The publishing industry: this week in quotes

“Many people in the beleaguered industry are hoping that [The Apple Tablet] will do for reading what the iPod and iTunes did for music. A survey among booksellers claimed that an Apple e-reader would one of the main factors that will help push digital publishing forward.” – Thomas Rogers via Salon.com

“The fact is: My septuagenarian mother is delighted with her first-generation Kindle and my sixty-something-year-old mother-in-law is delighted with her Kindle 2 and my 14-year-old nephew is delighted with his iPod touch…If I were to guess, out of all the aforementioned people who already own devices, the only one likely to spend money on an upgraded device anytime soon will be my teenage nephew. That’s not a very large percentage of current owners willing to re-invest in this newest generation of devices, the ones we’ll be hearing about over the next week.” – Edward Nawotka, in an editorial on publishingperspectives.com

“Writing about writing is the best way I know to discover what I think about a book and what I think about what other people think about it. Sometimes reviews bring new readers and sometimes they don’t. Tony Hoaglund’s book Donkey Gospel published by Graywolf didn’t receive one review yet became widely read. A positive or opinionated review in the NYTBR can bring many readers, but reviews in smaller magazines do not have much effect.” – poet Emily Warn, on Lemon Hound

“I spend an inordinate amount of time doing nothing. I don’t even think it can be called daydreaming.” - Joyce Carol Oates, via Paris Review.

“I’m beginning to see just how irrelevant our prejudices about new technology really are. Books are wonderful partly because they have been an unchanging corner of our lives in a world that thrusts change on us every day. But anything that reassures us by being constant should also make us anxious, because there are no exceptions anymore — everything is being transformed in the digital age.” – Peter Scowen on the Globe‘s book blog

Amazon’s Kindle 2: “An alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization.” NOT!

At least, not according to author Nicholson Baker, who has written a long, occasionally pedantic article about his experiences with the machine for The New Yorker. The piece is full of typically florid Bakerisms: he likens the Kindle 2 to “a restaurant accordion,” refers to the “gray and Calvinist” typeface it employs, and complains about the page-turning deficiencies of the Kindle 1, which are “accompanied by a distracting flash of black as the microspheres dived down into their oil-filled nodules before forming new text.”

But the article is occasionally quite funny – offering, among other things, the title of an erotic novel that features “the mother of all orgasms” – and is a welcome respite from some of the more tech-oriented responses to the digital device. Baker offers an infuriating quote from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (“We think reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device” – yeah, that would be THE BOOK, you chucklehead), and compares switching from an iPod Touch to a Kindle 2 to “going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.”

Baker’s ultimate conclusion is that the Kindle 2 is a viable reading device if the book is compelling enough to make you forget the device itself. He uses the example of Michael Connelly’s thriller The Lincoln Lawyer:

I began pressing the Next Page clicker more and more eagerly, so eagerly that my habit of page turning, learned from years of reading – which is to reach for the page corner a little early, to prepare for the movement – kicked in unconsciously. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all. I was trying to hurry the Kindle. You mustn’t hurry the Kindle. But, hell, I didn’t care. The progress bar at the bottom said I was ninety-one per cent done. I was at location 7547. I was flying along. Gray is a good color, I thought. Finally, I was on the last bit. It was called “A Postcard from Cuba.” I breathed an immense ragged sigh. I read the acknowledgments and the about-the-author paragraph – Michael Connelly lives in Florida. Good man. The little progress indicator said ninety-nine per cent. I clicked the Next Page button. It showed the cover of the book again. I clicked Next Page again, but there was no next page. My first Kindle-delivered novel was at its end.

Your e-book speculation for the day

It’s a shame Canadians still can’t experience the apparent bliss that is Amazon’s Kindle 2 (despite the release of that iPhone app that would doubtless work perfectly well on Canadian models), but that hasn’t stemmed our interest in all the commentary on e-book readers, like that which came out of a recent publisher’s conference in Britain.

Meanwhile, American author Steven Johnson’s piece from The Wall Street Journal is perhaps the first article this Quillblogger has read that makes an e-book reader sound like something worth owning:

A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I’d bought and downloaded Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty. By the time the check arrived, I’d finished the first chapter.

This has obvious benefits for publishers, says Johnson:

Amazon’s early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it’s not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you’re at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and — voilà! — you own it.

Bookmarks: Shopping lists, the iPhone Kindle app, and the $1-million French novel

• For those who thought the old adage was a joke: William S. Burroughs’s shopping list showed up on eBay (and was purchased for $400).
• Do female novelists write about sex less skillfully than men? Author Jane Vandenburgh believes so.
• A French novel that has already divided audiences in Europe (and which was picked up – at a price tag of $1-million – for North American publication) has been reviewed by The New York Times. The Kindly Ones is “a fictionalized memoir of a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather.” Oh-la-la?
• Amazon has released a free app that allows iPhone (or iPod Touch) users to read e-books originally developed for the Kindle. At last, Canadians can experience what they’ve been missing!

Shortcovers set to launch tonight

While nerdy Americans await delivery of their Kindle 2s, nerdy Canadians can console themselves by trying Indigo’s new Shortcovers service. The ambitious e-book service – which allows users to download titles to their cellphones or personal computers for anywhere from $9.99 to $19.99 – launches tonight (or tomorrow, technically) at exactly one minute after midnight. You can see Q&Q Omni‘s previous coverage of Shortcovers here, you can get a sneak preview of what to expect here, and if you’re the early-adopter type you can go here tonight to actually download something.

Waiting for the Kindle 2

Amazon’s Kindle 2 began shipping to eager U.S. technophiles earlier this week, and while few consumers have actually received the device as of yet, the anticipation is reaching ridiculous levels. According to an article on Computerworld – which appears to have been researched solely by perusing online forums – many Kindle 2 customers have begun posting copies of their Amazon shipping notices online, as a sort of badge of honour.

“Oh joy, joy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” a customer from Texas using the name Elsi wrote in a Kindle forum on the MobileRead community site.

“Add my voice to the collective cheer, to all who [are] about to get a Kindle 2. Enjoy!” wrote another user going by the name Joobies in the same forum. The thread began on Sunday, when a user named Lilly posted a copy of her Kindle 2 shipment notice from Amazon.

Elsi, Joobies and several other commenters on the forum compared notes on how much they paid for shipping and the exact day that they hope to receive the reader. Others promised to share their reactions once they activated the device.

As the Computerworld piece goes on to note, a few consumers actually had received the devices Tuesday, including somebody identified as tvBilly, who “misses the rubber on the back of the Kindle 1″ but finds the Kindle 2′s new charger “the best thing since sliced bread.” Another user, named Frank of Doom, writes:

“I was clever enough to have mine delivered to my office. It’s sooooooo pretty! First impression is very positive, I love how the page buttons tilt in when pressed instead of out, feels much more solid. Not sure I’m going to get much work done today.”

Kindle 2 not coming to Canada

This week, Amazon unveiled Kindle 2, but the thinner, sleeker e-reader is still not available in Canada. That means Canadians will have to wait to read Stephen King’s lastest novella, which is a Kindle-only exclusive. The National Post reports:

The company still has a number of issues to solve before the device can be sold [in Canada], including Canadian digital publishing rights and electronic distribution negotiations.

“The book publishing industry in Canada is not up to speed in terms of what is available in the number of titles [online],”  [Amazon.ca spokesperson Margaret] Antkowski said. “Secondly, because it has WiFi capabilities, there has to be an agreement with the providers – the Bells of the world, the Rogers of the world. That’s one of the things that’s standing in the way, and they’re working on that.”