This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.

This week we were extraordinarily lucky to get some of the precious time of Maria Popova, the Internet’s most awesome curator. Maria is best known for her site Brainpickings, in which she and her co-curators find the most interesting stuff on the web, consistently — typically, what is the most beautiful, inspiring, and poignant. Maria, unlike many of the rest of us, approaches the vastness of the web with a sense of wonder that is infectious. Her work always communicates the passionate belief that the connectedness and openness of the Internet can foster creativity, curiosity, innovation, and growth. We all adore Maria and were thrilled she could talk to us — because in addition to her extraordinary insight on creativity, she also loves reading, and had much to say not just on what books are, but also on what books ought to be.

How do you do most of your reading and annotating these days?

I prefer digital — Kindle on iPad is my weapon of choice. (Despite its many design and usability flaws, which are the subject of another conversation.) I’m an active marginalian and like being able to switch between my reading and Evernote, where I save quotes from and notes on the reading material in question. I also read a fair amount of longform on Instapaper, mostly at the gym during my morning workout. It’s safe to say I only ever use the iPad for Instapaper, Evernote, and Kindle. In fact, reading is the sole reason I got one.

That said, I read a lot of old books, most of which are not available on Kindle. Because I didn’t grow up in the U.S. and only moved here for college, I’ve always felt like I have this vast literary debt. I try to do an old book for every “new” book I get. And because most of my reading springs from the wonderful mesh of allusions and references of which literature is woven, this creates an interesting bipolar rabbit hole of past and present driving my discoveries and decisions on what to read next. It’s a beautiful process of controlled serendipity, but it can also get very overwhelming.

Because I’m a writer as much as a reader, I often take notes with the awareness that I’ll be writing about what I’m reading. I think this changes the lens of reading significantly, and marginalia play an enormous part of that. As I mentioned, I save a lot of clips and quotes and notes, but that’s a surprisingly — or perhaps unsurprisingly — laborious task. On the one hand, when I’m reading on paper — which tends to be the case with all the vintage books I read — saving something to Evernote means manually transcribing it. I do that a shameful amount, sometimes transcribing entire pages I know I’ll need to refer to. I estimate I type anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 words a week just transcribing what I’m reading. (I eagerly await the day our technology is good enough to automatically and perfectly transcribe text you take a photo of. Until then, an intern would suffice.)

On the other hand, with digital, DRM regulations are making it extremely difficult, or purposely impossible, to export highlights. (This is partly why Findings makes my life easier.) Which means we’re either back to manual transcription or, my recent embarrassment of choice, taking a screenshot of the highlight on the Kindle iPad app, then emailing the photo to my Evernote email. Evernote has optical character recognition, so searching for a keyword will also fetch results from images of text, not just typed text.

How has reading become more social for you?

It hasn’t.

I have a friend who “skims” books by turning on the popular highlights feature in Kindle and only reading those. It works for her, but to me that’s the death of reading.

Reading is a bootcamp for developing and exercising critical thinking. Without that — intellectual apocalypse! And critical thinking is about developing a point of view, and all writing is — or, should be — about arguing a point of view, implicitly or explicitly. When you bring the crowd into the equation, this concept completely disappears — because a crowd cannot have a point of view, at least not one that is simultaneously focused and authentic to each individual in the crowd.

I don’t need a focus group of strangers to tell me what I should be reading or, more dangerously, how to read what I’m reading. Decision by committee doesn’t work in creative labor, and it certainly doesn’t work in intellectual labor.

Mortimer Aldler, in the wonderful How to Read a Book, says that marginalia are your private dialogue with the author, the intellectual tug-of-war that is really the greatest compliment you can pay an author. Being guided by other people’s marginalia is like letting a thousand voices into your head while trying to hold a challenging debate. Have those conversations, by all means, but do so over dinner or tea with people whom you respect and only after you have read the very thing you’re going to discuss and made up your mind about it.

“Listen, then make up your mind,” Gay Talese famously said about the secret of writing. It’s only logical that this should be inverted when it comes to reading: “Make up your mind, then listen.”

That said, I find it intriguing to see what and how individual people I respect — as opposed to an amalgamated “crowd” — are reading. I subscribe to Steven’s findings via RSS, for instance, and have made it a game of trying to figure out what his next article or book will be based on what he’s reading. I often add those items to my own reading list — I think there’s nothing wrong with complementing your own literary diet and curiosity with discoveries from individual readers you respect.

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This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.

This week, we were extremely honored to speak to Internet intellectual Clay Shirky, writer, teacher, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Clay is a professor at the renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books, most recently Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Clay is one of the foremost minds studying the evolution of Internet culture. He is also a dedicated writer and reader, and it was natural that we would ask him to contribute to our series to hear what he could teach us about social reading. Clay is both brilliant and witty, able to weave in quotes from Robert Frost in one breath and drop a “ZOMG” in the next. So sit down and take notes: Professor Shirky’s about to speak.

How is publishing changing?

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a physical copy.

The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where data goes to die, as well.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.

What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?

One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

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This post is part of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here.

This week we sat down with Clive Thompson, contributing writer for WIRED and the New York Times Magazine, perennial blogger, and maybe the most energetic person to ever grace our offices. Enthusiastic and hilarious, Clive is actually bursting with ideas about what the future looks like — and what seem like insane ideas or improbable projections are often backed up by a surprising amount of on-the-fly statistical citations. Clive has done his homework, it seems, for every subject on the planet. In our conversation, he seemed to effortlessly switch gears from publishing to literacy, to education, to demographics, and then on to networked societies and television shows.

Clive is currently working on his first book, about the future of thought in the age of machines. He is a prolific Tweeter and Instagrammer, and you can also find him at his blog, Collision Detection. He’s written about the future of reading before, here and here. Below, he explores some of his ideas for where he think the written word is heading. His conclusions? In the future, we might be “ass-deep in books,” and he’ll need a T-shirt that says, “Piss off, I’m reading War and Peace on my iPhone!”

How do you do most of your reading these days?

I do about half in print and half on various screens. I ended up reading all of War and Peace on my iPhone. I have Stanza, which is this app that lets you download books directly from the Gutenberg project. It turned out the iPhone was a really great way to read longform fiction. I found the idea of approaching a very big book less intimidating because you only approach it page-by-page.

How do you annotate, and why?

I annotate aggressively. If I’m reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I’ll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.

Why are you taking notes? What are you doing with that stuff?

If you look at the memory athletics competitions, where the memory athletes are given something written and they have to repeat it, they’re really good at lists of random information, they’re really good at information about people — and they hate the poetry event. It’s almost impossible to listen to a poem once, to read it once, and then remember it. There’s something about literature that’s just too complex. What does work for remembering literature is repeating. That’s why I like having these little printed books, or these little files of my notes, because I can literally pull up anything I want to remember from Moby Dick, and in repeating it, remember it. Annotating becomes a way to re-encounter things I’ve read for pleasure.

We forget most of what we read, right? The only way to fight that is to write it down, and consult it. So I frequently will almost randomly pick up an old book and look at my notes, because it refreshes you as to what you find interesting about that book. Recently I re-looked at a book and I was delighted to discover that even though I’d read the book 22 years ago, I’d highlighted a bunch of stuff and written notes to myself, and some of the things I remembered about the book were things that I’d highlighted and written about. It was proof that the act of highlighting and thinking about it and writing that little note does that little extra of cognitive work that means you’re more likely to remember something about the book. This is called the generation effect — when you generate something yourself, you’re more likely to remember it. This is one of the wonderful things for me about a world in which people are writing in books and talking about them more: This fantastic generation effect means we’re going to internalize and remember and understand more deeply the books that we’re reading.

It sounds like you’re having a conversation with the text, and maybe also with your future self.

Yeah. It’s a conversation with the author, with yourself, and in a weird way, if you take it along as a lifelong project, you are having a conversation with your future self.

Is the end game of writing creating these conversations?

Yes, absolutely. Whether it’s internal conversation in your head or socially. I’ve always regarded the endpoint of my writing to get people talking to me, to each other, to themselves about this stuff.

I actually strongly believe that social sharing of this marginalia is going to unlock unbelievable amounts of conversation. But I’m embarrassed at the quality of a lot of my notes — they’ll literally be me going like “hahaha” or “lol.” I look like a 12-year-old. But I’m assured that when you import them into Findings, they’re all private. So I’m going to import them, because I love going through Findings and seeing what people have clipped.

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This is the fifth post of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. See our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here.

Kevin Kelly is a scholar of the future. There seems to be no better way to encapsulate his myriad intellectual endeavors, which have sought to explain the new economy, technology as an extension of the self, and the mechanisms of complex organization. Even the creators of The Matrix recognized his brilliance — they made his book Out of Control required reading on set. It’s impossible to speak to him without it realizing that you are talking to someone who has a wide and incredible knowledge of the world. A humble and extraordinary man, Kevin has so many ideas for the future, he doesn’t quite know where to put them all.

Currently, Kevin maintains an active presence on his website, KK.org, where he blogs on several different personal projects he is pursuing, including the sequencing of his own genome and incisive analysis of gadgetry. A founding editor at WIRED and prolific writer of nonfiction books, Kevin’s explorations have never been far from text. So that is precisely what we wanted to ask him about. And who better to ask about the future of books than a scholar of the future?

You’re posting your book New Rules, New Economy in blog posts over the course of a couple of years. I noticed that the posts are formatted in a way that makes them seem annotated. Can you tell me about that?

I long ago got in the habit of marking up books as I went along — talking to it, marginalia, dog-earing, all that kind of stuff. I’m an active reader, and I mostly read to write.

This project is a recycling of that book. When the book was out of print, I decided to re-issue it as blog posts page-by-page. I had some heuristics, and my assistant Camille went through the book. It’s her work. There was some emphasis elements that we decided on, and on her own judgment, she followed through emphasizing in more than one manner.

I have had an idea of actually republishing the book in paper in the kind of annotated way. That was inspired by Tom Peters, the business guru, who does these books where he has a kind of kinetic typography. I always liked that, so I thought I’d try to imitate it here.

Why post your book as blog posts at all?

I’m so far onto the left of the copyright issue. I believe that the natural home of all creation is in the public domain. I believe that is naturally where it wants to reside. I think that works enjoy a temporary moment where they are monopolized and you can charge for them, but they’ll revert back to the free. So putting it out free was basically my habit. I believe — I’m not sure — but I believe I was the first person ever to put an in-copyright, in-print book on the web for free. I happened to have owned the digital rights. Because when it was contracted in 1989 or 1990, nobody knew anything about digital rights.

I don’t think my publishers even know. I just decided to do this. I have no idea whether I own the digital rights or not. I’m no longer even concerned about how many books I sell. I’m really concerned about how many books people read. I’m almost willing, right now, to pay people to read my books.

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Welcome to the fourth installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. So far we’ve spoken to a nonfiction author, two magazine writers, and a designer-turned-writer-slash-publisher (there’s no good way to put Craig Mod in a box). But we haven’t yet gotten the perspective of someone who doesn’t write for a living.

Enter Ryan Chapman, online marketing manager at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In many ways, this series is an investigation of industries that are intersecting in new ways. Ryan in particular sits at the intersection of publishing and digital media — or the way he puts it, at the center of “the Venn diagram of literature, new media, & some cool, mind-blowing third thing.” In addition to tweeting at his personal account, he also tweets for FSG’s official account. Ryan is the editor and creator of Work in Progress, an FSG marketing and outreach website. Publishing, needless to say, is undergoing an upheaval — at the very least, a radical redefinition of self. We wanted to see what the future of reading looked like from inside one of the New York’s most prestigious publishing houses. As an integral part of FSG’s social media arm, Ryan is looking for it every day.

How do you do most of your reading these days?

It’s very environment-dependent. I read print while I commute, preferably a trade paperback I can hold with one hand — I’m sure if I was on a subway line with more open seats I’d read more hardcovers. At home it’s a mix of laptop reading and print reading. Plus the Kobo for manuscripts from work. And nothing beats oatmeal, coffee, and the Times in print on a Saturday morning.

I keep track of my reading habits on Goodreads, except when I feel like I’m adding administrative duties to my leisure time. Or when I read a guilty pleasure I’d rather keep secret. Lately I’ve been underlining choice sentences and paragraphs for the FSG Tumblr.

If you could move one feature of paper books to digital books, what would that be?

Portability. I know it’s an odd thing to say, but tablet and dedicated ebook readers still carry the preciousness of tech gadgets. I don’t mind bringing a paperback to the bar. Go ahead, spill beer on my Geoff Dyer book. But my iPad? I’m already embarrassed for how irrationally angry I’d become.

Can you recall the moment you fell in love with reading?

My grandmother taught me how to read at a young age. While I was a source of endless disappointment at the piano, she did like my progress with the ABCs. And later I remember thinking it was cool that the Boxcar Children were allowed to sleep outdoors, without any parents around.

Has reading become more social for you?

Reading has become more social extra-textually, if that makes sense. I remember discovering Maud Newton’s and Mark Sarvas’ blogs in 2004 and thinking, “Oh, this is an internet I actually care about.” It works both ways, too: The first year I used Goodreads I realized I’d only finished eight novels. The unique shame this brought on motivated me to read triple that number the following year.

But reading has yet to become more social within the work itself. That’s fine, it’s a nascent space. We’ll discover the audience or the kind of book that works best here. Will it impact colleges more? Book clubs? I don’t know.

When is the last time you shared a clip of text with a friend?

I’ve been selfishly hoarding clips so far, as a kind of record of what I’ve found interesting. No more will I have to vaguely describe the title or misquote the salient stats from that great New Yorker essay I read a month ago.

From your perspective inside publishing, what do you think have been a few examples of successful strategies in the digital age?

I’m consistently impressed by Graywolf Press. Because of their enthusiasm and authentic voice, Erin Kottke and Fiona McCrae have grown a dedicated literary community. While flashier and more expensive promotions get the press, Graywolf’s marketing proves that slow and steady wins the race. Several other presses have perfected subscriptions and bundling as a way to build loyalty with readers. Some of my favorites: Featherproof, Algonquin, Coffee House Press, and McSweeney’s.

How do you see reading evolving in the years to come?

I think we’ll see formats and reading behaviors hew much closer to certain genres and use cases. We know romance and thriller fans are voracious readers: a dedicated e-reader seems perfect for them. And interactive, iterative publishing may benefit the Design and How-To communities most, as Tim O’Reilly has shown with his titles. Will literary fiction be the vinyl of publishing? Maybe.

I hope we’ll also see much greater interoperability between devices, ebooks, and social reading platforms. This might pinch a few companies’ bottom line, but it’ll greatly benefit readers and foster more innovation.

How do you talk about books after you’ve read them? How does your work in FSG’s social media contribute to the conversation going on around books?

This is a tough question. In a way, it’s my entire position at FSG. It’s also very difficult to quantify how our social media efforts translate to quality conversations. I’m very proud of our user engagement levels in our email newsletter, on Twitter, and the like. But we have to move past these metrics when thinking long-term. I trust that we’re headed in the right direction, though I can’t say how far there is to go.

Find Ryan on Twitter (personal/FSG), at his blog, and on Findings.

(All interviews conducted by Sonia Saraiya.)

Welcome to the third installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. This week we spoke to Craig Mod, writer, publisher, and former designer at Flipboard.

Craig has written and spoken on the future of books before: Check out “Books in the Age of the iPad” and “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing” — essays that have been heavily clipped on Findings. Craig has the perfect combination of skills for a leading innovator in digital publishing — his extensive experience as a designer, both for devices and for print, dovetails with his skill as a writer and his own love for reading. He’s particularly interested in the intersection of digital publishing, education, and “super cheap devices.” Craig splits his time between Palo Alto and Tokyo, working on a project that combines all of these interests. It’ll probably be incredible… but we don’t know what it is yet! In the meantime, we wanted to know how we was reading these days, and where he thought publishing might innovate. (Hint: hover cars may be involved.)

How do you do most of your reading these days?

In order of frequency: third-generation e-ink Kindle with keyboard, iPhone, physical books.

The recent touch-based Kindles fail for me given their lack of page-turn buttons (although I love how much more intuitive touch-based swipe-to-highlight … but then, I lament the loss of highlighting across pages. Always something!). I find the keyboard Kindle still works the best for me. I suspect the issues I have with the touch product will be fixed in an upcoming revision.

I find I almost never read on an iPad. The resolution is simply too low for good typography. I anxiously await the retina-display iPad which hopefully will arrive imminently.

On the iPhone I use Flipboard most frequently. But I also use plain ‘ole mobile Safari quite a bit, too. I access Techmeme half-a-dozen times a day, having it bookmarked and on the first screen of my iPhone. I find the Techmeme mobile site is a near perfectly curated quick-dip into tech news.

Kindle is for consuming books (and particularly for those kinds of books I feel the need to highlight/notate). iPhone is for news. Physical books are for art, design and photography books, or for the rare piece of fiction not available digitally.

I read mainly at home or in coffee shops. I don’t have a commute.

Kindle.amazon.com keeps track of what I’ve read or am reading. I also augment that list with a Simplenote note of physical books I read. There is always another book in the queue.

If you could move one feature of paper books to digital books, what would that be?

A better sense of edges; distance traveled.

Can you recall the moment you fell in love with reading?

Always. It’s like asking the moment I fell in love with breathing. :-)

I was lucky to have a mother who was an elementary school teacher and as such was obsessed with books. I’ve been reading something for as long as I have memory (starting with variations on the Bible, Dick and Jane, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, etc). The first time I thought — wow, OK, so this is how you imagine another world — was when I was nine, in fourth grade, reading Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. As a child I was obsessed with gore and horror (as is the wont of young American boys) and was pulled to King for those reasons. But The Gunslinger had none of that, and yet I couldn’t stop re-reading it.

Has reading become more social for you?

A little bit. Hardly as much as those of us watching this space have expected. Amazon.kindle.com is just sitting there, waiting to be exploited. I’d love to poke my head into Amazon HQ and find out what, exactly, they’re planning on doing with that.

I find I struggle with other “social” reading applications because they require excessive amount of work to get the books into their system. I am tremendously lazy. If the social component of reading doesn’t happen seamlessly with my Kindle habits, it’s very unlikely I’ll engage it regularly.

The most “social” reading experience I’ve had recently was at the MacDowell Colony. I had wonderful conversations with novelists and artists every day, and every day I’d have a list of five new books to read. At night I’d go back to my cabin and check for them on Kindle. I’d grab one and stay up all night reading it. Then I’d re-engage the community the next day, get more book recommendations, and so on. God, what a nourishing cycle that was.

I’ve had no such experience digitally.

Do you often annotate what you’re reading? Why? How has this changed over time, with the advent of new technology?

More highlight than annotate. I then go back over highlights later and use them as jumping points for longer discussions. As I’m reading I want any engagement with the text to be as lightweight as possible. I’m very cognizant of disruptions to the reading process and try to avoid them.

How has it changed over time? I feel like highlighting now has a measurable return — I get a personalized cliff notes of the book (again, on kindle.amazon.com). I find I’m much more likely to go over digital highlights than physical ones simply because of the hyper-simplicity of searching them in digital spaces.

How does highlighting create longer discussions? Do you share them with people, or are they for your own benefit?

Right now they’re just for my benefit. Mainly because there isn’t yet a great interface/network into which my social graph is plugged to generate discussion around them. That said — they often end up as quotes in my essays or blog posts and the discussion emerges from there, albeit then far from the original source.

I know that you’re working on your own writing — how does what you’re reading, and your highlighting process, help you with your work?

It’s a reminder. I often scribble down in my notebook a particular passage as I come across it and digitally highlight it. Then, later, I can pop into kindle.amazon.com or Findings and search for the quote I scribbled. Mainly, though, I use the highlights to refresh my memory after having made it through a book once. They’re anchors of my interests, which may inspire additional re-readings of specific chapters.

How do you see reading evolving in the years to come?

My hope is for even longer batteries; I don’t want ever think about charging my reading device. More responsive e-ink (although I wonder where the responsiveness/quickness asymptote may lie and fear that we are rapidly approaching it).

But more generally in terms of the act of reading? I hope not much changes. It’s not broken. At least not for standard fiction/non-fiction books. Children’s books are evolving into interesting places. But then again, we’re constantly redefining the edges of the things we can call a digital “book”. Are these children’s book applications even books anymore?

How do you think publishing might evolve? How could publishing better serve the needs of the changing reading process?

It’s already evolving. Smaller operations are, for example, making money! Especially off of independently (or, pejoratively, ‘vanity’) published books. Trust me — that’s quite a change. :-) 

I’m pretty sure all the founders and authors of the tiny imprint A Book Apart get around NYC in private helicopters. Or, OK, maybe not private helicopters but certainly hover cars. Or at the very least, fancy boots.

Nick Carr had a nice post about digital/physical bundles recently. I think that’s an under-served aspect of the reading process — giving digital away for ‘free’ with physical book purchases. Do that and you help embed some awareness of the experiential differences between the mediums into the consumer package.

I wonder if books will ever go the subscription route. Amazon is pushing in that direction (certain free book checkouts for Prime customers, for example). I used to think it was inevitable but then again — how many books a month do you read? For most people I suspect it’s a very small number. I.e., It might be hard to justify a $9.99/month subscription rate if you’re only reading one book a month. Still, the idea of a Spotify-like model — everyone has access to every piece of media — has interesting implications on sharing/gifting/excerpting/etc.

If, for example, you know everyone has access to every book (the Spotify model) then you can start to point people to chapters (this works particularly well for non-fiction). The innards of the books become much more accessible (as opposed to just the highlights captured somewhere externally — Amazon’s bizarro floating web netherworld in which highlights live, for example) and that would, I believe, make them feel a little more malleable. Good or bad? Who knows. Certainly curious.

Kindle previews sort of gets us a pinkie toe into this world. I know I Kindle preview like a madman. I assume everyone else does, too. A book looks even mildly interesting? Dump it into Kindle as a preview! We’re sorta turning into book squirrels, acquiring a variety of nuts to dig into in the cold, lonely winter months.

Find Craig at his personal website, on Twitter, and on Findings.