Friday, August 22, 2008
eReading eWriting eRithmetic
Here’s a sentence that wouldn’t have made much sense to most people a year ago, from Galleycat:
“Last night, the Soft Skull Twitter feed directed readers to Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy‘s five-point plan to revitalize book publishing....”
Richard Nash, the publisher for Soft Skull, totally gets it. I‘ve been following him on twitter ever since hearing him speak at The New School last year on a small press panel. I remember feeling refreshed and impressed with Nash’s point of view regarding the future of publishing in a modern, digital, connected world.
One person asked, “Aren’t you worried about people stealing books if they’re online, like music piracy?”
Nash said, “The publishing industry wishes it had that problem.” I’m paraphrasing, but fairly sure that was the gist. He also said it in his fabulous British accent, so it sounded even more intelligent.
Last week he tweeted, “I can’t wait til we have content we can put here: Free Software Turns the iPhone Into an E-Book Reader.” Oh, I would look forward to that.
[UPDATE: softskull (Richard Nash) just twittered a link to a free PDF of The Wizard of Oz. It’s pretty cool-lookin’.]
Last week I downloaded that app (Stanza) to my iPhone, but ran into the same problem I run into with all e-book/e-reader internet-audio book delivery situations.... a rather crap selection due to copyright limitations and lack of publisher involvement. I’m hoping very much that it’s just the beginning, and that soon I’ll be eating those words.
My fear is that application developers and participating publishers will track participation and make premature assumptions about the habits of the eReading public — since I can’t really tell them, “Look, the books I would have read on your ereader I have already read because they were written forever ago. I’d love to peruse your offerings. Can you maybe organize them a bit better, and offer more than an author and title because all these are super obscure. Oh! And I don’t speak German.”
Indeed, people who don’t read (Steve Jobs) love to talk about The Curse of the eReader and how people don’t read books anymore. Blah Blah fine. And only like 4% of people who start writing books finish writing a book, but wow, there sure are a zillion books out there, so shut up with numbers and start thinking outside the pod. I also barely listen to music anymore, but I’m on my second iPod and buy things to put on it from the iTunes store.
I want a lot of books. I’d really like them all instantly.
I would be really tempted to buy a Kindle if selection didn’t suck.
From one of their bullet points: “More than 150,000 books available, including more than 98 of 112 current New York Times® Best Sellers.”
150,00 titles sounds like a lot but from where I’m standing it’s all foam, no beer. If publishers and marketers are only interested in selling books to the beach-reading crowd who treat books as disposable wrappers for brain candy, they will have misjudged and under-served the book market on the whole. That — or I’m overestimating people, and no one will read in the future, and all those non-book-loving people will fail to notice that it’s the end of the world until there’s an infographic about it.
How about books not on the NYT BS list? Maybe that consumer-friendly market can subsidize the expansion into more books, other canons, forever, until they’re all there. Who do I have to bribe to get a little free market action around here?
Can I get my reading list for school this fall? No. Jerks. Judging from last year (*and my attempts to buy locally from used book stores including Strand) I’m going to have to buy books through Amazon, which taps into tinybooksellers throughout the U.S. and England, who sell me an inexpensive book that usually costs less than the price of shipping. It’s a modern miracle to do business like this — and I cherish these books — but suddenly, finally, we’re all painfully aware of how expensive and retarded transport is.
The process of obtaining these books strikes me as wonderful and terrible at the same time. It breaks my heart to think of what it costs independent booksellers to pay a human stand there and wrap my little $1.50 book printed 30 years ago, resold countless times. It puts the fear in me. It’s not a sustainable practice. I rather give the sum total to that bookseller, than have most of the money go to shipping (oil), the waste of the cardboard and plastic it came in, and so on.
I know that for me, until there is a way to search and find almost any book, any eReader will feel like a stunted thing, a peripheral device of the most frivolous sort, when it has the potential to be so much more.
I’m just a cranky potential customer with a reading habit, a wallet, and a willingness to try new things.
Page 1 of 1 pages
