The Observer’s figures were based on a notional £20 hardback book, from which I’ve extracted the percentages, which in my experience hold fairly true across standard formats for traditionally produced books in the major bookshops. So for a £10 paperback, the retailers will take anything between a 40% to a 60% discount (and guess who’s trying for more), and the author can expect to see about a quid, depending on their terms.

I think this illustration serves a number of purposes, not least to illustrate the mark-up taken by the retailers. There’s some justification for this by bricks-and-mortar stores, with huge overheads, but I’m yet to hear a decent one for internet retailers, who don’t have shop rents to pay - their motivation, of course, is simply to undercut the high street. Publishers are giving away huge sums in their failure to compete on direct sales - and they’re going to struggle to justify high ebook prices too.

The nature of the web makes such a book possible. Immediately, a simple reading of the user-agent to determine the reader’s operating system and browser could be used to present each with a different version, breaking the narrative along several general pathways. Sections could be hidden or revealed by simple manipulation of the layout.

Secondly, parsing the IP address of the reader would reveal their rough geographical location, or the institution they were calling from. In the first instance, sentences could be run through rough online translators, translating passages into - or out of - the reader’s assumed language. Different nations could be offered different political perspectives on the narrative. In the second, those from academic institutions would find appended a wealth of sources, some true, some false, while government agents might find the entire pages reduced to Xs and punctuation marks.

Finally, simple randomisation could alter the meaning of certain words, their tense or number. Names would be changed, emphasis misplaced. But random number generators are no such thing, and each has a pattern. A one time pad.

The final stage attempts to preclude the existence of a master copy.

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• A Big Boost to Books as Apps?

I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me):

Books are not applications, or software. They are words.

I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy because a lot of book apps (such as booksinmyphone’s Java apps) are really just wrappers for the text.

But by creating multiple versions of books - rather than agreeing on a single format (e.g. but not necessarily, ePub) and building separate software to display that - we’re heading down a road of locked-down, device-specific book technology that is antithetical to the nature of the medium, and costly to publishers. If only those publishers that can afford to spend the time (not necessarily money, the time alone has a cost) creating huge ranges of different applications can get their books onto the marketplace, it won’t be the rosy future for niche literature that some versions of the ebook story predict.

The sheer replication involved - reproducing the same lines of code over and over again for each book in a library - bothers even my low sense of efficiency and programmatic elegance too.

Of course, this development is not of the choosing of anyone in books. It’s a short-termist, technological hack, to get books onto closed platforms like the iPhone and other smart phones, and in large part it’s caused by the development of the App Store, which provides us with a sneaky way of getting book texts onto phones while there’s no equivalent of the iTunes Store for text files. But I’d much rather see a Book Store selling files to be read by standalone ereader apps than this glut of mini-apps.

Such a path would not prevent publishers building their own, branded and self-promoting, ereader apps, as I’ve previously suggested, but it would massively widen the interoperability of ebooks and ereaders, which readers will only thank us for. Perhaps we should be looking at some other hacks instead?