Nice to have. I find that I only really enjoy using SafariBooks Online on the iPad. Their DRM consists, really, in reproducing the printed page in a way that makes it downright unpleasant to work with their books on a computer: that is, the books are not simply transformed into easy-to-use HTML. Instead, you have flippable pages. Even though I am getting more use out of the platform than I ever have before — and I have been paying %10 a month for a while now — I find myself considering canceling because the usage is so limited. (I’m told the mobile interface is the way to go, I will check this out later.)
All posts tagged books
If I were to set up my own business right now, it would be built around an old-fashioned, mechanical printing press. Minibuk is not doing that, but they are offering people the chance to publish their own books, but real paper books, not e-books. They offer perfect bound, spiral, and saddle-stitched bound books. They are all the size of a small index card, 3 x 5, and intended, from what I can tell of their own promotional materials, as promotional materials themselves. Want people to remember you? Hand them a small book after your talk. It’s an interesting idea.
I like knowing the outcome of things in which I am deeply involved. And so I am trying my hand at designing the basic layout for Genius Loci. What amazes me is how much I have forgotten: I paid off my graduate school debt working with Pagemaker, which is InDesign’s antecedent — Adobe having bought the application from Aldus, or acquired Aldus (like they would later acquire Macromedia).
Here are some useful links:
- A Site about Nothing has a nice page which gives the basics of getting type to sit on a baseline and capturing it with paragraph styles.
Bookbinding Circa 1961. 12 minutes long. Black and white footage. Factory tour. Part of the “Americans at Work” series.
Here’s yet another future for the book. From what I can tell, most of the futures look pretty much the same. Sliding, zooming, etc.
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
The Open University has made the software stack behind their Open Learning initiative available for download. It’s on SourceForge. I have yet to try it out: it’s a Windows executable, but I hope to do so when my own university makes it possible to download and install Windows software.
My genre fiction of choice — apart from hating the term “genre fiction” and the way it marginalizes with a single otherwise useful word like genre what amounts to the majority of fiction sold and read — is science fiction. And one of my science fiction writers of choice is Iain M. Banks. It turns out there may very well be a few more fine Scottish science fiction writers, all of whom might be worth examining:
As well as one other British newcomer:
Business books are an interesting genre. In another life, I would love to have participated in something like critical business studies that took its cue from critical legal studies. (Maybe this field exists?)
That noted, I have to admit that I have read enough of the books in my time that I recognize the role many books have as consulting pitches and not really as standalone commodities. That’s perfectly acceptable. In some cases the humanities pursue a similar economy: scholarly books aren’t really published for the raw sales numbers they will accumulate but more for citations and/or speaking engagements, which are very similar economy to consulting.
And so when a book titled Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
Kevin Kelly observed recently that in the era of authors being able to self-publish through Amazon, especially self-publish e-books that do not come with the same kind of distribution costs as paper books, the 99-cent book becomes a viable way to make a living. His example is of an author who had a book priced at $2.99 and was selling 40 copies day. When he dropped the price to 99 cents, he sold 600 copies a day. (How long this lasted is not clear.)
Shortly after moving into our old house, my wife and I stepped into the wonderful maze of the remaining independent bookseller in Lafayette that also happened to be in our neighborhood. Inside, in one of those lovely moments of finding something from your past, I came across a copy of Alistair MacLean’s South by Java Head. As an adolescent reader, I had rapidly run through my father’s collection of MacLean novels. They were, in a way, my next step after the Hardy Boys.
I had read the Navarone books, and I remembered reading a whole lot of others, but I had never read South by Java Head, which was MacLean’s third published novel. Strangely enough, it was a lot like one of my favorites of MacLean, The Golden Rendezvous, which I had carried with me as a battered paper back through many years of graduate school. Reading South by Java Head scratched an itch and it didn’t spur me to read more of MacLean for a while. A few years went by and I found myself purchasing a few more here and there, but I wasn’t drawn to read them. Not until this past summer when something about being in the new house returned me to MacLean and I read The Golden Rendezvous (again), Ice Station Zebra, and Night Without End.
And now I am reading The Secret Ways, and my initial response is that I like South by Java Head and The Golden Rendezvous better. Unlike the other books, at least those I have re-read so far, SbJH and TGR do not feature professional spies as protagonists but rather capable men simply caught up in larger events. It may be no accident that both men are executive officers of merchant ships. MacLean was himself a sailor: his first book H.M.S. Ulysses was, I believe, based fairly closely on his naval experience. Perhaps he is at his best when imagining himself caught up in larger events.
Another response is that MacLean’s prose, when he is at his best, is quite good. Better than Clive Cussler. I am listening to Cussler’s The Chase right now as an Audible book, and I have listened to two of the books from the Oregon Files series. Cussler’s prose really can’t be even described as workman-like, for at times it is so — clumsy? awkward? — that it actually gets in the way of itself. (Please note that I am quite sure Cussler doesn’t care one whit about evaluations of his prose style: the man has produced a remarkable oeuvre not only in his “only-author” books but also in the franchises he has set up with other authors. He is able to do so because readers have come to expect a certain kind of book from him and his name is a trustworthy brand to deliver that content. I should be so industrious and smart as Cussler … I just wish I could edit him here and there. That’s all.)
I read both MacLean and Cussler less as an English professor and more as a writer: Could I do this? Could I pull off this plot line? How would I do it different? What story can I tell? What do they do well that I could imitate/use in my own work, no matter whether it is nonfiction or fiction?
I have no idea if there is any scholarly treatments of either author. Ian Fleming has certainly achieved a certain status now. Perhaps it is time to give MacLean his due. I wonder where he fits within the larger chronology of the development of the spy thriller or whatever one calls this genre that also includes the work of Cussler and Robert Ludlum — remember his three word titles? — and later folks like Tom Clancy and I suppose now Dan Brown(?).
The Wall Street Journal has a nice review of John Szwed’s biography of Alan Lomax, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. (I can’t link to it because the WSJ just makes it too difficult.) In that weird version of journalism where the review is really a summary, here are some of the highlights (the good):
Capturing such performances and the stories they told was a lifelong obsession for Lomax, who wandered America and the globe in search of the sounds of traditional music endangered by the very technology he used to record them for posterity. His travels took him from his native American South to remote outposts of the Caribbean and across the ocean to the British Isles and the fishing villages of Italy and the mountains of Spanish Basque country. His work spanned six decades, from the Depression all the way to the 1990s. (Lomax died in 2002.) He began his career gathering songs with a 300-pound disc-cutter in the back of a Model A and ended it using hand-held video cameras for backwoods documentaries. No matter what the gear, Lomax never wavered from his mission—to find evidence that the world’s poorest places offered some of the richest cultural treasures.
and (the bad):
The staggering output came with a heavy cost, dooming Lomax’s first marriage and other relationships as he followed his collecting compulsion, often working himself to the point of physical collapse. A charmer and a bully, an antiacademic who depended on educational funding, a man equally at home in a straw hut in Haiti and at a White House reception, Lomax was a controversial figure, often accused of exploitation and grandstanding. He made enemies well beyond the field of folklore, not least the FBI agents who trailed him for years on account of his radical politics. An early file report depicts “a very peculiar individual in that he is only interested in folklore music, being very temperamental and ornery. . . . He has no sense of money values, handling his own and Government property in a neglectful manner.” Even so, Lomax had fiercely loyal supporters in high places, ranging from Margaret Mead to filmmaker Nicholas Ray, and he has been a revered mentor to several generations of historians, including Mr. Szwed.
The review is by Eddie Dean, who himself is co-author of the biography of Ralph Stanley’s Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times.
Once upon a time, while I was taking in break from graduate school and working as a management consultant, I took the time to teach myself how to make paper and to make books — though I later took a class in bookbinding, because trying to learn how to sew a perfect binding from illustrations is not easy.
Now I find myself ready to teach my daughter, and perhaps some of her classmates, how to make something which they may interact with fairly little as adults.
What I never had in my little studio apartment was a proper press for my leaves of paper. I found a nice one at Dick Blick, but given its simplicity I think I could probably make it:
Arnold Gummers Papermaking Paper Press at Dick Blick's
Alexander Chee’s meditation on his collection of books and on how to shelve them in his new apartment makes for an interesting companion piece to Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Unpacking My Library.”
Google’s eBooks has finally emerged from its Google Book shell:
Today is the first page in a new chapter of our mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale.
The full post is here.
In the most recent issue of Museum Anthropology Review, there is a review of Chris Caple’s Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past. (Please note the link is to the HTML version of the review, but a PDF version is also available.) The reviewer, Jeb Card, does a good job of laying out the strengths and structure of the book, which strikes me as being somewhat divergent from my own interests in material culture. That noted, it did send me to Amazon.com to see what a search on history of the world in objects would turn up. It’s an interesting mix:
First up there is Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects, which he describes as follows in the introduction:
In this book, we travel back in time and across the globe, to see how we humans have shaped our world and been shaped by it over the past two million years. The story is told exclusively through the things that humans have made — all sorts of things, carefully designed and then either admired and preserved or used, broken and thrown away. I’ve chosen just a hundred objects from different points on our journey — from a cooking pot to a golden galleon, from a Stone Age tool to a credit card, and each object comes from the collection of the British Museum.
The next book, and I’m only going to sketch out the top three because the focus of the search results rapidly deteriorates past the first six hits, is Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules–for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. Gilbert Taylor, of Booklist, describes the book thus:
Only the supremely self-confident put forth all-encompassing theories of world history, and Morris is one such daredevil. An archaeologist by academic specialty, he advances a quasi-deterministic construct that is suitable for nonacademics. From a repeatedly enunciated premise that humans by nature are indolent, avaricious, and fearful, Morris holds that such traits, when combined with sociology and geography, explain history right from the beginning, when humanity trudged out of Africa, through the contemporary rivalry between China and America. Such temporal range leaves scant room for individual human agency: Morris names the names of world history, but in his narrative, leaders and tyrants, at best, muddle through patterns of history that are beyond their power to shape. And those patterns, he claims, can be numerically measured by a “social development index” that he applies to every epochal change from agriculture to the industrial revolution. However, the reading is not as heavy as it may sound. His breezy style and what-if imagination for alternative scenarios should maintain audience interest; whether his sweeping perspective convinces is another matter altogether.
Finally in the top three is Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By, by Anna Jane Grossman and James Gulliver Hancock. The title gives away the fact that the book is breezily nostalgic, as the product description notes: “Obsolete contains essays and entries on more than 100 alphabetized fading subjects, including Blind Dates, Mix Tapes, Getting Lost, Porn Magazines, Looking Old, Operators, Camera Film, Hitchhiking, Body Hair, Writing Letters, Basketball Players in Short Shorts, Privacy, Cash, and, yes, Books.”
An interesting collection. It moves in short order from the serious to the silly rather quickly, with a trip through the future along the way. All three books have been published in the past year: the first two in 2010, and Obsolete in 2009. Clearly, along with making, there is a rise in interest in objects. Given this search result, it’s just not clear that we know what to do with objects, or, conversely, objects can do just about anything.
