TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Interview’ Category

By Robert Nagle

This is part 5 of a 5 part interview with  84 year old Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 ,Part 2 , Part 3, Part4. Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction),  Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting and On Choosing the Right Name for a story character by Jack Matthews. 

The mobile phone is emerging as an important way for people to read; indeed, in Asian countries, authors are already writing specifically for phone owners. The challenge is writing in smaller chunks — so the reader is not required to read for extended periods on a smaller screen and can easily resume where he/she left off. For poetry, this isn’t a problem, but what about fiction? Does limiting chapter length to (for example) 400 or 500 words reduce the dramatic or literary potential for the story writer?

 I don’t know — I like the rhetorical short jab (Obama mastered it by dropping his voice to briefly pause after every 5 to 15 words, suggesting conclusiveness, authority & mastery of the material, & this unfortunately got him elected). As for the technical modifications: I’m at a loss. I like to tell people that I’m still getting used to electric lights. A touch of hyperbole there, but I also collect antiquarian books.

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By Robert Nagle

This is part 4 of a 5 part interview with  84 year old Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 ,Part 2 , Part 3, Part 5. Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction),  Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting and On Choosing the Right Name for a story character by Jack Matthews.

I just finished HANGER STOUT, AWAKE  (which you published in 1967, to some acclaim). This simple naive voice plus the subject matter (cars, girls, and an unusual contest) makes me wonder if the ideal reader should be an 8th grade boy. Did you write this with the intention of attracting a younger audience?

In a way, an 8th grader could respond to it. Years ago I bought the plates from Harcourt and paid to have 3000 copies printed, which I sold out easily. Most of them sold to colleges and high schools, and I remember doing a phone interview with students at a high school in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In another sense, however, I think someone like Hanger (i.e., any young person) would be far less privileged in understanding the novel. The distance of age is required to understand much of his innocence and brave integrity (cf. McLuhan’s "I don’t know who discovered the ocean, but I know it wasn’t a fish.’) It’s all a matter of perspective.

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By Robert Nagle

This is part 3 of a 5 part interview with  84 year old Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 ,Part 2, Part 4, Part 5. Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction),  Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting and On Choosing the Right Name for a story character by Jack Matthews.

What do you do or where do you go to get away from writing and literature?

 I collect old and rare books. When I was younger, I jogged, but quit after a bone spur in my heel talked me into it. And I’ve always loved to drive — years ago, I calculated that at that time I had actually driven over a million miles in cars.

 One of your bios mention that you and your wife used to store your book collection in an old saloon, "bought for that purpose and located in a small southeastern Ohio mining town." What’s the story behind that? Do you still own the saloon?

We’ve just, in the past month, sold the old place on a land contract. Before that, I sold the books in the store (about 10 to 15 thousand at each sale) to Mike Riordan, a  friend from Hell, Michigan (yep, that’s where he was from). He’s  the retired captain of a nuclear sub who’s now crazy about the book game; the last I heard, he had accumulated over 300,000 of them. (He and his wife  Janet  have moved to Colorado.)

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By Robert Nagle

(Here is a brief excerpt from  WORKER’s WRITEBOOK, an unpublished notebook  about writing fiction  which Jack Matthews prepared for  his  Ohio U. creative writing students in 1994.   See also the interview with Jack Matthews ( Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 & Part 5.)  and Jack Matthews (an introduction) and Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting ).

Creativity finds its natural expression in the generation and testing of hypotheses. Actually, it has more to do with the generation than the testing, but we’ll leave the testing part in, for-like the Background to the Opening Scene phases in a story, it cannot be easily distinguished from the generation. Even as we spin an idea, a cadre of analysts in the mind’s bureaucracy are busily probing it and assessing it for its worth.

The words “What if” signal the release of a question or hypothesis, and with it, the imagination. “What if a man awakens one morning to find that his wife has left him?” Is this a good idea?  Well, possibly. It’s hard to tell. Why is it hard to tell? Because it’s too vague. Already, dullness has crept in. Rather, nothing has crept in, and nothing has yet come alive. Why not? Because the idea remains too abstract, too featureless.

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By Robert Nagle

See also: Jack Matthews: An Introduction, and Interview with Jack Matthews (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 & Part 5). Also On Choosing the right name for a literary character by Jack Matthews.

Many authors rail against  the inanities and injustices  of the literary marketplace; Jack Matthews plays it like  a  game. And if you’re playing, it’s a lot more fun to play as a book collector than as an author. The book collecting sport is part treasure hunt (Matthews calculated  that over his lifetime he had driven more than    a million miles in search of books) and part casino. Which books are likely to appreciate in value and which ones are likely to plummet? These are fundamentally economic and recreational questions, not literary ones. Jack Matthews is a cheerful capitalist (delightfully bargaining people down and unapologetic about showing up at estate sales to buy rare books from clueless relatives of the deceased). Although Matthews is primary a fiction writer,  his 1977  best selling book Collecting Rare Books for Pleasure and Profit is a practical guide for how to turn an expensive hobby into an occasionally lucrative pastime.

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By Robert Nagle

This is part 4 of a 5 part interview with  84 year old Ohio author Jack Matthews. See also: Part 1 , Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Also: Jack Matthews (an introduction),  Jack Matthews: The Art and Sport of Book Collecting and On Choosing the Right Name for a story character by Jack Matthews.

Can you talk about authors who have influenced you during various stages of your life? What was the first literary work that really made an impression on you?

I remember having Joseph Conrad’s late novel, THE ROVER, assigned in a high school English class, but reading it anyway, & while reading it, pausing on a page to contemplate how wonderful it must be to create such realities. (When I mentioned that in a biographical essay, my editor got back to me about the word "anyway" saying that sounded like I wouldn’t normally have read it. I told her that was correct — for I was a relaxed under-achiever as a student). Earlier influences? No particular author, with perhaps the exception of Kenneth Roberts, whose historical novels I greatly enjoyed when I was a pup.  Later, however, I was greatly moved/influenced by reading the novels of Balzac. Then, of course, Mark Twain (I have a pretty good Twain collection of 1st editions, ephemera, etc.). Still more recently, I’ve loved the Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novels (I’ve included "A Sheep In Wolfe’s Clothing" in one of my books on bibliophily; and of the 20 or 25 books I’ve re-read, a half dozen are Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries). Most recently, I’ve gotten to collecting the 1st editions of Christopher Morley — a wonderful writer , woefully neglected by English Departments. I published an essay on his writing in the ANTIOCH REVIEW a year or so back, and just recently got a letter from a "kinsprit" (CM’s neologism) in the Czech Republic, sharing his own enthusiasm for CM (he’s not a native of the Czech Republic, but an American living there). Another recent book I’ve liked & admired: William Gaddis’s novel A FROLIC OF HIS OWN, a wonderful legal satire. And just now, I’m reading my 2nd Lee Child suspense novel — great fun for the 12-year-old that lives on in every man, if he’s not impoverished in pizzazz.

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By Robert Nagle

See also: Jack Matthews Interview ( Part One, Part Two, Part 3, Part 4 & Part 5). See also:   Jack Matthews and the Art and Sport of Book Collecting. Also, On Choosing the right name for a literary character by Jack Matthews.

My introduction to short story writer Jack Matthews could not be more accidental. Between 2007 and 2008, I had been downloading and listening to a series of author interviews conducted by Don Swaim during the 1970s and 80s. Don Swaim did a series of 3 minute interviews with CBS Radio Services called Book Beat, presumably when authors showed up in NYC for a book tour.  Swaim shot the breeze with authors for an hour, talking about random things, and later found enough material for the three minute segment that actually aired.  But he saved the audio from the full interviews, digitalized them and put them online.

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By Chris Meadows

When I was writing my series about “Paleo E-Books”, one of the sites I mentioned was Shifti.org, the wiki successor to the defunct Transfomation Stories Archive. In the course of writing about it, I came to read some of the stories there—and found I enjoyed them enough to contribute a few myself.

While independent e-publishing sites such as Smashwords or unfiltered document hosts such as Scribd are what generally come to mind when you think of independent e-publishing, smaller themed fiction sites such as Shifti represent another way—one which does not tend to get as much media coverage.

As you might guess, Shifti.org hosts mainly stories that involve some form of transformation taking place.  It lists 722 pages in the “Story” category at the time of this writing.

Some of these stories center around transformation as fetish (as Hazelton says below, “Rule 34” applies), but most of them simply use it as a metaphor for exploring what it is like to be different. (Or, for that matter, exploring what it would be like to be turned into a furry animal.)

I interviewed Shifti’s technical administrator, Daniel “ShadowWolf” Hazelton, through Google Wave about how the site works, the stories that are hosted there, and whether sites such as Shifti might represent the future of fiction on the Internet.

Here is what he had to say.

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By a TeleBlog Contributor

Smashwords has worked out an affiliate relationship with Wordclay, a print on demand company, to encourage writers to appear on paper as well as in ePub and other electronic formats. Mark Coker briefly discussed this during an audio interview with TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba during Tools of Change. "Authors should publish in print," Mark said—since e-book revenues are just a fraction of those from paper books.

Electronically, Smashwords books are available not only directly but also through new arrangements under which you can download them within the Stanza program for the iPhone.

In the interview with Paul, Mark touched on many topics ranging from the company’s origins to the number of people who’ve joined the Smashwords site: over 1,100, mostly writers—with almost 250 having actually published. "People are downloading the books…People are starting to sell books, not a lot—we’re still in the very early stages of the site…We’re getting fan mail from authors everyday for getting their books out to be read."

Mark on DRM:  "The author are generally positive about.. ‘DRM free.’ In the last nine months I’ve probably only fielded two or three questions from authors" asking how to "protect" their books. "When I tell them about the downside of DRM, they all say, ‘Thank you, that’s fine.’..We’re very much against DRM at Smashwords. We think that if you’re imposing DRM on your customers, you’re treating them like criminals and not giving them the ability to enjoy the book the way they want to enjoy the book."

Related: MP3 of interview with Mark.

By David Rothman

What will it take to get e-books off the ground for typical readers? Is the Amazon Kindle launch enough?

Not really, if you go by a new report from MarketIntellNow, a TeleBlog advertiser not associated with any hardware or software vendor. The for-sale report, based on a poll of 5,000 Web users, analyzes people’s book buying habits and amenability to reading devices like the Kindle, Cybook, iLiad or Sony Reader. See Inside the heads of prospective e-book buyers: A Q & A with Marie Campbell of MarketIntellNow for more details on the report.

Right now, as hinted by this photo of a p-book fan—E, too?—laptops are far more popular than special e-reader gadgets. Will that still be true in the future?

Interestingly, too, the survey suggests that dedicated e-book readers had better look good, a factor in the Kindle debate. Thirty-eight percent of respondents said an uncool design would stop them from buying an e-book reader.

Lower prices: More important than readability and convenience

Potential cost-savings are a more persuasive reason to buy e-books than readability or the convenience factor of e-books, the report also says. Consistent with that, it predicts that a “significant” number of e-books will be “ad-subsidized on some level”—a finding that should please Adobe’s Bill McCoy, who talked of such possibilities in the Newsweek article that Steve Levy wrote on the Kindle.

Let’s just hope that the advertising will be restrained, as I urged in a Publishers Weekly post (inspired by speculation that the Wall Street Journal will go free on the Web).

In the e-book area, Analyst Marie Campbell at MarketIntellNow presents a scenario of static content with advertising generated dynamically at the time of reading.

The laptop surprise

Now back to the issue of reading devices. Like many serious readers of e-books, Robert Nagle and I favor PDAs and small devices designed for reading. But surprisingly, the report found that consumers are generally comfortable with using laptop-based readers to read e-books, just the market that Wowio is aiming for with its PDF format. Could this also be good news for Asus, assuming that its econo-laptops are powerful enough to do PDF justice? And now about the OLPC laptop, which offers higher screen resolution than Asus and which you can even fold up into an e-book-friendly tablet?

The lack of a portable dedicated reading device just for e-books—which has often been blamed for poor e-book sales, will not be a significant factor deterring people from buying e-books—says the report. On the other hand, the price of individual e-books will be a deterrent.

Good news for Adobe PDF—in the popularity of laptops

People’s preference for laptop/tablet solutions over dedicated readers has many implications for me. If you extrapolate from the report, Adobe Reader PDFs may predominate. Also, consumers will have more control over e-book reading software rather than relying on the hardware manufacturer to make those decisions. There is also the possibility that multimedia platforms like Flash and MS Silverlight will turn into e-book reading platforms as well.

Of course keep in mind that the report reflects present consumer tastes; people sometimes don’t know what they want until it exists. The IDPF’s .epub format could change the rules, with its ability to be displayed on laptops and PDAs alike—thereby satisfying consumers’ hopes that one file can work on all their devices. Ideally the same format will show up on dedicated devices, as, in fact, is the plan of Sony and ETI. And Amazon, too, in time? As supporters of e-book standards, we certainly hope so. For more information about the Amazon Kindle in an .epub context, see Amazon-sized egos? Kindle reader to shun IDPF e-book standards? And, yes, the ugly box is the FINAL design (my post in PW). Also of interest for those curious about the Kindle might be TeleRead’s discussion of the Newsweek article.

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