September is a month of full moons, totally lunatic with classes starting up and a million things to do at work. (I’m department chair these days, am teaching a first term seminar, and I agreed to also serve for a year as the director of our faculty development program. Shoot me now.) I’ve had a couple of conferences to attend in the past month and always feel behind on the weekly column I’ve been writing for Library Journal’s Academic Newswire. So posting here and on my Scandinavian Crime Fiction blog has fallen by the wayside. But I want to share this . . .
I just got the cover art for my next book – and I love it. Minotaur asks for ideas, and I made up a web page with some images that seemed to fit. And they picked right up on it! This shot is one of Chicago’s many spooky and intriguing underpasses. And I’m happy it isn’t a picture of the Loop which is what almost appears on the covers of books set in Chicago (and is so not the Chicago I write about). I’m also highly tickled because it’s based on a CC-licensed photo I discovered on Flickr, not on the usual stock photography that appears (again and again) on book jackets. At the end of Open Access Week, this just feels so right.
The title, by the way, was inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, Anthem. There are a couple of lines that I particularly like that I used to introduce the book. I can’t quote them here because they are owned by Sony Music, and I had to pay a lot of money for the right to quote them. (This is sometimes jokingly referred to as “seeking permission” – as in “I just sought permission for a new Jaguar, and man it’s fun to drive. Too bad I had to remortgage my house.”) What really burned me was that not one penny went to Leonard Cohen. I wish he got at least some of it.
I’ve just started reading William Patry’s new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, and as you can see, it’s getting me all stirred up.
As I was away for a few days, meeting a large number of grasshoppers, prairie dogs, and buffalo in the South Dakota Badlands, I had to wait for the thrilling conclusion to Green Apple Book’s Smackdown! between books and the Kindle. Clearly, the guys got a little excited and began to take the brand name seriously. First – round eight: the staff picks shelf goes up against Kindle availability. Even Nobel Prize winners are not Kindled.
Round nine: a book dropped on the ground comes out of the accident unscathed. A dropped Kindle leads to a major catastrophe (wherein the imagination decides to head for the high ground and bring fire trucks and airplanes)
And finally, round ten: in which Lemony Snicket, when asked to sign a Kindle, encounters an unforunate event that seems to have been scripted by a major Hollywood committee.
All in all, good clean and completely over-the-top fun. Thanks, Green Apple!
My favorite so far in the book v. Kindle battle of the giants. Green Apple books is having fun making an entirely one-sided and shamelessly partisan argument for books. This round gets the “cutest smackdown ever” award.
The Green Apple Mega-death-smackdown-super-ironic-silly-athon continues as the handselling capabilities of a good bookseller (or, as it’s known in librariana, Reader’s Advisory) is compared to keyword searching. Okay, so maybe the contest was a little rigged. Still, there’s a real point to be made here: when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, a curated collection of hand-picked books (and someone who knows them) has an advantage over a bunch of stuff with a search engine. Not that too many bookstores or libraries will likely have close to hand that particular book . . .
The fifth round of the Green Apple smackdown between books and Kindle is . . . well, it’s kind of a guy thing. Actually, the whole series is kind of a guy thing, as the sports motif might well indicate. Still fun.
In round four of the Green Apple Smackdown, the pleasant feeling of drifting asleep while reading . . . turns dangerous. Warning, contains graphic violence and ghoulish Bezozian laughter.
Admittedly, I know a lot of 500+ page books that are more risky than a Kindle to read in bed, being capable of significant blunt-force trauma. (Has reading Infinite Jest in bed led to vists to the ER? Sadly, CDC reports have not addressed this issue.)
As for these videos – they do but jest. Poison in jest. No offense i’ the world.
There has been more than enough said about the Kindle, which has been good for getting buzz if nothing else. I’ve had my own reservations about Amazon’s extraordinary vertical integration of businesses that give them a major stake in everything from self-publishing to audio to used books to book discussions online. But this series of videos is just goofy good fun. An independent bookseller, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, has started a video smackdown, pitting the book against the Kindle. Here are the first rounds.
Selling your books so you can support your book habit:
Buying a book, in which the TOS (that in reality nobody reads) offers some surprises:
Story time. Nuff said.
No doubt a Kindle-lover could make equally funny videos about the superiority of the Kindle for those who want a book NOW and/or have panic attacks when stuck on a plane with fewer than four or five books. But for amateur YouTube fun, these are pretty sweet. I’ll post more as the smackdown continues.
Pardon a bit of navel-gazing, but I am tickled that Nemo, a Finnish publisher, wants to take a gamble on translating In the Wind for a Finnish audience. This is thanks to a Finnish reader somehow getting a copy of it, enjoying it, and bringing it to the publisher’s attention. Thanks to him, to Ann-Christine Danielsson, and to Nina Karjalainen, the publisher for taking a leap of faith. I’m extra happy because -
Finland rocks. Helsinki is a wonderful liveable city with neo-classical, art nouveau, and very modern architecture. They have a gorgeous public library in Tampere that amazed me many years ago because they served delicious ice cream. Back then, that would have been heresy in the US. Now we’re catching on to the idea that food and books do go together. They now have a Moomin museum in the basement. Moomins are another reason I love Finland.
The Finnish language is amazing. I love the way it looks and sounds. (That’s why I gave my main character a Finnish name; it sounded good. Shallow, I know.) I think it would difficult to learn, though. Here’s how Nemo presents one of their translated authors: “Marcia Muller on syntynyt Detroitissa Michiganissa vuonna 1944. Opiskeltuaan kirjallisuutta ja tiedotusoppia Muller muutti San Franciscoon. Hän työskenteli lehtimiehenä ja haastattelijana kirjoittaen yksityiskohtaisia kuvauksia ihmisistä ja heidän elinympäristöistään. Romaanihenkilönsä McConen tapaan Muller harrastaa lentämistä. Hän on kirjoittanut 27 rikosromaania ja toimittanut miehensä, rikoskirjailija Bill Pronzinin, kanssa rikosnovelliantologioita.” Isn’t that fabulous?
Finns read a lot. I told a friend, a professor of Scandinavian Studies, about this and he said, “that’s great! Finns read more than anyone.” Gotta love a country where reading is so popular.
Scandinavian crime fiction is the best in the world. The. Best. Just look at who’s up for the CWA International Dagger this year. I rest my case. So incredibly cool to be able to share a bit of shelf space with the best of the best.
Shelf Awareness has been profiling interesting tidbits from BEA and one of them was a presentation about a New England independent bookstore, Northshire, that offers print on demand services with a rented Espresso machine. People enjoy watching it make books, and the store sells 150 to 200 Espresso-printed books per month. Given the machine costs a thousand dollars a month to rent, requires a full time staff person, plus takes up a 5′ x 15′ plus clearance chunk of floor space (and apparently a fair amount of under-the-breath cursing because it is finicky) the bookseller thinks it still has the potential to provide a comfortable profit, particularly if it could quickly fulfill orders for frontlist books that aren’t in stock.
But what is their Espresso serving now? Mostly self-published titles, which run $10-$15 for a 200-page book and involve staff time providing layout and other services. Lulu is cheaper, but Northshire is high-touch and has local appeal. They’ve essentially become a small publisher, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say a printer who provides some publishing services. They also print copies of public domain books through Espresso’s arrangement with the Open Content Alliance . There’s a theoretical arrangement with Lightning Source to provide mainstream publications, but very few in-copyright back- or front-list titles are currently available, which the bookseller thinks may be related to the lack of the Espresso’s system to integrate with publisher’s inventory systems. Or maybe it’s one more technical hassle the publishing industry doesn’t want to undertake until it has blockbuster potential.
The new Espresso 2.0 was rolled out recently. (Northshire has the 1.5 veriosn.) You can see it at work in this promotional video printing a copy of Jason Epstein’s book in which he predicted an ATM-like machine that would print books from an electronic catalog on demand. He partnered with the inventor of the machine to founded the company that makes Espressos.
I can’t figure out the math. The machine costs a lot – far more than a $1,000 / month rental would support. It’s available in a handful of independent bookstores – one each in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia; some university bookstores and libraries also have the machines. Are these demos just to get the word out? Though there is a market to produce nicely printed copies of things like reports and conference proceedings, as well as self-published cookbooks, memoirs, local histories, novels, and poetry, the lack of integration with publishers’ lists mean it won’t change mainstream book distribution, not unless things really change dramatically. That means there is no “greener” or more financially efficient book market as a result – just bookstores becoming print shops and adding an entirely new set of services to their business.
I think there’s a significant market that will endure for printed books. I think readers want to have high-quality books that have been carefully chosen, professionally edited and well-designed; hand-crafted, but not home-made. I would like to think there’s a less wasteful means of delivering them to readers that could be nearly as instant as it is with Kindle. (Don’t you think the reason they use a “whisper-net” is so that you can’t quite hear the price tag of that book you just bought on a whim?) I’d like to think this efficient and fast delivery could be done without some vertically-integrated Wal-Mart of books becoming our one and only bookstore, self-publisher, and e-book vendor. But for every innovation that shows promise for the development of a healthy book culture that isn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business, there are seemingly impossible barriers for making those innovations deliver books from traditional publishers.
It amazes me that publishers rush to do business with Amazon even while fuming that they have artificially depressed the cost of e-books to sell their proprietary hardware and reset the retail price point. Why can’t publishers do more to maximize the potential that independent booksellers have to create a healthy and innovative book culture? There has to be way.
Posted by Barbara 
Posted by Barbara 
Posted by Barbara 
