TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘books’ Category

By Chris Meadows

The Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy” blog has an interview with William Gibson, part of a longer piece it will be publishing in the next day or so. This segment focuses on Gibson’s thoughts about the future of book publishing.

Gibson notes that, thanks to Twitter, he is experiencing a larger level of fan engagement than he had been able to previously and finding it “more pleasant” than he had expected. He is also able to get a clearer picture of where the book is being released and when.

He also notes that he doesn’t see the rise of the e-book as the daunting prospect many of his contemporaries do, but doesn’t expect physical books to completely go away, either. And he points out that a lot of the environmental waste associated with modern publishing could be eliminated by the rise of print-on-demand book machines like the Espresso.

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book -– and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper.

I’ve been meaning to read Gibson’s present-day books, Spook Country and Zero History, having heard good things about them. I do find it interesting that essentially co-inventing the cyberpunk genre has given Gibson cred as a futurist, given that he originally based it more on the video games his kids played than on real computers, about which he actually knew very little at the time.

But then, anyone who thinks about the future at all could be called a futurist I suppose. And it does bear thinking about—it’s where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives, after all.

By Chris Meadows

Sammy Perlmutter at The Huffington Post has an interesting piece looking at the innovation of Lynd Ward’s wordless graphic novels, which are being reissued in a 1,600 page boxed book set. (If ever there was a case for e-books, that would be it!)

Perlmutter talks about the device of narrative told entirely in pictures with no words, and suggests that makers of e-books could learn from it. He explains that the illustrative nature of the story gives it a kind of universality that surpasses native language, and also draws the reader deeper into the narrative. The reader has to construct for himself what is going on rather than having it fed to him, which Perlmutter says makes the books “interactive”:

Put differently: a novel without words can elevate its reader to a level of authority equal to — or beyond — that of the author. One message of wordless books, then, is that the reader is simultaneously an author … or, at the very least, an active participant who can think critically about, question and critique the story in front of her. As a result, when a child reads a wordless book, she inherently learns how to be a critic, not just a passive observer, of a text.

Books lacking this interactivity are not only boring, but can also be dangerous, especially in our digital age when messages and media spew at us from a million directions at a mile a minute.

I’m not entirely sure I’d agree with that definition of “interactivity” but will definitely agree that wordless graphical stories can do more to engage the reader than those with dialogue. I’ve long had similar feelings about animated narratives without dialogue, such as Daft Punk and Leiji Matsumoto’s Interstella 5555, or Chage & Aska and Hayao Miyazaki’s On Your Mark. (Probably not coincidental that these are both essentially music videos.)

Permutter makes the point that interpretation-required graphic novels do more to challenge the reader than the more traditional definition of “interactive” hypertext and multimedia works. I can’t really argue with that, but I’ll also note what a pity it is that these stories apparently aren’t available in a form that can be read by e-book readers even though, at 1,600 pages of black and white art, they would seem to be a prime candidate for e-ink displays.

By Chris Meadows

Here we have yet another story on why print rules and e-books drool, by 26-year-old Emma Silvers who posits the thesis that she is somehow nobly fighting against the tide of her generation, rejecting conformity and marching to the beat of a different drummer and all that. It ends up coming across as smug and smacks more than a little of entitlement.

Silvers writes of encountering a woman reading a book on the Kindle and being annoyed because instead of seeing a book cover to give away what the person was reading, she saw the “smooth metallic back of the thing.”

As I stared at the woman, fully engaged, happily using this very practical and very expensive device that, for all I know, she saved her pennies for a year to buy, I felt something entirely out of proportion with the situation: I felt personally slighted.

At least she admits that her feelings were “ridiculous” and out of proportion, and then goes on to analyze why she feels what she feels. She actually goes all the way back to her childhood and discusses how she taught herself to read by annoying her older sister, read in the car on family vacations to the point of motion sickness, and has been known to walk into trees and lampposts while reading on the street (I’ll admit, I’ve been there).

She touches on Nicholas Carr’s article about what the Internet is doing to our attention span (which I covered here) and notes that all the social networking and Internet-related features of the Kindle are exactly the kind of distractions she doesn’t want to take her out of the immersive reading experience she treasures. She writes that the multitude of musical choice offered by her iPod means she rarely listens to albums all the way through anymore, and adds:

Out of every argument I’ve heard in favor of e-readers — no dead trees, portable research, "it’s the future," etc. — my least favorite might be the central point of the thing: the fact that it allows you to choose from thousands of books at any given time. I simply don’t want that kind of potential for distraction. Would I have ever made it through any book by Herman Hesse if I’d had the choice, with a press of a button, to lighten the mood with a little Tom Robbins? Will anyone ever finish "Infinite Jest" on a device that constantly presents other options?

She does admit in closing what seems obvious to the rest of us: her disdain for e-books is at least partly rooted in her nostalgia for the reading experiences she had growing up, and a sadness that kids of future generations aren’t going to have those same experiences.

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By Chris Meadows

On Publishing Perspectives, I’ve noticed an editorial by Deborah Willis that reads almost like a response to our recent post by C. A. Bridges on print vs. paper books (though of course they were written completely independently of each other). Bridges admits that a number of things can be done with the physical artifacts that are paper books that can’t be done with e-books, as a reader he finds he prefers the electronic version.

Deborah Willis, on the other hand, is concerned about the essential nature of printed books becoming diluted or vanishing as a result of migration to electronic pages.

In a world where people read on electronic devices, books may become mash-ups of media, including music, video, and possibly advertising. (Advertising in ebooks is of particular concern if we distribute them for “free” or nearly free.) An electronic, interactive Alice in Wonderland is an incredible thing, and I’m intrigued by the possibilities of the technology. But the electronic Alice may be closer to a video game than to Lewis Carroll’s original. So perhaps I simply have a problem with the vocabulary: can something that is not bound, not made of paper, and not necessarily meant to be read –– can that thing still be called a book?

She points out that the architecture of the web, built on links and hypertext, intended to facilitate jumping around, is at odds with the nature of books that are mostly meant to be read from beginning to end.

While there is still some of the same sentimental attachment to the old for which I like to poke fun at other writers (especially those who bring up smell as a determining factor), Willis does make some good points. Right now, e-books are mostly a new way to present the same old prose we get in print. But as time goes on and multimedia gadgets like the iPad become the order of the day, will stand-alone prose fade away in favor of multimedia?

And if so, how good or bad a thing is it?

By Chris Meadows

The Bookseller has a post looking at decisions by a number of “stranded” established children’s authors to follow in the footsteps of writers like J.A. Konrath and Seth Godin to publish on their own or through smaller presses rather than the traditional publishing houses that had previously published them.

"A number of established authors are not being published who would have been published five years ago and are looking at different ways to market,” [children’s author Lucy Daniel Raby] said.

Raby has bought back the rights to her Nickolai of the North series, which she now publishes herself through Tinkerbell Books.

The article refers to the traditional publishing houses as “risk-averse” but does not really go into any level of detail as to why these “stranded” authors are not being published through them anymore. It would have been interesting to have that information as background for the rest of the piece.

Children’s books seem to be in a bit of an odd position, given that about the only time these books seem to impinge upon adult consciousness is when they become runaway bestsellers like the Harry Potter or Twilight books, or are made into movies like Percy Jackson. I’m not sure I could name more than one or two other children’s book series, and that’s only because I’ve seen them in bookstore displays.

I wonder if that has something to do with why publishers are so “risk averse” right now? It must be tricky marketing books to kids when adults are the ones who for the most part hold the purse strings.

By Chris Meadows

Over at Gadget Lab, Tim Carmody has an interesting look at why e-book readers are the size they are. It has to do with sheep. More specifically, the sheepskins that were used to make parchment back in medieval days.

Folding the parchment a different number of times before cutting produced a different number of parchment sheets of different sizes, which rapidly became the standard sizes of the printing industry. Even after printing moved from parchment to paper, the sizes were preserved out of habit—they were already set up for working with those sizes and there was no compelling reason to change.

And the same thing happened when electronic gadgets started to impersonate books. In order to play up the resemblance to books in order to sell the gadgets to book-lovers, it made sense that they would keep the devices the same size as the books we know and love. There was even a size roughly equivalent to the iPhone’s screen (though it doesn’t seem to have gained the same level of popularity as larger sizes—perhaps even then, people complained about it being “too small to read”).

So, as Tim points out, when people talk about a “paperback Kindle” or compare e-reader sizes to particular types of books, they’re continuing a long tradition that goes all the way back to the age of parchment. And yet they don’t seem to feel even the slightest bit sheepish!

By Chris Meadows

You know that “print vs. e-books” debate we’re always covering here? The New York Times has an interesting article looking at it from a novel new angle: what happens in households where one person favors print and the other prefers e-books.

In looking at these little “toilet seat up or down” style disputes, the article is often rather amusing.

“[My wife] talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium. He added, sounding mildly piqued, “She uses the word ‘real.’ ”

The e-book device industry is taking note of these mixed couples, and trying to figure out how to convert the print-book-only holdout to an e-reader, too (“One of us! One of us!”) or else fit both parties with a single deal, e.g., print-plus-e-book bundling.

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By Chris Meadows

This Saturday, I drove about 30 miles west of Springfield to visit the Gay Parita Sinclair, a restored period filling station in Paris Springs, just west of Halltown, Missouri on old Route 66.

Several huge photo blow-ups of the place hang on the wall in the breakroom at TeleTech where I work, in keeping with the building’s “Route 66” decor theme. It was only last week when I googled it that I realized I had actually driven right past it without even noticing it twice while on my way to Carthage. I guess I’d mentally filed it as “just another gas station” without realizing. So as penance, this time I drove out there specifically to see the place.

While I was there I happened to notice, amid the shelves of period and Route 66 memorabilia, a couple of old Brownie cameras.

“I used to have that camera,” I said, pointing to the one on the right.

“You don’t look that old!” the lady who was showing me around (the daughter of the Sinclair’s owner) said.

And it’s true, I wasn’t that old. But the camera was.

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By Chris Meadows

In a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched the repeated claims by the content industry that some new copyright violation is going to “kill” their business, a study on the economic impact of Google Book Search shows that having a searchable catalog of books has apparently helped publishers a lot more than it has hurt.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt posts a summary of the study, which shows that affected publishers’ profits grew faster on average in the years after the project than the years before. Publishers who did not opt out of the publishing partner agreement also saw large increases in revenues and profits.

This puts me in mind of the VCR, which thirty years ago Jack Valenti famously compared to the Boston Strangler, but subsequently formed the basis for an entirely new business sector in Hollywood that accounts for significantly more revenue than theatrical showings today. Who knows what Google Books will have made of the publishing industry thirty years from now?

By Chris Meadows

The death of the e-book has gone meta.

NPR mentions a new children’s book about books, where one character is puzzled by another character reading this dull paper construct that you can’t “scroll down” or “blog with”.

Actually, this book is brought up as an anecdote to lead into yet another article on the death of the book (ho hum!), but it is at least fairly well-researched, and suggests a few alternatives to the black and white, life or death depiction to which many paper book adherents fall prey.

Dan Visel, of the Institute for the Future of the Book, notes that books that are meant to be read will probably end up as e-books, but there are also books that are meant to be seen being read (e.g., political titles such as Going Rogue by Sarah Palin) and those will likely remain around in printed form for quite some time because of their value as a social display.

Savvy publishers, [Visel] says, "should be establishing themselves as brands or curators." And they "could be in the business of providing community to the readers: allowing readers to have conversations with authors or like-minded readers."

The piece also talks about textbooks versus e-textbooks, and Stanford’s new “bookless” physics and engineering library. And also, it turns out that the author of the aforementioned pro-paper children’s book is himself interested in new digital technologies’ potential for storytelling.

The ascendency of the e-book cannot come soon enough, in my opinion. If only so people will stop talking about what will happen to the paper ones.

Related:

• NPR covers e-book pricing
• Audio report from NPR: in epublishing revolution rights battle wears on
• NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ on e-book DRM
• NPR offers clueful DRM story: Rude surprises ahead for unsuspecting Kindle owners?

By Chris Meadows

On the Bookavore Tumblr blog, my attention was drawn to an “e-book article drinking game,” mocking some of the worst excesses of the e-book news coverage field (and TeleRead certainly is not immune to these either!).

The first few lines:

“Will e-books wipe out/kill/decimate/pulverize/HULKSMASH/angry verb real books?” — one drink

Above question is lede — one drink

Every use of phrase “real book” — one drink

Expert you’ve never heard of before predicting percentages — one drink

Any predicted percentage of anything over 30% — one drink

Absolutely hilarious, and possibly worth printing out and keeping by the monitor as you read much e-book coverage.

By Chris Meadows

The Bookseller reports on author Jeanette Winterson expressing dismay over the march of digitization (or “digitisation” as they spell it on that side of the Atlantic). At an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of her novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, she said:

"What worries me is that a load of s**** has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that the Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves."

She brings up the browser’s dilemma: if you can only find what you’re looking for, you’ll miss out on the happenstance discoveries of what you hadn’t known you wanted to read.

Meanwhile, ever-thoughtful publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin has posted another of his lengthy editorials, this one about the “death” of the printed book. While Shatzkin does not believe that printed books will be “eliminated” by e-books, he does suggest that arguments that the print book was “perfected” several centuries ago may not be as favorable to the primacy of printed books as those who put forward the arguments believe.

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By Chris Meadows

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb has written a pair of articles considering the advantages that e-books and printed books have over each other. E-books get the nod for social highlighting, notes, look-up of words, ability to tweet and Facebook quotes, and search; paper books get it for feel, packaging, sharing, keeping, and second-hand books.

I can’t help but find both of these lists a little lame.

The e-books list seems to place an undue emphasis on social networking (the ability to tweet and Facebook quotes? Really? Something that only the Kindle has, and even it only got in April?) and leaves out such huge advantages as the ability to carry dozens or hundreds of books in one pocket-sized device, the instant gratification of having a book in your hand immediately after you decide to purchase it, or the way any e-book can be large-print with a simple font setting tweak.

Furthermore, despite the claim in the paper books list that they can’t, e-books can be “lent” in some cases more easily than printed ones. The Nook allows you to “lend” an e-book to a friend, for instance (though the feature does come up a bit lacking in the actual execution)—and needless to say, any book without DRM can be “lent” by e-mail.

As for the paper books list: again, why should “feel” even be in the running as an advantage? It’s nice and all, but I don’t consider the tactile experience to be a factor in any purchasing decision. And as for “keeping”, e-books can be copied, backed up, and stored in ways that paper books can’t. (And what about the days when books were printed on acidic paper that slowly crumbled away into dust? How “keepable” were those books?)

Still, I do agree with MacManus’s conclusion:

In summary, there are pros and cons for both paper books and eBooks. The eBook market is ripe for innovation and breakthroughs in how we read, so eBooks will only improve over the coming years.

In the final analysis though, the real value of any book – whether read via paper or electronically – is in the words.

By Chris Meadows

The Literary Platform has an editorial by Matt Young, the founder of a small publishing house called InPrint Books. InPrint has a couple of gimmicks—it creates books with colored covers made entirely from different colors of paper, with no ink involved, produces them in lots of only 1,000 numbered copies, and it doesn’t do e-books. (The editorial is prefaced by a rather smug commercial on YouTube doing the whole “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” thing with a book and an e-book.)

Looking at the site, this publisher seems to be going heavily into the idea of books as artifacts, or even art—generally doing reprintings of “classic” works such as Great Expectations or 1984, and limiting the size of (and numbering) the print run. These books are for book-as-artifact snobs, plain and simple—they’re produced as collector’s items, not mass market titles. They’re meant to be appreciated, not actually read.

As one might expect, the piece has an obvious pro-print book bias. Young admits that e-books are probably going to become the norm sooner or later—but they’ll never replace printed books, because darn it, printed books are just awesome.

(And yes, the smell of a book is practically the first thing he brings up.)

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By Chris Meadows

Just a couple days ago I wrote about an article wondering if the iPad had “preemptively killed the US tablet market”. It would seem at least one person believes the answer is no, because CNet is running a brief piece by Brooke Crothers predicting that a lot of media pads are on the way, and listing some of the features they might have.

What I take from all this is that prognostication is really anybody’s guess.

And speaking of prognostication, fresh from offering his $100 tablet expertise to the makers of India’s announced $35 tablet, Nicholas Negroponte has confidently predicted the death of the paper book within five years.

“People will say ‘no, no, no’ — of course you like your libraries,” Negroponte said. But he cited the report that sales of books for the Kindle recently surpassed sales of hardcover books.

Oh, well, if he says it, then it must be true.

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By Chris Meadows

On Newsweek, Malcolm Jones writes an interesting editorial pondering whether e-books might replace printed books, and if so, what will happen to libraries. Although, despite the mention of libraries in the article’s headline (“Farewell, Libraries?”), there is actually relatively little discussion of them within the article (even though one prominent library actually did ditch most of its print books recently, Jones never mentions it)—most of it is related to the same book-as-artifact vs. book-as-content discussion that is rehashed in every single argument over whether e-books are awesome or awful.

Expect this kind of thing to come up more and more, the bigger e-books’ market share gets, as more and more writers in the mainstream suddenly discover the issue and don’t realize it’s already been discussed to death. I will say this much for the Newsweek piece, though: it comes with a fairly nice infographic comparing the relative advantages e-books and printed books have.