Semantics: "Real" Books vs. eBooks

Get with the program. eBooks = BOOKs. Stop editorializing about how eBooks kill "real books." eBooks ARE "real books." eBooks are of course drastically minimizing (though not killing) paper-books, but the narrative (the REAL "real book") remains intact, regardless of the container. Thank you and have a great day.

Luddites Whining: The End Of Bookstores

Nicole Krauss uses the pages of The New Republic to moan about our losing a certain curatorial element which she believes can only be found in the brick-and-mortar bookstore.

HarperCollins's Open Letter to Librarians Shows That They Just Don't "Get It"

John Marwell's letter appears on Library Love Fest: "We spent many months examining the issues before making this change. We talked to agents and distributors, had discussions with librarians, and participated in the Library Journal e-book Summit and other conferences. Twenty-six circulations can provide a year of availability for titles with the highest demand, and much longer for other titles and core backlist. If a library decides to repurchase an e-book later in the book’s life, the price will be significantly lower as it will be pegged to a paperback price point. Our hope is to make the cost per circulation for e-books less than that of the corresponding physical book. In fact, the digital list price is generally 20% lower than the print version, and sold to distributors at a discount."

Will HarperCollins program print editions of books sold to libraries to spontaneously combust after 26 reads?

Another point: Setting aside the ridiculous notion of limiting usage on a sold edition of a book, the idea of digital prices being arbitrarily pegged 20% lower than hardcover or paper prices is equally absurd. In this way the cost of traditional print, paper and bind dictates the cost of e-editions? The tail wags the dog?

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Marginalia

per NY Times re: digital. But I'm a book lover; and I don't give a rat's ass.

Authors Guild vs. The Free Market

PW: "To mark the one-year anniversary of what it calls 'the Great Blackout'--when Amazon pulled the buy buttons from Macmillan’s titles to protest the publisher’s adoption of the agency model--the Authors Guild is doing a series of member alerts looking at 'the state of e-books, authorship and publishing. ... " Want to survive the sinking of a ship? Swim away from it before the suction drags you down. The Authors Guild seems to like the Agency Model a hell of a lot more than does the British Office of Fair Trade.

Let's Buy Macy Halford a Paper Book on Manners

Who besides me is offended by this insufferable bit of multilayered snobbery from Macy Halford on "The Book Bench" blog of The New Yorker: "When I read a book all the way through to the end, I want the evidence stuffed and mounted on my bookshelf. My suspicion is that people who prefer e-readers use them primarily to read Harlan Coben, and are happy to be able to delete the physical evidence."

Fearmongering: Kindle eBook Lending Will Lead To 'Lost' Book Sales?

A bit of absurdity reported with appropriate sarcasm by the good people at Techdirt: "From the and-burn-down-the-libraries department: We've already pointed out how Amazon's new 'lending' feature for Kindle ebooks is extremely limited, in such a way that it's barely useful, but already we're seeing fearmongering about how that feature is going to create 'lost' book sales. Glyn Moody points us to an article at The Next Web, which discusses how some folks have formed a 'lending club' on Facebook, so that they can find a larger pool of people to lend books to and from. And, the article's author warns, this inevitably means lost book sales ... "

Readers Shift to eBooks: Publishers Take to Drink

Actually, if I take to drink, it is to toast the new technology, which should in no way be considered a threat (rather, an opportunity) for those who know how to adapt and innovate. Survival of the smartest. BNET: "Publishers and authors who want more time to move from paper to ebooks had best quicken their pace. Barnes & Noble notes that a shift in consumer preferences have made eBooks more popular than paper for the company’s online customers. Given the lower sales prices and the growing ability of authors to work directly with retailers, publishing will see economic and sales pressures that will make previous years look like a holiday. The results could drive publishers to drink — or out of business. ... "

The New Spanish Civil War: eBook Visionaries vs. Publishing Luddites

Publishing Perspectives notes two intriguing new publishing alliances in Spain -

The first is ​​​​​​​​​​​​Unebook, a digital platform created by 62 of Spain’s university presses to digitize and sell their content. With the help of digital distributor Publidisa , the group has created a direct-to-consumer website www.unebook.es where titles from the participating publishers are offered for sale in PDF format with Adobe DRM; Publidisa is also distributing the titles to mainstream online booksellers including Casa del Libro.

Meanwhile, up in Galicia, ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​the Consejo de Cultura Gallega (Galician Culture Council) announced the formation of a new “cluster” that will bring together the area’s publishers, distributors, and booksellers in order to “respond to the e-book threat” – as the cluster’s new president, Alfonso García Sanmartín, described it. In Galicia 98% percent of the population speaks gallego, one of Spain’s four official languages (usually in addition to fluent Spanish), which has given rise to a regional publishing industry to serve readers in both languages.  While García Sanmartín asserts that the publishers in Galicia who have e-books on offer have sold no more than 30 copies a year, and that the digital future “is likely to arrive much more slowly than what has been predicted”, the cluster nonetheless hopes to create a common strategy to help all of its members — the group is firm in its desire to maintain the traditional publisher-distributor-bookseller value chain — weather the disruption brought about by technological changes to the industry.

Luddites Whining Department: Philip Roth

Yahoo! News: "NEW YORK (Reuters) – American novelist Philip Roth dislikes e-books and the distracting influences of modern technology, which he feels diminishes the ability to appreciate the beauty and aesthetic experience of reading books on paper. ... 'It is a shame. It is also what is happening, and there is nothing at all to do about it,' the 77-year-old Roth told Reuters, discussing the changing publishing landscape in the digital age during an interview for his new book, Nemesis, which is released in the United States and Britain on Tuesday. 'The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach anymore,' he said." I focus on books, in silence, quite regularly. And those books are on a Kindle.

How E-Readers Change the Way We Read

I don't agree with - or perhaps don't really understand - the reasoning behind Jonah Lehrer's "Head Case" column in today's Wall Street Journal. What does the luminescence (or lack thereof) of a particular eReader or tablet screen have to do with how cognitively-challenging a particular word, phrase, paragraph or idea might prove to be?

WSJ.com:

... the act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra cognitive work wakes us up; we read more slowly, but we notice more. Psychologists call this the 'levels-of-processing' effect, since sentences that require extra levels of analysis are more likely to get remembered.

E-readers have yet to dramatically alter the reading experience; e-ink still feels a lot like old-fashioned ink. But it seems inevitable that the same trends that have transformed our televisions will also affect our reading gadgets. And this is where the problems begin. Do we really want reading to be as effortless as possible? The neuroscience of literacy suggests that, sometimes, the best way to make sense of a difficult text is to read it in a difficult format, to force our brain to slow down and process each word. After all, reading isn't about ease—it's about understanding. If we're going to read Kant on the Kindle, or Proust on the iPad, then we should at least experiment with an ugly font.

Every medium eventually influences the message that it carries. I worry that, before long, we'll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink that the technology will feed back onto the content, making us less willing to endure challenging texts. We'll forget what it's like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a thorny stretch of prose. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should be easy to read.

Paul Carr: A Modest Proposal For Authors Who Abandon Their Publishers — Give Me A Break

I actually don't agree with anything Carr says here, as he is basically knocking the indie movement. But he does it so engagingly. TechCrunch: "If I were a commissioning editor in a major publishing house, I’d be feeling a little unloved right now. Like the wife of a guy who runs over his neighbour’s cat: why does everyone hate me? What did I do? Maybe hate is too strong a word: hate is when you hope that someone will burst into flames and die. The current feeling towards publishers isn’t quite that: no one wants them to combust – it’s just that, well, they wouldn’t urinate on them if it happened. ..."

Surprising Luddite: Ray Bradbury

When I become a raving, cranky old man, please just turn off my microphone.

Sorry, Customer: No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment

Bravo, Nick Bilton. My favorite line from his piece in today's NY Times Bits Blog: "I wonder if people went through the same thing in the mid-1400s as they sat in coffee shops with their pesky paper books? I can imagine a coffee shop owner demanding that a patron remove his book from an establishment that only allowed spoken communication."

Well, you know, it's just all the noise those damn Kindles and Nooks make, and the noxious smoke that comes out of them all the time. Your fellow customers find these things annoying. As well, please remember that your servers need a healthy workplace ...

Gotta love it.

Will eBooks Make Midlist Authors Extinct?

Of course not. Quite to the contrary. eBooks remove barriers. But I'll catalogue this essay anyway and file it under a new category: Luddites Whining.

This Just In: New York Times Objects to the Reading of Its Feed

Or so it would seem. Embattled reactionary old media Luddites trying to create false scarcity.