Digitisation - It's Not About 'Books'

Today we stand at many believe is the digital evolution of literature, moving from paper to bytes. Many others believe that much will remain the same, after all we, ‘all love, grew up with and where educated by books’. We now ask if the evolution is about books or about the content itself.

In the mid nineties only the few would have envisaged the impact the Internet was going to have on all our lives. Then it was no more than a dirt track and many doubted it could raise its game, but it did and the only limiting factor on its path was not technology, but culture and our ability to adopt, adapt and utilise it on mass.

We have assumed digital is the same as physical and have created programmes and devices to migrate one form to the other. We now have to ask if that’s wise?

We were once invited, along with a mismatch of what appeared no more than teenagers, to a conference held by a global broadcaster. They asked us what they need to do differently and they listened intently to the answers they were given. The biggest change is that the global broadcaster now sees themselves as a rights, manager and owner not a broadcaster. Other media companies are now starting to change their views as change continues and divisions blur and are redefined.

Now we would ask the average book publisher what they see themselves as? We would guess that 'rights manager and owner' wouldn’t be on the tip of most tongues. Some would say that publishing isn’t about books it’s simply about content and rights and understanding the market and channel to it. If we were to look at the trade as a rights trade what would that mean moving forward?

Why do we presume that the physical content will merely morph into the digital. History has surely taught us that media survives but has to adapt to new forms. Fiction is not about books of 75,000 words or 250 pages, its more about telling a good story that captivates, engages and stimulates readers. Why does this have to be any specific length?

The challenge we may now face is to create short stories that are suited to new media. Some may opt to serialise something that was never written to be serialised and in doing so merely create a half way house which is neither one or the other. However, to support short stories may mean that we have to accept that old skills that were honed to the book may not always adapt.

Chunking

Chunking means different things to different sectors and as always we find ourselves joined by a common format the book but speaking different langauges.

As the spine explodes and publishing goes digital we find ourselves effectively on different digital flight paths, even different modes of transport and also travelling at different speeds. Fiction has long worked on a 75,000 words and a 250 or so page format and for the printed book this worked, but as anyone who has tried Daily Lit would know fiction just isn’t friendly in a chunked form. Imagine the page turner that becomes a page stopper as the story is constantly put on pause. We have to think again and think short stories and also think back to the fiction many wrote in magazines etc. Its just a case of 2,000 words or a 20 min read, thanks. It doesn’t mean the long story is dead it just means it exists on different media and maybe a different audience. If this were to happen we would enter a world of ‘native chunking’ and a whole new writing paradigm that we have forgotten through the forced economics of the mass fiction formula we know today.

Education doesn’t make sense in dollops of 75,000 words and again it about writing to fit the media and its usage.

One of our clients has 250,000 chapters available to rent or buy as chapters. These are academic titles and in many cases the reader only wants the odd chapter not the whole book. They want to rent not buy and it’s not a case of overnight seed change but more of gentle readjustment for all over time.

Forgive us for drawing on a loose analogy with music, but in the fifties music was limited by the vinyl media , then came the magnetic tape and then the CD which both could store more and the tendency changed to release albums not singles. Then came the download and reversed it once again. Its about matching the media to the media and stop trying to pour a quart into a pint pot.

We like the term ‘native chunking’ and only hope that we all have a common understanding of its meaning.

So how do we Identify a Chunk?

The trick to any machine to machine communication is identification of the product and clarity as to what to do. The ISBN was a great identifier and has served the industry well and no fits even more comfortably within the EAN structure. The adoption of the ONIX/XML message again was a significant step forward and has positioned the industry well in it e communication.

We read today of the edict that the industry should provide a separate ISBN for each digital rendition of a title. This makes logic sense as is what has to happen. After all who would dream of giving the paperback, hardback, large-print copies of the same title the same ISBN? The long overdue ISTC number, which is to identify and effectively group all impressions of the same title, also makes good sense. It’s just a pity it has taken so long to come through the process to the market.

The challenge however lies with the fragments or what is commonly referred to as chunks. The DOI is a great mechanism for referential linking and provides persistent resolution but is it the right means of identifying chunks? We think it may be a sledgehammer to crack a nut and its structure is not one that would be easy for the trade to adopt for this purpose. It works well in an online world of search and discovery but the trade environment it will be significantly different from the academic or educational ones. The question is about what we need to identify chunks for and what we want to do with them once identified. Even if we want to sell chunks do we have the pricing structure or the permission rights processes to do it and track the money through to royalty. Today the easiest solution to fragments is to issue them ISBNs and to link them to the title via a combination or an ISTC.

This issue will grow as content starts to fragment and break from the jacket which once held it so neatly and is a challenge to us all.