(2010-08-15) Sundman Coker Smashwords Interview

John Sundman interviews Mark Coker of Smash Words about the future of Book Publishing. I created Smashwords so I could take a risk on every author. (Self Publishing)

I think we’ll also see books become more interconnected. In the paper world, each book is a virtual island. In the ebook world, thanks to hyperlinks, each book can become part of a network of books. With a print book, if you want to read an author’s next book, you have to drive to the bookstore or logon to Amazon. With an ebook, you can click a hyperlink to the next book, purchase it instantly, and start reading. I think there's a useful but tricky idea inside this lame one. What you really want are books that are Paragraph Addressable so that a book (or blog post) can discuss specific bits of a book and refer the reader to the original. But how do this, esp when EBook-s get downloaded instead of read online? Here is my answer:

• master electronic version of book (XML? EPub?) should have Purple Numbers assigned, so they are consistent.

• every book should be available through at least one master website which includes a Metered Pay Wall like the Ny Times model, so readers can follow links to read bits of the book for free, but need to pay to get the rest. (Book Server)

  • Maybe, to reduce Channel Conflict, you don't allow full-content reading from that site at all, but only link to other purchase sites?

    • Or maybe you keep up your paid master site, but allow those other channels to sell access to it for a commission? (It's hard to imagine Amazon going for that...)

• Sept13 update: see 2010-09-13-McguireBookInternetMerge

My first bit of advice is that if an author’s primary motivation is financial gain, they should get a job at Starbucks or McDonalds. It pays better for the vast majority of authors.

John: I have two novellas that depend a lot on typography, illustrations and book design. In my view, such a book is not merely the words in sequence,it’s the actual designed object. When you convert these books to formats like EPub or Mobi using tools like Meatgrinder, you lose lots of information and much of the charm of the books... Mark: I would strongly encourage you to rethink your approach. I would challenge you to re-envision your book, and to understand that the ebook publishing industry is still in its infancy. Your ebook can be and should be different from the print version... Although you may share a close affinity to your well-chosen font, your reader may not share the same aesthetic taste. Your reader may want to murder the formatting of your book by clicking a button, as they can do with Stanza, to change from Palatino to Verdana, or change the font color to yellow and the background color to purple. I think that's a pretty lame response, though it might be the most pragmatic in most cases. (Yes, it's good to let reader customize, but you should have control over the start/default view, and it should be easy for the reader to return to that style.) I wonder how well Apple's Pages app handles fonts when it generates EPub? 2010-08-30-PagesToEpub