I bring two dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives to Sprint Beyond the Book. The first is the per­spec­tive of an author. My first novel, Pop Apoc­a­lypse (2009), is a near-future sci­ence fic­tion satire about a world where the Inter­net has been con­sumed by a new, closed plat­form called the medi­a­s­phere. As someone who likes to make fictional predictions, I’ve been think­ing a lot about the future of media.

I’m also a literary scholar. In my academic work, I’m inter­ested in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can writ­ers, the rise of celebrity authors, and the rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions of Anglo-American trade pub­lish­ing since 1960. I’ve been impressed by new lit­er­ary schol­ar­ship such as Mark McGurl’s The Pro­gram Era (which is about the rise of cre­ative writ­ing programs) and by lit­er­ary soci­ol­ogy such as John Thompson’s Mer­chants of Cul­ture (which is about the social field of trade pub­lish­ing). These books show how profoundly the lit­er­ary field has changed over the last four decades. Pub­lish­ers have been con­cen­trated, often becom­ing sub­sidiaries of multi­na­tional media com­pa­nies. Agents and retail­ers have gained mar­ket power, squeez­ing the bot­tom lines of pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies. Authors, most of whom make lit­tle to no money from their writ­ing, have increas­ingly had to sup­port them­selves either through sec­ondary income streams (such as talks) or by seek­ing patron­age from insti­tu­tions such as the university.

These trans­for­ma­tions affect what authors do – and what they can’t do. Insti­tu­tions are always leg­i­ble on the page. As a fic­tion writer, I’m inti­mately aware of how these pres­sures migrate into my every­day prac­tice. My abil­ity to write, and the con­tent of what I write, is hemmed in by the insti­tu­tional sup­ports, the com­mu­nity gathered around me, the assump­tions edi­tors bring to my man­u­scripts, the con­straints of the current book mar­ket and broader eco­nomic and tech­no­log­i­cal trends.

That’s why we need to reimag­ine (and trans­form) pub­lish­ing as a field, not just as an indus­try, from pro­duc­tion to dis­tri­b­u­tion to con­sump­tion. We need to ensure that authors receive the sup­port they need, and that read­ers have access to well-edited, high-quality writing. What are the forms of support that allow authors to sur­vive and write well? What forms of men­tor­ship and career devel­op­ment are pos­si­ble today? Who creates and shapes reading publics? What direc­tion do we want to move in?

These aren’t only academic ques­tions, but also questions whose answers should guide what actions we take in mak­ing a bet­ter future. We shouldn’t simply sub­mit to the mar­ket or to the allure of new tech­nolo­gies, but should make a new lit­er­ary sys­tem that works for read­ers and writers.

I’ve joined the “Sprint Beyond the Book” in Frankfurt for two main reasons. First, as a writer who’s been trying to push boundaries for years, I’m keen to learn more about where authoring, publishing and reading (all in the broadest sense) are heading as we evolve away from our traditional manufacturing models. Second, I’m sitting at a table with authors and thinkers I admire.

The word I find most useful in this context is “ecosystem.” As Charlie Stross put it earlier today, a basic function of a book is to convey ideas from an author’s brain to the brains of the readers. One of my goals here is to start to sort out the ecosystem(s) that will make that happen in years and decades to come.

Going “beyond the book” means asking all kinds of questions. I suspect the most important one is this: “In a digital age, what is a book?” But it’s only one of dozens we’ve considered already.

Novelists can answer the “what is a book” question more easily than other authors. Novelists write self-contained entities that start here and end there, and they usually create a single edition that doesn’t evolve beyond sequels. I’d imagine that historians are in similar positions, though they always know that new documents and other interpretations may alter the conclusions they’d reached.

The books I write – and especially the one I’m working on now – are much more difficult to pigeonhole. Much of what I write is about topics that change rapidly and dramatically. My first book, almost a decade old, is wildly out of date. My last book is less so only because I decided to play down the technologies that change so fast and concentrate on principles that remain more or less constant.

The lines blur even more when we think about media in a more generalized way. The EPUB format, for example, offers all kinds of ways to enhance and extend text. When does a video-laden book become a series of videos with text annotation? Do links turn books into web pages? If a reader can make choices about where a book goes next, is it a game?

I’m especially hoping to explore how we can turn some kinds of books into living documents that have at least these properties: a) great authoring tools to use all kinds of media, including social tools for collaboration with audiences; b) fast updating to reflect changing circumstances; c) better interaction and annotation for readers; and d) financial models to support them.

I also hope we can thrash out the ecosystem issue. The people and institutions in the ecosystem include authors at the center, as well as editors, designers, agents (literary and speaking) and many others. The traditional methods and institutions still work well for best-selling authors, but for almost no one else.

I’m tempted to say, let’s hack publishing. Too late: It’s been happening for years. But we’re in the early days, which means the experiments — in writing, reading, producing and selling — have only just begun.

I’m Charlie Stross. I write for a living, but I’ve got a dirty little secret; I don’t understand books.

Books: a tool for conveying information — normally (but not exclusively) textual and pictorial information – from one person’s head to another’s. They’re not the only such tool, and they evolved iteratively from earlier forms. Clay or wax tablets, and bundles of leaves or tree bark, gave way to parchment scrolls and then, via Johannes Gutenberg, to bundles of “signatures” – big sheets of paper printed with text and pictures, folded and stitched and then cut along three edges – bound between leather or cloth or board covers. We’ve been refining the design and manufacture of these physical objects for hundreds of years.

Most recently, with the development of high capacity data storage media and low power/high resolution display panels, we’ve come up with machines that let us read and display text and graphics without needing the bulky, heavy lumps of bound paper. A 500 page hardback novel weighs roughly 650 grams; it contains up to 1MB of textual data. This was a remarkably compact form of information storage back in the day, but in the past couple of decades it has come to seem laughably restrictive. My iPad weighs the same as that hardback, but has roughly 64,000 times its data storage capacity – potentially enough to store an entire library. Moreover, digital data is searchable and (in principle) mechanically indexable. (Don’t mention this to a professional indexer, though, unless you enjoy being mocked; indexing is a highly skilled speciality, and one that is in danger of being destroyed by the reductionist assumptions of the software developers who build “just good enough” indexing tools into word processors.) Digression aside, what does it mean for the function of a book, the transfer of information from an author’s mind into a reader’s, when the book becomes an easily transferable chunk of data not bound to a physical medium?

We talk of publishing books, but there are many kinds of business that call themselves “publishing”. The trade fiction industry is structured and operates along radically different lines from peer-reviewed scientific journals, academic textbooks, dictionaries, map-makers, and graphic novels. All of these industries have the core function in common — transferring textual or graphical ideas between minds – and all of them traditionally ran on ink on paper printing, but the source material, editorial processes, marketing and distribution channels are so radically different as to be nearly unrecognizable. An innovation in production that disrupts and revolutionizes one publishing industry sector may be irrelevant, inapplicable, or laughable to another. They may even surface in an unrecognizable form: the academic paper public pre-print service provided by Arxiv.org bears an odd resemblance to some of the urban fantasy/media fanfic aggregator websites if you squint at it in the right light – the workflow of submitting an astrophysics paper to Arxiv.org is eerily similar to that for submitting a Harry Potter fanfic to fanfiction.net.

We think of authors, especially authors of fiction, as being creative monoliths who have total control over the cultural artifact they produce – the mechanism for transferring ideas from Head A into Head B – but that’s not actually the case. Some authors write using an amanuensis or secretary. Some authors collaborate. Their manuscripts are then edited – both substantially, by an editor who reviews the structure and content and suggests changes or even re-writes sections, and at the copy level, by a copy editor who enforces syntactic and grammatical consistency and corrects spelling errors. The author may not be responsible for the final title of their work; they are almost certainly not responsible for the cover or other marketing adjuncts. Authors work as part of a complex ecosystem, which exists to generate inputs compatible with the production pipeline that results in physical books.

Again, we need to ask: how does the shift to books-as-data affect the processes by which books are created? Are some specialities or workflows no longer needed? Are other, new techniques required? The transition from hot lead typesetting in the 1980s rendered human typesetters’ skills obsolete but opened up new roles in layout and design for the more forward-looking professionals in that sector (which, while heavily automated by Desktop Publishing [DTP] applications, nevertheless raised standards of book production quality across the board after the initial excesses of the “I’ve got a font so I’m going to use it!” school subsided). What is the equivalent of the hot metal typesetter to DTP transition, and what new skills and specialities is it going to generate?

I’ve been writing on this subject for most of an hour, and I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Two decades ago, in 1993, I thought I pretty much understood what a book was; now, in 2013, I’m far less certain, because the book has acquired a strange, shimmering, protean nature. Books are changing. And I’m here to take a look at how and why, and what they might look like a couple of decades hence.

I am here because, as much as my career has revolved around the reading, writing and publishing of books, the book, as a content delivery mechanism (whether print or digital), has limitations. The book, in fact, has become very disappointing in comparison to other things I can learn, do and experience through other mediums. While the book has become a shadow of its former self partly because of how often the form has been exploited and overproduced for profit (for the slightest and most banal of ideas), mostly I just see it as a less compelling way— even a last resort — for sharing ideas. I would rather attend a conference, I would rather read and write online articles, I would rather interact on social media (the horror!).

It doesn’t have to be this way. I still thrill at reading a beautifully written passage that fundamentally shifts how I see myself and the world—something that reminds me that most of what I know and believe has in fact come from a lifetime of unforgettable long-form reading experiences. In fact, every one of my major life changes can be traced back to a very influential book.

But the basic physical form of a book, as well as its direct digital corollary, the e-book, has not been successfully integrated into the larger digital network we are all immersed in. I ponder this question every day: Does the book belong apart, or outside, of this network, for a focused and sustained reading experience that is quiet and solitary, demanding reflection? Or does it belong inside the stream? Or perhaps it exists in both places at once, and we shift modes based on need and desire.

When I attend writers’ conferences, I often tell writers to think beyond the book, to think instead of the story or message they wish to share, rather than focusing on a particular container. There has been so much aspirational focus on writing and publishing a book without consideration for the many other ways we can share ideas in the digital age. I am here to think more deeply about the purpose of the book (to question its very definition), and to explore its place in the ecosystem of ideas, communication and collaboration.