Category Archives: books

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.

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.

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.

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.

books phones screens freedoms

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The UK is one of the most watched over societies on earth with CCTV cameras in abundance, and the whole world is waking up to how much retrievable evidence the likes of Google have on us all thanks to our laptops and cellphones. (This spooky walking iphone was seen at the New York Halloween parade last week).
But is the invasion of privacy making our culture more secretive or less? Networks like FaceBook appear to be turning the once wild web into a cosy global village where all know each other’s business and keep an eye out for our digital neighbours and group members.
Privacy and the implications of social networking and user generation on our culture were key topics in a discussion about new technology on the UK internet TV company Doughty Street TV this November 5th, hosted by the Institute of Ideas.
Reading has always been a solitary activity where the individual’s imagination roams at will. There’s been a strange reversal now that book groups and recommendations from chat show hosts – Richard & Judy in the UK, Oprah in the USA – create a tiny pool of recommended bestsellers in the vast and frightening ocean of the unread. Who are the free thinkers now, websurfers or bookbrowsers?

“digitization and its discontents”

Anthony Grafton’s New Yorker piece “Future Reading” paints a forbidding picture of the global digital library currently in formation on public and private fronts around the world (Google et al.). The following quote sums it up well – ?a refreshing counterpoint to the millenarian hype we so often hear w/r/t mass digitization:

The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database. Neither Google nor anyone else will fuse the proprietary databases of early books and the local systems created by individual archives into one accessible store of information. Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.

Grafton begins and ends in a nostalgic tone, with a paean to the New York Public Library and the critic Alfred Kazin: the poor son of immigrants, City College-educated, who researched his seminal study of American literature On Native Grounds almost entirely with materials freely available at the NYPL. Clearly, Grafton is a believer in the civic ideal of the public library – ?a reservoir of knowledge, free to all – ?and this animates his critique of the balkanized digital landscape of search engines and commercial databases. Given where he appears to stand, I wish he could have taken a stab at what a digital public library might look like, and what sorts of technical, social, political and economic reorganization might be required to build it. Obviously, these are questions that would have required their own article, but it would have been valuable for Grafton, whose piece is one of those occasional journalistic events that moves the issue of digitization and the future of libraries out of the specialist realm into the general consciousness, to have connected the threads. Instead Grafton ends what is overall a valuable and intelligent article with a retreat into print fetishism – ?”crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables….millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books” – ?which, while evocative, obscures more than it illuminates.
Incidentally, those questions are precisely what was discussed at our Really Modern Library meetings last month. We’re still compiling our notes but expect a report soon.

what’s the word’s worth on the world wide web?

In early October R.U. Sirius published a nice piece on 10 Zen Monkeys in which he asked ten writers who have done reasonably well at straddling the print and online realms, “is the net good for writers?”. The result is an interesting little snapshot of a craft in transition, with a better signal to noise ratio than most other authors-mulling-over-the-future sorts of features. Some respondents veer inevitably into grumbling, but it’s a more considered and witty sort of grumbling (and with flashier prose) than one finds in the reactive screeds that John Updike and others have periodically spewed. Common laments are the shrinking of attention spans, information overload and the tyranny of the short blurb over the long, polished prose piece. Familiar tropes, but expressively tackled. And it’s refreshingly light on copyright matters.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the more constructive remarks. First from Mark Amerika who among all those queried has the most evocative take on how the persona and skill set of the “professional” writer may have to adapt in the new environment. I recently picked up his book META/DATA: A Digital Poetics and this makes me even more eager to dig in:

It helps to know how to write across all media platforms. Not only that, but to become various role-playing personas whose writerly performance plays out in various multi-media languages across these same platforms. The most successful writer-personas now and into the future -? at least those interested in “making a living” as you put it -? will be those who can take on varying flux personas via the act of writing.

And Edward Champion (a fellow Brooklynite) who, while noting the hazards for writers in the new net culture, is on balance optimistic:

The Internet is good for writers for several reasons: What was once a rather clunky process of querying by fax, phone, and snail-mail has been replaced by the mad, near-instantaneous medium of e-mail, where the indolent are more easily sequestered from the industrious. The process is, as it always was, one of long hours, haphazard diets, and rather bizarre forms of self-promotion. But clips are easily linkable. Work can be more readily distributed. And if a writer maintains a blog, there is now a more regular indicator of a writer’s thought process.

This emphasis on process is important. We need to be thinking about writing and the book more in terms of process and less of product – ?although various saleable products (print, speaking engagements or whatever else) may arise out of this visible process. He continues:

The stakes have risen. Everyone who wishes to survive in this game must operate at some peak and preternatural efficiency. Since the internet is a ragtag, lightning-fast glockenspiel where thoughts, both divine and clumsy, are banged out swifter with mad mallets more than any medium that has preceded it, an editor can get a very good sense of what a writer is good for and how he makes mistakes. While it is true that this great speed has come at the expense of long-form pieces and even months-long reporting, I believe the very limitations of this current system are capable of creating ambition rather than stifling it.

And on the subject of short blips and blurbs, one commenter takes similar encouragement:

Is it just me that thinks this may presage a resurgence in the popularity of the short story? Beautiful writing in bite-size chunks seems tailor-made for the current generation.
Sonnets and haiku place huge restrictions on poets. It can take more talent to create in a confined space than in the wide-open page.
Whatever happens, it’ll be interesting.

harry potter and the litigants of doom

J.K. Rowling has maintained an admirably strong grip on the creative lives of her fictional creations and their merchandising over the years, for instance insisting on complete control over the writing and casting of the movies and ensuring that Coca Cola put money into literacy projects around the world in exchange for putting HP on their bottles. But the news today that she is suing a publisher for planning to bring out an encyclopedic companion to her books is alarming. Does she really fear that her book will bomb if somebody else ‘steals’ the idea first? Why shouldn’t fans – or even critics – write freely about her work?
The growth of fan fiction, blogging and the exchange of views on favourite books and characters has been a wonderful development of creative reading on the web – and done wonders for the rampant cult of Hogwarts, so it’s a big shame J.K.R hasn’t taken a bold stand for reader interaction with her (copyright) world.

unbound reader

CommentPress, be it remembered, is a blog hack. A fairly robust one to be sure, and one which we expect to get significant near-term mileage out of, but still an adaptation of a relatively brittle publishing architecture. BookGlutton – ?a new community reading site that goes public beta next month – ?takes a shot at building social reading tools from scratch, and the first glimpses look promising. I’m still awaiting my beta tester account so it’s hard to say how well this actually works (and whether it’s Flash-based or Ajax-driven etc.), but a demo on their development blog walks through most of the social features of their browser-based “Unbound Reader.” They seem to have gotten a lot right, but I’m still curious to see how, if at all, they handle multimedia and interlinking between and within books. We’ll be watching this one closely…..Also, below the video, check out some explanatory material by BookGlutton’s creators, Aaron Miller and Travis Alber, that was forwarded to us the other day.

The first, the main BookGlutton website, is a catalog and community where users can upload work or select a piece of public domain writing, create reading groups and tag literature. The second part of the site – its centerpiece – is the Unbound Reader. It has a web-based format where users can read and discuss the book right inside the text. The Unbound Reader uses “proximity chat,” which allows users to discuss the book with other readers close to them in the text (thus focusing discussion, and, as an added benefit, keeping people from hearing about the end). It also has shared annotations, so people can leave a comment on any paragraph and other readers can respond. By encouraging users to talk in a context-specific way about what they’re reading, Bookglutton hopes to help those who want to talk about books (or original writing) with their friends (across cities, for example), students who want to discuss classic works (perhaps for a class), or writers who want to get feedback on their own pieces. Naturally, when the conversation becomes distracting, a user can close off the discussion without exiting the Reader.
Additionally, BookGlutton is working to facilitate adoption of on-line reading. Book design is an important aspect of the reader, and it incorporates design elements, like dynamic dropcaps. Moreover, the works presented in the catalog are standards-based (BookGlutton is an early adopter of the International Digital Publishing Forum’s .epub format for ebooks), and allows users to download a copy of anything they upload in this format for use elsewhere.

booker shortlist set free

CORRECTION: a commenter kindly points out that the Times jumped the gun on this one. What follows is in fact not true. Further clarification here.
The Times of London reports that the Man Booker Prize soon will make the full text of its winning and shortlisted novels free online. Sounds as though this will be downloads only, not Web texts. Unclear whether this will be in perpetuity or a limited-time offer.

Negotiations are under way with the British Council and publishers over digitising the novels and reaching parts – particularly in Africa and Asia – that the actual books would not otherwise reach.
Jonathan Taylor, chairman of The Booker Prize Foundation, said that the initiative was well advanced, although details were still being thrashed out.
The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought. If readers like a novel tasted on the internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book.