The Daily Lit
Gizmodo breaks down how easy/difficult it is to get published on various ebook devices:
Now that the iPad has captured 22% of the eBook market in it’s first 60 days, authors are clamoring to get their books into the iBookstore. What most are finding out is that publishing on the iPad is no simple task. Where Amazon has had 3 years to make publishing eBooks on Kindle a snap, Apple is just now clunking up to speed. The publishing process on iPad is almost not worth it, until you weigh in the fact that the iBookstore is now available on over 3 million iPads and all iPhones with the new iOS4-that’s a potential audience of over 40 million people. That’s right, it’s not just eBooks on the iPad anymore, it’s seamless distribution through the iPhone, too. Add to this a major push by Barnes and Noble and Borders to build their own eBookstore platforms and your eBooks could reach over 100 million readers.
Will the last bookstore please turn out the lights?
Pessimism is often thought to be bred right into the genes of booksellers, who, after all, often watch helplessly as their charmingly shabby neighbourhoods go upscale, dragging rents up with them, or as the building they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars maintaining is rendered obsolete by behemoth online retailers who need never worry about either leaky plumbing or unsold stock. Even worse, they must listen as the very item they have handled, recommended, sold and loved for so many years – the bound book, the gift of Gutenberg – is given its terminal diagnosis over and over again. No one wants to be the last store specializing in 8-track tapes.
According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.
Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, “we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion”.
The Daily Lit
Who do you write like? I got Palahniuk.
Oliver James on giving a literary talk:
On the whole, the audience are there because they have managed to find some value in the author’s scribblings or witterings. It’s a chance for them to get a smell of what he or she is “really like”. At the same time, it’s a chance for the author to escape the confines of their desk and, in my case, I use it to seriously let off steam, to tell it like I think it really is.
James Patterson sells more than 1million ebooks:
James Patterson has sold more than one million e-books, which his publisher Stateside - Hachette Book Group - claims is a worldwide first. As of last night, the crime author had sold a total of 1,141,273 digital units.
I’d like to point out that Patterson wrote exactly zero of those books. Also, is a million really the best “the factory” can do?
Amazon’s Best Books from the first half of 2010:
As usual, a pretty solid if unsurprising list.
The Daily Lit
The Holy Grail was achieved and it made no difference:
The fact is that people who do not want to read digital media care little for the quality of the text or the photographs reproduced within. They do not care that it is an advance of technology that deserves praise from every quarter. They just will not read for leisure on a screen.
HarperCollins Partners With NetGalley:
HarperCollins Publishers has partnered with NetGalley to distribute digital galleys. The program will roll out today at ThrillerFest with Judgment and Wrath by Matt Hilton.NetGalley has a community of reviewers and journalists who can use the service to download review copies digitally.
The Daily Lit
An Interview with the Writer of the Worst First Sentence in the World (2010 Edition):
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (named after the inventor of the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night”) is an annual affair that recognizes the worst first sentence in the world. This year, local author Molly Ringle brought the crown home to Seattle with her first-prize sentence.
Sony Cuts Prices On Their E-Readers Too:
The new prices are:
• Reader Pocket Edition is now $150 (from $170)
• Touch Edition Reader is now $170 (from $200)
• 3G Daily Edition Sony Reader is now $300 (from $350)
I still think Sony’s Touch and Daily editions are garbage, but their Pocket reader is still the best in breed, and it’s a steal now at $150.
iPad and Kindle reading speeds:
The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability.
Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can’t say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed. In any case, the difference would be so small that it wouldn’t be a reason to buy one over the other.
This is fascinating, if only because I completely disagree. I’ve read twice as many books this year as I had last year, and it’s 100% credited to carrying around an ebook reader. So the question is, am I reading slower, yet reading so much more that I don’t notice? Then again, how much slower is 10% slower, anyway? Would the human brain even notice that sort of lost time when reading novels?
What I’m surprised by is that reading on the iPad is faster than on an eink display. You’d think it would be the opposite. I wonder how much of that time lost is due to the loading time between flipping pages on an eink device.
The Daily Lit
Bezos: Kindle and iPad are separate devices:
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a recent interview that it’s not really a choice — “the Kindle is for readers,” and he considers the iPad “a different product category.” That’s interesting. Most people might view the iPad and the Kindle as competing devices, especially since the Kindle has apparently dropped price to try and stay relevant.
That’s because most people have no idea what they’re talking about. Bezos may be a crazy billionaire, but he isn’t stupid. The Kindle has come a long way in the last six months, from dropping its prices to raising its royalty rates and expanding its compatibility on different devices. Kindle’s big problem is that you can’t get your books off of it, but if every single piece of tech out there eventually has a Kindle app, that won’t really matter, will it? Now if only they’d do something about making the Kindle itself less ugly. But whatever. The Kindle didn’t drop in price to stay relevant; it dropped to become ubiquitous.
Talking heads, hearing voices, and the disappearing narrator:
Good dialogue is all about the author being invisible and letting the characters take center stage. It’s the difference between watching people on a screen, versus spying on them through the window, versus being in the room with them. Ideally, you want your reader in the room with your characters; experiencing your story as opposed to witnessing it (or simply hearing about it). Crafting realistic dialogue is a matter of time and practice, of listening to people and having an ear (and a love) for accents. While I have a few pointers on those things, they’re really up to the individual writer to work at. However, I have learned some very practical ways for the author to disappear when it comes to writing dialogue, methods that remove the one-way mirror between the reader and the story.
The Daily Lit
Rosalind Porter talks to Margaret Atwood:
What seems to come out of people posting comments on my blog is that they want both. They want to have paper books for things they want to keep, to read at home, to read in bed, to read in the bathtub - all those comfy things that people do. And books have a rather decorative function too and most people want to have them on their bookshelves. But for books you want to read only once - for books you are in the process of reading but don’t want to cart around with you - electronic books can be very useful.
The Rise of the Author-Entrepreneur:
Over the past couple of years, whilst building CompletelyNovel.com, we’ve noticed an increasing number of authors, including fiction writers, treating their craft like a business. These are authors who have used our self publishing systems to sell and distribute their books. Without a traditional publisher or PR company behind them, learning new skills, particularly on the marketing front, is highly beneficial for building their audience.
Strikingly small, Santa Cruz lit magazine publishes Issue No. 2:
For a dime an issue, Kyle Petersen publishes a quarterly literary magazine. He charges his customers nothing. And he’s seen enough success to debut Issue No. 2 on Thursday during a reading at Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing.
You Can Preview Kindle Books On the Web Soon:
The new service will be available “in the coming weeks,” according to an Amazon blog post, and will show ebook previews that can be accessed from Amazon.com. You’ll be able to read a sample chapter, and if you decide to buy a book it’ll be downloaded to your Kindle or Kindle app.
The Daily Lit
Today is Literacy Advocacy Day. The general push today is to raise awareness of the dire position in which libraries have found themselves lately. Click the link to watch a video detailing the problem. To sum up: more people are reading than ever, more people have library cards than ever, and yet funding is at an all-time low.
Libraries fading as school budget crisis deepens:
No one will know exactly how many jobs are lost until fall, but the American Association of School Administrators projects 19 percent of the nation’s school districts will have fewer librarians next year, based on a survey this spring. Ten percent said they cut library staff for the 2009-2010 school year.
Asked about whether the decreasing price on e-book reading devices would help schools adopt them, Chow said that it would help, but they’re still pretty expensive and given all the budgetary demands school libraries are under already, it can be difficult to justify their purchase. Only one person can use an e-reader at once, whereas online e-books can be used by anyone with a computer.
The Daily Lit
Publishing on the iPad: “Like Playing 3-D Checkers”
Not really sure what 3-D checkers would be like, but okay, sure:
Magazines will, at some point, have to realize that the Web and the iPad are separate but equal forums that will co-exist with their existing print product, but not replace them. Readers know this too. (Just look at Kafka’s comments). But the opportunity here is that the best magazines, the one’s with strong brands and great writing might even be able to get people to pay twice, which is a phenomenon that we are seeing with books.
Read: magazines will eventually have to stop screwing iPad owners with high prices and hollow premium content.
Books telling gay and lesbian stories for young people become a survival tool for LGBT teens:
“Kids have for the most part become ‘Will and Grace’-ified,” she said. “Oftentimes I’ll hand them a book that has a gay main character and tell them how funny it is, and they take it and like it. These are kids who wouldn’t normally touch anything like that. I live in the land of rednecks, but they like it because it’s funny and good.”
Today’s vampire – a needy, neurotic wimp:
“I personally think vampires should not be depicted as vegetarians, as they are by Meyer. In other books, they tend to be quite neurotic. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was so good because it was dark, multi-layered with violence that was inferred. Teen vampire fiction is spoiling that,” she said.
The Daily Lit
Books’ power to connect is as potent as ever:
Humanities are under fire at the moment. Teach students something practical, many Americans say, something to help them get jobs and support themselves. But I believe that to thrive in the world, we must also understand what it is to be human. As Socrates said, an unexamined life is not worth living. And right now, when retreat and distrust and anonymity divide us, it’s more vital than ever to examine not only our own lives, but the lives of those around us.
With the coming of ebooks, this invisible craft must be reinvented if it is not to disappear. Designers, used to tweaking a book so that no chapter ends with a few words on an otherwise blank page and no line of text is jarringly gappy or overstuffed, see much of their control handed over to readers or to device-makers. Design conventions that seemed immutable on paper cease to make sense. It is an upheaval as deep as any in the wars between Apple and Amazon, publishers and pirates – and it is taking place in front of readers’ eyes.
Drunk writers were better sober, says psychiatrist:
“The idea that drugs and alcohol give artists unique insights and powerful experiences is an illusion,” he said. “When you try and capture the experiences [triggered by drugs or alcohol] they are often nonsense. These drugs often wipe your memory, so it’s hard to remember how you were in that state of mind.”
The Hub: business model of the future for books and libraries?
Our local library system spends a lot of time helping newcomers to the community—they have kits to help people learn English, they run classes on how to find a job and use a computer, and they have an extensive directory of community organizations they can refer people to for various issues. In this age of information overload, there is a place for a hub like this!
The Daily Lit
When I was a grad student, I felt like a fraud for writing papers that I wouldn’t want to read. Only later did I realize this is the norm.You’re forced to publish frequently. You can’t wait until you think you have something worthwhile to say.
The academic writing world isn’t so different from the consumer book world. Lots of authors have multi-book contracts, even though they may not be multi-book writers. The secret to great readability has always been quality, not quantity. Unfortunately, quantity is a side effect of living in a consumer culture.
A Canadian author’s perspective on “radical extremism” and copyright:
Here’s what that means for creators: if Apple, or Microsoft, or Google, or TiVo, or any other tech company happens to sell my works with a digital lock, only they can give you permission to take the digital lock off. The person who created the work and the company that published it have no say in the matter.So that’s Minister Moore’s version of “author’s rights” — any tech company that happens to load my books on their device or in their software ends up usurping my copyrights. I may have written the book, sweated over it, poured my heart into it — but all my rights are as nothing alongside the rights that Apple, Microsoft, Sony and the other DRM tech-giants get merely by assembling some electronics in a Chinese sweatshop.
I don’t always agree with Cory Doctorow’s views on copyright, byt I’m 100% with him when it comes to “digital locks.” You can still send a letter to your MP and parliament about the issue.
Nicholas Carr on The Shallows. Click the link to hear the full interview with Nicholas Carr on CBC’s excellent tech show Spark. Here’s the teaser:
I’ve been noticing something in the last few years. I can’t read books anymore. I mean, really read them….sink into them and lose myself in them. I’ll sit down with good intentions, but I find myself distracted. My mind wanders, I’m constantly taking a break to check my email or look something up online. I used to be a huge book person. I’m really worried I’m losing my ability to follow a long narrative in a book. I was relieved to read Nicholas Carr’s new book, because at least, it seems, I’m not alone. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Carr argues that the way we absorb new information online is not only changing our habits, it’s actually changing our neural pathways.
