Posts Tagged: books

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2
Mar 12

eBooks Are Stuck at Suck

Some of the digerati are all atwitter, pun intended, over the recent rejection of Seth Godin’s book from the iBookstore because, and this is from an iBookstore reviewer, there are links embedded in the titles of books mentioned in the text that lead to the Amazon bookstore. Now Godin’s essay does not reveal whether the same books are available in the iBookstore or if it was the case that they are not and the only way to link to them was to their listing on Amazon. Now, mind, I also agree that he doesn’t need to link to them at all — surely readers/users could cut and paste titles or authors and search wherever they like — but it could be argued he was offering a convenience. (I also don’t know if the links involved an Amazon promo code which would given him a commission.)

Let’s set all of these considerations aside for a moment and simply admit this: the current state of things has two publishers emerging as dominant in the eBook landscape, Amazon and Apple. Stunningly, these two are also dominant publishers across a broad range of media: music, video, applications. During this transitional period, each is jockeying for at least a substantial share of the market and/or a dominant position in the market, which means they want to give away as little as possible for fear of making it easier on their competitor.

Equally stunning is how the old media companies — both book publishers and the video industry (here I am lumping together both film and television content producers because it’s all becoming video at this point) — are encouraging the two to create walled gardens because they are banking everything on keeping their content locked down in the belief that copying is going to undermine their business. By encouraging the erection and maintenance of walls, however, they are only making it harder on consumers and easier on Amazon and Apple to keep playing hardball with each other, which also trickles down to consumers.

Some brief examples will suffice, I think, to reveal how stupid this situation is:

  • In order to read books from both Amazon and Apple on my iPhone, I need to have both their respective apps on my phone, iBooks and Kindle. Not terribly a bad thing, but I also have to keep Stanza and GoodReader around because you never know what file the first two won’t open. If I was given a choice in the matter, I would choose Stanza for eBooks alone or GoodReader for any reading whatsoever. Both are better than the proprietary applications. But I need the proprietary application in order to open the proprietary files.
  • In order to read books from Amazon and Apple (or from any non-Amazon vendor like O’Reilly) on my Kindle, well, I have to download the book and then email it to my Kindle. The only non-Amazon vendor for which this does not suck is Pragmatic Programmers who are smart enough to e-mail it for me.
  • In order to view video from iTunes or Amazon on my iOS device … oh, wait I can’t view any Amazon video on my iOS device. I can only view it through a browser on my Mac OS computer. (To be fair, I don’t know if Android devices also have this problem.) I can, however, view my iTunes videos on Windows PCs — but probably not on the Kindle Fire.

The short of it is this: too many either/ors. When family and friends ask me about which eBook reader to buy, I really can’t recommend either an iPad or a Kindle right now. In my own household, we have both, but we have been underwhelmed by the fact that my wife and I can’t loan Kindle books to each other, and so we are thinking about merging accounts or simply switching to a new joint account — which would perhaps also allow us to give things to our daughter.

Now, none of this was a problem in the world of physical artifacts: books and DVDs circulated easily in our household. I know content producers are terribly worried about the prospect of me having a copy and then giving someone else a copy, but they also seem terribly excited by the idea that they can force us each to pay for our own copy.

And so my conclusion for now is: they all suck.

UPDATE: Mathew Ingram over at GigaOM wrote much the same thing two days ago. Oh well.

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24
Feb 12

→ Nicholas Carr: Why publishers should give away ebooks

Carr’s argument is, in part, that the music industry is already doing this: buy the atoms (the physical copy) get the bits (the digital copy). It is also, in part, the sense that many of us have: why do I have to pay twice for the same content?

I am a big fan of both Pragmatic Programmers and O’Reilly because both will bundle bits with atoms, or atoms with bits, for a discount that varies by title. In fact, O’Reilly deserves an especial tip of the hat for their recent move to make buying eBook versions of some of my shelf favorites so easy and so affordable. ($5 for a number of my favorite titles.)

Sometimes I want paper, sometimes I want my phone or my Kindle or my computer. The publishers that give me that choice will quickly become my favorites. (And so I am buying more books from O’Reilly in particular.)

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6
Feb 12

Platform Lists

Nothing too new in David Kazzie’s report, which is delightfully detailed, that getting in Amazon’s KDP Program was a boon to sales of his ebook. It echoes pretty clearly comments made recently by Marco Arment in his 5by5 podcast that the one, true, way to insure success was to get on the App Store’s recommended or top lists. Historically, this is not unlike being on the Billboard charts or the NYT Bestseller lists, but in this case the list maker is also the distributor, who also happens to be the store owner. To some degree, this is the much sought after disintermediation that some internet advocates have championed, but are we so sure that getting rid of all the middle men is a good idea?

Did we learn nothing from the scouring out of middle management that happened in the 80s and 90s that left corporations trying to “manage knowledge” — because it turned out that that was what a lot of middle managers did?

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24
Jan 12

Safari Books Online Keyboard Commands

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.)

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26
Oct 11

Minibuks

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.

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18
Aug 11

Designing a Book

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.
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6
Aug 11

Bookbinding Circa 1961

Bookbinding Circa 1961. 12 minutes long. Black and white footage. Factory tour. Part of the “Americans at Work” series.

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21
Jul 11

Another Future of the Book

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.

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22
Jun 11

Interactive eBook Production Software

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.

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23
May 11

Scottish Science Fiction

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:

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3
May 11

Tribal Leadership

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 crops up on my intellectual/professional radar I am intrigued. How substantial will the book be? How well will its use of tribes articulate with domains of knowledge that I hold near and dear? I haven’t read it, but I will keep an eye out…

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22
Mar 11

The 99-cent Book

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.)

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6
Feb 11

Re-reading Alistair MacLean

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(?).

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27
Jan 11

Alan Lomax, Catcher of Songs

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.

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7
Jan 11

Paper Press

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
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