So it was very heartening to read this breakdown by Daniel Tenner (via Steven Gould) about what Wave is and isn’t, and what it’s good for and what it’s not designed to be:

Wave is not a social tool. It’s not Twitter, it’s not GTalk, it’s not Facebook. It was never designed to appeal to the crowds of geeks who are currently trying it out.

Wave is built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool for getting work done. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this very early stage.

I agree completely. Well, almost. I don’t necessarily think Wave’s appeal is limited to the corporate environment; quite the opposite: I see it becoming an invaluable tool for anyone who needs to communicate and collaborate: soccer moms organizing their PTA, artists collaborating on a project, designers working with clients, musicians brainstorming and shooting ideas back and forth, families trying to agree on a schedule, and yes, corporate suits collaborating on a business document.

In short: so far, so great. If I have one misgiving about Wave, it’s that more of my day-to-day co-workers and colleagues aren’t on it yet.

In your opinion, how is Tor.com leveraging New Media and the genre? What are the things that you’re doing right?

One of the things we’re doing the best, I think, is engaging with our audience, and listening. Publishing is a very insular industry, where insiders are constantly talking to each other, but very rarely do they actually talk to or listen to the actual end customer: the reader. There have traditionally been some very valid arguments as for why this is the case, but as digital media democratizes the world more and more, those arguments become much less convincing or even relevant.

Tor.com is one way in which we’re talking directly with readers, listening to what they have to say, and we’re finding out a lot about them. And I do mean a whole hell of a lot—some of the very dearly-held assumptions of the publishing industry really don’t hold much water with the reading public, and it’s very sobering to compare and contrast what I see and read every day on Tor.com in particular and the internet in general with what I see and hear from within the walls of the Flatiron building.

Read the whole thing over on Bibliophile Stalker.

I just got back from Reykjavik, Iceland, where I attended EVE Online Fanfest 2009 thanks to the gracious folk at CCP Games, whose game tie-in books Tor Books is publishing. They wanted their editor, Eric Raab, and I to check out their fanbase and their headquarters, so they flew us out for the weekend. What an experience.

First things first: these guys are amazing. They put out a top-notch product, are incredibly passionate about their work, and to a person are fans of the franchise. I didn’t meet one single CCP employee who didn’t give off the vibe of being part of a big, extended family, where everyone watches out for each other. It was pretty amazing. Also, the level of outreach to their fandom was remarkable. I mean, I suppose that’s part of the nature of running an MMPORG, but still, coming from a culture (publishing) where the fans/readers/customers are barely an afterthought, it was eye-opening.

Additionally, as a casual gamer, I found their plans for expanding the scope of their intellectual property very compelling. I won’t go into detail here, since I’m unclear as to how much is public knowledge and how much isn’t, but suffice to say that their plan of attack for the next 18 months is formidable. Their keynote presentation, which was conducted by Hilmar Veigar Petursson, the CEO of CCP (and one of the chillest fuckers I’ve met), was a pitch perfect combination of new information, showcases for new tech and demo videos, self-deprecating fun, and liberal Kool-Aid dispensing. Additionally, the panels I attended—from the lectures and QA sessions about the in-game economy, featuirng CCP’s in-house PhD in economics, Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmundsson; to the panels featuring prominent members of the alliances that for the core of the player associations in game—were fascinating.

Aside from the EVE-related events, we were, of course, in Iceland, and at a con, so there was much partying. I’ve learned a few key facts about Islanders: they like to drink heavily, and have a penchant for staying out all night—I never made it to my hotel room earlier than 6am. They apparently like to break drinking glasses—it wasn’t unusual for the dude standing next to me to drain his glass and not-quite-nonchalantly fling it against a wall. The streets are literally covered in broken glass by 4am. And they make the best goddamned hot dogs known to man. For reals.

On the food tip, Eric, Shane (one of the marketing people for CCP), and I decided to embark upon a night of morally ambiguous dining: we had whale (both as sashimi and cooked), puffin, and horse all in one night. All were delicious. But nowhere near as amazing as those hot dogs. Hm.

I also discovered Skyr, which is similar but not quite the same as yogurt. It’s a bit more sour, and I absolutely loved it. Mary Robinette Kowal, who lived in Iceland for a year, tells me that it’s available here in NYC at Whole Foods, so I’m going to have to check it out. I hope it’s the regular, untreated kind, and not the more commercial stuff, which is infused with fruits or vanilla, or caramel. That stuff is all right, but the raw stuff is better.

Unfortunately, what with the Fanfest, and the drinking, and the meeting the EVE developers, and the drinking, and the panels, and the drinking, we didn’t really get to leave Reykjavik at all. Eric and I tried to find a way to see the fabled northern lights (or Aurora Borealis), but unfortunately, circumstances conspired against us: according to locals, it’s hard to catch the lights in the light-saturated city; it wasn’t cold enough for the lights to be visible (although this sounds like misinformation; I don’t understand how temperature can affect a magnetic event); or it wasn’t the right time of year. In any case, an excuse to go back.

Another excuse to go back are the geothermal seawater baths, specifically the Blue Lagoon. Our contact person for CCP, Yohei Ishii, took us to this world-famous spot on Sunday, right before we got on the plane back home. Wow, what a relaxing experience, and what a great preamble to the hassle of international flying. I’ve never slept better on a plane in my life.

In all, an amazing trip. More crappy iPhone pictures here. Eric and I will be getting together to hash out the thousand-and-one ideas we both jotted down with regards to working with CCP over the next week, and I’m looking forward to going back to Iceland someday on a personal vacation, to get to know this beautiful country better.

It’s a damned shame that the camera had to focus on my ugly mug instead of the slides, which add information (and most of the punchlines) to my speech. Here‘s a PDF of the slides that accompany the talk, in case you’re inclined to follow along at home.

As someone working in a similar industry, and facing similar problems, I understand the content providers’ hands being tied, in terms of their being dependent on the business model that things like Hulu potentially cannibalize, and I also understand that change at large corporations is not easy—it takes time and planning to turn a big ship around. But honestly, I can’t see how Hulu on Boxee hurts their bottom line: they’re still getting ad impressions, and in extreme cases like mine, where I don’t have a cable subscription at all to begin with, ad impressions via Hulu on Boxee are not cannibalizing ad impressions on the broadcast networks.

While my case is probably the exception for now, as less tech savvy people start to realize that things like Boxee are out there, and are very easy to use, that situation will change. It’s untenable for me to pay a cable company for a slew of channels I don’t want, when the specific content I do want is individually available for me online. As the economy gets worse, and people start cutting down on their expenses, alternatives like Hulu on Boxee may very well become the norm. Content providers would be well served to work with outfits like Boxee, instead of flat-out shutting them down. The long term benefits are evident, but the network execs need to start looking beyond this financial quarter—or this season’s ratings—to be able to see the forest for the trees.

Boxee has now implemented what amounts to a work-around to the absence of Hulu on their software, and I applaud them for it. Time will tell if the fight they’ve got coming will be one they win. I sure hope so.

So, are people rolling their own private microblogging networks yet? And knocking together mobile pages and writing/hacking desktop apps to work with their private microblogging networks yet? It would seem to me to be the obvious outgrowth of the Twitter phenomenon: ambient communication for secret societies.

I would love to have a private Twitter network for just my friends. Apps like TweetDeck serve to compartmentalize tweets, but not to compartmentalize the whole network.

via Warren Ellis » Secret Twitter Society.

The Pirate’s Dilemma has a spot-on analysis, as usual. Of particular interest to me is Mason’s likening of vinyl records (whose sales apparently doubled this past year) to books: “Records are like books – they are souvenirs of ideas.” Indeed. But that still means a smaller, more selective audience, looking for a high-quality product produced in smaller numbers with collectors in mind, versus the cheap, mass market (no pun intended) alternative.

Mason continues by calling attention to the plight of the college yearbook: “The yearbook business, for example, has evaporated thanks to social networks”. I hadn’t really thought about that, but it makes perfect sense, and not necessarily only for the reason that The Economist states. Aside from the archival capacity of sites like Facebook and MySpace to keep the same mementos previously housed between the covers of a yearbook (pictures, etc.), the fact that social networks keep people connected despite the separation that comes after graduation makes the need for a commemorative tome practically nil. I don’t need memories of Susie Jenkins; Susie’s still in my life—I see her status updates every day, for better or for worse.

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

And why have I always thought this? Because if you know half a thing or two about how information moves from place to place, it just makes sense. The telcos take advantage of the fact that most people won’t be bothered to work this stuff out for themselves, which makes us all suckers. If I had my druthers, we’d all be using VoIP on community ad-hoc WiFi networks.

What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting [NYT]
via
The New York Times: Text messages cost carriers virtually nothing [Boing Boing Gadgets]

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.

Cover to Cover #333A: Tor.com