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Definition games: Ebooks vs books (with a side of fanfic)
March 4-10 is Read An Ebook Week (officially, read an ebook month in Canada) and for the last couple of years I've wondered, does fanfic count?. I've been pondering the difference between "documents" and "ebooks" a lot recently, because I'm involved with a publishing company and I'm also converting some fanfic to ebook formats. The subject matter is similar. The writing quality is similar. I do about the same work for both kinds of documents… only, when I'm done, some are "ebooks" and some are "just fanfic."
"Ebook" is currently a word lacking a useful definition. It stands for "electronic book," and forty years ago, when Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg, that was an obvious and simple thing. Book in hand, computer on desk (or on wall, depending); transfer contents of A into container B; poof, ebook. Not so simple anymore… a "book" means something (although that's a bit blurry, too; are pamphlets "books?" Are magazines?); we (mostly) recognize a "book" when we see it. Everyone knows what a "book" is. Or at least, what a book was, a few decades ago.
"Books" had two notable traits that separated them from other documents:
1) They were fixed. Frozen. You can't change them. You can mark them up, but the markings were obviously in addition to the "book" content.
2) They came from Real Publishers™. You couldn't make one with your little home printer; you couldn't even get one made from the local copyshop. At best, you could get a comb-bound imitation of a Real Book.
These two led to the assumption of a third trait:
3) They had high-quality content, or at least content of some value—because the other two aspects made them expensive to produce, and nobody would do that for dreck unless they had money to burn. Vanity press publications were small enough that they could be discounted as a tiny group of exceptions. (This led to the correlated assumption, "if your writing was any good, it'd be In Books." And plenty of fanficcers have fought against that—we know that "printed on pages" is not a measure of quality; it doesn't prove something is good, and lack of a publication schedule certainly doesn't indicate low quality writing.)
I digress. The point is, an "ebook" no longer means "contents that had been published in 'book' form, transferred to a digital file." Ebooks include a lot of things that have never been released in print form. It's no longer obvious what makes an "ebook"—and that means it's not entirely obvious what a "book" is.
Here, I'll simplify: In my opinion, a "book" is a finished product. A "document" or a "manuscript" is not.
Clear as mud?
Right.
Moving on.
Are fanfic zines "books?" Are PDFs of zines "ebooks?" Is any single download from AO3 an "ebook?" Sure, it can be downloaded in an ebook format—but how many of us count individual ficlets in our ebooks-I've-read count?
Do they only become ebooks if downloaded and loaded onto an external device, and remain "documents" or "fics" if read on a web browser on a desktop or laptop?
These are only semi-rhetorical questions, because they tangle into the whole "line between fanfic and other publishing" thing. (Not so much fanfic-vs-profic, which has an obviou$ $tatu$ marker.) (Erm, where does that leave fanfic authors who write for charity donations? Or who take commissions?) Where's the line between "fan writer" and "published author?"
What's the difference between big-name fanfic authors and Joe Konrath? (Besides half a million dollars a year.) Book cover art? The fact that much fanfic is about copyrighted subjects, and maybe is too derivative to be published for money?
Hard to tell, that last one. The unauthorized sequel to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye was ruled to be infringement; the different-perspective retelling of Gone with the Wind was ruled not (or at least, close enough to not that they could go ahead and sell it). The line between "parody" and "derivative" is legally thin—and of course, anything in the public domain is free to be written about. Is there a categorical literary difference between Wide Sargasso Sea and Not Every Gentleman? (Disclaimer: I haven't read the fic. I looked at word counts, hit counts, comments & bookmarks to pick something novel-length and of presumably high quality.)
For those who aren't writing in public-domain fandoms, "file the serial numbers off" has become a well-known practice in fanfic-to-profic publishing. In some fandoms, it's likely that's not even necessary. Yuletide gets fic based on songs, videos, picture books, metafannish concepts…someone could put together an anthology of "15 great Yuletide stories" (with consent! Not talking about stealing anyone's stories!) and publish it on Smashwords and Amazon, either at a nominal price ($.99?) or for free—and then those fanficcers would be Published Authors.
Whatever that means.
Setting aside the gift economy and fanficdom community issues… there's all these stories with nothing that objectively distinguishes them from "self-published" works for free or for sale on the various ebook sales sites. I am delighted by this. I am thrilled that the publishing universe is so scrambled that the only way to tell what's worth reading is by figuring out what's quality writing—that there's no objective external measurement like "is published into bookstores" or "has been through a professional editor" or "if it's available for free online, it must be junk."
None of those are true anymore. Not that they ever were, but they used to be mostly-effective ways of filtering quality from garbage, even if they had both false positives & false negatives.
I look at the self-published freebies at Smashwords, and oh my fanficcy friends… your writing is better than most of what's there. Your writing is better than a lot of the for-pay self-published works at Smashwords, because much of it is by people with delusions of talent who think they just need a venue to Get Recognized and become famous authors.
You know better. Being amazingly talented doesn't get you recognized outside of your little fandom niche. Making money from your craft doesn't mean it's higher quality; it means you've found a market niche. And spending many hours writing a story doesn't automatically make it a better story, nor does spending many hours formatting it make it higher quality. (Those only work when done well.) Putting it on AO3 instead of Smashwords doesn't make you less of an author; it just means you're writing for a different community, with different rules and standards.
I am *loving* the utter chaos in the publishing industries right now.
"Ebook" is currently a word lacking a useful definition. It stands for "electronic book," and forty years ago, when Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg, that was an obvious and simple thing. Book in hand, computer on desk (or on wall, depending); transfer contents of A into container B; poof, ebook. Not so simple anymore… a "book" means something (although that's a bit blurry, too; are pamphlets "books?" Are magazines?); we (mostly) recognize a "book" when we see it. Everyone knows what a "book" is. Or at least, what a book was, a few decades ago.
"Books" had two notable traits that separated them from other documents:
1) They were fixed. Frozen. You can't change them. You can mark them up, but the markings were obviously in addition to the "book" content.
2) They came from Real Publishers™. You couldn't make one with your little home printer; you couldn't even get one made from the local copyshop. At best, you could get a comb-bound imitation of a Real Book.
These two led to the assumption of a third trait:
3) They had high-quality content, or at least content of some value—because the other two aspects made them expensive to produce, and nobody would do that for dreck unless they had money to burn. Vanity press publications were small enough that they could be discounted as a tiny group of exceptions. (This led to the correlated assumption, "if your writing was any good, it'd be In Books." And plenty of fanficcers have fought against that—we know that "printed on pages" is not a measure of quality; it doesn't prove something is good, and lack of a publication schedule certainly doesn't indicate low quality writing.)
I digress. The point is, an "ebook" no longer means "contents that had been published in 'book' form, transferred to a digital file." Ebooks include a lot of things that have never been released in print form. It's no longer obvious what makes an "ebook"—and that means it's not entirely obvious what a "book" is.
Here, I'll simplify: In my opinion, a "book" is a finished product. A "document" or a "manuscript" is not.
Clear as mud?
Right.
Moving on.
Are fanfic zines "books?" Are PDFs of zines "ebooks?" Is any single download from AO3 an "ebook?" Sure, it can be downloaded in an ebook format—but how many of us count individual ficlets in our ebooks-I've-read count?
Do they only become ebooks if downloaded and loaded onto an external device, and remain "documents" or "fics" if read on a web browser on a desktop or laptop?
These are only semi-rhetorical questions, because they tangle into the whole "line between fanfic and other publishing" thing. (Not so much fanfic-vs-profic, which has an obviou$ $tatu$ marker.) (Erm, where does that leave fanfic authors who write for charity donations? Or who take commissions?) Where's the line between "fan writer" and "published author?"
What's the difference between big-name fanfic authors and Joe Konrath? (Besides half a million dollars a year.) Book cover art? The fact that much fanfic is about copyrighted subjects, and maybe is too derivative to be published for money?
Hard to tell, that last one. The unauthorized sequel to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye was ruled to be infringement; the different-perspective retelling of Gone with the Wind was ruled not (or at least, close enough to not that they could go ahead and sell it). The line between "parody" and "derivative" is legally thin—and of course, anything in the public domain is free to be written about. Is there a categorical literary difference between Wide Sargasso Sea and Not Every Gentleman? (Disclaimer: I haven't read the fic. I looked at word counts, hit counts, comments & bookmarks to pick something novel-length and of presumably high quality.)
For those who aren't writing in public-domain fandoms, "file the serial numbers off" has become a well-known practice in fanfic-to-profic publishing. In some fandoms, it's likely that's not even necessary. Yuletide gets fic based on songs, videos, picture books, metafannish concepts…someone could put together an anthology of "15 great Yuletide stories" (with consent! Not talking about stealing anyone's stories!) and publish it on Smashwords and Amazon, either at a nominal price ($.99?) or for free—and then those fanficcers would be Published Authors.
Whatever that means.
Setting aside the gift economy and fanficdom community issues… there's all these stories with nothing that objectively distinguishes them from "self-published" works for free or for sale on the various ebook sales sites. I am delighted by this. I am thrilled that the publishing universe is so scrambled that the only way to tell what's worth reading is by figuring out what's quality writing—that there's no objective external measurement like "is published into bookstores" or "has been through a professional editor" or "if it's available for free online, it must be junk."
None of those are true anymore. Not that they ever were, but they used to be mostly-effective ways of filtering quality from garbage, even if they had both false positives & false negatives.
I look at the self-published freebies at Smashwords, and oh my fanficcy friends… your writing is better than most of what's there. Your writing is better than a lot of the for-pay self-published works at Smashwords, because much of it is by people with delusions of talent who think they just need a venue to Get Recognized and become famous authors.
You know better. Being amazingly talented doesn't get you recognized outside of your little fandom niche. Making money from your craft doesn't mean it's higher quality; it means you've found a market niche. And spending many hours writing a story doesn't automatically make it a better story, nor does spending many hours formatting it make it higher quality. (Those only work when done well.) Putting it on AO3 instead of Smashwords doesn't make you less of an author; it just means you're writing for a different community, with different rules and standards.
I am *loving* the utter chaos in the publishing industries right now.
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I'm glad I managed to keep it down to a coherent set of points. Thanks for commenting!
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I have non-fandom friends who 'oo' and 'aw' over some of the paranormal urban fantasy stuff out there, and I'll read it and think it's really, really horrible, trite and OMG so Mary Sue....
Also, I do love the ePUB option on AO3. I don't know if I'd read big bangs on my computer, it's so much more convenient on my eReader.
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I remember picking up some free Harlequin ebooks, including one or two from their paranormal line, and... ick. Ick ick ick. And I realized that even their mainstream romances often seem flat to me; I've read enough intensely-nuanced slash and het that I expect *serious* character insight and growth, not just "they meet! They hate each other! But they're attracted! Wait, they're falling in love!" I consider that the plot, not the character development.
And I loooove the epub download option. Saves me much time; I used to painstakingly copy-and-paste to Word and then save to ereader-sized PDFs.
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I completely agree that a great deal of fanfic writing is better than some 'published' writing and I would say this applies to some printed books from professional publishers as well as to self published works.
I also agree that the lines between different types of texts are blurred - but that's the way it always used to be until the rise of the big publishers.
I also find myself in a quandary.
I write fanfic and 'publish' it on AO3, on DW and on LJ. I get lovely comments and kudos from my f'list, people in the comms I belong to and complete strangers.
I also write original fic (no filing off of serial numbers - this is actually original) and if I want to share it with a wider public than my f'list I have only two options. I can submit it to professional publishers and join the lottery that is today's publishing industry. (I don't need the hassle and to be honest I don't need the money, such as it is.) Or I can self-publish on Smashwords or Kindle (or via Lulu etc) in which case I risk people whose opinions I respect dismissing my work as likely to be of lower value than my fanfic. I believe my two types of fic are of an equal standard and I know I am not alone among fanfic writers in writing original fic.
There's dross on both sides of the fence and the only thing people can do is read and judge for themselves. (Whilst remembering that there is no equivalent of AO3 for our original work.)
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Ficwad is for original-and-fanfic. But like most archives, it's maintained by a single person, so it's subject to both time constraints on that person and whatever zir preferences/squicks happen to be. There's a few other sites that are "put all your stuff here!!!"... but yes, nothing like AO3 with a decent search engine and meant to encourage interactive reading; most are more "document/text hosting" than an active library. (Scribd will take anything. But then your documents are alongside bootleg book scans, legal rulings, and advertisements disguised as health reports. Also, they do text & PDF only.)
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I would never upload to an archive with a single maintainer, however broadminded they were. Nor would I put my stuff among lots of non-fiction etc. Plus, marketing it would be too difficult. I can't see some of my writing group/family/friends looking through something like that with no decent search engine.
And while I'm saying I'm not in the market for the dubious royalty rewards of mainstream publishing, that doesn't mean I intend to publish for free. On AO3 I get feedback, and the chance to read a lot of wonderful work by other people. For my original fic I certainly want a small financial return, if only for the work of formatting it. Then I would hope to attract more readers by having a book they like and sequels or further books.
Basically, I agree with most of what you say, but I think you are doing a disservice to a lot of people who write both kinds of fic by suggesting/encouraging the idea that most self-published work is bad. Yes, some of it is; perhaps quite a lot. But so is some fanfic. To some extent it's subjective. I have read some truly horrendous (to me) fics which clearly pleased the authors and their f'lists.
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Most self-published stuff is atrocious. (And I love it.) I love that I can read 500 blogs and some of them are typo-ridden ego-driven incoherent rants. I love that there are self-published ebooks in tiny niche markets (I don't know if "market" is the right word for things offered for free, which some of them are) and they can find their readership of 3 dozen people who will *adore* those books and never would've had the chance to read them before. I like the truly astounding ego that lets guys write 4000 words of het bdsm and ask for $3 for it. I like the godsawful pretentious "literary experiments" that float around all over the web. I like the first-attempt-at-a-novel stories that are crowded with grammatical errors and the heroine's name keeps changing spelling.
Most self-published ebooks are bad, in the same way that most web content is inane or stupid or redundant or far too personal to make any sense in public. I'm very, very happy we have an internet for all these people to be sharing all this info; I'm likewise very, very happy we have self-publishing venues for all these books to be offered in.
I don't want less junk on the internet; I just want more robust recommendations and opt-in filters--and we'll only get those if more people keep making stuff-to-read so we *have* to find ways to discover what we like. I can say, of a set of ebooks, "those books are bad"--badly written descriptions, convoluted plots that don't go anywhere, bad grammar, cardboard characters--without saying "they should go away." I don't have to say "quality is entirely subjective" to acknowledge the value of something that I don't personally like.
(That said, I'm aware that quality is fairly subjective, and I'm not saying everything I don't like is bad. Just that... omg, there are a lot of really really awful self-pubbed ebooks out there. Really. A lot.) (And it's glorious.)
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That only works if the person who created the PDF file initially formatted it in a way that Calibre can then translate into a decent file. I've take a lot of PDFs that look great on my laptop, converted them into epub, put them on my ereader, and then, after trying to read them with the most )#*$)(#* up formatting for a few pages, have deleted them while sighing.
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I'm still mostly working with Acrobat 7; we have 8 installed on one computer at work, but I'm not sure I want to upgrade--I don't know if some of my most used plugins will make the switch. (Am still annoyed that Compose stopped working with Acrobat 6. I'd cry if I lost Ari's Bookmark Tool.)
9 & 10 get weird. It stops being "a doc archive/printing/edit-a-little-bit program" and moves into collection archiving, and some of the Acro 9 collections are *awful* to open in earlier editions. And they don't edit the same way. :(
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I often offer people having problems with PDFs that if they can send them to me, I'll see if I can fix them. But that's a one-doc-at-a-time solution; it doesn't help them deal with PDF magazine subscriptions or large collections. (If you're having problems with PDFs, ping me; if I can fix them, I'm happy to.)
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Thank you. I'll keep that in mind. In the last year and a half since getting my ereader, I have been able to find more and more epubs so PDFs are less of an issue for me now than they were a year ago. Still, I do have the occasional one where that is the only file version offered.
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However, I notice Smashwords are now advising people not to use Calibre to convert for upload to Smashwords so there must be some incompatitibilty somewhere. My e-reader is a Kindle and uses mobi so maybe it't the epub format that has the problems. That's sad! Perhaps there will be some attempt to make the formats work together? Or perhaps that's hoping too much.
I have had one or two things that I have had to accept in epub format and it does seem to be more problematic than other things. For example I subscribed to a book on Unbound Books and when it was published got an epub version by default. My laptop won't read it but if I load it into Calibre I can then read in Calibre's own reader screen.
It seems very churlish of the various companies not to work at making everything compatible. They probably quote competition etc. but it is hardly consumer-friendly!
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Commercial novels & nonfic released as PDF can also have problems--generally, they have hard page breaks, with the headers & footers repeated on each page, and sometimes they have hard returns at the end of every line. These features are dependent on how the PDF was made--what software & processes went into it. There's nothing the end receiver can do to fix them, other than "convert to something like HTML or RTF and manually fix the formatting."
Smashwords has never allowed Calibre uploads; it requires .doc, and specially-formatted .doc files to look at all decent after the Meatgrinder finishes processing.
I read a lot of epubs in the Firefox plugin, EPUBReader.
They probably quote competition etc. but it is hardly consumer-friendly!
Until very recently, every would-be ebook-pusher (store, device, some publishers) decided to make its own proprietary format with proprietary DRM, so you'd have to read the books on their hardware or software and couldn't lend them to anyone else. EPub has mostly killed that concept, with Amazon's mobi as the only big holdout. (It'll eventually fold. Mobi is a much more limited format, and as more magazines & tech manuals go to ebook, they'll need epub to support their layout options.)
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The other option, I suppose, would be to ask for recs in
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Although what I think would be most amazing would be something for the wacky AUs of public domain stuff, e.g. Hamlet in space or the Lovecraft Hamlet fusions...
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(Anonymous) 2012-03-12 06:46 am (UTC)(link)It makes me wonder, are there any well-trafficked, well-run sites that host self-published ebooks of original fiction online? It strikes me that it could follow a similar model to Baen Books' free online library...offer some works for free, new authors or the first book(s) (or chapter(s)) in a series. And it could have some sort of pay-for-the-ebook thing set up if someone wants to buy a book in question or maybe for the later books in an author's series. Reviews and recommendations could bring authors' work to more readers the same way they do in fan archives, mitigating the problem self-published ebook authors have with publicizing. Just thinking out loud here...I didn't even start thinking about this until reading what you wrote, but this sort of thing seems so doable with today's technology; is anyone doing it? Does anyone know? I would love to browse an online library of self-published original fiction. (Maybe this already exists somewhere and I've just completely missed it?)
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I buy a lot of ebooks from Smashwords. (I need to post more about those, both more meta here & more actual reviews at
Ficwad is a free public archive, like fanfiction.net; it allows original & fanfiction. Quality is... what you'd expect. There's a few other fic-archive sites that allow or encourage original fiction; several of them are on the eFiction platform. (I don't have names or links; I remember running across some a while ago.)
ForbiddenFiction (Disclaimer: I work for them) is setting up a system of serialized stories, some free to the public & others for paid members only, with a "buy entire ebook now" option. The serials have discussion pages for each chapter, and for the book as a whole, and there are discussion forums for authors & readers to interact. But we're not a self-publishing platform at all.
Meta Thoughts: the problem with operating an archive for self-pubbed fiction, is that if it's open for *anything,* most of *anything* is total crap. Which won't sell. Hosting content that doesn't bring in money is troublesome--and unlike hosting free blogs, like DW does, people don't flock to free self-pubbed ebooks and buy other things on the site. The *good* self-pubbed ebooks get lost in the slushpile--and still have the problem of convincing readers to take a risk on something they've never heard of. It's do-able, but it needs a lot of resources (money, coding, business savvy) and a firm plan for how to make it work and what kinds of rules to set up.
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(Anonymous) 2012-03-12 10:16 pm (UTC)(link)I see what you're saying about the difficulties. I wonder if there *would* be any way to striate quality for better word-of-mouth. Hopefully as people start taking advantage of the technology someone will find a good business model...
Thanks again!