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By Nico Vreeland, on March 20th, 2009  In The Daily Beast Tuesday, Yale professor Stephen L. Carter cries out for a bailout for publishing, claiming that paper books as objects are essential to no less than democracy itself.
I could not disagree more.
Look, fearing the future is natural; it is by definition the unknown, and it’s scary. There are two ways to deal with this fear: we can describe it, define it, and use it to better the future that arrives; or we can prematurely assume that our fear is founded, cling to the past, and attempt to resist the future’s inexorable pull. Carter takes the latter route, the unhealthy route, the useless route.
I could spend all day picking apart this article. In fact, I’m going to. Brace yourself.
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By Sean Clark, on March 17th, 2009  Bi ciuin! Ta tinneas cinn orm. In the spirit of all things Irish, I wanted to remind everyone that most of James Joyce’s work is beyond copyright, and thus free. You can get his books for nothing in many formats here, and I encourage you do so. Start with Dubliners and Portrait, and work you way up to Ulysses, his masterpiece–one of the best books ever written.
Some other great Irish writers in the public domain:
And a few that aren’t yet free but worth every pence:
- Samuel Beckett
- Brendan Behan
- Seamus Heaney
- Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan)
By Sean Clark, on March 11th, 2009  Photo credit: makezine.com “The iPod of books” is a phrase I’m seeing tossed around more and more lately, either as and indication of what the industry needs, or praise of what the Kindle is. As I’ve already mentioned in my rather wandering and round-about posts, trying to make an ereader fit into the exact same business model as the iPod is not unlike shoving a square peg into a round hole, because the differences between books and music, in terms of portable devices, are many. Not to mention, while I’m tossing about clichés, Apple more or less caught lighting in a bottle with the iPod, and for a company to realistically assume to replicate the staggering numbers Apple has achieved in market share is like Saturn saying they’re going to best a Mercedes. It’s possible, but it takes actual work and R&D, not just advertising and a bunch of crude oil stock backing up a half-assed vehicle that’s still a poopy Saturn on the inside, and just looks like a Mercedes on the exterior.
Now I’m not a market analyst, and I won’t pretend to know how things will work or what companies are thinking as far as business tactics in the publishing space. But I do know that le dame Fortuna’s a rather fickle broad, and she doesn’t tend to help out those who just point at the rich guy next to him and say I want what he’s got. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 5th, 2009 Cory Doctorow has an article up at Locus Magazine, called “In Praise of the Sales Force,” about the irreplaceability of the publishing industry’s ground-pounding sales force. He makes a number of good points about the potential difficulties of democratizing publishing using the Internet, including essentially his main argument:
though it’s easy to find an outsource firm that’ll get your books from Warehouse (A) to Store (B), it’s a lot harder to find the cost-effective firm that will convince Store (B) to order the book from You (C). That’s shoe-leather business, the slow, messy human-factor business of getting to know thousands of key people around the country, people who will introduce your book to readers who haven’t heard of you and don’t know why they should be reading you (good bookselling is fractal: the sales rep knows what the clerk will like, and the clerk knows what the reader will like).
I can understand (and respect) Doctorow’s loyalty to the people who’ve worked hard for his books, but I just don’t buy this argument. These days, I purchase books in actual bookstores very rarely, and I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book because the guy at Borders recommended it. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 2nd, 2009  According to the Guardian, and GalleyCat, historian Ben Wilson’s next book What Price Liberty? will be released electronically in April according to the Radiohead model, which means it will be free to download and readers will be encouraged to pay whatever they feel like for it.
I think this is excellent. This model was very successful with Radiohead’s album, but BitTorrent fearmongers like to say that Radiohead only succeeded with that model because they already had a wide, die-hard fan base. You certainly can’t say that about Ben Wilson; I’m sure he’s great, but how many historians have die-hard fan bases?
The problem with a lot of the downloading/piracy debate is that there isn’t really much data to back up one side or the other, so a lot of it becomes shouting in the dark. This one experiment certainly won’t solve that lack of data, but hopefully experimentation with different digital distribution models will continue to expand.
I predict that this will work quite well for this book. Free digital downloads will hook people into getting this book, and then guilt or well-meaning will get a good price out of most of them. If people are treated nicely, they tend to reciprocate; most humans learn this by adulthood, the record companies, though, don’t quite seem to grasp it.
But if this scheme works, the anti-DRM, pro-digital format crowd shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too hard. The fact that it’s pay-what-you-like will act as its own piece of publicity, and that will drive sales in and of itself. This model won’t work–at least not this well–forever. Radiohead already abandoned it, and Trent Reznor says they half-assed it anyway.
Still, any step toward proving BitTorrent is not the fourth horseman of the new media apocalypse is a good step in my book.
[via Guardian and GalleyCat]
By Nico Vreeland, on February 26th, 2009  This site hasn’t been around very long, and already I’ve written several scathing posts about how ereader makers and ebook publishers are screwing up ereading. That’s because I don’t want to see a corporate pissing match hijack the development of a potentially groundbreaking device that could shape the next stage of literary culture in our country. (And only partially because I’m a naturally negative person.)
But this post is about the upside of ereaders and their future potential. This is why I want Sony and Amazon and Random House to quit screwing around and consider their customers when it comes to ereaders and ebooks. This is why reading on ereaders is better than reading paper books.
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 23rd, 2009  There’s quite an interesting post on Booksquare today about ebook pricing, and why the publishing industry is keeping eprices artificially inflated. The writer, Kassia Krozser, lays into publishers for fearing to get on board with ebooks, refusing to invest in epublishing the same way readers are investing in ereading, and not realizing that they now have to follow the Kindle’s $9.99 pricing model.
She offers both hope:
People will pay for content as long as it meets some basic needs. Digital books offer as much pleasure as print books, but digital books are also viewed as something slightly different.
and harsh reality:
In the digital marketplace, books have to remain competitive with other media. It’s not so much your opinion of the value of your product that matters; it’s all about how the customer values your product…. You can trot out your business model and your profit-and-loss statements, but your customers don’t really care.
The thing is, I understand why big publishing houses aren’t getting behind ebooks. It’s the same reason people buy more Nora Roberts books than Karen Brown (besides the fact that they’ve never heard of Karen Brown).
The problem is that we all have a deep-seated aversion to risk, an aversion which allows consumers to be more easily controlled by major media corporations who themselves are seriously risk averse. This cycle is strangling the development of artistic media in the modern world.
However, the digital revolution of media (lynchpinned by digital piracy) has a chance to free us from that risk aversion, and lead to the resurrection of art, including, maybe most of all, the resurrection of good writing.
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 22nd, 2009
I’m looking at my bookshelf right now, comparing my largest books to my smallest books. The fattest books, (a few reference volumes, a couple of art books, several anthologies, and a copy of Infinite Jest which I am still too intimidated to begin) stand on the bottom shelf, ranging from around eight inches tall to well over a foot. The skinniest books are hiding on the middle shelf, mostly individual volumes of poetry whose spines blend together into one solid stripe of art deco rainbow. Above that is a hodge-podge of paperbacks and periodicals, some neatly lined up and some stacked teetering on top of each other, the broader volumes providing a foundation for my pocket-sized books.
Now I’m trying to imagine one universal ereader that could reasonably accommodate all of these different sized books with minimal effect on the experience of actually reading them. …
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By Sean Clark, on February 19th, 2009  A French TV Book, whatever that is, circa 1932.
In his post the other day, my esteemed colleague mentioned his preference for watching televisions shows online with sites such as Hulu. He mentioned the “brute force” distributor control that is slowing things down. He said more, and I agree with most of what he said. I won’t repeat it; you can read it on your own. I want to chime in though (be forewarned, I can ramble like the best of them).
I derive a geeky pleasure from reading tech blogs like DVICE, and reading about future technologies being worked out by company labs now. Sometimes, though, the technology we are aching for as consumers is actually a few years old. Our economy and our society’s technological gumption both rely heavily on competition. When companies are locked in battle, fighting for market share by creating the best product, the consumer and technology both benefit. When their hearts aren’t really in it (as I would assert is the case going on with Sony and Amazon with their readers), the consumer and technology suffer.
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 17th, 2009  TV doesn't rot your brain. Bad TV rots your brain. (image credit bbc.co.uk) Here’s how I watch TV (this all ties in to ebooks eventually). I subscribe to a number of shows on Hulu, and I’ve set up other shows in bittorrent RSS feeds (the ones that aren’t on Hulu). Every day, new episodes of the shows I like come to me somehow, and I watch them in order of how much I like them. If I run out of those and still want to soften my brain, as happens from time to time, I have a number of shows I’ll deign to watch episode by episode on Hulu, in order from bad to worst. And there are, of course, a great many that I’ll never watch, no matter how they’re broadcast.
There are only a rarefied few (House, The Office) that I will actually take the time and energy to hunt down showtimes for, find the right channel, get myself on the couch at the prescribed time, and actually watch the broadcast of, as we watched everything ten years ago.
This is how on-demand digital media changes media consumption: it allows each person to create their own meritocracy of content. They do not have to tune in at a certain time on a certain channel; they do not have to sit through some godawful tripe between Friends and Seinfeld.
The control of consumption is more and more in the hands of consumers these days, and much less in the hands of distributors, and it is this reversal, more than DRM or piracy, that is seismically shifting the media business models of the 20th century.
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