One of our customers, Bruce Blanchard, suggested, "... appeal to a sense of culture which brings us together as people. Make us feel part of the process of our history and bring the "need to know." Politicians have been doing this for ages. Richard, bring the reader into to the sale Bring him/herself into the future. Politics holds few apologies. What i am saying is sell what you have with the needs we reach out for. Encourage us to grasp beyond. Your words will matter big time. You are not grasping money from our hand, you are providing the product to make us realize our dreams. You have opened up so nice and I love it. Prove to me you're worthy of distinction."
So here's the big picture:
The transformation of books to electronic form is a revolutionary technological innovation. But while such books are now readily available from many sites on the Internet, they are not yet widely used, enjoyed, and appreciated. What's needed are creative applications of this technology that capture the imagination, that make these texts truly useful and valuable in everyday life.
The nature and size of a "book" is an accident of paper and print. Electronic publishing makes new forms possible, but for the most part we continue to mimic the printed book in a new medium.
So what is there to capture the imagination? Three elements, I believe.
1) books as building blocks for cultural contexts
With paper, every additional page means more cost as well as bulkiness and weight, making the work more difficult to handle and to store. In electronic form, size does not matter. A file is a file is a file, whether it is 10 kbytes (a page or two) or 300 kbytes (about the size of Huckleberry Finn) or hundreds of megabytes (as on our CDs) or even several gigabytes (as our Complete Book DVD in its current form).
With books in electronic form, the "book" need not be the finished product, rather it can be a building block. By putting books together in interesting combinations, you can stimulate readers to recognize important connections that could have passed unnoticed, at the same time as making it easy for a reader to follow-up references and also follow trains of thought inspired by the first work.
In the first stage, we are making our CDs not just random collections of text, but rather complete contexts -- by theme, genre, geography, time period, and author.
As demand builds, we hope to offer contemporary works in such contexts -- as we have done with the works of novelist Roberta Kalechofsky -- where recent books take on new meaning who juxtaposed with other works that influenced them and amplify their message. You don't just get a novel, or a dozen novels by the same author -- you get hundreds of related books, an entire cultural tradition, an environment that fosters the growth of new ideas.
2) books and contexts can change and grow rapidly
With paper, books tend to be static -- once a book is published, change is expensive and slow. It might be a year or ten years before another edition is released. More often, the book goes out of print without ever achieving a second edition.
Books in electronic form can be dynamic. It is very easy to make changes and to disseminate new versions. Over time, we expect that authors will take advantage of this capability, though for now the best known ones are still caught up in the world of paper printing, and don't know how to continuously improve and grow their works, while making them widely available.
For now, most readily available books in electronic form are older works, in the public domain. So creativity and change show up in the combinations of these works rather than in their creation and modification. We currently update the contents of our CDs and DVDs, adding dozens or even hundreds of new books to an existing CDs two, three, or even four times a year. And we plan to update our DVDs far more frequently than that. we are always open to suggestions for new ways to combine texts for distribution on CDs and DVDs, including personal anthologies.
3) books as an environment in which readers can actively participate
With printed books, the book is an object you hold in your hand. It is something separate from you. You may well appreciate and enjoy "great works", but at the same time they are intimidating -- they in a sense might emphasize your unworthiness. The great ones did this and thought this, and we, in awe, study their works. Print distances us from the realm of creativity. Only few will ever succeed in having their work recognized as deserving the honor of being print-published.
With electronic books, you can be immediately immersed in an environment of ideas and creativity. You can save books on your hard drive and add your own highlighting and comments and related thoughts and save those with the original book. Each book can become your personal commonplace book -- like a diary of your personal development, your tastes and inspirations, as well as your own related writings. And of course you can combine by juxtaposition or even with hyperlinks various works that you love and in which you sense an important, but not obvious connection.
At the same time, the barriers to "publication" go down as the costs of copying and disseminating works plummets. That means that more people venture to "publish" their own works -- on the Internet, on CD, on DVD -- sometimes doing it for free (for the pleasure and the stimulation of having an audience and interacting with that audience).
The best example I've seen of that phenomenon is "fanfics". These are story-length and book-length works based on popular TV, movie, videogame, and book characters and situations (many are based on Japanese anime creations). They are typically written by teenagers and posted on the Web, available for anyone to read them for free. There are tens of thousands of them available today, with the numbers growing fast. In some cases, the writing is exceptionally good. The imagination and creativity shown by these works is extraordinary. But you have to work your way through lots of dross to find the best. Other creative fans make their own selections of what they believe to be the best, acting as volunteer self-appointed editors. (My 14-year-old son, Tim, acts as both an author and an editor of fanfics. You can read his selections at http://www.samizdat.com/fanfics )
At some point, hopefully -- if we're lucky, sometime in the next century -- legislators will wake up and alter copyright laws to make more rather than fewer books freely available in the public domain, to encourage adaptability and growth of works of the imagination, and to encourage rather than discourage this variety of creativity. But even within the limits of current law much is possible that was never possible before. We can all begin to participate in, rather than just watch and study, the joint adventure of mankind -- trying to understand ourselves and the world we live in and the ways we interrelate; using the written word to talk together across the globe and across centuries, finding words that spark new thoughts in us and writing words that spark new thoughts in others.
A
library for the price of a book. (our online store)
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