bookbook blog

Well, after all that work by the Productivity commission, all those submissions, all the debates, all the column inches, all the blog posts and all the private discussions the government has decided to do nothing. In a decision truly worthy of a modern centre-left neo-liberal government Rudd et alia have decided to just leave things the way they are. Actually that’s not quite right. They’re claiming that their act of nothingness is in fact an act of laissez-faire capitalism; if in doubt, leave it to the market to decide. No doubt if the market fails to sort the issue out then they’ll get the Productivity Commission back to do another review in a few years.

In a small victory for reading culture in Australia the news of the government’s (in)decision took up almost the whole front page of the Australian the day after the announcement. That small victory however was offset by the fact that Amazon and The Book Depository were both name checked in the leading article. Many Australians will already have heard of Amazon. The Book Depository may not have been on many people’s radars but that’s changing fast. I’ve had more than half a dozen people recently recommending it to me. Free-worldwide delivery is a great marketing trick and one which is attracting a lot of interest from the Anglophone diaspora.

Through this debate I’ve come to the conclusion that we really need to distinguish reading from book buying. The two are not the same. A lot of our book buying habits arise from consumerism rather than a love of reading. “Shopping” has become a valid pastime in our age and bookshops provide one of the richest browsing experiences on the high street. This year I gave up buying books and instead started going to my local library, borrowing from friends and downloading free ebooks. What I’ve learnt through the experience is that reading is a lot more fun when you stop buying books.

I was also keen this year to make a dent on my backlog of unread books but instead I’ve actually just started giving them away. Unread books are a burden because I feel obliged to read them even when I’m not interested in reading them. Giving up on a library book after 50 pages is a lot easier than giving up on a book that you’ve shelled out $30 for.

Back to the government’s decision and I’m not particularly surprised or interested for that matter. Protectionism is a defensive play and it may preserve the domestic publishing industry in the short-term but in the long-term it’s not going to help win the war. The war is the fight for reading culture. At the heart of this whole debate must be a belief that people who read are happier people. Furthermore, there must be the belief that a society which writes and reads about itself is a happier society. You know you have a rich literary culture when a book or piece of writing is able to define the zeitgeist or significantly change public opinion on a particular issue.

I’d like to suggest a few offensive strategies to the Australian government which may or may not work but I’ll throw them out there anyway.

Promote reading for children
This one’s obvious but I’ll spell it out anyway. Childhood is when reading habits are entrenched so the key to developing a rich literary culture in your society is to get your children reading. The government already spends a lot of money encouraging kids to read be it through schools or other programs but there’s no harm throwing more money at the campaign.

National E-book library
The issue of e-books and libraries is a thorny one which seems to be the subject of an uneasy standoff at the moment. Public libraries owe their existence to a longstanding belief that reading should be free to everyone. It’s a principle that I still believe in but one that is going to come under increasing pressure. The problem is that the experience of reading an e-book is not at all dissimilar to the experience of reading a library book; you don’t get a physical object, you can’t lend it to friends, you can’t keep it on your shelf as an intellectual ornament. And yet to buy an e-book costs upwards of $10 but to borrow a library book is free. This contradiction has yet to be resolved.

I’d suggest that Australia should be the first country to set up a comprehensive national e-book library. I don’t just mean a fancy internet archive of important Australian literature. I mean a website where any Australian can go and download a copy of the Da Vinci Code for a set period of time ideally for free.

This would involve an almighty deal with the publishing industry but I think it’s a deal that needs to be made. It would force the publishing industry once and for all to decide how much they want to charge people for reading a book as opposed to owning one.

Set up a CSIRO for books
CSIRO is Australia’s national science organisation. It is a public sector organisation but operates autonomously and independently of the government. It is self funding and has been very successful especially in recent years. The government should set up a similar organisation to promote, publish and commercialise Australian writing. Such an organisation is going to be essential in the coming years as e-books and cheap imports start to really take their toll on local publishers and book sellers. Nationalisation isn’t very popular nowadays but is there any reason why we shouldn’t nationalise domestic book publishing. If not nationalise then maybe mutualise.

Invest in libraries
Libraries and not bookshops should be the hubs of book culture. There are many ways in which libraries could employ additional funds to promote book culture. One simple way would be to advertise in the community to let people know about their local library. Most people I know don’t even know where their local library is. Additional funds could also be used to buy more new release books. There is currently a 3 month wait to read Tim Winton’s Breath in my local library. Substantially increasing the public lending right for Australian authors is also an option and may help publishers take lending more seriously as a financial model. Literary events, prizes and competitions are also another great way for local libraries to promote book culture. Further to my digital library idea above it would be great if we could start opening mini-digital libraries in shopping malls. I hate shopping malls with a vengeance but I do occasionally find myself in them and I always lament the fact that there aren’t not-for-profit spaces where you can sit and relax and know that some capitalist isn’t going to try to gouge you.

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.

I’m a big Google fan so I am very excited to hear the news that Google is planning to launch an ebook store in early 2010.

I’m usually pretty verbose but I can’t thing of anything to say for some reason…

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”.

Yeah right, you big soppy bastard!

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.

1. Excellent Cadavers by Alexander Stille
2. The Kon Tiki expedition by Thor Heyerdahl
3. Hell West and Crooked by Tom Cole
4. Endurance by Alfred Lansing
5. Island of the Lost by Joan Druett
6. Stalingrad by Antony Beevor
7. The Great Crash by JK Galbraith
8. A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols
9. Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March by Adam Zamoyski
10. A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan

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