Something changed in 2008. For the better. Obviously not the global economy, no, rather I am talking about the publics attitude and awareness of ebooks. Anecdotally I have been amazed at the transformation of ebooks in people’s perceptions from soulless book killers to the saviour of holiday reading; from impossible, unworkable uber-geek niche, to mass-market Oprah promoted consumer phenomenon.

Of course not everyone has decided ebooks are great, but certainly there is far more discussion of and openness to them.  Reading devices too have broken through- in publishing they have been unhesitatingly embraced as a convenient solution by readers used to lugging around huge and cumbersome manuscripts.

Anyway without further ado, my highlights of 2008…

The Sony and Waterstone’s launch: Professionally the first 8 months of my year were dominated by the run up to the September launch of the Waterstone’s ebook store and the UK release of the Sony PRS-505. It was a long time coming but this event singlehandedly put a rocket up the e-backside of UK trade publishing and gave ebooks a huge momentum. Suddenly ebooks were in the papers, on TV and most importantly readily available.  Yes there were ebook stores and reading devices before this, but none had quite the scale and the all round package. This was the moment ebooks broke out and became mainstream.

The iPhone 3G and the Appstore: If ebooks went mainstream then the 3G launch of the iPhone and the Appstore went stellar-humungous-out-of-control mainstream. Millions of handsets, hundreds of millions of apps and that sweet, sweet interface transformed not just mobiles but the whole raison d’etre of hand held devices.  Suddenly we were all walking round with portable games consoles, reference libraries, music players, web browsers and yes, reading devices.  What can I say? I’m helplessly addicted to Reign of Swords.

We Tell Stories: In their partnership with Six to Start Penguin took a bold step in redefining the role of a publisher. So this might not be the kind of storytelling that booms in a downturn.  What the hell, it was great watching the ideas and narratives unfold, finally seeing the synergy between and old and new media storytelling I’d been looking for.  The work of Six to Start and the continued burgeoning of cross platform entertainment (or what Dan Hon might called a “story game”) has been a fantastic strand of 2008.

Anything else that should be up there?

James adds…

My three highlights of the year that was are: authonomy.com, thegoldennotebook.org, and Faber Finds… And, erm, our own programme of ebook special editions, which are significant, if not wildly commercial, explorations of the potential of the ebook composition of a text.

Authonomy.com showed us again, as Macmillan New Writing did the year before, and perhaps lulu.com and Create Space the year before that, that there is a large group of web users out there who are also authors trying and wanting to be published. This community holds good writing within it and the industry should pay attention.

The online reading of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is, I think, the first really strong example of a networked book in action that we have seen. It works both as an academic exercise in distributed and interactive reading, and as an example of how open source software and a bit of hackery can facilitate a digital approach to publishing.

Finally, Faber Finds – and by extension, Bookkake – illustrates how POD and a bit of intelligent package design (and ruthless rights hunting) can enlarge your house’s list seemingly overnight! And that only a few copies sold can mean costs covered. Oh, and that the value of a book can be re-invested in that book if customers’ excitement in the book itself can somehow be married to a simple act of passing the buck to suppliers when it comes to the price point.

2008 is dead; long live 2009.

Out There

I’ve written before about ARGs on The Digitalist, and obviously no one could have missed THAT publishing ARG but the day was interesting to get some new perspectives on what has been happening. Alex Fleetwood discussed his Hide and Seek festival, something I was annoyed to miss early this year. The festival is one of “social games and playful experiences” and specializes in live, pervasive gaming. Most enticing of all was a game called Journey Through the Night. The premise of the game is that players have to get from Point A to Point B in London via a series of checkpoints; at the same time a bunch of people are chasing them and if a player gets caught they to are a chaser. Like “It” meets psychogeography via a benign version of Resident Evil, kind of. What appeals is the way a new dimension is added to the urban space- it becomes naraitivized, experienced as an adrenalin fuelled game space not the trudge home. He also gave a mention to the Sleeveface phenonmenon- I for one love it.

Hazel Grian was talking about work she is doing at the extraordinary Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. In partnership with HP Labs (who are building some seriously cool technology with mobiles and GPS) they are pushing the boundaries of what media is and can do. Hazel has been involved in web projects like the sucessful Bebo drama Kate Modern and has now been working on pioneering ARGs like The Sky Remains, which took the extreme step of building in its own social networking site. The advice was: don’t do this, use the SNSs that are out there already. Audiences are hard to come by, go where they are.

Lastly Dan Hon was chatting about some of the stuff they have been getting up to at Six to Start and before that the work he did on Perplex City. The quality of what is produced by Six to Start is never less than brilliant- I have been playing there latest offering with Puffin, a young Bond text adventure- and it’s fantastically good fun. Dan and Six to Start have developed an excellent set of principles for ARGs- they should not need instructions, they should tell a good story, they should have some kind of commercial viability, they should be well and intuitively designed. This is ARGing looking to the big picture, gesturing towards the mass audience while keeping the quality high. Legendary ARG developer Jane McGonigal (whose latest ARG was the environmentally minded World Without Oil) cited Dan and Six to Start at this years SXSW as some of the most innovative and interesting ARG developers in the world so it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Coming Soon

The Future of the ARG, haphazardly guessed at, in miniature.

Its hard to know exactly what Penguin’s criterion of success in this project is- it must have cost a bomb and has no obvious revenue stream. As for traffic figures, I haven’t clue. In terms of coverage I think it can definitely be considered a success and has been featured in Newsweek, USA Today and Wired amongst others despite the ARG being a UK only affair. If nothing else it has introduced many people to a new way of storytelling and pioneered digital fiction in mainstream publishing.

Gawker don’t seem to like this. In the louche style characteristic of the site(s) they ask: “There’s got to be a better way for publishers to get people to read more books… using actual books. Um, right?” Um, no. Because I don’t think Penguin were trying to get people to read more books.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, the man behind the project and new found web celebrity, has specifically stated that the project is not about print, in fact quite the reverse, saying to Newsweek “[ebooks] are pretty much the same thing as the print book but delivered in a different way. We thought we’d try something a little more ambitious and actually develop stories designed for the Internet, not adapted to it.” Rather than being about books this is specifically about moving away from them.

Fair enough. As the name suggests this is part of a view that sees publishers not just as creators of books but as curators of stories. Had this attitude been more prevalent over the past few hundred years no doubt that the media landscape would look very different today. Opportunities missed from film to gaming might have been taken and a more integrated approach to narrative entertainment prevailed.

When Gawker say “[they] have a new project to tell the stories of books online — using new media, get it? ” it’s the sneer of a new media company suddenly fearful that its very cutting edge newness is getting eroded by so called old media companies keen to redefine exactly what that means. Gawker suggest that they read books to get away from the internet- something I can sympathise with- but publishers are still well poised to make entertaining interventions on the web, using capacities built up from the book world to find new species of storytelling.

Publishing, in some areas at least, has been hit hard by the web. Take maps. Why buy a map when Google Maps is free? And better? The 21 Steps was an inventive use of Google Maps that in some small way marked a kind of reclamation of the space. Ok, it might not do anything in itself, but it points to a future where publishers can more than just co-exist with the web, aloof new media neighbors or no. For me that has to be a good thing.

Meanwhile you can watch the ARG evolve on the unfiction boards- as good as playing for those with no time, I tell myself.

Photo: 16/06/06 Dramatis Personae by Andrew Coulter Enright