The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.

The tweet got some negative reaction. But I’m certain this shift will happen, and should happen (I won’t take bets on the timeline though).

It should happen because a book properly hooked into the Internet is a far more valuable collection of information than a book not properly hooked into the Internet. And once something is “properly hooked into the internet,” that something is part of the Internet.

It will happen, because: what is a book, after all, but a collection of data (text + images), with a defined structure (chapters, headings, captions), meta data (title, author, ISBN), and prettied up with some presentation design? In other words, what is a book, but a website that happens to be written on paper and not connected to the web?

An ebook is just a print book by another name

Ebooks to date have mostly been approached as digital versions of a print books that readers can read on a variety of digital devices, with some thought to enhancing ebooks with a few bells and whistles, like video. While the false battle between ebooks and print books will continue — you can read one on the beach, with no batteries; you can read another at night with no bedside lamp — these battles only scratch the surface of what the move to digital books really means. They continue to ignore the real, though as-yet unknown, value that comes with books being truly digital; not the phony, unconnected digital of our current understanding of “ebooks.”

Of course, thinking of ebooks as just another way to consume a book lets the publishing business ignore the terror of a totally unknown business landscape, and concentrate on one that looks at least similar in structure, if not P&L.

While you can list advantages and disadvantages of print books versus ebooks, these are all asides compared with the kind of advantages that we have come to expect of digital information that is properly hooked into the Internet.

Defining a book by what you cannot do

What’s striking about this state of affairs — though not surprising, given the conservative nature of the publishing business, and the complete unknowns about business models — is that we define ebooks by a laundry list of things one cannot do with them:

• You cannot deep link into an ebook — say to a specific page or paragraph chapter or image or table
• Indeed you cannot really “link” to an ebook, only various access points to instances of that ebook, because there is no canonical “ebook” to link to … there is no permalink for a chapter, and no Uniform Resource Locator (url) for an ebook itself
• You (usually) cannot copy and paste text, the most obvious thing one might wish to do
• You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal, written in 1942 — even if they are from the same publisher

You cannot do any of these things, because we still consider that books — the information, words, and data inside of them — live outside of the Internet, even if they are of the e-flavor. You might be able to buy them on the Internet, but the stuff contained within them is not hooked in. Ebooks are an attempt to make it easier for people to buy and read books, without changing this fundamental fact, without letting ebooks become part of the Internet.

Many people don’t want books to become part of the Internet, because we just don’t know what business would look like if they were.

This will change, slowly or quickly. While the value of the digitization of books for readers has primarily been, to date, about access and convenience, there is massive and untapped (and unknown) value to be discovered once books are connected. Once books are accessible in the way well-structured websites are.

What lurks beneath the EPUB spec

The secret among those who have poked around EPUB, the open specification for ebooks, is that an .epub file is really just a website, written in XHTML, with a few special characteristics, and wrapped up. It’s wrapped up so that it is self-contained (like a book! between covers!), so that it doesn’t appear to be a website, and so that it’s harder to do the things with an ebook that one expects to be able to do with a website. EPUB is really a way to build a website without letting readers or publishers know it.

But everything exists within the EPUB spec already to make the next obvious — but frightening — step: let books live properly within the Internet, along with websites, databases, blogs, Twitter, map systems, and applications.

There is little talk of this anywhere in the publishing industry that I know of, but the foundation is there for the move — as it should be. And if you are looking at publishing with any kind of long-term business horizon, this is where you should be looking. (Just ask Google, a company that has been laying the groundwork for this shift with Google Books).

An API for books

An API is an “Application Programing Interface.” It’s what smart web companies build so that other innovative companies and developers can build tools and services on top of their underlying databases and services.

For instance:

• Google Maps has an API so that geolocation services (for instance Yelp) can use Google Maps and the business data contained therein to better serve their niche customers
• Twitter has an API so that other services can build Twitter clients, search Twitter, provide Twitter analytics, etc.
• Amazon has an API that lets developers easily find and point to product information.
• Wikipedia has an API, so that you can do thing like make books out of every edit done on the Wikipedia article, “The Iraq War“

We are a long, long way from publishers thinking of themselves as API providers — as the Application Programming Interface for the books they publish. But we’ve seen countless times that value grows when data is opened up (sometimes selectively) to the world. That’s really what the Internet is for; and that is where book publishing is going. Eventually.

I don’t know exactly what an API for books would look like, nor do I know exactly what it means.

I don’t know what smart things people will start to do when books are truly of the Internet.

But I do know that it will happen, and the “Future of Publishing” has something to do with this. The current world of ebooks is just a transition to a digitally connected book publishing ecosystem that won’t look anything like the book world we live in now.

Related:

• View From the Trenches: Surviving Change
• What publishers can and should learn from “The Elements”
• The Tragic Death of Everything
• Metadata, Not E-Books, Can Save Publishing…

The latest numbers from Bowker are extraordinary: In 2002 there were 215,000 books published in the USA, and a further 32,693 print-on-demand title (short-runs, self-published etc).

In 2008, traditional publishers put out 275,000 books; but there was a huge surge in print-on-demand titles, and at 285,000, for the first time there were more non-traditionally published books than traditionally published.

By 2009, the whole applecart was upside down: 288,000 books published traditionally, and 764,000 (!) self-published and print-on-demand books. That doesn’t include, as far as I can tell, the thousands of ebooks getting published at places like Smashwords.

Even if you forget about the self-published books, since 2002 we’ve seen a 105% increase in poetry and drama books (11,766), 80% increase in the number of biographies published (12,313), an 80% increase in general fiction titles (45,181), a 75% increase in literature (10,843), a 50% increase in religion titles (19,310), and a 30% increase in science books (15.428). There have been declines in only three of the twenty-five categories tracked by Bowker: Agriculture (down 6%), computers (down 32%), and languages (down 32%). Across the spectrum, we’ve seen a 32% increase in all titles published since 2002, all without an appreciable increase (that I know of) in the number of people who actually buy books, let alone read them.

Add to this significant growth the 764,000 (!!!) non-traditionally-published books, and you can see where the fundamental problem for publishing lies: there are so many books out there, and a limited number of readers.

Supply Makes Demand Look Puny

We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is a whole other article to write about the business implications of these numbers, but I’m interested here in some ideas about how our info systems might manage this huge pile of books. That is, how are people going to sift through all these books to find what they want?

How the Web Solved the Problem of Over-Supply

If you think the problem of books is a hard one, consider this: there are 72,000,000 active websites on the Internet. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that 5% of those websites are blogs.

So somehow, you found this post, a 1 in 3.6 million chance, and have made it this far, which indicates that you found more-or-less what you were looking for.

We seem to have solved the problem of sifting content on the web and with blogs, where anyone can publish what they want. It turns out that the vast majority of blogs are uninteresting to me, and to the vast majority of readers. Blogs are, by the numbers, a vast sea of stuff people don’t want to read.

And yet.

And yet – as a reader, I constantly find wonderful stuff to read on blogs. I read blogs of friends and colleagues and strangers, I read NYTimes blogs, I read BoingBoing – which usually points me to other blogs; I follow Twitter links to more blogs I have not heard of – almost exclusively now I find good blog posts to read through Twitter.

But, still, given the overwhelming preponderance of stuff I’m not interested in, how is it that I only read wonderful stuff on the web?

The answer is in the link. The link creates a currency for readers and writers to surface wonderful stuff. In the earlier days of blogging (I was relatively late to the party, arriving in mid-2004), links were an essential part of the ethic: we read each other, we pointed to the stuff we liked; people pointed back. Crucially, you could “see” when someone pointed to you (referrers, technorati, google alerts). And crucially as well, Google built a kind of reputation exchange, based on the link: the more links you got, the more “important” you were to Google’s search; the more important you were to Google’s search, the more heavily-weighted your links were in Google’s algorithms – conferring your importance to others.

This created an ecosystem of readers and writers, that grew to the point that now blogs are a fact of life – and come in all flavours and shapes, from Samuel Pepys‘ diary, to this blog, to Paul Graham, to cat-pictures and everything in between.

What’s the Difference Between a Blog and a Book?

Fundamentally, though, the stuff in blogs – and in “books” – is not anything in particular. Blogs – like books – are just a means to transfer words from someone’s fingers tips into someone else’s eyeballs. Blogs made it easy for anyone to do that. Enter an era of more terrible and irrelevant writing than the world has ever seen. Enter, also, an era of more wonderful and important writing than the world has ever seen.

The good stuff gets found. If there is one thing the web is brilliant at, it’s getting millions of people – billions? – to sift through junk to find what is valuable.

The same will happen with books.

Book Economics

So this raises two questions:

1. how will we create a similar kind of reputation economy in books? i.e. what mechanisms do we use to bring something like linking to books? and

2. how is anyone going to make money?

To #1., my guess is that the next generation of writers and readers — and their books — will all be online as a matter of course. They will find, read, and link to each other in the same way that bloggers do.

To #2., my guess is that it’s going to be very hard in the traditional publishing business. There will be money to be made, but nothing like the kind of money now, in the way it’s being made. Big advances are going to start disappearing. Early cash investment in careers is going to start disappearing (it already is, usually). I talked to one senior executive at a big publishing house at BEA who thinks the publishing business as it is is about two thirds bigger than it “should be.” I don’t know if I’m that radical, but as a relatively heavy reader, I cannot understand how the commercial publishing business can sustain its current output. Supply and demand curves don’t make any sense. 280,000 books is a lot of books. One million books is another thing altogether. And we are now publishing one million books every year. In the United States alone.

What’s a Publisher For, Again? 

Still, publishers fundamentally provide two values to writers and readers:

1. quality (editorial)

and 2. audience (marketing)

So publishers who continue to figure out how to bring good books to the people who want them will be providing a great service, for which people will be willing to pay, one way or another.

But that role of “publisher” is going to look very different in 5 years than it does now.

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress. My thoughts here come out of our experience building Book Oven (a thus-far closed, proprietary system envisaged to be just this); and subsequent conversations with John Maxwell, of Simon Fraser University’s Masters of Publishing Program, and Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works.

I am happy to report this is more than just thinking: this past term (January to April 2010), John Maxwell and his MPub students built a prototype of this WordPress-based publishing system, and tested the prototype by creating, and publishing the Book of Mpub, available in print-on-demand ready PDF, epub, and html.

Background: Book Oven

At the end of 2008, my co-founder Stephanie Troeth and I started Book Oven, an ambitious venture to work towards transforming the book publishing process into a webby, connected process. The key insights behind Book Oven were the following:
 

• publishing a book is (almost always) a collaborative enterprise
• online tools (should) make collaboration on making books easy(er)
• if you build a “book” in the cloud, using structured mark-up, then expression of that book in various forms (print, epub, pdf, mobipocket, html, etc), on various devices (including paper & print) becomes arbitrary, and should be nearly trivial
• further, if the “book” exists in the cloud, then the range of things that can be done with this “book” multiplies significantly
• if a system built on these ideals is implemented well, it will be transformative, both for professional publishing workflows, and for the emergence of a new grassroots of indie publishing.

I am still deeply committed to this vision.

But I have shifted towards a belief that the above-described platform should be open source. Or at least, an open source version of such should exist.

The Big Revelation: WordPress

We’ve done some good things with Book Oven, but around November 2009, we shifted focus to the bit of our platform that was (according to our analytics) the most engaging to our users: Bite-Size Edits. That shift occurred in parallel with a revelation:

We were trying to recreate so much in Book Oven that was already handled well by another class of software, namely blogging software, and specifically WordPress.

My thoughts about WordPress were crystalized in October 2009, during a conversation with Shana Kimball of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library. I was pitching Book Oven as a good tool (in progress) for academic presses to use in their production workflows. Shana had various hesitations — open source vs proprietary being a big one — but during our conversation, Shana said something like: “It would be great to have a tool that’s as easy to use as WordPress. I love WordPress.”

Indeed.

So, I started having some conversations with some people I knew who were already doing some work in this direction, in particular: John Maxwell, at Simon Fraser University, who was experimenting with prototypes for html-first book publishing systems, and was exploring different candidates, including WordPress; and Kirk Biglione who had independently started poking at WordPress as a book-publishing tool.

I also floated the idea to a few others who are doing some of the most interesting things right now in publishing/tech, especially Liza Daly and James Bridle, and two of the best WordPress hackers I know, Steph Daury (who works for Automattic) and Jeremy Clark.

The idea, everyone agreed, had some legs.

WordPress, it seems, is an ideal candidate as a platform on which to build an open source, online, webby, book-publishing system. There may be other likely candidates, but WordPress has the following characteristic which suggest to me that it is an excellent place to start:

• it is a familiar and comfortable tool to most writers and
  publishers who are at all engaged online
• it is a stable platform that can handle just about any scale of
  traffic you can throw at it (the New York
  Times, New York Times Blogs, for instance, run on a heavily-hacked version of WordPress)
• it is open source
  
• through its plugin architecture, it is infinitely extensible
• through
  its template architecture, it is infinitely stylable
  
• through WordPress Mu, it is
  infinitely scalable
  
• it has a huge, world-wide community of committed developers
• existing plugins and plugin suites already achieve much of what would be
  wanted in a WordPress-based book publishing system.

[NOTE: I've since discovered Leanpub.com, built by Ruboss, which is already going along this path].

The Outline

I’ve described above some of the reasons why WordPress is, I believe, a good candidate as the basis for an online book-publishing platform. Here is a proposal for some very rough product specs:

• Authors/editors can add text
• Editors can edit text
• The editing/publishing process can be public or private, with easy assignment of various permissions (none, read-only, read/edit, read/edit/admin)
• Formatting creates structured html
• Finished text can be generated in the following formats:
• plain text
• epub
• html
• InDesign-compliant markup – to generate a professional print output from In-Design
• automatic print-ready pdf – using something like a web-based LaTeX system
• etc.

WordPress can do much of this already, but not all of it, and certainly not everything you would want it to do. The finished platform should have (among others) the following plugins/characteristics:

1. robust version control
2. digress.it (based on the old commentpress)- to allow para by para commenting for editors, and later, if desired, for readers
3. wordpress –> epub conversion
4. wordpress –> ~LaTeX –> print-ready pdf conversion (or similar)
5. wordpress –> InDesign-compliant mark-up conversion
6. book-friendly front-end template(s) (including Table of Contents, Title page etc)
7. generation of a download/(sales?) page that lists available formats (epub, html, pdf etc)
8. table of contents generator
9. a book metadata generation/management tool (ONIX, OPDS compliant?)
10. …etc.

This list of plugins can continue, subject to the interest of developers, and the needs of users of such a system.

SFU and the MPub Prototype

All this would be just a lot of writing and good intentions and conversations, except for John Maxwell and his team of talented students at Simon Fraser University, including: Vanessa Chan, Cari Ferguson, Kathleen Fraser, Cynara Geissler, Ann-Marie Metten, and Suzette Smith.

In the span of four months in 2010, the SFU MPub team did two extraordinary things:

1. they built a prototype of this WordPress-based book publishing system (tied in with InDesign for the print book)
2. they published a book using the system – suitably, it was student-essays about the future of publishing: the Book of MPub

I had the pleasure of seeing John and some of his students present the results at BookCamp Toronto this past week, to a crowd of publishers, writers, designers, and technologists.

The Reaction

I was curious to see the reaction to John’s presentation at BookCamp Toronto, with a wide range of people in the room. Particularly encouraging was Ingrid Paulson’s take on it: Ingrid is one of Canada’s best-known book designers, and was excited by the idea of streamlining and formalizing the process of text/mark-up delivery from publishers. She seemed entirely open to a better toolset to make that happen. Others in the room were equally intrigued.

For myself, I was amazed at what the SFU students delivered in such a short time, and was reignited with excitement for this project. I have no doubt that a streamlined online publishing system, using structured mark-up, will transform the publishing industry. And my bet is on WordPress as a great starting platform to do just this.

Whether or not it could be the long-term winner, I know not, but something will be, and WordPress has a whole lot to recommend it.

And how about you? What do you think?

Bio: Hugh McGuire builds webby things, and writes about media, publishing, mass collaboration, and technology. He is the founder of LibriVox.org, the volunteer-run makers of free public domain audiobooks; and Book Oven, which makes Bite-Size Edits, an online editing game/tool. He is a co-founder of BookCampToronto. His personal site is hughmcguire.net and you can find him on twitter at @hughmcguire.

[Pic of Hugh McGuire by Ron Grimes - Flickr / Twitter]