some very dense, heavy-packed, and slushy snow.  It’s hard to move around.  It doesn’t stick well to other types of snow, either.  Especially at certain temperatures.  Molding writing like that into a story without the same consistency is no picnic.  Trying to mold that dense snow to the icy powder at the next layer is an exercise in futility.  The powder is light and great for skimming over, wonderful for a fast read or action-packed scene, but it’s wispy.  It blows around and rearranges itself according to the wind, or even the shift of what’s underneath it.

To even get the hard-pack to come close to sticking to the powdery stuff, you have to cup your hands around the powder and breathe on it, just enough to melt a teensy bit of it for the dense stuff to grab onto.  And don’t think there’s a shortcut in the future where you can roll your snowball around for a quick and easy expansion–you’ll be fighting for every new millimeter added to its size.  You have to smooth the surface to get it to stick.  Pin those words down with the heat from your hands to ease the heavier stuff into bonding with it.

Then, underneath, is the ice.  The dangerous, subversive stuff.  The hard and unpleasant surprise at the center of a vindictive snowball, or the slick danger that looks like maybe just a patch of wet on the road.  Sometime’s it’s there because the ground was warm, then later cooled with the blanket of snow, freezing it back up after it’s melted.  Maybe it’s there because it’s been packed down and driven over.  Enough pressure has been placed on it that it’s hardened.  Frozen up into something with a smooth surface and a chill of its own to infuse its own properties into that of the other snow types that are making their way into the snowball of a story.  But it’s the ice that’s at the center of the story.  It’s hardest to change the properties of the ice.

As authors, we simulate the human voice in our writing–each of our characters has their own “voice” – their own sound and rhythm of speech yes, but also their own outlook on life, their own values and their own worldviews.

But as authors, we also need our own voice–our particular, peculiar ways of telling stories that make those stories unique to us.  There are, at best, three dozen or so plots in the whole world so far–there is nothing new under the sun, and it’s the way we as individuals tell those stories that make them mediocre, or make them great.  Voice is that elusive quality that editors and agents look for that makes a book stand out, and sadly enough, it isn’t something that can be taught.

The only way to find your voice is to use it.  The amazing experience that is listening to a pipe organ is made or broken by the acoustics in its cathedral.  Same with your writer’s voice.  Find your cathedral and then let your Vox Humana echo from the rafters.

There’s nothing a writer likes better than accumulating words.  I just came down not too long ago from a period of 30 days where I had to produce 1667 words a day (or sweat catching up).  And lemme tellya, days where I pulled ahead, or got my words in early, those were good days. Thing is, though, when you’ve been doing this for longer than a week, you’ll start to notice something.  Everybody has writing goals and tasks that sound like the easiest thing in the world–”Write two pages” or “Write a thousand words.” And they inevitably finish with, “…and then I’ll have a novel!”  If I just let the snow fall–it doesn’t take work, it just takes gravity.

Haha.  I mock because I am jealous.  Because no, in ten weeks, I will not have a novel (and chances are, most of the rest of you won’t, either).   If I just let the snow fall…I still won’t have a snowman.  Oh, yes, at the end of ten weeks, I’ll have enough words to fill the pages between the front and back covers of a novel, but it will be a long ways away from being a novel.  And that blanket of snow on the ground is only a snowman in its unrealized, unrolled, unpacked, and un-balled form.

Accumulating pages and words is a great exercise for getting your brain into the practice of expressing what you want to say, but there’s a world’s more work in doing it. As anyone who’s participated in NaNo can tell you, it does give you a rush to realize you’ve created.

But I’m staring out my window at a white world and thinking that accumulation of words and pages is a lot like the accumulation of snow.  It’s beautiful when it’s happening, and there’s a myriad of good things that will come of it…but sooner or later, you have to go get the shovel and put it where it belongs.

But lemme tell ya about something promo-fied that is, in my humble opinion, promo-riffic. Most posters are of the agreement that the quality of their online interactions with authors means more than the quantity, and that the most egregious of author gaffes does come from the online arena. But in other venues and in other conversations I’ve had with readers and authors and PR people with an interest, the tchotchkes invariably come up, and the DA thread is no different. Some people love the bookmarks. Some people love the postcards (honestly, from the little research I’ve done, the postcards seemed cheaper, but if you roll-your-own bookmarks, five to a sheet, you can actually come out ahead. Postcards are only four to a sheet). Some people loathe both with the passion of a thousand erupting Hawaiian volcanoes. As a reader (and writers start out and continue as readers), I’m equally okay with bookmarks and postcards. Your bookmark comes in handy when I’m marking my place in someone else’s book (so does your postcard, but I bend paperback spines too. I am evil. EVIL, I tell you), but your postcard looks more like a scale-model of your book (and can fit more blurb text on it, too!), and thus it intrigues me more. Has a better chance to hook me.

However, both are items of transient usefulness and limited relevance. Eventually, and it will be sooner rather than later if I’m on a decluttering rampage, I will toss that bookmark or that postcard in the recycling bin. I will eat your candy and probably forget about you (but not before sending up a good thought at that kind fellow author that provided emergency chocolate to tuck in my purse at the event or conference). Your pens will get used, and used well, but ultimately die an untimely death at too young an age (because they seem to always go fast. I don’t think they’re making pens quite the way they used to). Plus, your name will have worn off rather before the pen dries up. Your keychain, business card, or plastic doohickey will blip up on my radar, but do so in a manner unrelated to either your career or your book. But I will tell you freely and with great passion, that if you happen to give away a bag at a booksigning…I am yours.

No, I don’t mean a grocery bag or a baggie. I mean one of those canvas totes with a picture of your book ironed on or silk-screened onto one side. And I will confess, the bag doesn’t have to be of particularly sturdy or well-ornamented quality, either. Although that’s a huge plus. Several years ago I won a drawing for a canvas tote of Rosemary Laurey‘s. It contained some nominal things I don’t even remember (although I think one of them was a stuffed bear dressed as a bat because my kid chewed the ear off it at one point). But the front of the bag has an iron-on transfer of the covers of Rosemary’s Forever Vampires books from Kensington Zebra, and the back has her autograph.

I take that bag everywhere.

It’s held books, dancewear, lunches, computer equipment, more books, groceries, crochet supplies, more books, notebooks, changes of clothes and diapers for children, totable toys, and books. In point of fact, it’s held every one of Rosemary’s books that appear on the bag front, and one or two more, to boot. And I know those titles and those covers on sight and by heart.

I have another bag, given by Samhain Publishing to attendees of Lori Foster‘s Readers and Writer’s Get-Together event held in Southwestern Ohio the first weekend in June. The Samhain bag is awesome–canvas panels and made extra roomy with mesh inserts. Nice long handles. I could fit a small kid in there. My oldest did fit a small kid (my younger) in there. Thankfully, he didn’t get away with it. I take that bag with me to many, many places, too. The book covers are smaller and a little harder to read, but Samhain’s never far from my mouse when I’m scouting for something to read.

In this day and age, going green is all the rage. I reuse and recycle grocery bags. I have crocheted net bags from leftover scraps of Ye Olde Yarn Stash (and I have a stash, yes I do. I am a happy and well-kept hooker). And the canvas bags I’ve amassed from years of conferences, conventions, subscriptions to magazines, and professional meetings have all found life and use, safely tucked one inside the other and accompanying me every time I go to the grocery store. I get a three-cent discount for every new plastic bag I don’t use, thanks to my bag o’ bags.

I try to conduct my “author presence” by being thoughtful, relevant, and useful, and promo should be the same way. When I next find myself ready to promote a book, and with the wherewithal to do so, I’ll be doing it “green” as well as “relevant and useful” and via canvas tote.

There are standing-room-only business seminars going on all over the country about the impact of social networking sites like Twitter, blogs, Facebook, et cetera. These social networking apps are all wildly popular, even crossing the boundaries into realtime discussions on places like NPR and Slate.com where Facebook is cited in the category of tools as ubiquitous as “email and antiperspirant.” We all instinctively know that these places are important–important enough to think that surely everyone must be using them. And they are, from Manhattan to Mars. The Phoenix Mars lander (@MarsPhoenix in case you’re wondering) live-twittered its landing and subsequent exploratory career, and is still Twittering away. It also follows others’ tweets – keeping up with coworkers Spirit and Oppy (@MarsRovers) on March Madness (NASA-style), wondering what got stuck on their shoes, and how their colleague Cassini (@CassiniSaturn) is doing on the quest for a ring.

Friends and families use social networking sites to keep up with each other over long distances and tight schedules. For the regular Joe and Jane, there’s little problem with using the sites as they were mainly meant to be used–as collections of daily life–snippets of thoughts, photos, little silly games that can be played in five-minute breaks, and small chats with each other. But how do you navigate something that’s the internet-based equivalent of The Great Office Breakroom when you play a public figure?

The first important thing to remember is that the social networking sites on the internet are not the direct correlation to the Breakroom or the Water Cooler. The internet has a memory, and it can be a long one. Also, you are being watched on the internet. By Google and everybody. If you are in the hopefully-enviable position of having someone searching specifically for you, then they will find whatever can be traced to you…whether you want them to, or not. Social networking sites are all *public* spaces, even though they may feel private. There is–or will be–a strategy that needs to be considered when using them, since we are, to some extent, public figures.

I don’t think that authors, agents, editors, etc. need to be restricted from Twittering or whatever. But be truly aware that your professional identity will garner you a following for professional reasons, so if you are twittering personal stuff, it’s going to be shown in a professional capacity, too. It’s fine to Twitter or blog about cats or personal party anecdotes, but be aware that if you’re presenting an identity as a professional person (in any sort of capacity, not just publishing) then using your professional contacts or notoriety as a captive audience to your frustrations with the biz may have some unintended consequences.

Social networking also presents the larger body of public opinion with a direct and immediate megaphone. Recently, the Twitter hashtag #amazonfail documented in realtime not only the events surrounding Amazon’s de-listing of content identified as “adult” (many times erroneously so, and apparently focused on GLBTQ-oriented publications), but the very real, visceral, and public reaction to the event and the company’s subsequent explanations. And on a somewhat more positive note, the meteoric rise at light-speed of an unemployed charity worker auditioning for “Britain’s Got Talent” courtesy YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites pushed her from “Local Girl Done Good” to “International Viral Media Hit.”

Now on the other, more fun, hand, social networking sites provide an immediacy of contact and a level of suspense that we as authors should appreciate. Approach Twitter with the immediacy for which it was intended. The basic question is simply, “What are you doing now?” and that question can be streamlined into an approach to Twitter that will use that immediacy for unique ways to express yourself. If you have an author presence on Twitter, and have amassed some followers, ask yourself what you would do as an author if you had an immediately responsive audience present in front of you…because on Twitter, you actually do, to an extent.

One more thing to remember about social networking sites is that they have the tools to become interconnected–Twitter feeds can go to Facebook, and Facebook feeds can go to blogs and vice-versa. Linking your feeds can be a real time-saver on a species of internet sites designed to suck the time away.

And finally…remember that in all the neat technology and new ways to reach out and touch someone else’s pixels, that first, last, and always, the eternal truth out there is that CONTENT IS KING. Whatever you choose to say…make it matter, and others will listen.

Now…I do try to participate in some things here and there. I’ve been known to get into web-based discussions or email loop chats about one thing or another. But I am not by nature a very peppy person, and if there’s one thing they give you when you get that “OMG I sold a book, now WTF do I do?” it’s the feeling that you absolutely, positively need to become Pollyanna in public. Okay, there really is no “they” and there’s no hit squad that will hunt you down for wearing the crankypants every so often, but if you do happen to be around the Romancelandia side of the internets, there are some pretty memorable examples of what happens when Authors Behave Badly that will convince you that if you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut and your fingers off the keyboard. And if you can say something nice, better to leave the keyboard anyway, just in case it wasn’t nice enough. To be honest, it’s not that far off the mark. Being kind and polite to people keeps things civilized, and heaven knows the internets are full enough of populated troll-pastures.

But I also have to be honest in saying that I have a pretty low fill-requirement for the tried-and-tested fare found on many Romancelandia menus. Not that I don’t appreciate the hunks, and the squeeing, and the dirty jokes (because I do–I’ll take a Double-entendre shot of Freudian slip with my coffee every chance I get), but I find myself gravitating towards parts of Romancelandia where the washboard abs and kinky humor are served with a hearty helping of more serious discussion.

Now don’t get me wrong–I love giggling over over-the-top erotica as much as I love writing it (and giggling when I’m doing it), but I refuse to believe that we’re all reading and writing romance, erotica, and erotic romance in a literary vacuum. I know I’m not just writing to titillate. I’m putting some heart and soul and gray matter into it, too, and I’d bet good money that readers are putting a nice hunk of their own gray matter into thinking about what the authors are writing about. And I’m sure we can discuss that while remaining civilized, and without losing our enthusiasm for the genre.

It’s beyond doubt that piracy hurts authors.  Unfortunately, no one’s yet been able to quantify how much.  And just as it’s hard to prove a negative, no one can really determine whether or not it’s a one-to-one correlation between illegal downloads and lost sales.  I’m operating on the generally-accepted idea that the majority of “pirates” would not have purchased an ebook if they weren’t able to get it free.  I’m also operating on the assumption that most people don’t go out of their way to get something for nothing unless they are either hard-up, or just assholes.  In small-scale marketplaces, and in much of the world, and for much of the world’s history, “value” is a fluid concept.  My own experiences in countries outside the US, and at small market venues like flea markets, yard sales, bazaars, and other individual transactions, along with the haggling scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian suggest that this is not an unusual state.  Bargaining, dickering, haggling, back-and-forth–are all dialogues that help interested parties determine agreed-upon value of something.  Value that both parties in the transaction can live with, if not celebrate.

This to me suggests that there are some parties out there who find no value in an electronic file.  But there are many, many parties who do, and those are the parties I care about reaching.  Of course, I can ‘t do that if I can’t feed my cat.  The problem is, essentially, how to compensate authors of creative works without punishing those who want to compensate while at the same time penalizing or neutralizing those who actively work to deprive the authors of said compensation.  I’m not talking about somebody who emails a copy of one of my ebooks to their best friend in an, “OMG you HAVE to read this!” email–hell, I want to find those people and shake their hands.  I’m talking about wholesale pirates–people who go out of their way to actively divert customers away from a legit venue and into a not-so-legit one.  People who chop and scan books or burn pirated DVDs extracted from the factory prior to shipment of the release in mass quantities.

One of my key thoughts on the matter is this–most people won’t pirate if it’s easier to find something legitimately.  And more significantly, if people feel the cost of acquiring that something is fair, they will pay it.  But that’s the key, isn’t it?  The value of that something has to be a fair and reasonable value, and neither fair nor reasonable is easily quantifiable.

Quantifying the effect of piracy on the ebook market in simple financial terms also presents an incomplete picture.  We can’t really understand a way around piracy until we understand better the full value of a creative work, and it can’t be accurately measured in simple sales.  And we will lose the battle against piracy if we choose only to measure it in financial terms, and ascribe its only value in the commercial.  If one thinks of a lost ebook sale, what comes to mind is a single copy of a book, say, a mass-market paperback.  Valued at 4.99-8.99, it most tangibly represents what we tend to think of as a book, and it most tangibly also represents about six ounces of pulp paper, cardstock, ink, and glue.  If someone walks out of a store with a paperback stuffed up their shirt, they’ve walked off with about six bucks worth of raw materials.  It’s the intangibles that count, and the intangibles that make up the majority of the book’s actual value.  Enough people believe that a book is the sum of its raw materials and some vague quantity of “a little more” for what’s on the pages.  We know different, and so do they, if you get them to think about it.

Getting them to think about it is the hard part.  Artists do not have that much value in our culture.  Mention that you want to be an artist to your relatives in the tender college years and you’ll get a variety of responses, most of which will encourage you to study something “worthwhile” or “more reliable.”  Mention that you want to make a living off artistic pursuits, and you’ll be encouraged to find a “real job” you know, just to “fall back on” (translation, you’re expected to fail, and on the off-chance you do succeed, you won’t see enough money to be a contributing member of society and you’ll therefore become a drain on it).

Part of the problem is that art is so tied to commercial endeavors, at least in the publishing world.  In the past, there existed an idea of patronage–an artist’s expenses were subsidized by a patron (aka a wealthy noble)–the artist’s food, shelter, materials, and equipment were paid for, leaving the artist free to create works which were shared with the public, and in so doing, bestowing upon the patron the respect and accolades one would receive for enabling the continuation of the arts.  Oftentimes, in payment for the patronage, the subject matter of the artist’s work could be directed by the patron, mutually beneficial for both individuals to a certain extent, and potentially censorious in another.  If it became enough of a problem, though, an artist could find a new patron more receptive to his or her subjects of interest.

I have no interest in being a kept woman, any moreso than I am currently kept (by people I’ve either married or given birth to).  I do, however, have an interest in being both read and fed.  I can’t change the way our culture views art and the creation thereof, but I can think about trying to encourage a few minds at a time to think about where the real value is in the things they own.