What does the User Need in an Ebook?
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This talk was provided by Eric Swenson at the 12th Annual BISG-NISO Changing Standards Landscape forum at ALA in Washington DC on June 21, 2019
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What does the User Need in an Ebook?
- 1. What Does the User Need in an E-Book? What Does the User Want? The Changing Standards Landscape Forum: Readers and Ebooks: Making The Connection 12th Annual NISO/BISG Forum – Friday, June 21, 2019 Eric Swenson Swensonia Consulting | New York
- 2. A funny thing happened on my way to the conference….
- 3. What readers want: to transcend effortlessly involuntary transhumanism? are earpods synthetic horns? https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/20/horns-are-growing-young-peoples-skulls-phone-use-is-blame-research- suggests/?utm_term=.313de97199da
- 4. 1991 - 1992 Storyspace map – Eastgate Systems – www.eastgate.com
- 5. Non-linear storytelling What’s old is new again Netflix – Black Mirror https://slate.com/technology/2017/11/mosaic-from-steven-soderbergh-is-a-noble-failure.html
- 6. Georges Bataille, "The Cruel Practice of Art" (1949). This translation first appeared on the CD-ROM BLAM! 1 (1993) ‘We use type to maintain the rhythm and the pace of reading,’ says Swenson. ‘In our manifesto we quote Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “Speed is the essence of war” and we kept that in mind when dealing with typography. We were also very conscious of the syntax and rhyme and meter of the linear prose we were dealing with. All those old rules of dissecting poetry were always in my head while taking things apart.’ From: Blam! The Essence is Speed William Owen, Eye magazine, Autumn 1994
- 10. “I don’t distinguish between readers of different formats; just grateful that they buy the book at all and that some of them actually read it.” Ashton Applewhite Activist Author
- 11. There are “the others” who maintain the struggle to settle for nothing short of the new. Hugh & O’Leary (2012) and Meyers (2014) present serious studies of what might be…or might have been…are now…and still remain to be realized. Updates, please!
- 13. "One day I would like to produce a book that would deliberately hurt people. The words would wound their feelings and the object would cut their fingers so that they could not turn a page without bleeding on it. A very small number of people would be willing to take this experience on themselves and I would love them for it.” - Supervert (quoted in A VOID) eBooks could be combined with other consumer and prosumer technology to deliver shocking results. Haptic tactile pleasure/pain response is a possibility with existing technology. Think different. https://pavlok.com https://morbidbooks.net/shop/a-void-magazine-issue-3
- 14. I do not think books that hurt people should be catalogued. They should be hidden away, locked in cabinets, known only through their cult reputations... "Did you hear what happened to Meghan? She couldn't resist the idea of checking out THAT BOOK... You know, that AWFUL BOOK... It's such a shame. She still can't hold a knife and fork. Doctors say it could be months before she regains the feeling in her ring finger.” Supervert (private correspondence) Readers want to engage. Stoya reading “Confessions of a Skull Mask” from Necrophilia Variations in Hysterical Literature, the viral video series by photographer and filmmaker Clayton Cubit Tattoo:@lucygasms
- 17. Eric Swenson Swensonia Consulting | New York e.Swenson@Swensonia.com | @eswensonia Thank you!
Notes de l'éditeur
- I’m Eric Swenson. My roots are in the worlds of art, design and electronic publishing. For the past 7 years, I was in the scholarly communications world at Elsevier leading Scopus product management. I also spent a few years on the NFAIS board of directors and was the president in 2018. Through that work, I became acquainted with the library community as well as various important organizations such as NISO. Today, I’m an OSINT (open source intelligence) researcher and a product management consultant.
- A funny thing happened on my way to the conference at the airport. I’d considered referring to some papers and articles about media consumption, but I think these pictures do a better job of capturing where we’re at and where we are going. I’m a bit of a voyeur, a people watcher. I like to pay attention to what people are reading, listening to, watching. I saw the usual assortment of people jacked in to headphones, heads tilted down, looking at iphones and ipads. I didn’t see any paper books or novels in the wild. Then I saw this guy (see the guy with the red skull cap and Oculus visor on?) and I stopped paying attention to everything else. (I saw that his flight was destined for Los Angeles, so, we can forgive him….) Now, I’ve been using VR headsets for a very long time and they are not new to me. But you don’t see them in the wild that often. I’m sure we will, very soon. We’re at the stage now where seeing someone like this, head tilted up (vs. down) is reminiscent of the first time I saw someone talking to themselves loudly, apparently in deep conversation with themselves. But it was just a business man on a conference call, oblivious to his surroundings.
- Within minutes of taking that picture and wondering what ‘ractive that guy was in (to use Neil Stephenson’s term from The Diamond Age) a friend sent me this, from the Washington Post. (This really is the age of physical computing, isn’t it?) Electronic reading, like gaming, and typing now has physical consequences. Listen carefully! This will come up again! Could a writer design a text, or an immersive story app, that is designed to intentionally cause horn growth? A shock to the heart? Or induce literal physical symptoms of pleasure--or pain? Let’s find out!
- When I was in grad school at NYU’s ITP program in the very early 90s, we were pre-web. Everything was about VR, Cyberspace, hypertext and multimedia. Except for rampant carpal tunnel syndrome and occasional reports of motion sickness from those who were fortunate enough to get hold of early VR headset prototypes, we didn’t have many worries. The EFF was new [ACTION: PUMP FIST!] but the general population including designers and developers didn’t think a lot about security or privacy. We knew about the web, but the graphical browser hadn’t taken off, and there were so many competing closed platforms, that it took massive energy and money to build and deploy products. We were certainly thinking about scholarly communications, but the majority of those in the academic and entertainment side of the business were focused on non-linearity. Hypertext. Hyperlinks. Hypermedia. We created hypermedia “stacks” in Apple’s HyperCard (later destroyed by Steve Jobs – one of his MOST unforgivable crimes) and we developed multimedia, multithreaded interactive apps in what was then called Macromedia Director.
- The most well-known mainstream example of nonlinear storytelling today is the Black Mirror Bandersnatch episode. But there’s more out there…. I was prepared for disappointment when I heard about Steven Soderbergh’s MOSAIC. I read the piece in Wired that explained the painstaking process he went through, mapping story nodes and forking paths, simultaneously building out a hyperthreaded app experience and a TV-only release. I’d been there and seen all this before, but I’m an optimistic skeptic – so, I hoped for the best. In both the case of the forking path Bandersnatch and Mosaic, I was underwhelmed. It was interesting watching my two children, ages 15 and 19 watch Bandersnatch. My daughter, a college senior was excited. She missed out on the CD-ROM and hypertext revolutions of the 90s. Since then, it’s been all screens, but forking paths exist in video games and the algorithms work quickly, you’re conscious of the fact that you have choices; that’s called game play. You just have to make the right choices, or your character dies--and then you’re reincarnated. There are no enduring consequences. But all of these choices and all of these constructs are programmed. Interactivity is a lie.
- My work began in 1992 as the co-founder of Necro Enema Amalgamated, and BLAM! a CD-ROM trilogy that boasts the world’s first interactive user profiling engine (sadly, not patented, but still discoverable) which was designed to deliver both advertising and “punishment pieces” – sometimes obscene and always-grating modules on content that the user could not escape. The intention was to underline the fact that we, the programmers, controlled your destiny…. Again, “Interactivity is a lie!”. The point in bringing this up here is to link to the topic of PRIVACY that will be coming up later today. Today, publishers are finding more ways to plant “canaries” and nearly-impossible-to-detect beacons and other hidden forms of DRM in their files. We don’t have a lot of insight into what Apple and Amazon are doing with our reading histories; the situation is opaque. My current work is focused on OSINT (open source intelligence) and the flip side, PRIVACY (privacy hardening, OPSEC, etc.) I’ve spent a lot of time recently on the surface and the dark web. I know that there are honorable information liberationists and that there are also just plain old pirates and bad guys. The point is that we in the information services community whether we’re librarians or publishers need to put civil liberties first. There are plenty of ways for readers to share and express their reading habits when they want to; they shouldn’t be coerced and they shouldn’t be forced to surrender data in order to read. Necro Enema Amalgamated built user profiling engines to serve ads, horrific, loud, obscene art, etc. Our point was to explode the myth of interactivity and the agendas of those who we knew were coming. We wanted to expose the future and educate, scare and titillate you simultaneously. We shouted from the bowels of the Lower East Side from ten years. A few people heard us. But our mission to increase awareness of the fact that interactivity is a lie continues today.
- I interviewed Bob Stein to discuss this talk and our agenda today. Bob Stein is a pioneer in the publishing world and he’s always practiced propaganda by deed. He enacts his philosophy via the founding of bookstores (he’s a cofounder of the original Revolution Books in New York City), the Criterion Collection, The Voyager Company, Night Kitchen and most recently SocialBook and the practice of social reading which he considers to be the future of reading and hence, the future of publishing and publishing ecosystems.
- When we talk about social reading, there are three primary dimensions of social. First, there is the solitary reading experience. You read a book, alone, in your favorite char. Second, there is the “outside the book” social dimension: you discuss the book with a friend or a classroom; someone writes a gloss; someone writes a review or a piece of literary criticism…and people discuss that. The third dimension is the social exploration of what’s inside the book – between the lines. Bob is aware of the challenges inherent in social reading. It’s hard. Some teachers don’t like it because it requires them to rework lesson plans and spend more time “inside the minds” of their students. Some students don’t like it because it’s, well, social – you can’t hide. SocialBook requires a complete reinvention of contemporary pedagogy because it forces the teacher to get outside of common core strictures, away from workbooks and quizzes, PowerPoints and smart boards and into the book with the students. This is light years beyond the common forums we see in LMSs such as Blackboard or Moodle. I think there’s room to contemplate this and other potential uses for available technology during the Panel discussion on Ensuring system interoperability or later during the roundtable discussion. We want to ensure that ePub evolves in a way that allows tool builders to ingest it easily, with no built-in restrictive technology. Let the tool builders and the commercial publishers work out licensing between themselves.
- Perussal picks up on the major themes of SocialBook. It’s a product designed for classroom use and I’ve seen demos of it working at various levels from high school to grad level. It picks up on SocialBook’s emphasis on close reading (which harkens back to the Modernists in the early 20th century) but it also combines a series of tools. DURING a live demo the leader confusion report that was used at this week’s Summer session of the BEST TEACHERS INSTITUTE to o prompt the class tied to the lecture outcome. And an additional feature of Perussal is that it uses machine learning Analysis of the annotations to do provide Assessments
- Readers don’t always know what they want, and often, people who pick up books don’t read them. The same thing goes for activism or what we call clicktivism. It’s one thing to pick up a hip book about climate change, the future of work, MeToo or any other facet of social justice. It’s another thing to read and act. Tougher still, writing and then doing activism. Ashton’s most recent title is This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, and the book has spawned a movement. Access to her material across cultural, gender and of course, ageist boundaries is essential to her work. But that said, Ashton’s focus is on the words, the function, not the form. She says, “I don’t distinguish between readers of different formats; just grateful that they buy the book at all and that some of them actually read it.”
- On the hyper independent spectrum, I spent time speaking to a cult writer whose work penetrates both the deep recesses of the underground as well as the classrooms of a scattershot of hip professors across the globe. I asked Supervert to tell me about his writing process. In 2010, Supervert published Perversity Think Tank. “The physical book made use of the print format in a way that did not lend itself to being reproduced digitally. When the book sold out, Supervert updated and revised the text to work in ebook format. Thus there are two slightly different versions of Perversity Think Tank: the print version (which is also the same as the PDF) and the "remix" version for iBooks and Kindle. I asked Supervert: What do readers want from a Supervert book? Do their needs vary between media? For example, do readers of paper Supervert have different kinks from say, readers of digital Supervert? What have you observed or heard from readers? Mostly the choice between paper and print is driven by accessibility. When the print editions sell out, the price on the rare book market becomes prohibitive for most people. As a result, they turn to electronic versions -- ebooks which can be purchased from Apple or Amazon, PDFs which can be downloaded for free from supervert.com (since I post them once the printed books run out), or pirated versions such as can be found on Pirate Bay. Because, however, the printed books become expensive on the rare book market, there is a subset of readers who fetishize Supervert enough to pay a few hundred dollars for them. Are they more masochistic than the buyers of ebooks? Do they identify with the kinks in the rare books they hunt down? Are they Supervertophiles?
- Further on, I asked Supervert: Would you consider digital publishing and the ebook medium in particular to be a potential for inflicting this pain? For example, what if you discovered a way to embed code in an ePub that could cause the battery in a Kindle to explode while reading is in progress. That might cut some fingers! Interested? “Yes, I would be especially interested to cause heating malfunctions. I would write a book that melts in the reader's hands and drips down into her lap. It would scald her, brand its title into the skin of her thighs, so that no one could have sex with her without recognizing that Supervert had been there first. ” Dark humor aside, this provokes the need for a conversation about safety and privacy. eBooks, especially the ePub and PDF formats are still ripe for hacking. Now, those of us in this room might not be as concerned about malware making it into an ebook delivered by Ebsco, but you should. Between the vulnerability of file types and the absolute surety that the records of your library, your vendor and your vendor’s vendor, Amazon, Apple, Kobo – everyone – will be compromised you have to ask yourself about what can and should be done to harden our contemporary systems. I’m looking forward to Hugh McGuire’s talk following mine and his discussion on Protecting user data and user privacy.
- Readers want to engage This case study takes us into the issue of limitations. As we begin to discuss standards regarding the primary output formats, metadata requirements, accessibility requirements and so on, we cannot lose site of the fact that the eBook file formats and display mechanisms that are currently on the market are insanely limiting. Outside of the PDF and perhaps the DjVU format, there is very little hope for the aspiring multidimensional writer who envisions language and their engagement with the writer via a means beyond the linear structure enforced by the standard codex. Hell, the codex itself is as limiting as it is convenient!
- Wired magazine launched in 1993. They proclaimed Marshall McLuhan as its patron saint. Fair enough, we said, but, we warned, “McLuhan himself used to say that we march backward into the future. We hope that the editors of Wired understand that they understand their patron saint’s words as a diagnosis – not a destiny.” I think it’s important to keep McLuhan’s warnings in mind today, while we work to improve the electronic publishing ecosystem. Think forward, not backward and open up the sky to let the light shine in. Consider practitioners, researchers and writers as not just scholars delivering plain text, references and citations but help them to express themselves and their important work in multiple dimensions.
- As the group continues its work today, I encourage you to th Key words for today: open; secure; flexible and free.