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.

Same goes with manuscripts and characters.

My current WIP is in draft status, but it has scented an end of a sort, and my creative engine wants that end to happen as fast as possible–which is fine for a discovery draft. But I’m past discovery draft time and into “let’s make this presentable” time. Once you’ve got a handle on what the theme of your story is, your scenes have to express and enforce that theme in some way. But characters don’t always want to stay on task. There are greener pastures just out their windows, and they can see. And boy, do they want to explore said green pastures.

One of the things they tell you as a young or beginning writer is to play games of “what if.” And those games are great for building worlds and making plots and creating stories. But when it comes time to make sense of those stories, you have to pick a scenario and stick with it. You pick a worldview and the scenes in your story have to support that worldview, so those tangents your characters are begging you to follow–sorry, kids. rest stop only. Back on the bus, because school’s not out yet.

If you don’t yet know what your story’s theme or worldview is, consider asking, as my second grader does constantly, “Why do I have to do this?” Your story, like my second grader, needs to fulfill some requirement. Granted, your story’s requirement will probably be less “basic math and reading comprehension and spelling skills” and closer to “love brings people together” or “luck favors the prepared” (although come to think of it, my second grader is learning that lesson). If your theme isn’t yet clear, feel free to wander off on some of those promising-looking tangents, but once you identify what it is that you’re trying to say with your story, get back on the bus, or you risk letting your story languish on side roads, and readers can’t find you if you’re too far from that interstate.

Today, I’m the bug. On the interstate. I can see a deadline approaching (with the word “Peterbilt” emblazoned across the grille) and I’m flapping my little ladybug wings as hard and fast as I can over the keyboard in hopes that, like a quantum butterfly, I can effect change. Mostly the change from “X words” to “(X+5000) words*2^The End” words.

This one is research-intensive. I’m constantly tabbed-over to wikipedia, and Google Books (and lemmetellya–whatever issues I as an author or the Author’s Guild or publishing companies have with Google Books, it is an INVALUABLE research tool for extant material and out of print primary source material. If I had to plumb the library for this, it’d be weeks and probably more than a couple bucks). Also, there are a hundred and ten other sites I’m constantly flitting to and from, including the library in meatspace.

The trick to researching is that you only research what you need to continue. It’s too easy to dig into something just for its own sake and end up two weeks into the project and not have written a damn word. But I got a handle on this one.  And now I’m gonna go read a little bit more.  For research purposes. No, really, I need this…

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.

Part of the reason we are so on the ball this year is that We Have A Plan. Mr. Xandra and I sat down sometime back in October or November and decided we needed a Garden Vision, instead of a half-assed, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have fresh vegetables and cut down on the grocery bills a little?” idea that never quite pans out. Except in zucchini. Man, if money were measured to the zucchini standard, you could call me Croesus. We drew charts. On graph paper. And we planned out how many boxes we wanted, as well as what would go in ‘em. So after the Snowpocalypse finally melted away and the sun remembered that people live here and kinda need to see it every once in a while, we knew where we were going and we could hit the ground (literally) running (metaphorically).  I’ve recently begun to adopt some of this to my writing, because next to that feeling of  writing “The End,” there’s nothing quite like the feeling of, “yeah, I know where I’m going with this.” When you’ve got headlights in the dark, you can punch the accelerator.

Now, I come from a long history of pantsing. Back when my stories were written in crayon, I had fantastic starts that ended up in really random places, often dead-ends. I still go through multiple revisions, and I think I’ve probably as of now trashed twice as many words as I’ve kept. When I strike out into The Unknown, I usually do it without a map.

But lately, I’ve had to modify my adventuring into the mists. Writing time is always at a premium, and I have a backlog of ideas and a backlog of stories partially written or in varying stages of revision that aren’t doing anybody any good sitting on my home network.  So I said, this time, I’m doing it different.

Now usually, the career pantser will interject with the horror story of trying, and failing, to navigate by plot outline or something. And in the past, that’s been the case for me. Once a story’s plotted, it’s out of my head, and I have little desire to actually write it.  It goes in the file for “Save for the future when I need ideas.” Only problem is…I haven’t run out of ideas. Ideas are the one thing a writer rarely runs out of. But this time, I’m doing it different. I’m not taking a map.  I’m taking a compass.

Our garden plan is an awesome thing in theory. In practice, well, no plan survives contact with the enemy, as the saying goes, and this is the case with both the garden plan and the WIP outline. What the garden plan did was give us dimensions and boundaries in which to work. It gave us a compass and a sextant to find true north, and showed us the boundaries of our world.  That’s what I’ve taken with me in my WIP. I don’t have an outline plotted to the nth detail.  But I know where the shady spot is, where the swampy bits are, and which bits of green are the weeds.

It won’t tell me the exact path to take, but it will show me which ones are growing in the right direction. The steps I take are part of the discovery.

For some, an ebook is simply a different means of content delivery. They will enjoy the latest bestseller or their favorite author’s latest story in either digital or print form–it’s all the same to them. They want the story, and they want it when they want it. For others, an ebook is an opportunity to make changes in the process of publishing–for them, time spent hunting down out of print backlists of favorite authors, or missed books in a series, or even classics from the next fifteen-year overnight sensation, is only a process they engage in because it’s currently the only way to find that awesome book from 1994 whose title you can’t remember. These readers question why the access to the content requires an expiration date when it no longer requires a physical manufacturing process. And for still another group of readers, an ebook is an opportunity to change the way we experience a story.

No one is sure yet which of these groups has the closest guess to right as to what the future holds. But it would be crazy not to at least try to imagine what could be.

We still see ebooks through the reference lens of print books. But what if it doesn’t have to be that way? What ways could the benefits of instant online gratification find a way to enhance our reading experiences? What makes an ebook a unique experience, and what could make reading an ebook not simply different from reading a paperback or a hardback book, but better?

Playing it safe is a net gain in writing, too.  Writing from non-controversial points of view keeps a writer from offending people.  Sensible shoes keep your toes from getting cold if you find yourself standing in the shadows or away from the sun. And yet…without running that risk, those little piggies don’t have the chance to wiggle in the sunshine, and neither do your words.

It’s always more of a risk to write about something you feel strongly about.  It also takes more work.  It isn’t safe, and it’s certainly not inoffensive (although, honestly, nothing really is totally inoffensive–there’s always somebody around to get offended if for no other reason that they may be having a bad day and you’re the unlucky random target). But the payoffs can make you feel like you’re two inches taller and your legs look hot in skinny jeans and chunky heels (I make my own fashion statement–don’t judge).

The trick is to find a kernel of passion in your writing.  That kernel of passion will often be sensitive if you poke it.  It’ll hurt. It’ll shiver at the thought of going out without a coat to protect it from the world. It’ll definitely try to hide and fool you into thinking that there’s something else you should be more passionate about.  It’ll make you think you look fine wearing the loafers with the jeans, even if your white socks make you look like you’re prone to the moonwalk and should be short one sequined glove.

But I’m wearing strappy sandals today, in spite of my toes maybe freezing off. I’m heading for sunny spots, even if I have to walk through the shade, and dammit, my piggies are gonna wiggle in the sunshine.  I’m putting strappy silver sandals on my writing, too.  My current WIP wanders further afield than I am used to.  But I’m more excited about it than I’ve been in the planning stages of a WIP in a long time, and that, my friends, is what wiggling your piggies in sunshine feels like.

Whether from bad dreams, a too-cold bed–even when there’s a cat curled up on someone’s head, or “I heard a noise, Mom, our house is haunted, I swear.” (and no, the house isn’t haunted, it’s three years old and the place used to be a farm and a pasture, if we’ve got the ghosts of anything, it’s cows, squirrels, and the spirits of soybeans past, now go back to bed), my nighttime visitors will snuggle for about ten minutes, just until they fall back asleep, and then–off come the covers.  It gets me to thinking, these late-night invasions, and I’ve been thinking about covers lately.

Book covers, that is.

One of the persistent concepts I toy with on a regular basis is a question I keep asking myself.  How are ebooks different from print books? Followed up with the more interesting question of how can ebooks be more different from print books?

Both Alien Communion and Jolly Rogered have awesome covers.  Liquid Silver is one of the better houses for providing classy, quality covers, and they did so long before some of the other houses left the Poser-art covers behind in favor of photomanip and original artwork.  Each of my books has an excellent cover, as do many e-only and e-first releases.

But why just one?  I mean, ebooks can be found and “shelved” in multiple places, under multiple keywords, and under multiple sub-headings.  I see reissued print books in stores with updated covers, covers differing between hardback, trade, and mass market paperback editions, and books repackaged with movie stills.  I see books repackaged under different auspices–they started life as one genre or subgenre and after the movie came out or the hype exploded, they re-emerge with new covers to appeal to a larger audience attracted to a more general marketing appeal.

But all that takes time and money in the print world–a publisher has to seriously consider whether or not to create a new print run of a book when the old one might not have sold through, leaving extra stock with older covers on the publisher’s books. But things happen faster at the speed of electrons.

Not to say cover art is free in the world of epublishing–artists should be compensated for their work whether they paint in pixels or pastels. But if you write something cross-genre, say, Science Fiction Romance *cough* ;P then the online sales of your story aren’t limited to one shelf or the other, and perhaps your cover marketing ought not to be limited, either.

Every author wants to attract more readers, and the genre shorthand of visual cues on covers can help to reach a core audience within a genre, who knows what they’re looking for and knows what the cues mean.  But why limit that attraction to a single genre when cover cues can be used to reach multiple genres?  I’d love to know if anyone’s tried a simultaneous release with different covers–with a print or an e-book.  If so, was it a successful or wise decision? Do you feel you’ve reached more readers?  Do you feel multiple covers would give you the chance to reach more readers if you write cross-genre?

As a writer, it is mega-important for you to figure out your own personal flavor and brand of gut-rot.  I know, ewwwww, right?  But writer’s gut-rot can eat into your work and your writing and your career until you wake up one day and realize that this thing you once loved, you now hate and don’t know why.  So many writer-friends have told similar stories about something in their process, their career, their writer’s life, or elsewhere that unequivocally rotted out their passion from the inside. And if something is rotting in there, it needs to change.

That gut-rot might be a step in your process, like plotting (or not plotting, or the way you plot), or the efforts you put into promo (whether or not you’re published yet), a particularly draining critique group, a toxic business or personal relationship, or even unreasonable personal expectations (I’m not saying aim for the ground, but if your goals include “NYT bestseller list” or “XYZ publisher acquires me/puts me in lead title slot/spends millions on promo for my title” you are making your success dependent on factors not wholly in your power to control.

Which brings us back around to my broken streak.  It started last year, when I was whinging to Mr. Xandra about my six whole readers (honestly, I’m not sure if there are even six of you out there, LOL!  And I wasn’t whinging about you, I was whinging about the lack of more of you) and why didn’t I see more traffic to my blog. Pragmatist that he is, shut me up by telling me, “Duh, readers want something to read.”

Yep.  If it wasn’t for the hot air, my head would collapse in on itself sometimes.  I mean, I knew this stuff, I’m a smart chick, right? (Don’t answer that)

So I very quietly made a promise to myself that, come hell or high water, I’d make sure to post something in my blog once a week.  If I couldn’t post on the same day (which I often can’t as schedules for moms of little kids are fluid, at best, regimental at worst, and neither offer much in the way of free, quiet, quality, tranquil time in which to ruminate intelligently a la blog), then I’d use the handy-dandy magical “schedule post” button to make it cleverly look like I was showing up once a week, even if I was neck-deep in edits (which I was at one point) or otherwise occupied (several times).  I have (mostly) kept to this goal, and the goal remained something that would be in my control.  Last week, I should have scheduled my post earlier and been done with it before my troubles hit, but it’s a lesson I shall take with me into this week.  I can’t control how many blog readers I get–that’s up to anybody who stumbles across this out-of-the-way cul-de-sac of the internet.  But I can make it a place where readers have something to read.

Now, speaking of something to read…there’s a story that isn’t writing itself.