(2018-07-06) Forte Future Of Ebooks

Tiago Forte: The Future of Ebooks. My self-publishing experiences have led me to believe that we’re in the midst of a transformational revolution in reading. But it remains to be seen whether ebooks in particular will fulfill their potential in the digital age, or remain a mediocre one-time experiment (Information Ecosystem Roadmap)

content is a commodity

As the emphasis shifts to discoverability amidst an endless sea of content, the focus for both publishers and consumers is moving to the context surrounding the book

The challenge of digitizing books has never been the text conversion process. That is trivial. The hard part is rebuilding the socio-cultural context that used to so strongly shape our reading habits

While old-school publishers think of the internet as a new means of distributing the same old text containers, and software as a way to drive down costs, startups are building new kinds of content that couldn’t previously be conceived of. For them, text is one possible output of a channel, not the input. (Media Inventor)

Digitizing text created great abundance. It is metadata, and the sorting, filtering, and searching it enables, that will help us make sense of it all.

Service over product

Publishers are no longer product companies. They are service companies. What matters is not the container wrapped around a bunch of exclusive text, but the service wrapped around the container. (Book Publisher)

What are the services that readers want around their books? They want convenience, specificity, discoverability, ease of access, and connection.

Publishers need to realize they are no longer in the content production business. They are in the content solutions business. Their books need to become part of a value chain that solves their customers’ problems. Because what people ultimately want is not a book. They want an answer, a pathway, or a spark of insight that leads them to an outcome.

The publishers that win in the digital age will be those that offer metadata and tools that help their readers manage the true enemy of reading: the curse of abundance.

Creation over consumption

From the very beginning, books were social objects

What’s changed is that all that marginalia – the bookmarks, notes, highlights, progress markers, reviews, comments, discussions – once hidden amidst the pages on each of our private bookshelves, has been published and networked online as digital artifacts

Forward-looking publishers will begin to provide richer forms of interaction:

This level of interactivity might seem challenging, but it’s been done before. ChessBase is a database and book engine used by serious chess players around the world. Both ebooks (by multiple publishers) and mobile apps integrate directly with the database, which contains thousands of historical and modern games that can be searched and replayed

What is at the heart of our desire to create is connection. As sublime as the creative process can be, what we’re truly after is what it evokes: surprise, delight, gratitude, insight, revelation. A reaction of any kind, really.

By connecting these small, local networks forming around each book, we could eventually create a single networked literature

Streams are powerful, but they underestimate the value that humans place on tangible artifacts

the more fundamental need to take away something tangible from the experience of reading is one of the things driving the return of commonplace books.