The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.

Although still in the early days of development and potentially taking years to complete, the BookServer project will allow search engines to index books from all over the web. What that means for an end user is that you could type a title into a search engine and the engine would return results listing everywhere you could get that book in digital format including online bookstores, libraries, or a direct method from the publisher itself. Depending on your needs, you could borrow the book or purchase it and then download it to your digital device.

While the project isn't exactly a direct effort to take down Amazon's online bookstore or Google's upcoming online eBook store called Google Editions, it will provider book publishers and online libraries with the means to more effectively compete with those companies. By allowing publishers to set their own pricing and manage the distribution of their books, they will be able to take back control from Amazon and Google who would rather dictate those terms for them.

An Open Marketplace for eBooks

A secondary goal of BookServer's open system is to fight back against the proprietary marketplaces, such as Amazon's Kindle Store, where books are only sold in a copyright-protected format (.AZW) that only works on the company's eReader device, the Kindle. Elsewhere, some book sellers use other proprietary formats, others use the open ePub format, and still others distribute books as Adobe PDFs. For consumers, this multitude of choices only leads to confusion. People don't know what formats their particular device can read or where to get them. It brings to mind the similar issues consumers have had with digitally distributed music. To this day, many are still confused about whether their iTunes purchased music can play on other devices or whether tunes purchased from other online MP3 stores will play on their iPods.

While Google promises its Google Editions store will allow anyone to access digital books as long as they have a web browser and internet access, it's still unknown at this time how the company plans to make the digital content available offline. Will it require the use of special web browser plugins to do so? Until Google reveals more about the technical details, it is not possible to know how truly open their online store will be. And even if their store is 100% open, they are still a company whose ultimate goal is to profit from their work of digitizing books. BookServer's goal, on the other hand, is to provide universal access to book data made available in open formats.

Today, a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O'Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

Some parts of the available prototypes are interesting but opinion in the scientific community seems split. Is this ground-breaking stuff or yesterday's news repackaged by another industry threatened by the web? That depends on who you ask.

The proposed new format incorporates things as simple as bullet point summaries and playable audio interviews with a paper's author and as complex as click-navigable data visualizations and real-time citation analysis. Some of the AJAX implementations are quite smooth and useful looking. The full summary of proposed features is available on Elsevier subsidiary publisher Cell's site and the company is seeking public comment.

Blogs and websites are weighing in with different points of view. James Dacey writes at PhysicsWorld that "I reckon this is another key development in an interesting transitionary period for both the publishing and media sectors." Several commenters on this article on Canadian Law Library blog Slaw were far less generous.

Gary P. Rodrigues, a former LexisNexis publishing exec, had the following to say there:

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of the 'future' in the 'Article of the Future'. Rather, it seems to me to be a collection of everything that it is possible to do now, but for which there is no commercial demand. Reed Elsevier faces a major challenge to its dominant position in the market for scientific journals from the Open Access movement. It needs to do something major to meet that challenge. The prototypes just don't live up to the hype.

Indeed, the article prototypes are reminiscent of what in the tech world was being called the Social Media Press Release, an attempt to make press releases multi-media and filled with social media hooks that could make them more useful to journalists. That effort seems to have petered out as most people in relevant industries found the format more trouble than it was worth.

There is a possibility that The Article of the Future will suffer the same fate. Elsevier says that it hopes the new format will make consumption of scientific research more efficient and interdisciplinary. We suspect, though, that many people who are interested in reading a paper titled "A Dynamic Pathway for Calcium-Independent Activation of CaMKII by Methionine Oxidation," for example, would prefer to keep out the clutter and stick with a familiar, scannable, academic format. Some of the features proposed are undeniably useful, though, and could lead to change that's incremental, if not revolutionary.

For a more in-depth look at other attempts to disrupt the scientific publishing industry, see Michael Nielsen's article on the topic, this Nature blog post about scientists' use of social networks and this profile of a new social network for scientists called MyExperiment.

Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work.

Making Books a Different Animal

The Telling Stories project transformed the work of six UK book authors into six different web experiences. Hon said the authors were mainstream writers whose reactions ranged from indifferent to bemused when they were first approached. After participating, all six are now enthusiastic to do more on the web, he said.

Hon's favorite of the six parts was a mystery thriller written about the streets of London that his company transformed into a Google Maps overlay; the map marker became a flying first-person narrator for the bird's-eye readers. Book chapters unfolded as map annotations.

Another author's book was serialized into 140 character abridged lines and delivered over months to followers on Twitter.

The whole Telling Stories project has been applauded as a great example of book publisher Penguin boldly stepping into a new medium. Hon says the authors were assured that visiting emissaries from the internet had not come to destroy them.

The project has brought the authors creative opportunity and substantial exposure. Personalized social serendipity service StumbleUpon has brought in half of the traffic to Telling Stories, Hon says; sometimes up to 10,000 people will Stumble on to the site on a seemingly random day.

Those visitors are encouraged to jump media and buy the full dead-tree version of the web-ified stories. Hon says though that he thinks the division between media types will become much less clear in the near future.

The Future of Stories

This CEO and I didn't talk much about monetization - emergent forms of creativity shaking up the old are more exciting. We didn't tackle the debasement of literature by Twitter because Twitter's awesome potential is more interesting.

We talked just hours after the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement was made and Hon was excited that the new Bluetooth connectivity could mean a vastly improved interface for glucose monitors, for example. He said that developments like this could be the stepping stones toward a future of ubiquitous computing.

"Soon people will realize that there is no 'mobile internet' - there is only the Internet," he says. "And stories are everywhere." Hon says web content today is like the early days of TV, when all anyone could think to do was broadcast actors from the theater in the new medium. But new types of media enable fundamentally new types of content and experiences.

For example, we're just beginning to learn how to leverage the web's social connections, Hon says. He points to the first iteration of "urban games" as something rudimentary that won't last: groups of people organizing online to meet in person dressed, let's say, as Pac-man characters, running through city streets and posting videos of their adventures on YouTube. "Those games ask people to get up and do something they don't really want to do," Hon says.

Instead, he believes that the future of interactive story telling will be pervasive - it will be available throughout your typical day. Walking to work, even while at work.

"I have no idea what we can produce in this medium," he said, "but I think it's going to be like turning the whole world into Disney Land."

Just remember, Dan, how much free time you said you discovered when you quit playing World of Warcraft. Turning the whole world into Disney Land is nothing to take lightly. That said, I'll see you when we meet up in the Harry Potter ether. I won't be surprised if you and your team help build it.

According to Facebook's director of product, Chris Cox, in the new version of Facebook "profiles and pages become the same thing." During last week's presentation where he and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the changes taking place, Cox was quoted as saying, "now users can open up their profiles for other users to subscribe to. That means pages will become more like the profile."

That couldn't be further from the truth.

Pages Didn't Get the New "Publisher" Box

After testing the new public profiles for hours on end last night, we discovered there are still a lot of issues with these pages. In some cases, the problems we encountered have existed for some time, but in other cases it's just a matter of pages not getting the same updated features as the personal profiles did.

For example, one of the most exciting changes to the new Facebook is a box called "the Publisher." This feature brings new functionality to what was once just the status update box. Before, that box prompted you to finish the sentence that began with your name and ended with "is...". Users could then type in a quick thought and post it to their wall.

Today, the new Facebook Publisher box asks you "What's on your mind?" The change is a nod to the rapidly growing social network Twitter where users answer the question "what are you doing?" and then respond with text, links, photos, videos, and more, thanks to an ecosystem of integrated third-party applications that let users share more than just a simple thought.

Since the Facebook upgrade, however, the Publisher box permits users to share updates that go beyond text-only notes. Users now can share photos, links, and videos. Some applications are also publisher-integrated, appearing below the box and in the drop-down list beneath it.

Here's what the Publisher box looks like on a personal profile.

Unfortunately, Public Profiles don't get this feature. Instead, this is what the Publisher box looks like on a public profile.

Clearly, public profiles are not the same as personal profiles in this area, but the differences don't stop there.

Most Applications Don't Work on Pages

If you don't run a Public Page, then it probably never occurred to you to think about how Facebook applications work with Pages. As it turns out, Pages aren't able to run most of the applications you can run on your personal profile. This is not a new issue, but it was not corrected in the major upgrade that supposedly makes "public profiles work like personal profiles."

After creating a Public Profile, you have the option to browse through the available applications on Facebook to find apps you want to add to your page. There is not a separate list for Page-aware applications so you'll find that many apps just don't work. You're often only provided with the option to add an app to your Page's list of "Favorites" - a move that serves as nothing more than a list of recommendations to your fans. While this is a great way for a company wanting to promote their other public pages and applications (like the New York Times does here), it limits the functionality of the profiles themselves...especially since it's the applications that often make profiles so dynamic.

So Broken: No Twitter Apps for Pages

A notable example of this problem is with Twitter applications. Although there are multiple Twitter apps available on Facebook, the current ones either don't work with Pages at all or they don't work all that well. The most popular of these apps, for example, only works with personal profiles or pages - it doesn't work with profiles and pages.

You can follow this thread on the Twitter app's discussion board where people are talking about the various workarounds for the lack of Twitter integration on Pages. To date, the best workaround for this issue is using the Facebook Static FBML application to display a Twitter badge on your Public Profile page. This is a poor substitute as the badge just reads "follow me on Twitter" and includes a link. It can't update your status.

To add the badge, you must first add the Static FBML application which lets you copy and paste code (HTML or FBML - Facebook Markup Language) into a box. That box can then be added to your Profile page.

Another workaround would be to add your Twitter's RSS feed to the Notes application, one app that does work with public profile pages. However, the Notes application only allows for the import of one external feed so you have to make a big choice here: do you import your Twitter updates or your blog?

If you're savvy with services like Yahoo Pipes or Xfruits, you can combine RSS feeds into one master feed and use that in the Notes application instead. Yet this still is not an ideal solution because the RSS updates from these services are slow. In fact, in testing both Pipes and Xfruits, updates were so delayed that using either feed was almost pointless. Definitely not great for sharing information on a real-time web.

You should also be aware that if you put the Notes box on any other page of your public profile besides the Wall page, it will not be able to update your Wall with posts. So much for customization!

Apps Get Confused Between Personal Profiles and Pages

Another major issue with applications is how they get confused between your Pages and your Profile - like the Twitter issue referenced above. When you create an account on Facebook, you're automatically given a Facebook profile. That causes problems with some applications as they don't seem to know whether to link to your profile or to your page. Again, with Facebook's own Notes application, clicking through the Notes link on the "Page Manager" (the area where you edit the settings for your Page's apps), you're taken into the Notes application where personal and public notes are merged. Although you were working on your public profile page, once you arrive in the application you'll be surprised to see that it's already linked with your personal profile. All the links you've been sharing on your personal profile are also found here on this page, intermingled with your public notes.

This is confusing since most people would assume that, since they had arrived at the Notes app via their Public Page, this would be a separate instance of the application that's associated only with the page, not the profile. But that is not the case. Even more confusing is the fact that imported RSS feeds you set up on your Page will also import to and post to your personal profile. Disaster!

Other applications, like the popular "My Flickr" app for example, don't even work on Pages even though they have a button that says they do. Perhaps the reason this app failed in our tests was because it was already on our personal profile, but it's hard to say for sure.

Don't Think Problems Can be Solved with a Separate Login, Either

After reading through all these issues with applications you may think the easiest solution is to just create a whole new login for the sole purpose of managing a page. Not so fast!

If you're a public figure and not a business who wants to create a page for fans in addition to your own private profile, you have to do so under the same login or you're in violation of Facebook's Terms of Service (TOS). According to the site's help documentation:

"Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts."

Either Create a "Business Account" or Don't Bother with Public Profiles

That sounds to us like Facebook doesn't want individuals to set up separate accounts. The other option - and one we did not test - was to set up a "business account." Business accounts are designed for companies that need to set up a page without a personal profile associated with the login. Although these business accounts are still limited by the lack of page-aware applications, they are more customized to a business's needs. For example, the Facebook business account for bands comes pre-installed with a music player, video player, discography, reviews, tour dates, and a discussion board.

Companies operating on Facebook through business accounts may not have all the same problems as a public figure who creates a page in addition to their personal profile, but there are still issues to be had. But for people, not businesses, it's almost as if Facebook doesn't want them to really take advantage of the Pages feature.

In fact, we think Facebook might even be actively discouraging people, be they public figures or otherwise, from setting up pages to represent their public-facing image. There seems to be an undercurrent of thought at Facebook that people should just open up their private lives to the world. You can see this belief in action when you examine how difficult and complex Facebook's privacy settings are. Those settings are so granular and there are so many different areas to adjust, one has to imagine that perhaps Facebook doesn't really want people to adjust them at all.

If Facebook made Pages easy for personal users to create and keep separate from their personal profiles, then nearly everybody would go use them - especially when it came time to "friend" people you didn't really want to friend - people like business colleagues, the boss, and followers (if you're a public figure).

As a "normal" Facebook user, you may not ever run into these issues, but for public figures, it's becoming a real problem. And by "public figure," we don't necessarily mean major celebrity - small communities also have their own micro-celebs that attract a lot of friends and followers. Even adding as many as 100 or 200 of these so-called "friends" can dilute a public figure's ability to use Facebook effectively, despite the new friend filtering features introduced in the upgrade.

This problem isn't just limited to the tech bubble where everyone tries to friend Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte - it's a growing trend in every industry. It's also an issue we've encountered before - back then it was called MySpace.

MySpace's core belief is also centered on this idea of openness. Profiles are open by default and gathering the most friends practically became a contest in MySpace's heyday. But that also may be, in part, what led to its decline among users. (Well that and those garish profiles with glitter text).

By not duplicating the extreme openness of MySpace, Facebook had a chance to differentiate itself. Sadly, it seems that they haven't figured it all out yet. For public figures, a choice still has to be made: "do I friend everyone who wants to follow me and dilute my network or do I keep Facebook for private connections only?" An upgrade to public profiles should have offered a better option than this, but it did not.

Why Is It So Hard for Individuals to Maintain Public Profiles?

We're not sure why it needs to be so difficult to let some users (users that is, not businesses) maintain a public profile on Facebook. Why can't status updates and other posts just be checked as to whether they get posted to a public page too? Why can't applications be built with different settings for personal profiles and pages? Why can't "Share on Facebook" pop-ups have a checkbox that reads "also post to my public profile"? Are the technicalities of implementing a simpler system really all that difficult?

Or is it that Facebook doesn't really care about the people who want to build a public profile page - only the businesses that want to build pages and buy ads, too?

If Facebook can't strike the right balance between public and private sharing for public figures, it leaves the door open for someone else to do it better. At this point, we would welcome that challenger. Actually, that challenger may have already arrived. It's called Twitter - the social network that gets one-way friendships right. And the one Facebook has now tried, but failed, to copy.

Click here to read Sam's take on the news.

The Times quietly announced in May that it would soon be publishing APIs, which are means by which outside developers can access NY Times data for use in other applications, interfaces and mashups. We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.

The Times describes its initial offering like this:

With the Campaign Finance API, you can retrieve contribution and expenditure data based on United States Federal Election Commission filings. Campaign finance data is public and is therefore available from a variety of sources, but the developers of the Times API have distilled the data into aggregates that answer most campaign finance questions. Instead of poring over monthly filings or searching a disclosure database, you can use the Times Campaign Finance API to quickly retrieve totals for a particular candidate, see aggregates by ZIP code or state, or get details on a particular donor.

The Campaign Finance API is currently limited to presidential campaign data. Future versions will include house and senate campaign data.

The demonstration application built with this API is a simple mashup of the campaign contributions and the Google Charts API, to create a graph of contributions by zip code. You know what we'd like to see? A Greasemonkey script that shows political contributions for a geographic area whenever a user hovers over that area's name on a web page. Would that be cool, or what?

The possibilities are truly endless.

We're very excited to see what kinds of data the Times opens up next.

Why APIs are Important for Newspapers

The UK Guardian is the best example of a newspaper that understands the opportunities in becoming a broker of machine-readable data, instead of just human readable content. Reuters is doing something similar with it's Calais program. (Calais is an RWW sponsor.)

Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity. It's hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world. They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in - that's not a safe bet for the future.

One thing that big media still does have a particularly good share of, though, is information processing resources and archival content. The Times' campaign contribution API is a good example of this. The newspaper is far better prepared to organize that raw information, and perhaps offer complimentary content, than any individual blogger or small news publisher.

They, along with everyone's favorite API management service Mashery (again powering another exciting API), have the skills and the draw to offer this data in a way that a lot of developers will find compelling. When developers create applications that use their data, the Times will once again assert itself as an essential part of our information landscape - both in mind share and in inbound links/Search Engine Optimization for their online content.

Further, the times are changing and if you're not publishing for those readers of yours who happen to be robots - you're missing out on an important constituency.

We're really excited about the New York Times APIs and we look forward to seeing what kinds of innovative things the development community can do with them.

How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.

The AP Marketplace interface looks like a sophisticated, multi-media RSS reader but with limited sources. Publishers set up a workflow that lets editors send selected media items directly from the reader out onto the paper's website.

Below, the AP newsreader, click to view full screen image.

It's very reminiscent of of the CMS built by the Crowd Fusion team, which we profiled last week. There's one huge difference though between the AP's project and things like the Crowd Fusion project, the red-hot world of cool-hunting aggregation and even the new publishing strategy of web giants like Yahoo and AOL. The AP service finds and publishes AP stories, not content from around the whole web.

There was a time when it must have been hard to imagine getting more news to choose from than what the wires brought publishers each day. That time has passed and while the small Midwestern US newspapers that the AP highlights as happy users of the Marketplace may be on board - it's hard to say how for how long readers will remain excited about AP fueled news websites. Especially once they discover a little more about how the internet works. (We don't mean to be critical of Mid Westerners, they were just the demographic of several AP demo sites.)

The online research tools used by financial professionals, for example, could probably slap this service both ways to Sunday before it knew which way was up. The AP says, though, that many local papers find their readers overjoyed with the breadth of topical AP content published to content sections or niche websites.

Left: The North West Arkansas biker scene had nothing like this news site before the AP Exchange came to town, the AP says. This kind of site does look like a good idea for everyone.

Training Component

One very interesting part of the AP Marketplace is that it's very search-centric and the wire service offers weekly 30 minute-long classes in online search skills. The AP Exchange School of Search is a great idea.

Not all parts of the program are working well, admittedly. The Exchange "blog" and community on Ning are dead, for example. Perhaps early participants learned enough to escape out into the web at large.

News Publishing Around the Web

A year ago media analyst Jeff Jarvis wrote an excellent post about what Editor 2.0 jobs are shaping up to look like. Two years ago we wrote here about some of the exciting things that AP competitor Reuters is doing. [Disclosure, the Reuters semantic web project Calais is now an RWW sponsor.] The media business blog PaidContent says that the AP Marketplace/Exchange service is pitted against new aggregation services explicitely aimed at replacing the AP, like Politico.

It's a time of deep change in the news media world and though we love the feel of a good local paper and its website - their ongoing success cannot be taken for granted. Tools like the AP Exchange look like a great step to take and we enjoy getting to see what the RSS reader equivalent is inside hundreds of local newsrooms.

Features

OpenZine tries to differentiate itself from blogging sites through a number of features. One of the main ideas behind OpenZine is that you don't have to create all the content yourself. Instead, you can mix-and-match content from other zines to create your own page. Every time you see something interesting on another page that you would like to add to yours, you can clip that content and then add it to your site. Attribution is handled automatically by OpenZine.

At this point, however, there is not a lot of content available on the site. Also, integration with Flickr, which allows users to post under the Creative Commons license, would seem like a natural fit if you are looking for images to showcase on your site. As of now, however, you are pretty much restricted to either bringing your own images or clipping them from the limited pool of other zines.

Besides clipping content, you can, of course, add your own text and images to every page and add YouTube videos. Sadly, no other video services are directly supported at this time, but you can use the embed code from other video sites in any text field.

OpenZine also includes a number of social networking features, including a private messaging service and commenting functions.

One major limitation of OpenZine, however, is that you can only choose from eight different layouts, which wouldn't be so bad, if these templates didn't exactly define and restrict where text, images, and videos can go on a page.

Highlight: Image Editor

One feature we really liked was the image editor, which has a series of relatively sophisticated functions, including the ability to blend images together and to add shadows and various geometric figures. This image editor is invoked for creating cover pages for your zines, as well as for editing pictures to be featured on your pages. In our experience, the image editor for OpenZine goes far beyond what we have seen in any blogging platforms so far.

Lots of Ads

Overall, though, even your best planned layout on OpenZine might be crushed by the Google AdSense advertising OpenZine displays on your site. Even the text and image editors feature advertising, which takes away from the experience, especially because few of these ads are actually relevant to the content and all of them are image ads. We understand that OpenZine needs to pay bills as well, but it would be nice if users could maybe choose the placement of ads or if they at least didn't appear in the editing modes.

Verdict

OpenZine could be a far more worthwhile exercise if you could personalize your templates a bit more. Right now, the look and feel of most zines on the site is similar to a MySpace page, where the pages are crowded with numerous YouTube videos, images, and short snippets of text.

The real question, though, is if OpenZine offers enough flexibility over a regular blog. After all, when publishing a blog, you don't have to have lots of content available at the same time. You just add more content every day and you layout can easily resemble that of a magazine if you choose to do so.

We can see a niche for OpenZine among users who want to publish a travel diary or artists who want to showcase their work. In most cases, though, other publishing mechanisms would offer more flexibility and control than OpenZine does.

If you would like to hear more about OpenZine, here is a short video describing the service:

MagCloud is another project to emerge from HP Labs. Earlier this year, HP Labs launched BookPrep, a print-on-demand service for out-of-print books. Now, they're delivering MagCloud, a project devoted to providing small independent publishers the ability to publish digitized magazines as well as economically print on demand. Using HP's Indigo technology, the magazines are printed when ordered in full color on 80 lb paper with saddle-stitched covers.

How To Use MagCloud

To get started with creating a custom magazine, you must first create a PDF of your content using a tool that outputs high-resolution PDFs, like Adobe InDesign. You'll also need to have a PayPal account in order to sell the magazines with the markup you choose. Since the service is in beta at the moment, orders must be sent to a U.S. shipping address. Publishers can request an invitation here.

Browsing the MagCloud Selections

For those just interested in reading the MagCloud produced zines, you can create an account and then browse the selections of magazines available or subscribe to receive email notifications from the publisher as to when new issues are available. You can also choose to subscribe via RSS, but the feed does not contain the magazine's content as posts, only notifications when new issues are released.

There are already tons of magazines to browse through in diverse categories ranging from Art to Food to Literature to Finance and so much more. For example, RWW readers might be interested in the soon-to-launch magazine "The Rubyist" (for Rubyists, by Rubyists), which will focus on technical content and happenings in the world of Ruby, Rails, and Merb. Or for the more business-minded, the magazine "Professionally Speaking" may appeal, which gives tips on public speaking, giving presentations, etc.

Another great thing about a self-published magazine is that you can just purchase the issues you're interested in - the same as buying from the newsstand. You don't have to commit to a full subscription.

Previewing a MagCloud Magazine

A Great Addition To The POD World

As we noted earlier this year, the print-on-demand industry has really been heating up. Amazon launched CreateSpace and another Lulu-esque service called Wordclay began offering paperback publishing. Even casual publishing outfits like CafePress and Blurb have continued to offer options for less serious writers. Now, MagCloud seems to be a perfect addition to join the POD space. If you want to join MagCloud yourself, the signup page is here.

"Here Ends the Beginning is much more than a conventional e-book," wrote Furlong to us in an emailed press release. "The text is punctuated throughout with video clips and photographs of actors recreating the characters and scenes. Music and sound effects further enhance this novel experience."

The first 5 chapters of the 43-chapter-long book are available for free, with the full book available for $12.95 CDN. But is this really the future of the novel?

We've seen a lot of experimentation with the traditional book publishing format over the past year. From an author using Amazon's Kindle ebook reader to beta test his book to one using blog comments to peer review another. From books being written and released on cell phones to novels being serialized and released over LiveJournal, Twitter, and Google Maps. Unfortunately, none of these experiences have so far been able to match the enjoyable, intimate feeling of curling up with an real, printed book -- at least for me.

Writing about Penguin's Google Maps-based novel mashup in April, Booklist's Keir Graff wrote, "It's an odd sensation, really: simple words can evoke a world in our imaginations, but as soon as the words are married to real-world images, they lose much of their power." The same thing can be said of Furlong's Quillr concept. While videos and images flowed well as far as where and how they were inserted into the text, they seemed to detract from my reading experience by breaking up the continuity of the "inner movie" I develop whenever I read a piece of fiction. Also, constantly having to scroll and click while reading a long piece of writing can be frustrating -- it's just not as natural or satisfying as turning pages in a book.

But perhaps that's due to my advanced age of 24 years old (ha!). Maybe multimedia-enhanced, web-delivered books will resonate better with a younger set of readers. Give Furlong's book a chance and then come back here and leave a comment letting us know what you thought. Is this an enjoyable way to read a book? Or are publishers barking up the wrong tree with experiments in web publishing that mash books with web technology?

Two of the first weeks include serializing a story called Slice through two LiveJournal blogs and two Twitter accounts, and placing a second story called The 21 Steps on a navigable Google Map. Three stories remain and the distribution formats to be used are unannounced. (Actually, we hear now that the next step will be live performance - we'll see what that looks like!)

Slice, the story of a girl and her parents, was delivered by serialized LiveJournal and Twitter postings. Now that the week has passed, it's pretty frustrating to try to read the stories in reverse chronological order.

Apparently some of these media work better than others for story telling in real time. A mere 78 people signed up to "follow" the parents' Twitter account, more than 110 followed the daughter. As Gawker said in its coverage - "But getting away from Twitter is exactly the reason we read books!" Said like a true Twitter user.

Google Maps

The other story of note so far, a thriller called The 21 Steps, is easier to read. Navigation around the map is quite controlled, though, rich media elements are minimal for the first 6 chapters (all I could get through) and the medium does slow down reading. That said, I enjoyed the birds-eye view of the places that were being written about. I might finish that story later.

Author Charles Cumming said in an interview with CoolHunting yesterday about the project that the process of writing along with game designers, within the technical limitations of Google Maps, was a positive experience.

It was limiting only in the sense that I couldn't explore character in any great depth or get into the more psychological or emotional sides of the story. Plot was everything. Suspense was everything. It was all about pace and movement. But that in itself was quite exciting. Once I understood the parameters of what Penguin were trying to achieve, I had a lot of fun with it.

Booklist's Keir Graff writes of the effort, "Well, it beats cell-phone novels, but I still don’t think this is the fiction-delivery vehicle for me...It’s an odd sensation, really: simple words can evoke a world in our imaginations, but as soon as the words are married to real-world images, they lose much of their power. Similarly, it can be fun to look at a map and imagine what the places really look like, but here, the Google satellite view just made me frustrated because I wanted to see what the place really looks like at street level and inside the buildings."

My experience was similar.

I'm not sure that Google Maps alone is the best way to accomplish this goal. Forrest points to Portland mapping service Platial and it certainly seems like there's continued opportunity for any number of startups in this space beyond Google Maps.

A Look Into the Future

The book publishing world, like so much of legacy media, is scrambling to stay relevant. We've written about collaborative novel writing here too, some of which has been explored by Penguin as well.

It will be interesting to see what the next three installments of We Tell Stories bring. So far none have seemed like a real winner to me. So far I'd rather see the whole book be offered for download on BitTorrent (see Laughing Squid) and then offering interactive elements to supplement the actual reading of the book. If it was good enough I'd pay for it. Most publishers would probably do well focusing for now on making their transition to a largely digital world truly good enough, if not great, and focus on making money afterwords. That might sound crazy, but it's not as crazy as reading a novel on Twitter a week after it was published.

Then in January of this year, Author Solutions, Inc., who own AuthorHouse and iUniversere -- both POD publishers on the full-service end of the spectrum -- launched a new Lulu-esque service called Wordclay. Wordclay offers a menu of do-it-yourself and premium services including, printing, distribution, editing, and design (or, the iUniverse package offered a la carte). Wordclay currently only offers black and white paperback publishing, with hardcover and color publishing coming later this year.

Earlier this month, Lulu made waves by announcing a partnership with Borders -- the second largest bookseller in the US -- to power kiosks in new concept stores where customers can upload and sell POD books. They'll also provide the muscle for an online print on demand service called Borders Personal Publishing. Participants in the program may have the option to take part in in-store activities, such as author readings and book signings.

It is also probably worth mentioning that along with the release of their Kindle eBook reader (our coverage), Amazon has provided a method for authors to self publish books to the Kindle Marketplace, which has prompted some authors to take rather innovative approaches to the publishing process.

Why all the sudden movement in the POD space? Wordclay president Dave McCauley equates it to the evolution of the music industry. "Really, it's like music," he told me. "10 years ago it was all about big labels, now it's all about the independent artists, with MP3s and MySpace." The book publishing industry is just a little behind the times.

"I think what the industry is trying to do is remove all the barriers," he said. According to McCauley, in the traditional pubishing industry publishers put in a lot of time and money to overcome barriers to get to market -- things like editing, layout, design, distribution, and marketing. What POD publishers are doing, is using web 2.0 tools to try and break down those barriers and put publishing tools in the hands of authors.

For less serious writers, who don't want to get their books on store shelves but rather just want to publish a few copies for family and friends, there are casual POD publishers as well. CafePress has offered print on demand books since 2003 without all the bells and whistles of more author-centric services, and Blurb, which launched at DEMO in 2006, specializes in more visual books and books based on blogs and photo sharing sites.

While there is still a certain negative stigma associated with self publishing, the tools to do it cheaply, easily, and effectively are continually getting better. It's also nice to see that even though, as Steve Jobs says, people don't read anymore, at least what people are writing is being given more of an opportunity to be read.