Earlier this week I wrote a post called "Dangerous startup ideas infiltrating the book world" and there has been some awesome discussion in the comments about the role of business/marketing vs. art in the creation of a book, as well as some insightful debate about whether a book gets better when an author edits it based on early reader feedback.
As an extension of that discussion, I found a great post over at PSFK by Stuart Kelly that they pulled from the Guardian called "How Ebooks are Clearly Different to Print." In the article he makes two major contentions:
1. Print books are a private experience, eBooks are tech and our behavior becomes data.
2. "...readers remaking the text..." or guerrilla editor changing books after they are created.
And, by extension, he posits different types of books in the future where personal data allows a company to personalize a book for a reader. (This one seems pretty 1984-ish and scary to me, not innovative.) He closes out by making the point that print books remain constant across time and every reader, while eBooks maybe don't or won't.
In my own post, I riffed on the idea of treating books as a startup enterprise and looked at how tech language was changing the way we think about books. In Kelly's article, he talks more about how tech is changing the nature of what a book is and potentially what it will become.
At the core of both of these debates, I see a lot of solitary vs. public tension, along with permanence vs. fluidity.
Books vs. eBooks
Books as we know them are written pretty much alone, then published, then purchased and read by one person.
eBooks are also written alone, then published and then read by one person. The difference is the medium. Because it's an "e" book we can think about it differently if we want to. We can get data about it, we can make it social by nature, we can iterate on it the way we do pretty much everything else that is tech.
I love books, and I tend to prefer print books over eBooks. I'm not sure if I'll ever switch over entirely. For me there is nothing better than being able to make notes in the margin, fold the page corner, and stuff the book into my back pocket.
But when it comes to the eBook, is it something different entirely? Is it, as a tech object, something that we can think of and play with in all of the social, iterative, sharable, data-gathering glory that the Internet brings?
What do you think? Is an eBook different enough at its core from a print book that the rules are different? Is there a Book and a Book 2.0? Should we be calling eBooks something else, like eReads, eStories, or something else to differentiate them from print books?
Image courtesy of Pen Waggener via flickr
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