February 2009

To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions.

Book publishing has many conundrums to solve in the coming decade, and not a week goes by without a long, thoughtful article in some major magazine about the impending collapse of the industry and its myriad causes: ebooks, Youtube, greed, television, gaming, big advances, returns, amazon, pirates, the Decline and Fall of Civilization.

The articles all revolve around this central and troubling question: “How can publishing maintain its financial viability when fewer people are reading books? Especially when everyone wants everything for free?”

This is going to be a tough question for publishers to answer, but it misses a more fundamental question, which is: “What do readers want, and how can we best provide it?”

I don’t mean: “What books do they want to read,” but rather, “What can we do to help people read more books?”

Full article here.

Where’s the beef?

In today’s New York Times op-ed. Blount, author of the popular title Alphabet Juice, confirms that “Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one.”

He continues, “And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing.” His beef is that the authors and members of the Author’s Guild, where he currently holds the position of president, are not receiving audio rights to Kindle 2’s robotic audio versions.

Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

Author Rosemary Wells made a lot of people feel good about themselves at the Staten Island Historical Society Literacy Leadership luncheon at the Excelsior Grand, New Dorp.

The creator of beloved characters such as sibling bunnies Max and Ruby stressed the importance of reading to children every day and praised the people who help make that possible.

“Without teachers and librarians, our world as writers would be very small. Because of you, the world of ideas is open to all children,” she said. The author of some 60 books lauded the society’s honoree, Robert (Bobaloo) Basey, for his work as a storyteller.

“When you go around to schools and libraries, you are a living book and that is a wonderful life to live,” she said.

Telling a story about building bridges, and performing his own exit music on a flute, Basey, a teaching artist and Stapleton native, expressed his gratitude for “getting a boost to hang in there. It’s a challenge with arts funding being cut.”

A major Max and Ruby fan, Robyn Busan, 7, was there to meet Ms. Wells. She is also a child who is being given, in Ms. Wells’ words, the “gift of thought and language” by being read to.

“I like that he [Max] doesn’t really talk much,” said the first-grader at PS 65.

“And he doesn’t listen,” said her father, Robert, who was obviously benefiting from the daily reading sessions he and his wife share with their daughter.

George W. Bush’s presidential library is taking shape in early designs, evolving from separate buildings at SMU into a single, multi-story complex with a policy institute nearly two-thirds bigger than first proposed.

Imagine bringing home a music CD from Best Buy and discovering that it will only play on some of your stereo equipment. Moreover, you’re limited in the number of times you can switch the CD from one stereo to another.

That is the kind of restriction and hassle that e-book enthusiasts face today, according to critics, because of the widespread use — misuse, they would argue — of digital rights management (DRM) technology.

In the high-tech industry, you live for the day when your product name becomes a verb. “I Googled him.” “She’s been Photo shopped.”

Amazon, however, is hoping that its product name, a verb, becomes a noun. “Have you bought the new Kindle?”

The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that’s not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.

A couple of factors made the Kindle a modest hit when it made its debut in November 2007. First, it incorporated a screen made by E Ink that looks amazingly close to ink on paper.

Unlike a laptop or an iPhone, the screen is not illuminated, so there’s no glare, no eyestrain — and no battery consumption. You use power only when you actually turn the page, causing millions of black particles to realign. The rest of the time, the ink pattern remains on the screen without power. You can set it on your bedside table without worrying about turning it off.

Full story in the New York Times

Today’s By Design/Shelf Life in the NYT celebrates real books in a real bookstore. You might be reading this online, but an architectural bookstore in San Francisco is a reminder that there’s nothing like beautifully printed matter.

Author Allison Arieff writes, “I felt so fortunate to attend a special presentation the other night: William Stout, owner of the eponymous architecture and design bookstore in San Francisco, had been invited to talk about his favorite books at Linden Street, a casual salon of sorts that aims to foster the design community in the city.

Bookstore owner Stout began with his favorite quote from Balzac: “I seldom go out but when I feel myself flagging I go and cheer myself up in Pere Lachaise … while seeking out the dead I see nothing but the living.”

It was evident that, surrounded by these volumes — some slim, some massive, some lush with color photography, some filled with impenetrable academic jargon — Stout felt inspired, in love, in awe, much as Balzac did wandering past the tombstones in that Parisian graveyard.

Some interesting comments including the fact that you can’t use a Kindle as a doorstop.

Stimulating Reading:

The starving of public libraries is just one piece of the problem, though. School libraries are shrinking too–sometimes there’s no money for books, sometimes there’s no money for staff and sometimes overcrowded enrollments eat up the space itself. Ideally, every public school classroom should have enough books for independent reading during school hours and also to lend out for home reading: vast numbers of low-income students have no other access to books.

Cory Doctorow isn’t writing about libraries, but I can’t help but want to apply this to libraries:

But just because an industry is socially worthy, it doesn’t follow that it is commercially viable. Today, besides newspapers, three other media are thrashing over their futures in a networked world, and as with newspapers, the rhetoric is mostly of the nonproductive “But I like it!” and “It’s good for society!” variety, with not enough thought given to whether these media are commercially viable in the Internet age.

Eric Schnell Wonders, Can High Density Barcodes Connect the Mobile Library User? High density bar codes like QR codes and Microsoft Tag can both serve a similar function: linking the physical to networked resources for either objects or locations. Librarians could put these bar codes on handouts could direct customers directly to databases, a journal article or a current bibliography. Codes on various physical services could lead customers to help and tip sheets. Codes on promotional and marketing materials could lead customers to library resources.