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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

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

WIG&TSSIP: The American Short Story “Today”

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

In commenting on the previous section I noted that I’m personally not interested in belonging to any literary movement or critical school. I have my own literary perspective, certainly, but if I belong to any literary tradition it’s the one that puts human experience and truth ahead of everything else.

My complaint about literary movements and schools is that they are inevitably temporary and almost always fad-driven. This section of Hills’ book unintentionally proves the merit of that perspective in that it replaces two sections that appeared in the original 1977 printing. Those sections were, in order, Fiction and the New Journalism and Real Fiction, as against the New Fiction.

In the late 1970’s New Journalism and New Fiction were hot literary topics. Like all hot literary topics they faded soon afterward, rendering Hills’ own commentary effectively meaningless except for historical value. In reading those sections again I think the current narrative non-fiction movement owes a debt to New Journalism, while flash fiction and other current experimental forms owe a debt to New Fiction. But it also seems, at least to me, that these movements are part of a never-ending effort to make fiction be somehow more than fiction. Whether the hot literary topic is meta-fiction or anti-fiction or hyper-fiction, the aim is always to make plain-old fiction do more, when plain-old fiction does what it does better than any trendy variant ever will.

As Hills wrote in the section on New Journalism:

Imagination is anyway implicit in the very definition of “fiction,” as distinguished from its opposite in the absurd term “nonfiction.” And fiction and nonfiction are, again anyway, both perfectly good things in themselves — there doesn’t seem to be any point in mixing them. The resultant hybrids aren’t a new strain of literary art at all. They’re just intermittently useful, futureless one-timers, as unaesthetic and recalcitrant as mules.

In removing those two sections and replacing them Hills demonstrates the merit of his own words and the futility of embracing fad as craft. If you really feel the need to write from the crest of every literary wave I support you in that pursuit. Not only is it not for me, however, I don’t think it’s a particularly good way to become one with the ocean.

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Tim Schafer, Kickstarter and You

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Before you get excited, two things to keep in mind. First, Tim Schafer is an interactive entertainment legend. He is his own brand and his own reputation for quality in a way that few people ever are. If you’ve never heard of him that only means you have a giant, gaping hole in your database of important cultural knowledge. (And you’ve missed out on a lot of fun.)

Here’s Kickstarter on Kickstarter:

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

You know you’re reading marketing hype when you read the word amazing (or excited). You know a web site is super-serious about its marketing hype when it uses all the colors of the rainbow to format its text. (Click here, then on the link at the top to “learn more”.)

Tim Schafer likes making very smart and very comic adventure games. The greater gaming industry likes making routinely dumb and routinely disappointing crap. Because of this mismatch in interests, Schafer and others like him have had a very hard time getting funding for projects they want to pursue. At least until a few days ago, when Schafer put a proposal up on Kickstarter seeking to raise $400,000 over the course of a month.

He achieved his goal in eight hours. He raised One Million Dollars in a day. Currently the total is $1.37 million and rising.

Now remember: this guy is a legend. And whatever Kickstarter is all about, nothing helps sell a project like celebrity, which Schafter has in spades even if you’ve never heard of him. And while plenty of people have used Kickstarter to get their own projects off the ground, it’s not at all clear that all of the potential legalities — including frivolous or hostile lawsuits — have been beaten out of this or any other crowdfunding system. This is cutting edge stuff, which means it’s both cool and risky. (And I’m willing to bet Tim Schafer has a lawyer making sure he’s protected six ways.)

Still, it’s pretty impressive, and all the more so because it directly connects a creator with the audience that person would clearly like to reach. If Tim Schafer can get advance sales of a game sufficient to enable completion of that game, then he’s in business for the rest of his life. No more funding hassles, no more percentages off the top, no more publisher beating him to snot and running off with his IP, no more time spent raising money like a bottom-feeding politician trading a tattered soul for one more term. Just a straight-up trade: we give you some cash and you make us laugh.

Since most of you reading this post are writers, I know you’ve already gotten bored with Schafer and are wondering if you can fund you own, smaller projects in the same way. This list of smaller projects would suggest the answer is yes. But remember: if it blows up in your face for some reason it’s not my fault. Do your homework, protect your copyrights at all cost, and don’t promise something you can’t deliver. Your credibility is more important than whatever you think is more important than your credibility.

Update:

Very good comments here on a related thread. Covers many of the concerns I have while underscoring how this model allows creative people to avoid the gatekeeping inherent in third-party funding. My biggest concern is simply that a weasel could raise money then pocket some or all of the cash by saying the project failed for any number of reasons. Kickstarter disavows any responsibility to vet projects, and leaves the risk squarely with investors — which again underscores how important your personal credibility is in this weasel-infested marketplace we call the world wide web.

— Mark Barrett

Network Solutions Fails Again

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Last year I wrote a couple of posts about the tech support hell I ended up in with my internet service provider (ISP), Network Solutions. I also wrote a post explaining the tech-support process and how to navigate some of the obstacles you’ll encounter. I stated at the time that I would look for a new ISP, but NetSol performed well until the renewal of my service contract seven months later, so I opted to go with the devil I knew.

That devil has now failed to get one of my sites up and running for an entire week. During that week I’ve been told the problem was related to a denial-of-service attack, and that it was related to an error in the configuration of my WordPress settings, but neither of those knee-jerk diagnoses were true. When tech support came to the same conclusion — after multiple calls from me — they escalated the issue to engineering. My site is still unavailable after seven days.

I understand that Network Solutions can’t provide free tech support to every site owner who uses WordPress. And I have no doubt that they are constantly badgered by users seeking exactly that: free service for problems those users created. So when the NetSol techs told me there was a configuration problem with my WordPress settings I took ownership of the problem. (They stressed that they weren’t even supposed to do that much, and I’m grateful they tried to help within the confines of their internal directives.) In looking into the issue, however, I realized not only that I didn’t cause that problem, but there was clear evidence to suggest the configuration issue was not the cause of the problem I was having.  [ Read more ]