publishing

Thursday various

  • Putting every New Yorker on paper.

    Artist Jason Polan has an ambitious goal: to sketch all 8.3 million people in the city. He captures his unsuspecting subjects eating pizza, riding the subway, catching a train.

    Hmm. I wonder if I’m anywhere in his sketchbook. [via]

  • Looking for another reason not to like “textbook sociopath” Ayn Rand? Apparently she was a big admirer of certain serial killers. [via]
  • Roger Ebert: class act. [via]
  • It’s not a “late fee,” it’s just money you owe if you don’t bring back the DVD on time.
  • And finally, a great interview with Ursula K. Le Guin about the Google Book Settlement and why she’s opted out:

    I’m part of the technological age whether I want to be or not, and mostly I enjoy it very much. I’m not protesting technology — how stupid would that be? Writers against Computers, or something? I’m protesting against a corporation being allowed to rewrite the rules of copyright and the laws of my country — and in doing so, to wreck the whole idea of that limitless electronic Public Library.

    I think the Google Library could do a lot of good. I think the way Google is going about it will do a lot of harm. [via]

Wednesday various

Getting a read on e-books


Proof that reading can be dangerous

What follows is a long and possibly rambling post about e-books, e-readers, and publishing in general. You have been forewarned.

I think I’ve more or less decided to wait before buying an iPad. At least until the early adopters have reported on its problems (and moreover their fixes), if not until version 2.0 is released. But the naysayers out there notwithstanding, I am extremely tempted. I’ve signed up to be notified when the first models are available for order, and though it’s no small investment, I may have to talk myself down from buying one when that notification arrives. I do, after all, have a birthday coming up in late March, and really it is very pretty and shiny…

Okay, so maybe it’s safe to say I am still a little undecided.

Because I think it’s a genuine innovation, a reasonably affordable cross between a laptop computer and an e-book reader. Obviously it doesn’t have all the features and capabilities of the former, and you can find plenty of people whinging about that online, but I’m not yet convinced that that actually matters. That it doesn’t have a camera certainly isn’t a dealbreaker for me — I think I’d prefer it without one, actually — and while its inability to play Flash is perhaps troubling, given how reliant the web is on that medium right now, it’s debatable just how much longer that will be an issue. I don’t view the iPad as a replacement for my personal computer, but as a lightweight, portable, and internet-ready extension of it. It’s easy to affect an air of being unimpressed, but as Stephen Fry noted after first testing the device:

I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.” And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.” And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”. I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.

The device isn’t perfect, heaven knows, but it does look pretty darn cool. I’m not naive enough to think it will change everything, but I do think it’s a game-changer, or will at least make the game a whole lot more interesting and complicated going forward.

Take, just for starters, the fact that it’s a color e-book reader. We’ve seen a tiny few of those in the past, but none at these prices, nor with the iPad’s added features. I like the E-Ink screen of my Sony Reader, and I do have serious questions about the experience of reading longer books on a LCD screen. (Although not enough to really consider an e-ink knockoff like this one.) But there are simply some huge benefits to a color (and wider screen) when it comes to publishing, not least of all from a design standpoint. (And that’s even without discussing how it might affect newspaper and comics delivery.)

Graphic designer and book cover artist Chip Kidd talked about this at some length back in May of 2009. “Frankly, what would make me worried,” he said then in conversation with Jian Ghomeshi, “is if Apple decided they wanted to do it.” Aesthetically, the iPad represents a much more inviting interface for reading than the Kindle ever will, and it offers a wider assortment of design options. “I mean, the Kindle has one typeface,” Kidd added. As a designer, that’s kind of pathetic.” It’s hard to get around the fact that, right now, e-books are kind of ugly. But, as Sene Yee, Picador’s creative director, recently told Wired, “It won’t stay ugly forever.”

The truth is, I still don’t buy very many books on my Sony Reader. Like Jonathan Strahan, I think it’s mostly useful as a tool for reading slush. I upload all the submissions I get for Kaleidotrope to my Reader, rather than print them out or spend uncomfortable hours reading them on a computer screen, and that was in fact the deciding factor in my getting an e-reader in the first place. But, with only a few exceptions, the books I’ve read on it have been free downloads from the publisher. I think this is actually a great way for a publisher to introduce a book or author, especially when they’re promoting a new book in a series and can easily make available the first book to whet the reader’s appetite. This is how I started reading Naomi Novik and Charlie Huston, for instance: at sites like the Suvudu Free Book Library, the publishers made His Majesty’s Dragon and Already Dead available for free, and they hooked me on the respective series. It’s worth noting that, while Amazon doesn’t advertise this fact too much, most of their top e-book “sellers” are free, too. (This complicates the already very complicated “What should e-books cost” question that’s ramped up quite considerably with the recent Macmillan vs. Amazon pricing kerfuffle.)

I still buy a lot of physical books, and I’m not above occasionally fetishizing them as objects. (Though I have nothing on Chris McLaren in that department.) And yet an e-reader that can more closely mimic that physicality, both in relative size and appearance, definitely piques my interest. There are a lot of books I want to keep on a shelf because they’re gorgeous in and of themselves, or because I have some personal connection to them, and for that buying an ink-and-paper copy still makes a lot of sense. There are books I want to read but not own, and for that there’s always the public library. But there are other books I want to own, for easy and repeated reference, for which I don’t necessarily need a physical copy that I’ll have to tote around every time I move. (Or replace after wear and tear.) Every e-reader, including my Sony one, gives me that last option, but the iPad is intriguing because aesthetically it feels a lot more like a book.

Obviously there are still a lot of questions about e-books, and also about the iPad, left unanswered. Will Apple’s new reader usher in a Huxleian nightmare, where “we’ll all be at the mercy of one of the world’s biggest control freaks”? Will it create a bizarre “future where applications and data in the cloud are more our own than the computers on our desks”? Will it actually enable creativity? Does the brain even like e-books? Heck, I work in publishing, and e-books are still pretty much a guessing game even for us.

But I do think the iPad has the potential to change things pretty substantially. Am I as over-the-moon about it as Stephen Fry was? No, but I do think he might be right when he says:

You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.

For now, I’m still not sure if I will have one. But I’m definitely still considering it. Heck, this whole post has pretty much just been an excuse for me to dither about that a little longer. For now, I’ll just leave you with two more videos, two of my favorite recent “book trailers.” The first is for the New Zealand Book Council and is pretty stunning; the second is for a short story in Electric Literature #1, Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You.” It was enough to get me to buy the issue.

Although it now occurs to me I probably should have bought the e-version.

Thursday various

  • “I will come and find them and kill them so dead I’ll murder their ancestors!” Yeah, that sounds like Harlan Ellison.

    I don’t think he’s being completely unreasonable, despite the typical fervor of his invective. The publisher might have been tempted to rewrite his blurb, and I don’t think it should have done so without his permission. (We edit author endorsements at work all the time, usually for length, but also for other reasons, like if it repeats words or phrases used in other blurbs or in the book’s description. But we always ask the endorser’s permission first.) But I do note with amusement, as others do at the link above, that Ellison’s alter-only-under-pain-of-death endorsement contains a spelling error.

  • Some rookie mistakes: advice for first-time novelists. [via]

  • At the beginning of the year, I made the odd — and, given that I work in publishing, probably self-defeating — pledge not to buy any new books in 2010. I did this for one reason: to compel me to get through the mountain of as yet unread books that I already own. (“Mountain” here being a relative term.) Yet it seems like every day, there’s a new book — or, in this case, set of books — that I’d like to own. I may just have to break down and declare this pledge, this moratorium on buying new books, a failure. [via]

  • Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yeah, but only the boring stuff before 1877. [via]
  • And finally, How to Report the News. [via]

Monday various

  • I think the most interesting thing about this new Dante’s Inferno video game — which itself sounds pretty silly, a mashup that misses the point of both sides — is this quote:

    “We look at companies like Walt Disney, where they’ve got intellectual properties that feel like their own, but are based on literature from a time gone by,” said John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’s chief executive. “A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start.”

    Because it underlines that Disney made it big by adapting well known tales it didn’t originate (from the very beginning, actually) but nowadays runs for its lawyers anytime someone tries to do the same to it. This is nothing new, but shouldn’t Mickey Mouse be, you know, out of copyright by now?

  • The headline reads, After Taliban hit supplies, Army chef serves up 42 days of Spam. [via]
  • You can keep your fart noise generators, this is the only iPhone app I’d really love to have. If they make it available for the iPad, I may just have to break down and buy one.
  • “A third of all children aged five to 16 are convinced that the body of one of their teachers has been taken over by an extra-terrestrial being.” Tell me, can you prove that they haven’t? (Then again: “The survey was commissioned by 20th Century Fox to coincide with the release of Aliens In the Attic on DVD.” So, you know, grain of salt and everything.) [via]
  • And finally, I’m basically just copying this from Making Light, but I agree that Cat Valente makes maybe one of the best arguments for why we still need publishers in the world of e-publishing:

    Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

    And writers would line up at their door.

    I’m obviously biased, since I work as an editor (for a smaller textbook and professional publisher). But sometimes, there’s a middleman for a reason.