Publishers do not sell books – they sell content. Nothing new – I hope… – here. But in the digital shift this is more important than ever. This content may certainly center, especially at first, around books. But these will become something different from what are now. Four are the main forms that this content may take, it seems to me – I will talk about three of them in this post, and leave another one (the most interesting to me) to the next one. So:

Books as, well, books.
That is, the same content you’ll find in the bookstores, hopefully with a better structure and redesigned to best suit the different devices on which you will read the title. Apparently a simple task, in fact there still is a lot of work to do – and I believe that finding a new structure for the content will be an exciting feat for designer in the near future.

What are you selling here? Content in the form of an almost traditional book.

Books as networks.
That is, a book that explores part of the inner references it contains. If you are reading a novel that is part of a wider saga and you encounter a new character, a link may bring you to a brief description of who that character is, or to a crucial passage in a previous novel. If a passage has been quoted in other works, you may click and see the paragraphs from the other works and see how the passage you just read has been interpreted by other authors.

And much more. This kind of books add more layers to the main story – layers that one may or may not want to explore, but that may be interesting and turn useful in many cases. Books become in this way deeper in a quasi-physical way, as you may start following a link and follow a separate path from the main story.

This may also well be a rights nightmare: what will you be permitted to do? Will you be able to just look at citations from other titles? Will you gain access to entire books? Will you just gain access to brief articles that explain some passages? Will the agent/author permit you to alter the original text? And is this altering a text, actually? And on, and on, and on.

What are you selling here? Content in the form of links, references, quotes, added information. A content that explodes in a rizomatic way, closely linked to the main story, but that builds on it to create something different.

Books as gadgets.
This may be, well, everything. Take a book, and add images or videos to describe a character or a landscape. Put games in it. Add a soundtrack. Have actors read the text. Work with the net – link to websites, forums, create micro-communities or websites centered around the book itself. And many more things.

Not that I believe these will all be great ideas. In fact, I believe that the other options will be more successful and in the end will reveal themselves to be the real innovation.
But for some kinds of books it is well worth a try in the path to gadgetization. Think children books, or celebrity books. Think singers, or war reportages.

What are you selling here? Content in the form of a variety of media, all orbiting around a core content that is the spark for many different contents.

In the next post, books as…