Books used to be works of art. Typesetting was to the printed page what good lighting and backgrounds were to photography. You learned the craft from the masters, and the writer seldom if ever violated that sacred space. Not any more. The e-book has destroyed the art of book-making, at least temporarily.
The e-book is an oddity. It is a child of a general technology revolution that attacks the pillars of traditionalism with nary a plan to follow its invasion. Back when the “point and click” interface first turned the computing world upside down, the first victim was design in the revolution called desktop publishing. It turned that world inside out, and the result was a surge of very bad product - stuff that your middle school child would produce in their first newsletter class.
Other traditional markets soon felt the assault. Video production, music production, music retailing ... these and others fell victim to the emerging prowess of the software and hardware armies marching through complacent corporations on their way to world domination.
Then came the e-book. (If this were a video blog, you could hear the sigh ... just use your imagination - heresy in the tech world, I know, but there you go). Easy to create, easy to publish, easy to price cheaply. A revolution - followed by a surge of poorly written works masquerading as books. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I am a believer in the leveling effects of the marketplace to weed out bad writers. Like any product, to remain a writer and prosper, you need to write well. Bad product will disappear by itself. But that is not the entire issue.
E-book readers are at once helping establish the new market and contributing to its failure to embrace the art of the book. Scholarly studies are now being published that study e-book reader behavior relative to product and electronic reading devices. Shin (2010) describes the relationships between perceptions of quality both in terms of product and delivery on a function he calls confirmation - a key to gratification and therefore continued purchasing of e-books and e-book devices (274). While not specifically calling out the current state of the mobi or epub file formats, Shin acknowledges that users “continue to favour [sic] some characteristics of paper books” and that “some emotional factors are missing from the e-book experience” (261).
Quality of product is one of the core components of the gratification process (274). It is here that e-books fall way short of their potential even within the ability of current technology. The rudimentary appearance of the typical e-book lacks the aesthetic qualities of print that enhance a reader’s experience. Proprietary approaches to e-books and their reading devices contribute to this problem - both in terms of delivery and quality.
Amazon’s Kindle gives the appearance it can only read files purchased from Amazon’s e-book retail store - which is not entirely true technically, but from a user’s perspective true enough. The mobi file format is a poor representation of the art of a book while at the same time makes vast amounts of electronic books available. Amazon’s market clout means that to many users, the Kindle and its rudimentary product appearance represents the state of the e-book product. Once comfortable with this marginal level of product, few readers will show a willingness to explore other options (Shin, 261).
Apple has their own proprietary response in the iBookAuthor program and what I call an “enhanced e-book.” A producer can format a book exactly as a print publisher would, with strict control over typography, format, media, and interaction when displayed in landscape mode. It then allows for free-flowing text and font resizing in portrait mode. The product, however, can only be read on an iBook platform - iMac, iPad, and iPhone. In addition, if you plan to sell the enhanced product, it can only be sold through iTunes. Given that the software and its processing back end is available for free, I cannot fault Apple for wanting to control sales to recoup its investment, but limiting a product to a single sales channel is somewhat self-defeating.
Smashwords takes a broader approach to distribution by acting as a distributor to an ever-growing array of retailers, including iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Nook, Sony, and the new subscription services. At the same time, the product is the low-end epub format - less restrictive than Amazon’s mobi file but no more of a platform for producing a quality artistic product.
In the push to gain market share and become key players in the e-book marketplace, companies have taken fairly short-sighted approaches to the e-book product itself. At the same time, production and delivery capabilities have improved - further facilitating the proliferation of a sellable but substandard product that fails to satisfy what e-book readers are seeking.
Apple has shown that a quality artistic e-book is technically possible given the current state of technology. Smashwords has shown that expanding distribution is a viable business model. Amazon has shown that large volumes of sales are possible. Yet none of these major players get it right - at least for now.
The questions facing the e-book community are daunting. How can we make e-books ubiquitous without destroying the artistic quality of a book users still demand? How can we expand distribution opportunities to facilitate readers’ buying patterns and make e-reader devices capable over a broad spectrum of product offerings? How can we avoid domination by a single player, thus destroying competition and innovation?
Graphic design/desktop publishing is no longer the ugly ducking it once was - professionals embraced the technology and an entire industry was rejuvenated. Your middle school newsletter may still look like it was created by middle school students - go figure - but the design industry was taken back and improved upon by professionals armed with the new technology.
As writers and publishers, we need to demand that same dynamic. We need to demand that e-books become a quality artistic product, not just a free-flow of ugly text. The book as an art form can survive in an electronic world. We have to demand it, and show our readers we understand they are dissatisfied with the current product. It can happen.
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Shin, D-H. (2010). Understanding e-book users: Uses and gratification expectancy model New Media and Society. Retrieved from http://nms.sagepub.com/content/13/2/260
