

How the shift to ebooks will affect genre categories in fiction - cstross
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/the-death-of-genre.html

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tomku
Two main points:

1) Exclusive genre is artificial and arbitrary, an incidental relic of the
physical book-selling process. It would die whether e-books became popular or
not, because people were already shifting their physical book purchasing to
the "infinite bookshelves" of Amazon and B&N. E-books are simply the "native
format" for the infinite bookshelf. If you can imagine a world where Kindle-
compatible e-books were sold offline in brick-and-mortar stores via throwaway
SD cards or scannable high-res 2D barcodes, they would end up divided by
exclusive genres as well. The pigeonholing of a book into a single genre is a
characteristic of the medium of sale, not the actual end format of the book.

2) While we're losing the "nearby book on the shelf" effect, we're replacing
it with a vibrant ecosystem of social networks, blogs and forums external to
the actual book sale location. When I shop for books, I don't really do it on
Amazon - I go there when I know what I want, but I rely on sites like
GoodReads[1], Any New Books [2], Twitter (where I follow authors I'm
interested in) and Facebook (where I sometimes find recommendations from
friends and family) to find my next read. This is definitely a shift, but I
find it to be an overwhelming improvement from the old system of going to the
bookstore and checking out whatever book's spine catches my eye. It's less
arbitrary, it's (hopefully) less subject to manipulation by authors and
publishers, and I've enjoyed reading the books chosen this way more. Your
mileage may vary, naturally.

I think that to a certain extent this is similar to the "filter bubble"
mentioned in the context of Google and searching. Having the "infinite
bookshelf" and the powerful filtering/tagging makes it easier to find what you
want, but it eliminates the natural wandering that some people rely on to be
introduced to new things that they wouldn't necessarily look for
intentionally. It may be that we simply have to force ourselves to wander a
bit if we want variety and novelty, and hopefully the digital world continues
to make that easy as well.

[1]: <http://www.goodreads.com/>

[2]: <http://anynewbooks.com/>

------
Havoc
I don't feel that the marketing or curation is problematic really. However:

Suppose I want to buy "A Song of Ice and Fire" for my Kindl - a reasonable
enough proposition in my view. A quick check reveals two problems: Firstly
those bits & bytes are somehow more expensive than the massmarket paperback -
which is completely ridiculous. Secondly both the individual books and the set
have warnings (either by amazon or reviewers) that clearly state that its a
criminally bad OCR job.

So essentially the product is overpriced and defective. Doesn't matter under
what genre you file that its a crap purchase.

Same thing for the Dune series. So in the mean time I think I'll just side-
load books until Amazon sorts their shit out. Hell I'd even look past the
overpriced bit if they fix the crap OCR jobs.

~~~
nnnnni
What I don't get is WHY a modern book would require OCR to be turned into a
digital format. The publisher surely has the original tex (or whatever format
the author/editor used) file(s) that can easily be rendered to epub/mobi,
right?!

If a book predates computers, I can understand OCR, but not for something
that's been written in the past ~20 years and is popular enough to not be
"lost".

~~~
cstross
_The publisher surely has the original tex (or whatever format the
author/editor used) file(s) that can easily be rendered to epub/mobi, right?!_

Wrong.

Prior to 2000, the MS may never have been submitted electronically; or might
be in an obsolete format (Word Perfect, anyone?).Then, until circa 2008, the
book was almost certainly copy-edited on paper -- that is, the editor printed
out a paper copy and the copy-editor corrected typos by hand, which where then
manually transcribed on a DTP system to produce the final output. The author
therefore doesn't have an as-published electronic copy.

To make matters worse, all the big publishers outsourced copy-editing,
typesetting, and printing many years ago. The typesetting was probably
executed using Quark Publishing System on MacOS by an external agency, who
then burned any backups on floppy disk or CDROM. The publishers do not own
these, and in fact cannot acquire them without paying the typesetting bureau a
three (or four) digit copying fee. So _neither the authors nor the publishers_
own an as-published copy.

These days stuff is typeset on Adobe InDesign, which is a whole lot more ePub-
friendly, and which can import Quark files ... except that Quark's format is
notoriously idiosyncratic and import ops commonly lose some formatting info.
(Such as italics, font changes, etc.)

TL:DR is that any book published before 2007 or thereabouts may be impossible
to republish without either OCR or re-typesetting from scratch.

(TeX is pretty much unheard of among authors outside the science fields, and
thanks to M$ churning the MS Word file format repeatedly between 1990 and 2008
it may be difficult to do anything with the original manuscript.)

Going forward the picture is brighter: I have as-published ebook editions of
all my books and know how to crack the DRM on them to pull that text out in a
legible form, with formatting intact. (Yes, I appreciate the irony of this.
Why, _just last week_ I emailed three DRM-cracked novels I downloaded off
BitTorrent to an editor. I wrote 'em, the editor has a license to publish them
in the UK, so it's legal, but ... the irony! It burns!)

~~~
Havoc
That makes sense - I always suspected something along those lines. That
probably also explains why the Hunger games set I bought is fine.

------
keltex
I'm a big SciFi fan and love Charles's work. I'm sure he knows more about the
industry than I do, but from my own personal experience I much prefer the
discovery process of SciFi books with eBooks than with pBooks.

In an ideal world, bookstores would have their shelves well stocked with a
deep assortment of titles. Unfortunately, most bookstores carry a thin
selection of good SciFi books. They have some of the latest books from well
known authors, but rarely did they have some of their earlier titles. And
worse yet if the book was part of a series, you would see the latest one or
two books but never any of the previous ones.

So for example, they might carry Stross' "Rule 34" but not his earlier (and
great) "Halting State" and "Accelerando". So what's a SciFi fan to do? Track
them down in a used bookstore. I only get to visit Powell's once a year when I
visit my parents. Back order them?

Now with my Kindle, it's much easier. Grab a sample for free. Peruse a couple
of chapters and if I like it, buy it and have it in my hands in a minute. DRM
or no, it's a much more pleasant experience and I get to read a lot of better
books.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Nobody is arguing that it's getting any harder to "find more books by the
well-known author X" or "find more books in series Y". These techniques are
powerful and getting more powerful.

But how do you find new authors? Stross argues that the old technique, "look
for whatever is shelved next to your favorite authors", is going to give much
different results in the future than it did in the past, because in a world
without physical shelves every author will scheme to get her works listed next
to the works of as many other authors as possible. So what's next?

One technique is "listen to what folks like Stross and Gaiman and Walton blog
or Tweet about", but the point is that the set of works which I'll find with
that technique is highly unlikely to correspond to a well-defined 20th-century
genre like "SF" or "fantasy" or "mystery". It's unlikely to be an especially
coherent set at all. It's going to be a highly personal subset of the entire
canon of English literature.

~~~
cstross
It's worse than you think.

I _don't read enough_. That's because when I'm writing SF as a day job, I have
a limited capacity to enjoy reading the stuff recreationally in my spare time.

(I know for a fact that this problem affects many other authors: you don't do
for relaxation what you're doing for a day job the whole time.) So I'm not
necessarily going to be a very good guide to what's worth reading ...

~~~
jlgreco
I think an important thing to consider in this discussion is the role of
anthologies of short stories.

I suspect because of the economics of paperback length that you mentioned,
that seems to be how almost all short stories are published in physical form.
The move to ebooks allows short stories to be published on their own which is
great and all, but it likely comes at the cost of disincentivizing all of
those multi-author variety packs. A good deal of my author discovery has come
from those books (for example, I read your 'Lobsters' in one); it would be a
shame to see their obsolescence.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I imagine that blogs acting as curators would pop up, recommending sets of
short stories to purchase together. Odds are that they wouldn't cost any more
than a collection does now.

------
PaulHoule
Note the theme of how collapsing publishing sectors get eaten by Hollywood.

Consider the case of comics, particularly Marvel and DC. I'm a huge fan of
Stan Lee's work from the 1960's and 1970's and I like some Marvel and DC stuff
after that.

Lee created some incredibly popular characters in the "Silver Age" but nothing
added later really caught on. But, 40 years on, what can you write about the
Incredible Hulk? How many times can Magneto trash the X-Men's house?

Sure, later on the comic houses published some books by Frank Miller and
others that had more literary and artistic pretention, but none of those sold
as well.

By 2000 or so both Marvel and DC flirted with bankruptcy and got bought by
media conglomerates because movies about comic book characters were much more
profitable than comic books.

~~~
egypturnash
Lee AND THE ARTISTS. Many of these characters were developed in close
collaboration; the "Marvel Method" was usually "writer and artist jam on ideas
for a few hours, artist goes off and draws pages with rough notes as to
dialogue, writer does final text based on that". Marvel would not exist today
without the titanic creativity of Kirby.

And then Marvel systematically screwed the artists out of credit, residuals,
and just in general. They're still doing this, too. DC's not much better,
either.

Pardon the slight rantiness here. I'm an artist so the creative credit going
to the party who does the LEAST amount of the creative work bugs me.

~~~
PaulHoule
Granted, but once Lee left the editor-in-chief position, things went downhill
fast at Marvel and the best people (Marv Wolfman) wound up at DC.

~~~
theretodivert
Lee stopped editing in 1972. Wolfman left in 1980. So, what happened during
that time?

Various writer-editors were given the title of editor-in-chief but they really
didn't do that job. Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Wolfman, Gerry Conway (for less than
2 months), and then Archie Goodwin all had a significant amount of reprinted
comics published because the new issues weren't done in time. Readers hate
reprinted stories. (The only writer-editor who did not become editor-in-chief
was Steve Gerber.)

What stopped this trend? Marvel hired an editor to be an editor-in-chief. This
annoyed a few of the writer-editors and so most left in dramatic diva fashion.

Most comic fans do consider the 60's Marvel as equally good as the 80's
Marvel, which includes Walter Simonson's Thor, Frank Miller's Daredevil,
Byrne's Fantastic Four, Roger Stern and John Romita Jr's Amazing Spider-Man,
and Claremont, et al's X-Men.

70's DC is an example of how to ruin a company. Without detailing their
editorial problems, let's focus on two significant events. Sometime during
1972 and 1974, Marvel starts to outside DC for the first time in history.
Except for a handful of months, this has been true until very recently. The
second event is known as the DC implosion. DC screwed up and had to cancel a
large number of their titles. Much of their talent landed jobs at Marvel.

So Wolfman and the other writer-editors jumping ship for DC was not a step up.
It was a step away from meeting deadlines, and other responsibilities. Lee
understood that no editor-in-chief could edit the writer-editors, which is
likely why he left when he did.

------
russnewcomer
I feel that Mr. Stross has sidestepped the strongly related medium that has
been likewise disrupted by digital mediums and delivery - the music industry.
It seems to me, as a not frequent observer of the music industry, that genres
in music are doing just fine if not better than they were ten to twenty years
ago.

Now, we've got the iTunes Store, iPods, individual song purchase and the
'death of the album' and while there is genre blurring, it seems to me that
this has also been happening for a long time and there are plenty of strong
musicians who play almost exclusively in their genres and succeed.

The music industry is not an exact analog to the publishing industry, I know,
but it would seem they have enough similarities to be explored by someone like
Mr. Stross, and extrapolated out to genre fiction.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is
far older than recorded music itself.

Concert venues enforce genre, more strongly than the shelving of books or
records has ever done. If you show up at the square dance and they're playing
eighteenth-century pavanes, or Black Flag, there will be protest. If you show
up at the county fair and they've booked a Korean classical ensemble, there
will be mass confusion. If you go clubbing and find that they're playing the
classic hits of Kansas, there will be blood.

Musical genres are centuries old, and because new music must necessarily be
premiered at venues designed for old music, new musical forms have often been
greeted with confusion or hostility. Audiences rioted at Stravinsky's _Rite of
Spring_ premiere, they were puzzled by most of Beethoven's symphonies, and you
don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers in the
early days of punk and New Wave.

For all I know, recent changes in the recorded-music industry could actually
_strengthen_ genre boundaries in music, because as recordings get less and
less profitable the revenues from live performance become more and more
important, and having a definite genre might help when scoring live bookings.
This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to run a live band.

~~~
stcredzero
_Music is different because of concerts, an established revenue stream that is
far older than recorded music itself._

Much of music is also intimately tied to the old art form of dancing and many
other aspects of culture, such that very strong sets of expectations are
placed on music in different contexts.

Actually, it's even more complicated than that. These sets of expectations are
often somewhat disconnected from the mainstream population's everyday
experience, have become somewhat shallow/cartoony, and are subject to media
manipulation.

 _you don't even want to ask what they threw at the punks and the New Wavers
in the early days of punk and New Wave...having a definite genre might help
when scoring live bookings. This is just a guess, though; I've never tried to
run a live band._

Having a live band is often fraught with dealing with expectations. It's to
the point where someone can have something like an Irish Traditional or
Bluegrass influenced band and run up against people constantly asking for
music that you don't really want to do or really doesn't fit the aesthetic of
your band.

------
b0rsuk
I don't buy it. Tags can work, tags can be very helpful, but they're time and
effort consuming to get right. Personally, I hate with passion systems where I
can't search by multiple tags (tag1 + tag2, or tag1 - tag2). Frequently, it
degenerates into a situation where a single tag is assigned to zillions of
content and you have to review it all manually anyway. And if you leave tag
creation completely open, you'll and up with tags "dragon", "dragons", "one
dragon", "two dragons", "half a dragon","dragoon", "fire breathing lizard",
used inconsistently of course.

I also don't buy the idea that everyone is going to use a tagging system. Not
everyone understands the benefits or cares about them. Never underestimate
inertia.

------
javajosh
I think ebooks will change the landscape less in the short term than Charles
is supposing. The idea of 'genre' is a powerful one with a lot of momentum,
and not a little utility independent of physical organization of books. Genre
will continue to be a useful way for retailers to partition the power law to
maximize sales.

I'm also hopeful that the growth of ebooks will make the promise of GoodReads
or even the good old days of rec.arts.sf.written come true: that 'what you
read' will become an ever more viable way to find birds of a feather for both
book recommendations and social connections.

One interesting thing is that an e-ink e-book is particularly bad interface
with which to find new titles. It's fine for buying something you know you
want. But a real, internet connected PC is currently needed. I imagine this
situation will get better.

------
zupreme
I'm an eBook author with several books that pretty much live on the first page
of results for their genres, so I have experience in this arena.

The recent growth in the eBook market is, in my opinion, excellent for most
aspiring authors, but might be bad for some already successful authors.

eBooks lower the barrier to market entry. Aspiring authors don't need
expensive equipment or software anymore (my ebooks are written in Microsoft
Word), nor do they need to spend time socializing and mingling with industry
types that they should be spending on writing.

However, eBooks are hastening the end of the days of an author being able to
write one book and live off of it for years. The lowering of costs, as well as
the increase in competition, will force eBook authors, myself included, to
focus on both increasing quality and on churning out more books more quickly.
The economy of scale applies here in ways that used to only apply to
publishers, not authors.

Of course, this makes sense because in the eBook era the author is, quite
often, the publisher.

------
nextparadigms
Fiction should cost $0.99, because it's a genre millions of people buy. At
$0.99 the price will represent no barrier for anyone even mildly interested in
reading a fiction book.

