Internet safety tip: DO NOT image-google "hardcover book," even with the safe search on moderate.

By now, you’ve probably seen the NYT’s story on publishers phasing out the hardcover book in response to ebooks. Paperbacks are coming out earlier, and “many publishers” now “wonder if cost-conscious shoppers are reading e-books right away rather than waiting for the paperback.”

(You can stop wondering, publishers. They definitely, definitely are.)

So. Hardcovers are mortally injured and slowly dying. This is excellent news. I agree with Paul Constant over at the Stranger (and with myself) that the hardcover business model is unsustainable in a digital world. It continues to actively hurt publishing, but at least publishing seems to be growing aware of that hurt.

Since ebooks were first introduced, publishers have bent over backwards to protect the exorbitant retail prices of new-release hardcover books. They struggled to make distributors adopt the agency model, so they could drive up the prices of ebooks (even though they make less money with agency-priced books). They did that only to make hardcover prices seem like less of a rip-off.

This environment is great for established, in-demand authors like George R.R. Martin, who sold 170,000 hardcover copies of Dance with Dragons in just one day. But climbing the hardcover hill makes it harder than ever for new authors and unknowns to get the recognition they deserve. The higher the price of books, the fewer risks readers will take.

By contrast, without hardcovers, there’s no disincentive to buy the newest books and try out lesser known, lesser publicized authors. The death of the hardcover will make for a happier, healthier reading culture, and that will create more book sales, no matter what that crazy Macmillan CEO says (he also bribes people for the right to sell expensive textbooks to poor African kids).

Releasing paperbacks a little bit earlier won’t help either, it’ll only increase people’s incentive to wait for that paperback before buying a new book. That’s not a sound way to cash in on all that first-edition marketing. (Quick, name a book you were thinking about buying six months ago but didn’t.)

Only the death of the hardcover will do now. I can’t wait to rejoice when they finally kick the bucket.

It’s a pretty cool program that is open to all unpublished writers. Sure there’s a bunch of not great entries, but there’s a whole bunch of really great writing too. I’ve had at least one over the years that I was genuinely sad not to see win the whole shooting match. I obviously can’t talk specifics about the books I have now, but you can see full lists of the 2011 entries by genre, and read a little of each, at the above link.

It’s defintely a fun thing to get involved in. I encourage anyone who has the time to read some excerpts and post comments on the ABNA site Amazon set up. It’s a nice way for young writers who have the cajones to submit an untested manuscript to get some honest feedback from (anonymous) readers.

The finalists will be announced in late April, and panels helmed by Lev Grossman and Gayle Forman (links: I’ve reviewed both their books on the site) will take things from there.

Edits: See books, newspaper, and final thoughts sections, below.]

I had a chance to play around with an iPad over the holidays. Here’s a comparison of the iPad and the Nook Color, which I’ve been reading on for about a month (full Nook Color review here). Obviously the iPad does a lot more than reading, but this post is designed to give avid readers an idea of whether a Nook will be enough for them, or an iPad will be worth the extra money.

And the short answer is: the Nook will be enough. It’s a close fight, but the iPad simply doesn’t seem to care enough about reading to win.

[Note: I only had a day and a half with the iPad; if you're a more experienced iPad user and I got something wrong, let me know.]

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The iPad's more newspaper-like newspaper layout. (Click any picture for full-size.)

Newspapers: iPad wins (for now)

The iPad’s NYTimes app looks more like a real paper, and features big, beautiful pictures and embedded video. Best of all: it’s free (for now). The Times has plans to start charging at some point; once that happens, this will be a much closer race.

The Times app needs an Internet connection to work, where the Nook Color downloads the whole paper so you can read it offline. There’s no archive in the iPad version, only today’s news, and if you want a paper other than the Times, you’re out of luck.

I don’t really care about the layout, to be honest. Some people don’t like the Nook Color’s list-of-articles-style layout, and it could certainly use some navigational help (like a back button). But the iPad layout is basically the same, except for the front page of each section.

Photo essays like this one are awesome, but they take an age to download (after several minutes, only five pictures are available).

I am jealous, however, of the NYTimes app’s multimedia content. I’d like to see the digital edition of the Times include videos, photo essays, and blogs like the iPad version, I’d like to see it download an entire edition to your device like the Nook version. The iPad’s 3G is basically worthless, so you have to read the paper at a WiFi connection.

So: the Nook gives you more papers, and gives you the complete archiveable print versions of them. The iPad only gives you the NYTimes, it needs a WiFi connection and expires too quickly, but it offers a lot of multimedia content. Once price is no longer an issue, the winner of this fight will depend on how you read the paper.

[Edit: People have pointed out that there are other newspaper apps in the iPad store. I searched for a dozen prominent papers and came up empty. The selection is definitely worse on iPad, but I can't comment on the apps I didn't try.]

Books: Tie

The iPad and Nook Color are almost identical when it comes to books. Both can bookmark, highlight, and take notes—and both note-taking systems are terrible. Both can change font and font size. The iPad has page-turning animation, the Nook Color has a night-reading mode. The iPad also has a two-page view that’s pretty cool, mostly because it feels more natural on the giant screen.

[Edit: Some have commented that the iPad offers a lot more choices for ereading apps. That's nice, but I don't think it changes the equation. It's difficult to get much better or worse in terms of books, unless you really want some specific feature like page-turning animation. Both devices can do library ebooks. Both take notes. It's a tie.]

Magazines: Nook Color wins

A page from "The New Yorker." They seem to feel the screen is too big.

Getting a magazine on the iPad is a frustrating experience. You have to download the magazine’s app, and then often you must buy each issue individually, which makes it $5 and up, instead of the Nook Color’s $3 per month and down subscription price. That’s not a huge difference for a monthly magazine, but weekly magazine prices really add up. (Obviously, both systems’ prices need to drop to below print subscription rates.)

Then there are size and downloading issues. When I bought an issue of The New Yorker, it was inexplicably more than 100Mb (because of the embedded video in which Jason Schwartzman shows you how to swipe?). To make matters worse, it won’t download in the background, you have to sit there and watch it.

Zinio's "Text" view

The Zinio app is crucial for iPad magazine readers. It lets you browse a wide selection of magazines, and offers the only subscriptions you’ll find. Weirdly, you have to use a credit card or Paypal to pay, instead of getting routed through your iTunes account.

The Zinio interface is smoother than the Nook Color’s, but it’s simply not as useful. The Nook Color’s Article View, which isolates the text of a story, is much better than Zinio’s similar “Text” view (pictured), because Article View is available on any page of a story, remembers your place, and lets you side-swipe directly to the next article. Zinio-”Text” does none of these things, and the page is wider than is strictly comfortable for reading a magazine article.

All in all, it’s no surprise that iPad magazines are in steep decline. It’s obvious that Apple doesn’t care enough about magazines to organize a system. They care about absolutely everything, so that says a lot.

Comic books: iPad wins

It’s not much of a fight, because the Nook offers no comic books. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because B&N want to sell comic books through their store, while Apple is happy having an app that does all the legwork. Hopefully a ComiXology app is coming to the Nook Color soon.

Kids’ books: [edit] tie

I couldn’t find any kids’ picture iBooks that featured embedded audiobooks, which is definitely the killer feature of the Nook’s picture books.

[Edit: As several people have pointed out, there are kids' books with audio, available on the iPad as individual apps. So this is a tie, too.]

Shopping: Nook Color wins

If you "browse" at the iBookstore, you're just given a huge list of authors' names. Unhelpful.

For the most part, these shopping systems are equally crappy. I understand there’s limited screen real estate on the Nook Color, but it’s fairly impossible to browse for books. The iPad, shockingly, is almost as bad. There are “Featured” layouts in each of the genres and categories, layouts that look roughly like the iTunes store. But if you don’t want a featured book, slogging through the “Browse” interface is a chore.

Certainly, iBooks’s curated store is more helpful than the Nook Color’s horrible shopping interface, which constantly tries to hard-sell me romance novels, and never recommends a book I’m remotely interested in. But the Nook wins this race to the bottom because Barnes & Noble has an actual website, and anything you buy or sample there shows up automatically on your device. Also, you can get magazines and newspapers through B&N, instead of through a thousand different channels on the iPad.

There is no iBookstore website, so iReaders are stuck in the slog.

Extras: iPad wins in a landslide

Obviously. But it’s worth mentioning.

Hardware: Shockingly quite even

The iPad is smoother without a doubt, but is it that much faster? I didn’t really notice a difference for just reading. And the iPad glitched and jerked more than the Nook. A caveat: obviously the Nook is comparable only when reading; I’m sure the iPad is faster when doing other things. Reverse caveat: if you’re considering a Nook, you’re not really interested in the other things.

The Nook Color’s screen size is preferable to me. Even magazines, the only medium that requires size, look great on it. Magazines look better on the iPad, but the screen is too big for everything else you’ll read. You might feel differently if you have poor eyesight, but you can adjust the text size of anything.

Final thoughts

• The iPad’s 3G: a rip-off at half the price. There are a lot of limits, like you can’t download anything over 20Mb through 3G. Plus $25 for 2Gb of bandwidth is a ludicrous price, and, of course, it’s woefully slow. I mean, AT&T can barely handle iPhones rendering mobile webpages, what made them think they could handle full-scale pages for iPad, plus heavy, multimedia-rich apps like the NYTimes? Simply put, a 3G dongle is not worth the extra $130. [Edit: People have defended the 3G with bared fangs, but I smell buyer's remorse. At best, you're getting unsatisfying service at exorbitant prices.]

• The Nook Color revolves around reading. The iPad is about design, and it looks great. But the Nook is about functionality, and it shows, especially in magazine reading. Apple’s hands-off approach to newspapers and magazines really hurts the iPad in those departments. The Nook needs its share of help, too (magazine price reductions, and all kinds of firmware improvements), but it’s at least on the right track.

• Verdict: I’m still very satisfied with my Nook Color. The iPad has a few advantages, but also a few disadvantages. All in all, the Nook Color is a better device for avid readers, and it’s only half the price to boot.

• [Edit: This post, of course, has been read as iPad bashing, but that wasn't my intention. The iPad's a great device if you want a tablet. The Nook Color holds its own as an ereader, and if that's all you want, it's a better fit and half the price. Based on ereading features, it's about a tie. Settle down, fanpeople.]

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The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

This is an important book, and one you probably read in high school for it portrayal of historical working conditions for immigrant laborers. But it’s also a very good book. If you don’t remember it, give it another read. It’s pretty short, so you should still have time for beach bocce.

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The Pullman Case, by David Ray Papke

I’ve never read this, so I can’t attest to it. But Papke’s got a pretty cool name. If you’re into history books, this could be a good pick-up. In case you don’t know. The Pullman case was a landmark in labor laws–and was helmed by Clarence Darrow. It stemmed from a railworkers strike that got violent when federal troops arrived. It was the reason Grover Cleveland (or Congress then, whatever) established Labor Day and all the hot dogs that entails.

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Labor Day, by Joyce Maynard

I’ve never read this book either, but after reading the description at Amazon, I kinda want to. Also, it is set in New Hampshire, which increases its odds of being good by about 11%, because everyone knows NH is the awesomest state in the union.

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Baker Towers, by Jennifer Haigh

This book I actually have read. And it’s very good. A coming of age family drama set in a Pennsylvania coal town, Haigh’s novel isn’t directly about labor unions, but salt-of-the-earth, blue collar existence permeates the tale. It mostly takes place right after World War II, when middle America clawed its way to prominence and backyard barbecues were the cat’s meow.

Percival’s Planet, by Michael Byers, reviewed by Suzanne Berne (New York Times)

Ms. Berne’s review is mostly plot and character summary, but luckily Byer’s plot and characters are quite interesting. The novel is a work of historical fiction telling the story of a Kansas farm boy who discovered Pluto. Berne’s description–”Mr. Byers reminds us that whether we’re gripped by desire for a new planet or for another human being, that yearning has dignity and its own strange logic”–makes this sound like a maybe-too-literary book, but the characters seem quirky enough that that may not be the case.

A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things, by C.K. Williams, (Publisher’s Weekly)

PW doesn’t credit their reviews, which are only about 100 words long. It be faster for you just to read this review yourself. (Excerpt: “A boy lives near a ‘regular, ordinary, standard sort of forest,’ except that along with the usual perils of cliffs, bears, snakes, and wolves, there’s also an actual, awful monster with a penchant for scaring children.”) This is a children’s book so 100 words is probably sufficient anyway; I wish I could have found an example of the illustrations on the internet.

The Four Fingers of Death, by Rick Moody, reviewed by Troy Patterson (New York Times)

In what seems to be a work in the tradition of Breakfast of Champions and Pale Fire, Rick Moody’s new novel is told by “a long-winded ham” and “sci-fi horror hack” named Montese Crandall, writing in a dystopian 2025. The Four Fingers of Death is presented as Crandall’s novelization of a 2025 remake of a real B-movie from 1963. When I read Patterson’s decription of Crandall as “a figure far more baffling than an unreliable narrator: an anti-reliable author,” I knew I wanted to read this book.

The Lady Matador’s Hotel, by Cristina Garcia, reviewed by Carolyn Alessio (Chicago Tribune)

Ms. Alessio’s well-written review does a fine job of describing how this novel “captures many of Guatemala’s funny and grim contradictions, and probes their often freighted origins.” The book takes place in an upscale hotel, during a time of political instability. Garcia’s strentgh seems to lie in her characters. The few Alessio deems “cartoonish” she asserts are countered “through her more complex guests at the hotel and use of a clever chorus.”

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen (Wall Street Journal)

Franzen’s name (and photo) has been everywhere this week, and Freedom is getting a lot of hype. The Corrections was pretty great, so hopefully this lives up to expectations. The WSJ (in a short article credited to “WSJ Staff”) rounded up a bunch of choice review quotes, so I linked to that. C4 will have its own review in a few weeks.

Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith, reviewed by Olen Steinhauer (New York Times)

Three Stations is a short (243 pages) thriller set in Russia. Steinhauer says that Smith elevates the thriller to social criticism, and with such a small canvas, it’s easy to hope for a tight, small, beautiful knot of a novel. Although, Steinhauer also compares Smith’s hero to Stieg Larsson’s eponymous “girl” hero, which makes me wary—I don’t care for Larsson.

A Mountain of Crumbs, by Elena Gorokhova, reviewed by Kapka Kassabova (Guardian)

Kassabova makes A Mountain of Crumbs (which came out in January in the U.S.) sound like a charming, beautifully written book. It’s a memoir about Gorokhova’s life in Soviet Russia, but even the few brief passages quoted in this review feel novelistic—what that means for the book I’m not entirely sure.

The Glass Rainbow, by James Lee Burke, reviewed by Dick Lochte (L.A. Times)

Lochte reports that the new Burke is mostly the same old Burke (which is quite solid mystery, if you’ve never read him), with a few sprinkles of new stuff. This review is worth looking at just for the art that accompanies it—it’s about a thousand times better than the book’s actual cover.

Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach, reviewed by Peter Carlson (Washington Post)

This book bears all the fingerprints of Mary Roach, which Carlson is quite happy about (he calls her “America’s funniest science writer”). Packing for Mars sounds like a gross and hilarious account of the minutiae of space travel. The last Roach book, Bonk, was a C4 Great Read.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen, reviewed by Joanna Smith Rakoff (New York Times)

Hodgen’s second novel is a coming-of-age novel told in the second person, by the protagonist to the five people who made her who she is. Rakoff says the premise might seem obvious (sounds more cloying to me), but she claims “its execution proves deeply, satisfyingly original.” Sounds good.

This week’s JABBIC has a pretty intriguing and mysterious cover. Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Adam Ross’s novel with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.

1.) MacDonald Rathwaite has had enough. The new gangster kids on his block call him “Mr. Peanut.” They think it’s funny, because he walks with a cane and cause his head looks weird. They think he’s stupid, they think he doesn’t notice. They don’t know him, and they sure don’t know what he’s done for a living for the past forty years—the job that gave him the limp, and shattered his skull. Rathwaite sat by when the gangsters sold drugs on his porch, and when they spray-painted the bodega on the corner. But when they start in harassing Lola, the young single mother who lives in 3C, that’s more than Rathwaite can take.

2.) It’s on the side of a tin on a shelf in every pantry in America: the smiling face of Mr. Peanut. But look closer…  Conrad Frayn is a defamed illustrator and aspiring artist. When he tries to relaunch his career with a new take on a marketing icon, he soon learns that he infringed on the wrong trademark. In this Pynchon-esque thriller, Adam Ross weaves a tapestry of commercial conspiracy and personal redemption that just might have you thinking twice before you pop open your next can of cashews.

3.) A factory mishap ships a popular brand of powdered makeup with exceptionally high levels of a peanut extract, causing allergic reactions and deaths nationwide. Disfigured from the incident, male model Antoine Feinderlacht uses the situation to rewrite the rules of fashion, and of terror, in this taut and hip thriller.

4.) Nathan and his friends thought they could ruin any teacher Cedar Creek Middle School could throw at them, but Mr. Peanut, their permanent substitute shop teacher, isn’t going to crack so easily. When even their best pranks fail to temper Mr. Peanut’s ardor for woodwork and whistling, the boys come to respect and befriend their teacher, making him an honorary member of the Creek Creep Gang. And when a mysterious figure from Cedar Creek’s past shows up at school asking strange questions, they must solve the mystery of Mr. Peanut’s mermaid tattoo, or else he, and the rest of the Creek Creep Gang, will be history.

5.) Alice Pepin’s lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock—or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a violent possible masterpiece. Gradually, the two detectives on the case begin to see disturbing parallels between their own marital dramas and the Pepins’ cruel rotations of brinkmanship and adoration.

Judge a Book by Its Cover is basically Balderdash for new or forthcoming books.  A number of our contributors have made up synopses for an interesting-looking new book based only on its cover and title. This week, the book in question is Light Boxes, by Shane Jones.

Can you guess which of the following paragraphs is the real premise of Light Boxes, just by looking at the cover?

Answer (and who wrote which fakery) coming later today in the comments.

1. Light Boxes follows the plight of a town battling to free itself from the brutal hold of the month of February, a meanie that has not allowed its wintry grip to lift for hundreds of days. When the despairing townspeople, led by valiant Thaddeus Lowe and his wife and daughter, suffer reprisals from February for trying to break the weather, a group of former balloonists don bird masks and, calling themselves the Solution, instigate a rebellion. Thaddeus’s daughter, Bianca, is kidnapped, along with other children, leading Thaddeus to plot ways to deceive February. Will they defeat February in time to save the town?

2. Shane Jones’s Light Boxes is a fictional memoir recalling the hilarious happenstance of its own creation. One snowy Monday, Jones and friends dressed as art-house movie penguins and stormed Penguin, Ltd., demanding that the powerhouse publish his book-in-progress (the plot of which was indeed progressing before the receptionist’s eyes). Penguin’s president, Morgan Freeman, who just happens to love art houses and penguins, gave the project a quick green light. Drama ensues when the 13-page manuscript was almost pulled for brevity. Thankfully, a 100-page color insert featuring the waddle in a variety of poses saved it in production. Light Boxes is well worth the $72 cover price.

3. For generations, the Grape family has lived by the Three Iron Laws: no women, no liquor, no knives. But then their youngest son, Gabe, is kidnapped by the notorious knife-wielding, booze-swilling, womanizing Parakeet Bandits. Gabe quickly learns that the outside world is much more fun than his forebears led him to believe, and he soon joins the gang. When his oldest brother sets out to bring him back to the fold, Gabe Grape must choose between his new life as a Parakeet and his devotion to his family.

4. In the tiny, remote town of Vinchizstrasse, the men all wear masks and the women all wear veils; in fact, it’s considered a sin to show your face to another human being. One spring, as the ice thaws to snow, the townsfolk begin acting weird—Henniger the butcher attacks Mrs. Leep and Jolimar the magician kills his assistant in front of a live audience, but neither has any memory of their actions. They quickly conclude that the people of neighboring town Tulingradstock (who have always been jealous of the Vinchaise) are forging masks and impersonating the Vinchaise men while committing horrible crimes. When Henniger and Jolimar confront them, the Tulingrash insist it’s a mind-disease that’s already crippled several other towns. Can the Tulingrash be trusted? The only way the Vinchaise can know for sure is to throw away their masks, but that might be more than they can take.

5. There are only five oiseau men left, and none of them have ever seen the sun. They’re condemned to spend their lives in Lincolntown, where it’s always cold and cloudy. At the bidding of invisible overseers, the oiseau perform mundane tasks like copying notes, folding papers, and whittling trinkets. Their ignorance about the outside world doesn’t protect them from an aching emptiness as they face the certainty of their extinction. However, just a few miles away in sunny Noirville, the Herschel family hides the only oiseau who’s ever escaped, and he’s been working tirelessly on a plan to free these mysterious men the only way he knows how…

Sales do not make a book "unputdownable"

Publishing is not a victim of the iPad, it’s not a victim of Amazon’s $9.99 pricing model, it’s not a victim of piracy, it’s not a victim, period. Publishing is slowly strangling itself by myopically hard-selling each and every title it cranks out, instead of nurturing the readers who sustain it.

I believe the novel is the best form of entertainment available to modern humans. Reading a novel offers a deeper, richer, longer, and more satisfying experience than any other media. I read four great novels last year (one, two, three, four). I enjoyed those four books more than any movies or TV shows I saw last year, more than any album, or live show, or play, or anything else.

But there were only four of them.

The flipside of the entertainment equation is that books are more expensive than movies, TV shows, or albums—more expensive in terms of both money and time. If you hate a movie, you’re out ten bucks and ninety minutes. A book might take up days of your time, and up to $25 in hardcover—if you read a bad one, the sting is much worse. And it gets exponentially worse when publishers overtly lie to their readers—like say, The Girl She Used to Be, which was nominated for a mystery award though it’s neither a mystery nor worth printing, let alone reading.

Publishers don’t seem to realize this, and they’ve taken a shotgun approach to bookselling: they think if they can fire enough tiny pellets of low-grade iron, one of them’s got to hit something. I’m here to disagree.

Problem: Publishing too many books, and too many crappy books

In 1993, according to Bowker, U.S. publishers released just over 10,000 books classified as either “Fiction” or “Literature.” In 2007 (the last year Bowker has a final tally for), publishers released more than 62,000 Fiction/Literature books (via; find the raw numbers here). That’s one work of fiction published every eight and a half minutes, all year long.

Since the average reader takes slightly longer than eight minutes to read a novel, we’ve got to choose. In 2009, I had a bad year choosing. I read and reviewed 31 books for C4 last year. Eleven were bad; ten were “OK, but…”; six were good; and only four were great.

Even if you lump in good books, that’s a 32% success rate. Less than a third of the contemporary books I read were worth the time and money, and that’s excluding all the books I tried to read, hated, and never finished.

Here’s an idea I don’t understand: Why—in an age where books have to compete with more TV shows and more movies and more video games—why are publishers releasing even more books? More than six times as many as just 17 years ago, which means one of two things: either six times as many publishable novels are being written, or publishers are lowering their standards. You might be able guess which theory I agree with.

Get your stupid from the TV, come to books for smarts

A billion Dan Brown fans might tell me I’m wrong, but I don’t think books do a good job with stupid, mindless entertainment. TV’s got stupid and mindless covered. Books should play to their strengths: intelligence, depth, and drama. Not that all novels should be stodgy period pieces, but neither do so many need to be vampire books because Twilight was popular, or any of the thousands of other coattail-riding knockoffs. And neither do we need thousands of plain old crappy books with half-conceived plots, pushed out to meet a pub date instead of being actually nurtured until they were good (or simply rejected).

In this piece, Jay Nicorvo says editors are putting out blockbusters and clones because of more guaranteed sales. That strategy might work in the short term; it might make more money this quarter. The downside is that it’s actively killing publishing, bit by bit.

Right, so, let’s just make all books better. That shouldn’t be too difficult, right?

Before you start poking holes in that proposal: I know that it’s a pipe dream. I know judging a novel’s quality is a subjective activity, I know that publishing is a business, and I know there are many many more publishing houses now than there were twenty years ago, all trying to make a buck. But, as a reader, I feel disillusioned. It seems like publishers are willing to release 50 mediocre novels in the hope that one becomes a hit, rather than select the 5 best and put more effort into them.

It seems, in short, like publishers aren’t culling bad novels like they should be, and then readers have to do it, which means sifting through dozens or hundreds of published novels to find just the few worth reading. And that gets old.

If we’ve got so many choices, we need a better way to choose

A while ago, I floated the idea of trial periods for ebooks, some length of time during which readers could return books they don’t like. I think that would go a ways toward reestablishing faith in the publishing industry (tag line: “Never read another bad book”), but I think to fully stabilize and grow the industry, publishers need a major shift in attitude.

Instead of publishing as many novels as possible and trying to market their way to good sales figures, publishers should focus on cultivating readers. By that I mean the first priority of a publisher should be to ensure that readers find books they love. That doesn’t mean describing every book as “hilarious,” it doesn’t mean puking out Harry Potter clones in the hope of getting a few more sales, and it doesn’t mean bending over backward to convince people that the latest stock vampire novel is actually good or different (they did that with the last stock vampire novel, and they lied). Instead, publishers should be finding the qualities that individual readers look for and pairing them with novels that actually have those qualities.

This is the kind of thing that companies like Amazon got right—as much as it pains me to admit. When publishers told Bezos to delete negative reviews on Amazon.com, he replied, “We don’t make money when we sell things, we make money when we help people make purchase decisions.”

Like Bezos himself, that response is 90% creepy robot, but he’s got a point. If you match readers with books they love, they will read more, they will like books more, and they will spend more money on them.

Publishers, for some reason, hate to match readers with books they will like. Look at the descriptions on Random House’s fiction page, and let’s play Glowing Platitude Bingo. “Dazzling”? “Wondrous”? “Lush”? “Moving”? Bingo.

I want a Netflix system for books, one that goes beyond Amazon’s linked metadata, and doesn’t require me to read bought reviews by Publishers Weekly, or dozens of customer reviews by people who might or might not know what they’re talking about. (Just take a gander at the responses our own Sean Clark got when he uploaded to Amazon a fairly even-handed review of what appears to be an unquestionably bad book.)

Another symptom of the disease: Publishers’ hatred for libraries

The root problem, again, is myopia. Publishers want to sell more books right now, not in a few years or decades. But their customer base is eroding. People have many more ways to spend their free time now than they did in 1993.

This myopic attitude was thrown into relief by Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s thoughts about libraries, which he expressed in March. He said that he wanted people to pay for library books, and questioned how libraries could possibly be good for the publishing industry.

From a certain angle, this makes a bit of sense. If people can get books for free, it must eat into profits at some point. But here’s the other angle: when I was eight years old, my parents told me they’d buy me as many books as I wanted. That lasted a couple of months before they cut me off and sent me to the library. If there had been no library, I would’ve watched TV and found something else to do with my life.

Let me say it in no uncertain terms: if we eliminate free public libraries, it will be exactly one generation before there won’t be enough readers to publish 1000 books a year, let alone 60,000. Libraries nurture readers. Publishers should learn from this.

One last plea

It’s arguable whether or not there are 60,000 publishable novels written this year. But if, as an industry, you’re going to give me 60,000 choices, you’ve got to give me the tools I need to find the books that are right for me. Otherwise I and your other avid readers will wander off into the wilderness of the millions of crappy books you’re all too willing to bring into the world.

Publishers, please. Please help me. I’m speaking as someone lost deep in the forest here; I love books, but I’m enjoying reading less and less these days. Something has to change. Quit whining about piracy and ebook prices. Fix this instead.

Twilight sucks. We don't have to keep talking about it. But we can, if you want to.

It’s pretty easy to work up a good hate for intellectualism—especially the smarmy, condescending kind. Books (or “literature” if you want to get snooty about it) and the serious discussion of them sometimes get confused for just that sort of pretentiousness.

One instance of such confusion is an essay called “I Just Want to Read,” by Ann Nichols, in Open Salon. In short, Nichols bemoans the overuse of formal literary theory, and pines for the days when, like the title says, she could read just for pleasure.

She makes some good points, especially about the ease with which you can fake hifalutin-sounding insights about literature (just learn and use a few words like “postcolonial” and “metafictional” and you’ll get a B in most lit classes). But for the most part, Nichols’s anti-criticism rant irks me, for several reasons. Here they are.

Nichols starts with an anecdote that immediately sets off my internal BS alarms. It’s the old when-I-was-a-kid bit, this time about a wide-eyed girl with a stack of books and a dream:

I was reading critically in the sense that I liked or disliked books, and knew what did and didn’t make sense or appeal to me, but there was not, at that blissful time in my life, any imposition of an external standard of quality or any requirement that I investigate the author’s prerogatives or background.

First of all, critical reading is not the imposition of an external standard of quality. I would define critical reading (I’m talking only about fiction here) as the formal analysis of writing in order to intellectually understand your emotional reaction to a certain work.

Secondly, nobody should be investigating any author’s background in relation to any work of fiction, ever. Once an author finishes a book, he is a completely different entity from his work. He cannot defend it, he cannot explain it, and nothing he says about it should be trusted. The author is a curiosity and nothing more. It’s interesting to hear what Michael Chabon has for breakfast, but it has nothing to do with his novels.

Nichols continues:

I didn’t have to delve deeply into the behind-the-scenes world of a book to understand or enjoy it.

This sounds an awful lot like: a) nostalgic blowhardery; and b) laziness. Let’s get this out of the way: everybody has nice memories of childhood. Even if it sucked, you had a couple things you liked that were uncomplicated and fun. And that’s nice. But it doesn’t mean those things in the grown-up world are still uncomplicated, nor should they be. And just because they’re complicated doesn’t mean they can’t still be fun.

Severe problem #1: Nichols isn’t interested in complexities. In college, she finds:

Studying literature involved what seemed to me to be a desecration of art based on bizarre and irrelevant external standards.

Again, critical reading should not be the application of external standards, it should be the use of intellectual tools to better understand a work of literature. Nichols maintains that the act of reading should instead be the equivalent of looking at a van Gogh and saying, “That’s pretty.”

I might need to understand how my car worked in order to fix it or maintain it properly, but I do not need to see, fix, repair or disassemble the “works” of a novel or poem in order to have the experience intended by the author. If I do, there is something wrong with one of us.

Jon Gruden is the James Wood of football.

Instead of mechanicry, I’m of the opinion that art criticism should be closer to something like football commentary. Great football analysts can discuss a game on several different levels. They can tell you simply that a team is good, or they can explain how West Coast offenses require quick-throwing QBs who don’t need strong arms, and exactly why Flozell Adams is worth 15 yards in penalties per game. Listening to knowledgeable sports analysts is no different than listening to knowledgeable, competent art critics. The major difference is that football never gets that anti-intellectual backlash (and also some some stuff about subjectivity/objectivity).

Even though I love great analysis I certainly don’t think that every book needs to be formally deconstructed, and I wholeheartedly agree that English lit classes can too easily devolve into mishmashes of gobbledygook. (My own nemesis was the “reader-response theory,” which states, basically, that you can say anything you want and it will be a valid point. I’m not sure if Nichols would love or hate it.) The solution to gobbledygook, though, is not to shut down all analysis, instead monosyllabically grunting and farting our responses to history’s greatest masterpieces. I think we can find a middle ground here; for starters, I want even the laziest reader to be able to answer the question, “Why did you like this?”

Even that seems to be too much for Nichols. She says that books, during her simple, idyllic childhood, “were ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for me” and she cringes at the thought of delving a molecule deeper. Implied in Nichols’s nostalgia is the idea that a suitable defense for anything, even drek like Twilight, should be “I liked it.” She seems to want those three words to end arguments and insulate her from further thought.

Of course, certain tools are appropriate for certain jobs. Nichols mentions a blog post that argued Twilight author Stephenie Meyer “‘wasn’t educated in critical perspectives on race, class and gender.’” That’s a bit like taking a Howitzer to a paintball fight. Meyer sucks for many, many reasons (even NPR ripped her to shreds), and her perspectives on race and class are pretty far down the list—at least below her failures at prose, dialogue, and character. But just because that kind of criticism outclasses a book you like (and should feel guilty for liking), does not mean that we should stop reading critically. I worry about this.

More broadly, I worry that a lack of continued critical thinking will lead to more formulaic narrative art. There are things that people historically like and don’t like, and it’s pretty easy to crap out the literary equivalent of Iron Man 2 and mildly amuse some people who don’t know the difference between quality and familiarity.

The job of great art, however, is to surprise and educate, and so answering the question, “Why didn’t you like this?” is every bit as important as answering its opposite. We don’t need to bring in postmodern ontological-schism theory to every piece of fiction in the world, but neither do we need to limit our criticism to a yes/no response.