Counterbalance

Lit Bits and A Bit About Big Red (or Blue or Gray) Books

• Kindle offers lending and a Facebook group springs up to swap Kindle books with strangers. Will be interesting to watch this develop.
• How many things can you find that are wrong with this 5 E-Book Trends that Will Change the Future of Publishing post? I'd say way more than five, but that's just me. Days later, this still irks me.
• I'm so focused on the reading I didn't finish in 2010 that I'm a bit slapped up side the head about how good 2011 reading is looking. Colm Tóibín, DFW, Chris Adrian, Joanthan Evison, Donald Ray Pollack, Julian Barnes, Nicholson Baker, Marisha Pessl, Haruki Murakami, Péter Nádas and so many more. To simply scan The Millions' list of writers with something new out this year is...whoa.
• I'm still working my way through the NYT Why Criticism Matters piece. You?
• I'll be starting The Instructions tonight as part of the roundtable discussion we'll have here in the coming weeks. I can't help but feel I (and by extension, you) have bitten off more than intended. But it's the beginning of the year, and if we can't find the momentum for this feat now, will we ever? I'll be posting intial thoughts and some broad outlines of what we could do for discussion and posting if we choose. It's up to you.

Writing Whilst Buying Shoes

In the November/December issue of Poets & Writers - The Indie Innovators issue - Adrian Versteegh has a brief piece on the challenge writers have in shutting out the noise of the internet so they can get some writing done.

The usual suspects are cited, from Jarod Lanier of You Are Not a Gadget to Nicholas Carr of "Is Google Making us Stupid?" and The Shallows fame. Write Room, Dark Room, Q10 and Writespace are noted as vital tools that allow one to write without the distractions that TweetDeck and Facebook and Tumblr throw up in unwitting writer's ways when all they really want to do is get back to their plots.

All good. All well. All fine. I get it. (Other than, um, why have most "distraction-free" options opted for a horrific green screen vibe? Must distraction-free also mean design-free? Pfft.)

What I loved most, however, is Wells Tower's approach. He "maintains two separate writing spaces: one with an Internet connection (for research and magazine work), the other without." The money quote?

"It's difficult to write good sentences and simultaneously buy shoes."

Indeed. Yet, I try in vain to accomplish said feat on an alarmingly regular basis.

Rentership: The Lending of Digital Books

In this month's issue of WIRED, Chris Suellentrop has a fantastic piece on Rentership and the inevitable benefits afforded to renters during times of great financial contraction and phenomenal technological expansion. As I read his article, I thought immediately of eBooks and the many #bib10 discussions we've recently had about the sharing of digital books. I also recalled many discussions about the future of our favorite independent bookstores and that selling books can't, in any successful long-term future, be the sole source of their revenue.

So it was rather delicious to read Suellentrop's final summation:

"For the rest of us, we’ll always own some things. There’s stuff we use all the time, like furniture and clothing, and objects with sentimental value (take your stinking paws off my Yoda figure with plastic snake). But the Internet is creating markets that enable us to own much less. The winner of the ebook sweepstakes will be the bookseller who becomes a bookrenter. I don’t want to own hundreds of books on a Kindle at $10 a pop. I want to Netflix them — pay for access to every book ever published. I’d rather be a renter in Borges’ library than the owner of my own."

I read this at 1am a few nights ago. Damned if I didn't dance a little jig while the rest of the house slept. I'm not crazy after all. Or if I am, at least I'm in very good company.

A More Measured Look at eBooks?

USA Today has just published a piece about eBook adoption and eBook sales and offers a more measured approach than, say, Negroponte who proclaimed yesterday that printed books would be obsolete in five years.

While this piece doesn't hit every note, it certainly attempts to and offers both sides of the eBook argument for both publishers and consumers. Two sections of note:

"An estimated 4 million U.S. homes have an e-book reader such as Amazon's Kindle or Barnes & Noble's Nook, according to Forrester Research, which predicts sales of more than 29 million devices by 2015.

In a Harris poll conducted in August, 8% say they have an e-reader; 12% are likely to buy one in the next six months. But 80% say they're not likely to do so.

Those results "ratify that using devices for something (reading) that doesn't require a device at all, and has worked perfectly well for centuries, may not be of obvious appeal to the bulk of readers," says Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Lunch, a digital newsletter.

Michael Norris, an analyst with Simba Information, a market research firm, also questions if a tipping point has been reached.

He sees "gradual, uninterrupted growth in e-books, but tipping point implies there will be something overnight which will instantly change the character of the publishing business. Thousands of new consumers are showing up in the e-book 'yes' column every day, but on the other hand, there are still over 120 million people who buy print books."

Fair enough.

"Grove/Atlantic's Morgan Entrekin says that "the change will not happen as fast as it has happened in the music business or even in the newspaper and magazine world." He sees a substantial market for physical books for at least another 20 to 30 years, "but eventually, 30, 40 or 50 years from now, e-books will be the predominant form."

A more measured approach than Negroponte's? Or just as extreme but on the opposite end of the spectrum?

Allen Ginsberg's Howl & eBook Formatting Nonsense (or, HTML is Hard)

I am agog. I am aghast. (Yes, I listened to the Les Misérables soundtrack a bit too much growing up. Another post for another day.)

When I first read that Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems would soon be available as an eBook, I immediately worried about formatting. It's not a secret that various digital book formats have had typos, spelling errors and odd pagination issues. But an entire collection that includes Howl? A classic poem that at its very core relies upon line breaks? I worried. Yet another part of me thought, well good on them. Surely no one would deign to digitally publish Howl without being sure that formatting was properly sorted.

Hah.

Yesterday brought news that all my format fretting was not in vain, as Howl looks like hell on Kindle.

I tweeted my frustration. Others did too. What does this say for eBooks if we can't get basic things like formatting right? Why create such hullabaloo around this digital release if you hadn't properly checked formatting on every device? Why is it that publishing sits so far outside the norms of what is required to launch something digital? 

I've spent my entire career working at digital agencies. I have war stories about site launches that would make you weep. At any digital agency responsible for launching digital stuff there is Q&A. Tons of it. On multiple platforms. In multiple browsers. We have entire teams devoted to it. We don't launch with errors or people get fired. We don't launch with errors or clients lose sales. We don't launch with errors that anger our clients' customers. They look bad, we look bad. The customers get mad. It's triple bad. So we have systems in place to prevent these errors. If there are too many errors and we're nearing launch date? Guess what? We work all night for weeks on end to fix it or we move the launch date. We don't just ship and cross our fingers. 

But I was getting worked up and yesterday was long. Eventually, my frustration subsided after several long Twitter sessions and I focused on other important things. Like launching sites without errors. And reading James Salter's Dusk and Other Stories which cracked me wide open with its devastatingly clean stories full of ache.

This morning brought news that the reason Howl looks like hell on Kindle is because HTML is hard. See paragraph above. We don't just ship and cross our fingers. And we sure as hell don't say that there were mistakes because building websites is hard. Why? Because we should not be in the business of building websites (or launching digital books) if we don't know what we're doing. Period.

So why is publishing, now playing the digital game, somehow outside these basic digital launch tenets? Surely they have folks who build their websites. Agencies who launch every author site, hound litbloggers to write about the latest book touted in their ePressReleases, build and code their next viral book trailer. So why can't these same teams help Howl out?

What am I missing? Is there some cosmically difficult step in turning a digital file into an eBook that renders basic HTML code unreadable? Who is advising these publishers on fixing this problem? Today's revelation that HTML is hard and that there are no resources to help out is laughable. Quality HTML coding skills are among the cheapest and most plentiful to find. So why is this so difficult? 

What. Am. I. Missing?

Update: I was recently directed to this insightful piece on eReader incompetence - it adds a much-needed additional layer to the discussion as it touches on formatting issues of digital magazines and iPad apps for those magazines. The piece also states quite plainly what we've been discussing in the comments: "If most ereading software doesn't offer a better experience than simple HTML and CSS, why are so many publishers reinventing the wheel?" Indeed. Definitely worth a read, especially as we wrestle with eBook formatting that finds HTML and CSS to be a challenge.

The Future of The Book: Possible or Im(possible)?

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

I'm hardly someone that takes pleasure in saying something can't be done because I live at the intersection of big thinking and "yes, we can do that" for my clients. I'm also an advocate for wondrously wondering what's possible when it comes to technology and how it might change the way we read. So of course, The Future of the Book from IDEO has me thinking about huge possibilities. If I'm honest, though, I keep thinking that at least part of this looks like fantastic ideas that don't make a ton of sense when you think about how people read now and how they may read in the future. It could be disruptive thinking & tech in the best possible way or it could just be cool ideas that don't translate to consumer behavior. Much more to say on this, but wanted to start the dialogue. What do you think?

Kindle's Collective Highlights: Creepy or Cool?

I noticed it awhile ago, but only while reading Mr. Peanut by Alex Ross (another post for another day) did I begin to feel its presence acutely. Kindle has a feature that allows you to see how many others have highlighted a certain passage within the text you are reading. An example of this, from Mr. Peanut, is below. You can see that "10 highlighters" have used the Kindle feature "Add a Note or Highlight" to underline this passage on their own Kindle or in the Kindle app on iPad:

 

My initial reaction when I heard about this feature before seeing it in action? Kind of cool. I love used books for exactly this reason. Other people's highlights are my secret shame. They're electronic ephemera minus the receipts and scribbled phone numbers and funky sticky pages. I also thought (rather snarkily, if I'm honest) that finally all the eBook naysayers would begin to see that perhaps there is something to this eBooking after all. That perhaps some of the features that are soon to roll out may ultimately get more people excited about reading and, well, that's a personal quest of mine so I was amped up to see this new feature for myself.

I can't remember precisely when I first noticed the feature (somewhere back in the LAT Book Awards haze of reading like a madwoman mid-May?), but I did think it was kind of cool at first. As in, oh look at that, someone else thought this passage -- this very passage that I'm highlighting -- was worth highlighting too. Kind of cosmically cool, as if we are all connected. Sort of. If you squint. For whatever reason, though, the books I've been reading since that first flirtation with the collective highlight feature didn't have very many of them so I didn't think much about the feature until I began reading Mr. Peanut. Oh Mr. Peanut and your many, many highlights.

The Technology Will Save/Kill Us

I've had many conversations over the past few months about the frenzy that's taken hold of so many in publishing and those in the broader conversation about books. I'm sure you have too. The alarmist attitude is what's...most alarming. I've much more to say on all of this, but in order to really get a sense of how the freak-out has ramped up in recent weeks, it seems a solid foundation of the madness is required before we can begin to talk about all of this in earnest. I stopped doing link roundups long ago, but the pace of this "oh no technology is killing us" meme has me reconsidering. I'd like to archive the madness somewhere and I can't think of a better place to start doing that than here.

Here, then, is a roundup of recent links that run the gamut of the "this is so good" to "oh no it's all over for books" madness I'm fascinated with. I expect this will be one of many such roundups in the coming months:

• E-Books Make Readers Less Isolated from NYT
• Moving On from Seth Godin
• Ads in Books Debate Divides Twitter from GalleyCat
• iPads & Kindles are Better for the Environment Than Books from The Washington Post
• E-Book Price War Absurd from The Bookseller
• The Billionaire and The Book Lover from New York Magazine
• Books Have Many Futures from NPR

I've got a ton more, but this is as good a place to start as any. I may even get uber-crazy and start a scoreboard for pro & anti tech articles...that's how nutty it's all become. 

What headlines have made you want to pull your hair out lately?