But wanted to day that this is one of the best “how the book of the future might look/feel/read” that I’ve read yet.

I’ve pondered much the same thing at my own blog because I write non-fiction, and I think the e-possibilities for non-fiction are especially ripe and rich.

gotta raise overhead on each and every book,
as a tax shield for the occasional blockbuster…

and hey, being _big_ is what dinosaurs do best;
$1500 conferences on what’s “new” this quarter.

but let me tell you what the mammals will do…

they will be authors who shun any middlemen.

they’ll release their books, for free, to the wild.
they’ll use free tools to connect to their readers.

they’ll find fans who’ll feed back gifts to them,
repeat-readers who will await their new work…

they’ll nurture a relationship with those people,
form a strong bond between author and reader.

they’ll communicate with them in ways that will
transcend the superficial hype found elsewhere,
and in doing that, help create an honest world,
which serves our needs better than the old one.

they’ll do hard work to build long-term careers,
_careers_ that will mock the ever-transient and
fleeting nature of “this month’s best-sellers”…

they will laugh when corporate bookstores fall
like dominos. brick-and-mortar? yeah, right…
a better description would be a house of cards.
didn’t you notice all the record-stores closed?
what made you think you were any different?

they will understand, deeply within their d.n.a.,
that we need to go to the roots of storytelling,
that we need to recover our _basic_humanity_,
and they will scoff at the stupidity of the notion
this is all “managing” or “deals” or “marketing”,
or “a complex set of revenue opportunities”…

they will give away their books — free! — yet
make more money than most authors ever did,
and it will be money their fans gave voluntarily,
_after_ they read the book. no more scam jobs.

they will entice those fans to be _collaborators_
– and the fans will be _thrilled_ to participate.
somebody out there has a photograph that will
be a great illustration to accompany some page,
and that someone will appear with that photo…
their fans will happily furnish error-reports, so
the books quickly move to a state of perfection
that they couldn’t obtain with “quality-control”
even if they were willing to pay a bundle for it.

readers love authors, and authors love readers.
it’ll be like church, without any priest scandals.
churches have lived for centuries on donations.

get a clue-train. it’s all about the conversation.

there is dialog happening, and happening now.
a one-way monologue doesn’t cut it any more…

and nobody has to go through any gatekeepers
to reach an audience any more. that’s just silly.

and — on some level — you know it, and well…

after all, you put this on a blog, didn’t you?
you didn’t turn it into a book, find an agent,
seek out a publisher, and have it all “vetted”.

you wrote it up, you put it out there, and now
you’ve got feedback, whether you like it or not.

so, by your very own actions, you have shown
that you have absolutely no need for publishers.

neither does anyone else…

-bowerbird

Here’s an interesting thing. In a conversation I had with an industry insider (who spoke on condition of anonymity), I was told an interesting thing. This person told me that Mobipocket (now a subsidiary company of Amazon), who had promised in May 2008 to have an official iPhone Mobipocket reader client out by the end of the year, had finished the reader by August—but that Amazon was sitting on them, not permitting them to release it.

Though there are other readers (such as Bookshelf) that read Mobipocket books on the iPhone, none of them will read DRM-encrypted books the way an official Mobipocket reader could. Thus, the lack of a Mobipocket reader app for the iPhone means that all the stores that sell DRM-locked Mobipocket books (and all the locked books an iPhone owner might already have bought from when he had something else) are useless to an iPhone owner (unless he wants to break the law by removing the DRM).

and not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

amazon won’t last forever — nothing does –
and i can totally see entities nibbling its edges,
picking niches and specializing to superiority.

but to posit that something cobbled together
and outsourced, something that is “not good,
but good enough” can displace it? that’s silly.
it would be quite comical to see anyone try it.
unfortunately, i don’t think anyone is so stupid.

the only thing in “decliine” here is your spelling.

-bowerbird