Monthly Archives: November 2007

of razors and blades

A flurry of reactions to the Amazon Kindle release, much of it tipping negative (though interestingly largely by folks who haven’t yet handled the thing).
David Rothman exhaustively covers the DRM/e-book standards angle and is generally displeased:

I think publishers should lay down the law and threaten Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with slow dismemberment if he fails to promise immediately that the Kindle will do .epub [the International Digital Publishing Forum’s new standard format] in the next six months or so. Epub, epub, epub, Jeff. Publishers still remember how you forced them to abandon PDF in favor of your proprietary Mobi format, at least in Amazon-related deals. You owe ’em one.

Dear Author also laments the DRM situation as well as the jacked-up price:

Here’s the one way I think the Kindle will succeed with consumers (non business consumers). It chooses to employ a subscription program whereby you agree to buy x amount of books at Amazon in exchange for getting the Kindle at some reduced price. Another way to drive ereading traffic to Amazon would be to sell books without DRM. Jeff Bezos was convinced that DRM free music was imperative. Why not DRM free ebooks?

There are also, as of this writing, 128 customer reviews on the actual Amazon site. One of the top-rated ones makes a clever, if obvious, remark on Amazon’s misguided pricing:

The product is interesting but extremely overpriced, especially considering that I still have to pay for books. Amazon needs to discover what Gillette figured out decades ago: Give away the razor, charge for the razor blades. In this model, every Joe gets a razor because he has nothing to lose. Then he discovers that he LOVES the razor, and to continue loving it he needs to buy razors for it. The rest is history.
This e-book device should be almost free, like $30. If that were the case I’d have one tomorrow. Then I’d buy a book for it and see how I like it. If I fall in love with it, then I’ll continue buying books, to Amazon’s benefit.
There is no way I’m taking a chance on a $400 dedicated e-book reader. That puts WAY too much risk on my side of the equation.

newsweek covers the future of reading

6032-newsweekkindle.jpg Steven Levy’s Newsweek cover story, “The Future of Reading,” is pegged to the much anticipated release of the Kindle, Amazon’s new e-book reader. While covering a lot of ground, from publishing industry anxieties, to mass digitization, Google, and speculations on longer-term changes to the nature of reading and writing (including a few remarks from us), the bulk of the article is spent pondering the implications of this latest entrant to the charred battlefield of ill-conceived gadgetry which has tried and failed for more than a decade to beat the paper book at its own game. The Kindle has a few very significant new things going for it, mainly an Internet connection and integration with the world’s largest online bookseller, and Jeff Bezos is betting that it might finally strike the balance required to attract larger numbers of readers: doing a respectable job of recreating the print experience while opening up a wide range of digital affordances.
Speaking of that elusive balance, the bit of the article that most stood out for me was this decidely ambivalent passage on losing the “boundedness” of books:

Though the Kindle is at heart a reading machine made by a bookseller – ?and works most impressively when you are buying a book or reading it – ?it is also something more: a perpetually connected Internet device. A few twitches of the fingers and that zoned-in connection between your mind and an author’s machinations can be interrupted – ?or enhanced – ?by an avalanche of data. Therein lies the disruptive nature of the Amazon Kindle. It’s the first “always-on” book.

reenactment

From time to time, the Institute returns to thorny and intractable thought experiments. One that’s been kicking around for a long time is what we’ve called the “Communist Manifesto problem”: the problem of representing a book and the conversations it engenders over time, conversations which may grow to include other books. (The Communist Manifesto would be a particularly knotty text to render because it’s had so many cultural repercussions. See here and here for past references on this blog.) It’s a good thought experiment because it’s too big to be easily solved, but aspects of it come up fairly frequent basis. This past week, I found myself thinking about a particular facet of the Communist Manifesto problem: how we think about re-enactment in the age of the archive.
On Wednesday night, I went to see the Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet. I’m not especially qualified as a theater critic (I’m sure others here can say more intelligent things than I), but the central thrust of this production is simple enough: the actors performing Hamlet perform it in front of video of the 1964 filmed version of the play starring Richard Burton. The Burton version is a filmed play, a form intended to bring theater to the theaterless masses that never quite caught on; the Wooster Group’s actors expertly mime the 1964 actors, and sets are moved balletically to match changes in camera angles in the film. Often the original actors are digitally edited out of the film in whole or in part. It’s a clever idea. Hamlet is as familiar to us as any play can be. Even if you’ve never seen another dramatic or filmic production of the play, the language can’t be escaped: in some stretches, every line has been borrowed as a title for something else. It’s lousy with resonances. We can’t watch Hamlet as a self-contained work of art any more than we can look at the Mona Lisa. The Wooster Group’s production makes this explicit: when we watch Hamlet, we’re watching it against the army of other Hamlets we’ve seen.
scott shepherd and richard burton are both hamlet
This has always been an issue with certain well-known works: Hamlet‘s been omnipresent for a long time. The availability of a digital archive, however, has foregrounded this. Before film, theatergoers would be measuring productions against memories of previous productions they’d seen. Now we don’t need to rely on memory: a dozen filmed versions of Hamlet can be queued on Netflix without any trouble, to say nothing of the 4,700 videos that are the results of a YouTube search.
Another cover version: on Thursday night, I went over to Anthology Film Archives to see Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. From 1982 to 1989, a group of teens in Mississippi filmed their own scene-for-scene version of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movie, corralling their friends to play Egyptians, family dogs to play monkeys, and laboriously recreating all but one of the original stunts: they decided there was no way to film a Nazi decapitated by an airplane’s propellor without it looking cheesy, so they left that out. The film & sound quality is muddy, to say the least but one can’t help but be impressed by what they managed to do. It’s clear that an astonishing amount of work went into the film, still more when you realize that they didn’t have a copy of the original on video to work from. And spending seven years on the project: my youth appears pale and lazy by comparison. Strangely, the makers of the film only bothered to show it once before its rediscoveryfour years ago.
chris strompolos is a new and improved indiana jones
Once you start thinking about the idea of re-enactment, you start seeing it everywhere. Maybe the argument could be made that we’re in a cultural moment devoted to re-enactment. Much of what we write off as novelty can be put into this category. The Internet recently was excited about old people re-enacting iconic photos of the twentieth century; see also choirs of old people performing Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia”. Or choirs of small children doing much the same. But less ironic presentations abound: off the top of my head, Japancakes just released a note-for-note country-inflected cover of Loveless, My Bloody Valentine’s seminal drone-rock record. Going further, German new music ensemble Zeitkratzer has played and recorded Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Tom McCarthy‘s excellent recent novel Remainder concerns a wealthy man who maniacally reenacts scenes; McCarthy springs from the art world, which has been interested in re-enactment for a while. Examples spiral on ad infinitum. But there seems to be something in us that wants to see or hear what we’ve seen or heard before again.
These are quickly composed thoughts, and I’m ignoring a great deal; parsing the difference between re-enactment and adaptation could be fiendishly complicated, as might be the role of copyright in all of this, etc. I’ll simply tie this back to the Communist Manifesto problem. I think it’s become apparent that we’re no longer reading texts in isolation: now when we read Hamlet, digital media has made it possible to read any number of possible versions at the same time. The archive presents us with an embarrassment of riches, though I suspect that we still lack the tools to let us make sense of the pile: both to make sense of the growing number of versions of texts and to usefully compare versions. The Wooster Group’s Hamlet can be seen as a close reading of the 1964 Hamlet. But such a one-to-one reading might just be the tip of the iceberg.

build your own texbook

Peter Brantley pointed me to an interesting experiment from Pearson Custom Publishing, who is working with faculty at Rio Solado community college in Arizona to print custom textbooks assembled from multiple sources. Inside Higher Ed has details:

The result, in what could be the first institution-wide initiative of its kind, will be a savings to students of up to 50 percent, the college estimates, as well as a savings of time to faculty, who often find themselves revising course materials to keep pace with continuously updated editions.
…Professors can pick from among the books in Pearson’s library as well as outside sources in preparing their custom textbooks. For works not published by Pearson, there’s a limit of 10 percent of the contents, but the company will then handle copyright clearance.

I recently read in the Times about a similar service from Condé Nast for individualized cookbooks culled, à la carte as it were, from the Epicurious.com recipe library.

amazon kindle due out monday

In CNET news: “Amazon to debut Kindle e-book reader Monday.”
While it’s got more going for it than any of its predecessors or present competitors -? wi-fi connection, seamless integration with the biggest online store in the world, access to dozens of periodicals, keyword search for crying out loud, which the Sony Reader still bafflingly lacks -? I’m skeptical about the Kindle. If the device ($399) and individual electronic titles (barely marked down from print) weren’t so absurdly overpriced, it might make more sense to readers. Over at Teleread, David Rothman wonders about the solidity of Jeff Bezos’ long-term commitment to books.

library of congress to archive electronic literature (suggest a link)

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks your assistance in selecting “works of imaginative writing that take advantage of the capabilities of the standalone or networked computer” for preservation by the LOC and Internet Archive:

The Library of Congress has asked the Electronic Literature Organization to collect a sample of 300 web sites related to the field and to contribute that sample to the Internet Archive’s Archive-It project. The sites selected will be crawled and archived to the extent that the Archive-It technology allows. The result will be full-text searchable collections of the spidered HTML files in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The ELO will enter metadata including a short description and keywords for each URL entered into the database. The ELO Board of Directors, Literary Advisory Board, membership, and community are encouraged to suggest sites here for three sets of links.
-? Electronic Literature: Collections of Works: Sites that aggregate works of electronic literature by multiple authors, such as online journals and anthologies.
-? Electronic Literature: Individual Works: Individual works of electronic literature and collections of works by a single author, as opposed to collections of works by multiple authors.
-? Electronic Literature: Context: Sites related to the critical, theoretical, and institutional contexts of electronic literature.

More info on how to suggest links at the ELO wiki.

would you date someone with no books on their shelves?

I’m not completely sure about the netiquette of blogging about a conversation heard around the digital watercooler, ie on a close-knit community messageboard; but I came across one such recently that made me pause.
Paraphrased, the thread started out asking about the ethics of going through other people’s stuff. But it moved on to the subject of snooping on others’ bookshelves. The question then became: if you were left alone in someone else’s house the morning after a date, would you make a judgement about their suitability for future dates from their book collection? The answer was an overwhelming yes.
There were a few dissenting voices who muttered about intellectual snobbery, performance anxiety about their bookshelves, or even setting traps for book-snobs by displaying their Stephen King collection somewhere prominent. But the common element was a sense that someone’s book collection is an intimate portrait of their interests and/or aspirations, and can have a profound effect on others’ perceptions – to the point of being a romantic deal-breaker.
Books as extensions of personality is a familiar theme. But the context of the conversation, an internet messageboard, got me thinking. The theme of the messageboard in question is sexuality, and hence the community self-selects for reasons that have nothing to do with things intellectual/literary. I reckon it’s fair to say it was a small but reasonably random sample of moderately digitally-literate UK women.
Now, a familiar narrative in the publishing industry says that print is dying: see, for example, Jeff Gomez, Penguin USA’s director of online sales and marketing, on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book last week to promote his new (print!) book Print Is Dead. This narrative pits books against the internet, as though the latter either follows the former in some ineluctable evolution, or else the latter is a predatory force out to destroy culture as we know it. But this digital watercooler conversation, conducted amongst ‘normal’ internet-using people, suggests that these apocalyptic visions have more to do with industry angst than any widespread cultural shift among everyday users of print and digital media.
Despite a relatively high common standard of net literacy, no-one said ‘I wouldn’t care about lack of books – I’d be more worried about being stuck in a house with no wifi’. There was an overwhelming consensus that books are revealing, important and an insight into a stranger’s interests. The sense was not that digital media might replace books, but that they play different roles, and are perceived as different in kind – not just at the level of how they deliver ‘content’.
Such despatches from the middle ground might seem unglamorous in comparison with the giddy high-altitude futurism of Kelly et al, or pronouncements of the death of hard copy. But they’re worth noting. The cultural currency of books should not be conflated with the economics of producing them, such that a challenge to the latter is narrated as a collapse of the former. Though this might seem obvious, it’s one of the most common elisions in the discourse of print vs. online; it does little but muddy the debate, and has even less to do with lived reality for most people.

why are screens square?

More from the archive, I’m afraid; but I’ve quoted this so often in the last year that it merits repeating.
A video of Jo Walsh, a simultaneously near-invisible and near-legendary hacker I met through the University of Openess in London, talking about FOAF, Web3.0, geospatial data, the ‘One Ring To Rule Them All’ tendency of so-called ‘social media’ and the philosophies of making tech tools.
“Why are screens square?”, she asks. What follows is less a set of theories as a meditation on what happens when you start trying to think back through the layers of toolmaking that go into a piece of paper, a pen, a screen, a keyboard – the media we use to represent ourselves, and that we agree to pretend are transparent. This then becomes the starting-point for another meditation on who owns, or might own, our digital future.
(High-quality video so takes a little while to load)

reading as collective enterprise

In this excerpt from an interview with Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW’s Bookworm, Junot Díaz, the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao articulates an aspect of the communal nature of books that isn’t often brought up: he argues that we learn to read communally, and that this isn’t necessarily a mode of reading that we should move away from. Here’s the audio – there’s a fervor to Díaz’s argument that doesn’t come off in a straight transcription:

(This is an excerpt; the full version can be downloaded from the Bookworm web site.) For those who can’t listen, a quick synopsis: Silverblatt, looking at the way Díaz uses science fiction and diaspora culture in his novel, sees a similarity to how James Joyce uses Dublin in Ulysses, as a lens through which to scry the world; in Oscar Wao bits of sci-fi and pop culture become a “vast encyclopedia of the world”; the universe reveals itself in particular. Díaz then takes that idea and runs with it: as a reader, he sees his own book as a single part of an “enormous conversation of books”:

Nobody learns to read outside of a collective. We forget – because we read and we read alone – we forget that we learn to read collectively. We learn with our peers, and a teacher teaches us. . . . When you read a book – and especially like this book, where there’s gonna be Spanish, there’s gonna be historical references, there’s gonna be nerdish, as they say, forget the elvish, the nerdish, there’s gonna be fanboy stuff, there’s gonna be talk about Morgoth, about dark side, about John Brunner’s science fiction books, about Asimov, about Bova, about Andre Norton, about E. E. Doc Smith’s Lensman, you know all this weird esoteric stuff, amongst all these Dominican references, Caribbean references, urban black American references, all this nerd talk, all this kind of hip “we went to college” speak – the reason that’s all there in one place is the same reason that reading is a collective enterprise. When we did not know a word when we were young and learning, we would ask someone. We forgot – I think many of us forget – that praxis, that fundamental praxis. What I want is for people to read and remember that reading, while we may practice it alone, in solitude, it arose out of a collective learning and out of a collective exchange . . . .

publishing after publishers

Circulating briskly last week around the blogosphere was an interesting trio of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) by the thriller writer Barry Eisler pondering how various roles in the present-day publishing ecosystem might evolve – ?or go extinct – ?in the coming decades. He envisions a world (an America at least) where mega-chains and big box retailers have taken over most of the distribution functions of publishers. Each store powers a squadron of on-demand printers (like the Espresso Book Machine), churning out paperbacks from a limitless digital backlist – ?think of a Kinkos and a Starbucks fused together with a small browsing area in between. Direct dealings with authors, including editing, copyediting and packaging, have largely become the work of agents, who broker distribution with various on and offline retailers. Authors themselves have become the brands. In some cases retailers ink deals to run exclusive authorial product lines – ?like Tom Clancy’s “Op Center” or James Patterson’s various co-authored spinoffs – ?in their stores. Lesser known writers can make a living writing for these franchises, riding the coattails of tomorrow’s Dan Browns and Sue Graftons.

In a flat distribution world, retailers will need publishers less, perhaps, eventually, not at all (or rather, retailers will become publishers themselves). But they’ll still need someone to help them cut through the clutter. And someone will still need to represent authors to buyers. I expect agents will start selling directly to retailers, and that their business won’t be nearly as affected by flattening distribution as will publishers’.

Eisler is really talking primarily about blockbusters here, and within that limited scope his predictions seem sound (though I think he seriously underestimates the extent to which reading will go entirely digital). Authors in the “short head” of the curve are already essentially brands and it’s only a matter of time before they realize that their publishers’ services are no longer required and that they can keep a much bigger cut of the proceeds by going it alone. Eisler points to the situation in the music biz and Madonna and Radiohead – ?superstars who bucked their record labels in favor of independent distribution and have been wildly successful. But what does this prove? Blockbuster acts with legacy brands and massive fanbases can easily establish their own media empires – ?Stephen King toyed with the idea with his 2000 serial e-novel The Plant, which he sold directly to readers with modest success.
The point is that these examples shed little light on the future except for those few who are already at the top of the heap – ?that tiny heap which has become so disproportionately favored by an over-consolidated, bottom line-driven industry. Rather than heralding a new age of self-determination by artists, the Madonnas and Stephen Kings are the exceptions that prove the rule that, while distribution may have been radically flattened by the net, attention and audience are as hard (if not harder) to come by as ever. How the vast majority of writers will make a living, and how they might have to adapt their craft to do so, is far less clear (the R.U. Sirius piece I linked to earlier this month, which interviews ten serious midlist writers who have done a fairly good job of setting up online, “branded,” presences, is a good barometer of current anxieties).
Eisler’s right, though, that publishers need to start thinking hard about what they have to offer beyond distribution or else go the way of the dodo. But it won’t just be the agents that replace them but a melange of evolved Web impresarios: bloggers, curators, list-server editors, social bookmarkers and other online tastemakers. But writers too will have to change to survive. The digital medium will provide more maneuverability and more potential reach, but less shelter and less of the hand-holding, buffering and insulation from their public that publishers traditionally provided when once upon a time they managed the production and distribution chain. In many cases, writers will have to work harder at being impresarios, developing public personae and maintaining a more direct communication with readers. They’ll have to learn how to write all over again.