What Does the User Need in an E-Book? What does the user want? Keynote speech to the NISO-BISG forum on eBook standards. I examine often-ignored issues regarding slow-paced ebook technology including: physical repercussions of ebook use; security vulnerabilities; potential for physical interactions between authors and readers via 3rd party technologies. Standards must be as open as possible in order to encourage creativity and codex-breaking paradigms in what is essentially a very boring and limited medium. We consider product management strategies, ebook analytics, surveillance dystopias and other frameworks for considering the future of eBooks in the near-future.

1. I’m Eric Swenson. My roots are in the worlds of art, design and electronic publishing.
For the past 7 years, I was in the scholarly communications world at Elsevier leading
Scopus product management. I also spent a few years on the NFAIS board of directors
and was the president in 2018. Through that work, I became acquainted with the
library community as well as various important organizations such as NISO. Today, I’m
an OSINT (open source intelligence) researcher and a product management
consultant.
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2. A funny thing happened on my way to the conference at the airport. I’d considered
referring to some papers and articles about media consumption, but I think these
pictures do a better job of capturing where we’re at and where we are going.
I’m a bit of a voyeur, a people watcher. I like to pay attention to what people are
reading, listening to, watching.
I saw the usual assortment of people jacked in to headphones, heads tilted down,
looking at iphones and ipads. I didn’t see any paper books or novels in the wild.
Then I saw this guy (see the guy with the red skull cap and Oculus visor on?) and I
stopped paying attention to everything else. (I saw that his flight was destined for Los
Angeles, so, we can forgive him….)
Now, I’ve been using VR headsets for a very long time and they are not new to me.
But you don’t see them in the wild that often.
I’m sure we will, very soon. We’re at the stage now where seeing someone like this,
head tilted up (vs. down) is reminiscent of the first time I saw someone talking to
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3. themselves loudly, apparently in deep conversation with themselves. But it was just a
business man on a conference call, oblivious to his surroundings.
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4. Within minutes of taking that picture and wondering what ‘ractive that
guy was in (to use Neil Stephenson’s term from The Diamond Age) a
friend sent me this, from the Washington Post.
(This really is the age of physical computing, isn’t it?)
Electronic reading, like gaming, and typing now has physical
consequences. Listen carefully! This will come up again!
Could a writer design a text, or an immersive story app, that is designed
to intentionally cause horn growth? A shock to the heart? Or induce
literal physical symptoms of pleasure--or pain?
Let’s find out!
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5. When I was in grad school at NYU’s ITP program in the very early 90s, we were pre-
web. Everything was about VR, Cyberspace, hypertext and multimedia.
Except for rampant carpal tunnel syndrome and occasional reports of motion sickness
from those who were fortunate enough to get hold of early VR headset prototypes,
we didn’t have many worries. The EFF was new [ACTION: PUMP FIST!] but the general
population including designers and developers didn’t think a lot about security or
privacy.
We knew about the web, but the graphical browser hadn’t taken off, and there were
so many competing closed platforms, that it took massive energy and money to build
and deploy products. We were certainly thinking about scholarly communications,
but the majority of those in the academic and entertainment side of the business
were focused on non-linearity. Hypertext. Hyperlinks. Hypermedia.
We created hypermedia “stacks” in Apple’s HyperCard (later destroyed by Steve Jobs
– one of his MOST unforgivable crimes) and we developed multimedia,
multithreaded interactive apps in what was then called Macromedia Director.
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6. The most well-known mainstream example of nonlinear storytelling today is the Black
Mirror Bandersnatch episode. But there’s more out there….
I was prepared for disappointment when I heard about Steven Soderbergh’s MOSAIC.
I read the piece in Wired that explained the painstaking process he went through,
mapping story nodes and forking paths, simultaneously building out a hyperthreaded
app experience and a TV-only release. I’d been there and seen all this before, but I’m
an optimistic skeptic – so, I hoped for the best.
In both the case of the forking path Bandersnatch and Mosaic, I was underwhelmed.
It was interesting watching my two children, ages 15 and 19 watch Bandersnatch. My
daughter, a college senior was excited. She missed out on the CD-ROM and hypertext
revolutions of the 90s. Since then, it’s been all screens, but forking paths exist in
video games and the algorithms work quickly, you’re conscious of the fact that you
have choices; that’s called game play. You just have to make the right choices, or your
character dies--and then you’re reincarnated. There are no enduring consequences.
But all of these choices and all of these constructs are programmed. Interactivity is a
lie.
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7. My work began in 1992 as the co-founder of Necro Enema Amalgamated, and BLAM!
a CD-ROM trilogy that boasts the world’s first interactive user profiling engine (sadly,
not patented, but still discoverable) which was designed to deliver both advertising
and “punishment pieces” – sometimes obscene and always-grating modules on
content that the user could not escape. The intention was to underline the fact that
we, the programmers, controlled your destiny…. Again, “Interactivity is a lie!”.
The point in bringing this up here is to link to the topic of PRIVACY that will be
coming up later today. Today, publishers are finding more ways to plant “canaries”
and nearly-impossible-to-detect beacons and other hidden forms of DRM in their
files. We don’t have a lot of insight into what Apple and Amazon are doing with our
reading histories; the situation is opaque.
My current work is focused on OSINT (open source intelligence) and the flip side,
PRIVACY (privacy hardening, OPSEC, etc.) I’ve spent a lot of time recently on the
surface and the dark web. I know that there are honorable information liberationists
and that there are also just plain old pirates and bad guys. The point is that we in the
information services community whether we’re librarians or publishers need to put
civil liberties first. There are plenty of ways for readers to share and express their
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8. reading habits when they want to; they shouldn’t be coerced and they shouldn’t be
forced to surrender data in order to read.
Necro Enema Amalgamated built user profiling engines to serve ads, horrific, loud,
obscene art, etc. Our point was to explode the myth of interactivity and the agendas
of those who we knew were coming. We wanted to expose the future and educate,
scare and titillate you simultaneously. We shouted from the bowels of the Lower East
Side from ten years. A few people heard us. But our mission to increase awareness of
the fact that interactivity is a lie continues today.
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9. I interviewed Bob Stein to discuss this talk and our agenda today. Bob is a
pioneer in the publishing world and he’s always practiced propaganda by
deed. He enacts his philosophy via the founding of bookstores (he’s a
cofounder of the original Revolution Books in New York City), the Criterion
Collection, The Voyager Company, Night Kitchen and most recently SocialBook
and the practice of social reading which he considers to be the future of
reading and hence, the future of publishing and publishing ecosystems.
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10. From Bob’s perspective, when we talk about social reading, there are three primary
dimensions. First, there is the solitary reading experience. You read a book, alone, in
your favorite chair, in bed, on a park bench, whatever. Second, there is the “outside
the book” social dimension: you discuss the book with a friend or in a class
discussion; someone writes a gloss; someone writes a review or a piece of literary
criticism…and people discuss that. The third dimension is the social exploration of
what’s inside the book – between the lines.
Bob is aware of the challenges inherent in social reading and is quite transparent
about it in his talks. It’s hard. Some teachers don’t like it of the time investment
required to develop new plans, new methods of testing comprehension, etc. Some
students don’t like it because it’s, well, social – you can’t hide in the back of the
room. The plus side is, whether you’re work-weary or simply an introvert, the playing
field is leveled (at least slightly).
SocialBook and social reading requires a complete reinvention of contemporary
pedagogy because it forces the teacher to get outside of common core strictures,
away from workbooks and quizzes, PowerPoints and smart boards; it compels them
to dive into the text with the students. This is light years beyond the common forums
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11. we see in LMSs such as Blackboard or Moodle.
I think there’s room to contemplate this and other potential uses for available
technology during the Panel discussion on Ensuring system interoperability or later
during the roundtable discussion.
As we think ahead about the remainder of our day together, we should work to
ensure that standards surrounding ebooks and ePub evolves in a way that allows tool
builders to ingest content easily, with no built-in restrictive technology. Let the tool
builders and the commercial publishers work out licensing between themselves.
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12. Another player in the social reading space that I learned about only recently is
Perussal.
Perussal picks up on the major themes and UX paradigms of SocialBook. It’s designed
for classroom use and I’ve seen demos of it working at various levels from high school
to grad level. It picks up on SocialBook’s emphasis on close reading (which harkens
back to the Modernists in the early 20th century) but it also combines a series of tools
that integrate with other educational platforms and LMSs, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.
During a recent live demo at this week’s Summer session of the BEST TEACHERS
INSTITUTE the session leader used a confusion report with questions to tie his class
curriculum to the lecture outcome.
And an additional feature of Perussal is that it uses machine learning to analyze
annotations and provide learning outcome assessments. This is something I’m
curious about and plan on looking into more closely.
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13. Shifting gears…
Readers don’t always know what they want, and often, people who pick up books (in
whatever form) don’t read them. (Sound familiar, librarians?)
The same thing goes for activism or it’s lazy cousin which we call “clicktivism”. It’s one
thing to pick up a hip book about climate change, the future of work, #MeToo or any
other social justice movement. It’s another thing to read, respond and act.
Tougher still, try reading, writing and being an activist leader.
Ashton’s most recent book is This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, and the
book has spawned an anti-ageist movement. Access to her material across cultural,
gender and of course, ageist boundaries is essential to her work, so she has a great
web site, a TED talk and her book is also out in eBook form.
But that said, Ashton’s focus is on the words, the function, not the form. She says, “I
don’t distinguish between readers of different formats; just grateful that they buy the
book at all and that some of them actually read it.”
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14. And then, there are those who are focused on form and breaking the codex: the
indepdendents, the vanguard, the avant garde. The true edge cases in the world of
independent publishing. Their voices must be heard and we need to ensure that we
allow for these voices to get their work out.
Two solid studies that cover multiple experiments in electronic publishing are
McGuire and O’Leary’s BOOK: A FUTURIST’S MANIFESTO and Peter Meyers’
BREAKING THE PAGE. These books are 5 and 8 years old, respectively, but, sadly, a lot
of what they cover is still relevant.
I say sadly because the visions shared in both books are all still in progress. We
haven’t seen much evolution in the ebook space. But there is a ray of hope as we’ll
discuss in a moment.
In the meantime, Hugh [ACTION – REFER TO HUGH MCGUIRE IN AUDIENCE] I’d love
to see your important work updated, please!
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15. On the hyper independent spectrum, I spent time speaking to a cult writer
whose work penetrates both the deep recesses of the underground as well as
the classrooms of a scattershot of hip professors across the globe. I asked
Supervert to tell me about his writing process.
In 2010, Supervert published Perversity Think Tank. The physical book made
use of the print format in a way that did not lend itself to being reproduced
digitally. When the book sold out, Supervert updated and revised the text to
work in ebook format. Thus there are two slightly different versions of
Perversity Think Tank: the print version (which is also the same as the PDF)
and the "remix" version for iBooks and Kindle. The remix was necessary in
order to accommodate for the dual-stream, parallel reading paths illustrated
in the photos on the top-right of the screen [ACTION – POINT TO TOP RIGHT
OF SCREEN AND HIGHLIGHT THE TOP AND BOTTOM LEFT-TO-RIGHT READING
FLOWS]
I asked Supervert: What do readers want from a Supervert book? Do their
needs vary between media? For example, do readers of paper Supervert
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16. have different kinks from say, readers of digital Supervert? What have you
observed or heard from readers?
Here’s wheat he said: “Mostly the choice between paper and print is driven by
accessibility. When the print editions sell out, the price on the rare book
market becomes prohibitive for most people. As a result, they turn to
electronic versions -- eBooks which can be purchased from Apple or Amazon,
PDFs which can be downloaded for free from supervert.com (since I post
them once the printed books run out), or pirated versions such as can be
found on Pirate Bay.
“Because, however, the printed books become expensive on the rare book
market, there is a subset of readers who fetishize Supervert enough to pay a
few hundred dollars for them. Are they more masochistic than the buyers of
ebooks? Do they identify with the kinks in the rare books they hunt down?
Are they Supervertophiles? ”
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17. [ACTION: READ QUOTE ON SCREEN – LOWER-LEFT QUADRANT]
Further on, I asked Supervert: Would you consider digital publishing and the eBook
medium to be a potential conduit for inflicting this pain? For example, what if you
discovered a way to embed code in an ePub that could cause the battery in a Kindle
to explode while reading is in progress? That might cut some fingers! Interested?
“Yes, I would be especially interested to cause heating malfunctions. I would write a
book that melts in the reader's hands and drips down into her lap. It would scald her,
brand its title into the skin of her thighs, so that no one could have sex with her
without recognizing that Supervert had been there first. ”
Dark humor aside, this provokes the need for a conversation about safety and privacy
in the eBook ecosystem.
eBooks, especially the ePub and PDF formats are ripe for hacking by writers,
publishers and – intermediaries (be they marketing analytics companies or
malevolent forces). Now, those of us in this room might not be as concerned about
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18. malware making it into an eBook delivered by Ebsco, but you should be.
Between the vulnerability of file types and aggregation & distribution systems and the
absolute surety that the records of your library, your vendor and your vendor’s
vendor, Amazon, Apple, Kobo – everyone – will be compromised you have to ask
yourself about what can and should be done to harden our contemporary systems.
I’m looking forward to Hugh McGuire’s talk following mine and his discussion on
Protecting user data and user privacy.
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19. What we all know is: Readers want to engage with texts, with authors.
[ACTION: READ PART OF QUOTE FROM UPPER LEFT QUADRANT]
This case study takes us into the issue of constraints and limitations.
As we discuss standards regarding the primary output formats, metadata
requirements, accessibility requirements and so on, we cannot lose site of the fact
that the eBook file formats and display mechanisms that are currently on the market
are insanely limiting.
Outside of the PDF and perhaps the DjVU format [QUESTION TO AUDIENCE: HOW
MANY PEOPLE ARE FAMILIAR WITH DJVU?], there is very little hope for the aspiring
multidimensional writer who envisions language and their engagement with the
writer via a means beyond the linear structure enforced by the standard codex.
Hell, the codex itself is as limiting as it is convenient!
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20. Switching gears, backwards and into the future….
Wired magazine launched in 1993. Some of you in the audience, I can tell, hadn’t
been born yet.
Wired’s founders proclaimed media theorist Marshall McLuhan as its patron saint.
Fair enough, we said in an essay for ArtForum magazine, but, we warned, “McLuhan
himself used to say that we march backward into the future. We hope that the
editors of Wired understand that they understand their patron saint’s words as a
diagnosis – not a destiny.”
I think it’s important to keep McLuhan’s warnings in mind today, while we work to
improve the electronic publishing ecosystem. Think forward, not backward--and open
the sky to let the light shine in.
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21. We must recognize researchers and writers as more than simple scholars delivering
tomes of plain text, references and citations – they are artists, visionaries and
creators who want to push boundaries. Let’s help them to express themselves and
their important work in multiple dimensions.
Key words for today: open; secure; flexible and free.
[Thank you – enjoy the rest of today’s presentations and panels…]
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