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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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