Out of Print

Is There Money in E-Books?

Are E-Readers and Poetry Incompatible?

That's the question posed, recently, by the Washington Post.

From the story...

Form is essential to the art, Miller says. Line breaks, stanza breaks and pacing — that’s the poetry; otherwise it’s just words. And form, he says, is precisely what gets lost when poems get converted to e-readers, which is why Miller doesn’t publish on e-readers. He says they don’t honor his work.
That’s a widespread feeling among his fellow poets and a debate that can pit poetry purists against futurists. “The technology has to get it right,” says Miller. Or poets won’t use it. 

“Right now, we’re talking about conversion of print files to digital files and the greatest issue is in the poetry community,” says Ira Silverberg, director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts. “If you’re working on a Kindle or Nook or Kobo device, and you shoot up a page, you lose the line breaks depending on how you’ve formatted your preferences.”

The First Kindle...from 1935

It was, however, a little unwieldy.

A story in the Daily Mail...


The drawing carries the explanatory labels: 'miniature film carries photographs of book pages', 'page reproduced (enlarged)', 'ground glass screen', 'button turns leaf', 'adjusting focus' and 'swing screen to proper angle.'

It is not known whether the device was ever developed.

The design was carried in the magazine, 'Everyday science and mechanics' in its April 1935 edition.

The first generation Kindle was released in America in November 2007 to a fanfare of publicity and sold out in five and half hours.

Save the Sci-Fi

Groovy project. Singularity and Company are taking vintage sci-book books that aren't in print anymore then turning them into e-books.

From their site..
 
Singularity and Company is a team of time traveling archivists longing for futures past.  
Each month, our subscribers help us choose a vintage, out of print scifi book to rescue, and, with the rightsholders' permission, ebookify. We're bringing forgotten 20th century scifi into the 21st.

A Taste of TED Books

Haagen-Dazs, Summer Fun, Tweets, and an E-Book

Huh? New York Daily News explains, here.

Your E-Book is Reading You

Digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about their readers than ever before. How that's changing the experience of reading.

From an article in the Wall Street Journal...

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public. 

The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books. 

Publishing has lagged far behind the rest of the entertainment industry when it comes to measuring consumers' tastes and habits. TV producers relentlessly test new shows through focus groups; movie studios run films through a battery of tests and retool them based on viewers' reactions. But in publishing, reader satisfaction has largely been gauged by sales data and reviews—metrics that offer a postmortem measure of success but can't shape or predict a hit. That's beginning to change as publishers and booksellers start to embrace big data, and more tech companies turn their sights on publishing.

 

Enhanced Ebooks Are Bad for Children

Unlike print versions or basic ebooks, enhanced ebooks distract children from the story and stop them remembering narrative details according to new research.

From a story in the Guardian...

"The enhanced ebook prompted more non-content related actions (eg behaviour or device-focused talk, pushing hands away) from children and parents than the print books," found Cynthia Chiong, Jinny Ree, Lori Takeuchi and Ingrid Erickson in their study. "The enhanced ebook was less effective than the print and basic ebook in supporting the benefits of co-reading because it prompted more non-content related interactions. When adults prompt children with questions pertaining to the text, label objects, and encourage them to discuss the book contents in terms of their own experiences and curiosities, this elicits increased verbalisation by the child and can lead to improved vocabulary and overall language development."

Children reading enhanced ebooks also "recalled significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story", said the researchers, speculating that the extra features may be distracting. But while "print books were more advantageous for literacy building co-reading", ebooks, and particularly enhanced ebooks, were better "for engaging children and prompting physical interaction".

What Will Become of the Paper Book?

How will the design of books change in our digital age?

From a story in Slate...

This is one future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferation—a select group of design-conscious authors will continue to address their creations specifically to the printed medium. Their themes, like Plascencia’s and Foer’s, will likely revolve around the history and practice of writing books, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary—one of literature’s greatest themes has always been itself.

Other writers go even further, making over the entire paratextual edifice, as Anne Carson does for her recent New Directions publication, Nox. “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book,” she writes on the back cover. “This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The book is indeed a facsimile of a handmade original, bound accordion-style and boxed. Verso pages “translate” a Catullus elegy by offering long Latin-English dictionary entries for each word in the poem. Recto pages tell the story of Carson’s relationship to her brother through fragments of lyric essay and primary materials like photographs and letters.

Is the Novel Dead?

No.

From a piece in the Wall Street Journal...

Doomsayers have always worried about the commercial pressure on novelists. Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that American authors would "aim at rapidity of execution more than at perfection of detail…. The object of authors will be to astonish, rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste." 

John Updike, in "Bech at Bay," expressed that anxiety in more modern terms: "The book trade, that old carcass tossed here and there by its ravenous jackals? Greedy authors, greedy agents, brainless book chains with their Vivaldi-riddle espresso bars, publishers owned by metallurgy conglomerates, operated by glacially cold bean-counters in Geneva."

H.G. Wells lamented the fragmentation of fiction into islands of taste: "It was no figure of speech that 'everyone' was reading Byron or puzzling about the Waverley mystery.…" Today, even best-selling fiction captures a fraction of the number of people who watched the latest episode of "Mad Men."
I don't believe the novel is dying. I have just read a couple that reassured me of the vitality of contemporary fiction—"The Barbarian Nurseries" by Hector Tobar and "History of a Pleasure Seeker" by Richard Mason. They could hardly be more different; they could hardly be more provocative.

Used Bookstores in the Digital Age

How are they doing? Will they survive?

From a piece in Publisher's Weekly...

“In my mind, this is the second industrial revolution,” says Oldfather. “I know retail will never look like what it did.” After watching the number of available CDs dwindle, he predicts a similar fate for books. To protect the jobs of the 300 people who work at Bookman’s, he is planning to draw on his 36 years in used books and launch Bookman’s Recreation Exchange in Tucson this fall. “It’s going to be the same vibe, and that’s what we’re selling,” he says, along with sporting goods, exercise equipment, and sports books. “I want to make a sporting goods store that’s a place to hang out.” Oldfather would like to take the concept national.

Business is up 1% at Dallas-based Half Price Books, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. But that hasn’t deterred the 115-store chain, in 16 states, from adding a new store recently in Naperville, Ill., or remodeling stores in Apple Valley, Minn., and Austin, Tex. “We see people coming in—they’re just buying less,” says executive v-p, marketing/development Kathy Doyle Thomas. “We’re looking at how we can control expenses. We will close unprofitable stores. If our potential customer base goes down, we’ll consolidate stores.”

Recently Half Price surveyed customers to find out if e-readers were eating into their business. “What we’re seeing is interest in both e-books and print books,” says Thomas. “It’s going to depend on how cheap e-readers are.” 

Are E-Readers Really Green?

No.

Frankenstein Remixed

Salon praises the Mary Shelley Frankenstein app.

From the piece...

What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.

This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable.

Classic Movies on Your E-Book

Enter stage right - "Inside the Script" - where classic movie screenplays can be read on your e-reader.

From a story in the Wall Street Journal...

Warner Bros. Digital Distribution said Sunday it would start making the screenplays to four of the studio’s more iconic movies available for sale as e-books. As part of the studio’s “Inside the Script” digital publishing initiative, fans can now buy e-book versions of “Casablanca,” “Ben-Hur,” “An American in Paris” and “North by Northwest” for their iPads, Kindles and Nooks.

The studio hopes to establish a market for digital screenplays, which it can bundle with archival materials otherwise languishing in studio vaults.

Each e-book title will retail for $10 and includes the film’s actual shooting script and rare historical documents from the Warner Bros. archives. The “Casablanca” e-book, for instance, not only includes the original script, but it also features producer Hall Wallis’ production notes and studio chief Jack Warner’s telegrams and memos. The “Ben-Hur” e-book contains excerpts from star Charlton Heston’s acting and shooting journals during filming, as well as a forward and photograph captions written by Mr. Heston’s son, Fraser.

Literature Needs Much More Than E-Books

So says James Bridle on Wired.

From the piece...


But this innovation has been hampered by an entirely understandable misunderstanding of new technology and what it means for the book, as well as a historically misplaced idea of what constitutes "quality". The role of the editor -- the filter, the gatekeeper -- is not one of much value in a world which is as happy watching a camera phone video as it is 3D IMAX. Books, and the publishing industry with them, have been radically decentred by technology. The most common metaphor employed by publishers trying to understand what is happening to them is the music industry, but this turns out to be an error. The radical ephemerality of the MP3 file suits music in the same way that it destabilises the book, which has always existed to provide the corresponding physical weight to literature's intellectual heft. Freeing the idea of the book from paper and hard covers thus entails reconceptualising what "the book" is -- a weight that has proved hard for devices to take on.

Who is Reading E-Books?

Find out with this sprawling infographic, here.

The Kindle Index

What city buys the most e-readers? You'd be surprised by the results. The Atlantic has the answer, here.

Who is Reading and What Are They Reading It On?

Fewer people are reading - but at least they're reading more, and in more formats than ever.

From a story in the Huffington Post...

The report showed that as of February 2012, 21% of Americans had read an e-book, and that owners of e-readers read an average of eight books a year more than people without the devices (24 vs 16).

The surveys of 2,986 respondents, carried out in English and Spanish at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, also showed that the average (calculated by mean) American reads 17 books a year.

However, 19% of respondents aged 16 and over said that they hadn't read a single book in any format, over the previous 12 months - the highest since such surveys on American reading habits began in 1978. If this figure is accurate, that means more than 50 million Americans don't read books at all.

The Rise of E-Reading

People who read e-books read more than people who read book books.

From a piece on Pew Internet on the rise of e-reading...

The rise of e-books in American culture is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material. Using a broader definition of e-content in a survey ending in December 2011, some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone.

Those who have taken the plunge into reading e-books stand out in almost every way from other kinds of readers. Foremost, they are relatively avid readers of books in all formats: 88% of those who read e-books in the past 12 months also read printed books.2 Compared with other book readers, they read more books. They read more frequently for a host of reasons: for pleasure, for research, for current events, and for work or school. They are also more likely than others to have bought their most recent book, rather than borrowed it, and they are more likely than others to say they prefer to purchase books in general, often starting their search online.