It sounds like I took the sensible option of walking from the bus stop over to Clerkenwell but I do like walking in parts of London as you can dive off and find something unexpected in side streets. But anyhow…

Paul, Nico and Laura could not have been more welcoming when I arrived and I suspect that I sort of babbled at them. Sorry! I think I babbled quite a lot early on. Anyhow, Paul and Nico explained the format of the day and we sort of  got on with it. It sort of split into two, with talks and hacks. Given the day, I decided to do some hacking and to try and get some overdue building done.

Dan Franklin spoke about the book and the idea of enhanced books. I suppose I should be unsurprised about the analytics in apps but the notion that video is more unpopular than audio. It did spark a brief Twitter correspondence between myself and Ben Werdmuller re: this (which I thought I’d copied to Dan but muppet here got part of the Twitter name wrong). Rather than having the audio book, why not use the audio as extra notes and information to extend footnotes. Becky Hogge gave a talk about her forthcoming book and offered part of it as a download (which Nicholas Tollervey hacked into an app based around meta-tags that moved as you read it).

I began the day and working on the Open Correspondence toolkit, which has been posted on the Bookhacker‘s website and is the subject of yet another post entirely. I link to it when up. It is a set of indexes and some visualisations using Redis as a back-end and Protovis to show some statistics.

The next door table with the Electric Bookshop and Tom Abba. I’ve met Tom via email so it was good to put a face to the name. They worked on the really sound House of Story’s idea – a game style literary magazine as I understand it, that expands as the user goes through it and changes according to the stories. It looks like one to really watch.

Nicholas Tollervey, from Fluidinfo,  talked about the Semantic Bible that he’d done some work on which I sat in on part of but left through it. It was nothing to do with the talk but the fact that what he was talking about was something that I’m interested in for work and if I’d stayed I would have started hacking on it. It really got me thinking and on other days, I hang around but I needed to concentrate on the toolkit.

I also did a bit of hacking on the idea I had on Friday, the CouchDb document based store, as Laura had mentioned that Nico was interested in it. I’m currently looking at it in regards to Drupal 7 and module development but might do something else with it. Either way, I’d hope to post it on book hackers. I also had a quick poke around Node.js with regards to pushing data back out to users and Paul Squires suggested that it might also have uses deeper in the publishing process in terms of moving data between systems.

After presentations, including a sound hack from the pieces of said.fm which gave back relevant podcast for an author, Nico presented each team with a copy of “This is Not the End of the Book” by Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco before we decamped to the pub for a few minutes.

I sincerely hope that this is the first of many book hackdays and would be interested in helping out where I can. Looking at the book, the word, form and text can go, then no, this is not the end of book. Not if we (that is developers, teachers, readers, editors) carry on with these developments and ideas.

This is definitely not the end of the book…

On the other hand, Nicholas Negroponte has determined that the book will be dead . Using the Amazon data that e-book sales for the Kindle surpass physical book sales, he reckons that within 5 years, the physical format will no longer be the dominant format. He uses the data from music to justify this and to a certain extent, he is correct. I do see niche publishing, like high end Science, Technical and Medical publishing, going online and perhaps mass market publishing will grow faster online. But to go back to the music analogy, vinyl was going to be replaced by CDs.

Not entirely. For sure vinyl was not the dominant form anymore, it became its own niche but with a loyal fanbase.

I suspect that books will be the same. Publishing is going to change dramatically in the next few years whilst houses try to find various different models. Not all will work for all; each will have to choose and determine their own path. I still think that there will be  a vibrant publishing industry but it will be smaller and more specialised. According to the Bookseller some time ago, the average earnings for an author from books were about £4,000 a year. This implies that authors either starved, lived extremely frugally, had partners in supporting jobs or have  / had second jobs. A reminder of authors before the massive growth in literacy and I see it happening again. There will, of course, be some authors who can support themselves through writing. Some won’t and will work in other jobs during the day.

So perhaps we come back to Cory Doctorow’s observation that the obscurity is the thing to avoid:

That’s because my biggest threat as an author isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. The majority of ideal readers who fail to buy my book will do so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free electronic copy. (‘Why Publishing Should Send Fruit Baskets to  Google’, BoingBoing, 14 Feb 2006)

The less obscure an author, the less chance of the book / oeuvre disappearing.

I have to agree with Coldewey that as e-book / readers become cheaper and more prevalent, then physical books will become more luxurious items.  For sure. The mass market will change and it is up to readers and writers to make choices and go with it. So back to a more nineteenth century book culture again.

However the book will not die. It’ll change but treeware will survive in some form.

Also, as one commentator has mentioned, Elsevier has an expensive paywall around them and true innovation would be allowing the articles to be published for free (as in speech and beer), especially if the data which the article uses has been paid for from public financing and grants.

Mike Cane, over on the eBookTest blog, has a good article on the use and need for metadata in eBooks and how it could be re-used. I doubt that Elsevier will release this data as a queriable interface which would be highly useful inconstructing links and a library of useful posts/articles.