Great post. ++

Verrry interesting point, I’m working on my next book all summer in Greece, perhaps, I should finally enjoy my vacation and hire someone to build my thesis into an app?

Print is dead — Dr. Egon Spengler

I see where you’re going but I think what you’re getting into is no longer books. It’s a new way of telling stories. Which, I agree, is very cool. But it’s no longer reading nor books. It’s something new. Like movies, or radio, or video games.

So reading as Paul sees it might die a little just like it did when video came about. People watch movies or play video games instead of reading. They’ll do the same thing with these apps you speak of

so reading isn’t going to die just like it didn’t for those other mediums. People will just have another means for story telling

Remember this post ten years from now and how crazy what you said was.

welcome mr future, what can we expect in the following years!?

I wholeheartedly agree.

Hi,

Great Post!
I wonder what is the share of iphone or how many people globally can have access to an ipad in the next 5 years. Which raises a question .. is the question of turning publishing into the digital domain really a question valid to only UK and USA.

Books impossible to print: I like that.

That is, I wholeheartedly agree with whoever posted “Written like a non-reader.” Although that comment seems to have “disappeared.”

Written by the unlettered for the untutored…

I want to believe very badly that this is tongue in cheek. Sadly, I think it’s not, and this scares me.

Luckily, this kid is a digital hippie – an outsider not taken seriously by anyone outside of his Twitter-following, blogging subculture.

I’m 25, and I don’t think this is a generation gap talking.

Cody has an interesting point. The purpose of books is to convey and communicate information across. It does not need to be done in a “traditional” and static form, as we know book for hundreds of years. The new medium presents the same information and communicate in a dynamic way. I can see the whole paradigm shift coming over next few years and will define the way we see books in the future.

I’m an author. And this post depresses me.

Cody Brown in 1940: ‘Why don’t you just do radio, see?’

In 1960: ‘Movies are the bee’s knees.’

1980: ‘I want my MTV.’

And now: ‘Just, like, feed me an app, dude.’

What Mr Brown fails to understand is that the magic of books is not in the print. It is in the imagination shared between writer and reader. In what each brings to the experience. How I see Huck Finn will never line up exactly with any other reader’s vision or, for that matter, Twain’s.

Books are valuable because books are work. Unlike apps.

Carr is right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re 21, you’re a young and cool hipster, you know that print is dead.

Here’s the thing, though: books — media in the written word, really — are really easy to make. What you’re asking for is a multimedia production, and you know what? Those are hard to make by single authors.

Not impossible, true! But harder to make. And that barrier to entry might mean the difference between millions of diverse, raw voices or merely dozens of slick, pre-productioned and marketed consumerist pap for the proles.

And yes, you’re right! That’s exactly what’s happening right now with publishing! And you know what? That’s the exact same future the iPad is selling to me, right now. No change to the status quo, except making it harder for individual voices to get their stories heard.

This is the future? Whoop-de-doo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlKL_EpnSp8

That is all…

“What do you think would have happened if George Orwell had the iPad?”

He would have been shocked that people buy a product from the control-freaks at Apple.

Ah, the return of Apple’s HyperCard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

How I remember the cheesy Apps well.
The truth is … while all of these “books as apps” things sound great, most of them will be poorly done and a hindrance to finding information.
Writing a decent book is hard. Writing a decent book while writing a software app to put that book in is triplely hard.

Plus you have a ton of citation issues with this. How will you cite or share information (e.g., hyperlink) to the information you find in App X after you click the 3rd button and rotate 90*?

Normal text-based books aren’t dead and probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
They are too hard/expensive to make, if they are made well.
They can’t be used for academic/scientific/legal writing.
And the multi-media aspect creates a copyright re-sale nightmare (as DVDs of old TV shows with music has shown us).

Sure, some “choose your own adventure” style books will be great, but they won’t end text-based books anymore than TV did or audiobooks did.

It’s the natural tendency of every technology to overstate its claims. Why bother with the IPad?

Why not just talk about the good ol www? Imagine this article being written 15 years ago, and replace the word “App” with “Website” and you see what I mean.

Hyperlinks, interactive content etc. = books were never going to be the same or in this author’s words, “Books that can ever be printed.” (nice phrase but I’m generally wary of pithy aphorisms)

As it happens there are no www books that “cannot be printed” that are of much significance (attempts were made). But most books do have websites, communities of readers have sprung up, reading became more social etc. so the new medium, technology had its impact. Also, there was more stuff competing for attention, there was just more media and stuff to consume (like techcrunch!) and reading as a share declined.

Books that can’t be printed? Sure, but they won’t be called books. That’s like calling a narrative game like World of Warcraft, “a book that can’t be printed.”

My prediction – new forms of media, less share of the printed word, books adopting and trying to leverage the new medium.

All yes.

Books that can’t be printed? Yes, they’re called websites, games, tv shows, and now IPad apps. Welcome to the “future.”

The question is: Has he gone off his ADD meds?

“I’m 21, I can say with a lot of confidence that…”

Dude is waaay over confident. Too many participation ribbons/trophies.

There is some merit to this idea, however an app is a direct downgrade from a book. Even a DRM’d file can be read by any machine capable of reading that DRM format. It’s a format. iPad apps are only usable on the iPad. Not Windows, not your Mac and not even your iPhone. There can be interactive books that aren’t printable, but making each book an application is a path I don’t want to go down. I have an iPad – love the MLB app – and will probably buy ebooks though Apple and Amazon, but none will be book apps.

Audiovisual elements only limit the quality of fiction. Yes, even the cover of a book can seriously bias the reader towards a state of mind that will hinder the ultimate immersive experience that is reading. The ipad is the massive buzz kill for all fiction lovers like myself.
This kid really needs to reflect on how he became so ignorant. Maybe I’m too old at 35.

I disagree with this post on so many levels.

While agreeing the purpose of a book is to convey a message, the post author overlooks that the words on a page are input data to the best processing system in the world–the reader’s brain/mind. Words come to life, images are formed, connections made, and the brain/mind exercises it’s creativity. How sad to think that much of that would be taken away for just another iteration of a TV program (which is what the author is espousing).

Another area the author overlooks is the lifespan of the media. In my private library, I’ve a few books which were printed in the 1700′s, and which I read (carefully). In 300 years, would I still be able to read an iPad “book-as -app”? How about in 30 years? Would an author want their message to have a lifespan of only a decade or so?
How much knowledge and thought would be lost, just because the book is either several revs behind the current version of the technology, or the technology itself is obsolete?

After 30 years in technology, I’m wondering what I’ve helped wrought.

[...] read more, check out his “Dear Authors” post at TechCrunch. To find out more about his Kommons project, you can read this story on nyc30.com. Related articles [...]

“I see where you’re going but I think what you’re getting into is no longer books.”
Exactly what I thought.

Damn you Cody Brown! Do you really know what you’re talking about?

Damn you because if I want to write a novel and get it published (in hard copy), that’s what I’ll try to do. While there are publishers and booksellers out there in the real word, why shouldn’t I?

Have you been outside lately into the real world? Have you been into a bookshop recently? You’ll be surprised at how many bookstores there are and how many books they’re selling. I’m not kidding.

On the other hand, if I want to create a computer application for IPad, I will do that too!

Who are you to tell me what I should want to do or not do?

“What do you think would have happened if George Orwell had the iPad?”

Orwell. Perhaps not the finest example to pick, as Orwell embraced new technologies — he rocked the radio — but he made his most lasting impact with the written word.

This post worries me greatly. The author seems to have *entirely* missed the point of Paul’s article.

There is a massive difference between passively flitting around information fed to you in a controlled user experience, and simply reading plain text.

Cramming the experience of Tom Sawyer into a blog post or a twitter stream is absurd, and even a re-imagining of the communication into a fantastic visual experience where the text is reduced to a bit part ignores the importance of the craft of writing.

There simply is no substitute for well written words, in a story structure that takes longer then 5 seconds to absorb. Paragraphs and plot architecture that challenges the way you think, cannot be achieved with what this 21 year old envisages.

Paul Carr hit the nail on the head, without something akin to e-ink of a hybrid like the Pixel Qi screen, people will just refuse to read properly written books.

This was great. You may be the reason the first iPad book is published. All in all, this idea reminds me of the scene from Back to the Future when Marty is in the antique store. This may be the end of dust covers!

He’ll, I’d rather read an entertaining book over playing an iPad game any day.

“I’m 21, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define my generation will be impossible to print. This is great.”

I suspect books won’t define your generation, and that you’re on to something, interactivity, multimedia, etc., that will in part define your generation. But I don’t think there will be no defining books on or for your generation.

Books have a history of thousands of years – in mass editions more recent of course. There is something about books that transcends format options – words on a page that require your imagination aren’t likely to be replaced by something else, and will probably co-exist quite well, even as defining content.

I also hope this post was a joke. For one thing, if you can’t print it, it’s not a book.

I understand something like Elements, which is bereft of text, being an app, but I like my books collected in a managing app, be it iBooks, Kindle or whatever. This is one of my problems with PixelMags’ magazine solution, I want to deal with an app for each magazine? No, no I don’t, Zinio is the solution, an app that acts as my personal newsstand where I can see everything I bought and browse for new things in one spot.

Reading books will always have its place for many people, your new experiences in communication are welcome as well, just don’t call them books.

[...] 11, 2010 by Ned Resnikoff Via Joe’s Twitter, I see that friend and founder of NYU Local kommons Cody Brown has written a guest post for [...]

I assume the editors selected this piece ironically. A twenty-one year old worms into our consciousness based solely on rhetoric (not wisdom or coherent logic)… about the death of language.

Everyone knows new forms of media do not invalidate art formed in old forms. Steve Jobs has yet to embed a flexible LED on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Techcrunch ought to devote more resources to figuring out when I can finally buy a decent smart phone for Verizon and forget about teenage punditry.

By the same logic, maybe each vidoe and music should be an app, because you know, watching video and listening to music are now a lot more “sophisticated”.

Maybe after a scene, we can have a quiz and ask viewer some questions before playing the rest of the video. Maybe you can pause the music, get you to click a couple of things and only then the rest of he music continue to play ?

Would you like that?.

Totally agree.

This article makes it sound like a SWEET NEW APP-BOOK that mixes mad libs with homework is the same, and will be as popular, as sitting down and reading through an engrossing book and getting totally absorbed into the world created by it.

I’m 25, I can say with a lot of confidence that the author of this post has no clue what the hell he’s talking about.

Wow.

The iPad is just another medium, that comes with new techniques to interact with the reader and bring them into the author’s world. Author’s shouldn’t look at how to take advantage of that medium, just like author’s today don’t care about font-size, colors, indentation, etc. when writing. They focus on the words. The rest of work is left to other creative professionals. Writing is work in itself without having to think about whether there is a game between chapters.

Completely disagree with iBooks vs apps. With apps there is too much flexibility. You need some sort of consistency when reading a book. In English the book will flip from right to left, not down-up or just unroll like a map. Kindle and iBook formats act like these standards.

It’s a common fallacy to believe that simply by embellishing the reading experience with video, audio, search and hyperlinking, etc, it will in every way be ‘improved’. For browsing of time sensitive material, daily news, blogs, etc, electronic media obviously excels. But for ‘serious’ reading that requires time, effort and commitment, I strongly believe the tactile experience of the printed word on paper has a long, long way to go before it becomes ‘obsolete’.

Nah, he was never diagnosed.

A computer can run apps too, you just can’t buy PC/Mac/Linux versions from iTunes. Everything that the iPad is supposed to be doing is already being done with the goold ol’ web browser! Once the hype fades life will return to normal and we will enjoy media using our favorite browser on our favorite device.

Yeah, he’s been in the bookstore — sipping a latte while flipping through a magazine he borrowed from the racks and has no intention of buying.

Great post, if you’re into toolism.

I want to see all my books displayed on my ibook shelf, not cluttered onto my iphone homescreen. Plus if I end up buying tons of books I’ll never be able to keep track of them all like I can with ibooks.

re: “I’m 21, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define my generation will be impossible to print. This is great.”

This kind of means that everything that came prior to iPad and had not been “written for consumption via iPad” would be lost for your generation. If that is the case, I am sorry about your generation. You will miss a lot. You will not be able to read American, English, Russian, and other classics “like a game” on iPad. And, your life will be defined by Steve Jobs and iPad, however great he and his creations are.

More so, 1 billion (1/6) of the world population is illiterate. Do you think your generation will get to change the world if all you ‘read’ is what you get via iPad?

http://www.roomtoread.org

More so, have you met a true author? Authors are authors — they write; most of them know one media — “a pen”, keyboard at best. Most of them do not draw, do not create pictures, code, and all in between. Most of them write not for consumption by others, but rather because they can’t do otherwise. Most of them rely on their agents to distribute their art. And, if their agents are not doing the work, their art often gets lost.

You are a bit immature, but that is ok, you have a long life in front of you. Just make sure you get to learn things iPod can’t distribute and can’t communicate.
:-)

Best and warmest

Authors are not developers. While some may have the vision to create a new literary medium, the singular creation of the long form narrative is a skill in itself. Your industry in journalism, however, is one which needs to adapt to survive.

“There are literary techniques, there will be iPad techniques. ”

There’s also Kool-Aid techniques. You shouldn’t drink it so fast, especially since it’s Apple-flavored. What passes for confidence at 21 isn’t confidence, but rather naiveté. Unless you suffer arrested development (like many Mac-cultists seem to).

Cog — do not be depressed, keep writing. If your writing is good, people will read it. iPod is irrelevant to the type of art you create, just keep creating/writing.

The bottom line which the author of this post tries to get across is ridiculous. It seems to me that he has never ever picked up a book in his life (which is sadly enough).
Thus before even slightly suggesting that in future people wont read but experience these book-apps-thingies, he should first read a proper book that is so hauntingly beautiful written and let his mind savour each page, each paragraph and each word leaving his mind in a purgatory of images.

Also the hypothesis that the books defining “his generation” will be impossible to print is just absurd! Who the hell he thinks he is, that gives him the right to make such a judgment! I believe with the age of 23 I belong to this “generation” and his post was a great insult to me!

I agree, but I think that’s the danger. Once media starts being combined with code (as is the case with a videogame, for example), it starts to be very platform dependent. Music, movies, text, etc. are all portable because they’re just files, not executables.

Imagine if the iPad disappears as a platform. What next? Do we port these books around?

If we’re looking to start designing revolutionary, interactive books (or as many people have pointed out, these aren’t books, these are a new thing altogether), I wouldn’t invest in writing iPhone apps or even Android apps. I would be designing them in web technologies – HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

That really future-proofs this new medium against just being a flash in the pan.

Best post ever bar none. Cody is fucking brilliant.

Do they just let anybody write TechCrunch posts these days? Sure, it’s the weekend, but does the journalistic quality have to sink this low?

Not only is this analysis of modern books and reading dense and unoriginal, but a quarter of it is a weak response to Paul Carr’s post.

Saying unequivocally an author should publish an app instead of a book is like recommending a band create a music video instead of just music and we’ve seen how well music videos have caught on. Even on YouTube, I have a hunch a lot of music videos are listened to more than they’re watched.

Why is that? Because music is a specific way to “communicate in the rawest sense of the word” and it serves a specific purpose very well. A music video isn’t a replacement for a song. It isn’t better or worse necessarily. It’s a different medium and it’s part of the artist’s challenge to decide the best medium.

Apps don’t replace books either. This article acts as if the constraints of books are a hinderance, when in fact, many of those constraints are what ensure it’s endurance as a medium. I say this as a reader who these days mostly reads novels on an iPod touch, so I embrace many of the advantages of digital books (digital annotations being one of the best in my opinion).

But when I want a movie I watch a movie. When I want to listen I turn on the radio or Pandora. If I want a game I play a game. Most of the time (not all of the time) I don’t want these intermingling with my reading because it distracts from what the book as a medium does really well. Read that again – it distracts, not enhances.

Authors are not “completely missing the point” by seeing the iPad as a place to publish their next book. You sir, are missing the point of reading.

I’m excited by the new mediums which the iPad and tablets in general will usher in. We’ll have new art, we’ll have new entertainment, we’ll have new ways to learn and teach.

But these don’t replace the book. A book will always stimulate our minds in a way other mediums can’t and that’s why authors will continue to write them, and readers will continue to read them, no matter how they’re “published.”

P.S. Does this writer know anything about George Orwell? I don’t remember Orwell embracing film to “blow our minds” and that medium was certainly popular and available to him.

[...] I Just Wish It Weren’t Going To Kill Reading Too“, another one is Cody Brown’s Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook.  Then it gets me thinking:  What will George Orwell’s 1984 look like if is written, or [...]

Thank god you stepped in! Couldn’t have said it better.

Books will never die.

knw why? Tech Crunch didn’t write it…

ZING

I seem to remember that pretty much exactly the same arguments were made for multimedia on CD-ROM around 1990.

CD-ROM died, apps may very well have a future. I agree with other posters that these will not be books any more than movies or computer games are books. But a new genre for storytelling? Certainly.

But I cannot see apps replacing the written word the next 10-20 years, simply because apps are much harder to make.

Just consider your post: How long did it take to write it?
Now consider: How long would it take to turn that post into an app, including
* time to rephrase the argument into entertaining visuals and dialogs
* time to compose an original music score (or negotiating permissions and fees for using existing music)
* time to create artwork
* time to design entertaining interaction, including games and puzzles to solve in order to move from one paragraph to the next
* time to record video, music, voiceover, mixing, cutting, editing
* time to develop the actual app

It is easy to see that multimedia is orders of magnitude harder to do than just text, and most individuals do not have the skills to do professional work in all these fields.

So perhaps apps will become a major entertainment channel, but if so it will be driven by big media. I would guess game makers would dominate the field, as they are the ones best versed in “visual user-driven storytelling”.

For the rest of us, text is cheap, quick and simple, and I can’t see that changing much in the foreseeable future.

indeed

this kid sound like an idiot

You’d have never heard of “1984,” since it wasn’t originally written in Objective-C.

[...] [原文へ] [...]

It’s tempting to pick through the grammatical errors, here. But I know that’s so 2000-and-late.

More importantly, it seems to me that Mr Brown has turned out a huffy, contentious argument that… entirely supports his target, Mr Carr.

Carr: “The iPad will turn readers into watchers.”
Brown: “No! The iPad will turn readers into watchers!”

Well played.

Thanks for sharing your point of view. “Printing is dead” is a bit of stretch as we all know.

When eBooks came into play, they said “Printing was dead.”

When audio came into play, they said “Printing was dead.”

When Kindle was released, they said, “Printing was dead.”

Now, when iPad was released they are saying, “Printing is dead.”

It takes a VERY long time for habits to change. So printing won’t be dead for a very long time.

Best,
Rajesh

Geez, why did you write this post on a blog? I thought you were a cool 21-year old hipster…you should have made an app.

Cody, I think you are making a very important point here. The iPad is a gamechanger for publishing, and all authors (read: storytellers) would be remiss not to pay attention to that.

But the caveat this post fails to address is that books will not totally disappear from the creative landscape. Video didn’t, in fact, kill the radio star (at least entirely)—and the iPad won’t kill the literary star, either. Will the iPad steal as much of books’ creative marketshare as TV stole of radio’s? Maybe. Inevitably, as with the introduction of any new player, the market will do some necessary readjusting, and—you’re totally on point here—much of what comes to define our generation won’t be able to be printed.

But the iPad is not the harbinger of doom for literary storytelling altogether. Simply put, books are a medium. So are radio broadcasts, TV programs, dance performances, and theatrical productions. And despite all those innovations in storytelling, authors still write, radio DJs still talk, TV anchors still report, dancers still dance, and actors still act. Most of those media even integrate each other.

Now the iPad app is a medium, too. Let’s see what developers develop.

Great post!
Thats a great direction to think about: interaction integrated in the book “app” to monetize, to get some game into it or to hype a leran favtor or what ever…
I didnt took time to think about this stuff, but it sounds great!

p.s. Paul Carr deletes comments!!

You said this on the other thread too but, no, I don’t. They might get deleted by our spam traps, but I most certainly don’t delete anything.

“His example is vivid but also flat out perverse. Carr is confusing length with quality, and more profoundly, he’s confusing the ends with the means.”

Sometimes the means is the end, or part of the end. Given the multitude of entertainment options available people who read for pleasure do so because that’s the medium they enjoy. The idea of telling the story through some sort of application is interesting, but as another option for consumers rather than a direct substitute for books. I expect that when these story telling apps come they will exist alongside books (just like movies and television).

Whether these sorts of apps constitute a better way to communicate a story, as the author claims, is completely subjective. Some users will prefer them, some will not.

There is almost certainly a potential audience out there that does not care for books but would like these types of apps. But whether or not an app could be created that would give a superior (in their own subjective judgment) experience to people who prefer books over other forms of media is less certain. And even if that app could be created it might still be too book like to attract people who wouldn’t have bought the book.

The potential opportunity here isn’t to replace books with apps, it’s to create a new medium to reach a new audience.

What you’re describing is not a book, it’s a whole separate medium (I would argue we already have something like that – it’s called video/computer games. The Longest Journey, The Secret of Monkey Island, Heavy Rain – all new ways to tell a story.)

Having said that, a book is something else entirely. A book is about author “telling” you the story, but not “showing” it. It’s about letting your own experiences infuse the words on the page with meaning and emotion that are relevant to you. It’s about letting your imagination create pictures from words, that once again, are your own. Books are a more intimate experience than movies or video games will ever be. Simply because you’re much more “in control” of it – there are no actors portraying characters differently from what you’d imagine, and there are no scenes rendered in a way that does not speak to you.
There is a place, I would hope, for all those various mediums. And I’m sure someone will find a way to tell stories in a way unique to touch tablets, but that will not replace books, nor should it.

Also would it kill you to proof read your post at least once.
“A.) The iPad is a better buy then the Kindle…”

That was a cheap shot… but I laughed… it’s terrible :)

Exactly.

Also, independently of the storytelling form, let us not forget the many advantages of the book medium:
- universality (lots of kids around the world will never be able to afford an iPad for a long time);
- sensuality (some arenophiliac, book loving friends of mine told me that they like their books with sand grains between the pages, because it reminds them of the lovely, sunny beaches where they first read them);
- dependability (regular how-to books can be read in critical situations long after batteries have died);
- and so forth.

That being said, I am looking forward to the new generation of interactive books.

I’m with those hoping this is a joke.

If print (and by “print” I mean material that stands firmly on the written word) was going to be killed by a richer medium, it would have happened long, long ago.

If technology were going to kill books, magazines would have done that awhile ago.

I, for what it’s worth, find myself reading a lot more with my iPad. Or at least I have for the past week that I’ve owned it. I hope to keep it up.

I agree. To address this and a lot of other comments here, the point of this post is not to say print is dead, that’s cliche to an Nth degree.

What I’m suggesting is that if you’re an author and your serious about publishing on the iPad, you ought to be thinking far beyond the iBookStore.

You can whine all you want about the death of the ‘non-serious’ reader but it doesn’t get you anywhere.

I think Cody’s argument hinges itself on this:

“The mission of an author isn’t to get you to ‘read all the words’, it’s to communicate in the rawest sense of the word. Whether you’re Jeff Jarvis or Dan Brown, you have an idea or a story and a book is a way to express it to the world.”

Paul Carr said that reading an entire book on the iPad is impossible, and I agree. When I have to read texts for class I print them because reading off of an LCD screen is tiring, unengaging, and there is no way to annotate. So, Cody is right. Books on the iPad need to be different in some way so that they don’t become a worthless commodity. But they will no longer be real books for serious reading.

From a student’s point of view I don’t think textbooks coming to the iPad will be a great thing. For the reasons I mentioned above, but also because there will be no way to resell them. Publishers will have more power to increase profits at the student’s expense. If we can’t read as effectively, resell or take notes on the texts themselves, then education is going to be very different.

http://www.inkling.com/ is facilitating this revolution, starting with educational textbooks

Uhm…. hate to rain on your parade, but stuff like sensory and kinetic novels have been out long ago. They’re usually pretty low on computing power requirements too (by today’s standards anyway) so I don’t see any reason why they won’t run smoothly on tablets.

There are some really awesome examples like Planetarian, Narcissu. (Non-japanese readers might want to to check fan-translation sites like Insani or Haeleth).

Whenever an article prominently displays an author’s age, I take it as a disclaimer more than anything else.

The a)=>b)=>c) logic of this post is one of the more stupid things I’ve read this year.

The a)=>b)=>c) logic of this post is one of the most stupid things I’ve read this year.

Great post!

Nothing will ever take a way from writing and creation. Just like digital music. The music is still fantastic. The artists are still creating. We consume it on devices, rather than through vinyl on a record player. Should it matter?

It’s a new age of consumption. I can’t wait to see how this new paradigm will change the way we interact with content. Just think about how education can evolve. It’s going to be an interesting step. I am more excited to look forward then back.

With that said, I am at the age where I will still buy books. There are people that still buy records. But I am looking forward to be right in the middle of the next evolution. It’s only going to get more interesting.

The iPad sucks for reading things that are long, therefore we should only write things that are short…

I like some of the creatively here, noting the opportunities iPad may open up for multimedia and interactive books.

I don’t like the poorly framed suggestion that now everything needs to conform to Apple specs.

Sounds like a vapid future…

You’re obviously one of the people who don’t read much – those who Paul was talking about in his post – “I read on screen all day” when what they really mean is “I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work.”

New forms of media don’t necessarily replace old ones. You could make the same argument that video games should replace movies, since they can have detailed stories, beautiful cut scenes, interactivity, and are thus a more sophisticated medium of expression. But pretty much everyone still enjoys movies. There is a place for both
Likewise, we still have radio despite the rise of TV and the internet.
Despite what you say, there is more to books than simply “communicating in the rawest sense” and converting one to an iPad app is not necessarily going to make it “more sophisticated” and might even be plain annoying. Who wants to read a good story and have it interrupted by annoying quizzes and games? (except for school kids maybe) I’m pretty sure apps and books will easily manage to co-exist

And this is why I follow Cody Brown on TWITTER :)

Cody brings up a fascinating discussion that, while I don’t believe it was the point of his article, is profound in its own right.

“There are literary techniques, there will be iPad techniques.”

For all the talk about this “new medium”, this is the first reference I’ve heard to the iPad as a platform for new *art*. Lest we forget, literature is art. Film is art. What will be next? There was a great talk at SXSW about how the web has not turned out any artistic masterpieces (yet). I urge you all to bring art back into the conversation.

[...] and tribulations of mobile search and advertising. The same content is thus malleable and perhaps fundamentally changed when it hits a different [...]

Right. Because most books are made solely by the authors. Authors write, edit, re-write, edit, layout the pages, design the cover, print, cut, bind, assemble, assign an ISBN, package, ship, promote, distribute, promote by themselves.

Yep. Sounds about right.

[...] 图 书类App比电子书阅读器更划算 本文作者管组iPad应用及用户阅读习惯已经有一段时间，最近发布文章称用户在选择电 子阅读是应选择iPad等电子产品的书籍应用，而不是一部独立的电子书。因为购买iPad后除了读书还可有很多其他应用，而且明亮的阅读屏幕可以给眼睛更 多色彩。 WebKit 2浏览器内核发布转为多进程模型 WebKit是著名的开源浏览器引擎，也是Chrome和Safari等主流浏览器 的内核（Opera与Chrome的V8内核是基于WebKit开发的）。作为开源项目，它的开发主要由苹果公司主导。近日，来自Apple的开发者 Anders Carlsson 在邮件列表中发布了WebKit2，新版本完全重新设计，以支持类似于Chrome和IE8的多进程模型。这样在主流浏览器中，只剩下基于Gecko的 Firefox和基于Presto的Opera还没有采用多进程。 来源：donews [...]

Apps aren’t work? Go make one and get back to me.

“The iPad is a better buy THEN the Kindle”
…

Anywho, the guest article argues that authors should “APPify” their books because iPad provides a new set of expressions that conveyance the rawest ideas better than plain text.

So I ask, how come this shift in the paradigm of idea conveyance did not happen when laptops were popularized? Authors can no doubt “publish” their books on laptops as applications, and quiz readers before the next chapter can be accessed.

My author’s response to Cody, (too long for comments here) A book is a book, an app is an app.

http://www.taoofnews.com/2010/04/a-book-is-a-book-an-app-is-an-app.html

has the author ever truly read a book? i like reading books to read not to play a game or interact with something else on the page.

Why so many posts call Coby a “hipster”?

Just misinformed. 21 yr-olds not reading books is an American phenomenon. They still read a lot of books in countries like Japan, UK and France.

Ah, youth.

Brash and idealistic, and ready for a crash to Planet Earth at around 25. Like all generations.

OP is a troll

I must’ve missed the part where the author said that all print is dead because everyone seems to be referencing it. I think it’s pretty clear that Brown is referring to ‘books’ that are written for the iPad. To that end, he cites two authors whose work could be greatly enhanced if written as apps- Dan Brown and Jeff Jarvis. I’m not much of a fan of either’s literary output, but immersive graphics, even games or puzzles, would work in the Da Vinci code, and I believe reading a Jarvis book in which he says ‘link to the rest’ on a static page will soon–and should–be a thing of the past. And publishers could even charge a little extra for these book hybrids (and they will). Is all that so bad?

Reread his post. He meant books are work to read, as opposed to the other mediums he referenced which are passively experienced.

I think he is talking about the work on the reader’s side. Reading a book versus… using an app.

Wow, one of The best articles I’ve read In a while! :)

i thought i was going to catch some sleep from my 3 day marathon of consumption but i decided to stay up and paul tweeted this link. i’m 21 and i read more than the average person my age and if some person decides to market their book like a game inefficiently and implements a “pass a test” system for me to read the rest of whatever i have purchased then i am going to *cannot say what i’m thinking of right now, but i will be very pissed. when i’m reading a book i don’t have to pass whatever type of test, fun, boring, challenging, or otherwise test to move on to the next portion. i hope you’re not consulting anyone on what they should be doing for publishing their works. yes the independence factor and the unknown is exciting here. yes some people can maximize this platform for their own gains, and maybe break some ground. it’s really sad that so many people have given up on books in paper format. i don’t think i can ever read a complete law textbook online. i don’t think i can read a 800 pg history textbook online. i also don’t think i can read a 1000+ art history book online. what i do think is that people need to stop thinking about paper format books being translated onto online platforms. they should just think of them as literature online. they need to think of them as websites, apps, web comics, etc. it has to originate from the web/online space. it might have the potential of being printed on paper or on another format but it primarily has to be thought of as video online or blogs. something like that. i almost was about to rail about how if information wasn’t printable on a phycial format then i wouldn’t consume it, but that’s not true because i am online all the time reading and i barely print unless i need to. so maybe in years time nothing will be printed. it’ll be bad for people like me who read a lot constantly and experience eye fatigue, especially if the technology doesn’t improve with backlit screens. i personally think design and the concept of black and white, space, what colours we see and are soothing to brain sensors is the way to go because those are aesthetics we can change and get use to. we’ve had backlit screens for a long time. it’s past time technology improved or changed. at first e-ink reminded me of printing on recycled paper, the off white not highly treated paper, but then i realized that i can read better outside without amazing glare and reflection. it works because it changes the idea we have of white even though the black ink remains. that’s what needs to happen through design with websites, print, and screens…but of course that’s not going to happen. too many individuals with their hands in pots of interest. also light isn’t the only thing that affects the eyes, font type & size, spacing, the contrast of extra white paper and very inky, blotty, bold black type. so it’ll happen that you’ll get a book probably independently printed and you look at it and it seems different. yeah it’s because book publishers and printing companies (can’t forget the authors that barely have choices) make all these aesthetic decision on how things look and then we just have to do our parts and get “used” to whatever we’re given. sometimes some books will print covers on different materials, and you’ll get the occasional yellow/tea looking pages, or the off gray pages/papers, etc…and we still read those books, buy them. we don’t get the option to inform these guys on what their literature is published on. the standard for the web is the same except it seems like more people have choice. it’s just that they don’t use them. for a long time i observed the layout of the tc page looking around and comparing it to other websites and trying to gage what would happen if i read every single thing they posted in a 24 hour span and if my eyes would get tired or if i wanted to jump off something because mg posted 4 foursquare stories in a row. and what i came up with is that although the layout was slightly whack, but standard and well implemented, whoever chose the colour scheme for the website and decided to do the center alignment with the different breakdowns and the swatch og blue gray (i think the colour is #F0F0F0) to the side works very well in terms of space. this same process with websites happens with books, but the web gives you many more added elements, wanted or unwanted, good or bad. so i think if people are going to publish wholesale information online then it needs to be stand alone. it’s no longer a book. it becomes it’s own platform on a much bigger platform. it can include video, illustration, forums, crowdsourced edits, games. it becomes an app. it can be manipulated and transformed…all of this very easily. much easier and more instantaneously, more impactful and far reaching than a book.

The printing press brought the written word and the collected knowledge of humanity to almost every person on the planet.

The book was the killer-app that made literacy a must-have skill in almost every nation on earth.

The iPad is an overpriced, underpowered touchscreen netbook that’s missing a keyboard.

It will do for literature what the CueCat did for journalism and the Segway did for transportation.

Very thoughtful post and absolutely the right way to think about new distribution platforms and technology. What’s the point of just porting from one medium to another? Creativity should take advantage of anything a new medium has to offer.

Cody, you are right, the essence of a book is storytelling and not the paper its printed on or the typeface selected.

Great job TC for getting some fresh voices and insights.

Brown’s above response is more eloquently written and more concise then the actual published article. Fail.

anyone find it funny that a mg is correcting this kid cody?

yeah this is what i think everyone is trying to say. atleast everyone who’s under 30 anyways.

then they are no longer books, or on paper books. are they still “books” or literature or information if they are “printed” or published on other formats. i just think people need to get out of thinking about “book” or information printed/published in the traditional context of “book on paper” and everything will be fine. i’m not saying don’t print books aka information on paper. but cody, paul, everyone is right about this. there’s always the same talking points and it just seems like it’s all circular and the change isn’t happening enough on a broad based level. mobile is going to help this out, apple ipad or not. no one cares because the platform is online. it exists everywhere for everyone and is constant, minus bad internet connection, minus free vs pay or not. it can be an app, it can incolve flash, ads, illustration, video, forums, other tree type semi pages or sites, it can be anything. that’s what we need to think of. this possibility of anything. it’s already happening and has happened with other traditional mediums. we need to stop thinking about “book” and think about “media format/platform” which is what a book really is anyways. it’s a part of an information ecosystem. reading is not dead. it doesn’t belong to any singularity. the people commenting to pauls piece who were commenting about hardware, delivery are the one’s talking about where were going in terms of “entertainment information/learning specific information”. and the delivery aspect of it deals exactly with what cody mentioned in his bottom paragraph and what paul mentioned in terms of the hardware aspect of screens and e-ink, etc.

Great post Cody!!!

Yawn – multimedia format, right? Or subscription format? Or….(insert gimmick)….whatever. Hey, this might shock you, but many of us like to read. That’s right, read. Not with pictures. Not with sounds. Just words. What a bunch of luddites, right? Wrong. It’s the medium we love. The medium of words only. You think words aren’t rich enough and you need some kind of cheesy multimedia “experience” to “enliven” reading? Or some kind of gimmick? This is the opinion of someone who doesn’t enjoy reading because there’s no PERCEIVED instant payback like you get with an Xbox or a movie. You don’t understand the medium of words only.

That’s up to you, but the concept of reading isn’t “out of date” or “broken” just because you feel it needs multimedia or some game, or some gimmick.

Your point of view is like saying meditation sucks because it doesn’t look exciting, or yoga’s boring just because…well it doesn’t look exciting, or eating well is boring because there’s no instant sugar rush.

You don’t get it.

A book doesn’t need to be an “app”. It just needs to be well written.

Jesus man…it is satyr man. Are you really analyzing the use of books man? Books are still useful because people won’t be able to afford iPads man? Come on man! You really think this kid is saying that books shouldn’t exist anymore because they are outdated man? Come on man!…man!!

What you list there (what a book needs to be published) aren’t really germane to the actual story or work of the book are they? A multimedia production will involve more than just an author – an artist, musician, maybe an overall producer – no different to a movie. We’re talking about creative roles here, not assigning ISBN numbers and whatnot.

i don’t know where you fall on the 25 year old scale (old 25 turning 26 which is official over the hill old, or the the just turned 25 pole), but this guy is only one version/voice/distinction/facet of 21. i am of his generation. the generations my little cousins belong to are going to be of another. we are all digital kids. we learned about the past and listen to our parents and other adults talk about back in the day but we don’t know it because we didn’t live it. i still read paper bound books. it might not be hip. it might be dying, i don’t think i care as long as i can read anything, anytime, anywhere and my reading experience is not negatively affected. i also read online on mobile hardware and on mediums/platforms in specific spaces. books aka print based books aren’t dead, save paper movements or otherwise, and online published information isn’t going to be the entirety of the end game. maybe they won’t coexist, maybe it won’t be a peaceful coexistion, maybe one day when we are “old” 26 & over paper bound books will magicly no longer exist (doubt it). we don’t know. the entire ecosystem is changing and it has to change. the technology has to help us move forward. people will always read on paper or on actual physcial material. reading on screen is not physical material because all you can do is touch a screen. a screen is wonderful but limited. the pysical aspect of reading on a screen is the actual hardware (also known as paper in terms of books) and the buttons or whatever effects added.

the scary thing is that some kids in the developed world will grow up not knowing the past. if all schools transitioned to having everything on computers and didn’t include anything in the class that is based on paper or other materials all they will know are computers and technology. they will know writing in terms of typing but not actual traditional “writing” aka hand writing and not text will be lost but printing, cursive, script on paper will be lost. but it will all happen on a screen on a computer or computer based product because everythings been replicated thanks to technology. that’s what some people don’t understand. yeah i don’t really agree with this piece but i don’t think he’s entirely wrong.

yes. that’s the argument and this is what people should bank money on. i don’t know what you mean by dynamic but i think you might mean multi layered or multi dimensional. books (some) aka paper bound information (video/text) can be dynamic. sometimes i feel like people use the term incorrectly.

I’m 24, and I can say with a lot of confidence that this ‘author’ doesn’t understand books.

I wish people would stop writing nonsense like this and adding lines like “…‘books’ that come to define my generation will be impossible to print” to make it sound like something inspiring.

man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man man

first of all i totally agree with you. pheew got rid of that disclaimer. second of all i really like your timeline specific quips. i also liked the dude use, but for under 22′s it should be “duuuuuuuudeeeee” and for girls it’s “duuuudeee-r” (don’t ask. it’s all tarded shit). and i love books (paper bound format), and i like reading online. but IMAGINATION is not limited to FORMAT(S). you are right when you say it’s between the creator and the consumer, but those same creator consumer relationships exist online also. technology hasn’t ruined that relationship (or maybe it has. i’m not arguing in terms of good or bad. i’ll leave that up to paul carr since he is much older and wiser and more eloquent than i am. lol at that extra suck up padding). technology has changed that relationship, for better or worst. reading has changed. reading will exist. how we read has/will/might change. intangibles people say only belong to book aka paper/physical formats that aren’t translatable to reading/consuming via a screen isn’t entirely true. it’s just different (good/bad). an app will not destory the relationship between creator or cosumer or limit the ability of a creator to create information that stokes the imagination of a consumer. what an app will do, or what all these other means of publishing will do is take out or bring abroad certain people in the publishing ecosystem that creators traditionally had to deal with (wow sounds a lot like the argument that’s going on with music publishing. all forms of publishing/deployment is going to change. they all have to. times are changing, but you don’t have to get caught in the crosshairs. lol).

also your use of “work” is relative to you as it is to others individually. yeah there’s a lot of grabage apps, just like there are some good apps, but saying books are work and that apps aren’t is just dumb and childish reasoning. it’s something i would say because i’m dumb, but you probably shouldn’t because you sound like you’re intelligent. anyways all the things you say are contextual. it can also happen on platforms or hardware that have nothing to do with paper. a book is a book is a book and the problem is that we think about books as “paper format” instead of a book that can be anything do anything. a book should be limitless like the internet. it is a medium of delivery. doesn’t mean the content has to fire up your imagination, or not. anyways enough talking about semantics.

this line is hilarious by the way “Books are valuable because books are work. Unlike apps.” i think it’s my favourite part of your comment.

[...] desde el mismo TechCrunch me dejó pensando aún más. Cody Brown considera, más bien, que los libros deberían pasar a ser aplicaciones para entornos como el iPhone o el iPad. Claro, obviamente entonces ya no son libros, sino [...]

And this is not about iPad and iBookstore. Publishing will change, but plain books would not disappear, humanity is too big and people have different reading preferences.
And books, journals and newspapers will become more media rich (like http://vook.com/ ) and then more interactive, and thus more entertaining.
First you might create apps for each media-book, but I think that there either iBookstore or some iLibrary will become a commonplace for such media-content (hard to call them books).

hahahaa. reading is consumption. it is an experience as you say and it requires a lot of brain activity but it is also a learned and repetitive action. it only uses the same parts of the brain when you read once and read again, so your use of passive in terms of reading online, reading via app, watching a video, consuming other multimedia or multidimensial information in other formats is noted, someone can also passively read or passively experience reading a book aka paper bound format. passive is subjective to individual and can be experienced not only with reading on a singular platform aka paper bound books but can also occur reading online, through screen, viewing text/images, etc. consuming and experiencing is all “work”. reading information from a paper bound book format isn’t the only way to work out your brain. reading online does the same thing. it depends very much on how people read (which speaks more to pauls original post on how reading, the act of it, and comprehension is being degraded because of non traditional platforms that aren’t paper bound books).

I love that you love to read – wish you would have read my post before responding. My suggestions don’t have anything to do with adding multimedia in the way you describe. My argument is not an attack on people who like to read – Really?. The argument is instead, reading has changed, what Carr calls ‘non-serious’ reading is actual reading. Instead of whining about it, my suggestion for authors is to embrace it. This really is not a radical suggestion.

If you disagree and think people only want text bound in chron, more power to you. Others will innovate.

Great post, Cody. It got the brain humming. When I think of “books,” I think of stories, images, ideas, art, drama, tragedy, comedy — anything that can be shaped into meaningful thematic or narrative content. The platform and delivery vehicle, the length and duration of the content, are almost secondary. You wrote of “literary techniques” and “iPad techniques” — even beyond that, books and stories in the future also will be judged by a new criteria: how seamlessly they can be experienced in different hybrid formats, for your generation and mine.

When I was in my 20s, I told some old reporters in my first newsroom that one day, all of our dusty newspaper stories would be zapping through computers and cables and the air, kind of like radio waves. They looked at me strangely. Those wrinkly dudes are dead now. I’m a middle-aged journalist who’s watched the Internet grow since the early ’90s. And you and your tech-savvy peers are at the vanguard of an era unlike any other. Don’t worry about the critical comments. Whether you’re 21 or 51, I want to read more of your sharp insights into the future of tech and the media.

wow great,You may be the reason the first iPad book is published. All in all, this idea reminds me of the scene from Back to the Future when Marty is in the antique store. This may be the end of dust covers!

“The magic of books is not in the print. It is in the imagination shared between writer and reader.”

I love this point but I don’t see how it is, in anyway, exclusive to books.

I’m 28, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define my generation will be in print. The same as the books of the previous generation and every generation since people stopped writing on cave walls. This is great.

i actually like tariq’s use of multimedia because i think that’s where we’re going to be heading anyways because people’s attention spans are shortening, but the author didn’t say that he saw books of the future being multimedia. authors will say they are the singular creators of their productions and a whereas a director will not only say that they are singular creators/overlords of their creations but that they had a team of screenwriters, sound directors, set designers, art directors, etc who helped create their product. it’s a singular creator, team of creator dichotomy but they are both going through a similar ecosystem of creation to delivery. from author to delivery product of traditional book is what sundayafternoonwife explained, and from a multimedia author/creator to delivery product of text/images/video, whatever format on a platform is what you decribed. it’s not about assigning a barcode. you called it creative roles. it’s a role none the less. there are ecosystems both have to travel, the difference being that the collaborators, minions doing menial labour like the printing portion or overlords like agents, publishers, pr bullshitters, etc…all those people just have different titles to them. an authors world and a multimedia creators world aren’t mutually exlusive and closed to the other. they all work with each other. people who have ever had to market a product or work with advertisors know this.

yeah people were making this same observation in the fuck steve jobs reddit posts. no one in their right mind thinks orwell would be a fan of apple or many of the companies that limit people’s choices.

funny paul r. +1

great exmaples
There always will be books.
one more example: It has been possible to use figures and photos inside books for a very long time. But only some authors use these techniques. It will be the same with multimedia content or even interactive and crowd-sourced content. I think there will be lot of new ways of dicussing and commenting inside books, which is great.

Sounds a lot like the arguments around the times CD-ROMs came out. Seen a CD-ROM lately?

this is what i was thinking when i read his post. i just thought, where have you been cody, this shit is happening…maybe he hasn’t seen it yet. it hasn’t gotten to the point where printing will disappear but maybe that will happen. the multidimential or what did tariq call it, the multimedia part of it is happening. it’s not happening for a majority of books and it’s not happening enough, or implemented well, etc, but it’s definately here and it really is called “websites” which can become apps. i think cody is the one who hasn’t fully experienced what the future will be. he’s talking about it as if he’s the only one to realize this shit. geezus.

also thanks for the “narritive games” comment. you’re completely right. it’s already happening and more people need to understand that. they are being introduced to very rich, dynamic, dimensional products in terms of text/script/speech/images/video, etc in many formats that have nothing to do with “books” aka paper bound books. now they look different.they don’t include paper and have nothing to do with flipping something except maybe a game controller. doesn’t mean that the creator consumer experienced is any more limited than an author (writer) creator and their readers. imagination is not limited. also some games come with really extensive literature and back story and some of that is consumed or experienced via readin on a screen or reading on paper in a book.

he’s 21. give him a break. he only speaks of what he knows even if this has a whole “i know the future” ring about it and calls the knell for the end of books. yeah right. all i’m saying is he’s not entirely wrong and he’s just using the wrong words. infact tariq and kartik could have written a follow up post to paul carr’s original article and do a much better job.

lol. my older brother at 34 is already too old and so is my 24 year old brother. if you have kids or know any and ask them if 21 is old they’ll definitely say “too old” or shake their head as in nuh uh “not too old” but anyone under 17 thinks 21 is old…except for 16 year olds and 13 year olds. those are the complete batshit years (not speaking from personal experience. just saying what my parents said back in the day). adults=old as fuck.

lol. i’m going to read your comment after i finish going through the comments (almost done), but i hope your post talks about the benefits and limitations to the platform which is a book aka paper bound format or an app which can be anything aka literature online, multimedia literature, narritive games, etc. whatever we decide to call it when it all emerges. cody only briefly touches on the possibilites and the experience at the and but that’s probably what he should have started this article out with and just jumped in with cold feet and explain what he meant by books that aren’t printible because what he’s talking about is already happening in various formats. you can’t just say a book is a book an app is an app, infact my comment i’m going to post to cody is that what he’s talking about shouldn’t be limited to or even start as an app. it should definately start as a website or some kind of media engine and then maybe worked into becoming an app. the way i see it apps are very one dimensional, but maybe in a couple years people can do all the things cody and others forsee books to be in being dynamic, rich, multidimentional experiences instead of just text (good or bad) printed on bounded paper.

What a load of babble. Turn books into apps? Books are books you jerk. People love books and always will. Regardless of platform. All this idea would do is further dilute what a book is about. And stop it being one. Jeesh. Being 21 is no excuse for ignorance. You need to read some books yourself mate.

It appears that your whole conception of reading is upside-down. Probably because you don’t enjoy reading and you prefer to feed your brain with pre-packaged images and sounds rather than using your imagination – something that is being numbed more and more everyday (not only yours, everyones) – to picture a story that’s being told.

“The mission of an author isn’t to get you to ‘read all the words’, it’s to communicate in the rawest sense of the word.”

I completely disagree. The mission of a book, a well written book, is ALSO to have the reader read all the words, savour them, taste them, depict them in his/her mind as a part of a whole. This applies both to storytelling and to poetry that, hold yourself to something solid in case you faint, STILL EXISTS. Yeah, if I publish an app of a dancing tentacle monster shooting musical notes from its pores it MIGHT still be considered art, but associating that with poetry is just as a bold as associating a videogame or even a movie with a book. Books have been around since man invented a way to write down his ideas, and are going to be around way past iPad’s expiration date because they are the easiest and in the end most compelling way to do so.

“I’m 21, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define my generation will be impossible to print. This is great.”

This is ridiculous, you probably haven’t read any quality books. Try that, then read this article again and blame your hands for having allowed you to write it. The horror. The horror.

(Sorry if my english wasn’t perfect, it’s not my first language)

this is true. you sound like you’re an old 25+ “been there done that” person. i can’t wait to turn 25 and have reality give me a hard self check, but that’s some years away.

Books aren’t video games, but I do agree in some sense to building books into applications as opposed to having a basic text reader. It would allow you to do all sorts of things that eReaders are limited by – changing page layouts per chapter, page number placement, specific fonts, etc. I always feel I’m missing out when I read a digital format vs reading the physical book (and I am).

But that would mean that one particular book could become frustrating to read purely because the app it runs through is shoddily done.

A better solution to this would be a far more customizable reader but customizable from the book’s perspective. A book could define layout per section, background colour and so on (unless the reader disables it, because sometimes altered fonts, colours, etc. might not work so well on some users device in terms of readability).

This would give publishers and authors far more creative allowance on the digital version. Or at the very least, emulate the original print copy more.

if books are no longer printable then they are no longer books as we know it right, because then we will need to co-opt/change the definition of a book or add on narritive games as book type, etc… the term “book” is what’s leading to the confusion. also the whole print is dead/books are dead thing is in reference to what paul carr originally wrote, but i don’t even think he said that since he moved on to the whole how reading will change due to hardware and platforms argument.

I love the point about how the magic of books is in how the reader interprets the story and characters. It is the *lack* of visuals, of sound, etc, that makes books so special. The reader fills in the blanks in his/her own mind, and thus does so in a way perfect to him/her. It’s why the movie version is never better than the book.

I don’t think the format will ever change, other than genre popularity, and so we don’t have to really fear Cody’s brave new world.

lol. yeah, but publishing literature is not limited to a book aka paper bound format anymore. writing a story on cave walls does not make that content and those cave walls into a book. scrolls aren’t books unless they are “bound” so that they become like the book od scrolls or the book of kells, etc or like calendar books back in the day. reading is not limited to formats. imagination or good literature is not bound to formats. an app does not have to be absolutely crap or a bad platform to deliver literature. books or what we know as published content/books are changing. maybe not changing as quickly as everything else is, but maybe it should go through a change. i hope apple isn’t going to usher in this change because they are very very propietary and closed, but whether they usher in ibooks or app books or app literature or inarritivegames, whatever all this content becomes, it will not be on one singular platform. the only good thing about this post is that cody speaks from one perspective of where books/literature can possibly go. the “books” of content of my generation and following generations mayb not be printed on a physical medium. the content may exist in bytes and might be consumed only via screens. it sucks i know. if people don’t want that to happen they should continue reading paper bound books.

aren’t apps watered down versions of websites that can be accessed from browsers? so how can something as richly complex (not talking about the cotent, but i mean covers, inserts, number of pages) as a book be broken up and sold as an app? to all the people saying apps are no “books” aren’t e-readers doing this already delivering “books” via download. don’t you also lose what makes a book when you download it onto your kindle, ipad, sony reader, nook, etc? you get all the text right? do you get the inserts, front and back covers? do you get the coloured ullustrations or photographs? i guess footnotes show up because that’s all text based so that’s no big. visual media is the more difficult part of the book delivery on these type of products, but then again one can correct me and say text is visual media. meh.

i’m not going to laugh at your post cody cause it’s your first one here it looks like, and what you bring up is no laughing matter. i think you’re wrong. what you’re describing and what paul lines out in terms of limits in reader exerience has not yet been solved by technology and massly adopted products. more still needs to happen on the tech side. in the meantime what you say about apps being inserted into the ibook sphere is not wrong especially if you think websites cannot provide everything that apps can. i think you should follow up on this definitely, find examples that describe “books” that aren’t paper bound that are being consumed by a user base, and also talk about the selling points of multimedia “books” or apps like you were with price points and like i was with cutting out some of the steps in the author-publisher-printer ecosystem and how like some of the others mentioned the adoption of other creatives (designers, musicians/sound mixers, visual artists) into the newer ecosystem (not so new because authors/publishers work with other creatives too like visual artists, designers for websites, pr people for marketing platforms, etc…it’s the same shit different titles).

The post does bring up an interesting question.

Why let Amazon and iTunes dominate the publishers?

The Publishers should form a group and create a standardized Book APP for Adnroid and iPhone.

They should charge Hardback cover prices.
Then when the book is out long enough drop the price to soft back prices.

This would regulate Amazon and iTunes to charge the same price with their versions of the digital book.

And to cover this kids main point he is thinking of turning a written form book into something “more”……..I’m certain some publisher will do this but the main audience of BOOKS still want to simply read. I know my 62 year old Father will NOT want anything “fancy” and he buys a new Kindle book each week! Most people simply just want to read a book OR listen to the audio version.

Perhaps a MIX with Audio and Text at the same time to make the experience a bit more sensual.
Of the 5 senses at least 3 senses will be used.

The post does bring up an interesting question.

Why let Amazon and iTunes dominate the publishers?

The Publishers should form a group and create a standardized Book APP for Adnroid and iPhone.

They should charge Hardback cover prices.
Then when the book is out long enough drop the price to soft back prices.

This would regulate Amazon and iTunes to charge the same price with their versions of the digital book.

And to cover this kids main point he is thinking of turning a written form book into something “more”……..I’m certain some publisher will do this but the main audience of BOOKS still want to simply read. I know my 62 year old Father will NOT want anything “fancy” and he buys a new Kindle book each week! Most people simply just want to read a book OR listen to the audio version.

Perhaps a MIX with Audio and Text at the same time to make the experience a bit more sensual.
Of the 5 senses at least 3 senses will be used.

http://twitter.com/codybrown
To address a lot of initial comments. I’m suggesting a new medium, not *total displacement* of books. Just registered http://www.padature.com
about 6 hours ago via web

———————–
see and the thing is you’re not the first to make this suggestion. it’s not new. the medium or the multimedia/multidimentional book aka something not printed on paper and might/might not be printible is emerging. it’s already here. this is an alright first post. you should read through the comments and do more research on books/literature that are already doing what you described.

I would rather say “Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should Be Both an App and iBook”

Harry Potters is one thing that came first on my mind

this really does remind me of those “interactive CD-ROMs” that were supposed to change the way we look at media. they failed miserably. if you want to ‘read’ a book, you are not going to ‘play’ a CD-ROM.
in that same way you will not ‘run’ an app. it will feel too much like playing a video game compared to reading.

writing a book means to tell a story like it’s in your head, you tweak and tweak until it’s exactly what you want to get across.
to read a book is to be taken away by the writer’s fantasy. you turn pages because you want to know what’s happening next. and the turning of the pages is the only active thing you’ll do, you’ll let the story teller sweep you away. if the book is good, the story will have you hunger for more, and not make you want to interactively change the story.

“Carr defines this reading as, reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex.”
yeah, right. but is there anybody out there who really thinks that rubbing against women is actually better than being in bed with the one you love and experience hours long of love-making?

rubbing against women is not going to replace sex.
iPad apps are not going to replace books

see that’s what i was saying. it’s all reading whether i’m reading online or reading from bounded paper or unbounder paper in a “magazine instead of ezine, a periodical, a research paper (printed pdf file), a book aka traditionally bound book”. it’s not all just casual quickies or sex. someone commented here that the difference paul mentioned is between passive reading affected by medium delivery and repetitive motion of flicking through garbage writing online, or too much material lonline and actual indepth reading. so if we want to talk about how technology has improved or negatively impacted reading we can do that. but what i am doing and what you are doing is no different. it is all the act of reading. what is different is comprehenion. i don’t think format inhibits comprehension of thoughts relayed in various text formats. someone else here mentioned something about how apps are not like books. well they aren’t but that doesn’t mean that an app is inherintely crap or devoid of experience or good material. i think an app is the wrong way for books, especially these newish multimedia books or narritives to be delivered.

yeah and that’s the problem with what is being described here, because an app in general can be anything, just like a website. if a book app becomes like what is on the kindle, nook, sony ereader, then it is not multimedia. it is multidimensional because it is no longer just a paper bound book, or an ebook online, but now it’s an app that can be native or not and can use the internet or not.

there will always be books/written-published narritive works…doesn’t mean they will be paper bounded books.

What about books that are impossible to translate over onto the iPad? Or any e-book/laptop/display screen for that matter?

It’s wonderful that we will begin seeing “books” that can’t be printed.

But have you read House of Leaves?

A glorious example of a medium being stretched to it’s very limits, and those limits being celebrated.

You can’t put that on a screen.

For all we know, iBook could just be a testing-ground of apple for a new app that they will launch on their 2G iPad. I think right now, what should we be focusing are those good non-paid iPad apps. 

Will Apple let you create an app that compete/propose the same service than one of their standard app?

Remember Apple’s reason given to the FCC for rejecting Google Voice app, or not allowing flash developed apps.

Apple’s business strategy is keep their customers close. They will never let you sell your book as an app.

Will Apple let you create an app that compete/propose the same service than one of their standard app?

Remember Apple’s reason given to the FCC for rejecting Google Voice app, or not allowing flash developed apps.

Apple’s business strategy is keep their customers close. They will never let you sell your book as an app.

I don’t care how young the author is, he is definitely saying something very profoud. When people write books that will be viewed electronically it is logical that it should be written in a different way as to how authors write physical books.

For example, authors of textbooks for students have to decide how brief or verbose to write the information. Either they can assume the students will already understand various concepts, or they can explain each concept in detail. When the information is presented in a digital format, you can have the best of both worlds. The main text can be brief, but there can be collapsible sections, popup comments, links to other information, multimedia etc. that will provide more information for readers that want it.

Wiznotes note taking software allows authors to write information in this way quickly and easily. We designed Wiznotes exactly with this concept in mind that when you read and write information in digital format, the computer power should be exploited for the benefit of the author and the reader. In addition, authors do not need to be developers!

Eli Cohen
Mesoraware
(Wiznotes is a division of Mesoraware)

“I’m 21, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define my generation will be impossible to print.”

Right. I am 31 and my generation was defined also by ‘books’ that was impossible to print – the Web.

Could you tell the difference?

Surfing the net as much reading as using an app: it just isn’t.

great comment but the word’s aren’t the readers own. the words written in a book are the author’s own.

someone said something in the comments section about how reading online is being fed a consumer controlled experience. how’s that different from a an author telling you some story via paper bounded book? isn’t a book also a version of “consumer controlled experience” because it falls into a genre and sometimes comes with age suggestions, written for certain market, marketed, edited…so it’s not the version one that gets to the end consumer.

once again intimacy is relative. even if i agree with you. i’m going to add that on to the paper bound book experience that cannot be replicated. i agree about the more freedom for control though, but we don’t drive a story. a story is written and relayed. good stories really out us in the driver seat but not all stories are this way. one can also have intimate moments with other art mediums like films and vide games. the meaning gained though from the experience will be different. one cannot control a film. films and video games are also a part of the whole consumer controlled environment. we all have limited control offered to us as consumers of these mediums, but you’re probably right in that books give us most free reign to imagine.

also the definiton of a book can evolve, but i agree with you in saying what cody brown sees of the future of published narritive in it’s delivery is something different from a “book”. and if he does follow up on futher research on the evolution of books into new multimedia hybrids, he’ll come across narritive games like some of you commenters have mentioned.

Adding a little reality check:

Authors/Writers are 99.99% of the time not coders. 99% of books never make money. So do you really think they or their publishers will have any money to pay a developer to appify their book? No.

Let authors stick to what they’re good at: writing. When a book becomes a best-seller then the publisher can hand it off to some developer to make an app of it. Basically the same contractual construction that exist when games or movies are based on books.

Don’t burden a wordsmith with code.

yeah there are still stores that sell cd’s and music cd’s. infact musicians are still releasing their stuff on cd. thank god the floppy died. cd’s also need to die. let’s have usb’s take over the world.

yeah i think apps for books can be great marketers. good for updates. forums…but that’s already happening, and it’s also already happening with websites. what cody and some others want is a complete overhaul to create something new. it doesn’t mean books will no longer exist or that the appreciation for books wanes. it’s not true. we will have books, written works for long time. the platforms, the delivery, these are things that has/are/will/might change. who knows. hopefully by that time the baby boomer generation is gone.

yeah i never played any of that crap. if i wanted extra stuff the publisher or author was hocking i went to their websites.

Words have their power not in spite of their simplicity, but because of it. It’s why 160 years later I can read Uncle Tom’s Cabin on my phone. It’s why two centuries later we can learn from Benjamin Franklin by reading his autobiography. It’s why centuries from now people will still be writing and reading books.

“Radio, moving pictures, and television challenged the supremacy of print. Radio and television can reach a mass audience simultaneously, and the living voice combined with a lifelike picture has great emotion and persuasive impact. The challenge, however, added to the communications experience of mankind rather than making reading obsolete.”

– “Book.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 1973.

We’ve been here before.

Finally someone who’s seeing opportunity where others tend to just complain about the end of stone tablets.

My thoughts, exactly :-).

If this post was anywhere near the truth then TV would have killed off radio decades ago. Mediums tend to multiply and adapt rather than replace each other.

Most American kids have the attention span of a gnat now thanks to TV, but look at the megasales of books over just the last 10 years (Dan Brown, J K Rowling etc.). In fact the richest book authors that have ever lived are living right now.

In the same way that the internet is a medium, not the message and Facebook is a site, not the whole internet, the iPad is just a device, not a replacement for text.

[...] existe uma saída. Horas depois da publicação daquele post do TechCrunch, o mesmo blog publicou uma opinião conflitante, escrita por Cody Brown, um jovem de 21 anos. Com poucos e certeiros argumentos, Cody ratificou a [...]

A poor argument, poorly made.

House of Leaves began as a series of text files on newsgroups and websites. It evolved from a digital form to an analog one.

And I think an app version of House of Leaves could certainly be done, since the point of the strange formatting was to disorient you and control the pacing of the story, both of which can be executed in a digital medium.

What a bleak, horrible, naive future you paint for us.

I have a lot of issues with this post, but my fellow commenters already said it all.

‘it only uses the same parts of the brain’

This is false. There have been studies done, recently in fact, that prove stuff like reading novels and long works of fiction use many different parts of the brain and higher cognitive function.

It is because you’re not just ‘reading the words,’ when you read a novel. You are unpacking the meaning behind them I’m the context of the story. The parent comment is right. Books are work for the mind. Reading is not a rote activity unless your a computer or have absolutely no imagination whatsoever.

haha, watched it last night. He was way ahead of the game!

This is the kind of thinking that generally leads to #FAIL.

You see, “books” are (most often) about “story.” Or, minimally, well constructed narrative. It’s the way humans communicate with each other for a very specific experience. In the U.S. we have been diminishing that capability for close to 100-years (our forefathers/mothers were far better read and capable of more complex discourse)…

App Developers (generally) haven’t a clue about “story.” Just as “internet television” companies didn’t have a clue about “story.”

There are very few touch-points for technology and story. Those that work in this converged space do quite well, but, it’s a small group.

If our narrative capabilities are further diminished (Twittter replaces “news,” then the iPAD replaces actual writing, etc.), we will become a Nation of Idiots.

Um, well, perhaps we’re already there…

It’s not, but it is exclusive to storytelling. There’s nothing wrong with your vision of an interactive, app-like book or story. It reminds of the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books for kids, where you would read a chapter and then have to choose an outcome for the characters at the end of each one. You’d turn to one page for one outcome, you’d turn to another page for the other.

The problem is in your central thesis that a 21st century, digital version of the ‘choose your own adventure,’ or something like it, is a suitable replacement for the traditional narrative. It isn’t. Maybe it makes a very interesting addition to it, but it doesn’t, nor should seek to, *replace* it.

I think the fundamental thing Paul sees and doesn’t like is a tool that’s not adequately suited to the immersive experience of long-form, narrative story-telling, and being marketed as such inadvertently changing behaviors of people, because it’s not good for that intended purpose.

It sounds like you’re saying it doesn’t matter, that the solution is in an app, but that ignores what people who like books enjoy about them and want to share with others. Moreover, it’s a lousy solution for the technical shortcomings of the device as an eReader.

See, the goal of an author *absolutely* is to get you to ‘read all the words’ not just give the gist of something! The problem is not books, the problem is the display.

So, iPad’s shortcomings as an eReader (display, typography, etc) do not mean apps are a better solution for storytelling. Maybe they are on that particular device, but that means the device isn’t suitable for books, not that books couldn’t be suitable for it.

I can’t really agree with this. I know a lot of people connected in a lot of ways. The IPAD is just a bad e-book reader choice. If you want to read, you don’t get an IPAD you get a dedicated e-book device…or a book…unless you can focus on one thing without becoming distracted.

Just because YOU and (granted) a large portion of other tech-minded young people…are too distracted by shiny things to read the whole book doesn’t mean authors have to change their books into video games to suit you…it just means you are the wrong audience, or the IPAD is the wrong device for you to read books on.

If you believe all of that is necessary to hold your attention, then this is not an advancement. It’s a problem with attention span and focus. While multi-tasking on a computer or IPAD or other tech device is a skill (and probably even a marketable one) if it can’t be turned off, and you can’t focus long enough to read a book, there is a problem, and it’s probably not with the book itself.

The screen on an IPAD is not as easy on the eye as the KINDLE … because it’s really a computer monitor. I think the problem here is closer to what you initially suggested…the IPAD isn’t a great market for a book.

David

Non-book book apps are the new CD-ROM.

Reading is fundamental.

Solve a what now in order to read a book? When I’m reading a story, at least, I want to get lost in the story. I don’t care about the medium as much as I do the engagement. Things that pull me out scrolling on a webpage, flipping a cassette (back in the day), turning a page aren’t very distracting but I don’t want my experience of MOST books to be interactive. I sure as hell don’t want to be solving puzzles or writing the book…unless I pick up a “Choose Your Own Adventure.”

A book should only be interactive if it SHOULD be interactive as part of how it tells the story. It’s great that the functionality exists, but it shouldn’t be forced onto a story & authors shouldn’t spend time trying to figure out how to enhance it if that’s not where their instincts lead them.

I’m 24 and I hope to god that our generation still knows how to write stories without cramming them full of interactivity. I love what’s being done now with book trailers, character twitter streams, etc….but these things don’t interrupt the actual reading experience.

I can just imagine how amazing books like Snow Crash would have been if developed for a medium like the iPad (not that Snow Crash isn’t already amazing, but it seems very well suited for something like this).

>What’s not addressed is why this is a bad thing.

For anyone in doubt, I recommend picking up a copy of Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ (in dead tree or ebook form – there’s no app yet :). It was written to address television and not specifically computers or rich media, but it’s still pretty relevant.

You didn’t need to list the author’s age at the beginning. His youth and immaturity is made painfully obvious through his writing.

I am a 26 year old American, and I find this post disgusting.

I am 40 years old and I must say GREAT post! Why wouldn’t I use the technology available to enrich the experience of the end user of my product?

Why limit myself? Why deal with publishers? Isn’t Apple really the only company I need to deal with in the case of the iPad?

Bring on the future, which would you prefer Lord of the Rings with an interactive map tracking the fellowships progress or nice page flipping animations?

Yeah, who needs literacy.

Your problem is you only see dichotomies. You think : people either like THIS or they like THIS. Instead, look at them as CHOICES. I like reading short form and long form. I want both, not one or the other. Who wants the medium of communication to dictate for you what you want?

The immersive experience of reading in the long form isn’t going to go away as you predict, as it has its own unique value and reward.

The problem is, iPAD developers are not story tellers. Typically, they are 20-something guys whose narrative reference points are in gaming.

I’d say it will be all flash and no substance. But, since not even Flash is supported, it will simply be a vacuum of meaningless touch/drag hell.

“Interactive narrative” is not an area there is great expertise, only pockets of hope. Regrettably, the gaming industry opted for slash/burn/shoot over story, so, the past 15 years were more or less wasted.

I suspect we’ll see some pockets of hope springing up in terms of using the iPAD platform for something unique in the story telling space. But, it will be those who read/write books and understand story who succeed in this area, not Cody.

…you’re 21… i don’t blame you for this kid, i blame your goddamn editor(though tc probably doesn’t have those)

Hey, here is a great idea. How about writing a book and putting it on the web. Forget the application idea altogether. Let the browser render the text and images/graphics. Ala Cory Doctorow at http://craphound.com/. If any of your stuff is good enough, then people might buy the print version of your content.

“I’m 21, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define my generation will be impossible to print. This is great.”

Good post, many are waiting for these old fogies to finally kick off and take their elitist “paper reading only” attitudes with them. I’d rather have a forested country and a natural environment than a bunch of crusty, heavy old books. RIP paper reading.

yeah but it’s repetitive and it uses the same parts of the brain that it used everytime you read. the MATERIAL of the content might stimulate OTHER PARTS OF THE BRAIN. but when i open my eyes and i do that all the time and when i read like i read everyday, all the time, consistently long form and short form, indepth or passively i am still READING and i am using the SAME PART of the brain that i use all the time to read a book, read on a screen, read a billboard, read anything anywhere. the act of reading doesn’t change the function, which part of my brain i use to read. but then again i am no scientist.

also you can read NOVELS passively. just because there is great content on the paper doesn’t mean that your brain is fully engaged. the same shit happens when you’re reading online but even more so. i’m just saying i’ve seen my bros (who have always had difficulty reading) read assigned books from school (fun or otherwise. stimulating or otherwise) and never “unpack the meaning behind the context of the story”…but they will pick up a sports magazine and devour the information found there, the really well written pieces as well as the simple drudgery and make that connectiong with the text and with reading. but we’ve all been through what cody, paul, you, me and everyone else is describing. UNDERSTANDING, and various types of reading (the act of reading) is not CONFORMED to A NOVEL, A COMIC, AN ONLINE ZINE, A PERIODICAL, A HISTORY BOOK, etc. reading and comprehension and stimulation is not boung to types of books/print on paper/stories on paper (fiction/non fiction, etc).

great comment.

I have to wonder how different this thread would have gone if the author was NOT identified as a 21 yr. old.

i just read your response right now. great comment! i like how you went through history of reading and “book” creation and delivery, and the best thing is that you’re right. all you guys are asking the same question. it just won’t be known as traditional “reading” or “books”. it will either have to be something else or new meaning will have to be added to what reading and reading comprehension is, and what a book is, especially in the year 2074 or whatever will happen. by that time i’ll be dead so i don’t really care but maybe i do care about the legacy of paper. i mean someone mentioned stories being written on cave walls/stone back in the day, and before it was also on fabrics as well as paper. now it can be something else. the future is endless. cody isn’t totally wrong, but i think i would be scared of a future where we couldn’t print anything and everything would have to exist in the ether, or in bytes, and interacted/relayed/experience through a screen. screens can become very annoying. i hope technology forges the way in this and then maybe everyone else will adapt.

yeah and that’s the sad part about this whole debate (aside from the fact that it’s an old debate) is that good story writing is not as easily transferable like cody would want it from authors to developers of all kind, despite them being creators. i mean i can’t even imagine an app developer who has a good foundation in story writing and relation aside from maybe game developers and maybe screen writers (but are screen writers making apps?)…

[...] Annie Werner–of WTF Gallatin Majors–has posted a typically sharp response to Cody and me. I’ll admit she basically nails me here: “What about the tactile sensation of [...]

i’ll get this book in paper format and read it. thanks for the suggestion.

i like how you added american as a descriptive qualifier. it just remindes everyone about how low reading levels are in the us. sad but true.

oh and i agree with all the other people making 21 year old comments. that really was an unecessary preface. he could have written the whole thing without saying his age and i bet people could have guessed he was under 25…the hipster comments notwithstanding.

hahahaaaaaa. this comment is so golden. yeah and maybe we can regress a bit more while time still moves forward. this is also a great way to look at all the over zealous “organic”, “environmentalist,” “green,” crusador type of people.

So this post is funny on two fronts, he hit it dead perfect, but also was completely wrong at the same time.

The point on publishing on the iPad is spot on, has anyone even looked in the iPad app store yet? One of the best sellers, was a Chem textbook company’s app which was a multimedia version of their textbook I believe it is called the elements (or something similar) it includes 3d images, video, rich text, etc. Perfectly taking advantage of the iPad’s capabilities.

At the same time, reading in the traditional sense is not dead and I am sure that the best books that define our generation will not be read by most of our generation because very few in our generation actually spend time reading for pleasure. To think that a book-app will be the best thing in literature that will define my generation is disgusting to anyone who actually values a good book. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with multimedia used as a teaching tool that includes, text, photos, 3D photos, video, and sound, but I am sorry to say that this is not a book, please do not confuse the two.

[...] Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook is a great call to action from writer and media entrepreneur Cody Brown, who reflects on the way writers can and should adapt their creative practice to new platforms (because audiences sure as heck will) If you, as an author, see the iPad as a place to ‘publish’ your next book, you are completely missing the point. What do you think would have happened if George Orwell had the iPad? Do you think he would have written for print then copy and pasted his story into the iBookstore? If this didn’t work out well, do you think he would have complained that there aren’t any serious-readers anymore? No. He would have looked at the medium, then blown our minds. [...]

The apps that come to mind are the ones, that “fix” some of the problems with books (from some authors’ point of view).

I recall a friend, who wanted to create a book that allowed people to choose their path thru the book – to not read chapter 1 followed by chapter 2, but to choose the route a character would take through a book page 3, then jump to page 17, then back to page 6. On paper this is horrible to create and print, with HTML it is a tolerable experience, with an app perhaps the experience would be better.

Technical manuals are often out of date within months (if not days of printing), yet an app can get you to just the chapter, or an app can provide you with the latest changes to the book you already downloaded (replacing the outdated materials).

Reading in different languages and using different character sets, just by the use of an app can enhance the “book” experience.

Poets now read, record, and upload their poetry to the web. Is it an audio book, if I download their spoken words? I’m sure there is an app for that.

What about an app that lets the author be a choreographer of many talented people, combining reader and poet entries with art. Perhaps something that changes by the day or by the hour. Something more than a blog – something with vision.

Vision….

We no longer live in a world that believes that the past is “all that”. If we did, then our stories would be epics told in the dark night, hours and hours at a time (with no advertising to side track us to think about the yummy car we just can’t live without). Our summer reading would include great heroes, who right the wrongs of the gods and teach us a moral about humanity, not a light mystery that includes a vampire, who feels guilty for eating a decent meal.

We live in a world where blogs and immediate thoughts are valued. We live in a world where communication is so easy and so versatile, we don’t even know what we can do until we try.

Authors are artists; new canvas and new paint is now available.

Everything continues to change. Why not embrace the change and enjoy the ride?

Alice for the iPad

[...] been inspired. I just read a post written by 21 year old Cody Brown titled “Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not [...]

Excellent post! I’ve been inspired by you. It goes for film makers as well. http://bit.ly/dtkObD

Lae, your idea of age is absurd.

This post is brilliant. Let’s go back to the economics, team. If you are a writer, is a book the most profitable and effective medium to deploy your knowledge to your audience? Unconstrained by romantic notions, you can see other possibilities, and writers will respond. Automobiles did not displace horses..they were simply repositioned. Expect the same.

At first I was intrigued by the idea of a book being a game or an app, but after giving it some though, I realized that an app will never be a book. An author is not a programmer, and never will be. Just because our collective attention span has been shortened to 140 digitized characters doesn’t mean the value of a well written book has changed. I personally will continue to buy books made of paper, at least until I can afford a Kindle. I don’t ever plan on reading from an iPad, and I don’t want to live in a world where books are impossible to print. In that world, there can never be another classic like “The Chosen”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, or “The Great Gatsby” (a few favorites). You can keep your book/apps. I’ll stick with paper, where literature is for enlightenment, and not merely entertainment. By the way, I’m 23.

If my favourite author published a new book and they only way to “fully experience” it was on a device not yet available in my country, from a company that I despise, I wouldn’t be too happy.

George Orwell, Why I Write
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.”

Cody illustrates Carr’s fear perfectly. Plato is toast- he isn’t going to come back and turn “The Republic” into an iPad app. Steinbeck isn’t going to re-do “The Grapes of Wrath” or “Cannery Row”; neither will Hamilton, Madison and Jay come back to life to turn “The Federalist Papers” into a shiny object for young Cody to fondle. Guernica won’t explode; the Mona Lisa won’t explain her enigmatic smile. Enrico Caruso won’t be making any music vids. Michelangelo’s David will just stand there.

Cody and his generation and those that follow will be so culturally and historically bereft – drifting around in throw-away entertainments – that they’ll have no clue where they came from or where they’re going. Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn’t work when you ignore the giants and gaze stupidly at the surface of an iPad.

[...] I don’t follow Tech Crunch, but if you’re on Twitter and following over a dozen people, it’s likely you’ll see their stuff mentioned. I read the more interesting things and today I threw up a little in my mouth when I read the post title Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should Be an App, Not an iBook. [...]

Apple has already allowed a competing service to its iBook store – and that’s the Kindle store. I don’t see what reasons they could use to block any other book store.

it’s not that reading needs to get more sophisticated, the charm about text is just that… you create the content on your head and then elaborate… and this is proven by ‘works of inspiration’ which are based on books, and actual reading them! marvelous eh?

also, by the way… companies like squaresoft have been doing exactly what this kind of thing you ‘describe’ since loooooooong long ago… more than 20 years I would say :)

Writing, and reading, are not dead. Publishing, however, is evolving. With new tools, authors can use Lean Startup principles and apply them to the process of writing and publishing a book.

My company is building one of these tools, but I won’t spam-promote it here. I will, however, link to a blog post I wrote about this subject last year (http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=81) that showed up on Hacker News recently…

Thankfully not everyone in his generation shares his imbecilic view.

[...] Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook RT @notinmy: RT @librarianchat RT @TechCrunch Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook http://tcrn.ch/ddciv6 (tags: twitter_automatisch) [...]

[...] April 13, 2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/11/dear-authors-your-next-book-should-be-an-app-not-an-ibook/ [...]

[...] to point out its opposite when it makes an appearance. I have read the unintentionally funny named article in TechCrunch “Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook”. Here the author gushes [...]

It appears many commentors essentially stopped reading when they got to the ’21 years old’ part. Unfortunate, since Cody’s post offers a fair illustration of how to present a counterpoint perspective without stooping to derision and dismissiveness.

Printed books offer a significantly different experience than the oral tradition of storytelling. Every medium has its own in-built array of advantages and disadvantages as compared to any other medium. A printed book doesn’t replicate the exact experience of hearing a story told in person, and that’s okay; a book offers a possibility of a rich and immersive and engaging experience in its own right. The advent of the written word didn’t make vocal cords obsolete; if a medium offers new possibilities, it adds another layer to the strata of viable means of communication. A multi-media device has different strengths, different weaknesses, different possibilities than a printed book. If a multi-media device offers nothing more than the text of books plopped into digital format, then it’s simply a different means of delivery, not the unique medium of experience that it can and should be; and that would represent a failure to grasp the true possibilities of the medium, rather than a limitation inherent to the medium itself. I’m middle-aged, and have a deep and abiding love of books of the printed-and-bound variety; and still, i wholeheartedly agree with what Cody is saying here. The vision applied to creating multi-media materials needs to be as expansive and imaginative as the medium will support, and those who fully grasp those possibilities are the ones who can implement the ideas in such a way as to create a rich and immersive and engaging experience of a unique sort. Debating whether multi-media offerings are ‘superior to’ or ‘inferior to’ printed books is much like debating whether an orated story well told is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than a printed story well written. Different mediums, different experiences. That’s all.

Try reading a really book. It is less distracting then an iPad or a Kindle, needs no power, you can use natural light, plus you don’t have to buy some expensive device to read it on.

Snore. They’ve said the same about every communications advance to date.

pulp novels (not literature), pornography (not erotica, or even nudes), movies (not film) will continue to keep the masses entertained.

don’t see how these blinking lights are any different save for the portability/interactivity of the vector.

culturally and historically bereft? these kids have instant access to a massively expanded set of human knowledge than ever before. do yourself a favor and take a look at *just the advanced physics lectures* available on youtube.

eesh.

people still would have shat over what was written and maken less 21 year old comment but more “come on man what are you 12,” & “did an adult write this?” type of responses. it’s the name of the game and reflective of the age we live in.

great comment but look at andrew hill’s last sentence for the answer to your question. it’s because we’re not all smoking good kush and there’s a difference between a book, a book that is published in book format first and then is uploaded online and made into a multimedia narritive, a book that originates online, a book which originates online and is released not in a published text format but in a multimedia format like a video which would thn include text <–which is no longer a book but more like a tv show (cartoon, sitcom, drama, otherwise). so the book is transformed and is no longer contained withing paper bound format. it therefore does not exist as a book and is not known as a book. and the authors become something else. they now become author director, autho screenwriter, author visual artist/creative director, author programmer, author designer, author sound engineer, whatever variations of author/creator comes up, and all of that no longer exists in the author written word realm because then the term author will become even more generalistic and misused than ever. yes technology is providing for advancement and improvement in art, but that doesn't mean that all forms of art can be technologically translated or transferred exactly (added exactly because the lawyer in me doesn't want to allow for any outs).

this is cool. the story originates from a book, and it sure looks like a story yes, but it’s not a book, and it’s not even a book in the traditional sense. this app or alice story is doing much more in a technical sense than a book. the imagination part and the sensory part is incalculable, but in terms of the similarity, yes like a tradional book it relays a story. this app is no book. it’s not even a ebook either. if we’re doing these things then new words have to be created. also that looks like a lot of work for an author who might not know how to do all those things, and authors don’t want to be animators, and developers and all that stuff…or so some of them say. by the way that looks so cool…but i liked reading the books and imagining all those things better than seeing something as fabulous as this is. it’s great but it’s no book, and i don’t like having everything put out for me when i can imagine with my mind, but then again not everyone is alike.

yeah i know. adults are still old as fuck though. old old old and future baby boomers. now if we could get rid of baby boomers. but i don’t want to be stuck with people of my generation who are afraid of learning, change, science, maths, and history. we have to learn from adults and improve on what they’ve given the world…but that doesn’t mean we have to agree with all the adults and the terrible examples some of them have set for youths of today and the terrible cycles we see our societies in. to that all people, and all old people are accountable. when young people become adutls and old as fuck, then we will be accountable to the next generation(s). not like some of the foggie blowhards who keep messing shit up and then leaving it for our generations to fix. they kick the bucket first. we live on their sacrifices and imporvements. fine. but we are not accountable for messing shit up. our chance is coming. it’s just not here yet, and i’m not sure we can surpass the generations of before, but we can sure as hell try and not try to do ourselves, our future children, and their children a disservice. oh now it’s all about damage, “think of the children” they say when mistakes are made. yeah i’m sure if the kids could talk they’d tell you to fuck off, kindley or otherwise. you know kids nowadays, 8 going on 60. when you see children acting like adults, like they’ve probably done generations ago but much more pronounced and prolific now, then you know there’s been real drastic change and that there are problems. but once again “think of the children”. maybe that should be said before the mistakes are made so that some of us young people can believe it when we do hear it. it’s empty words.

yeah i think i’m with you. saying this in a room full of paper, paint, markers, canvas, etc. i like real things i can feel. i am not all for things that exist simply cause that i cannot touch. it’s weird.

lol. you might as well add “and yeah i’m not an old fogey *insert age here”. i agree. you should have written the post.

I can understand the desire to have a new word or set of words for the new experience.

Not so long ago, people would scream out “Author, Author” as they stood and applauded a great play. They wanted to see and applaud the person, who could envision the words and the movement of a great story. Now we would call that person a “playwrite”, because a set of people chose to separate out that experience as a subset of “author” and to call it something new. I’m sure that there are those, who believe game writers have no understanding of story and thus should not be called authors. Perhaps there will be a new word one day for story-tellers and people, who compile their poetry into a longer form and don’t first print and bind their words in paper or leather. Perhaps they will be called “Padders” or “Designers” or “Story Artists.”

As a species we have used a variety of formats over time to hold our sacred words and covey great meaning. We have an entire history of stored on papyrus that we don’t call books, we call them scrolls. We have stored information and stories on stone walls, stone columns (stella), and stone tablets. We have lost entire histories (I’m thinking of the Mayans) when entire hand written histories were burned.

For a time the literate “writers” were called scribes not authors, because they simply copied the stories or information. And for extra credit they would “illuminate” the text with pretty pictures and icons, which today are much admired.

So, yes I can see that our language and choice of words will change, as the next generations around the world take the next steps. Perhaps icons will replace common words, (oh wait, that is already happening). Perhaps the color of the text will make a difference in how the words are meant to be read (blue for sad, green for envious, red for hot/sexy, brown for snarky). I’m not completely sure how the next generations will choose their words or how they will express themselves completely.

So many new words have come into being or have migrated between different languages, since I was born. I would not be surprised if “book” doesn’t become a generic word to express compilation of ideas, in the same way that “telling a story” can mean “lying” or it can mean “in your own words, tell us what you saw” or it can mean “stringing a set of words together to create an imaginative scene.” I would also not be surprised if a new word or set of words isn’t invented to describe the new experience.

[...] to point out its opposite when it makes an appearance. I have read the unintentionally funny named article in TechCrunch “Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook”. Here the author gushes [...]

@Eli: “The main text can be brief, but there can be collapsible sections, popup comments, links to other information, multimedia etc. that will provide more information for readers that want it.”

“Learner-controlled” was a big buzz-word in training/education interaction design in the late 80′s and early 90′s when interactive multimedia was emerging, and it was an idea I fell in love with. But the results were repeatedly (despite massive government-funded research budgets and some of the smartest folks on the planet working on it) less than stellar. I recall there were numerous studies showing that we–as readers/learners–do a poor job of recognizing exactly what information we DO need.

I believe the summary matched other research findings on the difference between newbies vs. experts… and went something like: *advanced* people spent too much time on things they already knew, while *beginners* skipped too many things they needed. In other words, no matter what our level, most of us suck at knowing what–and how much–we need to learn. We NEED someone (tutor, mentor, teacher, coach, guide, etc.) or at least someTHING to help make learning decisions for us when we’re trying to learn something new. That said — and I don’t know your product — there are some possible ways to improve this including correct/smart implementation of self-assessments, and perhaps some AI for dynamically-adjusting views into the content.

But I’m pretty certain there’s plenty of evidence that simply having more options available as interactive options is not implicitly useful and could do much more harm than good. This has been studied since the dawn of hyperlinks (pre-WWW), though you may be using more recent research that points to better results with specific implementations… so I’ll keep an open mind.

i’ll finish reading the rest of your comment (thanks for replying to my reply. i make a lot of mistakes and i don’t make much sense), but padders make me think of fashion-fashion designers/sewing/people working with fabric manipulation/pattern makers & the story artists one is already in use i think in term of game and film design and also with illustration. so yeah too much confusion, doesn’t help the confusion already, and people don’t really understand the various differences between arts with creators, authors, writers, publishers, artists, visual artists, designers, developers, etc…

[...] Link to original article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/11/dear-authors-your-next-book-should-be-an-app-not-an-ibook/ [...]

I read Cody’s post with real interest, and I have also ploughed my way through all the comments, which were in various ways equally interesting. The number of people who completely missed his point is impressive!
What he is suggesting is an additional manner of telling a story, not, as many here seemed to think, advocating the death of printed or electronic books.

Whilst personally I am not a keen iPad person, I see exactly what he means, and I feel that it is a very good idea, why not make use of advances in technology to tell stories in new and interesting ways?
I was so intrigued by his ideas, that I wrote a post on it for my own blog about eReaders, which you might be interested to read as well as his original post (www.ebookanoid.com)

okay done. thanks for going through that history. we study the history of writing in english, history and art class so i know all about that and i’ve been mentioning them in the many comments i posted here (which looks like i really did shit all over the comments section and on cody’s piece but i don’t mean to and i think he has a point but maybe someone else needs to write it or he needs to rewrite it and state the vision of where he thinks this can go and not only one alternative and then research people/individuals/companies who are already doing this and are moving forward). i agree with you about the book becoming a more general term than it is right now but i think, as it’s been reflected, that it will face a lot of resistance from many authors and writers (i don’t know about publishers since they are/should look for new venues, and i don’t know if they would want to dilute their brand and open it up even more to market and more noise confusion). writing a book is different from making a multimedia version of a book and having it online or an app.

i’ve been reading online since i could walk and i’ve been reading books since i could talk. anything you put infront of me i will most likely read first and watch later or read instead of watch. i really value reading (even i don’t contribute to making sense, and the english language, and grammer, etc…) online or on paper. it doesn’t really matter to me either or as long as i can have both and more you know? i also consume a lot of information (this is why eric schmidts comment about look at 18 year old’s as the model of those who manage a multitude of information and consumer streams). i’m also an artist. i’m not a full fledged designer but i will be. i have and many of the people i know who use computers for GIS, computer design, programming, visual arts purposes, insist that this whole problem with the backlight, eye fatigue issue can very much be fixed or helped simply with aesthetic design because that’s the simplest, less tecnological, less monetary means of fixing the problem in the interim. it doesn’t do what e-ink does, website design, but it will do. what i mean is that we have to give importance to the research we have done on the way the eye looks at colour and reflects light. we have to look at the white (background) and the black (text) of display. you can’t replicate paper and the way we see paper and ink online. it doesn’t work. it does work in terms of just simple colour. i don’t understand why people, these website creators, the guys who came up with the standards and tried to replicate the pallette into web pallettes, don’t just change it all and come up with layout standards. i remember back in the day, when google was just starting out on that ugly ass one page and they had all these links at the bottom of their search bar, and their crappy primary logos, i was just happy that their background wasn’t all white. the colour they chose wasn’t any better but the all white kills me. yes it’s clean and conjures all these deeply embedded terms in relation to the tint, white, and i don’t get me wrong i don’t want all websites to go back to the geocities layout and some of the other crap that was on the internet, but there really needs to be more variation. it can’t always just be and also be the acceptable white and black. also when, which company was it, google, or bing, and or both had their earth day blackout, that shit was the gayest thing ever (not because it uses more energy). they could have done something else more conserving and meaningful than blacking out. white backgrounds for websites/design has got to go, but that doesn’t mean that all black websites need to emerge. i mean in one of my comments i spent a lot of time talking about the tc layout and standard colour scheme and why it works. when paul posts his reading/book pieces or mike posts about the nyt or the nyyt and how things need to change i, and other post about how more websites need to consider horizontal scrolling. you know these are simple things that people will understand, and get used to. it’s like when someone/certain people started building the internet and then building the web and sites, whatever, they took their configurations, used those, it became standard, and somehow it’s unchangeable or too hard to change, or too hard to code differently, or it doesn’t fit standards. give me a f’n break. nothing nowadays is set in stone. if anything it’s set in sand (i think sand fits cause there’s all types of sand and you can use it to make more stronger platforms like stone).

To start, I am 20 years old, not an older person who is dismissing Cody as being young and irrelevant. That said, I disagree in a huge way to what his thinking is. To be honest, I’ll die of shame if his vision of my generation’s ‘books’ comes to pass.

As a culture, we seem to be focusing more and more on instant gratification. “Oh, why read the book, there’s a movie out that’ll tell us exactly what happens in the book.” What Cody is outlining goes even further along that trail. Pretty soon we’ll devolve into a society with the attention span of goldfish. When I read, I don’t want to have to do anything that snaps me out of the world I’m in. I don’t want it to turn into a game. When I read, I want to be immersed in the words the author has written until I’m lost in that other world. I want to be able to take that story anywhere and read it for twenty hours straight if I wanted to. If I get sucked into a book, I’m not even aware of turning the pages. I don’t want to get distracted by gimmicks.

I think that’s the main point. Gimmicks are pretty well changing our society, and not for the better. Look at the iPad. It is just a money-making venture that has used brand name and advertising to convince the world that it’s the next big thing and going to change the world, when really it’s just an iPhone with a bigger screen and less capabilities. Cody, do you really think that instead of having books we should give all control of an entire medium of communication to one company, Apple? My version of this article would be less about questioning the relevance of books, and more questioning the relevance of the iPad.

A good example of this is our iPad app, “Beautiful Planet HD for iPad”, which we developed with travel photographer and author Peter Guttman. We needed to go beyond the ebook format in order to create a new way to experience the travel photography book, and I’ve seen this done well in several other apps for iPad, particularly children’s books, which can incorporate interactivity, games and word-highlighting. Our app has been tremendously successful and called “the reinvention of the travel book” by Wired, and listed as their top 5 first apps to buy for the iPad. It’s currently an Apple Staff Favorite and the #1 app in Travel and #20 Overall. We have more apps in the series coming out this month and I hope to see the genre continue to grow. http://bit.ly/8ZqZyE

I think what I hear you saying is, you have learned a lot in school, and that you are still learning.

And it sounds like your own experiences in life are coming into conflict with the knowledge you have been taught by others. If this is true, I gather that you are attempting to rectify this situation and come to stable set of definitions and conditions (also called standards) to work from.

For me, I feel like I understood Cody’s vision because the question was asked “why do we read books anyway?” Which he didn’t answer – he left that to me (the reader) to answer. And in answering the question for myself, from my own experience, of “why do I read books?”, I found that my definition of book went beyond ink on bound paper. I do know why I read “compilations of ideas”, aka books.

And that set the stage to look at the quality of the experience – to look at the tools available to enhance that experience – to look at the new artistry in authorship that is developing around the experience of reading (and thus writing) a book – to look at how we value compilations of ideas ($9.99 or $99.99).

The authors, who want to be involved in a different style of writing and storytelling, will use the new tools. For those, who want to be part of an emerging industry, they will be part of this group. Others will not be. It is not an “all or nothing” sort of thing — at least not yet.

Great comment, Steve. But think of how, by adding contextual information, great written works may be made more accessible and more interesting to tomorrow’s readers.

When I studied philosophy in college most professors tried to teach it with little or no reference to history, art or the cultural/intellectual currents that preceded and surrounded each philosopher. Perhaps they took for granted that their students would know such contextual information. The few profs who taught the context were loved, and their lessons were remembered.

Plato won’t re-write The Republic for iPad, but publishers can add contextual information (and resist the urge to stop at dumb cartoons), making great works more accessible and memorable to future generations.

[...] Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook – [...]

I’m an Icelandic writer. I’ve written about 9 books for children age 4-9 and I’m totally astonished by the iPad. Within the boundaries of my experience I saw all the things I could do with my stuff for the iPad. So, I started to translate my books, intending to “publish“ on the iBookstore. Then I saw the Alice in Wonderland app book … everything went out the window. This article is right on the money. We as creators need to rethink everything … and that’s very exiting.

This is a discussion that’s always been around every time a new venue or platform emerges. As a professional writer let me say this: It’s always about the story … not the medium. I’m personally looking forward to the rest of my life …
Cheers!

[...] Vad är läsande? Ipadden väcker frågan om vad en bok är, vad läsande är. Techcrunch har publicerat ett läsvärt perspektiv och nästan som en tanke släpps Alice i underlandet som en app. Se på videon nedan hur presentationen av en text kan utvecklas när man använder sig av ett nytt medium och inte bara kopierar det gamla. [...]

While I can see the benefit of an app for a textbook (images, links, further research, etc) I struggle to see the value in, for example, creating an app for a literary novel. What sort of additions would you add to a book like ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’?

[...] Brown argues on Tech Crunch that books shouldn’t be mere shovelware on the iPad. Think about them as apps. Not lifeless, flat [...]

Bingo Green Energy T.

[...] menos. E já perceberam que livros literalmente digitalizados podem ser UMA estratégia, mas há outras possibilidades, infinitas na verdade. Quanto mais interação, melhor. Quanto mais sentidos (visão, audição, [...]

[...] Read more on TechCrunch [...]

This has answered my question of what to do with my online coloring books; now I won't simply print them, I will help my tigers, orcas, unicorns, and colorful fishes enter the new app world! Now, I get it! Thanks ever so much!

[...] emailed this article to us a little while ago, and I have re-visited it in order to create some blog [...]

[...] Techcrunch recently published a piece that says that authors need to publish their “next book” as an App (instead of an iBook). Great read – do it now. [...]

Hate to break it to you, but reading a book actually does mean reading all the words. What you're talking about may indeed be great, but it's not reading.

The main difference is not platform or media or anything like that. The main difference is that I don't need anyone else's permission to write and publish a book. Not only do I need to meet Apple's approval to get onto their platform, I have to use their tools to write for it. I don't care how much better they are, it's a faustian bargain. Apple has become the new Microsoft and it's just a matter of time before the anti-trust authorities realize what's going on.

Shiny screens and flashy interfaces might be enough to get most people to willingly walk off this cliff, but I have faith that there are still some people who aren't happy being virtual sharecroppers of Apple or Facebook.

I like the ipad I've seen briefly and my spuose's Kindle is great for travel. But I am not prepared to proclaim the death of the book, as we know it (with paper, pages one turns.)
One of the challenges of this "insta" self-publishing ability may well be a lot of bad writing. Editors have a purpose, and not just as gate-keepers, but to help author's hone their words, sometimes to a thing of beauty. (And in my case, to be the human spell checker…Oh, those are copy editors.)

I recommend Cody (whose previous work I've read and liked) reads an article by Carla Hesse, "Books in Time." The introduction, "The medium is not the mode," might prove illuminating. It's included in Nunberg, G. (ed) The Future of the Book (University of California Press 1996).

That time appears to be soon:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apple_faces_...

Great article–but Orwell would've written exactly what he wrote. Writing for radio/TV/cellphone/iPad will offer new opportunities, but books will continue to exist. Orwell didn't focus on radio dramas because he was a novelist. The iPaddists will write for iPads. Novelists will write novels. There will be some overlap. That's all.

Well, and my bet is that novels will continue to outlive their more technologically-advanced cousins. We've all read 1984 and Animal Farm. How many of us have listened to Cooper's LIghts Out?

There are literary techniques, there will be iPad techniques.

I’m 41, I can say with a lot of confidence that the ‘books’ that come to define your generation won't be books. They'll be TV and movies and video games and aps: mostly TV. But that's not the game, defining a generation.

Good points, except that most authors are not exactly fluent in objective C and they would either need to know HOW to write an iPad/iPhone app, or be willing to outsource that task to someone who does and be saddled with the $20-40K price tag.

Cory, a few things:

a) Your definition of meaning is asinine. You assume, for example, that the only goal of using the written word as a medium is the one to one transmission of information. If that were the case, then your argument should be that J. Random Author's next book should in fact be a plot summary, not an iPad app. Writing is often as much about sustained and cumulative effects as it is about the transmission of information. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is less about Kurtz and the river than it is about the overwhelming and claustrophobic effect the increasingly dense prose has on the reader as the book goes on. Or take a non-fiction book, like David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. It's largely a collection of anecdotes and observations, interesting in themselves, but of very little value when trying to say something about the Homicide squad in Baltimore. However when you put them all together with Simon's loose but coherent structure, a startlingly clear picture of the job takes shape, from the daily grind to the politics, from the toll it takes on the detectives to the consequences on the street. Books have emergent properties, and in that way, all the pieces matter.

b) Orwell (and come to that, Huxley, for entirely different reasons) would have despised the iPad, and possibly ebooks in general. Orwell was terrified of the possibilities of a surveillance society imposed by the state, and while neither Apple nor Amazon nor even Google are 'the state', any fool (and Orwell was no fool) understands that the data they collect on your media purchases, your habits and interests, has tremendous potential for abuse, and would certainly qualify as surveillance if it were to find itself in the wrong hands and in the wrong circumstances. It is the very thing Orwell was writing against. (And Huxley would have taken one look at your middle class toy and laughed in your face.)

Come back when you know something–anything–about books–or at least something about the books and writers you plan to reference in your articles. Maybe then we can at least pretend you said something insightful.

Dude, seriously, put the pipe down and do some serious reading.

First of all, on a technical note, iBook books are applications; there's actual code in the ePub bundle.

Secondly, writer and artists are already way ahead of you; go look up something called HyperText fiction, and electronic literature.

It's more than twenty years old, and most of it sucks as fiction because it doesn't inspire narrative lust. The reader has no compelling desire to find out what happens next. Choose your own adventure ebooks, reader as writer collaborator ebooks, book as game–these are all old.

The iPad and iBooks and ePub are what books have always been; they are containers. Books contain text and images and sound and video. They are interactive. They exist in real time, and in real space, yet part of their function (their feature set, if you will) is that they allow us to leave this time and space for others.

I think that there is enormous potential for collaborative reading, and that it will happen on the 'net and that HTML 5 is one step closer to allowing us to have "net books." I want Borges library. I think Vannevar Bush was on to something. I think, as someone has said, Orwell would have freaked at how cloud data allows us to be tracked in the aggregate and as individuals; I think he would have been enamored of hypertext (this is a man who had a footnote within a footnote). I think Huxley would either be smoking crack and chanting "Be here now," or would be in some sort of Mennonite inspired religious sect changing "be here now."

What a loss that Orwell didn't live to price his books at $99.99 and add "tests" and let the reader write part of the book.

[...] notes are extracted from an essay written by a 21-year-old named Cody Brown.  The essay is called "Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook." Like most writers and people in publishing, I've been reading a lot about What's Next, and What To [...]

[...] The above quote was taken from a blog post by Cody Brown called “Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should Be an App, Not an iBook.” [...]

OMG, so brilliant.
http://asterling.typepad.com/incipit_vita_nova/20...

No madeleines for you!

I don’t know if I totally agree with this, but I appreciate the abilities that book apps have. I’m a big fan of the “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” app (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/you-cant-always-get-what-you/id365685513?mt=8) which isn’t on iPad, but certainly uses all my iPhone’s abilities.