NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

I met recently with Cory Doctorow to talk [stay tuned for audio] about his latest book Little Brother [free download here], and the future of the book. During our conversation Cory mentioned that he was signatory to a call, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for rejection, or amendment at least, of a proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google’s Book Search service. Here’s the conclusion to what Cory and the ‘Privacy Authors and Publishers’ had to say to the judge:

"Courts, libraries, and legislatures have fiercely protected the right to read without fear of being watched or reported upon. The Settlement, if approved, may enable Google Book Search to become the world’s largest public library, institutional library, book “purchasing” and ongoing access system combined. It is no understatement to say that this Settlement may create the central way that books are accessed in the future, and the only way to access certain books. Because of its potential to greatly expand book access, Google Book Search is extremely exciting.

Yet that future potential will be undermined if this Court allows Google to collect intimate, invasive and previously unavailable information on readers, aggregate that that sensitive information with information about them collected by and through other Google products, and by doing so create a real risk of disclosure of that sensitive information to prying governmental entities and private litigants. This chilling effect will hurt all authors and publishers, but especially those who write about sensitive or controversial topics. It will also hurt the public interest, as the advance of digitization would come at the cost of reader privacy. The Privacy Authors and Publishers were not adequately represented in the settlement negotiations. They would not have agreed to a Settlement so bereft of privacy protections. Without additional protections, the Settlement is not fair, reasonable or adequate to the class members or to the public. It should not be approved until sufficient privacy protections are put into place."

I’m meeting with lawyer (and Google senior copyright counsel) Bill Patry  this afternoon to discuss his new book Moral Panic and the Copyright Wars…I’ll be talking to him in his capacity not as an employee of Google, but as a citizen concerned about how the copyright debate is being conducted. Topics of conversation: the public good versus private gain, menacing metaphors, and the sanctity of privacy. Let me know if you have any pressing concerns about these issues, and I’ll try to thread them into the questioning.

"About publicity…it should not be difficult  – you may suppose – to achieve the simple feat of telling a few thousand intelligent people that Mr. A’s book has been published, is worth reading, and costs seven and six. But it is difficult…and becomes more difficult every year…According to the English Catalogue of books…in the year 1923 there were 7,992 new books published in England – something over 150 a week. That was bad enough. Ten years later, in 1933…the number had risen to 9,905 – or 190 a week…Of this total, by the way, fiction accounts for 1,950. Every week, therefore, on the average throughout last year, there were something like 40 new novels and 100 new books of more or less general interest competing for the attention of the public…

The most valuable publicity that a book can have is  – talk; one reader’s enthusiastic recommendations are worth weveral inches of newspaper advertisement….Next to talk, in the publicity scale, probably ranks reviews. Here again, the publisher’s influence is small. he can sometimes draw the attention of a literary editor or a reviewer to a particular book; but that is about all that it is prudent for him to attempt…Theoretically, the publisher’s influence should be nil. Actually, it is not quite that. His reputation goes for something. If it is good, books bearing his imprint will stand a better chance of serious attention…

There remains, however, one form of publicity which the publisher can influence and which is of very real value – the distribution of his books in the bookshops…The wise publisher will take every opportunity of making friends with those who sell his books; not only because, if he as well as his travellers is known and liked and trusted by the trade, the trade will do its best to give his books a good showing; but alos because he can learn a great deal from the intelligent bookseller, who stands in a far closer relationship than himself to his ultimate customers…

All is, in fact, very far from being well with publishing…What is wrong with publishing is that there are too many publishers, and far too many books. 

If every intelligent man and woman in this country could be made to realize that the responsibility for the future of English letters is ultimately his or hers, the whole outlook would be completely changed. It is the scantiness of intelligent, sympathetic, discriminating response on the part of the public which compels publishers to cheapen their ideals. If, instead of borrowing books you would buy them; if you would, especially, buy the books of unknown authors; if you would buy books speculatively – not for a possible first-edition value but on the chance of their containing something of value; if you would use your own judgment and discrimination, instead of going with the herd – why, then the face of publishing would be changed…the future of English literature depends on the private buyer of books. All that publishers can do in the long run is to give the private buyer the opportunity of exercising his judgment…Perhaps some energetic member of the Oxford University English Club will be moved to start an Anti-Best-Seller League. If so, I, for one, should be delighted to become a subscribing member."

          Excerpts from "Are Publishers Any Use?" A paper read by Geoffrey Faber to the Oxford University English Club, February 15, 1934. Published in A Publisher Speaking (Faber & Faber, 1934).

Wikipedia reports that there were 206,000 new books published in the United Kingdom in 2005.

• A few quick notes on what he said:
  
  
• ‘How much cheaper will the Kindle DX make university text books? ‘Substantially’ is all we get at this point. First though, you need to buy one for $489  – which includes a 3G wireless radio ($359 for the regular Kindle).
• Kindle ebooks are designed to work on iphones and other platforms, devices. With 9.99 price point for all books sold on Kindle. 
• Bezos prefers to keep book selling and device selling businesses separate. 300,000 titles now available on Kindle. Adoption rate has been high.
• ‘We humans do whatever is easiest.’ ‘We change our tools our tools change us.’ You can buy a book 60 seconds after hearing about it.

This from The Toronto Star: 

"…rights holders will receive a lump sum payment of between $60 and $300 (all figures U.S.) for each title now on Google Book Search and as much as 63 per cent of future revenues generated from digitized sales. Google is required to contribute an initial $125 million to an independent Book Rights Registry, which will disperse the payments."

And this from an astute commentator:

On the one hand, Google’s Book Search could turn out to be an excellent way of reviving out-of-print texts while providing authors with some revenue. On the other hand, the way that Google went ahead and digitised MILLIONS of books without seeking some sort of consent is appalling, and the idea of a monopoly controlling so much intellectual property is extremely unsettling. The best that an author can expect from all this is to end up a very small cog in a very big machine, and that should worry anyone who is concerned about art and intellectual freedom. When Grady says "The mood among writers is that it’s inevitable…" he might as well quote Star Trek and state the obvious: resistance is futile.

Submitted by DGM (our very own DG Myers?)

In her elegant blog post over at the Globe and Mail entitled "Poetry means the world to us," Judith Fitzgerald speaks to David Jones’s distinction between  "culture" and  "civilization:" the former which refers to the use-less or extra-utile, the latter to the use-ful or pragmatic. "Gratuitous acts," Judith explains, " such as goodnight kisses and gratuitous objects such as birthday cakes are innately symbolic – and, in these instances, directly express love. Utility or efficiency is the sole value of technology and the technocrat. Utilitarian or pragmatic objects (a circular saw) and acts (fixing the basement stairs) are not innately symbolic; and, in themselves, express nothing. That is why they contribute nothing directly to culture, although they do contribute to civilization and, so, can provide conditions conducive to culture." Problem is, she concludes: "Postmodern life dehumanizes because utility now far outweighs gratuity, which traditionally has been expressed in domestic rituals, religion and the arts. Today the primary emphasis of nearly all public and professional life is pragmatic, which means that civilization is thriving at the expense of culture."

Apropos of which, from Dick Meyer’s piece "Literary Death Spiral? The Fading Book Section" over at NPR:

" In capitalism, value is allocated in the form of money. That less money is being allocated to books and book publicity means that the society values books less. Books must be the most unprofitable form of entertainment and media today. You can probably count the number of authors and publishers who make, say, top lawyer money on your fingers and toes. Celebrity rarely comes to authors just from their books, but instead through movies and television.

This is a cruel virtue in most ways. It is partly because book writing is largely immune from the huge profiteering and wildly promiscuous marketing of, say, the shampoo or video game businesses that so many fabulous, contrarian, angry and wholly unique novels, biographies, histories and political books are written. Big money has homogenized movies and television, for example, and a "winner take all" economy of culture distributes huge rewards to the most popular few, with less left for the oddballs and dissenters. That isn’t true of books yet, though fewer authors can make livings writing and reviewing books.

The stand-alone book review section is just a bit player in all this. But it is the last venue for attention to books that has great stature and a large (ish) audience. Now it’s being spiked, and that’s not a good chapter."

I agree with this. But I also realize that the journalism business model and traditional methods of communication generally, are in the process of being shredded to bits. No one is making any money. Blogs, which to some extent are stealing and satisfying readers, certainly aren’t (at least not this one). Social marketing/gathering behemoths aren’t either. Facebook lives no where near profit.

The important clarification then: Is the demise of the book section a result of this cash-siphoning hole that the Internet has ripped into the news business, or is it symptomatic of a growing lack of interest in the type of information stored between book section covers? Of a shift away from the slow, careful reading and digestion of volumes of complex words and concepts, toward fast-paced, multi-tasked eating of more consumable, less substantial multi-media information?

The answer, it seems, is a bit of both. Still, so long as there are curious, intelligent minds at work in our world, minds that inevitably tire of flashed features, secondary sources and simplistic presentation, which yearn for engagement with difficult ideas…there will, I think, be a market for challenging, book-length, written information and entertainment. In addition, the one delight that books provide, that TV, movies, websites and video games cannot, is space. Room for the imagination to play in, to run loose, to create. Surely this alone, this desire to exercise and revel in – to feed and fertilize – one’s own imagination, will ensure that ‘books,’ precisely because they stimulate imaginative thought, hold the door for personal reflection and understanding, in ways as various as there are numbers of readers, do not die.

Christine Rosen in her New Atlantis article People of the Screen refering to former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly’s  2006 article in the New York Times Magazine:

"This ode to gigajoy included the obligatory prediction that paper books would be replaced with handheld devices. “Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums,” Kelly writes, the universal digital library that Google is bringing into the world “will encourage the creation of virtual ‛bookshelves’—a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information.” Kelly anticipates the day when authors will “write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages.” But what would a mash-up of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the latest best-selling mystery look like? There are some extraordinary lines in Eliot’s novel. Writing of Lydgate and Rosamond, for example, Eliot says, “He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.” But devoid of the complicated context of the rest of the novel, how can we understand why this observation is poignant, apt, and true?

Kelly’s hope for the book is to turn it into a kind of digital Frankenstein monster, a contextless “text” that is no more than the sum of its scattered and remixed parts: “What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library,” he writes. And he is confident that “in the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail.” Perhaps it will, but Kelly might want to include in his own future e-book another snippet from Eliot’s masterpiece, one which might serve as a warning for us all: “We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.”

Rosen ends her article with this:

"Such is the end of the tragedy we are now witness to: Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress."

****

I’m a little more sanguine. If the ebook replicates the paperback reading experience closely enough; if the new Kindle looks and feels as cool, and works as well as the iPod. If it holds 1000 books. If I can write notes in the margins, refer to other texts, and underline and more easily gather together, store and print-out significant passages…I say bring it on…Given that so many books are primarily about  content: If I can access it more easily; if the act of reading is as convenient and pleasurable as it is with the paper book, then by all means save the trees. Just publish hardcovers for those who want the ‘book’ experience, or who want to collect. Fewer printed volumes would be a good thing. It might also mean that existing editions (i.e. my collection) would assume prices more reflective of  their value.

Excellent article (I love his banana comparison) here in the Guardian, by Andrew Marr, on the arrival of the ebook, from which I pilfer at length as follows: …It’s partly that traditional books are such good technology, even compared with CDs or newspapers. They are a little larger than the hand, extremely portable, nice to hold and look at and remarkably cheap. Yes, there is an environmental issue but most are made of cheap, sustainable woodpulp. Simple technology that works is unlikely to go out of fashion. Those futurologists of the 1960s who predicted a world of silver jumpsuits and food-pills forgot that socks, buttons and saucepans were simple technology that worked, and the same is true of books. …Enter Sony’s Reader and iRex’s Iliad, which are being touted as the first really useable, easy-to-read products. I’ve had an Iliad for a month to try out. It costs £449 plus VAT, or slightly more with a handsome leather case that makes it look like a slightly larger, thinner Filofax. I have not been offered one for free, nor would accept that. So it has been a fair, straightforward trial: bibliophile, or perhaps bibliomaniac, meets book-killer. The one that was sent to me already had downloaded on to it four books by Arthur Conan Doyle, two Brontë novels, 10 by Dickens, four apiece by George Eliot and DH Lawrence, three Dostoevskys, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, Jane Austen’s complete works, and ditto Lewis Carroll, both big fat Tolstoys, five Thomas Hardy novels and quite a lot of poetry. That’s a hefty bookshelf, accommodated in a device only a little over a centimetre thick and in breadth and depth about the size of a closed hardback book.It is meant to be read, at length, and its claim is that the screen is good enough to allow you to read, even a Tolstoy, even in sunlight, and actually enjoy the experience. It works with a basic menu, four buttons separated into news (of which more anon), books, docs and notes. There is a small pen-like stylus attached to the back, which lets you make notes or add comments to your documents and – the best innovation – a thin silver bar on the left of the screen that you flick with your thumb to turn the pages. It is charged, like a laptop, mobile or any other similar device, and the battery should see easily you through a day’s reading and writing. For those interested in detailed specifications, I can say it weighs about the same as a medium-sized banana. It powers up quickly and turns off easily. …I was surprised by how easy it was to use, and surprised by how much can be stored on it. I liked the rather elegant, retro design, more like a digital slate than a piece of flashy gear – that’s good marketing. But the real question is whether it is so useful that it is worth more than £400? And on top of that, there’s the material itself, because although a deal with the Amazon subsidiary Mobipocket means there will be access to about 50,000 titles, and though publishers such as Macmillan are now moving into ebooks for new authors, scientific books and other material, the proud owner of an Iliad would still buy "books" to download. It isn’t cheap and it isn’t going to replace beautifully made books, or books with lots of pictures, or the latest must-be-seen-with novel, or the read-and-chuck airport thriller. It won’t destroy bookshops, any more than the much more advanced music-download business has destroyed albums. I won’t be thinning out my book collection and digitalising it. … I can now see a way in which this, or its future rivals, could become useful to me. In our house, every day we get mounds of newsprint, much of it thrown instantly away. The stuff hangs around like intellectual scurf, and it’s depressing. For my broadcasting work, another great wodge of briefings, clippings and so on arrives, most days of the week. They pile up. Just looking at them saps the spirit. …Then there’s travelling. Mostly I carry round a bulging bag of books, and on holiday it’s bigger still – a great back-straining burden. …But it’s clear enough that after all the waiting and the over-hyping, the ebook is arriving.

The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in Jan., 2006: “A group of academic libraries and corporate partners assembled by the nonprofit Internet Archive is digitizing out-of-copyright books and making them available online at no charge. The project has the backing of Yahoo and Microsoft, and many see it primarily as a response to the controversial book-scanning project led by Google.”

Brewster Kahl has put millions of his own ‘Internet-bubble fortune’ into engineering the non-profit Open Library Project as part of The InternetArchive.org, in San Francisco. Kahl was interviewed Aug. 19, 2005 by The Media Giraffe Project’s Bill Densmore.

I love this guy Kahl…

Go to Media Giraffe Blog January 24, 2006 post, and listen to what he has to say.