Tidbits

As you can imagine, without David Rothman around,  posts have been less frequent.   Here are some things you may have missed.

Roger Cohen begins a column about Sarah Palin by noticing that Rudyard Kipling has a lot of relevant things to say. (I offer  the public domain links here and here are some PG links).

In case you missed it, Motoko Rich had a piece on Sunday about using video games to hook readers.  I have fond memories of playing Dungeons and Dragons (whose books and modules were always gorgeous and highly readable). Each manual sparked players to find out more information…maybe to read about medieval weaponry or Greek legends or falconry or whatever. The problem with videogames today is that they are too structured by the particular gaming engine. (Pardon these superficial thoughts; check out Grand Text Auto for a more erudite discussion about games and books). About Rich’s article, Mac Slocum comments:

The anti-game contingent noted in the Times piece is falling into a familiar trap: assigning value to a container instead of content. The container trap was innocuous in years past because the audience (consumers, students, etc.) was limited to passive acceptance of a few choices. Now that digital delivery empowers audiences to naturally gravitate toward material they deem worthwhile, shoehorning people into a particular form diverges from bigger goals. If you want to accomplish something — be it literacy improvement or creation of sustainable revenue streams — you need to go with the audience grain, not against it.

Adam Hirsch on the “American literature is not worldly enough” Nobel pseudo-controversy:

As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater—as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.

Andrew Seal thinks this is a simplistic analysis and points to Ted Gioia’s entertaining Alternate Nobel Prize list (which includes prizes to Lem, Bradbury, Conrad, Borges, Bob Dylan, Updike, Kundera, etc).  M.A. Orthofer surveys the literary blogosphere for the party game called guess-the-next-Nobel-prize winner).

Gwen Dawson revisits the question of the difference between a novel and novella. My definition of a novella: any print book containing at least 10 blank pages.  (Of course, there is a movement to bring back blank pages to the web–I can’t tell if it’s a joke or not).

I don’t know if David already covered this when he blogged about Richard Herley a few months ago. Here’s his discussion of how authors can make a profit in this new century:

Without the author, there would be no publishing industry – no Quiggins or Craggs, no Barabbas, no agent, no hard-nosed buyer from a bookshop chain. Book-printers and binders and their suppliers would have to find other jobs to do. The government would be deprived of income; the Gross Domestic Product would not be swelled by publishers’ overseas earnings: the film rights, the TV rights, the Harry Potter merchandise and all the rest of it.

A book needs an author and a reader. Everyone in between is secondary, yet the reader must buy their groceries and pay their taxes. That is why Jane’s book costs so absurdly much in the shops; that is why Jane is living in poverty.

(6 months ago Herley wrote a piece for Teleread about why literary agents should welcome the arrival of ebooks. He just published another novel and is putting one of his recent novels the Penal Colony on a RSS feed for free download starting yesterday)

Mike Cane criticizes Stephen Poole for considering his book giveway a failure.   Cane writes:

A major deterrent is that the file format is PDF. PDF is hell. Putting something in PDF is tantamount to saying you don’t want anyone to read it. Even Sony has had to acknowledge that PDFs on its Reader isn’t a gratifying experience and has been working on improving the way PDFs are handled (and even then, that improvement is dependent upon the type of PDF formating! Some PDFs might never work enjoyably.)

The number of people who left a tip was equal to 0.057% of the number of downloads. Well, what did he expect? What makes any writer think download = sale? Have any of them ever had any exposure to direct mail marketing? For all he knows that 0.057% could equal a huge percentage of the people who actually wanted and actually read the book. I say again: total number of downloads is meaningless when trying to draw a conclusion about target-market penetration. There are people out there who will download practically anything that’s free. There are digital packrats just as there as physical hoarders. What matters is getting to the intended audience and once that’s accomplished, tallying the results. What’s wholly unmentioned here, and this statistic would be revealing, is how many people went to the download page, saw the subject of the book and declined to download it?

For the record, I read Trigger Happy 7 or 8 years ago and thought it fascinating. Now it’s a free download. See also his recent articles about culture for British media.

On the ebook front, Patrick George reports plans by UT to offer free electronic textbooks for a test project:

“Because of the cost of books, 20 percent of students can’t or won’t buy the text,” said Kevin Hegarty, UT’s vice president and chief financial officer. Courses in chemistry, biochemistry, marketing and accounting will use e-textbooks in the pilot program, which could cost $300,000 to $400,000 for an academic year andinclude about 1,000 students during the 2009-10 school year, Hegarty said.

“If we can improve this model and get enough professors and publishers interested, we can drive textbook costs down to half … what the average student spends on printed textbooks,” Hegarty said.