BookCamp 09: Reflections on Books and the Web
BookCampTO - June 6, 2009
This was the rare book industry event where it felt like most of the people in attendance were younger than me rather than older. Perhaps as a result, the discussion seemed vastly more interesting than at any of the "tech" day events at BookExpo? Canada in recent years. As well over 200 people turned out—which surprised almost everyone—McGuire, Bertils and company should be duly proud of their organizational efforts.
That said, I didn't get the sense of any emergent zeitgeist or coherent thrust to the conversations. What binds this crowd together seems to be the collective sense that the book business is poised for some major changes, and a desire to be on the active rather than the reactive side of those shifts. The sessions at BookCampTO represented a broad variety of issues, from the details of promotion and pitching to the existential questions of what it means to be a publisher. The range of ideas presented for the future of publishing—experience design; ebook formats; the fate of DRM; the future of curation and filtering roles—shows that a good deal of energy is being put in, but there is as yet no serious momentum or paradigm to bind everyone together. Watching the Twitter feed over the day showed as many people celebrating the imminent death of print as those who championed the book as "fetish object." Surely it's not so simple as this either-or.
To briefly report on the sessions I went to: Alana Wilcox from Coach House and Jack Illingworth from the LPG quite eloquently spoke of the perspective of the small press—quite used to operating without any money, as Alana pointed out, and quite agile as a result. Jack mentioned something he called the "digital paradox": that digitization initiatives are cheap for self-publishers, feasible for the big corporations, but a major source of pain for the indies. But this was a tame session compared (surprisingly) with Scolari and Troeth's session on reading experience, which spawned a stunning number of near-fistfights over such issues as the importance of optimal line-length calculations to the layout of pages and the relationship between form and function in publication design. Who knew these old chestnuts could be so controversial?
Sean Cranbury led an afternoon session on "curation" which quickly revealed—perhaps tellingly—that in a room of 30-odd BookCampers there are about six different notions of what curation might actually mean... a good example of the kind of divergent agendas at play. I found Sean's session was most interesting when it turned to the old question of whether or not a publisher's brand counts in the marketplace. For some years I have been predicting that the importance of the publisher's own brand is on the rise, but you wouldn't have gotten that impression from this room on Saturday afternoon. Craig Riggs more or less continued this discussion in the last slot with a session on the discoverability of books; Mitch Joel here notably argued that, from a user-experience point of view, it is better for a potential reader to be directed straight to Amazon rather than the publisher's own website—regardless of the desirability of the publisher maintaining "control" of the discourse.
The day ended with the after-party on a very nice patio, which for me was much more an exercise in hanging out with friends than in seriously continuing the day's discussions; this put BookCampTO in perspective for me, actually. Rather than coming away with powerful new ideas about the future of books and publishing, I came away with a bunch of new friends and contacts. I think I picked up about 22 or 23 new Twitter followers on the day, and met at least that many interesting people whom I hadn't encountered before. Which is what a conference is supposed to do for you.
A tiny manifesto...
Discussions of ebook formats, ebook design, and ebook reading experience were thick on the ground at BookCamp?, and I think there's rampant confusion about things. This came to a head around Liza Daly's very nice ePubZenGarden, where she very simply puts forward a demonstration of some nice typographic treatments for reading extended text online. But the interpretation of this seemed all over the map. Someone in the session called Liza's site an "emulation" of an ebook reader in a web site. But wait, ebooks—and especially ePub-based ebooks— are web pages. They are! Really! ePub is the same XHTML+CSS combination that powers the web pages you read on a daily basis, but in a wrapper. If an ebook's design sucks, there are two basic reasons: (a) the CSS included with the ebook sucks, or (b) the reader software's CSS support sucks. There is no real reason why ebooks should look any worse than any given web page, since the underlying technology is identical. Steph Troeth's post on Evolving with the Book does a good job of laying this out.
In a too-brief conversation with Liza Daly and Mark Bertils the night before, I felt the need to point out that there is no burning need for an ebook standard, or an open e-publishing technology, or a neutral platform for building e-reading experiences. That's because we already have one: it's called the web, and it's nearly twenty years old already. There are several billion pages of content on it already, and probably close to a billion people use it regularly. The extent to which the publishing industry seems to think it needs to invent an alternative to the web for its own purposes is somewhat pathological. The web exists, is ubiquitous, free, and even quite mature. It isn't perfect, but it has been on a journey toward perfection for a long time already.
It is certainly far more reasonable to think that usable publishing and reading experiences can be built on the web platform than on some alternative system cooked up in a few months to fit somebody's pre-conceived business model.
The web is a platform for content and interaction. We need to start taking it seriously as a platform, rather than trying to work around it. My own session at BookCamp, on XML Production Starting with the Web, made this very case. The web is an immensely powerful platform for creating, developing, collecting, managing, and distributing content. In 2009, it is already true that almost all content is web-based content. If book publishers want need print production workflows, then let's make those work with web-based content rather than trying to maintain the print and web worlds as parallel.