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Via the Book Oven Blog, an nifty little French video by Editis:

I mostly agree with what I’m seeing here, and it gets me excited. Except for two things:

1) When they get to the museum and scan the art book into their reader. I call bullshit. Art books are objects you own. They go on your coffee table, or on your bookshelf in a place of pride.

2) In the bookstore, again, replace all those trade paperbacks with really nice quality, upscale, finely printed and bound codices.

Quality, upscale, finely printed and bound codices will still have a place in our lives. Even more so than things like vinyl records. It’s the cheaply-made mass market (and to a lesser degree, trade paperback) editions whose days are numbered.

There’s a fascinatiing conversation going on on Tor.com right now about the Espresso Print-on-demand book-making machine and its implications for readers. Check it out here.

I’ve been saying we’d see a proof-of-concept for a high-res, bendable OLED or similar display before 2009 was out, but I didn’t expect it to be announced this soon. I can totally see an e-reader being made out of this material:
Contrast – A Sony OLED VAIO Laptop Concept from Sony Insider on Vimeo.

The Contrast Vaio laptop uses a foldable seamless OLED for the display and the keyboard, but as the videos show the keyboard can fade away and the whole thing can display something else. This concept has no restrictions on layout and size, and is extremely durable and shock resistant. Like the other Contrast product concepts, it is made of high performance flexible bioplastic.

And that will be the end of the newspaper and magazines as we know them.

via Contrast – The Flex OLED VAIO Laptop Of Our Dreams? | Sony Insider.

Salon.com’s got a nice post-game on the Publishocalypse that went down earlier this month in Jason Boog’s “Read it and weep.”

Who will survive publishing’s Ice Age? Undoubtedly, the companies that can command developments in the impending digital book revolution.

Well thanks, Captain Obvious. The word “book” in the phrase “digital book revolution” is unnecessary—the so-called digital revolution is upon, above, behind, around, inside, between and [insert more prepositions here] us, and it affects everything. To think that printed books are somehow immune to the sea-change that the information economy is imposing on our society is silly and near-sighted, to say the least.

The question isn’t so much the “what”—it’s the “how ” of the matter that really has a lot of people stumped. For what it’s worth, I don’t disagree with Boog: the real winners here will be the small, agile shops. Hopefully the indies, like McSweeny’s, and Subterranean Press in the SF/F world, but also (and I admit I’m slightly biased, because well, I’d like to keep my job for now, thanks) small spinoffs from large, corporate publishers like HarperStudio and Tor.com.

Working in publishing, being relatively new to it, and being involved in one large publishing corporation’s efforts to make sense of this series of tubes, I have some thoughts about how things should maybe play out in order for publishers to adapt to modern times.

On the role of the Publisher

I think publishers (and editors) need to start thinking in slightly more media-agnostic terms, and they need to embrace the opportunities afforded by being shoved into the digital age (sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes not), where your cost-per-unit is not dependent on bulky, expensive, and wasteful physical manufacturing processes (which, in essence, is what commercial book-printing is). While there are other costs associated with eBook production that may not be evident at first look (especially at the onset), electronic always trumps physical when it comes to the accessibility of the means of production.

Additionally, I think fiction editors need to look beyond the novel—or even the book as we know it—as the final product of their efforts. To paraphrase a co-worker, the truly great editor is an advocate for his authors and their ideas, and I think that this advocacy needs to extend into as many realms as necessary. Upon acquisition, an editor should ask themselves not what kind of book should this piece of intellectual property become, but whether it should become a book at all! Should it instead be an information-dense website; or a live-action movie; or a serialized, episodic narrative on the internet (see how far I’ll bend over backwards to not say “TV show”?), or a video game; or a presentation (think Al Gore); or a work of graphic narrative; or an animated movie (these last two most definitely NOT being the same thing)? Once the editor and the author have decided what this piece of IP should be, media-wise, it’s then the editor’s job, with the backing of the publisher, to find the correct producers for that idea, be they printers, eBook-makers, film-makers, game designers, comics artists, etc.

On books, specifically

As a book lover and collector, I do think there will be a space for printed and bound books for a long time to come¹. I just think that it will be a very limited market: for people who like books as objects, for art or photography books (including graphic storytelling), or beautiful collections.

On the technological side, however, things are moving fast. People are starting to read on their iPhones and other smartphones, the ePub format is gaining some serious traction, and devices like the Kindle and the Sony Reader are also becoming more sophisticated (think about the current iteration of the Kindle and similar devices as the same as the 13-inch, black and white tube television prevalent in the fiftes ans sixties). I wouldn’t be surprised to see colour, increased resolution, and maybe even rudimentary animation on eInk technology by the end of 2009, at least in proof-of-concept form.

This very well may be wishful thinking, but my vision for a holistic book publisher of the future is one which concerns itself with both the analogue and the digital life of a work of fiction, and works at or around three editions of a work that probably need to be published at the same time—this whole business of waiting a year to publish a mass market edition of a book is nonsense in a digital world.

1- Premium Printed Edition—The first edition would be a physical object: a beautifully-designed Premium Printed Edition, exquisitely-printed, bound in small numbers, destined for a small market of higher-end customers and collectors—much like music and movie boxed-sets.  Accompanying this tome would be a Unabridged Digital First Edition, which would include any multimedia elements that make up a part of the book (such as embedded movies, music, maps, illustrations, etc); as well as ancillary material that is not necessarily part of the book itself (think documentaries on related subjects, interviews with the author, etc). This would sell for a premium price, let’s say $50-$60².

2- Unabridged Digital Edition—At the same time as the Premium Printed Edition is released, you release that Unabridged Digital Edition that you included with the Premium Printed Edition as a stand-alone purchase, priced at around $10-$20 bucks. I think this price range is justifiable for a first electronic edition that is chock-full with additional elements that you don’t have in a regular, printed edition of a book. Additionally, buying this edition automatically entitles the buyer to download future, updated editions of the same book, either for free, or for a ridiculously low fee (I’m thinking like a dollar). Once you start including multimedia content with a work of fiction, and packaging it all together in an attractive way, editions become version numbers, and books truly become software in an ideological sense. This changes the work of an editor and an author: if an author so chooses, their work is never finished, and the author retains a very accessible way of adding, amending, and otherwise iterating on a previously-published work in a timely manner; likewise, an editor becomes even more of a shepherd, and the act of editing a book can become an ongoing curatorial pursuit. But I digress. Moving on…

3- Abridged Digital Edition—Still at the same time as the Premium Printed Edition and the Unabridged Digital Edition are released (remember, staggered publishing is for suckers in the digital age—you only need to walk Canal street on a movie’s theater release date to see the DVDs on display, and the fallacy in that model), you release the Abridged Digital Edition at mass-market prices: Say, $2-6 bucks, tops. This Abridged Edition is just the plaintext of the work in question—well-designed, nicely typeset, but no multimedia, no maps, no art, no entitlement to future iterations, no nothing. Words on a screen. Hell, if it were me, I’d offer this edition as a free download.

An aside: While incredibly nifty technology, I see Print-on-Demand as a stopgap measure between the phasing out of mass markets and trade paperbacks, and the true ubiquitousness of e-reading, so it doesn’t really fit in this model.

As it becomes more and more obvious that digital is the way to go for publishing (not that it ever wasn’t, really, it’s just that the big boys are now actually altering course on their big boats), many ideas will hit the market, and many will die before a successful model is found. This, I think, is a scheme that could be sustainable, and embraces the best of both the digital and the analogue worlds. Would it work? Is it too simplistic an approach? Is it going too much against accepted practices in the publising industry? Does it leave too many people that now depend on the infrastructure surrounding printed books out in the cold? I don’t know. What do you think?

¹ At least until people around my age all die off—children nowadays are consuming most of their media via digital interfaces earlier and much more often than before. I would be very surprised if a thirty-year-old of 2030 has a problem with reading off a screen, like many of my contemporaries do.

² All dollar values are purely off-the cuff, and more meant to reflect a relative pricing scale for different editions, than reflect any real costs associated with publishing—I’m just sayin’. A formal P&L is not part of this excercise…yet.

It’s no secret that the Amazon Kindle has reinvigorated interest in dedicated ePaper-based reading devices (if not necessarily publishing industry profit margins, just yet). It’s also no secret that the Kindle is absolutely atrociously designed, and that its closest competitors, the Sony Reader and the iRex Iliad, are not much better (although aesthetically much more pleasing).
Enter Plastic Logic and their as-yet-unnamed reader. It’s got almost everything that would make me want to buy a dedicated reading device. Let’s do the checklist:

As large as a sheet of paper: Tiny is not always better. I don’t necessarily mind reading books and documents on, say, my iPhone, but it’s nice to have a decently-sized reading area. As long as I can stick this in my bag in place of reams of paper, it’s still a space-saver.

Thin as all hell, and pretty light: This baby is 0.3″ thin. I could see myself slipping this into my bag along with my MacBook Air, no problem.

Touchscreen: My iPhone has spoiled me—I want a touchscreen on everything now. I find myself reaching for the screen on my laptop all the time, especially when I’m using an application that’s also present on the iPhone, such as Google Maps. The fact that you can flip pages, use a soft keyboard, and even mark up documents with fingerstrokes is a big, big win for the Plastic Logic reader.

Full colour, high resolution display: Still lacking, but give it time. Like televisions, personal computers, iPods, and other devices, I can see this reader’s first couple of iterations be black and white, but eventually move to colour, once price and technology make it feasable.

Open platform: Here’s a place where Kindle and Sony particularly fail. They’ve locked their devices to certain formats. The Plastic Logic reader will be document format-agnostic, as it should be. The presentation at DEMOfall shows the reader explicitly handling PDFs and PowerPoint presentations.

Here’s that presentation:

This looks fantastic. Wrap it up in something other than PC beige, price it competitively with the iPod, and I’m pretty sure you’ve got a winner. I’ll be keeping a close eye on these guys as 2009 comes around.

In the future I can see a device with the guts of the iPhone, or even the MacBook Air, adopting this kind of display, and becoming a full-featured input/output device. I can has touchscreen Mac Tablet?

A little old school party rap to take you back to the days before imminent, tin-foil-hatted ragnarok:

And remember, kids: the shit goes down on 09 September. Set your calendars.

Jo Walton has a fantastic breakdown of possible solutions for life on other planets, based on different takes on the Fermi Paradox by various SF luminaries over on Tor.com. This reminded me of this post which I’d begun to write a little while ago, but languished in the obscurity of my ‘pending drafts’ queue for some reason or another. Regardless, here it is:

Scientists in Australia have determined that some of the organic compounds found on a meteor they’ve been studying were created in space and survived the meteorite’s entry and impact on Earth. From the paper’s abstract:

Carbon-rich meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites, contain many biologically relevant organic molecules and delivered prebiotic material to the young Earth. We present compound-specific carbon isotope data indicating that measured purine and pyrimidine compounds are indigenous components of the Murchison meteorite.

The big news is that some of those molecules are basic components of amino acids, the building blocks of life. So, what does this mean, exactly? Phil Plait has a great post on his site, Bad Astronomy, where he clearly explains the discovery, outlines the possible implications, an debunks all the “Iz I teh alienz?” chatter that’s been making the rounds through the internet since this discovery was announced.

In short, it is possible that some of the elements that created life on this planet may have come from space, but it’s also equally possible that they developed here on a young Earth, since any conditions that would enable the compounds to survive after impact would also be conditions primed to host the development of these compounds independently.

Regardless, it’s big news, and brain-candy for those of us with a science-fictional bent, who like to extrapolate from these scientific discoveries. This discovery, while not necessarily implying that life on Earth has its origins elsewhere in the universe, does seem to indicate that the elements required for the development of carbon-based life exist outside of our planet, and could have found a hospitable environment in which to develop and flourish into life on some other planet. This opens up the possibility for many interesting scenarios.

There could be very distant genetic cousins to humans living on a hospitable planet somewhere out there. Given the right conditions, such as those on Earth, they could have developed into as wide a range of flora and fauna as we find on Earth, and even developed sentient life forms. Unfortunately for xenophiles, cross-breeding would probably be out of the question (assuming we are still tethered to our meatspace bodies by the time we discover our cousins).

There could also be sentient life just now crawling out of their primordial ooze as we speak, giving us a chance to observe, sometime in the future (when our technology is sufficiently capable to observe direct, on-the-ground action in faraway places), the initial stirrings of evolved life. Could we also, at that point in our technological development, have access to tools that enable us to edit and alter that genetic evolutionary process? This is very likely, and opens up the door to some ethical debate as to whether our involvement would be appropriate. This could turn into the hot-button, abortion-like issue in the political world of the 24th century. Trekkies will bust out copies of the Prime Directive as reference. Furious debate will ensue regarding the age-old question: When does life begin?

In short, a bit of news that helps to place humans as a species, and humanity as a civilization, into perspective. Every new discovery like this helps us realize that more than even global citizens, we’re denizens of the universe, which serves to reinforce the need for us to explore the stars, and start working towards taking our place among them.

Solar, LED, leaf-shaped, bendy ‘invisible’ streetlights, designed by Jongoh Lee. I don’t know how well they’d stand up to the harsh elements, but in theory it’s a fantastic application, especially for places that are still off the grid.

Via Carey Tse’s twitter feed.

And by ‘live’, I mean ‘online, for your streaming pleasure’, of course. I’d embed it here, but the idea is for you to check out their site, and prove, via the power of your mighty and unique view, that this is a viable method of delivery for entertainment. That, and it’s on Hulu. They don’t allow you to embed video elsewhere. Bastards. But it’s also on iTunes, which is a promising step (except that, even after buying the Season Pass, priced at $3.99 for all three 15 minute episodes [see? I'll pay for something I support, it's not all piracy around here] the downloads won’t start. Double bastards).

Regardless of a few day-one hiccups (and despite the fact that it’s on Hulu, which I don’t like simply because they pulled Battlestar Galactica away from the iTunes store–yes it’s a grudge thing, so sue me), it’s funny, precious, witty, self-deprecating, and sing-along-y, just like the Whedon your mama used to make ya on the teevee. I’ll review in full once all three eps are up, probably on Tor.com (yes, we’re getting closer to that July 20 launch date…).

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.
I can’t wait to see this. The fruits of extra-curricular (as in, not within the studio system) efforts from Joss Whedon during the writer’s strike, Dr. Horrible promises to be the beginning of a slew of independent productions from established old-media talent, taking their toys and playing elsewhere, away from the profit-crazed monolith that is Hollywood. The plan is to release three episodes for free streaming on July 15th, 17th, and 19th. They’ll keep them online for a short while, then take them down in order to sell downloads and an extra features-packed DVD. Sounds like a good idea to me. From the Dr. Horrible youtube site:

The story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to. Featuring Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny and a cast of dozens.

Fillion. Whedon. The intertubez. Doogie Howser. Full of win. The cast and Whedon will be on a panel at Comic Con San Diego later this month, I’m going to try to catch that, and grill ‘em with questions. In the meantime, here’s a fansite which has been keeping everyone up to date on Dr. Horrible-related happenings.