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E-book Reader Update

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I still don’t own an e-book reader. Until a few days ago I hadn’t been particularly intrigued by any of the current models, but PC Magazine’s review of a new version of the Nook Simple Touch caught my attention:

With E Ink screens, you need an external light source—that is, until now. The Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight ($139 direct) includes switchable edge lighting, like you’d find on an ultra-slim LED HDTV. You’ll pay more for the privilege—$40 more, to be precise, over the existing Nook Simple Touch ($99 direct, 4.5 stars), which remains in the B&N lineup.

I spent all the hours I ever intend to spend staring at an electronic screen that requires ambient lighting when I was playing games on my original Gameboy. The idea that I might be able to read an e-ink screen in a dimly lit environment like, say, my bedroom, has considerable appeal when compared to reading in, say, a bustling cafeteria. (Along with its review of the new Nook, PC Magazine released a roundup of all of the current readers. Although their five-circle rating system has always been badly skewed toward the high-end, it’s fairly reliable when comparing products across a particular segment.)

When B&N’s Nook first came out it was lambasted by the same tech snobs that turned Apple into a religion. While the Kindle is still the leading e-book reader, the fact that the Nook is holding its own — let alone introducing new features — is having an effect on both Barnes & Noble’s economic health and competition in the e-reader market. Specifically, Microsoft, always looking for an opportunity to cross swords with Apple, Google and Amazon, is now investing heavily in B&N:

The e-book market is still young; if Amazon continues to be seen as the enemy, there’s no reason in theory why the Nook shouldn’t become just as popular, if not more so. It’s true that you can’t read Kindle books on your Nook, or vice versa, but over the long term, we’re not going to be buying Kindles or Nooks to read books. Just as people stopped buying cameras because they’re now just part of their phones, eventually people will just read books on their mobile device, whether it’s running Windows or iOS or something else. And that puts Amazon at a disadvantage: the Windows/Nook and iOS/iBook teams will naturally have much tighter integration between bookstore and operating system than anything Amazon can offer.

Whether that bit of prognostication proves accurate or not, Microsoft’s involvement can only broaden the range of e-reader options and help keep prices competitive, and that’s good for everyone who isn’t manufacturing e-book tech. More here on Microsoft’s gambit from the Wall St. Journal.

Not too long ago there was serious speculation that Barnes & Noble might follow Borders and other big-box bookstores into the dust bin of history. I don’t know that anyone thought the introduction of the Nook would potentially lead to B&N’s salvation.

Update: The Nook Glowlight seems to be a hit.

Barnes & Noble plans to add near-field communication (NFC) technology to its Nook e-reader platform, chief executive William Lynch said Tuesday.

Lynch also revealed that the Barnes & Noble Simple Touch with Glowlight, B&N’s latest Nook, has sold out.

I’m not surprised. In e-book reader commercials everyone may be reading at the beach, but in real life the only people reading on a beach are wearing one of these and still going blind.

— Mark Barrett

Social Media Narcissism

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From Klouchebag.com developer Tom Scott:

“Klout annoys me for the same reason that search engine optimization annoys me,” Scott said. “It’s an enormous amount of effort designed to game an arbitrary and often-changing system. Imagine if all that time went into actually making interesting things, or caring about the people around you.”

Better yet, skip the imagining and get to work. Or skip the work and express interest in the people around you.

Either way I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the return on your investment.

Update: Nicholas Thompson at The New Yorker chimes in on social media and Klout here.

— Mark Barrett

Housecleaning

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I took a stroll through my blogroll today and pruned sites that are no longer updating or relevant to my evolving interests. It’s been a while since I surveyed the self-publishing ditch to see what may have sprouted, so my plan is to do more site seeing and replace sites that have gone to seed with sites that are sprouting or in full bloom.

— Mark Barrett

Where Were We?

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Two years ago, when the major publishing houses got together with Apple and conspired to fix e-book prices, they did so not because Apple was sexy and Steve Jobs was a benevolent god and the iPad was about to launch, but because Amazon was the devil.

Somehow, in the intervening era of Apple-mania, that narrative has been skewed. But that skewing is about to snap back with a vengeance:

The government’s decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges has put the Internet retailer Amazon in a powerful position: the nation’s largest bookseller may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over the potential consequences.

This is, in fact, exactly what drove the publishing industry en-mass into Apple’s price-fixing arms two years ago. Because if Amazon can sell e-books at prices below what the publishing industry sets — as a loss leader for the Kindle, or simply as a way to stab the publishing industry in the heart until it begs for mercy — the publishing industry effectively loses control of its product. And that’s the last thing quarterly shareholders want to hear.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

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Despite public acceptance of self-publishing as a viable means of expression, the traditional publishing industry continues to claim that it is the final arbiter of what’s good and right and culturally relevant. Today the U.S. Justice Department agreed that self-publishing authors pale in comparison with their industrial counterparts:

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple and several book publishers Wednesday morning, claiming they worked together to artificially prop up prices for e-books. .

The publishers sued were Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. The suit was filed in a district court in New York.

“Apple facilitated the publisher defendants’ collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers,” according to the complaint.

Real publishers illegally conspire with giant, anti-competitive, ruthless, monopolistic media companies like Apple to fix prices and screw their own customers in pursuit of profits. Self-publishing authors don’t do any of that, and probably never will.

— Mark Barrett

Demystifying Authorship

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I grew up with a reverence for authors. If you made a movie, or wrote a play or directed a play or starred in a play, that was cool, but if you wrote a book (fiction, and to a lesser extent non-fiction, but to a greater extent philosophy) you were somebody. Authors weren’t just artists using the medium of words, they were culture.

As the internet has devalued writing it has also demystified authorship in ways that I think are unique to the times. From the dawn of the first printed book until the public began expressing itself en mass I think a reverence for authors has been the norm. To be published was to be validated in ways that most people could only aspire to.

This does not mean, however, that any cultural stewardship claimed by the publishing industry was real. Far from it. Publishers have engaged in gatekeeping for no end of duplicitous purposes, and the people populating those power centers have never shown the slightest hesitation in abusing whatever trust the public placed in them. Where power, money and desire meet you can scoop cockroaches by the pound and never see the bottom of the barrel.

So complete was publishing’s power over the concept of authorship that anyone who attempted to publish outside the industry was deemed by all to have admitted failure. A painter could work in solitude, a musician could compose for an audience of one, a filmmaker could go independent, but to be a real author — to be a part of the culture — you had to sign a contract with someone else and give them editorial control.  [ Read more ]

Social Networks and Self-Inficted Storytelling

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There’s no question that the internet has changed the world for the better. Individual voices now have as much reach as the dominant political and cultural voices had when every broadcast medium was controlled by gatekeepers. Aggregate enough individual voices and the power to dispute if not disrupt corporations or governments anywhere on the planet becomes real, in real time.

This feeling of empowerment was a critical factor in mass adoption of the internet. For the first time in history individuals were no longer limited to yelling back at their televisions and radios, but could immediately broadcast their own responses. While most such responses proved to be inane, some were, shockingly, no less informative or entertaining than what the cultural gatekeepers were shoveling. In short order these unknown but insightful individual voices validated the internet not simply as an email delivery system but as a democratic medium of mass communication. If you wanted incisive commentary on the web about anything from a film to a political battle you were as likely to find it on an obscure blog as you were on the website of a mainstream media outlet. Those mainstream voices, saddled as they were with bureaucratic restrictions and marketing directives, were outgunned by individuals who had no axe to grind except the facts of a matter and no audience to pander to but themselves.

While this revolution prompted a virtual land-grab by individuals eager to set themselves up as online experts, watchdogs or counter-culture trendsetters, not everyone wanted to manage their own site. What the revolution did confirm for everyone, however, was something that had long been suspected. In the media universe of programs and publications authored by other people, each of us was the content we’d been waiting for.  [ Read more ]

E-Book Price Fixing

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In March of 2010, in the face of growing downward price pressure from e-books and open competition on pricing from online retailers like Amazon and Apple, the publishing industry took control of the price of its own products. It did so by abruptly and collectively by abandoning the long-time industry-norm of wholesale pricing and adopting instead what is called the agency model, in which retailers get a percentage of any sale rather than being allowed to set the price of goods themselves. (Like real estate agents and stock brokers, retailers who embrace the agency model never own the products they sell, they simply collect a fee for uniting buyer and seller.)

Fully two years later the federal government is signalling that the price-fixing party may be over:

Among the reported gripes the Justice Department has with the way Apple and publishers are doing business is a move toward setting standard prices and giving Apple a 30% cut of revenue for e-books sold on its devices. The business model, which Apple rolled out with the launch of its first iPad tablet in 2010, differs from what publishers offer to traditional bookstores, which is to sell books to retailers for about half of the suggested cover price and let the booksellers charge whatever they’d like.

As e-books have become more popular and brick-and-mortar bookstores have struggled, the industry has moved to the “agency model” Apple dictated with the iPad and, the Justice Department believes, publishers have acted in concert to replicate Apple’s model with Amazon and others. Publishers have denied such collusion, the report said.

So now you know. If you want to openly conspire to set prices in order to protect your market and limit competition at the expense of the consumer you will only be able to get away with doing so for two years, plus however long it takes the government to drag you into court, prove anything, and penalize you with a slap-on-the-wrist settlement in which you ultimately offer consumers a small price break they will almost certainly never take you up on for products they probably don’t want to buy anyway.

Or, you can avoid the icky, scummy feeling of being a money-grubbing liar by self-publishing your own books.

— Mark Barrett

Pandora Internet Radio

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I have a love-hate relationship with radio. I love when a song comes on that I enjoy, whether it’s one I’m already familiar with or something new. I hate everything else, including songs in heavy rotation, announcers using compression mics, commercials commercials, commercials, and incessant announcements about many songs in a row a station will play before brutalizing me with commercials, commercials, commercials.

I have various writing moods, and not all of them are music compatible. When I’m in the mood for a backing track, however, having a steady stream of songs I don’t have to manage, and that won’t be interrupted by histrionics, feels good. I can’t say I’m more productive while I’m listening to music, but there’s something about music that makes it easier to find a writing groove, and particularly a rewriting groove.

I have a lot of music on my computer, ripped from old CD’s, but even choosing which tracks I want to hear can be a pain. I either have to invest time in creating playlists that go quickly stale or I have to choose something new when each CD ends. I know there are a lot of music options available to me over the internet but until recently I didn’t know somebody had solved all my music problems in a way that would leave me utterly satisfied. And all for free.

If you haven’t tried Pandora yet I urge you to give it a look and a listen. Not only is it a free streaming music service with no commercials, you can program your own stations by adding artists that define the music that station will play. The algorithms behind the selections are not obvious, which I like, but with a little trial and error you can easily create a station that serve up a good mix of artists you included as well as songs from similar artists.

My main list has about twenty artists on it — mostly late 90’s alternative rock. I’ve added a few new artists based on songs that were played outside my playlist, and I’ve removed two artists to keep the station from wandering too far afield. On the whole, however, I couldn’t be more satisfied with the result.

Which leads me to the only caution I have about this service. It’s been a constant in my life that anything I really enjoy disappears soon afterward. If I find a favorite restaurant it either closes or burns to the ground. If I find a favorite food item in the local grocery it is soon discontinued for lack of purchases by anyone other than me. So it stands to reason that by enjoying (let alone recommending) Pandora I am ensuring it will either quickly die or go to a monthly subscription price, at which point I’ll think long and hard about paying for it before deciding not to.

Until then, however, enjoy.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Afterword: Writing in General

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The Ditchwalk Book Club has been reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The final section of Hill’s book is also the most personal. Departing from the twin subjects of fiction and craft that bound the rest of the work, Hills writes of his own experience with nonfiction and of the eternal self-abuse that is any kind of authorship.

If you are serious about making writing an ongoing part of you life, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself sitting in a dusty corner, staring across the room at your desk, wondering if you’ve lost your mind. You’re going to experience a crisis of faith that has no bottom. You’re going to think that you’re doing it all wrong while every other writer is doing it with ease.

When you do, this chapter will remind you how wrong you are:

If the way my mind works when I’m trying to write has any resemblance to the way real writers’ minds work, then I pity them all. When I have time to write the ideas aren’t there — or if the ideas, then not the words. Forcing myself to put the words on paper helps not at all: insights become platitudes as phrased when under self-imposed duress. You see?!

I’ve long been thankful that someone had the guts to admit that writing is a nightmare. Not a sexy, drunken-binge nightmare or a death-tempting, drug-addled nightmare or an artistically obsessed, relationship-killing nightmare, but a self-imposed, lost-at-sea nightmare. Because the romantic, angst-ridden writing process portrayed in the movies, and often by authors themselves, is a fraud. Writing is hard even when it’s going well, and most of the time it’s not going well.

Hills ends the chapter in a two-page-long, single-paragraph monologue that I reread whenever I feel like banging my head on my desk or taking an axe to my computer. And every time I read it I laugh and am reminded that I am not alone.

Whether you write fiction or nonfiction your success will be determined by your ability to merge multiple, fragmented lines of thought into a coherent and focused whole. Whether writing about the actions of imaginary characters or addressing a real-world subject you’re going to lean heavily on reason and logic to find your way, and sooner or later you will get lost. At that moment the best thing you can do for your sanity is remind yourself that what you’re trying to do is really, really hard, and all the more so if you’re trying to do it well.

As a fiction writer I find Rust Hills’ book to be an invaluable aid. As a writer I find this chapter to be soul-sustaining.

Writing is a solitary pursuit that routinely destroys good people. I want you to have your dreams but I don’t want them to break you. Whenever you run aground, this chapter will make you laugh and remind you that you are not alone.

— Mark Barrett