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Thank you very much for having me. I recently just published a book. It's about the meaning of technology
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ir our lives and this is the last paper-native book that I'm going to write. I've been sitting here the
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last couple of days, learning a lot about digital publishing and ebooks, and I thought what I would do
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this morning is kind of give you a larger context for the larger environment in which this is going to
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take place. And so what I want to do is talk about what I think is coming.
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What's ahead.
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I think there are six general points, I would call them six trends. Six, in fact, verbs.
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These are the kind of long-term directions that I think are taking place in the world at large in which
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book publishing will take place.
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And the first idea is screening. So screening is no surprise, you got big screens right here, there are screens
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everywhere, and we are moving from being people of the book, which is what our culture has been founded
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on -the word "author" and "authority" have the same root-
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we have Constitution, we have texts, we have laws, we have scriptures, we have... a lot of our own culture
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is based around the idea of the book. So we have been people of the book, but we are now becoming people
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of the screen. We're being surrounded by screens, like the ones here. Like the ones that are basically
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everywhere. If you flew here, you saw screens. We're only a couple of blocks from this amazing, over-the-top,
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wonderful excess of Times Square, where there are screens everywhere, and that actually is probably the
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future, when screen become cheap enough to be put anywhere. This is my workspace, this is what I want
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to have. You can't have too much money or too many screens, as far as I'm concerned. Even, recently,
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I was filling up my gas tank and I saw that there was a movie being shown right there in the gas pump.
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And in the grocery stores, there are screens everywhere.
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They've permeated, they're ubiquitous in our environment, that is the context in which we'll publish
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books. We even have the intimate tablets, we're stroking them, it's very sensual, very close.
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That's another type of screen. Of course the little screens,
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in our phones. Who would have thought, even 20 years ago, that people would read books on phone?
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If you told them, that wouldn't make any sense at all 30 years ago. You are going to read a book on a
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phone? What does that mean?
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The fact even that there's a screen on the phone is something we didn't expect, but screens are going
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everywhere. And they will continue to proliferate as they become cheap, LEDs, plastics, in fact probably
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every flat surface may eventually have a screen on it. And the fact that there are screens, and we think
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about ebooks, we shouldn't assume that there's going to be a single flat page, there's no reason why
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e-ink, flexible pages, could not be bound into the traditional form of a book.
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Not to suggest that everything is just one page. We have not yet begun to see the extent to which screens will
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permeate our culture. And, the important thing about the screens is that if I show you the screen, there's
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a screen there, you can't really tell what's going to be shown on that screen.
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It could be a movie, it could be a web conference, it could be email, it could be a book. It could be
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a web page. Screens are basically windows into the same machine and all the things that we are producing
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can be shown on the screens, and of course there are certain things that want to be shown larger and
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smaller, but in fact, as I'm suggesting, we don't really know what they are, and there is this idea in
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which this screen is the portal into this machine. In a sense, all this stuff is going through basically
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one thing. One screen for everything. And that's important as we make books, because we have to understand
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that it's not just other books, it's everything else that is in the competitive environment for our attention.
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And so, we are in this third stage of a move from a very oral culture to a literate culture -the people
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of the book-, and now we are people of the screen. And what we're kind of devising is visuality, the
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literacy of images, and some of those images are being melted with text.
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But that's the general trend.
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And so, what we are going to be seeing is TV that we read, books that we watch, and we may even think
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of this as a new verb: screening. Stuff that we screen, we're going to screen them, because the text and images will marry
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and become basically together into one larger transmedia of some sort. So that't the first point, is
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that we are becoming people of the screen, culture of the screen, we'll be screening things,
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including books. But books among many other things at the same time.
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So the second verb is "interacting".
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If you want to see what the future of books is look at a toddler using an iPad. I had a friend who had
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a toddler with an iPad and they were visiting someone else's apartment and the friends had a color glossy print-out,
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a photograph on the counter, and the little toddler came up to the photograph and was going like this,
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and she says: "it's broken".
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And so, I think the idea that we interact with these screens, not just with the ends of our fingertips,
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but with the rest of our body is an important thing. We have gestures, and if you want to think, or see, or imagine
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the future of where things are going, look at some Hollywood movies, with "Minority Report", the Tom Cruise
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character conducting the data in a very visual, embodied way.
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We see the same thing in "Iron Man", where they're taking lots of textual information as well, and manipulating
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it with their whole bodies, moving them around, immersed in the stuff, not just with the end of our fingertips and our eyes.
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I think in a certain sense we can imagine that reading would continue to expand to be something that
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we do with more of our body. And, of course, there's voice. And again, we see the innovations recently, where
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I had another friend who was taking his Kindle and putting the Kindle on the front passenger seat of
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his car and having it read to him while he drove, instead of having audiobooks.
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He had the speech synthesis in the Kindle dictating to him.
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And, we of course see the rise, 5% anual rise in the number of audiobooks sales, for years and years,
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and again, who would have imagined that this would become a major way in which reading is done, in this
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audible fashion. So this is another dimension of the increase in the sensuality and sensibility of reading.
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And it's not just something that was done silently, which was the amazing thing, that a lot of medieval
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people discovered was the idea of reading alone silently for extended periods was considered very very strange.
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We have eyeballs in all the devices that we make, phones and even these tablets will have eyeballs, and
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they will see things, and so what's important is that our books in a certain sense will have eyes, and
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those eyes will look in two different directions, just like they look out to the environment in which
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the book is in, and they look back at us, and they can track our eyes.
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This is a heat map generated by software in a camera inside a tablet, looking at the ways eyes spend
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their time tracking on a web page. The more orange it is, the more attention is given.
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And so it's really very easy to imagine our books looking back at us as we read them. They can respond
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to where we're spending attention, where we don't spend as much attention, our own mood, the general
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environment, and the background, our own usage of this thing, so they become adaptive, in some ways.
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The idea that there are books that have eyes that look both ways, that is the "where" of where the book
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is being read and the "where" of us. And of course, this idea of adaptive text had a name, and it was
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called interactive media, and if you've been around long enough, you'll realize that this is something
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that failed in the previous era, when we imagined that the future of books was forking paths, and there
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was no non-linear, no real ending, and it seemed to be a complete non-starter.
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Everybody seemed to want the linear, narrative, crafted beauty of a story. But in fact, this idea of
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having a multiple path through a text actually has succeeded in games, which is probably a bigger industry
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in total than books. And, before you dismiss that, just understand that in a typical Hollywood movie,
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which is written, there's a text, which is a script, there's 3 thousand lines of dialogue.
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In a typical open-ended movie, like Red Dead Redemption or Call of Duty 2, there are maybe 30 thousand lines
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of dialogue, which are written in a script form.
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And there's actually a lot more reading going on. If you haven't seen one of these, hang around a 14
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year old and look at the amount of text that they're seeing as they navigate through this, and choose
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their inventories, and switch back and forth. There's far more reading going on than we think. And I
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think it's premature to dismiss what games are bringing to the idea of a text.
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So, the third verb is sharing. If we have these windows, and they're ubiquitous, and they're all looking
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into this cloud, the cloud is also looking back at us.
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That's the big thing. If everything is looking in the cloud, the cloud is looking back to us, and that
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relationship is the basis for all kinds of collective social engagement. So I think what we're seeing
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is reading can be turned to become more social than it has been, much more of a social activity. Again,
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the idea of the lone, silent reader... that reading was a very private activity, I think is only one expression of reading,
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and we're going to see in some senses a return to the idea that reading is much more of a social activity.
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We've had marginalia in books forever, from the Talmud and beyond, we've always written into books, but
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now that marginalia can be shared, and that turns that kind of investigation, that kind of conversation
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with the book into more of a social thing.
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And we're going to see that continue even further.
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In fact, the ways in which things are hyperlinked... we heard yesterday that ePub3 might eventually be
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able to share the idea of one document hyperlinking to another document, one book hyperlinking to other
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books, which is really what we want. And we already have some sense of what that could be with Wikipedia.
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You can think of each Wikipedia article as kind of a very small book, or you can think of Wikipedia as
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one very very large book of all those small books, 27 million pages in total, but in fact in the way
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that in Wikipedia articles more and more terms are highlighted in blue to show they are linked out, eventually
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all the entire text will be blue, meaning the entire document, the larger library, is also completely
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interlinked to each other, and that's where we're going with books. In the same way, basically all books
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will be linked into the one large text that we'll call the library.
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And as we read socially, that means that we have to write socially, so Wikipedia has a lot of social
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writing, and those two are complementary, they're necessary to be paired together, we read socially and
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write socially at the same time.
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And I would suggest, on the meter of how much sharing we have done, we're only at the beginning, and
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this is the great impetus we see right now happening in the Web at large. It's that things that we thought
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could never be shared have no value, we are again discovering that we haven't begun to understand what
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we can do by sharing, and everything so far that we've done is actually increased in value by being shared
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and that we're just at the beginning to see how far that will go.
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Fourth verb is "accessing". Not owner. So there's this huge shift we see in the entire environment, where
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people get more value out of having access to something rather than of owning it.
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Netflix, you don't own the movies, you just have access to them. Spotify, Pandora, Last.fm are music
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streams that go by, you don't actually own the music, you just access it. Amazon Web Services, and we
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even see these things whith rentals, the increase in renting things. Why own them if you can have instant,
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all-the-time access? This shift from ownership to access is a huge fundamental difference that we're
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going to see coming up in this economy. I did a calculation showing that the total amount of storage
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that you would need to put every single music track that has ever been recorded in history in any language,
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any other country, you can put in 6 terabytes, which is about 500 dollars today, tomorrow will be half
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that, and soon it will be in your pocket, and the, if it's in your pocket, why even bother carrying it
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around? I did the same calculation to show that for 20,000 dollars you could store every single book
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that we know about, have ever seen in any library in the world, just to store is not very expensive.
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So that suggests that we're going to very quickly see all this stuff available in very large volumes,
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and why would anybody own it when they could just have access to it? And we have of course a fundamental
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economy around ownership, and is going to shift to one built around access, and that's going to be a
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very different economics.
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The fifth verb is flowing. So we can see flows. The first version of the computational world was based
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around the same desktop metaphor that we had, and then the great shift was to the second metaphor, which
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was shifting from files to pages, and from folders to links, and the desktop to the web. And that's where
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we have been, with the Web. And that's also been very conducive to books, because books were based
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around pages. And so it's been very compatible. The entire Web was about web pages, but that's now shifting
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again to this new metaphor, this new regime, which is about streams, tags, and clouds. And in this metaphor
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things flow through, there are flows and streams, there are not pages. Things are in real time.
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There are streams like the Twitter streams, and the Facebook streams, and RSS feeds, walls updates, headlines,
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the streams in Netflix and Hulus, there's a sense in which there are flows of data that go by, and once
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they go by, they go by, and everything is kind of in real time. And books will operate in this same environment.
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So we see the movement from pages to streams, clouds, now, from me to we, and it's all around data.
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And so all these flows, including finished books, will flow through in streams, and they'll be constantly
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updated, and they'll be constantly amended, and split into other streams that go into other media, and
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our own individual lives will be basically as long streams of chronologically organized data, and that's
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going to be the new metaphor. And everything, out there, is generating little streams of data, maybe not
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very much, maybe just small little bits, but they're all streaming data outward.
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And that is everywhere, that's the other thing, the streams go everywhere, so that data is everywhere.
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And it's always on. It's real-time, always on, everywhere data, and there is no sense in which things
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are being completed. Is kind of ever, constantly in flux. That is the environment in which books will take place.
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Let me get to the last verb, which is generating, to generate. One thing I have to stress is that there
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has never been a better time to be a reader than now, we have more selection, more quality, more access
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to great books and reading stuff than anybody, anywhere in the world has ever had. It's a complete Renaissance
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for reading. And if that was the only part of the story we would not be here, there would be no reason
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to have this conference. Because everyone is benefiting from this new era except the producers.
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But we have to understand that from the reader's point of view this is it, this is fantastic.
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So the question is: What about the producers? I'm going to suggest that in fact in a world where everything
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is moving to the free, we have to have a different attitude. And everything is moving to the free: some
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guy did this chart showing the price of the Kindle is on a straight line towards being free in November.
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Free meaning that you get a free Kindle if you buy so many books, it's not unconceivable.
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Everything is on this trend downward. And I mean literally everything, we've done many many studies,
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and all commodities go in this direction, and even if it doesn't reach free, it reaches some asymptote,
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that is as if it was free. So I call it the zero point price point. Not everything is going to be zero,
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but somebody will offer everything at that price point, and so you have to... even if yours is not at
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that price, you have to operate in a world in which someone else is offering at that price point. And
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even if it's not at that price point, it's as if it is.
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So that's a general trend. And I think publishers are not ready for the idea that books may only be
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99 cents. I can really figure out why books should be more expensive than a song.
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I don't think consumers are going to believe that either, that there should be any reason why.
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That downward pressure is really there, and it's going to continue. So the question is: Ok, what do we
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do? We understand that the Internet is the world's largest copy machine, and anything that can be copied
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will be copied. If it can be copied and it touches the thing, it will be copied. That is the general
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way in which the Internet works. It actually makes multiple copies every time you send an email.
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It's a copy superconducting machine. And so the question is: Ok, if everything is going towards free,
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these copies are generated, pressuring things to become free -even if they aren't, there's always that
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pressure on it, towards that direction- then, what do we do? And I think the only thing that becomes
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valuable are the things that cannot be copied. Easily, or quickly, or cheaply.
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So what kind of things can't be copied?
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You want things to be easy to pay, hard to copy. Let me give you one example: immediacy. I tried to
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download a National Geographic article recently. It was pre-copyright, in the 1920's, and it said: it
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will take an hour to download for free, but if you want to pay, six dollars of whatever it was, it'll
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download in a couple minutes. So you're not paying for the copy, you're paying for immediacy.
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You can eventually get anything you want for free, if you wait long enough, but if you want it as soon
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as the creator has created it, the artist has made it, you're willing to pay for the immediacy of it.
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Personalization. You might get music for free, but if you want it personalized to the acoustics of your
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livingroom you can pay. If you want it to be personalized, customized in your language, your dialect,
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you might may. You can get a free version, generic version. Personalization, which cannot be copied,
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by definition, you'll pay.
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Authentication. You might eventually get some copy out there, but if you want the authentic version of
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software, maybe the same one as the other one, you're willing to pay for the authentication.
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Findability. There's all this stuff out there. Amazon has tons and tons of books, but what they're doing
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is really not selling books, they're selling the findability of the book, the book can actually not be
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very much, but you're willing to buy it on Amazon because you'll find it among all the other similar
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titles or similar things.
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And of course "embodiment". Music is free, but the embodiment of it, going to see the music performer, the author, you might pay.
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And there's interpretation. Old joke in the software industry: the software is free, but the manual is
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1,000 dollars. So understanding how to use it, how to interpret it, costs some money.
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And accessibiliy, again. It's free out there -and this is what iTunes was-, it's all free music, but
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for 99 cents we'll get it to you really quickly.
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And attention, patronage. People will pay if the creator is giving them some attention.
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And I think that's not to be devalued at all, it's very important. So these ideas, what I call, these
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are generatives: immediacy, personalization, authentication, attention, interpretation, accessibility,
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embodiment, findability, are the generatives, they have to be generated in context, so they cannot be
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copied. They are the thing that's valuable.
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So these are the generatives. And I know that... I don't know what the models are, but I know that wherever
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attention flows, money will follow. And as we see more attention going to the screens, the money will
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follow for sure.
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So, these are the six trends, the six verbs, again: screening, everywhere, that's the environment, away
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from the book to screens; interaction, interacting with these things more than just with eyes and fingertips,
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with our whole bodies; sharing is the verb, is the default, we haven't begun to see how far we can go
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with sharing; accessing is more important than ownership; also flows, data flows, flows and streams,
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no longer pages; and generatives, the value in the copy world of the free, what's better than free,
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it's things that are generated in place.
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Thank you for your attention.
