If you’re not sure what ePub is, don’t worry. It will soon be history.

This digital format, which has done as much in its own way as the Kindle to hyperdrive the e-book business, has been the industry’s workhorse ever since ePub 2.0 was officially adopted in 2007 as the standard for production of reflowable digital books. It is the building block for Sony, Apple, Google and other e-book formats.  Even Amazon, which has its own proprietary format, accepts submission of ePub files, which can then be converted to Kindle’s unique language. (See What is ePub and Why Is It Important to You?)

EPub is still a superb tool if all you want to do is read – or publish -  an e-book in English or another western tongue. But what if your native language is Chinese or Japanese or Arabic or Hebrew?  EPub is not up to the task of handling symbols and pictograms or languages written up and down or right to left.

Or what if you want to “read” a vook or an app replete with videos, music and other enhancements? The ePub format is simply inadequate to the challenge of creating these complex multimedia works.

Enter ePub3, a more global, complex, interactive, media-rich format perfectly suited for the demands of the next generation of book (if after it is completely enhanced it will be recognizable as a book). EPub3 is currently being reviewed and tested by publishers, developers and other interested parties with an eye to rollout in 2012.

In an interview in O’Reilly Radar, Book Master executive Bob Kasher highlights three significant features of the new format: language support, greater accessibility, and increased multimedia functionality.

1) Language Support. “Language support, Kasher explains, “will allow ePub3 to save and search non-Roman scripts — such as Japanese, Chinese and Arabic — as font characters rather than jpegs… It will truly internationalize ePub.”

2. Greater Accessibility. By “greater accessibility” Kasher means that the new format will be far friendlier to the visually impaired, employing so-called “DAISY” (Digital Accessible Information System) standards for digital talking books, according to the DAISY Consortium, the official international organization.

3. Support for Multimedia Applications. Finally, and foremost, “ePub3 will be much more adept at supporting multimedia capabilities for both HTML5-based devices and the coming generation of tablets supporting both Flash and HTML5. It is hoped that in doing so, ePub3 will help develop an enhanced ebook standard that can be used across a variety of media and content.”

HTML by the way is the language that governs most Internet websites, and HTML5 is being designed to accommodate the same demands of multimedia and interactivity for the Internet that ePub3 is designed for text. (See What is HTML5, and Why Should You Care?)

For those of us who are perfectly happy settling down with a plain old conventional bells-less and whistles-less e-book, don’t worry: ePub version 3.0 will be “backward compatible” with 2.0, the current standard, even though it will one day be looked at by our grandchildren as primitive and one-dimensional – just like us.

Read What to expect in EPUB3

Richard Curtis

Enhanced e-books.  Here today, gone tomorrow?

In a recent interview with Michael Healy, Director of Google’s Book Rights Registry, Simon & Schuster President and CEO Carolyn Reidy offered many cogent observations about the e-book business including the fact that e-books represent as much as 60% of the initial sales of a newly released book.  You can read it all on Teleread. However, many who read the dialogue may have missed this significant comment by Reidy (obviously condensed by the transcriber):

“Enhanced ebook market is not very strong and some of the biggest sellers have still been less than 2,000 copies. Still experimenting doesn’t appear that public is enthused by the concept. Don’t do any apps any more because are very expensive to make and get lost in the App Store, don’t know how to get them recognized in the mass of stuff in the store. Can’t put apps into the bookstore which makes it harder for them to be found.”

“Enhanced” has been the hot byword in publishing for the last year or two and has even been the cause of friction between publishers and film companies. Movie people feel that if a publisher makes a book that looks like a movie and sounds like a movie, it’s a movie and the publisher is infringing on the moviemaker’s territory.  If other publishers come to the same conclusion as Reidy – that it’s just too expensive, time-consuming and unprofitable – the enhanced e-book may die aborning and we will all wonder one day what the fuss was about.  Then you’ll remember that you heard it here first. (See One-Word Explanation of Why Enhanced E-Books Won’t Work.)

Richard Curtis

“Enhanced e-books” was one of the most overused catchphrases in 2010. Publishers stampeded to load up conventional e-books with all manner of enhancements ranging from author out-takes to big-name intros to film and video clips. The idea was to justify boosting the price of their souped-up e-books.

Some of these products were interesting, entertaining and attractive, But were they worth those extra bucks? Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal asked that very question in Testing Enhanced E-Books.

Ana Maria Allessi, publisher of HarperMedia, says definitely yes. “When both digital editions are available, and consumers are given the choice, in half the cases they’ll pay more for extra content,” she says. Sourcebooks’ publisher Dominique Racca thinks so too: “I can imagine a product where you multiply by 100 percent because it has so much more value than the non-enhanced editions.”

But a very different view was expressed by Tony Woodlief, oddly enough in the Wall Street Journal too. He had a one word explanation for why most enhanced e-books will flop.  Click here if you’d like to learn what it is.

And if you’d like to hear it expressed poetically…

Publishers expressed enchantment
With the notion of enhancement.
Audio, video, music, flix,
Bangles, baubles, Bar Mitzvah pix.
A tune or two was all it took
To constitute a mobile vook.
They tossed in every kind of crap
And designated it an app.*

Richard Curtis

* From 2010 (The App) by Richard Curtis with permission of Publishers Weekly, PWxyz, (c) 2010 Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The Wall Street Journal.

Since the dawn of the digital age – call it Year 2000 – publishers and agents have separated e-rights into two categories.  One is verbatim text rights – plain old e-books.  The second is interactive use of texts in combination with music, video, audio and other media – what have come to be called enhanced e-books.  Commonly, agents struck the latter provision out of publisher boilerplate.  Why?  Because film studios and networks felt that  enhancements incurred on their ability to dramatize the books they acquired.

But with development of vooks and similar hybrids of text and other media (“Vook” = Video + Book), publishers are challenging the assumption that interactive rights must be reserved to authors. As enhanced e-books become viable and valuable, publishers want to know why they are abandoning rights to movie and television companies.

That is the background for the memo that a major literary agency has sent to a number of film agents informing them that henceforth they cannot count controlling those interactive rights.

The memo declared in part:

“As a result of this fundamental change in publishing, we will no longer be able to agree to the boilerplate language in most studio option/purchase agreements that address multimedia. These clauses usually restrict the author’s reserved electronic book rights to digital text only. We cannot agree to this limitation. Authors’ reserved ebook rights must now include the right to grant enhanced digital rights in their work, including all the elements mentioned above.” The memo made it clear that “enhanced digital editions, as long as they are non-dramatic, are best exploited by the author in conjunction with the publisher.”

Despite this distinction it’s not likely that Hollywood is going to take this shift lying down. Where enhancements end and movie effects begin will certainly become a bone of contention, so this is going to get interesting and probably adversarial. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Though enhanced e-books are on everybody’s tongue these days, we suspect you won’t see a flood of them any time soon.  The cost and complexity of clearing permissions and the time it takes to produce works of real quality will in all likelihood restrict the number released to a precious few.  But that may not be the point, as we will eventually see when the titans of publishing and Hollywood clash on the field of enhancements.

Richard Curtis

The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.

Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.

The High Cost of Permissions

In a cautionary anecdote Woodlief voices a complaint about the high cost of clearing permissions: “When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.” Woodlief spurned the record company’s price and elected instead to use a quote from a public domain source. In a masterfully understated phrase, he muses “it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.”

The debate over permissions has gone on for as long as copyright protection was established by statute, including the American Constitution, centuries ago. These laws attempt to navigate the tension – or perhaps conflict is a better word – between rewarding content creators for their works and satisfying the public’s need to benefit from those creations. Woodlief phrases it cogently: “While we want to give artists incentives, we don’t want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.”

Publishers and agents daily walk this tightrope, setting prices for licenses for properties under their control that recognize the licensor’s intentions and budget on the one hand and the value of the artist’s work on the other.  To the seller the price may seem reasonable, to the buyer exorbitant. The battle is never-ending.  Except that in the Digital Era the battle is intolerable and will simply have to stop.

Permissions clearance a disaster in the Digital Age

The reason it has to stop is the emerging species called Enhanced E-Books. Unlike simple print anthologies of an earlier, quainter century (the 20th), enhanced e-books draw on film, video, music, photographs, and other art forms. For which reason they are also known as “vooks” in contemporary parlance, a hybrid of “videos” and “books”. (See If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?)

So? What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.

“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”

The solution?  Become a Renaissance man

“There’s gotta be a better way,” I concluded.

Is there? Bartering isn’t practical, though Woodlief actually tried it. “Will you,” he asked some poet friends, “give me a poem in return for a book and dinner?” Some of them agreed, and their poems ended up in his book.

Marc Aronson took a stab at a more realistic approach in a recent NY Times op-ed. “For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads… If rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid.”

Unfortunately, Aronson doesn’t address how the book’s creator would divide payments among movie companies, music composers, photographers, videographers, and garden variety authors.  Nor does he venture into the question of how to place comparative values on a one paragraph quote from an obscure journal versus a three minute clip from a blockbuster movie versus a top-of-the-charts hit song. Nor does he tell us how a humble little vookmaker will be able to afford the permissions cost of all that imported content when even a few minutes of music will bust his budget.

In all likelihood Aronson didn’t venture into this territory because it’s radioactive. It’s hard to imagine how we will come up with a solution in the foreseeable future, even though the success of this exciting new genre desperately depends on it. Unless…

Some years ago as the Digital Age dawned I wrote a piece called Author? What’s an Author? suggesting that the author of tomorrow would have to become more like the breed of filmmaker called “auteur” who writes, produces, directs, edits and scores his or her own movies.

“The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works,” I wrote. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of ‘author’ will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.”

In short, if you possess the filmmaking gifts of a Hitchcock, the song-writing skills of Rogers and Hammerstein and the photographic genius of a Cartier-Bresson, and – oh yes – if you’re as good a writer as Tolstoy, you’ll be able to create your own enhanced e-books without laying out a dime for permissions. You’ll be nominated for a Vookie, which is undoubtedly what they will call the award given out to auteurs of vooks.  Just make sure you have your speech ready if you win.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.