How to write books for the Web?

What can you do with a book when it’s not on paper?

Comments

Well of course. Publishers should at least provide some mean of entering comments or reviews on the book site. Also people could publicly annotate the book at specific points, like the Django book (a book about a software development framework)

Continuous updates

We are not pushing the envelope enough in terms of continuous updates, addiction factor: take a cue from technical publishers: O’ Reilly has live books, published drafts, book upgrades. Today it’s all or nothing: Imperial Bedrooms is out on 15 June: then it’ll be available all at once, but until then not at all. Think of movie trailers, game demos. Of course, some read previews in the New Yorker. How many? Like 1% of the target readership? Free give aways, free chapter to circulate in the hope of becoming viral fall into this category.

Pictures!

Remember when you were small? And you had those books full of beautiful pictures? Then they gave you books for grown-ups; no more pictures, only black and white lines of text. Pictures are cheap now! We can make beautiful illustrated books for everybody. We can put any picture we want, photos we shot ourselves, for instance. A slight problem is that e-ink does not support pictures very well at the moment. No way though someone is not going to put something on the market which will show pictures and text well.

Merchandise, obviously

Sell merchandise: t-shirts with quotes from the book, mugs, you name it. Like Chuck Palahniuk (but minus thee annoying, irrelevant ads. Is there no ad server better targeted at this audience?)

Any language you want

The web allows total delocalization. Why should one publisher/platform only concern itself with only one language. Everybody on Earth reads US literature anyway; so it’s not like there are these huge cultural gaps between Pynchon wannabes (about 40% of high-brow authors under 50 in any language today). We can help authors of any language get published on our platform. We can automate/crowdsource translation and get fast turnarounds. Publish translations a bit at a time. No one says you need to get the whole thing at once.

And of course, edit it!

Everybody can edit the book and keep their own version, do whatever they want with it, print it, etc. Which license? It makes no sense to limit the edited copies for private use. You could give complete control of the edited version to the editor, but then it would be easy for anybody to make just a few irrelevant edits, call this version his/her own and undercut you. It also would stifle collaborative drives. You could reserve all rights on the original, then force everybody else to license their version under a CC Share Alike license. But it does not feel right. Paying for the privilege of editing the book? No one would: the only adavantage of paying would be that you could do it in public.

Control, control

The main question seems to be that to do the more interesting stuff you have to relinquish a lot of control on the book, in terms of creation and, to make creation interesting, in terms of distribution. Which is fine, except that it limits support options. Writing a book is cheap compared to shooting a movie. Still, you have to keep at least one person alive for the time needed to research and write it. Not all authors can be amateurs, because few people can commit enough time without financial compensation.