Books Are Not Files

Let’s consider that question again: Why is that pesky little file on your desktop an e-book?

“File” an e-book?

“Depends on the content” you’d say but quite strange. That’s not how we ever treated books in real life. Content is immaterial.

I mean books are so much about art and beauty and storytelling and timelessness. Files are simply enterprise bullshit. None of the charm or appeal of a book could be held together in a physical file. For example, would you consider a file at the DMV a novel about your driving history?

Nope. That’d be so wrong.

Files and books are two different products yet smushed together in the world of software.

I’m sure no kitten dies on this planet when someone calls a file an e-book but if the same thing were to happen to physical books someday, I’d probably visit our islands of bureaucracies and the DMV more often. Alas!

Okay kittens don’t die, but doesn’t it still hurt? I’d argue: yes. Treating e-books within the idea of files hurts the former. A lot.

Why so? Because containers are all too important. Sure content is even more so and a lot of experts argue that if the content is that of a book then it is a book but that’s not correct.

That’s like saying: Cotton is all too important. If the cotton that of a pillow, then it is a pillow. It couldn’t be a mattress or a duvet or a comforter. Or even a bandage or a cushion. Who knows?

Books and files are two distinct and unrelated objects in the real world. My opinion is that there shouldn’t be any ambiguity in the realm of software either. Does someone care?

The Format Soup

Can you guess the number of formats and greater-than-the-rest software exists out there that calls itself an e-book?

And it doesn’t even count Microsoft Word’s format .doc & .docx which too can be a valid e-book format as per current definition. Only if the content were not a manuscript by some way of treatment.

So let’s say you want to publish an e-book that works everywhere all across the world, you’ll need to support all of those itsy-bitsy formats out there. How did we get here? Are we in a format hell.

Well no. We’re not. Books are in the format hell. And no one is winking an eye. Besides, kittens are doing fine too.

Case of Websites

Many developers like to push out their books as websites. And that’s so much better than pesky files. I hope one day all books will be available as websites so that people can find them easily and read whatever they like without having to download an artifact (a dud file).

The only problem is that a website isn’t optimized for linear-reads. I mean hyperlinking is not exactly the same thing as the book bound on spine. Now this can be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. It depends on what the reader is looking for — quick reference or a full immersion from beginning to end.

With the context of books, I suppose it’s worthwhile for our community to revisit our failed experiments of 2003. We should support page-by-page adaptation of books on the web.

Why It Matters

Calling a PDF document or a DOC file a book is perhaps not clear. A PDF object could very well have been a stupid tender document from a random oil company. Or a silly resume of a noob trying to get into IBM. This usually doesn’t happen with mp3 files for music or jpg files for pictures. In fact even the .epub format does a great job — it instills a sort of confidence that what we’re dealing with here is an e-book.

Lack of clear separation of books from documents has a significant impact on the ecosystem of tools book writers have. An outcome of trapping e-books into the model of files is that it leads us to using MS Word, an enterprise documentation software, to dole out document-files for books. Does it kill creativity? Perhaps. But what’s important here is that this doesn’t happen with music or photography or videography. People there still use the guitar to compose music or camera to capture the moments. With books however, some of the wrongest tools take over and kill subtlety even before anyone has a chance to see.

A question: Does enterprise documentation software poison the creative process of writing creative books? I believe so, yes. Yet, there is quite a bunch of people still stuck behind the relic of MS Word in the Rube Goldberg Machine of book publishing.

People Love Books, People Hate Files

What’s true about terrible software in use for book writing & publishing is also true for what people think of physical files in the real world. People hate files. Files smell of bureaucracy. I mean I’m yet to come across someone who comes and says:

I love these files so much that I bought ‘em all from my neighborhood store!

Compare that situation with books. People love to keep and treasure books. Books are about knowledge. About learning. About emotions. About stories. Children love story books. Children do not care about files.

Physically, there are many enumerable differences between books and files. Books have a stylish consumer-hypnotizing cover that’s bound in a peculiar way. Files don’t have such covers. Books have a binding that’s both stronger and knottier; it’s rooted for durability, character and style. Pages of a book are in bifolium, can be arranged into sections to form a quire in duernion, ternion or quaternion. Files have no such thing. Book spine is another cool feature that files totally lack. Spine Titling is in fact a significant part of book branding, design and feel.

Files can not match up one-to-one with books in the real world at all. Neither in art, nor in class.

Books as First-Class Citizens of the Web

Here’s what I have on my mind: Why not make books a first class citizen of the web? Videos, music, images all of them get their fair share of love on the web, why not for books. Do we have to close our browsers and open up another application or hold another device to get a desirable book reading experience?

There are so many questions that pop-up with this thought on the mind. I wonder if others have been down this path before. What have you found?

The author is founder of Bubblin Superbooks, who dreams of writing superbooks.