So you’ve probably heard about the iPad, and Apple’s latest plans for world domination. For the first time, however, we – we the small, rather obscure digital writer community(!) – are directly affected by the actions of what is probably the most influential tech company of the age. This is big. This is something worth thinking about. What does the iPad mean to the digital book world, and why should we care?

I think there are two things that we need to talk about. First, the Kindle is screwed. There has been some debate on Twitter as to why and how Apple compares with Ye Olde Amazon, and the biggest argument against the iPad is that it has a backlit screen, and backlit screens suck for reading.

Now this is true. Backlit screens do suck for reading, and I know this because I own a aluminium Macbook, and the screen is terrible when I’m doing work under sunlight. But I don’t think it matters. Isa asks: Why would anyone want to read on an iPad? and that is, I think, a rather valid question.

It is also the wrong kind of question to ask. The correct question people should be asking isn’t “why would anyone want to read on an iPad?” but rather “why wouldn’t they?” Isa’s question assumes that the majority of buyers would be logical book-nerds – comparing e-readers on metrics such as heft, size, and screen quality, but that’s the wrong way of looking at things.

The right way of framing the question is to begin asking: who’s likely to buy the Kindle? Who’s likely to buy the iPad? What kind of people are they, and how are they different?

The Kindle is for readers – book nerds, but of a particular, non-technophobic kind. People like you and I. The iPad, on the other hand, appeals to just about anyone: rich geeks, early-adopters, technophobic aunts, families who’d like a secondary computer, kids who want a gaming device, your uncle Harry who loves reading in the toilet … the list goes on and on.

The iPad is a computer. The Kindle is an ebook reader. In this aspect, at least, the Kindle is outclassed. There are more people interested in buying the iPad than there are people interested in buying a Kindle.

And so the question isn’t – who wants to read on an iPad? – because that’s the wrong question to ask. The question you should be asking is rather – what, exactly, is going to prevent all these people from buying books and reading them? What’s going to prevent Johnny, say, whose parents buy him an iPad for Christmas to play games and surf the web on – and one day the new Harry Potter equivalent comes out – what’s going to prevent him from thinking: hey, the book’s cheaper on the iBook store, and I don’t have to go all the way downtown to buy it from a shop. What’s going to prevent Johnny from buying the book – literally flicking his thumb over a sheet of glass – and reading it on his iPad?

The answer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the truth of the matter is that Johnny’s probably going to buy other books for his iPad, and spend ridiculous amounts of time arranging them on his virtual bookshelf, simply because it’s a) cheaper, b) quicker, and c) it’s all just a thumb flick away.

And so now here’s a related question: given the audience of these two devices, who do you think the content producers – the publishers – are more interested in going to? The Kindle? Or the platform that is the iPad? The answer to that, of course, lies in the number of potential readers, which is related to the number of current users, and I’m willing to bet that there are far more potential readers on the iPad than the Kindle ever would have, given a year or so.

It isn’t clear, however, how Amazon would react to this news. John Gruber predicts that Amazon would jettison its Kindle arm to sell content through the iPad, because Amazon is a content company first and a product company second (and Apple the reverse). I’m not sure if this would happen, because I can imagine Amazon’s fears of being locked into a single store, but regardless of how you look at it, the Kindle’s days are numbered.

There is one last thing we should know, and this affects us more directly than any of the above predictions. It is this: the iPad uses the ePub format. The ebook format wars are effectively over. We’ve got a winner, folks, and that winner is ePub. Plan for that, because things might get pretty heated, pretty fast.

It appears that in the time I’ve been offline I have missed out on several big developments in the online fiction sphere. The Golden Notebook project is one of them.

Notebook isn’t really a blook – it is a novel by Nobel Lit-Prize winner Doris Lessing, and many consider it to be her most ambitious, and probably her greatest, work. The Notebook project is an ingenious one: it places the entire book online and it asks 7 readers, all women, to read the novel in real time and give their comments in the margins of the webpages that make up the novel. 

Part of me is awestruck: whoever came up with that idea must’ve been a friggin genius. But the other part of me – the writer part – is combing this project for ideas, is reading the book for the first time, and has come to the conclusion that whatever I have previously thought possible of this medium is but a pale caricature of what’s coming, of what can come.

Notebook as a novel is most famous for its structure: the work is divided into the four ‘notebooks’ of the writer Anna Wulf, each categorized by colour and each containing different aspects of her life. The story is concerned with Anna’s efforts to fuse all these disparate books together into one final, golden notebook, and the novel is set up in such a way that the four notebooks are referred to in non-chronological, overlapping manner, all excepts from the novel Anna is currently working on. The structure comments on the story, and the story comments on the structure, and it is precisely this that makes Notebook the kind of novel that takes weeks to read, and weeks more to figure out (another that springs to mind is Infinite Jest, which is structured in a circle, and where the beginning is the ending is the beginning is the ending).

What strikes me the most about the entire Notebook project is that it takes reading – an experience strictly individual – and it combines it with the living web: something inherently social and conversational, something that you really don’t expect reading to be. Now anybody going through The Golden Notebook can do so with the benefit of a host of people who are arguing, talking and who are above all, like you, trying to make sense of said and unsaid things within the novel. You no longer have to spend weeks of your life immersed in an epic, structurally intricate work of art, only to emerge from that experience going … huh. Or perhaps – and this is more likely – you no longer have to worry about leaving stones unturned while you’re reading the novel, as is often the case with such post-modernist works. 

Scott Mackenzie is the author of online works Rebirth and The Rising. He’s currently looking for online writers to contribute short works of fiction to an anthology of blooks. I’ll let him speak in his own words:

Calling all online fiction writers

I am looking for contributors for the *.fiction anthology volume 1. The anthology will provide a printed showcase for the emerging community of online fiction writers who publish their work on the internet for free. The plan is for the anthology to contain samples from 10-15 writers to allow them to promote their work in an accessible and cost-effective format.

All online fiction writers are invited to submit their work for inclusion in the first volume of the *.fiction anthology. This will be a community-focused publication and should be considered as a starting point in building awareness of online fiction. It will be made available for purchase at cost price and all contributors are encouraged to promote this work along with their own.

If there are more submissions than the number required for the first volume, additional work will be carried over to subsequent volumes. Please contact me at s.a.mckenzie@gmail.com for more information and submission guidelines.

The closing date for submissions for volume 1 is September 30^th 2008.

Scott McKenzie

www.stardotfiction.com

On a personal note I think this is a brilliant idea. Scott’s doing this for the community – I repeat: cost price – and the publicity in a dead-tree book will in turn drive attention to both blooks and their Lulu merchandise. If you have questions, feel free to ask in the commenting section of this post. I’ll update this announcement with new details as I get them – I have exams on at the moment so forgive me if updates come slow.

Penguin has been doing the ‘let’s try something weird’ thing again, and they’ve created this little project called We Tell Stories. 6 authors, 6 stories, and 6 non-linear presentation styles. There’s a competition involved (presumably to up interest in the experiment), and each of the stories takes its inspiration from a classic. The first week’s story is inspired by The 39 Steps.

I am most interested in Penguin’s take on non-linearity: Penguin’s Digital Editor Jeremy Ettinghausen has in this post talked about how non-linearity just might be the presentation method of the future. And while his point about non-linear information-seeking in this age is valid, I don’t think it will translate to how stories play out – a beginning, a middle, and an end simply do not conform with a random bounce-bounce presentation of information. Stories are linear. We live our lives in a linear fashion. So, the presentation of a story has to be – more or less – linear.

However, I do believe a random bounce-bounce presentation of the events happening within a chapter (or, say, an hour in a 24 hour period) would work, though in the bigger picture the chapters (or hours) would be linear in nature.

On other sites: James Smythe has a wonderful post about the possible implications this move would have if it succeeds (or fails), and Lee is not impressed with the writing. I, on the other hand, think it to be a really good experiment to the presentation of fiction. There’s a lot more story here in than there ever was in Dreaming Methods (which read more like poetry than anything else), and the use of Google Maps as a visual aid to move the story along is just brilliant. Another plus point: We Write Stories does not use Flash.

Keep an eye on this. Week Two’s coming out, and I’d like to see how this particular presentation plays out.