TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Robert Nagle’ Category

By Robert Nagle

Last week TeleRead editor David Rothman and I were strolling together around Old Town of Alexandria. We spent most of the time shooting the literary breeze and suddenly found ourselves in front of a chain bookstore (where a giant display of  Glen Beck awaited us). We walked through the aisles (making the usual snide remarks) and I mentioned  Daniel Stolar’s hilarious article about his unsuccessful attempt to persuade his local bookstore to carry his book. I also regaled David with stories about working at a chain bookstore in summer of  1997.  I found that job after working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Albania and being evacuated as a result of civil unrest. What follows are generous excerpts from a 1997 essay I wrote about that summer of working at a bookstore chain. By the way, if you like reading “insider accounts” of working at bookstores, be sure to check out Rick Klaw’s great Geeks with Books columns at SFSite.com .

In this land of abundance, value is underappreciated, underreported, underrepresented and yes, even undermined. Abundance is ultimately overwhelmed by triviality. One of my unpleasant jobs at my summer bookstore job was scanning each and every new book on the shelf with a computerized inventory gun. If the gun made a chirping noise, I would need to remainder (i.e. destroy) the book because it didn’t sell fast enough or didn’t justify the shelf space needed to stock extra copies of “More Chicken Soup for Idiots” or autobiographies “written” by half-literate basketball players.

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By Robert Nagle

Literary blogger M.A. Orthofer successfully predicted this year’s Nobel prize winner after noticing the web domain mail.Svenskaakademien.se in his referrer logs.

M.A. Orthofer’s Literary Saloon/Complete Review publishes lots of reviews of novels in translation. Therefore, it is not surprising that even the Nobel committee would end up using Complete Reviews as a reference. 

Here is the Herta Müller page at the complete review.  He summarizes the Romanian’ author’s appeal:

Pros:

• Lyric/poetic sense of language, in both poety and prose
• Brutally honest look at life in communist Romania

     Cons:

• Stories often hard to follow
• Tries to convey more through language than action
• The honest depictions can be depressing in their relentlessness

I expect in the future the Swedish Nobel committee will be more careful about their web surfing habits. That said, it is a sign of the importance that literary bloggers play in calling reader’s attention to new and overlooked texts.

To see wikipedia work its magic, check Müller’s page before the Nobel announcement and after the announcement. For the record, I just bought 3 books by Müller for 75 cents from Better World Books.

By Robert Nagle

Several literary communities have started with varying results. Here’s another addition to the mix.

Fictionaut (according to the announcement on the blog) is a burgeoning hub for a growing number of diverse literary scenes. I was a member when it was in private beta and have watched the community from afar. It has attracted a variety of contributions from new and established writers. Key features:

• a Save as PDF feature
• social networking features (contacts, bookmark, groups)
• a way to browse through members/contributors plus author profile pages
• a rich text editor, tags, and the option to choose creative commons licenses
• to see what a sample story page looks like, go to my attempt at fiction. 
• opportunity to make comments
• the ability to make a story as private (for members of private groups only to see it)
• an active blog that links to notable stories (plus publications of Fictionaut authors elsewhere). (This blog is well-written and gives links both inside and outside the Fictionaut community).
• a DIGG-like point system for recommending stories

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By David Rothman

When the TeleBlog upgraded to the latest WordPress, most people barely noticed—despite an “excuse our mess” notice from Robert Nagle.

Behind the scenes, however, Robert devoted many hours to the task from his place in Houston. He’s here in Alexandria, Virginia (second photo), now, part of his D.C.-area visit with friends, and we plan to walk along the Potomac and exchange some book chat—he’s a gifted writer as well as a tech guy, with an MFA from the prestigious program at Johns Hopkins.

Along with another volunteer, Brett Fielo, who supplies hosting services, Robert is truly our hero on internal technical matters. You might think of him if you’re looking for an experienced tech writer, assuming he isn’t already booked up. I know about Robert firsthand. Hey, how many blog owners will be getting cPanel documentation from a Hopkins MFA? And of course, don’t forget Brett as a possibility for Web services.

Meanwhile you can check out some quick thought from Robert on ePub, PDF and related matters. Among his tips for writers and publishers: Find out about “eScape, an OpenOffice template you can use to make .epub files.” What’s more, Robert notes, “Aspose Word for MS Word lets you save MS Word files as .epub.” Also think about plug-ins for DITA and DocBook (experimental). Your thoughts on these possibilities?

By Robert Nagle

Amazon.com is requiring Librarything to remove links to other booksellers on its book page On the bright side, it looks like LibraryThing is upgrading its interface and offering more features.  As a practical matter, I almost never did book hunting via librarything’s book page, especially because it didn’t list books on half.com (which usually had the cheapest prices).

Mike Cane notices that Google search results is now opening up PDFs directly  in Google Docs.

Aspose Word for MS Word lets you save MS Word files as .epub.  It’s a free plugin, and a cursory test seems to work with images. However, you still need to format MS Word docs very carefully.

Speaking of word processor plugins, here’s eScape, an  OpenOffice template you can use to make .epub files. Basically, the OO template loads a batch of designated styles, and a free downloadable Windows utility for handling the conversions.  They have a nice tutorial and a Style Reference Sheet (PDF). Again, this doesn’t eliminate the complexity of the task; you just have to understand the styles on the OO template which they provide. By the way, I noticed that they have a special style for verse. Nice!  The eScape interface lets you manually specify a different CSS file, so that gives you some control over layout. (The Infogrid Pacific people include two css files specifically for ebooks). (more…)

By Robert Nagle

Editor’s note: Continued thanks to Robert Nagle, who’s devoted a good part of his holiday weekend to the upgrade.  - D.R.

After a little bit of necessary downtime and upgrading, TeleRead is back up.

Some housekeeping still needs to be done, but this may take a while. In the meantime, it is 3:00 AM, and I think I will finally go to bed…..

By Robert Nagle

Nicholson Baker is one of my fave authors. The Mezzanine is one of my all time favorite works (along with U & I). He’s also written a lot of articles about the lore of libraries and card catalogs. He’s a professed Luddite – nothing wrong with that. In the current New Yorker issue, he points out the alleged flaws of the Kindle and Sony.

But I get tired of the same old  irrelevant criticisms that have nothing to do with ebooks and ebook readers.  To wit:

• “No Amazon Kindle version of …. (name fave work). Who cares!
• Inferior presentation of tables/charts/graphics…..Agreed, but that’s a technical problem. It’s because publishers were too lazy  and cheap to rethink print books for their ebook editions.
• Screen has a grayish tint. So what!?

Here are the obvious points about ebooks which are totally missed by Nicholson Baker:

• I (and most owners of ebook readers ) still read  a majority of  books in printed form  (especially because  many used books cost trivial amounts of money).  The reason why “Flaubert’s Parrot” is not available for Kindle is that a print version is still available for 75 cents + shipping.  5-10 years from now when used copies are more scarce (and more expensive),  I’m  100%  sure that an ebook version of Flaubert’s Parrot  will be for sale (priced slightly – or significantly –  lower  than the used print version).
• Kindle (or Sony, etc) provides a method for you to download public domain titles which were unavailable or extremely hard to locate. I’ve become acquainted with more new authors from the 18th or 19th century because of my ebook reader than as a result of a  4 year college education.  All kinds of minor works by well-known authors are  ebooks as a result of PG’s scanning.
• Indie authors can publish as ebooks and bypass the middleman. It doesn’t matter if their ebook isn’t listed on Amazon.com as long  as it’s listed on smashwords or available through paypal/payloadz. Many new works are never being published as print books at all.
• Free utilities and websites let you convert publicly available journals to a format readable on the ebook. Calibre in particular does lots of magical things; it lets you fetch articles from many well-known journals to read as ebooks).

To summarize: an ebook reader is necessary not to read titles you would have read anyway, but to read titles unavailable by any other means.

A more interesting question is how the e-ink reading experience compares to reading a laptop screen.  That’s a debatable question, but in my opinion, the ebook reader still wins.

See also: David Rothman’s piece responding to Baker’s readability criticisms.

By Robert Nagle

Pay no attention to the fascinating hullabaloo involving the false arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. It’s unimportant.

Henry Louis Gates deserves credit for discovering by accident the first African-American novel ever published in 1859. Here’s a  fascinating mp3 Gates had in 1983 with literary interviewer Don Swaim about Our Nig . The mp3 interview (recorded early in Gates’ career)  goes into detail about how Harriet Wilson’s publisher  publicized the “sad plight” of Harriet Wilson as a way to sell more books.  Some things never change! 

I’m happy to report that Our Nig is available on Project Gutenberg.  (It’s one of those early PG scans, and I think the hyphenation and formatting is not ideal, but it’s still readable and downloadable as EPUB.

The Gates interview was one of my favorites from the several hundred  Wired for Books interview mp3s I heard over the past two years.

See also: a minor academic controversy about whether Our Nig was really first.

By Robert Nagle

Quick: when you are a teenager, how fantastically awesome was your writing?

Imogene Russell Williams cautions young writers who wish to get started too early:

In your early teens, you’re not necessarily aware of how derivative your literary outpourings are, and the extent to which your reading shapes your writing; and you may not yet be sufficiently master of your own voice to take on high-falutin’ genres like fantasy and romance. (I speak from experience. At 13, I was passionately devoted to a high-fantasy epic featuring Dallien the dark prince, a charger called Bayard whom I’d pinched from Prince Caspian without realising it, and a large, coniferous forest – Mirkwood after the emigration of the spiders.)

(BTW, despite the boring name, the Guardian’s Book Blog  is easily one of the best group litblogs on the Internet).

Williams mentions several recent teen works and even a work written by a 9 year old. She cites Diary of Anne Frank as the model, although that case was clearly extraordinary . (See also: Zlata Filipovic’s  excellent Zlata’s Diary).

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By Robert Nagle

James Wolcott on cultural signaling and the Kindle:

In New York City (can’t speak for the other metro systems across this great land), every subway car is a rolling library, every ride an opportunity to spy on the reading tastes of fellow passengers and make snap judgments that probably wouldn’t hold up in court. Single women in their 30s and 40s gripping a teenage-vampire tale or a Harry Potter—they seem to be hanging out a surrender flag. Those parading the latest Oprah selection might as well honk like geese. Then there are those who defy stereotype. A tall, straw-thin model glides into seated position and extracts a copy of concentration-camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning from her bag, instantly making an onlooker (me) feel rebuked for assuming she was vacuous and self-centered based on her baby-ostrich stare. In the same car is another, older woman—do men not read anymore? (Seinfeld’s Jerry, defensively: “I read.” Elaine: “Books, Jerry”)—holding up a Kindle at an angle to catch the light. Unless you were an elf camped on her shoulder, what she was reading was hoarded from view, an anonymous block of pixels on a screen, making it impossible to identify its content and to surmise the state of her inner being, erotic proclivities, and intellectual caliber. She might be reading Alice Munro, patron saint of short-story writers, or some James Patterson sack of chicken feed—how dare she disguise her download from our prying eyes! And reading an e-book on an iPhone, that’s truly unsporting. It goes the other way as well. How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

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By Robert Nagle

In the last few months I have been reading about human-accelerated warming and how to understand the impact of our purchasing decisions.

I stumbled upon ClimateCounts, an environmental scorecard site. This site  tracks a company’s commitment to reducing their carbon footprint.

In the computer/electronics category, the highest rated companies were IBM and Canon; the lowest rated company was Apple. Among Internet companies, Google was ranked the highest while Amazon.com and Ebay were ranked the lowest. (Read more about Google’s effort to remain carbon neutral).  The company profile pages give a few sentences to explain the score.  Note: To see the complete report about the company, you need to download the scorecard  PDF (on the right side of the company’s profile). This scorecard goes into greater detail  about how Climate Counts arrived at the number for the score. 

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By Robert Nagle

(Filed in the I-didn’t-find-out-about-this-major-ruling-until-2-months-later department)

In April 2009 Nate Anderson reports on the finding:

Part of Berne requires countries to honor copyright on foreign works, so long as those works remain protected in their country of origin. Before URAA was passed, foreign works still received copyright protection in the US, but only on US terms. This meant that works began to leave copyright and enter the public domain in the US even though some were still granted copyright protection in their home countries. After signing URAA, these works reverted into copyright in the US.

Lawrence Lessig and a team from Stanford have been arguing for years in Golan v. Gonzales (now Golan v. Holder) that Congress overstepped its authority when it did this. A federal court disagreed and issued a summary judgment against Golan, a music teacher who had been freely using Prokofiev sheet music before it reverted back into copyright. But the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said back in 2007 that the case should be reconsidered on First Amendment grounds. Last week, the federal judge who oversaw the trial changed his ruling and agreed that URAA violated the First Amendment.

How? In another famous copyright case also argued by Lessig (Eldred v. Ashcroft), the Supreme Court had found that Congressional copyright action could be overturned if it "altered the traditional contours of copyright protection." Lessig seized on this phrase, arguing that putting public domain works back under copyright was unprecedented in US law.

In other words, this affects  the Rule of the Shorter Term provision (which I wrote about several years ago). Rule of the shorter term requires countries to honor the public domain status of a work if it is already in the public domain in its country of origin.   Basically the  US government  said it didn’t need to obey the Rule of the Shorter Term provision in URAA, and the federal judge concluded that not obeying  the Rule of the Shorter Term did alter the traditional contour of copyright protection (and that was bad).

The case will likely be appealed (perhaps up to the Supreme Court again).

Here’s why this case matters to me as an ebook producer.  American laws on public domain images are totally bonkers. Lots of photographs of paintings might belong in the public domain in the US, but it’s practically impossible to determine.   However, it’s comparatively easy to verify that a  painting is in the public domain in a Berne Convention country (all you have to do is to know the death date of the creator). Golen vs. Holder lets me determine if the work was in the public domain in the country of origin. Then, I can use Bridgeman vs. Corel (an American ruling) to claim the right to use reproductions of public domain paintings  in my ebooks.  (IANAL, just a crazy writing fool).  This legal reasoning is still untested (and thus murky). But there is reason for optimism.

By Robert Nagle

Gwen Dawson refers me to a Deborah Yao story about how the FTC plans to issue guidelines about blogs that review consumer products and services:

Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight.

The article sounds  unduly alarmist (and in fact my personal experience is that individual bloggers are ethical people).  The fact that it is so easy to game google makes it easy for SEO-savvy sites to fool people seeking  information. The problem comes with sites that have commercial interests  but which an  unsuspecting user thinks is a legitimate news source.  Many  legitimate blogs   wish  to share information (technical specs, photos, press releases  etc), even though they are being used by the company that produced it (and  yes, these bloggers are aware they are being used).   I am always amused to see the onslaught of lavish and uncritical coverage of the latest Apple device during  the first few days after release; obviously at that point very few bloggers have actually held the device to have an intelligent opinion,  but it’s relatively easy for a lazy blogger to  repost stuff from other sources. (I consider Gawker Media the worst offenders of this practice and thankfully meta sites like Techmeme make it easier to identify which blog posts are meaningful and which are just fluff).

Another issue  is the ethics of book reviewing. (See my Literary Disclaimers 101).  With ebooks,   book reviewers can receive review copies at no cost  without feeling subtle  pressures to write a positive review.  We are not there yet; reviewers still prefer print books, but once online critics become  more comfortable with digital copies,  publishers won’t have to pay to print and mail  uncorrected proofs; reviewers won’t have unread books stacking up in the living room, and smaller publishers won’t be handicapped by their inability to send out review copies.

Hypothetical Ethical question:  You are a  book reviewer for a well-known blog.  Amazon offers to send you a free Kindle loaded with  300 bestsellers (by certain publishers who paid Amazon for the privilege). According to Amazon’s offer, you could keep  Kindle on the condition that you  publish a minimum of 1 review a month  (positive or negative) on their blog for the next 12 months.  Should you accept this offer?

By Robert Nagle

Looks like a CH gadget reviewer has completed an early review of the unreleased Kindle 3. 

By Robert Nagle

Breaking News: Recent reports show that authors write reviews and articles for free—all as part of a secret scheme to  promote their own  books.

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By Robert Nagle

The Millions recently published a three part series about Amazon’s market dominance. (Part 1 examines the decline of book review sections. Part 2 examines why many indie bloggers use Amazon’s affiliate program. Part 3 examines the effect of the Kindle on the marketplace.)  Read ahead for juicy quotes and my reactions.

In Part 1, Garth Risk Hallberg  mentions the declining pay rates of book reviews:

Even more consequentially, in an era of rising unemployment, the economics of reviewing have shifted radically. For years, a good, professional newspaper book review was worth about $400, or 50 cents a word. Now, even as the number of column-inches available in print diminishes, online venues are starting to meet or exceed that threshold. Rumor has it that The Barnes & Noble Review pays nine times as much as a reputable newspaper for which one of our contributors has reviewed.

In Part 2, C. Max Magee talks about how many the  Amazon affiliate program allows many small and independent sites to earn some money, thus creating an interdependence between online sites and Amazon:

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By Robert Nagle

Here’s Robert Lanham’s Internet-Age Writing Syllabus:

Students will analyze the publishing industry and learn how to be more innovative than the bards of yesteryear. They’ll be asked to consider, for instance, Thomas Pynchon. How much more successful would Gravity’s Rainbow have been if it were two paragraphs long and posted on a blog beneath a picture of scantily clad coeds? And why not add a Google search box? Or what if Susan Sontag had friended 10 million people on Facebook and then published a shorter version of The Volcano Lover as a status update: "Susan thinks a volcano is a great metaphor for primal passion. Also, streak of my hair turning white—d’oh!"

(By the way, I visited the McSweeney’s booth at SXSW last year. Apparently I had assumed that McSweeney’s was a net-only publisher. In fact, not only do they produce lots of print books, the books I saw  were some of the most beautiful and exquisitely designed books I had ever come across. I wanted to hold every one of them and buy the whole lot.  Unfortunately you can’t really appreciate the books as objects by looking at an online store).

Here’s a comic video about ebook business models . Produced by Mediocre Films.

More seriously, I just noticed that Blip.tv has the TOC 2009 panel videos.  See for example the video of  Rise of ebook panel, featuring David Rothman, Mark Coker, April Hamilton, Joe Wikert. These should be familiar names to people who follow this blog. Thanks to O’Reilly for posting these vids.