abitlate (in regards to Designers = Buttons; Writers = New Narrative Forms!):

But I do wonder about the costs for this. An obvious place to start making a book more than words is visuals, a story told in pictures and words, and I’ve had so many ordinary art book projects sunk over photo rights costs. What’s free on the internet costs hundreds of dollars in a book. Is it the same for a new narrative forms? Or, will it seem free at the beginning when it is cool and new and people are willing to donate their rights? And then, get costly and gummed up as soon as the new narrative forms replace the books and/or become profitable? I am all for copyright law, and people getting paid for their work, but sometimes it does seem perverse.

Or am I just too much of a Word doc person to understand where this new extra-book content will be coming from?

A few (quickly-formed) thoughts:

1. There was a quote going around recently (sorry, no attribution) about the growing divide of ebook publishing. Summed up: single writers can go it independent of a publisher, while design/production studios are approaching indie film budgets with a cast equally as large. Kindle singles on the one end, possibly Moonbot Studios on the other. A lot will have to do with scale and reach, not unlike film budgets.
2. Purely text-based books will always exist—those folks can probably stick with Word docs. Or maybe they should write directly in html/ePub and skip the middle man in more ways than one.
3. In the instance of books becoming multimedia, we’re going to need writers that are truly collaborative. Far too many books today are written as Word docs, with no consideration of images (or subjective typography). This may simply be an issue of faults in publishing workflows in today’s industry, but to create a digital native “book” will likely require design considerations. We may need writers who act more like script writers, or we may need writers who just recognize that images, multimedia, and design are equal parts with the text in forming a narrative. What would McLuhan’s Medium be without Fiore’s contributions?
4. I don’t think we’ll escape the issue of rights, especially in the case of art books. But that’s not to say a different form of omnimediated books, magazines, or maybe some-form-yet-to-be-invented won’t exist that can escape these binds. Collaborations between photographers, illustrators, designers, writers, musicians—direct collaborations may be an end-around to the issue of rights.
5. Art books specifically, but other focuses additionally, could benefit from some post-artifact thinking (see Craig Mod’s Post-Artifact book). The “book as software” means a book can be shared, expanded, contracted, or split (imagine an art book that spends on images incrementally—accepting payments to pay the way for future editions and rewarding early adopters with updated books). Here we need writers who can create iterative arguments, plan for obsolescence or upgrades. There are whole secondary markets that books can use to economic advantage that were not previously available to the artifacted book (and no, not just advertisements). Let’s not forget paper costs, printing costs, and warehouse costs as hinderances of the printed book. 
6. Let’s admit it, we’ve been discussing a “new breed” of writer since hypertext (non-linear texts may yet again rear it’s head, but I don’t expect every narrative to adopt those ideas). Is the fact we haven’t yet found them indicative of a poorly developed idea, or simply that we need a longer timeframe to envision it?

Being at most an amateur writer the perspective of developing roles for full-time writers eludes me, but others are speaking up as well.

*I’ll leave the Word doc discussion for another day (sorry!). The tools we use and the formats we lock ourselves into are in desperate need of an overhaul.

(Source: 1pgbk)