Two 'must-reads' for e-book biz people: The glories of simplicity and interactivity

Sure enough, the e-book version of The Solomon Scandals was the first to find a buyer. And guess what? He doesn’t even live in the United States; rather, in Canada.

The second buyer, in Phoenix, Arizona, also bought E.

If publishers want to make money in this recession, they’d better take e-books seriously, given the economies of the medium and the global possibilities.

But in regard to E and the publishing industry, the old Pogoism continues to apply. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Here’s fresh ammo to show how publishers and tech companies are crippling e-books by way of format/DRM complexities and lack of sufficient interactivity

#1: Unwanted—-in fact, hated—complexities

Consumers are begging for simplicity, and the e-book business is not yet giving it to them. Not even the Kindle, Oprah’s “life-changer,” is up to snuff here. Amazon favors a proprietary DRMed format, alas. Best to drop the DRM and use nonencrypted ePub, so that Kindle buyers can own their Kindle Store books for real—available for use on their iPhones and any other gadgets they have, without the need for DRM-cracking or file conversions.

I’d heartily recommend that Jeff Bezos and others in publishing-related areas check out The Year of the Simpler Gadget, Damon Darlin’s piece in today’s New York Times. The piece is a must-read. What applies to video game boxes and video cameras certainly applies here. It’s high time to raze the Tower of Babel and kill off DRM to enlarge the market for e-books. I remain skeptical of all this talk of a DRM standard, given all the changes in technology. Even now, Mobipocket can’t or won’t even port its software over to the iPhone, and you can bet that a DRM standard won’t save consumers from similar gotchas and complexities in the future.

Far better for the International Digital Publishing Forum to create a logo for e-books in the nonencrypted ePub format. Now, that is a a standard. The longer the IDPF waits to do the logo, the more people will see organization as just an advocate for the DRM interests. Come on, IDPF. Give us a holiday gift, and follow through on that logo.

#2: Insufficient interactivity

Along the way, the IDPF should also take care to come up with a genuine standard for shared annotations—to make it possible for people to share notes when they’re reading books and even contribute to forums. Sites like BookGlutton are into the notes scene already. But it’s high time for a standard.

Once again, let me cite a must-read—in this case, a Times piece summing up Don Tapscott‘s Grown Up Digital, on the 11-to-31-year-old Net Gens, aka Millennials.  I have not yet read the Tapscott book, but for now I’d certainly agree with the observations below in the Times:

Mr. Tapscott says the Net Generation, also known as the millennials, is the biggest in history. He notes that more than 81 million people in the United States were born from 1977 to 1997, and that they now make up 27 percent of the population. By comparison, the baby boomers, born 1946 to 1964, were 77 million strong and are now 23 percent of the population.

But what really makes Net Geners different, Mr. Tapscott says, is their lifelong experience in using the Internet. Their parents were a television generation that watched the tube an average of 22.4 hours a week. Net Geners watch TV only 17.4 hours a week on average, but they spend 8 to 33 hours on the Internet. Whereas TV is basically a one-way broadcast medium that requires only passive participation, the Internet is a collaborative medium that invites simultaneous participation from multiple users all over the world.

Hello, IDPF? So when it will be possible for user-to-user communications in forums that are built into books—with ways for the book authors to do stable hyperlinks to messages that readers may post? I’m not happy with just the usual Web forums. I want everything to be self-contained within the book files and still be updatable.

From my experiences with the TeleRead blog, I know that some of the most valuable material is in the comments that readers make—some of them as long as or even longer than the original posts that inspired them. There’s no reason why the same idea couldn’t apply to books, so that they can reflect this group intelligence, not just that of the author.

I’m not suggesting forums, etc., for every book—I still have mixed feeling about this for fiction, at least the kind where the author’s vision is paramount—but they are a must for many forms of nonfiction. Especially that includes the how-to variety, which lends itself naturally to interactivity, collaboration and community. I’d love to see DearAuthor cover the possibilities for romances, moreover, one kind of fiction where this might work.

Detail: Lida Quillen, the publisher at Twilight Times Books, has a privacy policy and didn’t share with me any details that would make the buyers individually identifiable. So if Ben Bradlee wants to order a copy of The Solomon Sandals to see if it’s about the Washington Post—it really isn’t—I won’t be the wiser.