Arthur Attwell

Late last year writer Carolyn Meads interviewed me for a newspaper article on ebooks that, sadly, ended up mostly on the editing-room floor. It was a nice chance to cover some digital-publishing basics, so we're putting it up here.

Carolyn: What goes into developing and designing an ebook?

Arthur: First of all, an ebook is nothing special, it's just a document shared digitally. So, in that loose sense, anyone who's ever created a Word document has created an ebook. Thing is, publishers want easy ways to make and deliver ebooks en masse, and to keep those files as small as possible. So they and technology companies have spent years figuring out new file formats for ebooks; but really it doesn't change what an ebook is essentially: words and pictures stored and shared digitally. So, developing and designing a simple ebook is just the same as developing and designing a print book: write, edit, design, distribute, promote. The tools you use to design an ebook depend on the file format you're going to distribute in, but you can mostly use the same tools for ebook and for print.

Of course, some publishers are starting to do more than just words and pictures, because ebooks can also contain sound and video and interactivity, just like websites. In doing so, they're becoming a little more like software or web-development companies.

How will the Kindle being made available to South Africans influence the South African book industry?

It's unlikely the Kindle will make a big impact in South Africa: it's too expensive for most people (especially when you add shipping). More importantly, no one is likely to spend resources on marketing the Kindle in South Africa directly. That said, its availability does add to the already mounting pressure on local publishers to fully integrate ebook production and distribution into their existing processes. So it'll have a light, trickle effect.

While there is a lot of talk about ebooks, there are many other real issues and opportunities in working with digital files rather than print books. For example, in the education sector we should see publishers experimenting with textbooks being remixed by teachers (e.g see Symtext or Bookriff), schoolchildren getting homework help by SMS, libraries previewing books before purchasing them, books reaching schools more quickly digitally (e.g. see Paperight, which my company is developing), authors working collaboratively with editors and each other, or even with the public (e.g. see this approach from forward-thinking media company O'Reilly). There are other opportunities in adult education, healthcare, community development and so on. All of these ideas could be monetised, and all stem from the staff in publishing houses getting comfortable with working with digital processes – this isn't hard, it just takes effort and imagination.

So I prefer to talk about 'digital publishing' rather than 'ebooks', because 'ebook' is a catch phrase that doesn't begin to cover the range of possibilities publishers could be pursuing. (I address some of these issues in this presentation.)

Would you say the ebook industry is currently growing, also in South Africa?

Absolutely. The usual stats given are the APA's sales stats, which show massive growth of ebook sales in the US. As I've said, in South Africa most digital publishing won't be about ereaders like the Kindle, it'll be about a variety of other uses for digital content. There's a lot of experimentation happening with mobile phones (e.g. Random House Struik's new K53 pass-your-learners cellphone application, an interactive version of their well-known print book; or see Cellbook), and universities are way ahead of publishers in providing digital systems for sharing content within and among their staff and students, who often use shared computer labs and internet cafes.

What are the advantages to ebooks compared to printed books?

I know this doesn't answer your question directly, but I don't like to compare e and p in this way any more. They are different products, and one person's advantage or disadvantage is not another's. It's easier to describe it like this: what are the differences between a GPS and a map book? Both have uses and markets, but each is for different circumstances, depending on who you are and what hardware you have available. Similar comparisons are Wikipedia vs a printed encyclopedia, a website vs a magazine or newspaper, or, more obscurely, a tent and a caravan, or a bicycle and a motorbike. The point is that one is not a replacement for the other, they are each just a different way to get things done.

How will ebooks change our concept of books, especially with regard to interaction?

Ebooks don't change anything about our concept of books. If ebooks were called something else, like 'content-software', we wouldn't ever have to ask that question. When we use something on a screen, we expect it to be, to some extent, interactive, and perhaps to link to places on the web. So when that something is content that might also have been produced on paper, our expectations adjust accordingly. The only change for the industry, really, is that companies that used to produce only paper books will increasingly also produce interactive software (sometimes with those weird page-turning gimmicks), all based on the same sorts of carefully crafted content they've always produced.

There'll just be more, and more, and more of it, increasingly mashed in with music and video and social interaction. As a result, a whole new important industry will emerge, one that helps us find what's worth spending time on. That's the 'curation' industry. It's already big, and is going to be much bigger.

Will the book industry follow the same path as the music industry? CDs are not really selling any more – will book sales also decrease considerably? In other words, do ebooks present a threat to traditional books? Do they present a threat to publishers?

Ebooks (or, as I like to say, digital content) present the same simple threat to print books as music, video, TV, blogs, and social networks: that is, they're just a new product fighting for people's attention. Like music labels, publishers know that marketing their product is just a battle for people's time. In that sense, nothing changes, there's just that reshuffling of people's skills and areas of expertise that happens as new technological standards emerge and find consensus.

Well-made print books are a very special product: a beautiful marriage of a manufactured, physical object and a story, or a body of information. That's a unique combination. Of course, if you're a publisher that doesn't specialise in beautiful books, and just churns out what are essentially poorly made printouts, then you'd better get into selling ebooks fast.

Could ebooks actually stimulate the print-books market in a way?

That's an interesting point. Amazon has said for a long time that people who own Kindles buy more books than before they had a Kindle. In the latest figures (quoted in this NY Times article) they say 3.1 times as many books.

In the music industry and film industry piracy is a big problem. Will it affect the ebook industry? Do ebooks need to digital rights management (DRM)? What do you think of the DRM of some ebook traders that does not allow you to copy an ebook onto another computer or to print it out? Is this necessary or too restrictive? You said at your Book Lounge talk DRM is like "putting a self-destruct detonator in the spine of a print book." Can I quote you on that?

Well, I meant that quite tongue-in-cheek, so if you quote me, best if you make it clear I was half-joking. Two important points:

• First: Yes, trying to use technical restrictions to control what your readers do with your files is a very expensive thing, and does nothing to prevent the large-scale piracy that business-like counterfeiters can achieve. This is a very big area I don't have time to get into in detail, but I can point you to a blog piece I wrote recently about piracy.
• Second (related): DRM is not the only way to manage piracy. The piracy discussion tends to centre around DRM because it's an easy debate to get into. The more interesting and useful, but more complex, debate is around ways to affect people's behaviour to reduce piracy.