BookFinder.com Journal

When is a Kindle like a $10 piece of vinyl?

BookFinder.com Journal reader Wayne Somers took exception to my being surprised that the Authors Guild would want to force the removal of the read-aloud feature in the Kindle ebook reader:

"Your reaction seems to me to display what I would least expect from you: naivete about technology. The "canned computerized sound" these things have now will be replaced by better and better sound, but if the authors don't protest now, they will lose an asset that has been covered by negotiated contracts. The vast majority of authors make pathetically little for their hard work, and booksellers have historically been shamefully indifferent to copyright issues."

I'd like to address this by analogy. My neighborhood bookstore sells a wide variety of reading accessories. For a one-time cost of about $10, a reader can use a vinyl full-page magnifier to see the text of any book in larger print than was originally intended, effectively an unauthorized large print edition. But I've never seen the Authors Guild condemn bookstores for selling magnifiers.

If it's OK to spend $10 at a bookstore to turn virtually any book ever published into a serviceable large print edition, why is it so wrong to spend $359 at Amazon.com to turn a recently purchased ebook into a poor-quality audiobook?

This clearly isn't about helping readers. If the goal were to help readers, one would think the Authors Guild would encourage the development of more convenient modes of reading.

This clearly isn't about money either. Unlike ordinary books or audiobooks, ebooks with DRM generally can't be shared or passed along, meaning buyers need to pay for every single book they read. One would think that overzealous advocates of authors' rights would act like the RIAA or MPAA, working to support fully monetized DRM schemes that reduce potential profit loss from pass-along. If major ebook systems end up looking like the iTunes Music Store, there will be no market for used ebooks; shouldn't that delight authors furious with used books, and the right of first sale?

But that's not the case either. What's left then? Defense of status quo? If publishers aren't giving authors a fair shake, let's talk about that. Maybe technological change means that there will be increased blurring of the lines between print, audio, and ebook formats; if that's what readers want, the industry needs to adapt appropriately as it allocates and prices those rights. As an avid reader and book shopper, I'm just not ready to give up my right to resell used print books, or use third-party tools like magnifiers, booklights, or read-aloud systems.

[Now reading: The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial by Susan Eaton]

E-books the final frontier

The biggest question publishers are asking themselves these days is probably "what should we do about e-books?"

They are such a new concept that no one is really sure how to handle them or how the general public will eventually will want to use them.  So because of this any experiments that are played out are quite interesting.

Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher) recently wrote a book, Sunken Treasure, which he publishes himself though Lulu and was trying to decide if he should produce an e-book....  Here is a transcript from his blog explaining his thought process and what happened... 

"At 1:38pm, I sent the following message to Twitter: "Hey Twitterverse: how would you feel about a digital version of Sunken Treasure for about $5?"

I expected that a dozen or so people would be interested, but I hoped for more. Within ten minutes, over 100 different people said they were not only interested, but wanted it RIGHT NOW PLZ KTHX.

"Wow," I thought. "That was a more positive and emphatic response than I was expecting!"

I told Twitter: "Wow, so it appears that quite a lot of you want PDF versions of this book for $5. I didn't think it would be so many, honestly. Hmmm..."

Responses continued to pour in. I started making hash marks on a note pad.

A lot of people were asking about Kindle versions, Sony eReader versions, and other versions. I made a lot more hash marks on my note pad, and noticed that the page was almost filled.

I looked around the Lulu publishing options and told Twitter: "Many questions about other formats for digital versions of my books. Short answer: all I can do at the moment on my own is PDF. Still want?"

Short answer: Yes. A whole lot of people wanted it, even if it was in a PDF format.

I've always wanted to do digital versions of my books, but I've never had a way to do it that doesn't involve me manually accepting payments and sending out links or something equally complicated. My POD experience with Lulu has completely changed that. I logged into my Lulu account, clicked a couple of buttons, filled in one box with $5.00, and I was done.

I took a deep breath and told Twitter: "Okay, Twitterverse! You asked for it, so here it is. Sunken Treasure in DRM-free PDF for $5: http://tinyurl.com/sunkenpdf"

I admit that I had a brief flash of doubt. "Did I just screw myself? Did I just sell one and end up giving away a hundred?"

"No," I reminded myself. "People who will steal from me were never going to support my work, anyway. You're doing the right thing. You're making it available to people at a really fair price, in a super portable format. And maybe people will like it and want a paper copy for themselves or to give as gifts."

I hoped that PDF sales would be solid ... well, they were solid, for about ten minutes, and then they exploded. In less than an hour, the total PDFs sold exceed 1/5 of the total print copies sold. People were e-mailing positive feedback, people were Twittering positive feedback, and people were starting to talk about it on their blogs.

"Okay, this is awesome," I thought. "I definitely did the right thing."

Over the next 24 hours, I checked sales every hour or so (hey, can you blame me?) and I watched total PDF sales close the gap with print sales, but something really awesome was also happening: the print sales, which had slowed to about 2 a day a month after release, suddenly picked up! It wasn't a ton, and I'm still not getting rich off of this effort, but it was still pretty remarkable. Feedback from buyers suggested that a lot of people read the PDF, liked it, and wanted a physical copy of their own as a result. Any doubts I had about the demand for this format, or the wisdom of trusting my instincts and releasing a DRM-free PDF at a reasonable price point vanished. I started thinking about other work of mine, and how cool it would be to offer digital versions in a similar manner."

I think this experiemnt is a good look into the future considering that many of his followers (and fans) may be Science (Fiction) lovers, who are notorious as early adopters of technology.   

What I peronally take from this, so find a large salt grain, is that we are still a few years away from e-books proliferating the way mp3s have done but as the kinks are worked out of portable reading devices they will be well on their way.  If we were to track e-books on the mp3 time line I think we would be at about 1996 perhaps... when mp3s were just comming out but the internet had not yet adapted to high speed connections, napster was still three years away and hardrives were still hovering on or below the one gig mark.

However once these issues are fully addressed publishing will need to have worked out their price points, benefits of a paper copy, and DRM restrictions or they will have a fight similar to the music industry.

Authors slam reading aloud ebooks

While I like authors and am occasionally skeptical of ebook readers, the Authors Guild's slam against the Amazon Kindle 2 confuses the heck out of me.

One of the features of the upgraded Kindle is that it can read a book out loud to you, using a canned computerized voice similar to the text to speech systems available on many current computers.

Upon hearing of this, the Authors Guild told the Wall Street Journal "They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Faced with pushback (including the suggestion that perhaps the Authors Guild would like to ban all reading aloud of books), the Guild retrenched, suggesting that publishers should consider forcing Amazon to add restrictions to books that could block access to the read-aloud feature.

This is absurd. Book owners can buy paperback books, and rebind them into hardcovers; companies like Brodart sell this service to libraries. It's as if the Authors Guild was trying to put Brodart out of business, claiming that rebinding paperbacks would infringe on their exclusive rights to sell hardcover rights.

There's been a lot written about this, but my favorite is Neil Gaiman's take.

"When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it."

CPSIA regulations worry used childrens' booksellers

In the rush of the past few days, I totally forgot to post about the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), a piece of American legislation that could have substantial impacts on the sale of used children's books.

Under CPSIA requirements, children's products can't be sold if they contain over a certain amount of lead or particular phthalates, and many such products will have to undergo mandatory testing and certification. Lead poisoning and phthalate exposure can have a wide array of very negative health effects, particularly on children.

There's been tremendous worry and pushback from publishers, libraries, sellers of used children's books, toys, and clothing, and parents worried about whether something as simple as hand-me-down clothing will remain unambiguously legal. On January 8, The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a clarification, explaining that the rigorous testing and certification requirements are meant to apply only to new children's products, but that used items must still conform to guidelines. This doesn't seem to offer any ground for makers of new small-scale or handmade goods, which are still subject to the same potentially expensive certification requirements.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has suggested that books published after 1985 are relatively safe, but the threat of legal liability means that sellers of used children's books from before 1985 may choose to pull them out of the market or destroy them, rather than do costly testing of each individual book. For example, read these stories from booksellers at Overlawyered.

Read more:

• Official CPSIA summary
• Official CPSIA FAQ
• CPSIA on Wikipedia
• Ongoing coverage of CPSIA impact on books from Overlawyered
• Twitter posts about the CPSIA

Pancake Cookbooks for Mardi Gras

On February 24th we get to celebrate Mardi Gras, a holiday with several other names including Shrove Tuesday (as we called it my family), Fat Tuesday, Carnival or simply Pancake day. There are a great many traditions surrounding the holiday but I wanted to focus the eating of pancakes.

The original reason for eating pancakes on Fat Tuesday was so that Christians could use up the last for their rich foods (eggs, milk, sugar, lard etc) before they began the fasting of lent, and if you dump these forbidden ingredients in bowl with flour and water pancakes are what emerge.

My mother and I always ate pancakes for dinner on Shrove Tuesday, my father being of the camp that thought pancakes were breakfast food. He boycotted the event for several years before eventually realizing that our pancake feast vastly outdid whatever he was willing to scrounge up on his own and he slunk back to the family dinner table and realized that little can make you happier than to devour ones weight in ham and cheese crepe goodness.

If you are looking to make some traditional hotcakes on Pancake Tuesday you have a number of options. You make them out of whole wheat, buckwheat, or regular flour; mix flavors into the batter like blueberries or nuts; and top them with everything from fresh fruit, lemon and sugar, or any number of syrups (corn, maple, cream cheese). There are more flapjack cookbooks then words for griddlecakes but here are a couple of options.

Posh Pancakes and Fancy Fritters by Helen V. Fisher

The Pancake Handbook by Stephen Siegelman

The Totally Pancakes & Waffles Cookbook by Helene Siegel

Pancakes A to Z by Marie Simmons

Now if you are tired of the traditional and want to expand your horizons pancakes are a worldwide phenomenon, here are just a few worldwide pancake applications.

The French crepe is made with a similar batter to traditional (English) pancakes but is thinner and is wrapped around any variety of sweet and savory fillings. You can’t walk a block in Paris without tripping over a crepery trying to sell you a ham, egg and cheese crepe but seafood, jams, fruits, and other meats are also good choices. Eastern European also has a similar version called the Blin or Blintz which differs from a crepe in that it is made with yeast where a crepe is not. A complete explanation of both and recipes can be found in Belins & Crepes by Camille Le Foll

                              

            Crepes                                          Blintz                                          Raggmuk

A wide variety of pancake are eaten in Scandinavia, many of which are similar to English pancakes and crepes however they also have raggmunk which are a potato pancake as well as saffron pancakes which are made with rice and baked in the oven. While I don’t have a copy to check you should be able to find recipes for most of these options in Scandinavian Feasts: Celebrating Traditions throughout the Year by Beatrice A. Ojakangas .

Jewish Latkes are another great potato pancake, Jewish Holiday Feasts by Jeannette Ferrary has the recipe for these traditional Hanukkah treat

               
             Latkes                                       Arapas                                     Pupusas

Not just limited to European cooking the pancake can also be found in Latin America there are a variety of corn flour based treats. Columbian arapas, Mexican gorditas and Salvadorian pupusas are just a few, all of which are usually served with savoury fillings from casseroles, beans, cheese, and meats.   The South American Table by Maria Baez Kijac has a number of arapas recipes to try.

In Malaysia, Singapore, and China they serve a type of pancake called Ban Chian Kuih or Apom Balik (in Chinese or Malay respectively) which are traditionally filled ground peanut and alternatively egg, coconut, cheese, fruits, chocolate, and condensed milk. I couldn’t find a cookbook to suggest where I could guarantee a recipe, but fortunately I did find this recipe online thanks to the Malaysia Star.

Koreans also have several types of pancakes including jeon, which incorporates vegetables or meat mixed into a flour batter, as well as bindaetteok a mung bean pancake, and hotteok a pancake made with yeast and then stuffed with fillings. I personally love jeon and find it good alone or with a generous helping of Korean BBQ pork. In Japan you can get something similar called Okonomiyaki which roughly translates to "cook what you like,".. You should be able to find recipes for most of these in Discovering Korean Cuisine: Recipes from the Best Korean Restaurants in Los Angeles by Allisa Park

Heading a little further south to Vietnam you can find a crepe style pancake called bánh xèo which is made with rice flour, water and turmeric powder which is then stuffed with pork, shrimp, bean sprouts and herbs. Cambodians call this banh chiao, and you can learn to make it in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors by Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen

 

        Apam-Balik                            Jeon                          Okonomiyaki                    banh-xeo

If you have a further interest in Pancakes and how they have impacted the world read Pancake: A Global History by Ken Albala, where he traces the history of the pancake back to Greek and Roman times and even includes the oldest existing official pancake recipe, from a Dutch cook from the sixteenth century…

At first I was just going to make crepes, but after writing this I think I'm going to have to have a full pancake week.

Dubai festival bans book for gay character

English author Geraldine Bedell was set to launch her novel, The Gulf Between Us, at the Dubai Literary Festival but has now been told she cannot participate for a laundry list of bizarre reasons.

The Guardian reports:

Apparently, the organizers of the Dubai literary festival, or whoever made the decision on their behalf, couldn't see this. After all the initial excitement on both sides, they took the book, sat on it for a long time and finally came back with an almost comically long list of reasons why they couldn't have it at their festival. These included "it is set in the Gulf", "it talks about Islam", and "it focuses on the Iraq war and could be a minefield for us".

These weird-sounding objections become even weirder when you look at the book, which is extremely respectful of Islam (the Church of England actually gets a much rougher ride) and in which the Iraq invasion is only a distant threatening rumble, still several months off.

The only objection that made any sense at all, from their point of view, was that a minor character, Sheikh Rashid, is gay and has an English boyfriend. To which I can only shrug and say that some people are gay, and this is fiction. The Dubai literary festival has a vision statement in which it claims to seek to "awaken the imagination". It is tempting to feel they should have added "though only in approved directions".

I hope some of this preemptive negative press helps nudge the festival towards opening their criteria a little because if we can't discuss political and social differences in literature what hope do we have in politics and life in general.

*Edit - February 18th* - It has now been announced that Margaret Atwood has decided to pull out of the Emirates Airline international festival of literature because of this Bedell's banning.  It should be noted that Atwood is a vice president of International Pen, and following her announcement other authors including Anthony Horowitz and Lauren Child have said that they too are considering dropping the event from their schedules.

With this being the inauguraul festival in Dubai and the first of its kind in the Middle East all eyes are on the event... we will see how this progresses.

[Now reading: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson]

If Benjamin Button is so Oscar worthy...

I am by no means what one might call a film buff, but to my un-trained eye I did find this year’s Oscar nominations to be a bit lopsided. I'm not sure if it's just my memory but it seems that each year fewer and fewer films are actually recognized, meaning the bulk of the nominations are stacked on an ever shrinking set of films.

My wife suggested that perhaps studios are just pushing more and more of their overall budget into trying to create a bigger blockbuster than the next studio (all eggs, one basket) and so all of the best performances come from the same films, however I think that there are just less good scripts being written and adapted leaving the judges to pick the couple gems out of the dregs.

I sometimes feel the same way about publishing, in that the bulk of the books I want to read were written decades ago. Why publishers keep pumping out half baked memoirs when there are so many cool out of print books in their back lists that could be whisked back onto the shelves for the poor souls who have not yet found BookFinder. I'm not suggesting a kybosh on new books but I KNOW there are some very cool old tales that could happily be retold.

What got me on this rant was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It leads the way in Oscar nominations, and was first written in the 1920s.  It was first published in Colliers magazine and subsequently in the AnthologyTales of the Jazz Age which came out in 1922 and then fall out of print (in English) until 1991 when Eastern Press published a collector’s edition.

This little tidbit of information prompted me to issue my highly personal, mostly random, list of ten books from the 1920s that would be better than most new books.

Adam's Daughter by John Carruthers

Cover alone would sell the tale of this young girl trying to right the wrongs of her activities

Gabriel Samara Peacemaker by E. Phillips Oppenheim

A novel about Russian immigrants who are living in New York and plotting about how to make Russia a republic. Oppenheim has written somewhere near 150 novels, and even graced the cover of Time in 1927. Stir in a little star power and this has blockbuster written all over it.

The House of the Three Ganders by Irving Bacheller

Bacheller was a writer and journalist who was responsible for bringing the likes of Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle to American readers though his Syndicate that provided articles to Sunday papers around the US. (Only OOP in the US)

Right off the Map by C.E. Montague

Montague was Guardian journalist before writing this Science Fiction Novel involving a dystopic future in England.

On Doing What One Likes by Alec Waugh

Alec has been credited with inventing the cocktail party, offering his guests rum swizzles rather than tea, acts like that make me think I should read what this man has to say. Alec is elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh.

Sweard's Folly by Edison Marshall

He wrote The Vikings, Yankee Pasha and Treasure of the Golden Condor but Seward`s Folly has been out of print since 1924.

The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen

This book is about the interactions of several upper class Brits staying at a hotel on the Italian Riviera in the 1920s, the hotel did come back into print for a time in 2003 in the UK but has once again fallen out.

The Diamond Necklace by Fred Jackson

Jackson was best known as a screen writer. This was his first mystery novel, which has been out of print since 1929.

Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Story of two women in the English Countryside dealing with love, suffering and the like...

The Girl From Hollywood by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Since Tarzan has been pretty much beaten to death, it would be nice to have someone look at some of Burroughs' other work

I highly encourage you to submit any out-of-print gems that you think could trump current blockbusters.

Do books have to look like books?

Charlie and I spend a lot of time talking about books. Specifically, what makes a book a book. It may be because of his predilection for reading (heavy!) thousand-page fantasy novels, but he's been dabbling with hardware- and software-based ebook platforms for a while now. Charlie's last foray into the land of the e-book reading platform, the Sony Reader, was pretty much a failure. It sustained his interest for a while, but eventually never managed to fit into his workflow, due to bad desktop client software and lack of interesting content. Unusable as a book reader, then he tried to use it as a "computer-lite" to display RSS feeds; it worked up to a point, but was very inelegant, largely because of inherent device limitations.

Charlie's mental jump—from seeing the Sony Reader as an electronic book, to a portable computer text display device—reflects the same insight that Virginia Hefferman's son had, in her recent article on the Amazon Kindle:

"In their book 'Freakonomics,' Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books. But they also contend that reading aloud to children and limiting their TV time has no correlation with success on tests. If both of these observations hold, it’s worth determining what books really are, the better to decisively decorate with them. The widespread digitization of text has complicated the matter. Will Ben benefit if I load my Kindle with hundreds of books that he can’t see? Or does he need the spectacle of hard- and softcover dust magnets eliminating floor space in our small apartment to get the full 'Freakonomics' effect? I sadly suspect he needs the shelves and dust.

Anyway, Ben doesn’t distinguish between my Kindle and a BlackBerry. My immersion in the Kindle is not (to him) an example of impressive role-model literacy. It’s Mom e-mailing, or texting, or for all he knows playing video games. In fact, the only time he describes what he and I do together as 'reading' is when we’re sitting with a clutch of pages bound between covers, open in front of us like a hymnal." (more...)

There's a social role for books, books that look and feel like books. I fully expect to buy an ebook reader sometime in the next few years (I'm rarely an early adopter), but I'm acutely aware of the fact that you lose things along the way. I've had long conversations with friends about the role of record cover art; those who grew up in the age of records have a very different relationship with it compared to those who saw cover art shrink down to fit cassettes, CDs, and iPod screens. I'm not ready to make a value judgment on how important cover art really is, but I do know that eighteen year olds seem to have a disproportionate amount of 60s-70s rock cover art posters on their walls, versus cover art from the 2000s. If nothing else, I fully expect to see some print editions of classic angsty lit in college dorm rooms in the 2040s.

Beyond author websites

For the last several years, I've been the webmaster for my friend Chitra Divakaruni, a mid-career novelist and poet. Her website talks a bit about her and each of her books. It's pretty simple, and hasn't changed dramatically in a long time.

Chitra has the paperback of her latest novel coming out soon, as well as a new book for young adults. This, along with the ongoing death of US newspaper book sections, has lit a fire under us, and we're trying to think beyond the website, embracing social media to better reach readers where they're at. We have a mailing list set up, and are syndicating tour dates on BookTour.com; a blog and an expanded Facebook presence are on their way. It's been exciting to see the kind of positive feedback Chitra's already been getting from readers able to connect directly to a favorite writer.

The New York Times recently ran a piece on the new business of big budget author websites, online book launches, and author promo videos. As much as I'm into this sort of thing, some of the tactics just seem excessive. Is it really worth spending $35,000 to launch a promotional website for a novel? Does a website for a book really need an original score? Apparently I'm not alone in my confusion; publishers, bullish as they are, also seem to be a bit fuzzy on the ROI. (The article does mention that in a specific study, 8% of readers had visited author websites in the past week; by extension, 92% hadn't.)

How are your purchases swayed by author or book websites?