My husband has wanted a Kindle for a long time now. About two weeks ago, for our fourth wedding anniversary, his parents bought us one. Since then, there has been a stack of books at the foot of our bed: classics that Kindle offers for free. Eleven books in all: Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment, The Sound and the Fury, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, etc. My husband wants me to sell them back to the used bookstore. He argues that this will enable me to buy more books, books I’ll actually reread and/or aren’t available on the Kindle. Read more »

Every time I read a post about the kindle (or other e-readers) I get one of three things:

1. “I think e-readers are bad and the death of the book is nigh because most people are ignorant slobs who will steal books and woe is me!”

2. “The Sony kindlepadnook is the bestest thing evers and everyone who doesn’t have one is stupid welcome to the STONE AGE!!!”

3. “I decided that I would make an intellectual effort to compare the experience of digital text to that of physical books for the sake of a logical comparison, though I want to disclaim any support of horrifically large and abusive companies such as Amazon, et al.”

Kyle Minor recently posted a review of his kindle experience on HTMLGIANT, and it certainly falls into the third category. Judging by the posts and literary work of Kyle’s that I’ve read, he seems to be a very bright character. But I’m worried by things like this: “Am I distrustful of million-tentacled corporate monsters like Amazon? Very.” Not because I’m a corporate whore, but because it points the finger in the wrong direction.

Yes, large corporations are scary, because they have lots of power and little accountability, and that frees them to act like sociopaths whose sole focus is on the self. Sure. Understood. But isn’t there something larger at play here? Corporations don’t start out as gigantic evil monsters. They can only have real influence and power over the marketplace if consumers allow it. If few people bought items from Amazon, then Amazon would not sell millions of different products for low prices. They would only be able to sell items that were being purchased. But because they’ve established an effective business model, they’ve grown and expanded their influence because consumers keep coming back. Ultimately, we’re all to blame, right? People who spend money? So saying, as Kyle does, that there’s very little he can really do about such a company, is the easy way out.

But it’s also the easy way out to say that it’s consumers’ fault and we all need to fix things if we want them to be better.
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Last week my phone died. Remember when you could buy a phone without a camera, keyboard, and pasta maker attached to it? It was one of those. Call me old-fashioned, I guess. Heck, the memory card in the phone pre-dated the Cingular-AT&T merger.

So I got a shiny new phone with a camera and too-small buttons and the only phone numbers I had were my wife’s and parents’. The rest of the numbers I used all the time—friends, other family, the dentist’s office—were all lost to me, and I had to embarrassingly ask each person for their phone number. Which is a strange thing to have to ask someone who you just called the day before. Because even though I used them all the time, I had no idea what they were.

At first this made me happy. I don’t like talking on the phone anyway, and if I lost my address book, I’d have an excuse when people asked me why I didn’t call them.

It only took me a couple of days to get all the numbers back. Email and facebook and asking around (digitally, mind you, not in person) made it happen. And I wondered, what if I didn’t have email to ask what their number was? What if there wasn’t facebook (which I use mostly as a glorified address book)? What if I couldn’t call someone who called someone who had someone’s number in their cell phone?

What if this was 1994?
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i read murakami’s after the quake last week.  it’s a pretty slim volume, noticeably so in paperback, and even more so when you actually crack the thing open and see how the pages are typeset.  technically, it’s 147 pages.  you play with the margins, the font, the page size—it’ll still be over 100, but maybe not by whole bunches.  a quick peek at the table of contents at the front tells you each of the book’s stories runs about 20 pages or so.  i mention all this because i feel like each one of those details is helping to create expectations for the work before i’ve read a single word.  and none of that would be true if i was reading it on a kindle.

i was completely engrossed by after the quake—it’s a marvel of storytelling, and on levels i was hardly even aware of on a first read.  i caught myself, several times, pausing in the middle of a piece to flip forward and see how many pages were left in that particular story.  i was curious because i didn’t see how murakami could possibly pull it all together in just the few pages left.  yet he always did—or, at the very least, left me wondering at the end what the fuck had just happened in such a way that i was eager to re-read it.

the concept of a “page” is literally outdated for kindle users, though.  since you can change the font size to whatever you want, the device can only tell you what percentage of the way you are through a book.  and there’s obviously no heft (or slimness) to anything except the device itself—so you’ll never be intimidated (or perhaps inspired) by a huge novel in the same way you would with a 1,000 page doorstop sitting on your shelf.

so i’d like to ask kindle and other e-reader fans: do you find your expectations of books have changed at all with the digital format?  do you ever forget how long a work is while you’re in the middle of it, and does that affect your reading?  has technology changed the way you think about work that would be gargantuan as a printed object?

As was widely expected, Barnes & Noble introduced a new version of their nook ereader today. This is a big, big thing, and is either the first in a long line of successful products from B&N, or a last useless stab at a market they’ve been doomed in from the start.

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Just in case you’d forgotten, physical books are dead. And this just after Amazon sold out of the new Kindle in five days. Those new Kindles are cheaper and leaner and more efficient, which you knew had to happen because of the popularity of the iPad as an e-reader. And the technology is evolving fast enough that some companies, like Plastic Logic, are canceling upcoming products and moving forward with newer feature sets. Perhaps these newer devices will be helpful to fans of romance novels printed by places like Dorchester Publishing, which is going all-digital.

Sigh.

I was going to start this blog off with a confession about different files and programs I may or may not have pirated in my life, but then I thought better of it. You never know who actually reads this thing. Instead, I’m going to provide a couple links that argue the possible effects of pirating digital media and the future of authors and artists who create such media.

The first link is to Scott Adam’s blog. You might know him as the Dilbert cartoonist. He basically argues that within his lifetime authors won’t exist:

I predict that the profession known as “author” will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. People might someday write entire books – and good ones – for the benefit of their own publicity, such as to promote themselves as consultants, lecturers, or the like. But no one born today is the next multi-best-selling author. That job won’t exist.

As an author, my knee-jerk reaction is to assume that the media content of the future will suck because there will be no true professionals producing it. But I think suckiness is solved by better search capabilities. Somewhere out in the big old world are artists who are more talented than we can imagine, and willing to create content for free, for a variety of reasons. And so, as our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero. Read more »

By now you’ve heard (over and over again) about Amazon’s new royalty structure, announced last week. If you haven’t heard, you’re probably not interested much in publishing, but read it anyway. And I know there’s been a lot of ebook/Kindle talk on here lately (Scott’s excellent post, etc.). But now that the world’s had a few days to digest the Amazon thing, let’s talk dirty. (Full disclosure: a family member works at Amazon and I have a Kindle; try something before you talk shit about it. I dare you.)
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According to the NYT, “More than half of the ‘best-selling’ e-books on the Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-reader, are available at no charge.”