TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Branko Collin’ Category

By Branko Collin

“The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all,” the Onion reported last week.

Excerpt: “The publishing industry itself, which many believed to be most vulnerable, has nonetheless managed to weather the crisis. Publishers have reissued new editions of early, pre-union novelists—such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen, both of whom have previously established successful track records—and have seen no no change in monthly sales.”

(Via Scalzi’s Whateverettes.)

Moderator’s note: A real hoot. Highly recommended. - D.R.

By Branko Collin

Today marks the start of the Boekenweek, the Dutch week to promote books. This year’s motto is “Of old people…,” named after Louis Couperus’ classic 1906 psychological novel Of Old People and the Things That Pass… The theme focuses on old age, both in people and books, and has already been criticised by those who feel that youngsters should be encouraged to read books, not discouraged.

More interesting for the TeleReaders may be that Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’ classic translation of Couperus’ masterpiece has recently become available in many formats at the Internet Archive. If anyone would like a version that is more accessible (plain text, HTML, PDF), let me know and I’ll try and post one at my other blog. The Dutch version is available from DBNL.org.

Of Old People follows a couple of murderers in their old age, and their children and grand children, and shows how one gruesome act committed many years ago is felt in the family today.

(Picture: Louis Couperus. This entry also published at 24 Oranges.)

By David Rothman

Oh how I’d hate it if TeleRead weren’t a global e-book blog. Where would we be without posts from Branko Collin in Amsterdam or others such as Carol Jurd in Adelaide or Ficbot in Toronto—or, now, Richard Herley, the prize-winning novelist whose essays reach us from a village in the Hampshire Downs in the U.K., an area shown in the photo?

But no course requirements, no academic details, bedevil us. What about institutions? How can degrees be more similar in a number of places—not just Europe or the United States but also cash-strapped developing countries? And can open source software and the right library resources, including, yes, well-stocked national digital library systems, help? Not to mention OLPC-style computers and variants that can display e-books well.

The World in Your Library conference

Such topics will come up Friday at an all-day conference called The World in Your Library: International Users and International Librarians: Enriching the Academic Experience, and I’ll be among the speakers along with another name familiar to TeleBlog regulars, Wayan Vota of OLPC News. If you’ll be attending and want to say hello, just shoot me an e-mail. Wayan and I will be part of a 3-4:30 p.m. program and demo XOs afterwards, although we’ll be there all day. Beyond the librarians, I’m also looking forward to meeting Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation. The event is part of the LACUNY Institute series from the Library Association of the City University of New York.

Where the TeleBlog is weak: We need more contributors from developing countries, such as David Ajao, who wrote about e-books on mobile phones in Africa. E-mail me if you’re working to popularize e-books there and want to write about successes—or challenges.

By Branko Collin

Author and e-book expert Cory Doctorow published an article in Locus Magazine today in which he explores the economic realities of producing dedicated e-book readers. If Nintendo, he muses, cannot even cajole Chinese manufacturers into ramping up production for their incredibly popular Wii game computer, what chance does Amazon have of getting enough Kindles out the door?

Frankly, book reading just isn’t important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one’s making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren’t being made in such quantity that they’re being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.

[...]

I’m skeptical about selling ebooks as a business model (see my earlier column "You DO like reading off a screen" for more about this), but if I had to bet on a future for e-books, I would take long odds against a hardware reader catching on in any meaningful way.

Moderator’s note: Also see Cellphones vs. dedicated readers: Why Cory’s PARTLY right, my just-made TeleBlog post. - D.R.

By Branko Collin

Last Saturday Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was read by her UK publisher Nicholas Pearson at the award ceremony in Stockholm. Lessing, 88, could not attend the ceremony because of a bad back, according to the BBC. Her acceptance speech wanders from issue to issue without ever really taking a position, which has not hindered some of the main stream media in interpreting her words as “Internet makes people stoopid,” which is a lovely self-referential twist. You have to admire an author who can cause such an effect with a mere speech.

In the speech, Lessing looks for a short while at the changes the “revolution” of the Internet has wrought.

[...] I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. “You know how it is,” one of the teachers says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”

[...]

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing [...].

But the bulk of her speech is about the importance of stories and story telling to human beings. She particularly sees hope that the cultures of underdeveloped countries are still about knowledge rather than discourse (my choice of words). I fear the OLPC project’s disruptive technology may change the outcomes of her hopes in ways that few can foresee.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is—we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

The entire speech can be found here in four languages, and as a video recording of the reading.

See also: Robert Nagle’s introduction to Lessing.

By David Rothman

Along with Boing Boing, Wonkette and other well-known blogs, we’ve made Blogging Heroes—Michael Banks’ book, which Wiley will publish later this year. Mike likes our fight for e-book standards and against Draconian DRM, in addition to our library-related efforts.

You can read Mike’s TeleBlog chapter—which Wiley sent with permission to reproduce it—in either HTML or PDF. Order the book here.

Because of the nature of Blogging Heroes, Mike focused on me. So once again, I’ll remind you of the contributions of others, especially Robert Nagle, Branko Collins, Jon Noring and Garson O’Toole, not to mention Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti and newcomers such as Paul Biba.

Update: Robert and I will be accepting sponsors and advertisers to keep the blog sustainable without charging readers or going through the standard hassles of the usual nonprofits. The big condition, in every case, will be that people not lean on us to water down our stands. Publishers Weekly, our newest partner, has let me write exactly what I want in E-Book Report. Stay tuned for a PW blog post later this week on “DRM as a lit and biz toxin” (just David speaking for David).

Technorati Tags: Mike Banks , Michael Banks , Blogging Heroes , TeleRead

By David Rothman

The Web site of Publishers Weekly, the powerful 135-year-old bible of book publishing, has started running news and views I adapt from the TeleBlog.

I’ll also write some PW-first items, online and offline, and will welcome suggestions from the e-book community.

PW’s home page will spotlight my E-Book Report blog at least 2-3 times a week, and I hope that TeleBlog regulars will drop by to enrich my posts with their own insights. Commenters don’t have to work in publishing or agree with me. The only musts are civility and fairness.

P-E bridges

Also known as the TeleRead Web Log, we draw tens of thousands of e-book lovers each month and are read not just in the public domain and open source communities but also at major companies such as Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Oxford University Press. Not to mention our much-appreciated participants from smaller houses such as Books for a Buck and Drollerie Press. So the PW alliance is natural one. Meanwhile thanks to Robert Nagle, Branko Collin, Garson O’Toole, Jon Noring and others whose posts—sometimes in line with mine, sometimes fervently not—have helped us reach our present level.

My own personal vision over the years has been to build bridges between E and P. Despite my years-long campaign for free e-books via well-stocked libraries, I’ve always cared about the little detail of fair compensation for writers and publishers (as well as about e-stores—to assure the widest-possible choice of books). The PW gig is a paid one.

Same TeleTude

These past few days, I’ve been busy seeding E-Book Report with posts for you to comment on. My ‘tude in PW is the same as here, especially on DRM matters.

I hope you’ll jump in while keeping in mind PW’s different, less technical audience and the need to explain tech terms. That’s A Good Thing. Let’s share our enthusiasm with e-book newsbies in publishing. Be tactful and patient with them, DRM boosters included. Ideally all sides in the debate will learn from each other.

My PW posts so far:

–Parts I and II of “Feed Ed’s e-cats? Best-sellers out of tested ’slush’?”—complete with a photo of Ed Howdershelt with “Muffin” and “Bear.” The post is pro-Ed. As a successful E writer with crossover potential, he deserves a chance in P. Later I’ll mention other candidates for Big New York Publishers, or BNYPs as they say on the eBook Community list.

–The joys of e-book ownership. I did the library-in-your-hand routine and shared a few choice words about the anti-ownership technology known as DRM. I’d welcome some positive e-book stories in your comments—and why it’s better if  you can own books for real. Would you like to be able to pass on all your e-titles to your children, for example? I’m not saying that ownership should be the only option. But if we’re going to take e-books seriously as a medium, it had better be one.

-Parts I and II of “Why you should care about E–even if e-books now disappoint us.” No miracles promised, but I give four reasons for long-term financial growth–Topic A for publishers, even though I remain just as interested as ever in the social benefits of e-books. (more…)

By David Rothman

Note that we have created a Submission Guideline for TeleRead. For future use, the link is in the upper right of the blog’s home page.