Information Squid

Ebooks seem to be hot again, at least for slightly warm values of hot. I’ve seen more articles mentioning them in the past month than I had for quite a while before that. Most prominently, both the Washington Post and New York Times had survey-of-the-industry articles, the Post’s pegged to a review of the Sony Reader.

The more interesting development was that the Times article and a BloggingStocks post bring up the idea of iPhone as ebook reader. One of the difficulties for the industry has been that current devices and before them the Rocket eBook cost real money, $300 and $500 respectively. Most people don’t want a separate, expensive device just for reading on pixels. iPhones (or future iPods with a similar screen) could make ebook readers widely available - at which point more people would start using them.

Then the problem becomes the cost of the books. Charles Stross, science fiction writer, pointed out in March that “the economics of the commercial ebook market are sick”. Ebooks are sometimes being sold for almost the cost of hardcovers, which is crazy. Audio editions I can understand being worth that much, since they have added costs in the form of voice actors and sound editing, and they still have media and packaging costs. Ebooks? The simplest way to produce an ebook is to distribute the Word document you’re working from. You’ll still have costs for editing, promotion, distribution channel, etc., but none for paper and printing. How can that require charging as much as for a hardback?

I like physical books because I can see them and be reminded to reread, which (even with something like Apple’s CoverFlow for book covers) is unlikely to happen with ebooks. I like physical books because I can decorate my apartment with them. I like physical books because I can easily loan them to friends - and given the fog of DRM around most ebooks (there are exceptions like Baen), that’s not going to be possible any time soon. Ebooks aren’t worth as much to me as dead-tree editions, and I’m not sure what price would be right.

Some publishers are starting to think about the price problem. Baen’s ebooks cost a little less than paperbacks. Toby Buckell notes that Stross’s publisher was persuaded by his arguments to price his books’ electronic editions at three pounds. And of course the romance e-publishers have consistently kept their prices comparable to series romances, less than single title paperbacks. But most traditionally published books aren’t available as ebooks for anything like an appropriate price. Hopefully that will change soon.

Note: this is about ebooks-as-purchased-content rather than ebooks-as-freely-distributed-marketing. The latter strategy is going strong, with HarperCollins expanding its sample pages program to an iPhone-compatible website, authors posting first chapters on websites, and ebook authors expanding their work for traditional publishing deals.

LibraryThing is currently hosting a fascinating thread on tagging, “What does tagging do to knowledge (and they’re giving away copies of Everything is Miscellaneous to ten commenters).

The site is a place to catalog personal book collections, and they’re also working with libraries and booksellers to share their useful information. Because the community is interested in books and in libraries and in classification, some of the thread comments are fascinating. Some are from laypeople, others from librarians, archivists, etc.

“I like fun tags that are so personal or unique that nobody else uses them. A friend of mine, for example, has tags like “Detectives with gimmicks”, “Elaborate crimes”, “Witty people being clever”, and my favorite “Fangirlin’”. I myself want to use a tag for “Farm boys with magical destinies” but it’s apparently too long.” - saturnine13

“Conversely, the most intriguing tags (autistic-like character, Kleenex, the end of Pottermania) are almost inevitably used by only a single member.” - SilentInAWay

This reminds me of Elizabeth Bear’s LiveJournal tags, such as a policeman’s work is never done, all three sides of the story, and ask a stupid question.

“First, tags really only seem to work for organizing stuff you have some sort of conceptual “ownership” of - things that in some way you have an incentive to keep order within. People don’t seem to want to tag in enough quantity / detail to be useful when they don’t have a personal stake in sorting through the resultant mess.” - cubeshelves

I wonder how this relates to people’s del.icio.us collections getting out of control? Perhaps that mostly happens when they’re saving “interesting links” rather than “links related to this interest or project”. In the former case, it’s not at all clear what tags will be useful over time (level of detail, omitting broader categories, forgetting what’s been used before, etc.). In the latter case, the focus of a particular area lends itself both to continuity in tags and to having “a personal stake in sorting through the resultant mess” - or a stake in not letting it become a mess.

“In a small community, though, tags are very interesting. Not only do they provide the advantages mentioned above, but they also allow the community to negotiate meaning and context — the types of tags that are used, and the content of those tags says something about what is meaningful to a community.” - Placebogirl

But getting critical mass of tags in a small community is hard. One of the great things about Flickr, for instance, is that there are enough people tagging enough photos that I can easily find a Creative Commons licensed photo of just about anything to put into a presentation. Maybe this is just an instance of many intersecting small communities in one place, so that the wider world gets the advantage of each of those smaller groups’ tagging efforts.

“Something I’ve found frustrating about the tags I find on books here is _sometimes_ nearly all the tags are personal. If I am looking for sci fi recommendations about Intergalactic Travel, well, very few people use that tag. In fact, a fair number of the sci fi books will tell me the main character, series, where people have stored it, etc. without telling me what its world-view/situation is (such as psi, alien encounters, culture clashes, intergalactic civilization, parallel worlds, etc.) Those were things I was hoping to learn from other people’s tags, and, at the moment, can’t always figure out.” - EowynA

When cataloging physical books, the first instinct seems to be to tag with physical locations (coffee table), ownership (mine vs my boyfriend’s), personal state (unread), etc. Books’ contents come after personal reactions.

“Is there a genre that has a low/no rate of tagging? Why would that be? How would one find it if it isn’t tagged? ” - hexmap

A symbol for zero was invented much later than those for positive numbers. Stumbling on Happiness talks about people ignoring the intervening time when thinking about how they’ll feel in the future. Clearing your mind while meditating is difficult. Absence of information questions are a lot harder than presence of information questions.

“I have to admit, I never got really excited about tagging until we could search multiple tags. That ability has made me rethink how I tag things. ” Katissima

Tagmashes are fascinating. I’m looking forward to playing with them.