How Will eBooks Change Writing?

I've been thinking again. (I have an hour commute each way, so lots of time to think.) And was wondering what I would write about if I wanted to write a novel...which lead to thinking about various novels... which lead to thinking about The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time and how the book has text continuing into illustrations. The illustrations are not additions to the text but actual key parts of the text.

Then it dawned on me -- with ebooks, illustrations are not expensive to include (like they were with older books with typesetting and woodcuts). I understand there is some technical/file problems with illustrations (maybe?). But I am hoping that perhaps other authors will try this blend of words and illustrations thanks to ebooks.

So, what is your opinions and ideas? How will ebooks change the writing? (Not publishing -- but the writing.) Will more experimental styles appear? Maybe books with music?

I worry about the role of literary fiction in the context of self-publishing. I feel like ebooks in the romance/sci-fi/paranormal genre are selling like hot cakes, but wondering how well the slow-reads fare in this format? Of course, I happen to be someone who is attempting to write in this genre (just my luck) so it's really relevant to me. I'd be interested to see some data.

>1 LMHTWB:
Ebooks present a lot of technical possibilities for enriching the experience of reading — in theory. In practice, I suspect that the effect (at least in the short term) may be the opposite. In a paper book, you can be pretty sure that what the publisher designs is what the reader will see on the page. In an ebook, the physical specifications of the device, its software, and the options selectable by the reader mean that the author has essentially no control over how the book will look on the screen. An illustration may mess up the page breaks on one device, look ridiculously small on another, and be reproduced in a blocky, pixelated form on a third, so it's in the writer's interest to be very conservative in terms of design and graphic effects. Things like the famous blank pages in Tristram Shandy would be a waste of time in an ebook, because the reader would simply assume it was a coding error.
I'm sure that when things settle down a bit we'll start to see books that make use of embedded audio and video, and many readers will hate it and post angry messages in forums like this one. One idea that keeps being touted as the next big thing, but always seems to stay firmly on the gimmicky experimental side of things is non-linear narrative: Books with alternative storylines depending on user input, random numbers, or whatever; books that update themselves in real time; books where the reader gets to pick the names of the characters, etc. And probably, sooner or later, there will be "books" that are actually just algorithms. You specify a genre and an author whose style you like, the algorithm downloads a few tens of thousands of words by that author from a corpus somewhere, takes a few names at random from your address book for the characters, picks up the location where you are from Google maps, and generates a story of any desired length.

>2 hailandclimb:
Plenty of people read "great books" from Gutenberg, many of which are slow reads (I do a lot of that myself). In theory, that should be a market that is open to writers of literary fiction. The problem is how to convince them that your paid novel is better than the works of Dickens/Balzac/Tolstoy/Austen/Eliot they can get for free!

Give me a good book, a classic, a quickie bio, doesn't matter ... I'll read it on a Kindle or in print. I like being able to download a book from the computer and having it on my Kindle instantly. It eliminates ordering books by snail mail. But I'm a traditionalist too. I still love the bookstore experience, nosing around the shop etc.

Nos. 2 and 4: I write in a literary style and it hasn't given me anything but incentive to keep writing because whatever I read, my experience of the words, the story as I read it hasn't changed. I'm reading more. People are reading more because the material is more inexpensive and accessible.

I do find it's more competitive than it was before because it is now possible for anyone to be published, whether they should or not. No, that's not directed at you, No. 1 - but there is an awful lot of awful available that makes it rough for the rest of us. And that's a tune I've sung and many of us sung many many times.

# 1
You sure ask interesting questions. At this point my writing style hasn't changed. I just tell the story without thinking about how it will be delivered. I have noticed, however, that the majority of my sales now come in the form of E-books. I believe this method of delivery is mushrooming, and I suspect this trend will continue. I wonder how many Kindles, nooks, etc. will be given as Christmas presents this year? Many, I'm suspecting.

>3 thorold: I know there are problems with photos/illustrations now (and if you want a read mess, try a mathematical equation!), but I'm hoping someday that the problems will be solved. As for the algorithm novel... I don't even want to think about that.

>5 EllenLEkstrom: I know it can't be directed at me, because, well, I'm not a writer. I just like to play "what if I was a_____" kind of mind games to amuse myself.

>6 GaryBabb: Thanks. :-)

If I ever do switch to ebooks permanently in the future, there will have to be gimmicks for me. I can't separate the informational content of a story from the visual art it makes down to the shapes of the letters and the juxtaposition of words. If all I am given is text, then I want to be able to fully adjust it to my own artistic sensibilities, easily add my own pictures to the text, give a great book the beautiful cover it deserves instead of the awful one it came with, attach a song between chapters, add a cross-reference to another book, scribble on it and have the scribbles indexed -- all things that I either can't or won't do to a physical book.

When I used to read a lot of internet fanfiction in my teens I did this sort of stuff all the time. Reformatted the texts to my preferred 3-columns 6.5pt font (to see as much text as possible in the visual field), added linked footnotes and indexes, included pictures. But, still, the urge to print them, even if they were hundreds of pages, was very strong, and indeed, I have some binders in the basement filled with those old favorites. It seems print still wins for me.

(Yes, I really did go that far. Book art is important to me. Right now I am reading a book where the text block was accidentally sewn upside-down into the boards, and it's driving me crazy every time I open the book.)

For mathematical equations, the texts that I normally read (books or otherwise) have all been formatted (perfectly) with latex, which is what it was made to do. For chemical equations, all the ones I read (or write) are done with chemdraw.

Latex and chemdraw both perfectly convert to pdf which can be dropped into the text, with the flow wrapped around it and then output to a pdf which (as long as the settings are checked) will then output exactly the way it was designed. As long as the right options are prefaced, that pdf will look exactly the same on my screen that it looks on someone else's screen. The most important options all deal with embedding. (This already happens as it is supposed to -- I do not get weird formatting issues in my chemical or mathematical articles; all of the figures, images, diagrams and whatnot are in the right place and the fonts are never a problem.)

Those kinds of features and ease-of-use for quite difficult matters (mathematical / chemical equations), plus the requirement that the equations appear at the correct spot for everyone (wouldn't want to mistake the wrong formula with the results), regardless of what device it is read on, is pretty much why pdf is the standard format in academic (and otherwise) science publications.

The applications that I use allow me to add drawings, notes, links, remarks, commentary, etc. on top of the pdf, because a lot of the time I need to keep track of what I'm doing, how it ties in with other processes, etc.

Since this kind of thing is already available, I think it would be interesting to see how other areas of printing use these features. I wouldn't mind seeing things like plain text book versions for cheap or free, as a kind of new world take on old-school mass-market paperback almost, and the beautifully illustrated or enriched version available like a trade or hardback.

For milieu novels, I would pay a substantial increase in price if I got a nice encyclopedia or something like that to go along with it.

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One of my fav graphic novels right now is wormworld, which is available as a nice little app/website. You can get each digital issue of it for free, or you can pay a little bit and get the 'digital collector's edition' version, which comes with the artist's sketchbook, commentaries and other extra goodies like that.

The author recently had a kickstarter campaign (that met its goals) in order to produce things that fans like -- posters, plushes, t-shirts, etc. I look at this as the kind of example for how I think things can be changed. I love the story/world and now I get to have a bunch of fan-goodies, as he's using the kickstarter to not only provide the extras, but to start up the fan-store for the story/world.

More like this please! :)

>9 kassetra:
Yes, that's fine on a laptop or an iPad, but PDFs are hopeless on the first couple of generations of dedicated e-reader devices. No problem for engineering students, who will always have up-to-date devices to play games read textbooks on, but it will be quite some time before you can count on "normal" readers being able to read complicated PDFs easily on their "old" Kindles.

There's a link to an interesting Slate article that addresses this question here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/145451

Thanks, thorold: I came here to cross-post: saw this thread late, but find the discussion here interesting!

Personally, I find digital creation to be truly exciting. It's definitely a game-changer in terms of story-telling potential - I've been following transmedia storytelling groups for some time, and there are some fantastic projects out there. Take a look, for example, at Sparrow Hall's work: http://www.sparrowhall.com/blog/ He combines the text version of the book with a soundtrack, video and a multi-media short story.

For me personally, though, I still write my fiction first drafts in long hand. And I still prefer my books in a physical format. But publishing in eFormats does change the way I think about language flow and formatting as I'm transferring from handwritten notes to first digital draft. And it informs all of my editing from that point forward.

>10 thorold: I actually bought a Kindle this summer (the small, cheap version) and even text-only PDF's can be 'weird' with type sizes varying, bold appearing mid-word, and enlargement going from micro to huge in one click. The same file reads fine on my laptop.

>13 tkgough: Thanks for the link to the blog. It is interesting what can be done.

>14 LMHTWB: There are bunches of transmedia storytellers out there, all creating their own unique work. It's fascinating.

Digital isn't just changing the way we create, but the entire process is getting torn apart, too. Over at Wattpad, people have turned writing into a collaborative, fundamentally social activity - they run contests asking for others to contribute character and/or plot ideas, they make changes to their stories to satisfy the ongoing feedback they receive through comments on each installment. Sometimes they go back and change things they've already written. Sometimes they make up entire "fake" chapters just to play with their readers. The process of creating and writing has become an organic, living organism, with reader participating as important as the author's direction and intent.

Makes one wonder if there's a future for old fashioned, stay-at-home-and-produce-in-a-vacuum writing at all.

Not only that, more and more authors are giving up their entire books for free reading. I can certainly understand a few chapters for review, but the entire book? You can't go into a bakery and sample a whole cheese cake for free, so why an entire book, which took far longer to write than the cake took to bake?

I prefer the hunker-down in a vacuum with comfy sweater/shawl wrapped around me and the "Go Away" sign on the home office door method. I give out sample chapters, and giveaways (small numbers).

I do too, Ellen. I wonder if it's enough, though. A few more years, and we'll be the exception.

10 -
That's an issue with the readers, not the documents themselves, just like it was on linux for ages before they finally got their hands dirty and into the specs. It also happens less if the creator of the pdf embeds the items -- which most do not do, hence older readers can easily mess up a pdf when their reading specs are only a limited selection of the options available and the author has not embedded the content.

I don't know a single person that communicates through mathematics or chemistry that uses a dedicated e-reader to attempt to read those kinds of documents - with good reason, they aren't setup to handle the enormous number of papers, annotations and whatnot that goes hand in hand with those kinds of technical documents. Tablets are used instead because the people that create the apps for them have figured out that large-scale and complex pdfs are used by everyone in the scientific communities as well as by a lot of businesses, and so they can make some money by making good readers that allow markup and annotations.

If we already have something that works for millions and millions of people that need to communicate very elaborate and specific details on a daily basis, then I think it's somewhat silly to reinvent the wheel because some company just wants to lock down the content 'their way', as is the case with the older readers. Amazon kind of owned up to that being the case when they started actually making the kindle able to read pdf files.

This is another reason why having tablets compete with things like kindles and nooks is a good thing -- it forces the dedicated readers to be less locked-in to their own reinvention of the wheel in order to compete. The mobi spec was atrocious for anything but a wall of text that wasn't formatted when it first came out - so that the device could completely change the look (and of course, only readable on a kindle), but now that there are other devices that one can choose, the kindles are having to be less hostile to the idea that some authors/publishers want to control how the information looks.

Is PDF a panacea? Not on some readers and may never be on older readers that came out before any serious competition. With a heavy push from competition however, PDF could easily be a launching point for the future as to how to make content that goes everywhere while being exactly as the author/publisher intended -- exactly as PDF works right now for the scientific community.

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65% of US households plays games and drives the market of gaming devices and the average age of a gamer is 30 (ESA statistics), which is not correlated to science/engineering students (average age 21 / NSF), unless there are some statistics about college students that the universities haven't figured out (11% of the total student population can be called engineering students / NSF).

#19 - but one of the key advantages of e-readers, is that the reader can control such aspects as the font size. This has made a huge difference for my dyslexic son - reading change from a chore to enjoyable, and to let me read without worrying which glasses I am using!

>19 kassetra:
Most of my colleagues at work still read technical literature using the time-honoured technique of sending the PDF to the laser printer then studying the document on paper. This allows for practically unlimited markup and annotations, and - something that electronic displays don't permit yet - lets them view large numbers of documents side-by-side on their desks. But it costs a fortune in paper, energy and toner, so there's a lot of talk about tablets.

I concede your point about gamers. If the engineering students of my generation are still playing games in their free time, then that would account for the high average age, especially as they are likely to be the ones with the purchasing power.

I imagine that eventually there will be some kind of convergence between layout-based formats like PDF and structure-based formats like EPUB — after all, it's just a question of tags — but it may take a while.

WHo is going to do all this fancy multimediaing? You the author? DO you really have time to learn (and relearn and update and patch) all those skills in addition to living and writing? The publisher? the editor? your paid IT consultant? a collaborative artist?

I've been following ClosedCircle, CJ Cherryh's own dedicated ebook store, where they do little more than offer standard EPub/mobi files for you to buy and download. There's a team of three of them, all fairly IT literate, and it's still a massive chore for them, involving days of tedious bug checking across file format conversions, server issues, and many of distractions from actually writing. And CJC earns enough from her print works that she doens't need to hold down a day job too. I dread to think what I'd actually recieve from an upcoming author working on their own, with a day job, trying to get a multimedia book ready for all the different ereaders.

I've been reading ebooks for 4 years or so, and I've not noticed the format have any influence ont he writing at all - other than the proliferation (or at least availability) of self-pub authors, and the publishing industrys failiure to cope with this. Editing is still a vital skill, and it is this that has been impacted the most - from my perspecitve as a reader anyway.

pdfs - great on monitors, probably ok on tablets. Rubbish on e-ink. Each page appears as in full on a 5-6' screen. It's tiny, and barely readable. The text does not re-flow sensibly with any magnification - not a kindle issue, a pdf/eink icompatability. It is not the way to handle this.

#20: The e-reader has hooked my youngest son (autistic - high function) on reading because he can control the page, the print font, the size. It's made it easier for him to read. And as I've matured, my mature eyes appreciate not having to read the fine print.

>23 EllenLEkstrom: My father happened upon my Kindle when I was visiting, and he began to read a book on it. My mom then purchased a tablet and he prefers to read on it. It is easier for him to read because of the things you just said...he's also like me, or I like him--a control freak!

If you fall asleep reading a Kindle, make sure it doesn't fall to a hard surface. P.S. - You can get a damaged Kindle replaced for free.

>25 mreuther:
We need airbags for ereaders...

Rolling over on top of the e-reader is also not a good idea, though it will keep you warm....

My dog tried reading my Kendle and left teeth marks. This was the same dog that ate my hearing aid. I know she can hear better now, but reading? Humm

She was trying to get her teeth into the plot, Gary...

Laughing. Good comeback. I think she did

Some howling good stories there.

Let's take this act on the road...

1> LMHTWB

Thank you for posing your questions. I think eBooks will continue to be the major force in publishing for the foreseeable future. Until we have “book in a pill” to take with water or neuro-synapse download stations, eBooks and eBook readers will be the cool technology gadgets that keep people entertained in the most modern way available.

Amazon continues to report that Kindle book sales exceed real book sales (let’s call them rBooks) by growing margins each quarter. With Amazon’s new arrangement with authors, eBooks are loaned out for free to Prime Members, ads are embedded, and authors get a piece of the ad revenue. I think the sunk costs for Amazon are so low, the system is self-maintaining, and revenue potential is so high, that we might see a time when people do not buy books, they check them out, put up with the ads, and read and “return” the eBook. Loaning Kindle books is also a new force bearing on authors.

Merging modalities has continued to be the holy grail of technology. When instructional technologies emerged twenty-odd years ago, hyperlinks added the mystical ability to conger up related information (text, graphics, or sound) into the linear flow of thought. That frontier will continue to grow and Amazon’s Fire will doubtless be the mechanism for seamless integration of the entertainment experience (Blu-Ray is making a lot of this work right now).

As you have already observed, “illustrations are not expensive to include.” As the price of memory continues to plummet, large format, high resolution images are not a problem. Problems with formatting and appearance diminish every year with platform-specific style sheets and flexible formatting instructions in the html and xhtml coding. I cannot imagine reaching a point where rBooks return as the preferred format for printed material.

Throw in the advances in text to speech technology, including multiple voices and appropriate inflection, and I would anticipate eBook readers will become too desirable to ignore. We might not be that far from the neuro-synapse download stations.

I do have the gravest of concerns about having everything in media that is electricity dependent. When the F-5 tornado struck Joplin, Missouri on May 22, 2011, it devastated that city. Two days later, the FEMA folks were announcing that all the information people needed to know was available on their website. Seems a little naïve to me. Oh well, here we are living in the future.

I read/review books, and do not have any of the new equipment. Recently several authors have sent me pdf versions ....not easy to handle, alas.

We're well on our way to "enhanced ebooks." My hubby worked with Simon and Schuster to produce the enhanced version of Nixon several years ago. He provided and formatted CBS archive material for the ebook, so readers could click on clips of news coverage like MLK's Dream Speech and Nixon's resignation. With the advent of tablets for ereaders; novels with interactive maps, theme music, pop up notes, and all kinds of innovative stuff is probably already being experimented with. It's a brave new world.

19/23 - I enlarge the font sizes all the time on pdfs, because omg some people in chemistry seem to think that 8pt font is the way to go.

22 - Some of the e-ink people have not made great strides in working on their pdf reader. I had an older e-ink reader and every time I talked to their actual development team, they made a whole lot of excuses as to why everyone else but them could make pdfs work. I don't hold out a lot of hope there, similar to some in the linux world as well (it only took them what, 20 years to make pdfs work? ugh).

I have seen pdfs work just fine on e-ink devices (there's a korean one that a friend of mine had here that he was using to practice a talk on -- so I know it can work... if the developers want it to), but again, it comes down to the implementation of the specs. If they don't want to do it, they won't, and the people that buy them pay the price for that.

33 -
I don't know about amazon's fire being the mechanism, because people on a different side of the fence could say that about microsoft's store or itunes or whatnot. I wonder if the 'mechanism' will even be something we can see coming / predict. Maybe it's completely unknown to us right now, but when it comes along it will gain some traction and then other people will jump on that bandwagon and then it will be what everyone kind of was thinking that might happen, eventually (like when phones/music players/pagers/PDAs merged into single devices).

All that being said, I like the ebooks that have had extra goodies in them, and I haven't had any troubles reading different formats, although it will be a lot nicer when they finally settle down a bit and give us one format. Energy is a troubling concern, but I think that's true for any kind of modern-day device. Of course, since we've recently been able to get energy out of urine... maybe we'll just have to keep peeing to read our ebooks. :)

>36 kassetra: I lean toward Amazon and that mega-marketing operation in part because of their exclusivity clauses (perhaps a monopoly suit in their future?). Authors listing with their Prime lending program agree not to offer their eBooks elsewhere. Additional, Amazon continues to be the market leader in volume of sales. I agree that the next "big thing" is probably still not visible to most of us, holographic words floating through the room or instant book/brain interface events would be interesting...

although I am on my third Nook....I read alot and drop them alot as I am very clumsy :), I do pine for the days of wandering around a dusty, spicy smelling bookstore, paging through books until a story grabs me. But without the ereader thing I would not have been introduced to so many great indy writers. SO as much as I resisted, and only because my husband refused to install floor to ceiling bookshelves, I am loving my Nook. I also feel like Barnes and Noble is closer to a traditional bookstore than Amazon. I was recently found reading on my Droid Razr using a Kindle app out of sheer desperation to finish a series that was exclusive to Amazon. I have a major "hate" for that exclusivity thing. Do authors stand to make more money by agreeing to this or what?

Your husband refuses to install floor to ceiling bookshelves? Isn't that grounds for divorce?

Or grounds for DIY.

>38 Steelyshan: I'm not sure it stands to make more do to exclusivity. I don't really enjoy that fact either as an author. I want those readers that have Nooks, Kobos, Tablets, to be able to read my books on whatever they have. Unfortunately, Amazon offers a great service that allows authors to promote their books for free and thus they also promote them, but ONLY if you are exclusive for 3 months with them. There's no way to get around it either. Amazon literally goes on BN and other sites to ensure you are not violating the rules of KDP Select. I enrolled and then got cold feet and removed myself from it, but there was a catch-up period and they emailed me to let me know if I didn't remove the novel from BN that they would remove it from KDP select, which it already had been. I wish there was another way to promote the book for free, but no other site even offers a similar program.

Hallo writers on kindle - I am charging up my new device and will be scanning the lists for your works. What fun!

>41 CGiovanni: I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon. Love those monthly checks, hate the exclusivity. I think the KDP Select thing (for three months only) can be helpful if you have several books. An author can promote one book and people check out the others. It makes less sense if you have one or two books or use Amazon exclusively all the time. Ebooks are still only 20-25% of the whole market and, although Amazon is the largest ebook seller, others are starting to catch up (Kobo now has an ebook publishing arm and is much more popular worldwide than Amazon.) I think it makes more sense to have the book available across as many channels (print and ebook) as possible.

I seem to sell nothing on Smashwords after the first few weeks my books are available there.

Just found this thread as I was searching for "transmedia narratives". I'm getting introduced to them myself. There's not a lot of stuff out there (or, at least, not of great quality) but I can see how this would be great for the younger generation - to be able to read a book, watch certain scenes on video, interact with the characters on social media and attend related events. I mean, this does happen now to an extent, right? But, today's multi-media stories for kids (think Harry Potter or Pirates of the Caribbean) aren't quite as well-knit into a seamless experience just yet. The technology's getting there, though - both hardware and software.

I enjoy my physical book - don't own a Kindle or any such device. But, I think that the next generation will not be able to just sit and read a paper book for hours. They will want a lot more interaction, I imagine.

A guest writer just wrote about this on my blog - hence my interest. The particular transmedia story she's highlighting is not my sort - historical romance. But, I found the interview with the creator/producer to be enlightening in terms of the business side of things. I watched a couple of the segment videos and they're not that good (Did people say "dunk" in Victorian England? I think not.) But, I give those guys an A+ for effort at least. Must have taken so much time and effort....

The interview's here if anyone's interested: http://storyacious.com/kys-realm-transmedia-future-storytelling/

My opinion is that e-books are a really fast way to publish to a huge expansive worldwide audience. On the surface, it seems that the money end of it for writers may not be a generous, but then again, all of it can change in an instant, if the right people begin to notice. Just take a look at Amanda Hocking's personal story for more proof that I am right.