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.

And yet, when our one stop is the computer in front of us, it isn’t enough. Instead of one internet, we seek out one site. Now, granted, the modern version of resources (credit cards and identity) are still being preserved, but I have to wonder what it is in our logic that says a company that produces a product on the internet needs another company to distribute that product on the internet, when both companies are merely placing “buy” links and shopping carts to the same virtual product. With distributor discounts ranging from 15% to 65% I’m forced to ask, where’s the value?

In the print publishing world, distributors have an important job and many expenses that justify the distributor discount. Shipping, storage of physical stock, placement at actual points of sale, inventory management–none of that comes free, and I get that (oh, how I get that, from my days in lean manufacturing, I get that). But where is the cost associated with storing and shipping electrons? Are site hosting and credit card processing really worth 65% of a book’s cover price?

Distribution between creation and retail is a necessary model in physical stock inventory, but not so much in the digital world, and we need to think differently about the supply chain both as producers and consumers, or we risk missing an opportunity to redefine value and streamline a system that has been static and change-resistant, simply because we are creatures of habit.

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.

I’ve been reading a lot of tech blogs, since as a longtime geek, I’m more comfortable with the Silicon Valley side of things, rather than the Madison Avenue end.  I’ve read Cory Doctorow’s thoughts, and a few of his books, too.  I’m reading Lawrence Lessig right now, in an attempt to better understand, and maybe envision, a way that the wild, wild west spirit of the internets simultaneously shatters conventional business practices and yet seems so easily killed by them.  And what it will all mean to the artist–the author, the musician, the photographer, the graphic designer, the creative-class whose “product” is so easily convertible to new paradigms, and so ripe for being taken advantage of in those new paradigms.  Traditionally, the artist has labored under some version of patronage, whether it be a single individual or small group bankrolling an 18th century poet–keeping him in quills and parchment and a meal or two every so often in exchange for odes to the Patron’s largesse, philosophy, or skill with the ladies; or the distributed patronage of our current system of royalties from sales.  Both these systems force the artist to walk fine lines between commercialism and artistic vision–directing the art towards serving either the patron or the self, but never fully one or the other.  Of course, the bottom line is not “is my artistic vision as a writer free and unfettered,” but more, “can I continue to feed my spawn through this super-awesome job of making shit up and writing it down and showing it to other people.”

Now, I’ll be honest here.  I’m of two minds on this.  One part of me says, “Hell yes, I want to be the next Nora Roberts or Jenny Crusie.  Hell yes, I want those six- and seven-figure advances and be able to whistle a sweet little tune of avarice every time I step into the shower.”  The other part of me simply wants enough to keep my kids in shoes, keep the bill collectors off my damn lawn, and have a little extra left over for ebook downloads at the end of the month, while the accolades and maybe just a little bit of fame swirl around my ankles, occasionally rising to knee- and maybe thigh-level when I do something extraordinary.  Just enough to give me a warm feeling, not enough to turn me batshit-crazy because I can’t handle the fame and the pressure.  The question is–are either of these two scenarios feasible if digital book file sharing is in play?

Now the first thing off the bat that I want to say about this is–I want to table the discussion on the morality of file sharing for now.  I see it falling into the same broad category as after-market swaps of other goods, in spite of its virtuality.  I see both sides of the argument and find points of agreement in both.  But the bottom line is that with as much resources as any industry spends on crushing its undermarket, there will always be in existence that same undermarket.  Crack down on electronic file sharing and you get someone scanning in a print book.  Crack down on scanners, and some enterprising soul with time on their hands will hand-type the whole damn thing into a file.  Cut off their fingers and they will memorize it, recite it word-for-word, and perform free for either podcast or live performance, even if it’s to just a handful of other people.  People are creative, and that’s not going to change.  Possession is partly a consensus of perception.  So with that in mind, how can an artist still find recompense for sharing his or her work with other people? Does art have tangible value that can be used to generate sustainable artistry (ie, enough for an artist to live on so that s/he can continue to create)?  And the multi-part question that asks, is the value of that art diminished by the undermarket, in what ways, and in what ways is it or can it be enhanced by that undermarket?

My instinct is to say that file sharing is part of human nature (there will always be somebody looking for sumpin’ for nuthin’), and that a system of success means working with that aspect of human nature rather than in opposition to it.  Like the US’s idiotic “abstinence only” sex-education policy that completely disregards humanity’s formidable biological urge to fuck like bunnies humans and thinks that overblown horror stories, promise rings, and the vague threat of the belief that a big beard in the sky will shake a finger at you is going to block the urge of millions of years of successful evolution (which doesn’t require belief to exist, happen, and keep happening as we speak).  I’d rather work with that, or work around it, than butt my head up against it in futility.

The question of how to do that is anybody’s guess.  Doctorow et al are doing important and creative experiments with literature, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Radiohead are doing the same with music.  At some point, the paradigm shift will spit out an answer that will assign a real value to each step in the system, and some of those values will be at zero, others will be in the negative.  Something will be in the positive, because I don’t think people will stop listening to music, reading, making music, or writing anytime soon.  The question is how will doing it for love play out against needing to survive.

Time will tell.

Just taught me a little more about plotting than…oh, everything.

It’s a pinched nerve, and it’s up near the top of my spine, so my neck and back have twisted in knots, and my vertebrae are out of whack. Long story short, it sucks to be me right now, because I’m doing things with bags of frozen peas that ought to be illegal–and not in a good way.

Now what’s aggravating the condition (which I really didn’t know I had until it started to really friggin’ hurt), or at least, not helping it, is my new toy. Our new family toy, ahem. We prowled and waited and checked prices and got a nice Xbox360 over the holiday. The Spawn drooled so much over Halo 3 that the move came partly to preserve the carpets, and Mr. Xandra found it in himself to embrace the 80′s in a way we never did when they were actually here via Rock Band. Yes, it’s like Guitar Hero only it’s more like…Guitar, Bass, Drums, and Vocals Hero all rolled into one. There is nothing more hysterical than watching your friends, one by one or maybe in twos if you’ve got an extra controller do their impersonations of Axl Rose on nerve stimulants…except gathering around the ol’ green ring to engage in arthritic finger contortions, smash on a practice pad of giant, color-coded circles, and screech into a microphone in a manic breed of mutant karaoke

In addition to the freakin’ cool songs you get to unlock on Easy setting (like Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper, which is made of win and more cowbell!), you get to create your own rawk gawd (or gawdess) and customize your pixelated self-insert into the music scene with hair, eye, and skin color (including all the eye-cramping shades found in the Manic Panic line), styles of head-hair and face-hair for the guys, and you can even pick your rocker’s attitude (I’m a little in love with the “goth” ‘tude because it makes your rocker do funny ‘woo-woo’ things with his or her hands). There’s also a stunning array of ink styles by some pretty big names in the tattoo world, and even face paint, if you don’t want the students at your day job knowing the vice principal rawks out on the weekends with groupies.

So besides the fact that I could get lost in picking out clothes, shoes, hair, and makeup for my rocker (I have a chick with white and blue anime buns for my primary rocker–she’s a cutie), standing hipshot with a guitar controller slung over one shoulder and hunching over it while twisting my fingers into knots is not helping my posture any.

But that’s what the groupies are there for.

So I finished NaNoWriMo and produced 50,000 words of utter craptasticness that will someday be edited into something fit for human consumption. But to celebrate, I gave myself the gift of Nerd. I finally got Compiz-Fusion up and running on my rig and boy is it sweet like honey and chocolate and oral sex with a coffee chaser. Now for those of you who speak Geek, I’m a recent convert to Ubuntu from Gentoo Linux (oh, so, customizable, but when my laptop had hard-drive death, I did not have three whole days to customizably build it from the screws up…and well, Gutsy Gibbon had just come out and even though Gentoo is a kickass distro when it comes to powerful custom rigs, Gutsy was new and pretty and the Ubuntu forums are a very well-stocked place in the tweaking department and…).

So anyway…enough with the geekspeak…on to the screen shots!

I have the ability to “zoom out” to view all four of my virtual desktops and rearrange my apps between them. I keep email and net stuff on one desktop, Writer’s Cafe on another, graphics stuff on the third, and media on the fourth, so that my desktop at 100% zoom is not cluttered, giving me a lovely working space in which to play.

This is a shot of the desktop cube. Linux has the capability to make your desktop larger than your monitor screen–mine is 2 screens wide and 2 screens high, giving me 4 virtual desktops to spread out all my apps. I switch between the desktops using this awesome cube. The cube exists in a skydome, with graphical caps on the top and bottom surfaces. Freakin’ sweet.

My app switcher isn’t just alt-tabbing–I page through the apps on a desktop in this nifty little ring thingy that cycles them around each other. It’s like having a little circus that features geeks. Well…not real circus geeks, because my laptop apps don’t bite the heads off live chickens. Although I bet I could find a widget that features virtual chickens, with and without heads. I bet I could.

If I don’t feel like paging through my three-ring circus of apps, I can window-switch ‘em if I want using different keys. My apps page through like 3d cards. Much like Windows Vista’s 3d eyecandy rendering. However, of the few people I know who have actually been forced to upgrade upgraded to Vista have turned off their eyecandy because it’s a friggin’ resource hog.

After a month as intense as NaNo,  I take a bit of a well-deserved break due to temporary burn-out, and what better way to rest my brain than tweaking my workspace.  Eye candy, yes.  Brain candy, too.  And all free.

Now, I’ve taken some history classes, and read some history books–enough to know that there’s a crapload that I don’t know about the Middle Ages, and enough to know that I consider myself just ignorant enough to not be able to do them justice in fiction–I’m caught between some of the realism I know would just suck to have to live in, and the romantic fantasy that continually draws me to places like the SCA’s Pennsic War in the hopes of capturing just a whisper of that magical feel.  But for the most part, I get that a woman’s lot was short, brutal, and over too quick.  Especially a monarch woman’s.  But the fact that Poland actually picked a queen and afforded her power in her own right is astounding.

Interestingly enough, the crown brought several suitors to her doorstep, and in true medieval romance fashion, one of whom planned to pop the princess and present himself as husband accompli.  That plan was derailed, however, and the princess married a Lithuanian twenty-plus years her senior but apparently a monarch with Poland’s better interests at heart.  Her position likely held little power due to her youth, femininity, and the Polish system of government, but she was able to use her influence to benefit her people.  Not the least of this was restoration of a university, and the translation of Latin books into Polish, thereby bringing books to her people.  Alas, the perils of the medieval health care plan recognize no regency, and the young queen was a month past giving birth to her only daughter when both mother and baby failed to recover.  Jadwiga was twenty-five.  She survives as St. Hedwig, patron saint of queens.

So today, I learned something new.  Part of Eastern Europe had a government with checks and balances present, and an attitude with the beginnings of gender equality (tempered heavily by the whole hereditary kingship thing).  And that the definition of “benevolent medieval queen” includes “try to find your people something to read.”