what is lost

I bought and read my first e-book on a phone this year using an iPhone app. I don’t plan to repeat the experience, not because it was horrible but because I know too many booksellers personally and until it’s easy to buy from them I’m not planning to purchase e-books. But I felt as if I needed some experience with e-books.

The good side? It didn’t weigh much when traveling and I could read it in the dark on the long shuttle ride from the airport. The bad side?

Let me count the ways.

First, the pages look ugly. There’s no other way to put it. There is no page design, just letters poured into a mechanical box, no art in the chapter headings, no thought given to initial capitals, words broken in the wrong place, justified lines full of gaps like bad teeth. And of course no page numbers. The design of a page in a printed book is a nearly invisible pleasure. Page design is something I appreciate more since seeing what is lost when it’s absent.

Second, reading on a phone is fine for e-mail and  for short form texts on a web page, but it’s hard to get lost in a book when you have to turn pages every paragraph or so. I also found it strangely disorienting to have only a bar at the bottom of the page telling me where I was in the book. A sense of place, of orientation in the arc of the story is harder to grasp. (I found this also true when I held my most recently published book in my hands for the first time. The last chapters felt different when measured between the thumb and fingers and the growing weight of the left side than when I was scrolling to the end of a document. Though I did read the galleys on paper, I shifted the pages to the back of the stack as I read and so was surprised by how profoundly the anticipation of an ending affects the reading experience.)

Third – I don’t like a future for the book in which sharing is disabled and ownership of an immutable copy no longer exists. It bothers me that a corporation could reach into my personal library and pluck a book back or alter it. I don’t like the fact that there is no such thing as fair use in a world of licensed content and that I can’t give a friend or family member a book I read and loved. Sure, I could buy them a second e-book version, but it’s not the same as handing on the book I read.

Fourth – this post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation spells out just how much we give away to Google and Amazon when we let them be our “bookstore” and “library.” Real booksellers and librarians have stood up for reader privacy. Personal information is a valuable commodity to these corporations. I don’t like the idea of my reading habits becoming a commodity and I don’t like the aggregation of readers’ behavior becoming a huge data mine of our minds.

Google’s new Google Book Search Project has the ability to track reading habits at an unprecedented level of granularity. In particular, according to the proposed Google Books Privacy Policy, web servers will automatically “log” each book and page you searched for and read, how long you viewed it for, and what book or page you continued onto next . . . your Kindle will periodically send information about you to Amazon. But exactly what information is sent? Amazon’s wording — “information related to the content on your Device and your use of it” — reads so broadly that it appears to allow Amazon to track all content that users put on the device, regardless of whether that content is purchased from Amazon. Some security researchers have indicated that the Kindle may even be tracking its users’ GPS locations. Is this the future of reading?

God, I hope not. Cory Doctorow has put some of this in sharp perspective in “How to Destroy the Book” in which he argues that the true pirates are the corporations who are remaking our book culture so that they can be in the center of it, controlling books for the sake of profits. He contrasts this perspective with that of “people of the book” who love books, want to fill their houses with them, and pass favorites on to their children.

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

What he said.

photos courtesy of brewbooks and Josh Bancroft.

smackdown! the final thriathlon

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!

smackdown! storytime

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.

smackdown! finding the right book

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 . . .

smackdown! the icebreaker

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.

smackdown! nap time

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.

smackdown! the book v. Kindle

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.

book publishing is broken, exhibit C

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.

libary=pirate bay

This snack from Publisher’s Lunch reported from BEA caught my eye:

Macmillan’s John Sargent underscored that “you shouldn’t focus on Google as the danger point; the danger is what Google enables in making a copy and giving it to libraries,” whose mission to is disseminate information for free. “It becomes a very dangerous world when piracy exists, most importantly,” Sargent said, “to get control of the digital copies that libraries are going to have.”

On noes! Free copies!! Agghhh, run for your lives!!!

But, uh . . . the books being digitized belong to the libraries. And they can’t share the digital versions without getting their asses sued. So what are you so worried about, exactly? That pirates will hack Hathi Trust?

Why aren’t you all freaked out about that search inside full text at Amazon? Oh, right! [smacks head] They sell books, so they’re okay. None of that scary free stuff. Whew.

social capitalism

As I was just saying . . .

There’s a blurred line in social networks between communicating and selling.  And Leonie Margaret Rutherford has that borderland nicely nailed in a new article in First Monday, “Industries, Artists, Friends and Fans: Marketing Young Adult Fictions Online.” The abstract:

The Internet has facilitated the coming together of formerly more separated youth taste cultures, such that literary, screen and graphic fandoms now more readily overlap. Media industries have invested in online strategies which create an ongoing relationship between producers and consumers of entertainment media texts. Using the Internet marketing campaign for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga as a case study, the paper examines the role of the publishing industry in marketing popular teen literary fiction through online channels in ways that often disguise promotional intent.

Fan culture and Web 2.0 are often described as being places where cultural hierarchies are disrupted and tastes are actively shaped by diverse audiences who gravitate to niches. Anita Elberse has challenged Chris Anderson’s claim that the “long tail” of niche items will win out in a world where audiences can make their own choices among a myriad of options. Elberse’s research suggests that digital buzz actually compounds the blockbuster effect. And Rutherford’s research shows how this works. As she puts it,”[o]stensibly democratic networks of online youth sociability exist in a complex and complicit relationship with the processes of global media industries.”

She quotes  from a Publisher’s Weekly story in which a publicist at Scholastic said, baldly, “part of the trick to marketing books to teens online is that the most effective results seem to come from the coverage that appears most organic, viral and uncommercial in nature.” Appears. In other words, when you sell something, do your best to make it look as if you’re just another fan, raving about a positive experience.

As the quote from Scholastic’s publicist illustrates, the lines between user–generated fan sociability, and industry–generated social marketing are blurred. Such overlaps demonstrate the informational circuit of what Nigel Thrift calls “knowing capitalism”. Audiences/users gain information about narrative remediations and consumer opportunities related to their interests, while publishers and media industries garner data about their audience base. Through user feedback, publishing and media industry stakeholders are able to make projections about the viability of merchandising or cross–platform products associated with their literary or screen media properties.

Rutherford points out that genre fiction, particularly women’s romance fiction, has traditionally built on a strong connection between fans and producers of fiction. But the marketing aimed at youth also is intended as recruitment for a future market by going after the youth demographic and building the kinds of loyal relationships previously developed between women readers and romance publishers. But there’s also another key element: “The marketing of young adult fictions has also increasingly been aligned with the cult of celebrity.” Meyers built her own website so she could align her image with fans and identify as a storyteller, a geek, one of them. But the feedback loop between the author and the fans and the fictional world builds a committed customer base. “The author, the series and its characters have become celebrity commodities, fuelled by Internet communities of interest, an intersecting, cross–media stardom.”

Which is all very thought-provoking. This research does seem to describe the mechanisms by which audiences cooperate with and are coopted by marketers in making blockbusters, which in turn gives audiences a sense that they are participating in something really, really big. Which, of course, means niches are all very well but it’s not where the cool kids want to be seen.

The attention economy, like our economy, apparently has a widening gap between the rich and the rest. And on the Internet, nobody knows you’re an advertisement.