Likes & Launch

The day the Amazon Fire phone came out I just finished “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone. In the last chapter Stone mentions that a phone may be next for Amazon, perhaps even before the book is published. It took a bit longer than that for the phone but it got me thinking about the static nature of books, especially non-fiction. 

We’ve moved into this wave of building and collaboration. Yesterday, I wrote about the rise of collaboration KPIs and some of it’s challenges. Today, it’s thinking about how collaboration as a product could move forward or significantly alter some of the industries that haven’t been exposed to it yet. The first one I’d like to take a look at are books. 

When thinking about the shifts in social and mobile, there are a few trends that have emerged: 

Social v1 : Relationships online
Connecting people to people around content.

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Kik (more of a utility but social v1)

Social v2 : Publish to the people
Connecting people creating content to people consuming it. 

• Soundcloud (music)
• Wattpad (stories)
• Tumblr (blog)
• Youtube (video)

Social v3 : Build together
Connecting people creating content to people creating content.

• Splice (music)
• GitHub (code)
• Medium (blog posts)
• Google docs (documents and worksheets)

Social Books: Getting content into the community

Most publishers have only used Social v1, having other people spread the word about their books, as their entrance into social. They don’t do much to socialize a lot of the content inside of the book. 

Kindle has tried to build in sharing features within it’s digital books but it’s still a closed platform. I think they’ve missed the mark on making a book truly social. It’s not easy to share a snippet of a book with your community. The content is locked up, which means people hack around the system: taking screenshots, retyping portions of the book or going through their Amazon Kindle account online to see what they highlighted. There is too much friction to share. 

Super Books: Having the community contribute content back

And sharing isn’t just a one way street, that also means those books don’t link out to provide the reader more context about what they’re reading. If you wanted to learn more about a historical event or see a map, you’d have to leave the digital book to find out. There seems like a large opportunity to have the book readers provide links back into the book that make the reading experience greater. Just like Wikipedia allows contributions to make media rich pages. 

They also haven’t leveraged the opportunities in Social v2, having authors closely connect with the readers. Wattpad, though more focused on stories than books gets this. Writers publish stories to Wattpad, sometimes even once a week, so that they can connect directly with their readers. Readers can then give instant feedback to the writers on the stories. Traditional publishers leave that to the author to connect off platform with readers. 

Iterative Books: Ever evolving content

Book collaborations often happen before the book gets published. Editors work with an author to clean it up or search for errors. But a few eyes aren’t likely as good as the crowd. If I were a reader and I found a typo in a book, there isn’t a way to push that change back to the author so that the next person who downloads that book doesn’t see it. 

“The Everything Store” is a great book on Amazon but their history is still being written. I wish the story would continue as new information becomes available, like the release of the Kindle Fire phone that was just mentioned at the end. I’d love to hear about what Stone learned since publishing the book without having to wait until he publishes an entirely new book.

Even if Stone doesn’t have the time to write in new details about Amazon, it’d be great if the author could collaborate with a collective of writers to publish additional chapters to the book over time.

Instead of a single tomb in my kindle app, creating an evolving book that reflects what new information emerges. This is asking a lot of the author and questions the traditional way books are priced, but that’s why it’s ripe for disruption. 

Where will this happen

The capability of technology means it’s possible, but the industry hasn’t adopted those ideas. Wikipedia has shown that multi-authored histories or non-fiction entries are possible. Unfortunately, the publishing world sees it as a threat, not as the social innovation that’s missing. 

There are innovations happening in this space. Gitbook has taken Github’s collaborative text capabilities and used it to create a platform for authors to sell books. There are some early non-fiction books on the platform but many aren’t charging money. That’s when more publishers take notice, when the revenue makes sense. Hopefully that won’t happen after they stop publishing new books.

Have you ever contributed to a book or thought about writing a book as a collective? Any good tools you’ve seen?