Wake up and smell the eBook

I am a hoarder. A collector. I used to collect books, but I ran out of space and had to curtail my purchasing. Then about 7 years ago I discovered eBooks! They are very easy to buy, and take up no space. I think you can imagine what has happened. Now ebooks are becoming mainstream and we start to see some tired old complaints trotted out – you can’t read them in the bath, they don’t smell nice etc. I don’t have a lot of time for these discussions really, but there are a couple of threads I would like to follow up on.

Virtual goods are not the same as their physical counterpart (obviously), and quite often are inferior in terms of an overall aesthetic package. Nobody who remembers LPs would compare the lavish artwork, sleeve notes and booklets many LPs contained with the anonymity of a MP3 “album”, which is often missing even the most basic accompanying material. eBooks are treated even worse, covers are often missing, they are formless, and of course they don’t smell right! But it doesn’t have to be like this.

What could we do to make ownership of digital material more tangible? The video game, Disgaea, has an interesting approach to in game items. Instead of a small list of generic stuff that you can buy or loot, every single item is unique. They even have creatures living in them (again unique) that you can quell or tame but that is getting even further off the track. Why am I even talking of this? Well, there is no reason that each eBook shouldn’t be unique as well. Of course the content of the eBook needs to be consistent, but what about a layer of meta-data that records unique information about the book? One of the nice things about most eBook formats is that the format itself already supports this type of information and the reading software can choose to ignore or act upon it as it sees fit.

What could be recorded in this meta-data? The user’s name and other simple items spring to mind as the most basic. Support for author signings/messages/personalised bookplates? This is not DRM by the way, just information to make the eBook more individual. Straightforward enough. But what about a meta-data layer defining decay? I used to be able to tell when my brother had read my books because the edges of the pages turned black! He worked in a machine shop and read during his breaks with oily fingers. Every time we read a paper book, it wears out slightly, pages fray, finger marks appear and so on. Completely pointless, but we could add similar aspects to eBooks so that they “suffer” some of the stresses of use, and this decay could be recorded in the ebook and displayed in the reader.

Of course all of these depend on the reading software to interpret and record the meta data in a meaningful way. And since eBooks don’t really have pages as such, perhaps not a workable idea. But many readers let users annotate and mark up books, so there is already support (of sorts) for making a book unique.

One other area that is ripe for exploitation is the library management on your reading device. I have an iPad, and it, and other tablets, are no slouches when it comes to pushing pixels around. So why do we have flat shelves with 2D “books” lined up in rigid lines? Lets go to town here. Have a 3D (or even 2.5D) representation of a book, so that it resembles its physical counterpart, with varying height and thickness. Why not a 3D library environment with shelves, ladders, dust, cobwebs, and orang-utans. OK, maybe not orang-utans. I am not suggesting we licence the Unreal engine and produce an amazing 3D library (though that would be kind of neat) but simply something that emphasised the differences each book has, and gave us different ways to arrange and manipulate our library. Total gloss and frippery perhaps, but as a virtual collection grows, it is nice to be able to visualise and interact with it in different ways. There are several apps that attempt to do this with music, including Planetary, which represents your music collection as a solar system. Daft? Yes, but shows a bit of thinking beyond the rigid lists and collections that make up the building blocks of a software developers normal toolkit. Another app, Albums, shows your music as CD covers and lets you pile them up on a virtual table and shuffle them around.

Anyway – enough of me. Just a bit of a rambling discourse on making ebooks decay, wear out, and look individual.  But not smell. You can’t do that with meta-data or the Unreal engine. Yet.

 

 

Comments

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I've been thinking about this for a while. Apart from the smell (which is quite important!), another quality that eBooks cannot recreate is the space real books take. They are furniture and decoration. All these qualities combine into making them a presence. At home, my rooms take their shape and colour from the collective presence of all these stories I have read or am about to read!
It is illusory to try and recreate this virtually, when the whole point of digital books is to suppress the need for this presence. I would rather contemplate a future where electronic and physical books work together to help me build my home library to a higher level of thoughtfulness and perfection. As such, I am looking for readers capable of taking notes, comments, and ORGANISING them.
When it comes to organising notes, I am still looking for the ideal solution. I have been testing Notescribe quite extensively. This is the best I have found so far, but still not perfect (specially when it comes to reading non-English books!). I am specially in need of a software which would integrate eReader, note taking, organising and purchase platform.