I haven’t seen the word “Facevook” used, so if I’m coining an original term I hereby bequeath it to Mark Zuckerberg in the hope he will give me a modest gratuity.

It seems that Zuckerberg’s Facebook has acquired an outfit called Push Pop Press, we learn from New York Times‘s Nick Bilton. Bilton refers to it as an e-book publisher but from his description it sounds more like a vook developer: “a digital book maker that specializes in interactive books for the Apple iPad and iPhone. The e-books built by the publisher feel like movies; interactive graphics with words sprinkled about cross the page.”

We’re not sure Facebook wants to get into the e-book business but vooks reflect the social networking behmoth’s commitment to delivering entertainment. Says Bilton: “Facebook’s move into other forms of entertainment, like gaming and movies, demonstrates that the company is looking at other forms of revenue beyond standard advertising. Of course, it doesn’t need to own a book company to distribute books. It doesn’t own a movie studio or a game maker.

Why Did Facebook Buy an E-Book Publisher?

And for more about vooks, read If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?

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.

While neuroscientists and child development specialists have been delving into the psychology of reading e-books and vooks (see The Medium Is The Screen, But The Message is Distraction), a blogger named Danny Bloom has occupied himself with the nomenclature.

Plain old “reading” simply doesn’t seem to cover the various acts necessary to experience a multimedia vook that we have to click, scroll, screen, watch, listen to, and – yes – read. So Bloom, who has been aggregating on his blog a great deal of cogent information and articles about e-books, has proposed the word “Screading”, combining screening and reading.

We buy it completely, and from now on, “Screading” it will be.

Bloom also brought to my attention that “Kindle” is now a verb. It may be a while before “Nook” achieves verb status, however.

RC

Lynn Andriani of Publishers Weekly reports that “Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman is writing a new crowd-sourced short story on Twitter. Starting tomorrow at noon EDT, the author—and well-known Twitter fan (@neilhimself)—will Tweet the first line of a new story, and fans can continue it with their own 140-character contributions. BBC Audiobooks America will then compile the contributions—they expect about 1,000—into a short story that will be recorded by a professional narrator. The audiobook will be available for free download at BBCAudiobooksAmerica.com/trade and at iTunes and other audiobook retailers before the end of the year. There are no plans to release the story in print.”

I have a capacious 10 gallon hat that I am prepared to eat if no more than 1,000 fans contribute. I won’t be surprised if the number goes deep into the tens of thousands or even exceeds 100k. This is Neil Gaiman, people!

To participate, fans should follow @BBCAA and Tweet with the hashtag #bbcawdio. Official participation rules and a legal waiver are posted on the BBCAA blog. We suggest you read the legal waiver.

Logical next step – a vook? (Would-be vookster Gaiman pictured at left).

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Some ten years ago, in an article entitled Author? What’s an Author? I asked, “How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can’t process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?”

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. 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.

That day has come.

I didn’t have a word for the medium I foresaw, but last spring someone coined it “vook”, a hybrid (video + book = “vook”) blending traditional books with audio, video and other digital media, a little like the centaur pictured here. The term is so new that if you google it you’ll be asked “Do you mean book?”.

Today’s news brings tidings that Simon & Schuster “is working with a multimedia partner to release four ‘vooks,’ which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.” Mokoto Rich, who covers the book scene (soon to be “vook scene”?) for the New York Times, describes it in Curling Up With Hybrid Books, Videos Included, which the newspaper’s editors felt deserved front page status – front page, that is, of the entire newspaper. Rich quotes Judith Curr, publisher of S&S imprint Atria Books and a prime mover behind S&S’s vook releases: “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text.”

For all who toil in the two dimensions of the printed word, that’s a pretty depressing statement. The paradigm shift that seemed like a science fictioneer’s fantasy not long ago is now upon us and what was a simple world of Me Author/You Publisher has become a white water rapids of identities in crisis, including those of literary agents. Agents get agita when they’re not sure who’s the seller and who’s the buyer, and digital technology is dissolving the barrier between the two like battery acid.

Is the game over? Is it Death of the Book Time?

In my opinion? Not even close.

Let’s keep a few things in perspective. The most important is the distinction between reading and watching. Intoxicated though publishers may be with this new and admittedly exciting hybrid world, in time they will come around to the immutable truth that books – plain old linear text printed on bound sheets of white paper – offer an immersive experience for which there is no substitute. When an amazon.com reviewer of a vook proclaims ““It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like,” we rise up in wrathful indignation. For nothing – nothing whatsoever – makes a story more real than what we imagine the characters to look like. Viewing a video of a book, or about a book, or with a book, may be entertaining. But it is not reading. It is simply, as I have written elsewhere, Watching Books.

Any reader who has been lost in a book would not dream of breaking the spell by clicking, searching, supplementing, accessing, googling, listening or viewing. Hell, any reader who has been lost in a book does not even want to break the spell by breathing. Maybe we’ll be compelled to do some surfing and clicking when we finish reading, but just as likely we simply want to digest what we’ve read, or think about it, or reread it, or maybe talk to someone about it.

Nothing can or will take the place of books, and nothing ever will. Vooks are cool but they do not communicate ideas, transport us to magical worlds or immerse us in wonder. Watch a vook, play with it, interact with it. When you’re finished, shut your computer down and settle in with a good book.

Richard Curtis