Posts tagged design
What books will be
Mar 23rd
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…
Mobile disruption
Jan 27th
Andrew Savikas has an interesting post on the importance that mobile multi-purposes device will eventually gain – or has already gained – compared to the dedicated devices like the Kindle, the Sony Reader and so on.
It’s a sustaining against a disruptive approach, Savikas argues. Mobile devices are more affordable and portable. And I would add they are already more widespread, besides having less (let’s call them) psychological barriers: people are buying them for doing lots of things, with reading being just one of them, and certainly not the main one. It’s still early to see who will emerge the winner – if there will be (only) one – but the argument for the mobile multi-purposes devices it’s strong. They will be with any probability the real driver for the explosion of the e-book market, despite the smaller screens and retroillumiation.
The related question is: what will become of the (e)book? Different formats bring to different texts: it would also be possible to argue that an e-book readable on an iPhone will have to be designed entirely differently from one readable on a dedicated device – which once again brings to some heavy-thinking on the workflow side.
And then there’s the tablet, of course. And anything else will appear in the near future.
Getting the basics right
Jan 25th
A very nice post (not surprisingly) by Kassia Krozser on Publishing Perspectives: How about a little back to the basics? points out what every publisher should know but is able to get amazingly wrong.
The article is well worth a read, I’d just like to stress a few points.
First of all, the shift from the quality itself of the object/content, to the quality of the reading experience:
I have no interest in improving the print experience. I’m looking to improve the reading experience, which to me going forward means getting digital books right.
This kind of requires a shift in perspective: in a book you don’t really need to work on the reading experience, it’s been more or less the same for the last centuries. But now it’s open sea, and it will be interesting to look at all the experiments that will be made in the near future. Should I name my favourite insight on this subject, it would be this:
Consider the Medium: It’s digital, not print. Endless “pages” of breathless quotes about previous books are annoying and pointless. I’ve already bought the book; I want to start reading. Dump page number — they make no sense and highlight the lack of thought going into the digital edition. There are more logical ways to create these references.
Finally, and this will be a (the?) crucial point in the next few years:
It won’t come as a surprise to see that most of the basics noted below relate to production and workflow.
A well laid-out workflow is paramount. But this does not simply means to get the contect out in as many devices as possible with as less work as possible: it means rethinking the content itself (back on this, soon).
Recent Comments