The Future of Digital Publishing—Writeable Ebooks
February 23, 2012
by Carly Willsie
Do you remember choose-your-own adventure stories? They were the ones so prevalent in middlegrade book series (go Goosebumps!) where you got to pick if the heroine was going to jump the fence into the carnival (turn to page 15), or if she was going to play it safe and head home (turn to the next page).
Books with a choose-your-own-adventure structure allowed their readers a level of control not normally associated with the one-way communicative style of reading. With the explosion of digital publishing, the idea of collaborative books is also gaining traction. Choose-your-own-adventure stories very well may become write your own adventures in the future, as readers are invited to contribute to ebooks on an ongoing basis.
Terry Jones writes on the innovative concept in his chapter, “Why Digital Books Will Become Writeable,” in the book A Futurist’s Manifesto by Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary. Terry, the founder and CTO of Fluidinfo, demonstrates how the future of digital publishing may be found in this collaborative writing and editing model of the ebook, a la Wikipedia.
Jones writes, “Such a program could easily request and display opinions, ratings, annotations and page numbers your friends are up to. It could provide definitions, translations, footnotes, extra images, links, and the like. Additional information can be independently tagged onto the same underlying objects by other applications, with the ‘book’ being rebuilt or updated dynamically as needed.”
Crowd-sourced funding for books is already a reality. Organizations like PUBLSUSH Press, IndieGoGo, and Kickstarter have been getting a great amount of attention for their unique financial models in which fans get to vote and donate to books they support. They’ve been enjoying much success, too; Rich Burlew, author of the webcomic, “Order of the Stick,” recently raised $1.25 million for his project on Kickstarter—the only book project in the site’s history to surpass the $1 million mark.
What do you think? Are writeable ebooks the future of digital publishing? Would you buy them? And, more importantly, would you contribute to them? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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Fluidinfo
This is cutting edge stuff Carly. Glad you took a look into Fluidinfo. Many authors will be scratching their heads about it for a while - but soon it will self explain.
re: Fluidinfo
Agreed, Ted! Lots of potential here. Thanks for the comment. It's a great concept for authors to begin tooling with before it gains more popularity, too.
This is an interesting
This is an interesting concept. I wonder if it will really catch on the way the choose your own adventure books did back in the day. It will be cool to see what people can come up with.
So many people are contributing to recent posts at ebooks these days and it is no wonder because the right book can sell a lot but contributing writers may not be paid.
Not 100% sure
I must admit I can see some potential in this but the "a la Wikipedia" editing model of the book doesn't fully convince me.
Unless there's an implemented rigorous checking process on the contents, but than it will looses the dynamical appeal this aims to.
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