Owenstache, over at The 26th Story, asks what we consider to be a vital question:

I started reading White Tiger before Thanksgiving, but forgot to pack it when we hit the road. No problem, I’ve got my Kindle! So I downloaded it and finished the book, needing only a little more backlighting than usual. But why should I have had to purchase the book twice to enjoy this modern convenience?

Why, indeed.

The need to re-buy content has been with us for a long time: People bought newspapers to read their favorite comic strips, then re-bought them when they were released as compilations in book form; the same thing happened with pulp fiction stories, too. Music lovers used to buy LP’s to listen to at home and 8-tracks to play in the car, a split format strategy that was mirrored in the following generation when people did the same thing with CD’s and cassette tapes. Even cinephiles found themselves paying twice for their favorite entertainments, putting down their cash to see a movie in a theater, and then again to rent or buy the videocassette.

It’s been the growth general-purpose computing, coupled with the rapid digitization of media that’s led to the altered expectations of consumers. A lot of people found themselves re-buying their music and movie collections when the respective industries started putting everything on little silver discs; they might have even thought that this was a clever thing to do.

However, little did they suspect that their customers would bring these things home, slap them into their personal computers, and liberate the content from its delivery device. For all of the steps taken to prevent such things from happening, ripping CD’s and DVD’s is a trivial matter for most users. All they need is the right software, and you can find that sort of thing pretty easily. So, maybe doing all the work of converting their content to a computer-friendly, digital format was not so clever, in the long run.

But how could they have known? Ten years ago, a 56 kbps connection and an 8 GB hard drive were top of the line; when CD’s were invented, home computers were just starting to gain ground in the market. It would have taken a crystal ball and Nostrodamas’ ghost to foresee what the format would come to. As for what the future holds now, we agree with Tycho from Penny Arcade: The next format will be no format.

All this time, the publishing industry has had ample opportunity to observe the changes that have wracked the film and music industries. One has to assume that they’ve been paying attention because, though there have been various scatter-shot attempts, no widely backed, universal ebook standard has ascended to the top, yet. This might partly be due to the fact that there hasn’t been a method of reading ebooks that doesn’t leave one’s eyes feeling like a pair of boiled onions.

But, we suggest that a great deal more responsibility lies in the fact that, unlike the music and film industries, there has been no mass effort to digitize the content that the publishing industry produces. Because, in a very real sense, what occurred with music and movies was something that could best be described as a decoupling. This is a concept that should be very familiar to anyone with some knowledge of web design. As anyone who’s ever dealt with CSS can tell you, the idea is that content and style should be kept seperated, which allows for some pretty amazing things. It’s the philosophy that makes the web what it is today, that allows content to be split off into RSS feeds, remixed, repackaged, and re-presented in an infinite number of ways. (Allows mediocre minds like mine to redesign their site in a few hours, instead of focusing on improving my writing, for example.)

For a long time, a book was simply words on a page. In the future, however, a “book” will be just the words themselves — the packaging will be incidental. Paper bound between two covers is simply a format. What matters is the writer’s thoughts, the language used to convey his or her ideas. And that’s bigger and more important than any format.

Of course, we’re not there yet. The Great Decoupling of content from presentation has not happened to the book industry, thus far… but it’s coming. We really hate to use the word “inevitable”, but this might be the exceptional circumstance that requires it. It’s got nothing to do with what we believe is right, or some imaginary interpretation of technological progress; music labels don’t sell songs on iTunes because they believe in the future — they do it because people are willing to buy music that way, and if people want to pay, then the music industry wants to give them the opportunity, dammit!

As readers, the impression we’ve gotten of the publishing industry’s reluctance to fully embrace the electronic frontier is that they’re sitting on their hands, waiting to see how it all shakes out. Perhaps they’re simply waiting for a device that the average Joe feels comfortable with, that doesn’t cause eyestrain during long bouts of reading. Perhaps it’ll be the Kindle. Or, perhaps Sony will get off their duffs and figure out how to get their eReader to retail for under $100 (which we believe would blow the whole thing wide open). Or, maybe the iPod and the iPhone will become the average man’s format of choice. Publishers are not electronics manufacturers; perhaps when the right device comes along, they’ll collectively breath a sigh of relief and say, “Finally! Now, let’s get these e-editions out there!”

On the other hand… engineers could have been hired, and partnerships could have been made with tech companies –� consilience could have been achieved a long time ago. Any book that’s been published in the last 20 years must exist as a computer file, somewhere, ready to be converted to a consumer-oriented electronic format at a moment’s notice. Old books could have been scanned into electronic retrieval systems as well. The fact that the only company that seems to be interested in such a thing is a websearch firm, and has faced massive opposition to its efforts up to now, leads us to believe that this is an industry that’s being dragged kicking and biting into the present.

It should be somebody’s job at the big publishing houses to think about these sorts of things. And their failure to act should not be taken out on the creative staff, the editors, the marketers, or any of the people whose primary focus is on finding, publishing, and selling really, really good books. Because the Great Decoupling is going to happen, and it would be much better to get creative and prepare for it, than it would be to fight it every step of the way, so that the eventual loss will wind up rocking the industry to its core, putting a lot of people out of work, and forcing the entire thing to be rebuilt from the ground up.

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