Entries Tagged 'books' ↓

update: an appreciation

Jeff Bezos has been hyping the Kindle all over the place, and I make it a point not to buy any hype at all. None. Whatsoever. This guy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation isn’t buying Bezos’s hype, either. But it doesn’t prevent him from speculating about the imminent digital revolution in books suggested by a successful wireless device that stores lots and lots and lots of text.

And he’s got a good list of questions for the folks in the book industry to ponder:

• Will e-book readers be open to content from any source?
  So far, it looks like Amazon’s Kindle is limited in the type of file it can read. PDF files, for example, have to be converted before the Kindle can read them (whereas Sony’s reader can handle any type of file). Worse, books downloaded from Amazon appear in a proprietary .azw file format, which can’t be read on other devices. (The Kindle also bizarrely charges users $1 for each blog or RSS feed they subscribe to.) And if you’re trying to read digitally from Canada, you’re out of luck. Users should be able to seamlessly move content from their e-book reader to their computer to their cell phone. The winner of the format wars to come will be the one that can provides the greatest interoperability.
• Will digital books carry DRM?
  After insisting on dysfunctional copy protection for years, the music industry has finally realized that DRM doesn’t work. By making legitimately paid content harder to use than content downloaded for free, DRM punishes paying customers by locking up their content. And, since DRM is always circumvented eventually, it does nothing to prevent piracy (the Kindle’s DRM has already been cracked). Sellers of digital books and the makers of reading devices can save themselves — and their customers — ongoing headaches by avoiding these attempts to restrict customer rights to their content now.
• Will the first sale doctrine still apply when books are digital?
  Book readers are accustomed to passing their dog-eared copies of books without thinking about it. In the world of physical books, the first sale doctrine says that a book buyer can transfer the book by loaning, re-selling it, or even renting it out if they like, without infringing on the publisher’s rights. What happens when sharing a book with a friend means making an additional, perfect copy? Readers should not be asked to give up their first sale rights, whether their books are digital or made out of paper.
• Will libraries carry digital books?
  Libraries loan out a limited number of copies of new books for free, and publishers don’t complain. But what happens when the number of books on loan is unlimited, and the “loan” makes a perfect copy? Libraries should maintain the right to distribute books, even when books are digital.
• Will bookstores survive the shift in technology?
  Bookstores have always played an important role as community meeting places and as curators of our literary culture. But even great bookstores, such as Berkeley’s Cody’s Books, have been closing or are struggling as more people get their content instantly over the web. Bookstores must find a way to interact with digital content and monetize a broader range of goods and services that come attached to “book culture,” or they may end up suffering the same fate as the music stores that are rapidly going out of business.
• Will publishers be open to new business models?
  The music industry tried putting their heads in the sand and hoping digital music would go away, and it didn’t work. Now, the major labels are (belatedly) experimenting with a number of delivery options for music, from online radio to subscription services to pay-what-you-like downloads. Book publishers should learn from their friends in the music industry and move aggressively to try out new models.

Good questions all, but I doubt that anyone in the industry has the time to ponder them.

And while publishers are getting pummeled by the digital revolutionaries into thinking about what format to deliver their “content” in, Sarah Lacy, writing in BusinessWeek, has ideas for them about how to market their “product” in a Web 2.0 world.

Some of them make sense. But this one is just revolting:

Create stars—don’t just exploit existing ones.
When an author is established, publishers have to do less to make a book sell. So bidding wars start. As a result, even some best-sellers aren’t very profitable.

Instead, publishers should take a page from the handbook of Gawker founder Nick Denton and create stars. Find micro-celebs with a voice, talent, a niche base of readers, and most important—enthusiasm. Then leverage the publisher’s brand (and the techniques I advocate, of course) to blow them out.

Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter.

At the risk of sounding like a lit snob … are you fucking kidding me?

If you, like a lot of book lovers (including moi), find yourself these days with your nose in front of your monitor more often than between the covers of a book, read some book blogs—like Wyatt Mason’s Sentences, at Harper’s. They’ll get your juices going.

The other day, introducing a recently rediscovered author, Mason wrote:

Meaningful art—however long it might take—always reaches its audience. Writers or painters who work in obscurity and struggle to get an agent or gallery to give them a shot will, if their work warrants attention, eventually get it. That the attention may be too little or come too late, that the artist in the interim will have a fittingly miserable time being overlooked and unsupported–these sad facts are common enough, as anyone who has read, say, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, understands.

The rediscovered author is Lamed Shapiro. Here’s what Mason writes about him:

This week on Sentences, I’ve featured the work of gifted writer Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948), of whom I’d not heard until last week. And yet the collection published by Yale University Press in 2007, Shapiro’s The Cross and Other Stories, is superior in every conceivable measure to any gathering of short stories I read in the past year.

Now, doesn’t that make you feel like reading those stories? If so, you’re in luck, because Mason reprinted one of them.

Read it.

Norm Geras, displaying the unfailing common sense to which his readers have become accustomed, suggests the obvious for those who worry that the internet is ruining their book habit:

Me, I don’t get it. It’s true that sometimes, if you have to switch rapidly from one type of activity to another, there can be a problem. For example, if you’ve been in charge of boisterous young children for some hours, and have to sit down immediately to something requiring intense mental concentration, you may find that you’d be better placed coming to it after a break. Switching from much online hopping and skipping about to serious reading is no different. The problem isn’t with the internet. And the solution is straightforward. Here’s one version of it: however much of your spare time you spend online, spend at least 50 percent of that reading (books and such). You’ll find you can do it just as well as ever. This is if you want to. And if you don’t, then you don’t. But that’s you, in that case, and not the internet. [e.a.]

Geras was responding to the hand-wringing of this guy.

The number of links I’d have to provide for previous hues and cries about the death of books and reading would fill all the space that WordPress offers, so I won’t even try. I have written about the supposed death of reading before, though: here.

[updated with a link, and with a repeated sentence cut]

I’m beginning to see a future where we poor consumers of the entertainment nation will no longer be flooded with quite as much shit as we’re seeing now.

First, the NYT’s David Carr reports what we all know, because there are no goddamn movies that are worth seeing—namely, that indies are no longer king:

Why are there no independent movies worth seeing? As Yogi Berra might say, there are just too many of them.

At least, that’s the view of one veteran independent film executive, Mark Gill. In a speech he gave at the Los Angeles Film Festival a little over a week ago (a speech that set tongues to wagging after it was published by IndieWire, a Web site devoted to independent film), he pointed out that the number of films submitted to Sundance, the Valhalla of the indie film industry, has multiplied by 10 in the last 15 years to a total of 5,000. But that embarrassment of riches is really just an embarrassment.

“Most of the films are flat-out awful,” said Mr. Gill, the head of the independent company The Film Department. “Trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years. Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here,” he said, and boy, is it underwhelming.

Meanwhile, veteran publisher Jonathan Karp, fessing up that he has “sinned” too, notes that what’s coming out of book publishers’ warehouses is also mostly dreck:

Visit your neighborhood superstore, and you will be overwhelmed with ephemera: self-aggrandizing memoirs by recovering addicts; poignant portraits of heroic pets; hyperbolic ideological tracts by insufferable cable TV pundits; guides to staying wrinkle- and toxin-free; odes to Warren Buffett and Jesus Christ; manifestos for fixing America in 12 easy steps; manly accounts of the best athlete/season/team ever; and glittery novels about British royalty, love-starved shoppers, mournful cops and ingenious serial killers. (There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.)

I can’t be sure, of course, but he may have been thinking of books like the one being celebrated here. Okay, cheap shot.

Karp digs deeper to analyze the phenomenon:

Popular formulas repeat themselves for a reason: They have visceral, even mythic, appeal. A talented author can bring new vision to the most tired subject, so there’s nothing wrong with trying. Nor is there anything new about the syndrome. But what does seem more pronounced today is the relentless, indiscriminate proliferation of these books — and the underlying cynicism of the people acquiring, publishing and selling them.

That’s when he cops to having sinned:

I am, of course, mindful that people who work in glass publishing houses should not throw stones. I too have sinned. In weaker moments, I’ve been seduced by tales of celebrity, money, gossip and scandal.

Then Karp gets to the heart of the matter [e.a.]:

Books of this ilk have always existed. But in the past, they’ve been balanced by substantive books, crafted by monomaniacal authors who devoted years to the work. I can’t prove it empirically, but when I talk to literary agents and fellow publishers, they acknowledge an unarticulated truth about our business: Fewer authors are devoting more than two years to their projects. The system demands more, faster. Conventional wisdom holds that popular novelists should deliver one or two books per year. Nonfiction authors often aren’t paid enough to work full-time on a book for more than a year or two.

His prescription? Publishers should leave timeliness and buzziness to the newsbiz and focus on quality and longevity and posterity.

In any event, Karp writes, with the barriers to entry in the publishing biz lowered to the point where anyone can join in, publishers soon won’t have much of a choice if they want to survive. So they should protect their natural preserve [e.a.]:

There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively. Those who publish generic books for expedient purposes will face new competitors. Like the music companies, some of those publishers may shrink or die.

Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books — works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.

This is an important essay—a warning—from an important New York City publisher, just as Mark Gill’s observations are an important warning from a veteran film producer.

We’ll see what happens. (For the record, I predict no earthquakes.)

In the rush to announce the success of the Kindle, Jeff Bezos somehow failed to note that print-on-demand is sneaking around behind his back.

The Espresso Book Machine—which I’ve written about before—makes its debut in 50 stores across Britain soon:

Blackwell bookshop announced yesterday that it is to install an “Espresso Book Machine” that will allow customers to print out a novel in just seven minutes.

The self-service machine, which will eventually be installed in 50 stores across the country, offers a choice of around one million titles. The fully-bound books are printed to library quality, including a front cover.

A more sophisticated version of the machine is smaller and prints books in just three minutes. The older version has already been installed in 11 sites worldwide and Blackwell hopes to eventually have the faster machine in its stores.

Britain’s book industry has hailed the machine’s arrival as potentially revolutionary. It means high street bookshops can offer a range of books that will compete for the first time with online stores such as Amazon.

Blackwell is leasing the book-making machine from its American owner, On Demand Books, according to The Bookseller. Vince Gunn, chief executive of Blackwell, described the technology as “trailblazing”.

This is good news for those of us who like paper books, and a deep backlist of titles available at the press of a finger.

All hail Jason Epstein, the brains behind this innovation.

[updated (twice) with some missing links]

As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.

But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).

Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.

Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).

Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.

So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***

[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.

For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.

And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:

If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.

So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)

Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).

Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:

• Nick Denton at 01:20 PM on 06/05/08

  Connectedness Index: 1764

  @Choire: The entangling of literary, journalistic and romantic relationships is a topic worthy of Gawker. You can’t understand how the media works unless you know who dated whom. Every job, every magazine commission, every anonymous quote, every resentment-they can only be fully understood if you know that X went to school with Y who introduced them to Z who commissioned X to write that magazine piece which turned into a book contract lined up by Y’s former lover. When you and I chat over lunch, that’s how we talk. Why should all this information be reserved for the private conversations of media insiders? That’s why Gawker exists: to put all of that invaluable social information out on the web and make the media machine a little less monolithic and intimidating than it can so often seem.

Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

Here:

[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

And here:

[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:

For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.

But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.

It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:

something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:

Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.

“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”

The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.

For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:

Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.

And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he's referring to this "review" ---ed.]

Interesting times indeed.

update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.

Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.” 

———————–

*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos thinks he’s got a hit on his hands in the Kindle:

Is the Kindle about to catch fire?

Could Amazon.com’s seven-month-old wireless e-book reader – a rectangular wonder in antique iPod white, able to download any of 125,000 books adapted to its format – be the tipping point that marks the decline and fall of the paper book? …

The balding, blue-jeaned corporate dynamo – now a 44-year-old father of four who kept his empire healthy through the dot-com disasters – did everything possible to suggest the answers were an almost Joycean yes, yes, and yes again.

And he’s none too sad to see the end of publishing as we know it, or the back of publishers, either:

To Kindle doubters, Bezos got off one subtle jab about book-industry know-it-alls.

He recalled when he started his groundbreaking company 14 years ago. “The more you knew about the book industry,” he observed with a bright smile, “the less likely you were to invest in Amazon.”

This is true: the know-it-alls were in denial, and the book industry as we know it will change under the pressures of the new technology as more and more people will want this new gadget.

I predicted in December 2007, when it was released, that the Kindle would catch on. Sadly, I didn’t invest in Amazon (I wasn’t much of an investor, or I would have). But I know one wise man in publishing who bucked the trend and did—to the ridicule, and later the envy, of his colleagues.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Here’s a straw in the wind that I’ve been waiting for, and a possible indication that our pop culture may soon begin to catch up with 21st-century reality.

The Independent reports that the Brits’ love affair with memoirs about misery and wretchedness is over.

Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis lit boom may be over.

At its height, profits topped £24m a year and authors could be sure that the more they plumbed the depths of despair and depravity, the deeper publishers would reach into their pockets. But industry research firm Nielsen now estimates that sales for the top 10 best-selling misery memoirs will be down from £3.87m last year to £2.59m this year.

Regular readers know that I’ve been appalled at the poverty of imagination that’s been on display in the pop culture for a long time. The wretched-family-and-dysfunctional-child memoir has been one of the most prominent features of this trend. There is no more grappling with big ideas in the culture; instead there’s the obsessive focus on the minutiae of miserable everyday life and on the unique ways in which individuals suffer their particular wretchedness.

It’s a fucking bore! Leon Wieseltier agrees with me (sorta)!

The decline of The New York Times remains worthy of comment, as does the poverty of imagination in American theater and film.

I’m no expert, and there are plenty of people discussing the culture, in depth, all over the interwebs. What I am, though, is a very disappointed reader and movie-goer, because I’m not being presented with any big stories and big themes—books or music or movies or plays that address things that are way larger than individuals and larger even than the sum of individuals—that get my juices flowing.

Two decades ago Tom Wolfe called for more novelists to stalk what he called the “Billion-Footed Beast“ (subscription to Harper’s required). You can read all about it here, at the NYT blog Paper Cuts.

Wolfe has for decades complained that in about 1960 American novelists made the decision to turn inward, to take their work in abstruse directions and to reject realism. All this was a disaster, Wolfe has maintained, especially because the social changes in America during this period offered such rich material. With “Bonfire,” he set out to reclaim the ground once occupied by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell and the other Americans of the first half of the 20th century who wrote in the tradition of Balzac, Dickens and Zola.

About two years after “Bonfire” came out, Wolfe published a famous essay in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” (subscription required) laying out his theory in detail, and what really struck me while reading it again was that he could have written it yesterday and hardly changed a thing. He has gained no followers.  [e.a.]

More’s the pity. There is one exception: Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections was in fact a correction to the obsessive inward-looking trend in writers—a sprawling social novel in the tradition that Tom Wolfe had talked about (albeit, one with postmodern touches as well)—as James Collins notes in Paper Cuts:

The only book I can think of that has reached for something like the same realistic density, sweep and accessibility is “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. But the core of that book is a bourgeois family drama, and so it is really more like a gargantuan short story than a novel of the type that Dickens or Balzac would recognize.

Franzen himself addressed the discouraging landscape of contemporary fiction in a 2002 essay titled “Mr. Difficult,” in the New Yorker. It’s not available online. It provoked a dispute between him and Ben Marcus a few years later; discussion here.

Though Marcus’ essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. In particular, Marcus focuses on Franzen’s 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, and more generally with the modernist-inspired ideal of “difficult” literature—the belief that “the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study.” Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are “Status” authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: “Contract” authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.

While I’m waiting for all these novelists to sort themselves out and to start to grapple with 21st-century realities—and there’s a new generation of writers who seem eager to engage—I enjoy dipping into old pop culture favorites.

Like this 1961 movie (based on—gasp!—a trilogy of books! in French! which inspired a Broadway musical!), which was featured on TCM last night:

In a letter to shareholders, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos proclaims the success of the Kindle:

’ll highlight a few of the useful features we built into Kindle that go beyond what you could ever do with a physical book. If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Most important is the seamless, simple ability to find a book and have it in 60 seconds. When I’ve watched people do this for the first time, it’s clear the capability has a profound effect on them. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

 

---

Publishers—including all the major publishers—have embraced Kindle, and we’re thankful for that. From a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of advantages to Kindle. Books never go out of print, and they never go out of stock. Nor is there ever waste from over-printing. Most important, Kindle makes it more convenient for readers to buy more books. Anytime you make something simpler and lower friction, you get more of it.

 Well yeah, dude.

This is looking more and more like the tipping point for the book business, as I suspected it would be when I wrote:

kindles interest

December 6th, 2007 — books, publishing

It looks like Amazon has hit the sweet spot with the Kindle, its new reading device. There’s a ton of press, much of it positive.

…

I think it was a year and a half ago [in early 2006  ---ed.] that I wrote “the future of books is here.” There’s an awful lot of press right now, so it’s hard to say amidst the fog of PR whether or not the Kindle will ignite (ha ha ha HA!) the imaginations of gadget lovers as well as book lovers. Its wireless capability just may give it the kind of crossover appeal to make the idea of an electronic device for reading books stick. And that’s more than half the battle, I believe.

Which means that books may finally be tipping over into the digital realm for real. I’ve been writing about this subject for a long time on the blog. And I’m also the author of the slogan

if you love books, set them free™

So I’m pleased about this development.

The book business is great terrain for the long tail, and it will—eventually, after a lot more disruption in the lives of publishers, agents, authors, and wannabes—entertain, enlighten, and enrich the lives of more people in the world, in places where it’s hard to reach them now. The potential for the spread of knowledge is unfathomably huge.

Eventually, everyone will win.

Meanwhile, Bezos tries to make the claim that the Kindle will stretch short attention spans:

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. … Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. … As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools. 

I’m not buying that argument. I believe that info-snacking is very much here to stay. I also believe that the “info” we’re getting via the media (old and new)  is being produced in snack-sized bits (and bytes) and that, more and more, the content will be molded to fit an info-snacking world.

But I’m optimistic about the future of books as we know them, and about our maintaining our long attention span, the potential for which is probably hardwired into us.

The thing is this: it requires discipline on the part of the user to exercise a long attention span. We are the agents of our own fate. We need to unplug in order to concentrate.

It’s a choice. Don’t blame the tools. Use your attention span or lose it.

It looks like the “try anything” ethos is indeed—finally—taking hold among book publishers. Following on news of HarperCollins’s new “studio” comes this report about a project from Crown that was disseminated over the Internet by its author before he landed his book deal:

By rising to prominence without the financial backing of a mega-publisher, Sigler has defied the industry’s modus operandi. He’s discovered how to assemble, retain and sell to a growing audience, all on a shoestring budget.

“We are always looking for authors who have a platform and a core fan base, and our goal is to grow their audience and find new readers,” said Tina Constable, Crown’s publisher. “Scott is no exception and his fan base is already formidable. The wave of the future is how we harness the Internet to find these new readers, and we are devoting an enormous amount of energy and resources into this effort. The traditional model for publishing our books is quickly becoming obsolete and we recognize that creative Internet strategies are necessary if we want to remain competitive.”

There is vast, wide open country for enterprising types looking to exploit the very Long Tail of book publishing.

Saddle up!

Every day brings grim news to every sector of the old media businesses. Rupert Murdoch, whose reputation for swimming with the pond scum tends to overshadow his extraordinary business acumen and long-term success (compare and contrast with, say, Ted Turner, who was long hailed as a genius), is always interesting to listen to on this topic.

Here’s the heart of a recent speech he gave on the future of media [e.a.]:

In his speech, he said technology’s effects have permeated every aspect of News Corp., from the social networking on MySpace to the type of articles printed in local newspapers.

Consumers, especially the younger generation, have a chance to shape the inevitable changes by demanding content based on personal preferences, he added.

“Unlike traditional media, choices in the future will be generated from the bottom up, not top-down,” Murdoch explained. “A 13-year-old girl in Delhi is not going to want the same news and entertainment as a 50-year-old executive in Chicago … Our challenge is to personalize the experience for these people so we can reach them both.”

Murdoch foresees the end of traditional mass media with consumers receiving news and entertainment from limited sources. Media companies need to diversify to survive, which is one reason his company purchased MySpace in 2005, he said.

Perhaps that was the thinking (if indeed there was thinking involved—or maybe it’s a new “try anything!” ethos) behind a  new venture at NewsCorp’s HarperCollins book division, announced thus in the New York Times (and thus certain to have caused much agita in executive offices across New York City):

New HarperCollins Unit to Try to Cut Writer Advances

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies.

Roger L. Simon was unimpressed, and he had a question:

[W]hat interests me here is the second part of ths strategy – that the publisher will pay little or no advance and go into partnership with the author on potential profits with sales focussed, evidently on the Internet.

My question then is – what’s the point of the publisher?

Well, there’s editing (which one can get elsewhere) and the fancy publishing house imprimatur, maybe a little help with production and publicity (again available elsewhere – many authors pay for their own publicists anyway). It this really enough? The author can do much better on percentages, I am sure, by self-publishing. And that same author may know his or her way around the Internet better than the publisher, when it comes to publicity. So I am skeptical of this model.

I don’t blame Simon for being skeptical. Nevertheless, the point of the publisher—for now, at least—is the brand.  Until other brands develop to rival what the traditional publishing houses bring to the equation (professional experience, connections, and judgment), authors still have something to gain from trying to collaborate with publishers in this brave new media world.

But Simon is right on the money about one thing [e.a.]:

But I’m not surprised that it is happening – it is another symptom of the huge shakeout in the arts and letters instigated largely by the online world.

A lot of people are still clueless about the changes rocking their world. They’re still “comfortably numb.”

Time to wake up,

At the Corner,Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg, whose book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than ten weeks, gives a lively account of the ups and downs [e.a.]:

The most plausible explanation [for the books slide from the top 10] is the same one that explained why I leaped onto the Times list my first week out of the box. After all I opened at #10 even though I had a small first printing and it was hard to find the book in many stores. No one — except the Times itself — really understands how their formula works. But it definitely measures demand, perhaps not as much as sales, but enough to launch a book to the list if the demand is intense. In other words, the rate of sales — and presales — at all levels of the market (stores, clubs, wholesale etc.) are part of the formula. This week a whole slew of new books with big promotion budgets came online and the cross platform demand apparently shoved LF downward.

That’s an interesting perspective on the factors involved in achieving bestsellerdom on the New York Times lists, a mysterious process that was also mined last October by the NYT’s public editor, Clark Hoyt.

Goldberg also talks about how it feels to have written this book:

Obviously, I’d like to stay on the list as long as possible. …And it annoys all the right people the longer I’m on it, of course. … Three months on the NYT list — and hitting #1 — plus a dozen printings is far better than I dared hope. And yet I still hope the book does even better and has a wider following.

Son, you hit the lottery. STFU.

Are you surprised that publishers sign up books (including fake memoirs) that they think the public will buy? Chris Lemann is shocked, shocked:

How can editors–let alone readers–reasonably expect to encounter anything resembling “the truth” on a printed page, anyway? …

As observers fret over how it is that a major house like Riverhead could be gulled by a scheming prevaricator, it seems at least as worthwhile to ask what makes fictions such as Love and Consequences so compelling to publishing professionals in the first place.

The market, dear Sherlock, the market. Dysfunction sells! And the more dysfunctional you start out and the grander your arc into respectability (and a book contract!), the more delectable your story seems.

I wrote about the latest inauthenticity scandal here, where I noted:

Why does this keep happening? Because mundus vult decipi: people want to be deceived. …

In this particular case of the faked memoir, sophisticated readers—including agents, editors, copy editors, lawyers, and highly qualified reviewers—wanted to believe (no matter how unlikely it is) that a former fringe-dweller in American society is also very, very gifted author.

See? It’s not that complicated. The story of how the New York Times got fooled is an even more interesting one:

WITH a few computer keystrokes last week at my request, Jack Begg, the supervisor of newsroom research at The Times, showed me that there was no record of a Margaret B. Jones in Eugene, Ore. With a few more keystrokes, he brought up property records showing that the house Jones said she owned was bought by Margaret Seltzer and another person in 2000 and now belongs to Stuart and Gay Seltzer after an “intrafamily transaction.”

All of this should have been a huge red flag about Margaret B. Jones, the author of a memoir in which she said she was abused, taken from her family at age 5 and shuttled between foster homes for three years before winding up in a world of gangs, violence and drugs in South-Central Los Angeles.

The book, “Love and Consequences,” was a fake, and had Begg been asked to do five minutes of checking in readily available public records, or had reporters and editors done it themselves before the newspaper bit, The Times could have been spared the embarrassment of falling for yet another too-good-to-be-true memoir from a publishing industry unwilling to accept responsibility for separating fact from fiction.

By the time Begg did any checking, The Times had been taken in, as had National Public Radio, The Los Angeles Times and other news organizations.

Caveat lector! (And enjoy the ride!)

That’s my best guess, anyway, after reading this item at Publishers Lunch ($$):

How Many More eBook Releases Will We See?

The press release from Ectaco draws on a variety of cliches (”kiss your
old-fashioned, dusty library goodbye”) to announce the company’s new jetBook ereader. The cheap-looking device weighs just 7 ounces and has a five-inch screen (smaller than Kindle and Sony Reader) and appears to handle only .txt, .pdf and .jpg text files, along with mp3s. The company specializes in translation dictionaries and those are a focus feature of this device as well, which sells for $350.

Mostly you look at their site and realize how relatively easy it must be to design and produce a reader like this, and how many similar products must be on the way.

Duh.

From the press release:

jetBook(R) is an incredibly sophisticated e-book reader with a built-in
mp3 player that allows users to listen to AudioBooks as well as keep up
with their reading. Preloaded with translating dictionaries, you can
simultaneously enjoy a good book, improve your vocabulary by looking up and
translating any words you want, listen to your favorite audio files and
check out photos — all in the same device! With an incredibly simple to
read, large 5-inch, high-resolution display that is easy on the eyes, users
can now read for hours without the eyestrain that comes from ordinary
computer screens. And those with trouble reading normal-sized print books
will benefit from the different fonts and sizes you can change to
instantly. Weighing in at a remarkable 7 ounces, the super-slim device fits
easily in the palm of your hand for a truly comfortable reading experience.

I don’t yet own an e-book reader. (I don’t have a commute, so there’s no urgency. I’m waiting for early adopters to test them out and to advise me on which one to buy.)

My motto, however, is: if you love books, set them free^TM.

The last time I urged book lovers and book cultists to embrace the technological revolution was here.

What do you do if you’re a young writer facing a future in which the book is not a treasured cultural product? You become an explorer, a pioneer, an experimenter, and a partner with a traditional publisher, and you move into the unknown:

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

Read about it here, in the Guardian.

Among the freedoms our Constitution guarantees is the right to think—and even to promote—poisonous ideas about America and about history.

The novelist Nicholson Baker takes his freedom seriously, as Adam Kirsh, writing in the New York Sun, notes:

Mr. Baker’s book is designed to convince the reader that America should not have fought Germany or Japan; that Franklin Roosevelt connived to get us into the war at the behest of the arms manufacturers, and probably knew about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in advance; that Winston Churchill was a bloodthirsty buffoon and a protofascist; that in Japan’s invasion of China, China was the aggressor; that after the fall of France, Churchill was culpable in vowing to fight on, and not acceding to Hitler’s “peace” terms; that the Holocaust was, at least in part, Hitler’s response to British aggression, and that the only people who demonstrated true wisdom in the run-up to the war were American and British pacifists, who refused to take up arms no matter how pressing the need.

“Was the war necessary?” Mr. Baker asks in his author’s note. “Was it a ‘good war’? Did waging it help anyone who needed help? These were the basic questions that I hoped to answer when I began writing.”

Baker’s previous book contemplated whether or not it was morally acceptable to assassinate George W. Bush. No word on whether he’s got a contract for a new book.

Here’s one publisher who knows the score:

The free-thinking reader is not dead, but found online

As most book publishers bow to bestsellers and celebrity culture, serious literature can still thrive thanks to the internet

Read the whole thing.

Everybody who’s got a collection (or accumulation) of books has given some thought to how to arrange them. My rules were a little less neurotic but also way less amusing than Matt Selman’s:

RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE – It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman’s living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.

RULE #1: COROLLARY A: The living room books ARE NOT the combined book collections of Matt Selman and his wife. (She may have read some of them, but who knows, really.) This is only the collection of Matt Selman.

RULE #1: COROLLARY B: Writing in books on the living room shelves that Matt Selman has NOT read — I) Indexes. II) The ending part of the author’s acknowledgments that is just a list of names. III) Poetry that has been snuck into an otherwise interesting book. IV) Books written by my father that I told him I read. V) The super boring text in art books.

But there’s virtue in accumulating a huge library:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his thought-provoking and challenging book, The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable, tells the story of the writer Umberto Eco, who possesses a library of over 30,000 books (mine, by comparison, is a little over 2,000).  He separates his visitors into two categories:  1) Those who, upon seeing his library, exclaim, “Wow!  Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have!  How many of these books have you read?” Taleb explains the next category this way:

And the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.  Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.  The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.  You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly.  Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.  Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

…Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

More for home library owners here.

And something even more delectable—a reader’s guide to the unwritten—here.

I’m neither a futurist nor an interested party (except as a book lover and casual observer of trends who looks forward to a bright future for books when their content will be offered through many channels and via many platforms), but Evan Schnittman’s scenario about the pedestrian future of e-books [bottom line: they should and will, he predicts, be free] seems plausible to me:

My thinking was somewhat influenced by the events of the last couple of weeks. First Steve Jobs is quoted about the Kindle saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” One week later, Don Katz sold Audible, his digital audio platform and online retail store that was to spoken word recording what iTunes is to digital music, to Amazon for $300mm. Audible licenses its platform to Apple for use on the iPod/iTunes.

In my mind a connection was made between these events as I started to wonder if Jobs, smarting over the loss of Audible’s platform, was lashing out at Amazon. Then I wondered if this was a classic Jobs line – deflecting any interest in something and then a year later releasing that very thing. However, this idle speculation ebbed and a more interesting connection took its place – a link established in my mind between ebooks and audiobooks.

I have evolved my thinking to see that a “thriving” ebook market will look much more like the audio book market than the print book market. (I should mention that I see the parallel only in size, scope, and type of audience, not in market factors, content delivery, cost of production, or experiential preference. Audio books are not about reading – ebooks are all about reading.)

If one looks closely at how people like me use ebooks, you will see that convenience and portability is what drives use. While ebooks have been around for nearly 10 years in fairly usable forms, the devices to read them have been terrible – until now with the recent generation of e-ink readers such as the Kindle. (Yes, there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy reading on their PDA, iphone, laptop, etc – but let’s be honest; they are a tiny and low revenue producing audience.)

The growth I see in ebooks mimics the audio book phenomenon- by connecting readers who commute or travel with the content they crave. Audiobooks have made a marketplace out of people getting book content when they cannot read and has taught people to enjoy being read to again. Similarly, Ebooks are a brilliant option when you can bring everything you are reading with you and an even better option when you can buy instantly wherever you happen to be – just as digital audio downloads onto an iPod have done for the folks who don’t want to schlep around CD’s or cassettes.

 Via Michael Cader at Publishers Marketplace [subscription required]:

Returning to the Free eBook with Purchase Idea
Oxford’s Evan Schnittman has a two-part post on Oxford blog asking “Do I Believe in Ebooks?” Ultimately, what he does believe is that “an ebook license be granted as part of the purchase price to anyone who buys a new print book.”

He writes: “I have come to this somewhat radical idea, not because I am one of the folks who believe all digital content should be free for the benefit of mankind. Nor did I come to this conclusion because I don’t believe there will ever be a place for ebooks. I came to this conclusion after becoming a fairly heavy user of ebooks and learning first hand what is best and worst about ebooks.

“The reality is that even if the current audience of ebook users were to grow by magnitudes over the next few years, the total market would only reach 3 to 4% of print. Therefore we must admit to ourselves as an industry that ebooks will always be a small niche player as a standalone platform and make them free with new book purchases.

“Making ebooks free with new print books will be an operational puzzle that most will scoff at. While there certainly are huge issues to overcome, there are already many initiatives and ventures in place that make such a notion feasible.

“In the end this could be a marketer and merchandiser dream. I believe moving to free ebooks with the purchase of a new print title would cost or lose the industry nothing in sales as ebooks would still be available for individual purchase for those who don’t want to spend on print. What we would gain is that books – print books – would increase in value and utility.”

Recent post
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I await the bright future of a world awash with the cumulative information—and wisdom—of all mankind.

And I wish for every person access to the information and wisdom that can set him/her free.

It was in that spirit that I once wrote:

If you love books, set them free.

Sticking a toe in the Web’s water, book publishing giant HarperCollins starts to offer some of its content free, in the hope of enticing people to buy books:

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”

Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

HarperCollins also plans to upload a different title by Mr. Coelho each month for the rest of the year.

I’ve been listening to the give-it-away-free gospel for a while now.  Unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury, I wouldn’t say it’s unavoidable. And of course I wouldn’t want to draw any parallels here—I’m only making a lame joke.

But I think this is a step in the right direction: namely, into an embrace by the oldest of old media of the brave new media world. The future of books (whatever form they take and whatever platform they’re offered on)—and the future of stories and narrative and of all written “content”—is very bright. We’ve just got to move forward to meet it.

Bravo.

Sluggish times lead to …successful innovation! creativity! new ideas! weird new ideas!

I’m glad Jennifer Schuessler brought this up: The continued hang-wringing about the death of reading is driving me batty. Stop! 

Schuessler notes a great contribution to the Stop the Death-of-Reading Hysterics Club [e.a.]:

[T]he novelist Ursula Le Guin joins the fray with an elegant, wide-ranging essay aimed at deflating the N.E.A.’s alarmism (subscription required). The “hedonists” who love to disappear into serious books have been a minority in every age, Le Guin argues. What is falling by the wayside in our own time is social reading—the kind we do in order to be able to have “nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversations” with casual acquaintances. In 1841, strangers on the train could chat about whether Little Nell was going to be written out of Dicken’s latest serial. Today, we huddle by the water cooler debating whether Tony Soprano got whacked.

LeGuin correctly notes that our taste for stories hasn’t vanished. Our means of telling and communicating stories is evolving, along with our technology and our modern and ever-evolving way of life.

While that happens … at a glacial pace, all you book people: chill! 

Lots and lots of people read! They even buy books!
Serve the audience you have.

Simon & Schuster is bringing out a fourth Bob Woodward book about George W. Bush, I read.

Woodward’s previous three books on the Bush years closely tracked public opinion in their portrayal of the administration. Hence, Bush at War, which came out in 2002 when the president was riding high in the polls, was hugely fawning; Plan of Attack from 2004 was less sympathetic but still quite favorable; and State of Denial, published during the dog days of 2006, was by far the most critical. But the next one is a mystery. As E&P put it, “With the current mix of strong public sentiment against the Iraq War, but some tangible progress since ‘the surge,’ the tone of the next book remains a mystery.”

By the time this book comes out, it might be George Who?. On the other hand, it’ll be campaign season, and the Republican nominee is going to have to defend Bush’s “accomplishments,” so, sure: bring on another Woodward fairy tale. It’ll add juice to the campaign.

Clobbering its overheated blogospheric detractors over the head, Jonah Goldberg’s very silly-sounding book Liberal Fascism climbs onto the New York Times bestseller list at #10 (you’ll see it listed this weekend)

Hell-bent on keeping us informed, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, gave over an entire issue to books devoted to Islam. Odd behavior for a guy who’s been slimed as a “noted neocon” (and thus a hater), dontcha think?

Get cracking, dear readers. There will be a test.

The Islam Issue
‘The Suicide of Reason’
By LEE HARRIS
Reviewed by AYAAN HIRSI ALI
Arguing that the West’s “fanaticism of reason” is no match for the fanaticism of radical Islam.

Essay
Reading the Koran
By TARIQ RAMADAN
The Book of all Muslims, Tariq Ramadan writes, can be understood on many levels.
‘The Adventures of Amir Hamza’

By GHALIB LAKHNAVI AND ABDULLAH BILGRAMI
Reviewed by WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of medieval Persia is presented in a hefty new English translation.

First Chapter ‘Arguing the Just War in Islam’
By JOHN KELSAY
Reviewed by IRSHAD MANJI
A professor of religion traces the thinking behind Islamic holy war.
‘American Crescent’

By HASSAN QAZWINI
Reviewed by RASHID KHALIDI
From his mosque in Michigan, a cleric argues that Muslims can be integrated into national life.

First Chapter ‘Jihad and Jew-Hatred’
By MATTHIAS KÜNTZEL
Reviewed by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
A German scholar argues that Muslim anti-Semitism can be traced to a project of the Nazi Party.

First Chapter Essay
The Clash
By FOUAD AJAMI
I doubted Samuel Huntington when he predicted a struggle between Islam and the West. My mistake.
‘God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215′

By DAVID LEVERING LEWIS
Reviewed by ERIC ORMSBY
David Levering Lewis’s history of Arab rule in Spain focuses on its ethic of mutuality.
‘Peace Be Upon You’

By ZACHARY KARABELL
Reviewed by JASON GOODWIN
Muslim rulers, Zachary Karabell says, did not force conversion upon their subjects.
‘Napoleon’s Egypt’

By JUAN COLE
Reviewed by TOM REISS
A historian takes a new look at Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.

Essay
Beyond the Burka
By LORRAINE ADAMS
Muslim women’s voices are being heard as never before. But which ones?
‘Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy’

By PETER GOTTSCHALK AND GABRIEL GREENBERG
Reviewed by SHIBLEY TELHAMI
A look at American media since 9/11 makes the case that Muslims have been unjustly demonized.

First Chapter Caught in the Ayatollah’s Web
Reviewed by SARAH WILDMAN
Memoirs by Marina Nemat and Zarah Ghahramani, two women who survived political prison in Iran 20 years apart.

What a guy:

[H]e was an odd mixture of conservative (small “c”) and gleeful rebel, and liked nothing better than to, in the old-fashioned phrase, “épater les bourgeois” or discombobulate the pompously respectable. “Bring down the mighty from their seats?” he chuckled with immense relish.

Flashman is no more:

Sam Munson writes:

No-one would mistake the Flashman books for great literature. They’re full of cheaply-imagined sex and more than a bit of jingoism. But it would be impossible to deny their serious attention to historical detail, their capture of something essential about the vanished life of the British Empire.

Max Boot, eulogizing Flashman’s creator, George MacDonald Fraser, makes the inevitable comparison to Patrick O’Brian’s work:

Fraser has never really gotten his due. Another historical novelist of 19th century warfare—Patrick O’Brian—has received far more critical huzzahs. That is because his Aubrey/Maturin novels are more self-consciously literary, with relatively little action and lots of introspection, dialogue, and description. By contrast, Fraser’s books gallop along at the pace of a runaway mustang, with incident piled atop incident to keep the reader’s attention, many of them violent or salacious. …

O’Brian …was undoubtedly a novelist of great merit. Probably greater merit, in fact, than Fraser. But Fraser was more fun to read.

I’ll say.

Helen Rumbelow, writing in The Times (London), gives advice to women who find a Flashman book or two on the shelves of the guy they’re dating:

[T]here is one type of book so alarming that if you spot it you should gather your coat, write a note saying “it’s been special” and leave immediately. That is, of course, any book from the Flashman series, whose author, George MacDonald Fraser, died this week. Never heard of Sir Harry Flashman? Congratulations, this means that not only are you a typical woman, you are also hanging out with the type of man who is not called “jocular” at dinner parties. Vigilance is still required.

Hmm. I wonder what it says about me that Flashman is one of Mr. Hepzeeba’s favorite characters ever, and that I gave him the first book in the series to read … and that we’ve been married for decades? … Maybe we both enjoy a rollicking good story!

Fraser was also the author of a World War Two memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here, as the Telegraph’s obit notes.

A short, heavily-built man, Fraser held unashamedly reactionary views on law and order. He was particularly firm in his conviction that the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was justified, believing that among the lives it had saved had been his own.

Nor did he have much time for fashionable attitudes about the emotional delicacy of soldiers and their need for counselling. His experience, in what he acknowledged was another age, was that war was a job that needed to be done, one accomplished by his generation without relish but with a common sense and resolve since vanished from the public spirit.

He aired his views in Quartered Safe Out Here (1992) and was touched when many young people wrote to agree with his sentiments.

More obits here and here.

John Sutherland contends that we Americans don’t get it.

With Flashman, Americans didn’t understand the inverted Victorianism that was Fraser’s gimmick. Instead of Thomas Hughes’s prig Tom Brown (he of the Schooldays) Fraser chronicled the British empire through the dandy-cad who roasts young Tom over the dormitory fire and is, to the relief of decent Rugbeians, expelled by the fearsome Dr Arnold (the most eminent of Lytton Strachey’s eminent Victorians) for drunkenness and hanky panky with the barmaid at the local pub.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

Hitchens wrote about Fraser and Flashman in Vanity Fair in 2006. (The full article isn’t available online. Here’s an excerpt.)

Janet Maslin launched a broadside against publishers the other day.

As it becomes possible to rush books into print ever more hastily, editing ain’t what it used to be.

Though there are many candidates for the honor of Year’s Sloppiest Book, the wall-to-wall bloopers in “Pearl Harbor,” a novel by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forschten, warrant special “wretching noises” from us all. The books that follow, in alphabetical order by author, were, in the “Pearl Harbor” vernacular, “all ladened with” better things.

Too bad the Times buried Maslin’s criticism where it will easily go unnoticed.

Bottom line: As long as there are no consequences in the marketplace, publishers will continue to put out books that are full of errors.

I love GalleyCat, but the whiny editors and agents who’ve been writing in to bitch and moan about the publishing business haven’t taught me (or GalleyCat blogger Ron Hogan, as he notes) a thing. Anyone who’s really interested and has a good half hour or so to devote to the subject can delve deep into the reeds by reading recent interviews with two very knowledgeable players.

First up, Andrew Wylie, profiled in Portfolio:

New York literary agent Andrew Wylie seems perfectly happy to be known as “the Jackal”—the nickname that sticks even though he obtained it years ago in Britain during a publishing dustup whose baroque details have largely faded from memory. He’s equally unruffled when book editors and rival agents call him an “evil madman,” a “cold-eyed predator,” and a “monster.”

Much more interesting, detailed, and revealing is this interview with longtime agent Lynn Nesbit. Here are a few highlights:

On book people:

So you miss the personalities

Yes. I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], “You missed the good days.” When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who’s now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who’s also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I’ll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.

So why was that lost?
It’s the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn’t attract eccentrics anymore.

On competition:

You represent so many of the original New Journalists. What was it like to be at the center of a movement like that?
When I first represented Tom Wolfe, I was younger than Tom. I was a kid. And when I went to sell Tom’s first book, his editor, Clay Felker, was the most important magazine editor in New York. I sent Tom’s book out for auction. Viking, with whom Clay had an arrangement as sort of editor at large, brought Tom in for a meeting with Tom Guinzburg. But on the auction day, Viking didn’t bid. So I thought that was curious. But they didn’t, and the book went to FSG.

A few days later I went to this big literary party at Rust Hills’s. I will never forget walking in. It was jammed with every writer and editor in New York. Clay was then dating Gloria Steinem, and Clay walked right over to me—this is like two days after the Tom thing—and he said, “You fucking cunt.” …

On editorial intervention:

How do you see your principal roles and responsibilities as an agent? Have they changed over time?
You are part of a writer’s support system—a very important part. The role of the agent is more important today than it was when I was starting out. Because the publishing world is so corporate, and editors move around so much, you are increasingly the only fixed point for the writer. That’s one way it’s changed. Another thing that I notice here, with younger agents like Tina and Eric, is that they do a lot of editing, and we didn’t do that when we were young. I think it’s partly because of the editors. There is such pressure on editors to come in with something that’s almost ready to go that the agents are assuming part of what the editors used to do.

When did you start to recognize that as a phenomenon?
Probably just in the last [eight?] years, or ten years.

Did you ever edit?
Not to the extent that they do.

On replenishing the ranks of book publishing people:

In terms of the book industry itself, what would you say are the most troubling or frustrating changes today?
What worries me is that there aren’t as many younger people who want to become editors as there used to be. Because at a certain point they get frustrated. There’s not enough money to make the job palatable, and they don’t have enough freedom. So they feel that they have this corporate bureaucracy imposed on them and yet they’re not making a decent enough salary. What I see is this flow of young editors becoming agents. There are hundreds of agents. I can’t believe how many there are. When I was starting out, there were agents, but not at the number there are now. Because today they can operate out of their apartments with a telephone. Or they think they can.

On the biggest problem facing the business today:

What is the single biggest problem with the book world today?
Distribution. Especially for smaller books. Because the bookstores won’t take a chance. And if a writer has a not-so-rosy track record, then they won’t order more and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, if the book happens to get good reviews, you’re caught out of print and have to reprint and maybe the books don’t get to the stores fast enough. And distribution is a problem on the other end, too, with books that are overprinted, books that may get on the best-seller list. It may look good to the outside world, but the returns may negate the rosy picture.

On editors’ nerves about buying fiction:

What do you mean exactly by “nervous”?
Nervous that fiction is very difficult to sell. An editor wants to see something that’s more near completion, that the idea or the thrust behind a novel is more fully realized. Twenty-five years ago an editor would say, “Oh, this has promise,” and sign it up. Today, editors want to say no rather than yes. Unless they see it as a big book.

And this is because of corporate pressures? Profit pressures?
Profit pressures. You must know that fiction is very hard to sell. Today it’s almost that fiction needs to seem like it’s going to be an event. It almost has to open like a movie, on the commercial side, or else the editor has to be convinced its going to get such praise, such positive literary acclaim, that even if it doesn’t sell a lot you’re launching a real voice.

On losing readers (as a function of the culture, not as a function of lousy book marketing):

What other changes are you seeing?
I said this earlier as sort of a joke, but I’m beginning to think there are more writers than readers. I get these e-mails pouring in from people who want to write their life stories. It’s because of the memoir. Everybody thinks they have a story. I also feel there are fewer and fewer civilians—I mean people outside of our business—who I meet who have time to read. They all say, “I’d love to read, but I’m just too busy.” What worries me is that people are on blogs, Web sites—there is a lot of that going on—but they aren’t reading books. That phenomenon, to me, is not a product of the industry, it’s a product of how our culture is changing. People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. And everybody has their specialty. I don’t ever look at blogs or Web sites because I would never get anything done. I’m tempted to because I hear about these great things.

On the future of books [e.a.]:

A lot of people seem to think an iPod-like device will come along for books….
Great. That would be terrific. I have no problem with that. The more forms in which people can read intellectual content, the better. I don’t care if they read it in a real book or on an iPod. If they’re more likely to read it on some device, great. I have no fear about that. I have no idea why people do. It’s the content that matters, the intellectual content. As long as we can keep it copyrighted. I also look forward to books on demand. Jason Epstein*** has been working on this machine for years, and he tells me that other people have been trying to do it too. The modes of distribution are so antiquated.

Epstein also seems to think that publishers are getting too big and will eventually collapse from their own bigness and fracture into smaller shops.
Like what’s happened in Hollywood. I think it will happen. I think it’s happening now, with all these imprints. There are so many imprints. And once they get the distribution figured out…. If these machines really do become effective, and there are more efficient ways of distributing books, then I think there will be more and more independent producers. And independent producers use a distribution outlet. So the publishers will be more like distributors. I think it could happen. I don’t know because this business is so primitive—the publishing business—so unsophisticated. It takes so many years to make a change here …

Well worth reading.

——–
*** Longtime readers will remember that I have written about Jason Epstein and his print-on-demand enterprise several times.

Via Ron Hogan at GalleyCat, I just heard about DailyLit.

What an amazingly great idea! You want to read a public domain classic (and a growing list of copyrighted works)? Sign up and get an e-mail a day (or an RSS feed) and read your book in byte-size installments.

Read all about the various ways to make this simple, free service work for you. (You don’t have to wait till the next day to read the next installment if you just can’t wait.) I’m signing up right now to get The Education of Henry Adams, starting tomorrow, in 197 parts!

Really, I think this is genius—not so much because it will be self-sustaining (I can’t see reading this way for many consecutive books … though, who knows? I haven’t even tried it yet—and, like every other lit snot, I was certainly wrong about audiobooks: I thought the idea was ridiculous, and it’s a huge part of the book business) but rather because it will certainly reignite people’s passion for reading in long form—as in, you know, real books.

At the same time, it enables those who love to read but really can’t spare the time (say, a presidential candidate or a neurosurgeon at a teaching hospital or a traffic controller or a law clerk or nurse on 12-hour shifts) to get their fix and reconnect with their passion.

Kudos.

It’s in this spirit that I embrace digitization. Again:

if you want to save books, set them free

As Spengler said in quite a different context the other day: when nothing works, you try everything.

After centuries of being cut off from the greatest works of Western thought—and from standard works of Western thought as well—Arabic-speaking people will soon—finally!—be able to have access to translations of some of the books that changed the world:

It’s been 375 years since Galileo published his earth-shaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 336 since John Milton wrote Paradise Regained and nearly 40 since James D. Watson had an apparent international bestseller with The Double Helix, about the discovery of the structure of DNA. Amazingly, however, none of these books, and thousands of classics like them, has ever been translated into Arabic, the first tongue of more than 300 hundred million persons worldwide.

Now this situation is being rectified by the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Muslim United Arab Emirates, which last month officially revealed its plans to translate 100 epochal foreign-language texts into Arabic by the end of next year.

Karim Nagy, the entrepreneur who is the force behind this effort, which is being funded by Abu Dhabi, says that money is no object:

Nagy said “funding is the least of our concerns. It’s the quality of the translation that counts.” Indeed, Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest of all the emirates and Abu Dhabi city is ranked as the richest in the world. Nagy said Kalima is striving to find a balance between wanting the Arab world to “catch up” with the classics, most of which are in the public domain, and “keeping up” with recent and current literature, which requires copyright clearance.

Also: Nagy has no political or religious agenda:

Nagy insists Kalima has “no political or religious agenda,” and points to its decision to publish John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom alongside such Marxist tomes as Reading Capital by Louis Althusser and Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Also on tap is the Yiddish-to-Arabic translation of The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ethic s by the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Being a passionate devotee of books, I say it is this kind of effort—and not war—that will change the world most profoundly. The question is how long it will take to bring enlightenment to people who have been kept in darkness for so long.

But the desire is there, as Doris Lessing wrote in her Nobel acceptance speech:

The school in the blowing dust of northwest Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at those mildly expectant faces and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without text books, or an atlas, or even a map pinned up on a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves, they beg for books. … Everybody, everyone begs for books: “Please send us books”.

Yes, let us send books—the very best of ourselves.