I’ve spent some time playing with video, making machina movies, and doing a little programming. While I do share Robert’s concern that the cost of tools will move book creation out of the realm of the individual author (just as expensive tools and graphic requirements have moved computer gaming out of the realm of the individual programmer), I have a couple of additional concerns. First, I’ve never been blown away by any of the attempts to create program-intense reading experiences. From the early days of comic books on floppies to manga-versions of SF classics, to choose your own adventure style stories, all the cleverness seems to create a barrier between me and the story.

I’m not a luddite and I’m certainly willing to be proven wrong. Because I love the novel form, I like to think it will survive into the future rather than be replaced by something that involves large and expensive teams of developers (as happened with video games).

On the other hand, I once firmly believed that since eBooks don’t have covers, they shouldn’t need cover art. It turns out that at least some multimedia does help with books–at least in terms of encouraging sales.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

Wherever that point is, I’m talking about something that is more like a book than it is like a CD-ROM or a game or a movie.

As you move farther into those other creation forms, it’s quite possible the tools will be ever more expensive. Just as making films or plays has always cost more than painting and sculpture and those more than writing.

Roger

Because to my thinking, AJAX provides a low-investment high-impact path that doesn’t require expensive tools to write. The ‘prairielight’ frameworks are intended to give online AJAX-y capabilities to offline, desktop apps.

Adobe certainly has a history of charging for its creation tools, so AIR might follow the Acrobat or Flash model (pay for creation tools, get reading/viewing apps for free). I don’t know where Silverlight is expected to land.

But Prism and Sophie won’t carry any charges. (Sophie of course isn’t AJAX but is an easily mastered rich-media authoring tool.)

There are lots of editors for working with HTML and Javascript and CSS, some free or low-cost, some not.

As for imposing costs on self-publishers — professional tools for publishing have always cost money, whether it’s QuarkXPress and Photoshop in a current generation or “typesetting services and a designer” 25 years ago.

(Or maybe you use Scribus and Gimp for a no-cost approach. They’re certainly good enough. As an old-time equivalent. I guess that would be using one of those 1970′s IBM proportional typewriters for your typesetting.)

So this is just my long-winded way of saying I don’t expect it to be a problem, or any more of a problem than it has always been.

Roger