We’ve linked to stories about BookMooch – a website that allows book lovers to swap books free of charge – before, but here’s a more in-depth look at the site and its creator, the young high tech millionaire John Buckman.
Even though BookMooch is free to members, the site generates an estimated half-million dollars in annual book sales for Amazon because of a browser plug-in called the Moochbar, which matches members’ book wish lists to Amazon’s retail inventory. For every 25 books swapped on BookMooch, at least one person buys a new book on Amazon through the Moochbar. BookMooch collects 8.34 percent on each of those Amazon sales.
“We’re making money by accident,” said Buckman, who spoke recently at a technology luncheon near his home in Berkeley, Calif.
[…]
What’s more, within the next nine months, Buckman expects to have the inventory of books–distributed among its members–that would rival that of the largest book wholesaler in the United States. BookMooch now has an inventory of about 480,000 books among its 70,000 trading members, but at its growth rate it should rival Ingram Book Company’s 1 million books by early 2009, Buckman said.
Despite fears the internet could kill off the printed word, death by natural causes may be a greater threat to our literary heritage and Scottish scientists are searching for the cure.
A researcher from Strathclyde University has teamed up with the British Library to design a method of “smelling” the chemicals given off by decaying paper, hoping the technique will lead to an easy way to test the “health” of valuable or ancient books and ensure their survival.
Helped along by a team of scientists who are bottling the atmosphere of the British Library in small test tubes, Jim Levicki, a postdoctorate researcher at the university’s department of pure and applied chemistry, is working to isolate these chemical markers of degradation - the smell of which will be familiar to anyone who has inhaled the musty air of old bookshops.
[…]Levicki has designed a unique machine - bearing a gold panel dedicating it to his engineer grandfather, James Stuart - in which a book is left for 48 hours, to give off its odours. The chemicals that make up the smells are then distilled, isolated and examined using a mass spectrometer.
When the results are finalised, it is hoped a portable chemical “nose” will be designed that could, for example, sit on the end of the robot arms that fetch books from the British Library’s archive or be placed along the shelves to warn of the signs of degradation.
We see this as more evidence of a robot plot to enslave us all. Getting sick in musty old bookshops is a big part of what makes us human, for frack’s sake.
Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon’s Web site.
The move signals that Amazon is intent on using its position as the premier online bookseller to strengthen its presence in other phases of bookselling and manufacturing. Amazon is one of the biggest booksellers in the U.S., with a market share publishing experts estimate to be about 15%. Amazon doesn’t comment on sales.
The news appeared first on Writers Weekly, an e-zine for freelance writers. They have accumulated a huge number of links to stories about the move in the press and on the net and are providing daily updates.
The Music Genome Project has been dissecting songs since 2000, reducing them to a set of basic characteristics, such as the gender of the singer, pitch, and tempo. The theory is that once you know these objective details about a song, you can find – and presumably enjoy – others that are just like it.
And now Booklamp is trying to do the same for books. Its software scans pages and calculates the density, pacing, and levels of action, dialogue, and description. You plug in a book you love, and it spits out other books that are just like it. You can also specify other desirable characteristics to fine-tune the recommendations.
Here are some of our requests:
One Hundred Years of Solitude, but with all of the characters living in my spare bedroom.
It, but without the clown. That clown was too scary.
While the Canadian publishing industry is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward e-books, the U.K. industry seems to be chomping at the bit to get on board. According to The Bookseller, two of the U.K.’s biggest book retailers – Waterstone’s and Borders – are preparing to get behind e-books in a very big way, prompting publishers to step up the production of titles.
Waterstone’s is in talks with publishers about the supply of e-books, and is understood to be planning a July launch for its programme. Borders is gearing up to sell e-books from its transactional website, which launches in April. Commercial director David Kohn said: “We hope to have an [e-book] offer in place by the end of 2008.” Gardners is also ramping up its e-book delivery service.
Agents are being inundated with requests from publishers to clear e-book rights at speed. Philippa Milnes-Smith of LAW, head of the Association of Authors’ Agents, expressed concerns that authors were being “rail-roaded”. She said: “We understand where publishers are coming from, but we’re concerned for authors that they get the right remuneration, and also that e-books are published to the same standard as printed books. Our overriding imperative is quality not speed.” Publishers are looking for blanket clearance of rights, she said. “We treat authors individually, not as a job lot.”
The industry’s burgeoning enthusiasm for e-books is especially notable in that the U.K. doesn’t even have the big e-reading devices yet – the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are currently available only in the U.S. Basically, U.K. booksellers are just getting ready for the splashy U.K. launches of those devices later this year.
February 12, 2008 | 11:59 AM | By Michelle Collins
Advances in digital publishing have brought us to the ever-so-modern and high-tech production of what LibreDigital is calling book “mash-ups.”
The “mash-ups” are custom publications filled with content from several different sources and bound into one handy book. Using the eCompile Service, publishers can create custom publications for the truly demanding customer. LibreDigital is promoting their use for college textbooks and professional directories.
LibreDigital will announce the latest eCompile Service program at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York today.
Now that the crisis over parity and pricing has eased somewhat – at least for the moment – we can again turn our attention to a more pressing issue in books: how can we get them for free?
The easiest way to get free books is to work in publishing (or at, say, a publishing industry magazine), but there are millions and millions of readers – or, at least, thousands and thousands – out there who are not so lucky, and who are thus still paying money for books. And so, for them, here is the latest in free book news:
The New York Timesreports that a new online book show is due to hit the Web in March.
The program will be hosted by Daniel Menaker, former editor-in-chief of Random House.
The show, to be called “Titlepage,” will feature a round-table discussion between Mr. Menaker, 66, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, and a group of four authors. The first episode will be streamed online at titlepage.tv on March 3. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that it’s much easier to post video online than to get a show on television.
“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.
Created by documentary filmmakers Odile Isralson and Lina Matta, the program is set to feature authors Richard Price (Clockers), Susan Choi (A Person of Interest), and debut novelist Charles Bock (Beautiful Children) in its premiere episode, followed two weeks later by the second episode, on first-time authors.
Amid all the coverage of Apple’s new super-thin laptop and other plans, The New York Timeshighlights some choice comments from company founder Steve Jobs about the book industry. Apple is apparently looking to put the DVD industry out of business by offering virtual online movie rentals, but according to Jobs, the book business is beneath notice altogether.
Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
On the CBC Arts site, Sarah Liss writes about a new startup from a B.C. software developer. Protagonize, she explains, is “an online community devoted to the creation of ‘addventures,’ round-robin-style fiction in which users create and develop interactive stories.” It launched late in December, and so far, writes Liss, most users are creating stories in the Internet-friendly fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres.
However, this probably doesn’t represent the future of writing or anything. Creator Nick Bouton says, “Fun is the entire aim of the site,” while Liss describes it as “more of a Facebook-style community-interaction hub than a locus for creative development.”
For years it was impossible to even suggest that Amazon buy eBay because eBay’s market value was three or four times that of Amazon. And there was good reason for that: EBay’s margins have been far higher because it simply moves bits around, while Amazon has to move boxes (and take the risk of owning inventory it can’t sell).
Now the tables are turning. Amazon is in favor on Wall Street. Its shares are up 150 percent over the last year, giving it a market value of $38 billion. EBay’s stock has been flat for a year, and it is now worth only a little more than Amazon at $45 billion.
Amazon has been improving its margins, in part because it is increasingly acting as a broker for goods sold by other merchants (and doing a better job for new merchandise than eBay stores or eBay’s Shopping.com). Amazon’s margins, to be fair, have been hurt because it is paying for a lot of two-day shipping under its Amazon Prime program. Amazon also has a wild card in its growing sideline business of selling storage and processing services to other Web businesses.
The real question, as far as we’re concerned, is, “Should some restless and massively rich tech company looking for a little lit-cachet buy Quillblog?” The answer to that is also “yes,” provided that we are guaranteed total editorial freedom, paid handsomely and by the word, and that each contributor is provided with a summer residence located near water.
Reactions to Amazon’s new e-reader generally fall into two opposing camps: on the one hand, there are those who are shocked and appalled at the very notion, while others believe a wonderful new era has dawned. (We suppose a third camp could be made of people who don’t really care one way or the other.)
A cautious pro-Kindle article in the Los Angeles Times includes quotes from some publishing notables, including the New York Review of Books’s Jason Epstein and authors Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Franzen, who are heavily in the anti-Kindle camp. Franzen’s thoughts on the whole notion of e-reading, it must be said, make him look less like a defender of the simple virtues of the perfectbound, and more like a pretentious twit:
“People who care about literature care about substance and permanence […] The essence of electronics is mutability and transience. I can see travel guides and Michael Crichton novels translating into pixels easily enough. But the person who cares about Kafka wants Kafka unerasable.
Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”
[…]
“The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in a cathedral.”
There are a couple of points to be made here, while remaining Kindle-neutral: vows made in a shoe store mean just as much as those made in a cathedral (a point Matthew Yglesias makes in his blog at TheAtlantic.com); most people read Shakespeare in cheap, ratty, paperback student editions, not the Arden, and they are not any worse off for it; a lot of people listen to music on their iPods via files that are mutable and transient, but that doesn’t mean Beethoven and Bob Dylan and Kanye West and The Arcade Fire are themselves erasable. The portability of the medium does not necessarily have a retroactive impact on the creator of the content. If that were true, then this Quillblogger would be forced to apologize to the families of all the authors left behind on buses and streetcars or dropped in the bath and ruined.
Not that genuine, unpretentious criticisms of the Kindle itself are not being made. Even if one is to accept the near-blasphemous idea that words can be read on a screen as well as on paper, Amazon’s new device has some glaring shortcomings. The latest to be discovered is that, in some cases, the texts being offered for the reader are incomplete.
The device itself works fine. Yes, the screen could be more readable and it’s awkward to handle because the previous- and next-page buttons are much too big. (You can’t grab the device by its edges.)
I finished reading my first book on the Kindle yesterday (The Kite Runner), and the experience was fine. I really like the ability to preview any book by reading the first three chapters. Web access is clumsy because most web sites expect a much wider screen and clicking on links is roundabout and flakey, but it does work, it’s very fast, and it doesn’t depend on WiFi. Buying even best sellers for $10 or less is a great deal, as is the free web access.
But the problem is that the books are incomplete. I started the sample of my second book, Under the Banner of Heaven, and I noticed that the footnotes, marked with an asterisk in the text, were missing. (You’re supposed to be able to select them as hyperlinks, but they weren’t connected to anything.)
I checked another book I had in paper form, Einstein: His Life and Universe, and the only footnote that I could find in the sample seemed to be linked, although I couldn’t actually access it since it wasn’t part of the sample. Fair enough.
But The Path Between the Seas failed. A footnote was marked with an asterisk, but not linked.
I queried Amazon’s very responsive Customer Service, and they responded (on a Sunday!) with this: “Kindle Editions are electronic versions based on the original publication issued by the publishers. Occasionally, conversion of that content for reading on Kindle may require modification of content, layout, or format, including the omission of some images and tables and in this case footnotes.”
Well, I don’t want to read Kindle Editions, whatever they are. I want to read the books as written.
The latest news from the annals of text-message lit comes from Japan, where cell-phone novels – books composed on a cell phone’s cramped keyboard and consumed on its tiny screen – are producing bestsellers, emoticons and all.
The Sidney Morning Heraldreports that the phenomenon, called keitai shousetsu, is racking up some impressive sales numbers:
Remarkably, half of Japan’s top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way – on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined “to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture”.
Even more surprising, those figures refer to the sale of conventional, paper-and-glue books, not the text-message installments that are sent out to subscribers prior to the book’s publication. Here’s one keitai shousetsu editor’s rationale for why the e-book subscription translates into a physical sale.
It might seem strange that young readers are going out and buying the book after they’ve already read the story on their mobile. Often it’s because they email suggestions and criticisms to the author on the novel website as the story is unfolding, so they feel like they’ve contributed to the final product, and they want a hardcopy keepsake of it.
Too bad participatory novel-writing is the way of the future, not the past: this Quillblogger would have liked to have had a crack at, say, The Brothers Karamazov – another bestseller at the moment in Japan. Cut that sucka’ down to size!
Bad news, folks: new technology like the Kindle will enable the greedy, unruly masses to bankrupt the publishing industry as we know it. Glum futurist and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sounds the death knell on his blog:
Users may buy a book or two on Kindle, but many users will simply steal the content they want to read. Thanks to Amazon, that’s really easy to do on their slick new device.
Should users do this? No, and we do not encourage this. But will they? I think we all know the answer to that.
Good news, folks: the common decency of book readers, who understand that “[w]ider access to copyright materials and fair remuneration for rightsholders are not mutually exclusive,” will carry us over the shoals of the new digital age. Guardian blogger Penny Grubb keeps the faith:
The digital revolution is no different from any of the other new, unprecedented so-called threats to hit us. Everything’s new the first time it happens. Of course it’s faster, bigger, slicker, more efficient and encompasses the globe in a way we’ve never seen before. That’s the way the world works. It’s called progress. But not everything changes. Most people won’t knowingly break the law and will be happy to pay a fair price for what they use. All they need to know is what to pay for and how to do it. Of course, the how-to-do-it had better fit the falling-off-a-log model of 21st century convenience.
By now you’ve no doubt seen the long press release – er, sorry, Newsweek cover story – that announced the launch of the Kindle, Amazon.com’s new electronic reader. Elsewhere, though, bloggers and commentators have looked at some angles that Newsweek’s Steven Levy somehow didn’t get to in his nearly 5,000 words of “gee whiz.”
These include Amazon’s apparently heavy-handed approach to digital rights management (more on that here), the reader’s various technical and design limitations, and Amazon’s weird plan to charge Kindle users a subscription fee to access blogs, in some cases without telling or paying the blogs’ actual creators (more on that one here and here). Meanwhile, Q&Q art director Gary Campbell notes that in Amazon’s own demonstration video, “each line is fully justified, with no hyphenation! That makes for very gappy text, which is evidenced throughout the video.”
Watch Q&Q Omni later this week for a news item about what the Kindle doesn’t mean for the Canadian market.
The U.S. print-on-demand company BookSurge has teamed up with a website called Ancestry.com to come up with an ambitious new money-making venture, one which just might catch on. It’s a book series entitled Our Name in History, and it’s only available through BookSurge’s parent company, Amazon.com. According to the Book Publishing News blog:
The […] book collection was created using historical records [from Ancestry.com] dating from the 1600s to provide a blend of interesting facts, statistics and commentary about the history of the most common 279,000 last names in America. Now millions of Amazon.com customers can purchase a keepsake about either their own last name or that of their favorite actor, president or media mogul and have it printed on demand by BookSurge.
A quick look at Amazon’s website reveals that each title in the series looks virtually identical: an image of the Statue of Liberty adorns the cover, surrounded by oldy-timey black & white photos of happy immigrants greeting a brand new day. The only element that changes is the family name referenced on the cover. The first title listed, fittingly enough, is The Smith Name in History. There’s even The Zappa Name in History. There is not, however, The Joey Joe-Joe Junior Shabadoo Name in History, in case you were wondering.
October 3, 2007 | 12:48 PM | By Leigh Anne Williams
Former media baron and author Conrad Black has not been allowed to return to Canada following his conviction on fraud and obstruction of justice charges in the U.S., but he is finding other ways to reach out and touch the citizens of the country he once renounced.
Last night, Black appeared on CBC’s Rick Mercer Report doing a Martha Stewart-style celebrity tip on the proper techniques for waxing brightly coloured fall maple leaves. In the sketch filmed at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, he wryly suggested that it is necessary to press the leaves in books first, using weighty volumes such as his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or his latest of Richard Nixon, The Invincible Quest, for instance.
Showing off the results of his efforts, he added:
Here we have a perfectly waxed maple leaf, a great solace to everyone and especially to those who, for complicated reasons, can’t at first-hand observe the changing of the seasons this autumn in Canada. (Canadian Press)
Black is scheduled to make another appearance in Canada via Margaret Atwood’s LongPen at Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore on the evening of Oct. 15 to autograph copies of The Invincible Quest.
Depending on how many books Black might write if he is incarcerated, the LongPen may be a useful tool for any future book tours.
October 3, 2007 | 11:39 AM | By Leigh Anne Williams
Quillblog plays social convener today by introducing our book-loving readers to some book-loving podcasters with whom you may not be acquainted. Just One More Book is a thrice-weekly podcast created by an Ottawa couple, Andrea Ross and Mark Blevis, in which they discuss their favourite children’s books. The parents of two daughters, the couple hopes to build a resource for parents looking for good children’s books and an interactive community of interested children’s lit fans.
Just One More Book launched in July 2006 and already has an extensive author archive. Earlier this year, the couple was interviewed by Literary Safari and explained how they created their podcast:
Mark started Podcasting in 2005 and quickly became engulfed in the hobby. Some time later, his passion for Podcasting turned into the equivalent of a second and third job, and in June 2006 we attended the Podcasters Across Borders conference in Kingston, Ontario (Canada); an event attended by similarly passionate hobbyists. At this point, Andrea, a long-time kidlit enthusiast, decided that it was either “get a Podcast or get a divorce.” Just One More Book launched in July 2006 – an obvious marriage of two passions.The challenge was to find a way to work the recording into a normal and sustainable routine. Since our morning ritual was to catch-up with each other over a coffee after dropping our daughters off at school and before going our separate ways to work, we decided to build our recording into our routine and focus our coffee time on discussing a great children’s book from our own collection.
Not content to be sidelined by the literary establishment any longer, Amazon announced on Monday that it is teaming up with Penguin Group to launch a new prize for unpublished novelists. Appropriately, the “jury” is composed of amateur reviewers and established editors, who will award the top prize of a Penguin publishing contract and a US$25,000 advance:
… contestants from 20 countries [including Canada, except for residents of Quebec] can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow the field to 1,000. The full manuscripts of those semifinalists will be submitted to Publishers Weekly, which will assign reviewers to each. Amazon will post the reviews, along with excerpts, online, where customers can make comments. Using those comments and the magazine’s reviews, Penguin will winnow the field to 100 finalists who will get two readings by Penguin editors. When a final 10 manuscripts are selected, a panel including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the current nonfiction paperback best seller Eat, Pray, Love, and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, will read and post comments on the novels at Amazon. Readers can then vote on the winner …
Whether the formula is hopelessly baroque or refreshingly democratic remains to be seen, but its complexity seems to confirm one thing: clearly, scouting literary talent is a subtle art.
The New York Timeslooks at a couple of new e-book platforms set to launch soon. One of them is Amazon’s Kindle, which “will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.” And Google, which has been digitizing books behind the scenes for a while now, is reportedly set to start cashing in:
Also this fall, Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database, according to people with knowledge of its plans. Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google. So far, Google has made only limited excerpts of copyrighted books available to its users.
Times reporter Brad Stone shows some skepticism, recapping the long history of the stalled e-book revolution and asking early on “whether consumers really want to replace a technology that has reliably served humankind for hundreds of years: the paper book.” But he also suggests that things could change with Amazon’s new gadget: “Several people who have seen the Kindle say this is where the device’s central innovation lies — in its ability to download books and periodicals, and browse the Web, without connecting to a computer.”
Quillblog can’t help but wonder, though, if that function is really the missing piece of the puzzle for consumers. After all, the iPod has taken the world by storm despite the fact that it requires users to manage its contents via their home computers (at least, it did until this week, when Apple released a new wireless-friendly model).
Of all the traditional complaints about e-books – that they are hard to read, can’t be read in the bathtub, don’t actually resemble books, etc. – there is one that has never before been addressed, perhaps because most people assumed it was a point in favour of e-books: the fact that they don’t smell. Specifically, that they don’t smell like old books.
As it turns out, for a whole lot of students – the most lucrative potential market for e-texts – the smell of a book matters. And the older the better.
This is the very failing to be remedied by online e-book provider Café Scribe. According to a press release on its web site, the company will soon be providing e-book users with scratch-and-sniff stickers that give off the odour of a musty, old tome.
Though the target market is students for now, we see these stickers being an in-demand item for ex-used bookstore owners and librarians who are having difficulty adjusting to civilian life. It would be like a nicotine patch for recovering bibliophiles.
At a Friday seminar, Kris Abel, CTV’s resident tech expert, looked at some of the electronic-reading platforms currently on the market and forthcoming. He pointed to:
Manybooks.net, which offers e-books in almost any format for greater consumer ease; most formats are variations of XML or PDF, with the latter the most common so far.
Mobipocket.com, an online store that offers free software to allow readers to transfer e-book text to their computers, cellphones, Palm, and Blackberry devices.
The Iliad, which uses “electronic ink” technology to mimic the texture and feel of paper. However, the electronic ink technology means a high price (about $700) and makes the device unsuitable for other uses like watching movies.
Amazon.com’s rumoured “Amazonkindle” reader, which was to have wireless capablility; Abel speculated that its release was delayed or scuttled by Apple’s announcement of the iPhone.
The iPhone itself doesn’t have e-book capabilities yet, but Abel said that’s a likely development and labelled it as “the device to watch,” with a “deliciously high-resolution screen” and touch screens instead of a keyboard. The phone comes with four or eight gigabytes of memory.
At the moment, the Sony Reader, sold for about $350, is a leader among the gadgets. Although it is not available in Canada yet, it is being sold at stores such as Borders in the U.S. as well as in Sony stores. It has a six-inch screen and supports Sony files but can also read PDF files.
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates delivered a lengthy speech about the future of media and advertising last Tuesday at a conference in Seattle, and he spent a fair portion of it talking specifically about the future of print. Seattle-based technology blogger Todd Bishop has posted several excerpts from Gates’ speech, including this one:
Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. […] Somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.
Not that Gates would be biased toward technology or anything. A more convincing examination of the future of e-reading can be found on the Guardian’s website, where author and technophobe Andrew Marr writes about his month-long experience using the iRex Iliad, which has been touted as one of the first truly usable e-readers on the market.
(Thanks to Quillblog reader Jennifer Lambert for pointing out the Gates link.)
Peter Darbyshire, author and columnist for Vancouver’s The Province, has decided to set free his first novel, Please, by making it downloadable from his website. Please, which was originally published by Raincoast in 2002, won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, as well as the K.M. Hunter Award for Best Emerging Artist. On his blog, Darbyshire writes that he decided to make the book freely available because copies of it were becoming hard to come by through traditional retail channels. (Though it is still technically available online at Amazon and elsewhere.)
More and more authors, such as Cory Doctorow, are opting for the free route right off the bat, figuring that a wide readership is better than the paltry income likely to come from a regular publishing deal. Setting free a book that has gone out of print or that has dropped out of sight retail-wise seems to be an even easier decision to make, one that could potentially give a book a second life, albeit a likely non-remunerative one.
Letting go of anything is tough, however, and perfect-binding is probably tougher to let go of than most.
This week’s Friday photo comes courtesy of Gene Wilburn, who took this shot of Robert J. Sawyer reading a chapter from his new novel, Rollback, on his handheld computer at the book’s launch at Bakka Phoenix bookstore in Toronto on April 14.
The May issue of Q&Q, in stores now, contains a cover profile of Sawyer. Read a review of Rollbackhere.
Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.
BookNet Canada, the agency that, among other things, tracks books sales across Canada (the data that Q&Q uses to assemble its bestseller lists), has started a blog. In the latest entry, BookNet president Michael Tamblyn makes an interesting point about the kinds of titles available for download to the Sony e-book Reader:
Have you ever rented a cottage or stayed in an inn or hostel where owners and past guests have left books on the shelves for your reading pleasure? It is usually a mixed bag of thrillers, mysteries, romance novels, maybe some history, sometimes some real wildcards and surprises. You don’t have a lot of choice, but you do get this strange snapshot of what people read when they’re on vacation.
Getting books for the Reader at the Sony Connect store had a similar feeling. As I browsed around looking for titles, I realized that I was seeing a composite picture of the consumers that publishers believe are reading digital books. At the moment, they appear to be a group of randomly selected airport travellers. Lots of thrillers, mysteries and romance novels. Some science-fiction. Plenty of business books and sports titles.
One book Tamblyn would like to have available in digital form while on vacation is Thomas Pynchon’s 1,000-page 2006 novel Against the Day. Unfortunately, it’s not available for download.
Quillblog would humbly like to suggest that part of the problem Tamblyn faces may be due to his definition of a “cottage read.” Remember: Thomas Pynchon in town, Stephen King in the country.
The only catch — you’ll need a scanning electron microscope to read it.
At 0.07 mm X 0.10 mm, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town is a tinier read than the two smallest books currently cited by the Guinness Book of World Records: the New Testament of the King James Bible (5 X 5 mm, produced by MIT in 2001) and Chekhov’s Chameleon (0.9 X 0.9 mm, Palkovic, 2002).
(By way of comparison, the head of a pin is about 2 mm).
The production of the nanoscale book was carried out at SFU by publisher Robert Chaplin, with the help of SFU scientists Li Yang and Karen Kavanagh. The work involved using a focused-gallium-ion beam and one of a number of electron microscopes available in SFU’s nano imaging facility.
With a minimum diameter of seven nanometers (a nanometer is about 10 atoms in size) the beam was programmed to carve the space surrounding each letter of the book.
Not to belittle the accomplishment, but it has occurred to Quillblog that Teeny Ted, written by Chaplin’s brother, is probably somewhat shorter than the King James Bible, and maybe even than Chekhov’s story.
That quibble aside, the other pressing issue, considering that 100 copies of a signature edition are available from the publisher, is this: once you buy it, where do you keep it so that you can find it to read at bedtime?
The Alice Munro retirement dance continues. The Toronto Star’s Judy Stoffman keeps the story alive with a new piece reminding readers that Munro said back in October that she’s completed four more stories yet to be published, and after that, that’s it. “And at a recent event held at the World’s Biggest Book Store,” writes Stoffman, “where Munro read to the Toronto gathering long-distance and signed books using Atwood’s LongPen, readers pleaded with her to continue writing, but to no avail. She said she is done.” So Stoffman has written what feels like a legacy piece, quickly outlining Munro’s career and accomplishments. However, she still hedges a bet or two, noting about Munro’s retirement, “Her friend Margaret Atwood and editor Douglas Gibson don’t believe she means it.”
November 24, 2006 | 12:00 AM | By Leigh Anne Williams
Charles McGrath has been “test driving” the lastest e-book device from Sony and has reviewed it for The New York Times. Although the technology has come a long way, he says, the Sony Reader still needs some work: “It’s small and lightweight — about the size and heft of a pocket notebook — and, in a quaint little nod to the antique technology, it comes housed in a leatherette cover that actually makes it look like a book. But once you flip open the cover, the controls to operate the thing are maddening.”
McGrath’s complaints and compliments often come together:
The screen is not backlighted, which also saves on juice but nevertheless seems a regrettable throwback to the Gutenberg era. When it comes to reading in bed, the Reader and the traditional book work equally poorly.
McGrath does praise the Reader’s capacity, noting that it can hold about 80 books, or more with a memory card. But even if you weren’t thinking of putting a Reader in someone’s Christmas stocking, the review itself is an entirely entertaining read.
The Financial Times reported last week that a U.S. news service has designed computer programs to write stories for them.
“Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice,” according to the article. “The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public.”
The computers pen stories about “whether a company has done better or worse than expected …. by using previous results in Thomson’s database.” They’ve been 100% accurate so far, but the stories are a wee bit on the dry side, so a project to integrate more adjectives into their programs is in the works.
Thomson’s senior vice-president of strategy says that using the computers will free up their reporters to “have more time to think.”
Yeah — more time to think about how a robot could steal their beat.
CNET News’s Gagdet Blog reported yesterday that Sony has shuffled the release date of its PRS-500 eBook reader back yet another season. Once promised for spring, then summer of this year, an e-mail update from the company is now promising that eBook fans can get their hot little hands on it sometime this autumn.
According to the blog posting, “The e-mail attempts to lure fans with a peek at sample titles that will be available upon the PRS-500’s release, such as The Da Vinci Code, Freakonomics and others hanging out in the top 25 of The New York Times best-seller lists. Of course, if you’ve already polished off these titles, Sony promises 10,000 more eventually, with 15 categories and 100 subcategories.”
That Sony: they’re doing more bait-and-switch than a prom date.
We do everything with our iPods, from watching television shows to storing photos, so it isn’t that surprising that reading books on ‘em might not be too far behind.
The blog engadget has reported that they’ve gotten word from “trustworthy insiders that Apple’s not satisfied merely vending Audible’s books-on-digital-audio solution” and that, in an effort to combat the forthcoming iRex iLiad and Sony PRS-500 Portable Reader, the company is jumping on the eBook bandwagon, as evidenced by the fact that “[a major publishing house] was just ordered to archive all their manuscripts — every single one — and send them over to Apple’s Cupertino HQ.”
Another trusted source let them in on the fact that “the next iPod will have a substantial amount of screen real estate (as we’d all suspected), as well as a book reading mode that pumps up the contrast and drops into monochrome for easy reading.” Plus, you’d get to keep the eBooks you bought — presumably through iTunes — forever.
All the better to keep the world’s noses stuck in yet another piece of technology, right? Ah, well — better they catch up on their James Joyce than watch yet another Desperate Housewives re-run.
Margaret Atwood’s LongPen is set to wow crowds at BookExpo America in a couple of weeks, but at least one commentator is unconvinced of its appeal.
Author Stephen Henighan attended the failed test signing at the Bookshelf in Guelph in early March, and was struck by the low turnout for an event that was billed as historic. “The forty numbered tickets designated for the general public were not exhausted at the time the event was called off,” Henighan writes in his column in Geist magazine. “If Margaret Atwood came to Guelph in person, The Bookshelf could not contain the crowd. The reading would have to be held in the church across the street and the organizers could charge admission and still fill the building. (This happened when Ann-Marie MacDonald came to Guelph.)”
Provocatively, if dubiously, Henighan also draws some parallels between Atwood’s entrepreneurship, her writing, and her very culture. “By enshrining the author as a remote talking head, [the LongPen] harks back to an older vision of the writer as inaccessible authority figure,” he writes. “The device’s conception is counterintuitive to the logic of virtual culture. LongPen recapitulates the yearning for distance rather than engagement, ironic detachment rather than emotional involvement, that characterizes Atwood’s fiction; it evokes the diffidence of traditional southern Ontario WASP culture.”
Author and publicity machine Margaret Atwood has been getting written up all over the world for her novelty device the LongPen, a machine that allows authors to sign their books and speak to their fans from thousands of miles away via a robotic arm and video display panel. This past weekend was supposed to be the “Marconi moment” that would see the device used for the first time, linking Atwood, in a booth at the London Book Fair, to a crowd of fans at the McNally Robinson bookstore in New York City. The only problem was that, at the last minute, the LongPen broke down, leaving Atwood to apologize to the fans with a few trademark quips — “The first helicopter didn’t work either” — before promising to sign the books the old fashioned-way — with a ballpoint, in person.
Wall Street Journal media reporter Jeffrey Trachtenberg gives the Media Bistro site his take on a few of publishing’s recent hot topics, including technology, genre trends, and someone named James Frey. He also discusses the blog-to-book phenomenon, suggesting that while a blog may not be a guarantee of authorial success, it probably can’t hurt. Says Trachtenberg: “It is a significant advantage for authors to have what the industry calls a ‘platform,’ be it a show on radio or TV, a newspaper column, or, increasingly, a popular blog. Book publicists can only do so much.”
British author and columnist Robert McCrum has a longish think piece on The Guardian site on the perpetually impending e-book revolution. McCrum begins the piece by arguing the inevitability of a culture-wide shift to easily stored digital books, implying that printed books will go the way of the illuminated manuscript — beautiful artworks to be savoured by an elite of book collectors. The only thing preventing the bookish equivalent to the iTunes revolution, according to McCrum and several tech geeks quoted in the piece, is a viable platform from which to view and access digital books. McCrum points out that this problem is as old as the e-book itself, but claims that it is only a matter of time before someone invents a platform that mimics the printed page. But McCrum hedges his bets near the end of the essay, asserting that although “there is every reason to want to see the printed word enhanced by something more in tune with current information technology,” there will always be people who love the look and feel and smell of a real book.
In the “what will they think of next” category, Paris has instituted several book vending machines, through which book lovers can find their favourite read at any hour of the day. But as Jenny Barchfield of the Associated Press writes, the machines are still trying to keep their product classy: “Installed in four busy Metro stops and a chic street corner in central Paris, Maxi-Livre’s distributors were designed to bypass the characteristic vending-machine-drop, which can be punishing for books. ‘We knew that French bibliophiles would be horrified to see their books falling into a trough like candy or soda,’ [Zavier] Chambon said. ‘So we installed a mechanical arm that grabs the book and delivers it safely.’”
Earlier this week we posted a link to a Robert McCrum column decrying the publicity demands that big-time authors must endure. Now, Canadian online commentator Alex Good has weighed in with some perspective, addressing both McCrum’s oh-the-indignity complaints and, yes, Margaret Atwood’s electronic signing machine, the Unotchit, designed to spare authors the junk-food regimen of the publicity tour. As Good notes, “There are less well-known authors who would gladly trade places and eat the Pringles.” And to McCrum he says: “Movie stars have to do it. Sports players have to do it. Why not writers? If you’re going to profit from the publicity (and let’s not forget these people are promoting themselves, not just ‘the industry’) there are some things that can fairly be expected of you.”
Margaret Atwood’s invention of a remote book-signing machine — first reported in the January issue of Q&Q and later picked up by The Globe and Mail and The Guardian, among others — is now starting to draw reaction from other authors. And so far the watchword is “skeptical.”
U.K. star Neil Gaiman writes on his online blog: “The way I see it, the whole point of a signing is to be able to say hello to the people who buy the books and for them to say hello to you, and for them to know that you picked up that book and scribbled something illegible on it.” And on his own blog, U.S. author Neal Pollack agrees: “I got into this business to write first and foremost, but also to be part of some sort of community of people who share my enthusiasms and interests. That’s not going to happen if I’m signing books remotely from home with the help of a robot that, by Asimov’s fifth law of robot proxy, is ultimately bound to betray me.”
The Alice Munro retirement dance continues. The Toronto Star’s Judy Stoffman keeps the story alive with a new piece reminding readers that Munro said back in October that she’s completed four more stories yet to be published, and after that, that’s it. “And at a recent event held at the World’s Biggest Book Store,” writes Stoffman, “where Munro read to the Toronto gathering long-distance and signed books using Atwood’s LongPen, readers pleaded with her to continue writing, but to no avail. She said she is done.” So Stoffman has written what feels like a legacy piece, quickly outlining Munro’s career and accomplishments. However, she still hedges a bet or two, noting about Munro’s retirement, “Her friend Margaret Atwood and editor Douglas Gibson don’t believe she means it.”