Putting Vegan Freak on Amazons Kindle (or, this could be okay)
Much hype and even more hand-wringing has been thrust in the direction of Amazon’s new ebook reader, the Kindle. In case you’ve been too busy blowing money on holiday shopping to know, the Kindle is a kind of ugly, 80s-looking little device that uses an ink-based technology to provide what many see as a more readable medium than conventional electronic screens. This idea is not terribly new; Sony has an ebook reader that uses the same display technology, and there are others on the market as well. Reviews of the kindle range from sweaty and angry to relatively positive.
What is different with the Amazon model, however, is that it includes a cogent and interesting model for distribution. When you buy a Kindle, you get free access to Sprint’s EVDO network, the ether upon which the books and other goodies (blog entries; newspapers) that you purchase are delivered. Tied into Amazon’s entire store, you can send things to your Kindle from the web, or order them directly on the Kindle itself. Considering that a significant part of the complexity of publishing is a dilemma of distribution, I actually think this device could be a revolutionary package for delivering content, if it doesn’t get too sucked into corporate hype. It offers the possibility for even resource-poor publishers and authors to have their work delivered in the exact same setting as the industry heavy-weights, and for no or little upfront investment. If the Kindle improves in both design and price, and can be widely adopted, it could really be a compelling system for publishing, and encouraging a more diverse media ecosystem. I also think it has interesting possibilities down the road to transform how non-fiction and possibly even fiction works.
Given that, I spent a few hours last Saturday getting Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World prepared for distribution on the Kindle. Amazon’s DTP (Digital Text Platform) web-app converts your content from .pdf or m$ word .doc to html, with varying degrees of success. The PDF of Vegan Freak, converted by Amazon’s system, turned out pretty piss-poor. Most of the formatting was destroyed, page breaks were non-existent for the most part, and everything was essentially a massive jumble. I was able to export the book chapter by chapter as HTML from the originals, and then format it correctly by hand with some custom tags that Amazon supplies for things like page breaks, and generous use of non-breaking space elements. I was even able to embed the dingbats from the chapter headers in the original into each Kindle page. Overall, the export was surprisingly easy once I stopped counting on Amazon to do the translation for me. 12 hours after submission, Vegan Freak for the Kindle was ready, and it is now available for purchase. (I’m going to chat with AK Press about getting Making a Killing up there, too. Eventually, I’ll probably add most Tofu Hound Press titles myself, except the cookbooks, which really aren’t right for the medium — yet.)
What occurred to me as I was working up the book for the Kindle was that Amazon could make it super easy to create non-fiction books that had updated contents. For example, we wrote Vegan Freak more than 2 years ago. Since then, some of our ideas have changed, and some of the resources in the book have changed as well. In print, someone who buys the book is obviously stuck with what got printed. But on the Kindle, updating the book is as simple as changing some HTML, uploading it to Amazon, and hitting “publish.” This could really change how books are consumed and used; instead of buying a book outright, you could pay a book fee or subscription for which you’d receive updates as well, almost as with software. Thus, you could buy Vegan Freak version 1.0, with free “upgrades” until the next full-point version, edition 2.0. Both major and minor updates could be wirelessly and effortlessly “pushed” to your ebook reader, even while you were sleeping. Since the files are small (194k for Vegan Freak) you could even retain previous versions easily if you wanted.
Perhaps I’m too optimistic about this. I’m kind of a gadget head, and I tend to underestimate the barriers to the adoption of a device like the Kindle. But in the long run, I suspect the convenience, simplicity, and unique features of such a device will change the way authors and writers interact. That, I think, could be very, very powerful.
