TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Robert Nagle’ Category

By Robert Nagle

Video of an interesting new device for reading.  Some usability problems have been reported. Hopefully will be fixed in the upcoming firmware update. The company hasn’t published the specs yet, but some features immediately jump out:

• Excellent battery life
• Doesn’t seem to include DRM
• Tech support seems high-quality
• Transfer of reading material from one person to another seems error-free

(Thanks, Anne Gentle)

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Robert Nagle

WordPress forum thread: How to produce an entire book on WordPress blog.

Speaking of interesting threads, here’s a great mobilethread on obscure novels.  Notable mentions: Codex Seraphinianus, Will Cuppy’s How to be a Hermit, and Frigyes Karinthy’s Yes Sir.

I haven’t even discussed this with David Rothman, but I am now removing link condoms from URLs in comments on my idiotprogrammer blog. Link condoms, according to seomoz  are, “any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content”. The blog companies collaborated with Google to add the “nofollow” attribute to comments in order to prevent spam comments from receiving high placement on search results. (Wikipedia now is using link condoms on external links as well).

Here’s a list of arguments by a group opposing nofollow:

1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam
2. nofollow is confusingly named
3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites
4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique
5. nofollow could be used to shut Web sites out
6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
7. nofollow heists commentators’ earned attention
8. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs
9. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web
10. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech
11. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion

Link Condoms sounded like a good idea at the time, but one unfortunate effect of link condoms is that it becomes practically impossible for self-publishing authors to be seen by search engines unless they pay for advertising. On my personal blog, I carefully monitor comments and akismet handles the rest, so I don’t have a problem with commenters mentioning URLs. Most of the people who comment on my blog are writers or artists like myself, and I have no problem with giving them a little link love. (On a bigger blog like TeleRead, this might be a little harder to implement).

Fortunately, solutions are only a wordpress plugin away.  In a nutshell, Dofollow wp plugin seems to handle the job admirably.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Here’s a nice find. Smartpop publishes fun and thoughtful essay collections about mainstream TV shows. You know, Buffy, Lost, Simpsons, Star Trek, etc. Mostly, they publish print books. Essays by psychologists, professors, etc. Fun stuff.

On their free PDF ebook download page, they’ve apparently released three collections  of their pop culture essays as free pdfs.  Plus, there’s a free download about the Making of the Trouble with Tribbles episode on the original Star Trek.  I’ve looked at PDF previews of some of their volumes and find them appetizing to the eye.

Volume  1 (PDF) features  essays about Buffy, Serenity, King Kong, Narnia and Matrix (by Ray Kurzweil!!!)  Volume 2 PDF features essays about Harry Potter, Star Wars, World of Warcraft, etc. Volume 3 features essays about House, Gray’s Anatomy and the Simpsons. Volume 1 is 200+ pages. Volume 2 and 3 are slightly shorter.

For those of you who think essays about pop culture are boring, remember that they were a source of endless fascination for certain writers. (Check out for example, Umberto Eco’s essay about the film Casablanca.) TV depictions can cause today’s youth to view traditional professions in a different light; GraceAnne DeCandido argues  that the only positive role model for librarians on TV has been Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  One pop culture phenomena I think worth investigating is increased  levels of vomiting on TV (taste alert). Perhaps I’ll write a book about that.

On a somewhat related note, I’ve been using Cybook more often and have been pleasantly surprised at the zoom capability for PDFs.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Later today TeleRead will feature a longish piece by indie author & publisher April Hamilton about the consolidation of the publishing industry and what this means for self-publishing authors.

April has written several Indie Author  guides about how to publish and promote your own novel. Most notably, she recently published (in PDF form)  IndieAuthor Guide To Publishing For The Kindle™ With Amazon’s Digital Text Platform™ And MS Word™ 2003 Or Higher (PDF). She has been selected as a featured Booksurge/Createspace  author for BookExpo 2008 and blogs about Indie Publishing.

Here’s an author interview she did with Valya Dudycz Lupescu on ABNA Books about her latest book, Snow Ball (”a dark, comic mystery, similar in tone to the Coen brothers’ movie “Fargo”) and Adelaide Einstein (which she describes as “hen-lit –comic fiction about a middle-aged woman having some kind of life-changing experience”).  PDF Samples are here.  She also did a podcast with WritingCast about her recent fiction. She sells print versions of her novels on Createspace and e-book versions (PRC, PDF, Kindle) on her own Web site. (Read Amazon.com reviews of Snow Ball and Adelaide Einstein.)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Roy Peter Clark (author of the classic Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer ) started a contest for six-word journalism mottos. My favorite: History’s first version, updated every minute.

This comes from another contest for a six-word mottos about America. The winner for that one?  Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay.

Speaking of meaningless contests, can anyone summarize the ebook world today in 6 words? My nomination: Too Many Formats, Not Enough Readers.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Steve Pavlina on the benefits of reading:

But the actual knowledge and the new distinctions you gain from reading are not the main benefit. My experience has shown me that the real benefit comes not from what you read but rather from the habit of reading. When you read a new book every week, you condition your mind to keep taking in new knowledge. Your thinking remains fresh and sharp. Your brain is always churning on new ideas, looking for new distinctions it can make. Every day you pour in more ideas, which your brain must find a way to integrate into your existing knowledge base. Frequent reading fires up your neural activity, even during the periods when you aren’t reading.

Of course, reading web pages is a kind of reading, but not as intensive as book reading. I just love reading a book before going to bed. Even if it’s for 30 minutes or so, that reading is immensely pleasurable. Last night I read a letter from Paris to Helen in Ovid’s Heroides. Paris is trying to convince Helen to leave Meneleus. Tomorrow I’ll be reading Helen’s letter in reply. I can’t wait. By the way, here’s a free online translation of Ovid’s Heroides by Tony Kline, and here’s more about Tony Kline.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Michael Blowhard gives an entertaining account on giving a book tour with his wife to promote an erotic novel. To justify the time and effort they spent turning these things into events, Blowhard faces facts:

Books are a really hard sell these days. The old culture of books is completely shot to hell. It’s gone, it’s all over, it ain’t coming back, period, paragraph, finito. Young people are able to read, of course. But book-reading plays a different role in their media-cosmos than it does in older people’s. Settling down with a book at the end of the evening? Hard to imagine why, when you might be surfing the web instead. Sinking into a lot of linearly-organized text? What’s appealing about that? Young people have so many media options, and so many of them are so twinkly and enticing, that books look drab by comparison. After all, they don’t glow, they don’t make noises, they don’t move, and you can’t click on ‘em. While oldies tend to think of books as one of the acmes of civilization and automatically accord them respect, younger people see books as the low end of the media ladder, something to play with only when the Nintendo is on the fritz.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

In a speech to Clemson University freshmen, Ann Patchett defends the university’s decision to assign her Truth and Beauty book to its freshman:

“The people who oppose the assignment of Truth & Beauty, and oppose my presence here on campus today, do not do so for themselves,” I called out into the blinding light. “After all, nobody’s making them read my book. They are opposing on your behalf. They want to protect you from me. And since you’re just starting out as freshmen, let’s take a minute to think of all the other things you’re going to need to be protected from. Now, I used all possible restraint in making this list, because the fact is I could go on for the whole four years that you have to spend in college. You don’t want to pay good money to read about immoral behavior, friends, so Anna Karenina is out. It’s about adultery, a married woman’s affair with another man, and there’s a suicide. It’s scandalous, but you know, it’s also really long. Now, The Great Gatsby is going to have to go because it has more adultery and more scandal, in addition to alcoholism and murder, so that definitely has to go. It might be harder to let go of that one though, because it’s short and you may have already read it in high school. In One Hundred Years of Solitude you’ve got incest, which is a shame, because it is a spectacular novel. My personal uncontested pick for the best novel of the 20th century is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and I want to tell you, if I start talking about Lolita I feel certain the National Guard will come and remove me from this stage. Faulkner is gone. Hemingway is gone. Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Philip Roth, our three greatest living American authors, are strictly off-limits to you. Their books contain so much sex and filthy language it’s amazing I have mentioned their names on this stage.

“Or maybe those books aren’t the problem. Those are all fiction. Maybe what’s upsetting about my book is that it’s true, it really happened. So let’s make a pact today not to read any nonfiction that could be upsetting. If stories about girls who are disfigured by cancer, humiliated by strangers, and turn to sex and drugs to escape from their enormous pain are too disgusting, too pornographic, then I have to tell you, friends, the Holocaust is off-limits. The Russian Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the war in Vietnam, the Crusades, all represent such staggering acts of human depravity and perversion that I could see the virtue of never looking at them at all.” (A video clip of the speech is at the bottom of this interview).

Well said, but the hullabaloo is hardly bad for her career (Mike Royko once wrote that he wished someone would ban his book..and cause his book sales to rise).  Requiring something for class has pitfalls. My high school literature teacher said that the best way to spoil your appreciation of a certain novel is to assign it to your class.  But banning it…that’s another story.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Normally I don’t link to things on my blog from  Teleread (I just copy it over), but a few years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay about a bad self-published novel, and over the years, the comments I have accumulated   from random web surfers have been remarkable.  Or you can simply browse the hilarious reader comments on Amazon.

Lars Eighner (Austin author of  the legendary memoir Travels with Lisbeth) on why fake memoirs are popping up:

Literature has several main lines of muddling. One of them is fiction. I will not say much about fiction because essentially fiction is fraud-proof. I will not accept complaints about fiction even if the dust jacket stuff about the supposed author is completely unrelated to events on this planet. Fiction can convey truth or can be vacuous. The problem today is that the market for general fiction is very soft. And indeed, that seems to have played a part in the frauds of the moment, for at least in a couple of cases the authors are said to have tried to present their works at first as fiction but were persuaded that it was unpublishable as such. If only we had a genre for depressing agony fiction. Evidently people will buy agony literature if they are told it is true.

…

Required reading in high school tends to be the most bloodless, which is to say lifeless, sort in order to avoid the school board’s receiving complaints from born-again parents, and this situation is going to get worse as theocracy tightens its death grip on America. Required reading in college includes stuff that is no longer quite so spry as it was when it was written and stuff that appeals to scholars whose sense of pertinence is usually at least a generation behind the times. So if someone pronounces a new novel “serious,” the crepe hangers are overjoyed. That does not make lying okay or excuse fraud, but I think it has something to do with why people try to pass off novels as memoirs.

(For more on Eighner, check out his classic  essay on Dumpster Diving and his thoughts about writing Travels with Lisbeth. For the record, now that his dog Lisbeth has passed away, he now has a new canine companion Wilma).

Speaking of literary fakes, see M.A. Orthofer’s book review  on literary fakes (or check out Jerzy Kosinski’s mp3 audio interview on the subject) .

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

A few weeks ago TeleRead asked readers to take a five-question, muti-choice reading survey using the Survey Gizmo service. 161 anonymous respondents took the survey in the first week of March 2008, and the results suggest that many favor SF, award-winning literature, thrillers and public domain classics—in fact, fiction in general.

How many books and e-books have you paid for in the last year?

• 20+ books/ebooks 40%
• 11-20 24%
• 5-10 21%
• 0-4 15%

If you have bought an e-book or digital text before, please indicate which type: (Choose one or more)

• fiction (75%)
• business or job-related topic (21%)
• technical/computer manual (19%)
• n/a; I have never bought an ebook (17%)
• something for a hobby (17%)
• something for research or school (17%)

(more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Robert Nagle

If you haven’t taken the 5 question TeleRead reading survey,  visit this link on Surveygizmo. Thanks!

Perceptive readers may notice that I listed mysteries/thrillers twice on the fiction category. (Oops!)  Lesson Learned: Always have another person proofread your survey no matter how many times you have looked over it.  (This question allows you to choose 4 categories, so be sure NOT to pick both mysteries/thriller choices).

I’ll report the results tomorrow.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Note: Robert Nagle seems keen on the lit side, but I myself think we should go hardware advertisers as well. Take the survey. But I hope you’ll also help us when we do a second one—also nice and short—on your thoughts on hardware purchases. - DR. 

We at TeleRead have a favor to ask. We’re trying to gather more information about who the readers are. Doing that will help us in figure out how to make the blog self-supporting.

Will you please take a five-question TeleRead survey? It will take only a minute to complete and will help us immensely. Also, we’ll be happy to report the results in about two weeks. You don’t have to sign up for anything or give personal information. We thank you in advance for taking the tip to help us have a better glimpse of what things you like.

To see the TeleRead reading habits survey, visit this link on Surveygizmo.

Popularity: 5% [?]