There has been a torrent of new readers pouring through my RSS reader over the last week. The reason is that the Frankfurt book fair is on at the moment.
In summary then. There’s one called the txtr from a German company which looks fairly unremarkable from what I can see. A company called AUO has come up with a flexible e-ink display and also the world’s largest e-ink display at 20″. We’ve known about the Plastic Logic reader for a while but now it finally has a name: the Proreader. Ectaco are adding to their Jetbook range with a Jetbook lite which is likely to retail at $150 and uses AA batteries. There are a couple of really interesting dual readers as well in the Alex and the Entourage. The Alex interestingly is running Google’s mobile OS Android. Also, Barnes and Noble have finally come up with their Kindle rival in the Nook which is a colour e-ink reader.
Well, my plan to read four books as part of Book Thingo’s Books Alive challenge didn’t quite work out. The only book I finished was Ross Gittins’ Gittinomics, a slightly outdated popular economics (popenomics?) book which I’d actually highly recommend, especially the chapters about happiness and consumerism. The other three books which I started were Carlos Ruis Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, Michael Chabon’s CKavalier and KClay (which I’ve tried to read before) and JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. I’ll be finishing The Affluent Society in due course but the other two just really weren’t my cup of tea; I may finish them, I probably won’t. (I also read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but it’s a bit of a stretch to call that a book).
One of the reasons that I only finished one of the books was that I started a political movement halfway through the challenge. As a result of reading Gittins and Galbraith (and a few other things) I came up with what I thought was a brilliantly original new economic model. It’s a kind of anarcho-Marxist mutualism which I’ve subsequently found is not that original at all. I really thought that I was going to save the world from its self-destroying consumerist decline. I even started having messianic fantasies of winning the Nobel peace prize (this idea was way too big for just the Economics prize) and receiving a cross-party, 10 minute standing ovation from the US congress. I got myself the www.abandonprofit.org domain name and wrote 8000 words outlining my theory. I’ve gone a bit cool on the idea now but I still think it might have some legs. I might just have to settle for the Nobel economics prize instead of the full blow peace prize though.
Back to reality and specifically my failure in BookThingo’s Books Alive challenge and I think my big mistake was picking books that I thought I ought to read instead of things that I thought I’d enjoy. It’s a mistake that I make all the time. It’s a bit disingenuous to call it a mistake. It’s more of a character trait. I like the veneer of erudition and I’m frequently willing to sacrifice my reading pleasure to maintain the gleam.
I really need to get back into genre fiction more. The popular fiction genre’s I’ve loved in my life are crime and sci-fi (specifically hard sci-fi) and yet I almost never read them nowadays. Like Stevens the butler in Remains of the Day (which is a fantastic book as well as a great film) I really ought to just give in and read the genres I like and not worry about improving myself or trying to impress people.
“It’s not scandalous at all. It’s just a sentimental old love story.”
“Yes. I read these books, any books, to develop my command knowledge of the English language. I read to further my education, Miss Kent”.
A sudden spike in traffic to this site means one thing and one thing only: new readers for Australia. Like tremors in California, you’re never quite sure whether it’s the big one; this time, I can safely assure you, that it is. The Kindle is coming.
Firstly I ought to say that I have never even seen a Kindle let alone touched one so I can only have limited input when it comes to advising people about them.
From my distant vantage point however I’ll test my shoulder and throw in my two cents.
One of the big advantages of the Kindle in the US is that it offers access to the largest of all ebook stores. The claim in the press release is that Amazon has over 200,000 ebook titles; according to Wikipedia the actual number is in excess of 300,000 now. Kindle owners in Australia however are very unlikely to have access to the US ebook store. If you’re in Australia then I’d advise you to hold off buying a Kindle until we find out exactly what the availability of books is going to be like here. As far as I know the parallel importation rules apply to ebooks which means that in order to sell ebooks in Australia Amazon will have to buy almost all its content from Australian publishers.Negotiating with Australian publishers is likely to be time consuming and costly and I honestly can’t see Amazon taking the time to maintain a decent Australian ebook store. I could be proved wrong however. Australian publishers definitely won’t be welcoming Amazon with open arms either.[Update: if you go to the main Kindle product page and choose the country specific information for Australia then Amazon makes the unequivocal claim that 280,000 books will be available. Not sure I'd trust that claim just yet though.]
The design flaws with the Kindle 1 are well documented. No doubt you learn to live with it if you own one but be prepared if you buy one that you are likely to hate it for the first few weeks if not forever. [Update: in the rush to get this post I didn't really check the press release properly. The Kindle which is available in Australia is the Kindle 2 which by many accounts fixed a lot of the design flaws of the Kindle 1. He's the product page for the Australian Kindle.]
I keep saying this on this blog but I honestly think that e-ink’s days are numbered and that anyone considering buying an e-ink device needs to be aware of that. My pessimism may surprise a lot of people for whom e-ink has only just appeared on their radars and who didn’t even realise we were counting days yet but I think it’s true. It’s a great technology but it’s incredibly limited. It’s main advantage over LCD is battery life; as soon as LCD cracks that nut then e-ink is finished, kaput, finito.
If you love gadgets then it’s definitely worth getting one but if you just love reading then I’d have to say stick to paper for now. Paper books are by and large better quality and better value than most ebooks. Not only do all my friends and family have lots of paper books to lend me but my local library has tens of thousands of paper books most of which are in copyright, are perfectly formatted and are free. Ebooks are the future but they have a long way to go before they’ll stop me making a weekly trip up to my local library.
There is a beautiful understated simplicity about a paper book that ebooks and ebook devices just haven’t been able to match yet. You can literally (and that’s a literal “literally” not just an emphatic one) chuck a paper book off the top of the Empire State Building, walk down to street level, pick it up and start reading it again. Now that’s a great invention.
The Kindle has been widely hailed as heralding a reading revolution but what it’s actually heralded is a bookselling revolution. It’s taken the whimsical book buying habits of the modern shopper from the ‘3 for 2′ tables and into the digital realm. Real readers don’t need to carry 200 books at once. On the whole they read books consecutively not concurrently. They don’t need to be one click away from 300,000 titles; books aren’t junk food they’re cordon bleu (whatever that is). The Kindle is just another symptom of the mass consumerist society in which we live. A society in which people frequently list “shopping” as a hobby and actually kid themselves into thinking that “shopping” makes them happy. The Kindle isn’t a reading device, it’s a shopping device. Amazon really ought to be paying you to own one not the other way round.
If you’re waiting for a rhino to come through the door expect an elephant through the window.
Ancient Chinese proverb (possibly)
We’ve all been waiting feverishly for the fabled Apple tablet and now suddenly Microsoft has come from leftfield with the Courier.
I didn’t see this coming at all.
Here’s the video
The book industry needs to brace itself. Ebooks are approaching their ipod moment. Current piracy issues are a drop in the ocean compared to what is around the corner.
Bookthingo has alerted me to the Booksalive campaign. Bookthingo has set the challenge to read as many books as possible between the 7 and 30 September. I’ve read 30 books so far this year and we’re in the 36th week so I’m averaging just under a book a week. Over the next three weeks therefore I’m going to challenge myself to read 4 books starting with The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I’ll probably aim for two fiction and two non-fiction.
I’ve been trying to read some economics recently. I popped down to my local library recently and got out, among other books, Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. I love reading Galbraith. Whether or not you agree with him (or even understand him for that matter) he is a phenomenally good writer. His words just flow effortless off the page like poetry. I frequently find myself reaching for the dictionary (a modern metaphor for typing “define:” into Google) when reading him. This is from the introduction to The Affluent Society:
No one will think this an angry book. Some may think it lacking in that beguiling modesty which is so much in fashion in social comment. The reader will soon discover that I thnk very little of certain of the central ideas of economics. But I do think a great deal of the men who originated these ideas. The shortcomings of economics are not original because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. Yet I trust that judgments will not be too hasty. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.
And so begins Galbraith’s frontal assault on conventional wisdom, a concept which, ironically, has become so well accepted that it has itself entered the canon of conventional wisdom.
As for Bookthingo’s short challenge, here is a list of my favourite books from my favourite genre: non-fiction.
There are a few others which were close to making the list including Max Hastings’ Armageddon, Antony Beevor’s Berlin, Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life and Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
While I was away the Productivity commission delivered its verdict on Parallel importation restrictions. No doubt persuaded by my post on the issue the commission has recommended that the government “should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs) for books”. The report itself is something of a behemoth at 240 pages. Luckily its fairly well organised. The conclusions and recommendations are easy to find. There are three key recommendations but the first two are the most important:
RECOMMENDATION 1
The Government should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs) for books. The repeal should take effect three years after the date that it is announced.
RECOMMENDATION 2
The Government should, as soon as possible, review the current subsidies aimed at encouraging Australian writing and publishing, with a view to better targeting of cultural externalities. Any revised arrangements should be put in place before the repeal of the PIRs takes effect.
So, that’s it. Prepare for the streets to be flooded with impoverished authors and publishers crowding longingly around the golden doors of Dymocks as their books fly off the shelves at half the current price with limited if any royalties flowing back to the creators. Well, not quite. Despite the verdict the rumour is that the government will, in the time honoured fashion of governments, do nothing and just leave things the way they are.
At the heart of this debate is the question of whether protecting the publishing industry is an appropriate way to support Australian literature. I initially thought that it wasn’t but the fact that so many authors lined up along side the publishers stopped me in my tracks somewhat. Now I think there are indeed some good arguments to support protectionism chief among them being that without a strong local publishing industry Australian authors would find it very hard to get their work published. The problem is that the financial burden of this protectionism falls largely on the shoulders of readers at the moment.
At the heart of this report is a real lack of input from readers it seems to me. Readers have no representative industry body to lobby on their behalf. The report starts off with the bland, unsubstantiated statement “Australians are avid book readers”. I’d like to see them prove this. I’ve been convinced by Sherman Young on this issue; there are very few real readers. Just to dig into the numbers a little bit. The report states that book sales in Australia are $2.5bn. Of these 40% are educational, professional and reference texts. That leaves $1.5bn in sales of ‘Trade’ books. That’s roughly $75 per person in Australia (including babies and children who of course make up a significant body of readers). Take out of that all Sherman Young’s “anti-books” (celebrity biographies and movie tie-ins) and “functional books” (cook books, travel books) and I think you’d be lucky if we average one purchase of literature each a year. And that’s assuming that we actually read that one book that we buy. A lot of people buy books or are given them and never get around to reading them. Obviously you have to add back second hand book sales and lending (either between friends or from libraries) to get a true pitcture of reading but I’d still argue that the picture is a lot bleaker than this report paints it.
I’m happy for the Australian government to keep protecting the Australian publishing industry but I’d like to see them dip into their own coffers to do so. The government’s own coffers obviously come from the people originally but at least then the burden of supporting Australian literature is spread out over 20 million Australians instead of the few hundred thousand, if that, who regularly read and buy books.
Subsidising publishers and writers is a very tricky thing. One of the points that the report makes is that the current PIR laws do not distinguish between books of different cultural value. Tim Winton’s Breath gets exactly the same protection as Paris Hilton’s latest autobiography. Any form of direct government subsidy would have to find someway of determining cultural value to Australia. This is potentially a political minefield.
Publishing houses are first and foremost companies. Their primary responsibility is to make money for their shareholders. I’ve no doubt that a desire to further the literary culture of the nation comes a close second but the fact is that it always will come second. There is a fundamental divide here between authors.
There’s a question that I’ve always wanted to ask authors and publishers.
I’m not sure if I’ve got the numbers quite right but I suspect that authors and publishers answer this question differently. The publisher has to go for the money; the author on the other hand may value the exposure more highly than the cash. The vast majority of authors make little if any money from their writing. If they do make money then that’s a bonus but by and large not making money is not going to stop them writing. If we entrust the literary culture of Australia to the publishing industry we run the very real risk that the benchmark for literary value becomes profit instead of artistic quality.
Finally, I’d recommend reading the report. It contains a very good overview of publishing and bookselling in Australia.
should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs)
How much should an ebook cost? It’s a question which has been weighing on my mind for a while now. One thing is clear to me: ebooks are currently too expensive.
When you buy an ebook you’re not buying an object, you’re buying an experience. At the moment there are a number of other ways to get that experience which are significantly cheaper than buying the ebook. Most books I read are either borrowed from libraries, borrowed from friends or bought in secondhand bookshops. More often than not I sell books once I’ve read them as well.
Publishers need to work out a pricing model for ebooks which charges for the experience not the object. In working out how to price the experience there is an interesting model which they can look at and that is the Public Lending Right.
What is public lending right?
Public lending right is a program which compensates authors for the potential loss of sales from their works being available in public libraries. According to Wikipedia:
Fifteen countries have a PLR program, and others are considering adopting one. Canada, the United Kingdom, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand currently have PLR programs. There is ongoing debate in France about implementing one. There is also a move towards having a Europe-wide PLR program administered by the EU.
The method of calculating compensation varies from country to country. In Australia it is calculated using a flat rate per number of copies in the public library system. In other countries, including the UK, the compensation is based on the number of times a book is loaned out multiplied by a flat rate. It’s this second system that really interests me because it remunerates authors (and publishers) for the number of times their books are read.
The system slightly falls over with the fact that the rates are pitifully low in most countries. Some back of the envelope calculations: The public lending right rate per borrowing in the UK this year was 5.98 pence. When you consider that author royalties are usually at least 5% and books in the UK usually cost at least £5 then at the very least the author is losing out on over 75% of their royalties each time someone borrows a book. And that’s a best case scenario for the author! If their royalty is 10% and the book is retailing at £10 then they’re losing almost 95% of their royalty.
What you get when you buy an ebook is a lot more akin to what you get when you go to a library than what you get when you go to a bookshop. You can’t lend it to friends, you can’t sell it, you can’t keep it as an ornament on your living room shelf. And yet you can read a library book for free but if you want to read the ebook you have to pay almost as much as, if not more than, you would for the physical book.
We’re in a transitional phase for the book at the moment. The book industry needs to adopt a new royalty and pricing structure based on the cost of reading books as opposed to owning them. It’s a great opportunity for publishers to get control over book buying habits. The publishing industry currently loses huge amounts of revenue through people lending books to eachother or buying books secondhand. There must be a halfway point between 5.98 pence and the £1 or so that authors receive per book sale that properly reflects the value of reading a book.
Well, the traffic to this site doubled a few days ago which can only mean one thing: new Sony Readers. I had a quick look at them but to be honest I didn’t really study them too closely. One word made me immediately lose interest. That word? E-ink.
I have completely lost faith in e-ink. It’s clear to me now that any future ebook readers must be able to do two things: surf the web and render video. Nothing I have seen tells me that e-ink will ever be able to do these things properly. (the Kindle internet browser looks decidedly shoddy to me from the videos I’ve seen). Furthermore, I have every faith that Mary Lou Jepsen at Pixel Qi and others working on screen technology are on the brink of producing LCD screens which really challenge e-ink on screen quality and energy efficiency.
My advice to anyone thinking of buying not just a Sony Reader but any e-ink device is don’t! E-ink devices are about to be superceded by tablets with high definition, efficient LCD screens. Wait for these first gen devices to come along before making your purchase.
I think modern books are generally too long. I’ve just been listening to the last episode of BBC’s Front Row and a discussion with some crime writers on that show has reinforced my opinion. Mark Lawson makes the interesting observation about the length of crime stories. Edgar Allen Poe’s crime short stories were around 14 pages each; Raymond Chadler’s novles are usually around 200 pages long; modern crime novels have ballooned to around 400 pages. In response the three crime writers offer the following reasons for the size of modern books:
Economics; books cost a lot and people want to think they’re getting value for money.
Lack of editing
Writers are held to a book a year schedule. (she doesn’t explain why this leads to overlong books but presumably she’s implying that writers just keep writing until the 12 months are up instead of stopping after, say, 7 months when the book is aesthetically complete)
Contractual requirements for the length of books have increased. One writer was originally contracted for 50,000 word novels in 1981 but this has now increased to 80,000 words; the other writer is contracted to write 100,000 words per book
I rate all the books I read on Goodreads. Of the books I’ve read this year I’ve given 5 stars to five of them and of those three came in at under 200 pages: The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), On Chesil Beach and The Old Man and the Sea. I’ll admit that my list of top books of all time is dominated by longer books but that’s because I’ve been conditioned by the publishing industry into thinking that when I read I should be reading long books.
You might argue that books have always been long. Dickens is one writer who I love but who I rarely get around to reading because his books are so long. (I’ve only actually read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities). You have to remember though that people’s reading habits were very different back in Dickens’ time. His books were usually serialised and published over many months. David Copperfield was serialised over a period of a year and a half. Added to that people didn’t have the distractions of television, radio, the internet or even record players.
Anyway, I’m running a bit behind the book-a-week target I set myself at the beginning of the year. (I’ve read 26 so far which is where I should have been at the end of June). I’m currently halfway through Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield and despite its over 500 pages I’m really enjoying it. After Gates of Fire it’s going to be strictly short books until 2010.
I’m a big Google fan so I am very excited to hear 
A sudden spike in traffic to this site means one thing and one thing only:
While I was away the Productivity commission delivered 
How much should an ebook cost? It’s a question which has been weighing on my mind for a while now. One thing is clear to me: ebooks are currently too expensive.
Well, the traffic to this site doubled a few days ago which can only mean one thing: 
I think modern books are generally too long. I’ve just been listening to 
Recent Comments