When subjected to “cradle-to-cradle ” Lifecycle Analysis eReading is not nearly as green as many naively assume it is.

There is no question that print media could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders and cell phones don’t grow on trees and their spiraling requirement for energy is unsustainable.

Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently there was little if any voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle “backstory” of digital media.

Sadly, print has come to be seen as a wasteful, inefficient and environmentally destructive medium, despite the fact that much of print media is based on comparatively benign and renewable materials. In addition, print has incredible potential to be a far more sustainable medium than it is today… and a truly digital medium as well. Despite its importance to business, government and society, print has been cast in the role of a dark old devil in decline. Digital media has been cast as the bright young savior on the rise.

In other news, Al Gore’s new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (which I am enjoying btw) is not available as an ebook. (To be fair, it has a lot of cool color  graphics). See also my July article about climate change and ebooks.

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.

During the coup and massacre in Congo, the famine in North Korea, and the battles in Afghanistan, Americans were overwhelmed with the crises of Kelly Flinn, Clinton accuser Paula Jones and the “coming out” of lesbian Ellen DeGeneris on her TV show. On the day of crucial Albanian elections, the day that would determine if Albania would devolve into chaos or recover from its throwback into anarchy, the lead story on every news program in America and probably the world as well was (I kid you not!!) the biting off of a boxer’s ear in Las Vegas. The international media, which had given generous coverage to Albanian gangsters waving Kalashnikovs in the air, now provided around-the-clock analyses and reanalyses of this lost ear, followups and commentary, medical updates and on-the-scene reporting. Albanians may remember this day as a milestone for peace and democracy, but for the rest of the world, it was simply the Day of the Lost Ear.

In capitalism, prices are a relative and even subjective term. A 2 liter bottle of Coca Cola can be bought for 79, 99, 129, 159 or 189 cents, depending on where and when you buy it. A person seems to spend half his time chasing after sales advertisements or coupons or special discounts. The Consumer Reports ideology predominates: don’t get screwed and keep hunting for the best price. With one bookstore, you can get 10% off if you buy a little card. With another store, you can get 20% off only on Sunday if you have a coupon. With another store, you can get 50% if you’re lucky enough to find the book you want, and 75% off if you shop on a special sale day. American economists laugh at the communists’ futile attempt to set prices for consumer goods. But how much better are American merchandisers at setting prices? At a department store like Foley’s, everything is on sale, ranging from 10-75% off, but the “list price” was artificially high to begin with. Prices can easily be manipulated to make it appear that the consumer is getting a great deal. A coat that costs $100 is on the expensive side, but if the original price was $400, you somehow feel that you are beating the system. Ever since the day I saw the complete works of Shakespeare (discount price =$3) on the same bookstore shelf as “More Joys of Sex,” (discount price= $12), I realized the folly of hoping that modern society will place an  appropriate value on goods. This hit me again in the Ukraine where pirated versions of American software sold for a fraction of their “list prices.” I don’t condone software piracy, but does anybody in the world consider the $200 “list price” of Microsoft Word, the most popular word processing program, to be fair and reasonable? No pricing system is more artificial than that of the airlines, where a one way trip from Houston to New York cost $800 ,$700, $600 , $500, $400 or even $250, depending on which travel agent you call, and sometimes even what time of day you call. When I booked an airline reservation to Ukraine, the travel agents recommended that I book a “phantom” return trip in October, and plead ignorance of reservation restrictions when trying to redeem my return ticket home in the spring. Why did the agent  automatically assume I would lie for a better price?

Bookmarkism

People under communism in Eastern Europe and Russia had to “pay lip service” to the state ideology, while looking out for themselves as much as possible. They lived in a world where conformity in belief was expected, where people were afraid to speak their minds openly. Thank god America was different, I thought. Earlier this year I worked at a summer job in a mall bookstore chain. The job paid barely minimum wage (lower than workers at Mcdonald’s, I later learned), but it would keep me out of trouble until my Ukraine teaching job began later that year. My parents nodded their heads disapprovingly, with my mom warning me that a lot of retail managers of malls were tyrants. No matter. I could put up with anything for two or three months.

Many people in Albania had a stereotype about Americans: they worked too hard. It’s true. Our hourly productivity is the highest in the world. And the bookstore seemed determined to wrench as much work out of me as humanly possible. No idle time was permitted. I was to be helping customers, straightening or putting new things on the shelves. Fair enough. And if ever I happened to be caught at the checkout counter waiting for customers to check out, the manager would chew me out. Also fair. And I had to accost every customer with a “Can I help you find something?” and answer the phone every time with “Thank you for calling National Bookstore Chain where you can find “Into the Storm” for 15% off, this is Robert, how may I help you?” Everything seemed  excessive, especially the phone greeting. Probably it annoyed a few customers, but I could deal with that. But something about the whole thing seemed seriously wrong. You can’t impose friendly service on potential customers, especially if it seems robotic. And if the same clerk must ask the same question, “Can I help you find something?” for every single customer, the robot in a person tends to come out.

A crisis loomed at the bookstore. According to the regional office, sales figures were down. Sales clerks were not selling enough of the discount cards offered by the chain. That was the big thing; that was their creed. It was their method of guaranteeing repeat customers. Here was the sales pitch I was required to give to every single customer:

Do you know about our “Preferred Reader” card?

Well, if you join, you get 10% off all your books. Plus you get one point for every dollar you spend, and if you get 100 points, you get a free (!) $5 gift certificate mailed to you. And on the first purchase you make with your preferred reader card, you get double the points. Would you like to join?

Here was the slight bit of deception—to join meant paying an annual fee of $10. For $10 you get a 10% discount. In other words, if you spend $100 at the bookstore, you’ll come out even. Hardly a bargain, especially since our nearby competitors offered everyday discounts without a discount card. Okay, have you figured out yet  I wasn’t too keen on the whole thing? The worst part was having to explain the convoluted rules of the program (No, magazine purchases are not included. No, you could not redeem the $5 for cash, etc.) As explained above, the program sounds easy to understand. But imagine that you are a customer waiting in line to buy a card or comic book and some fast-talking clerk is explaining something about “10 percent” “points for dollars” “double the points for the first purchase” and “$5 back.” The math was confusing, and most customers simply gave me a blank look at my explanation. Surely, the reader’s card was a good deal for some customers, especially if their first purchase was more than 30 or 40 dollars. But the details were so complicated that only an idiot would agree to it without understanding them fully. Then again there are many idiots in the world, and many of them would love to have “preferred idiot” cards, whether they needed one or not. But for every person that bought a card, 32 had to listen to the sales pitch and say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” From the standpoint of the company, that was okay, but for the customer and clerk, it was one more needless hassle.

I mentioned my reservations to an old college friend who used to work at the same bookstore chain as an assistant manager.  He cringed.  “No, you can’t knock the Preferred Reader program!” he told me. “That was the life and soul of the chain.” He went into all the reasons why the program was necessary, reasons I’m sure were justified by the market data. The store computers in every store tracked the number of discount cards every worker was selling. Apparently, the minimum quota was that 4% of all customers should buy discount cards, and I was selling them only to 2 or 3%. And besides, my average transaction was not particularly high–$16 compared to the $18 or $19 of the other workers. The national headquarters set regional goals, and the regions set district goals, and the districts set store goals, and the stores set goals for each worker. Albania was bad because it was a command economy; but what wasn’t this essentially the same thing?

The store manager had printouts of numbers about our weekly productivity and used them to evaluate our performances. How meaningful were these numbers? Did they take into account the different hours in which we worked? Were they statistically significant? Did some people figure out how to make their numbers look as good as possible? (I knew that old trick from working at Randall’s supermarket for seven years. By scanning each individual soup can, I could make my “scanning time” higher than anybody else’s and was later awarded the distinction of “superscanner” at my store).

According to these printouts, the bookstore was losing money. The earnings didn’t meet projections. And the data clearly showed that some people were not selling enough discount cards! (At this point in the employee meeting, the manager glared accusingly at us). All my coworkers listened in silence. By now we’d heard the same reproach a hundred times. Sell those discount cards!! We were used to it, but this time it really stung. We were the problem. Why could we not do better?

Several times I had tried to approach the manager about the discount card matter. After my college friend  stressed how important the discount card was to the company, I knew better than to challenge the concept itself to the manager. When I suggested that nearby competitors might have more to do with the inability to sell discount cards than our personal salesmanship, she dismissed the idea. . When I explained how difficult it was to explain the terms of the discount card, she said, “Well,Tom at Store #47 sells cards to 7% of customers, and he seems to have no problem.” (Was there another explanation here? Was #47 at a more affluent zone? Did it have less competition? These subtleties didn’t seem particularly important to her). At the employee meeting, my manager mentioned that without any prompting, her own father told her how much he loved the discount card. I don’t doubt this. But how many customers disliked the mandatory sales pitches? Of course, negative feedback from customers  never showed up on weekly computer reports.

At the employee meeting, the district manager stopped by and stressed once again the dire consequences of not selling the requisite number of discount cards. Our bookstore was the lowest performer in the city, and until the sale of discount cards reached 4%, they couldn’t begin to train us on how to sell “Reader’s Choice Visa cards.” You guessed it, the company wanted us to sell Visa credit cards to customers while we were busy selling them Reader’s Choice cards. And then she unveiled the new corporate strategy (accompanied by bargraph illustration—clearly she had spent a lot of time preparing this presentation). This strategy could be summarized in 3 words—“Sell more bookmarks!!” Somebody at corporate headquarters had figured out that if every worker sold only 3 more bookmarks every day, average transactions would rise, and this low-performing branch of the company could make a miraculous turnaround. And if we started greeting customers by mentioning the Reader’s Choice card right off the bat, we’d have time to throw in the “would you like a bookmark with that?” right before hitting the total button. (The pitch for the “Visa card” could wait until a few seconds later). We sold these bookmarks for $1.99, and undoubtedly bought them for a tenth of that. Bookmarks, cards, and “cute posters” were crowded around the register already, so each of us had to choose our “favorites” to mention to customers. This was no joking matter. Our jobs were on the line, and the Garfield, Dilbert and cute baby bookmarks would really become our salvation. As cynical as I was about all this, the strategy had its own logic which we weren’t in a position to oppose. And the rally cry, “Sell more bookmarks!!” was one we had to adopt unquestioningly or risk unemployment.

I had been under no illusion about the retail industry. It was hard, low-paying work. At least 50% of my customers were mothers buying the latest romance to feed their dreams for another week. But I expected my extensive knowledge of books to come in handy and even to benefit the company. Perhaps it did. I am not a salesman, but enthusiasm for books always came naturally to me. I don’t know the genre stuff, but I can find value in books that might easily be overlooked. A woman came wanting to buy something for her 15 year old niece who is half Indian and lives in Nebraska. I threw out to her the titles, “My Antonia” by Willa Cather and “Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich, and sure enough, she bought them. But these sort of feats don’t occur very often, and besides this did nothing to raise my numbers on the weekly scorecard. And really in the retail industry, knowledge of books wasn’t really essential. The manager and the district manager, by their own admission, had no special interest in books. As management consultant Peter Drucker once wrote about new bookstore chains, “any salesperson who wants to read anything besides the price tag is hopelessly overqualified.”

Much as I hated to admit it, the bookstore was being run well, almost too well. People overseas admired the American way of doing business, and my bookstore used all the newest tricks. Just-in-time delivery, anti-theft security alarms, special orders, worker empowerment, sales contests, fancy in-store displays, carefully controlled inventory by computerized data guns, in-store events, book-drives and a smooth-talking district manager sincerely committed to motivating employees. And although I preferred other bookstores, this one appealed to its niche market of housewives almost perfectly. Perhaps the bookstore would go out of business. Amazon.com’s online booksellers threatened to take away the lion’s share of the market, and other competitors in the city threatened to erode our market share. Our bookstore would do everything to put off that day, even if in the process it had to browbeat its employees. All the time during my three months of employment, I was struck by how little the employee’s opinion mattered and how essential it was for employees to subscribe to the corporate belief structure. Albanians had Stalinism; I had Bookmarkism. Yes, I could leave any day if I wanted (and I eventually did, though not because of the bookstore), but practically speaking, people preferred the devil they knew to the devil they didn’t. Perhaps  more sophisticated jobs involved less of a personal investment in the company’s philosophy, though I doubt it. The more the job pays, the more responsibilities you are given, the more difficult it is to say no, the more you are expected to jump as high as the boss tells you. One day in Albania, after a grueling day of lessons, I looked out the university window and saw two shepherds yawning and relaxing on the ground next to their sheep (they had probably lain there all day). I had to laugh. My dedication to work was pure folly. After my lessons, I would go home and crash in exhaustion on my apartment bed. Ahh, what price civilization!

(This excerpt comes from a longer 1997   essay Sava’s Feet by Robert Nagle).

Note:  More photos of bookmarks can be found on the Flickr Bookmark Pool.

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.

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

The best thing about this site is that it lets you create groups (public or private) on the fly and add people to your contacts. This can make it easier to follow stories and individual writers. On the minus side, aren’t you growing tired of having to add contacts/friends to every community site you end up joining? Now I need to decide: do I know Maud Newton well enough to add her to my contacts?  (all this social awkwardness and uncertainty about the implications of adding a friend makes my head spin).

For the moment, membership is by invitation only. My unofficial count is that they have 800+ members (it’s unclear to me how many are writers, although I suspect the percent is probably higher than 75%). When the site was in beta, I would be surprised if membership continues to be by invitation only for much longer, but the Fictionaut people have proceeded fairly cautiously.  Four days ago  I requested an invitation for one of my pseudonyms and have yet to receive a response.  (I have 4 invitations to give, so if anyone is desperate enough, just send me an email idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net ).

From a technical side, nothing is ground-breaking about Fictionaut. But the site incorporates many common elements of web applications into one box in a user-friendly way. Also, it fills a huge  void in the online world  by making it easier to like-minded literary types to find one another under one roof. It  is a great way to make contact with editors of other online publications.  For now, the site’s focus has been on increasing its user base of writers.  The real challenge lies in how well it reaches out to readers and how successfully it keeps readers on its site.

From a writer’s point of view, it would be useful to add a few sample stories or chapters to Fictionaut as a way to gain prominence in the community. It is primarily useful for short forms (poetry, flash fiction, short fiction). Once you become a member, you could join groups on Fictionaut which are tied to other literary sites. 

Here are the things currently on my wishlist for Fictionaut:

• the ability to create anthologies (i.e., playlists, or groups of articles) within a group.
• the ability to add images to individual stories
• a reading view which removes the sidebar of comments. Can you imagine trying to read Franz Kafka’s Trial and having to have  a sidebar  of asinine opinions on the right?  
• some acknowledgment that the stories can be repurposed into another format (like .epub), etc.  For example, I would love to see somebody create a Calibre recipe which will scrape off the highest rated stories every month.

My long term problem with Fictionaut is how to identify  well-regarded stories. Sure, the Story page lets you sort by Recommended/Most Recent/Most Read/Most Discussed/Alphabetical. That solves the browsing problem, right? Not really. On the most recommended page,  I have a listing of the most recommended stories, starting with the story with the most votes. I hear that many people are buying and recommending Glen Beck’s book; why should I care? On the other hand, I would probably be interested in the favorites of Budd Parr (another well-known blogger).

Frankly,  few readers are going to take the time to surf through the online slush pile (but more power to those who try). Each member is probably going to be familiar with a small portion of published stories on Fictionaut which are worth reading.  Even those members whose literary tastes I trust are simply going to have a list of favorites on Fictionaut. Is that enough?  The problem comes when an astute reader’s favorites list grows too long to keep track of.

The Groups function are actually more useful for this function (see an example here).  Not only do groups let you view members and post on a group section, members can recommend stories to the group itself. So what? Is that really enough?  Warning: If all members have the chance to contribute something, chances are that 90% of it will be crap.

Imagine I were to create a hypothetical group of TeleRead contributors and these people all joined and starting adding stories to a a group pool.  People at TeleRead have interesting tastes, but I seriously doubt I would enjoy many of the same things that David Rothman or Chris Meadows or Ficbot or Court Merrigan enjoys (sad, but true). This isn’t a reason to avoid groups altogether, but you just can’t assume that emerging groups will automatically filter out everything except the best.  Having a DIGG like moderation system or group pool of stories  is no substitute for sensible selection by a seasoned editor.

Fictionaut groups might  be useful for starting  memes for storytellers. Suppose fictionaut sets a theme for the week  (i.e., “the wedding cake in the middle of the road”) and asked contributors to make a story with this detail. Later, people could vote for the most interesting story using that theme.  Admittedly, this would mainly interest creators of microfiction, but it would be an effective use of social networking. 

In summary: Fictionaut is a promising literary debut. Though the site’s features are  not really ground-breaking, it is (so far) ad-free and a good way to self-publish and learn about other writers.

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?

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).

In the technical publishing worlds, did you know that DITA has a plugin to output epub and so does docbook.  The docbook xsl uses ruby to zip everything, but you can simply use the docbook XSL to output everything and zip things with your favorite zipping tool. Here is a list of the epub parameters which you can modify. Generally, the epub xsl sheet uses the Chunked HTML stylesheet and adds a few epub-specific parameters.  Here’s a guide to all the user-configurable Docbook parameters for HTML output and here’s Bob’s Staynton’s guide about how to customize your html output with docbook parameters.

Time to make your bets about the Nobel Prize for literature. Don’t laugh. M.A. Orthofer notes that last year LeClezio was listed as 2-1 odds on the days preceding the announcement.

I received an email that the Fictionaut writer community site (which had been in private beta for over a year) will be going public next week. I’ve been keeping tabs on it for a while;  it could be a major source of quality content. The fictionaut blog seems to be full of articles about new writers.  Highly recommended.

Matt Mullenweg wonders aloud about why the Kindle can’t provide statistics about a reader’s reading habits.

You may know that many of the Paris Review interviews before 1990 are available as PDFs. Here are some of my favorite interview quotes.

Someone has a listing of TED talks as a Google spreadsheet.

MLA 2009  Guide about how to cite online sources.

Onfiction, an academic blog about the psychology of reading.

Jake Seliger wonders if reading is like a gateway drug.  Alex Rose argues that the  “at least they’re reading” excuse doesn’t wash anymore:

If the argument applies to one form of entertainment, though, it should apply to all. Why is it that when kids become enraptured by some idiotic program, no one says, “well, at least they’re watching TV?”

The answer is obvious: we don’t expect much from television. Call to mind the act of channel-surfing across a virtual sea of mediocrity–the officious network anchors, the blaring car commercials, the interminable daytime talk shows. It’s no wonder HBO established its high-brow reputation by defining itself in opposition to its own medium.

But is the literary marketplace really all that different? Step into a Barnes & Noble, with its endless shelves of celebrity hagiographies, its window full of diet books by suspiciously photogenic doctors, its rack of movie novelizations, and ask yourself if publishing is a classy industry.

It may be that the reason we’re so quick to defend the Written Word, to pedestalize its power and grandiosity to the detriment of all other media, is that it’s been here the longest. We can chart its evolution from primitive iconography, to ideograms and glyphs, to alphabets and punctuation, up through epic poetry and drama and novels. It’s earned its place as civilization’s posterboy. Where were the Sopranos when Homer, Cicero and Shakespeare were shaping the Western Canon?

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…..

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.

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.

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).

Now with printing/publishing costs becoming  more affordable, lots of young kids have self-published interesting things as part of school projects. We can mock, but I would have loved to have a published book  to keep in my scrapbook  of memories. Instead I spent my creative efforts writing  original Dungeon and Dragons adventure   modules. 

One obvious source of youthful creativity is blogging/journaling, but practically speaking, U.S. schools can’t sanction them or use them for class unless blogging sites are COPA-compliant. (I’ve been told that content filters on some school networks block blogging networks altogether). I suspect school districts subscribe to  walled-off COPA-compliant  student communities for students to share their writings.  That shouldn’t discourage young people from journaling in the wild, but they have to do it on their own time. Schools and teachers can prep students for potential problems of online writing and help them to  take reasonable precautions. But only the teen can take the important next step of actually  starting an online journal.  

It takes a few decades for a young person’s writing skills to develop. That’s not a reason for a student to put off writing.  Far from it.  Writing improves  with  practice. Even bad writing can record thoughts and feelings  of a time period.  (And if you don’t record them, these thoughts are gone forever).  Perhaps people’s verbal skills before 20 aren’t optimal, but they are more than adequate to present facts and daily events. Sometimes in fact, inner city youth may have lots to write about but little motivation.  (Projects like the Freedom Writers’ diary have tried to rectify this by encouraging students to write down their anxieties).

Short story writer Jack Matthews, talking about a 19th century diary written by a 16 year old, mentions how a dull style cannot diminish the events described:

…even the most prosaic of entries is possessed of the simply majesty of recorded fact. When 16-year old Charles Allen Smith from Pomeroy, Ohio, signed on the Kate Timmons as a deck hand in 1885, he was ill prepared to rhapsodize over the “beauteous sights afforded by Nature,” as the high style of the times required. Instead, when confronted by the ineffable, as on his first visit to New Orleans (on December 18, with the weather warm and clear), he states simply:  “The City is a fine one, it beats all my expectation. I cannot described it. I spent almost a day in the City, came to the boat tired slept all night.”

Probably most readers would prefer a style not quite so laconic, we wish Charley Smith (he had to be “Charley”) had given a shot at describing the city, and it might be interesting to have more details about what he did that day and maybe know why he was tired. Sustained excitement inspired by the exotic surroundings and constant walking could tire out anybody, even a sixteen-year old boy; but it would nevertheless be good to know exactly what happened to Charley – what he saw and what he did and, maybe, what was done to him that day. Evidently nothing too dramatic, or it probably would have gotten into his diary. Unless it was too dramatic, in the sense of too much; in which case, Charley – like a good Victorian youth – would have kept quiet about the whole business and not written a word. After all, his mother and father might be reading these entries. Or his sisters. Or future wife and children. (from Booking in the Heartland).

Even teenage overwriting can be endearing. Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse  and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein both strike me as more interesting for plot than style or language – at times, the style  and  emotional turbulence in both works strike me as insufferable – but sometimes the unintentional pomposity of their writing is consistent with the story itself.

Part of the fun of being a young literary type comes from  not knowing or caring whether famous writer X has already tried Y and trying it  anyway.   You never really can know for sure until you’ve  tried. And if later you learn  that someone else already wrote   about wacky bureaucracies (Kafka), moral indifference (Camus) or crazy Southerners (O’Connor, Faulkner, take your pick), chances are that your treatment of the subject is still going to be unique.  Even a badly written version of Romeo & Juliet can be a way for a young writer   to appreciate how a more accomplished writer handles the same subject.

Finally, we should fault the Disney/MTV empire for pitching youthful crap to youth. Naturally, people  prefer works of their own generation.  That’s fine. But isn’t it  a little insulting to think that young people can only enjoy YA fiction or books having pictures of teens on the cover?  Must every single thing pitched to the under 20 crowd contain a tie-in to some multimillion dollar TV show/hit album/comic-turned-movie? High School Musical this, Star Wars that … who cares!  What’s so bad about  going to the library and grabbing a random book off the shelf? The less known about it, the better.  (At the same time, the easy availability of wikipedia and online book lists makes it easier for discriminating readers to discover the classics).  Teenagers sometimes are in a better position to appreciate works without preconceived idea. Conversely, they are more likely to be impressed by works which only seem radical (Ayn Rand comes to mind) without recognizing true radicalism in art or thought.  Literature classes don’t necessarily spoil a person’s appreciation of literature.  But it’s tempting for a college student to start valuing  a book mainly   for  its ideas and not   for its characters or lyricism.  Sometimes reading with your heart can be more valuable than reading with your mind.   That’s something  teenage readers  do extraordinarily well.

Related: Nick Kristof’s discussion of the best children’s books (2800+ comments!)  and What Vanessa Reads (a literary review blog by a 16 year old Florida teen). Also, an amazing SXSW mp3 of a panel  about teenagers growing up online. (read a description of the panel).

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?

(the rest of the essay talks about how similar things have happened with the digitalization of movie and CD collections). James Wolcott  is not the first to generalize about America on the basis of life in  New York City – a city which to my mind is completely irrelevant to American literature. Here in Houston everybody goes around in  cars. It is rare to see a Houstonian casually carrying a book around – ok,  maybe  doctor’s office and  airport lounges.  But at doctor’s office, infomercials on TV make it nearly impossible to read anyway. At airports, you can read to the lovely sounds  of CNN Headline News and acid reflux drug commercials. If actually ran into someone in this city with a book in his hand,  I would die of amazement.

(Houstonians have books and read them; but the books stay safely inside people’s homes. Houston is a city with unbearable summer heat, no mass transit to speak of and  few public spaces conducive for reading).

Wolcott is correct to note that people now  communicate their taste by the gadgets they adorn themselves with (and that ties in with conventional critiques of American materialism). But Wolcott overlooks  the amount of sharing and signaling that already occurs online. See my librarything profile! See my favorite books on my facebook profile! See my recent reads on my blog! Complete strangers (I hope) are glancing at these data points and  revising their estimations of me  (or knocking off points for omissions). Some people prefer keeping these things private, but what happens when people share  not only  live journals but  GPS coordinates? Cyberutopians wax poetic about a time where a cell phone could locate people with similar interests    (overlooking  knotty privacy concerns); maybe it is a good thing to discover that the woman on the next aisle on the supermarket is a 1)knitting fanatic, 2)a voracious reader of vampire romances, 3)self-help junkie and  4)Palin Republican blogger.  Or is it?  Should I eagerly await the time when before I order lunch, a bellboy confesses that he  enjoyed reading my   post about breakfast tacos.

Ok, that’s a far-fetched scenario. And people already have information overload to deal with; nobody really has time to care about the interests of random strangers;  it’s hard enough keeping up with twitter updates of friends.  Also, in meatspace there is a  new chat protocol—it’s called face-to-face conversation.   Commenting on this promising new  technology, Charles Dickens writes: 

O, what a thing it is, in a time of danger and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face! I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much is any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true. Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw.

See also: Matt Yglesias’s discussion. 

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. 

Here is  a description of the  methodology to produce the climate change scorecard.  The site produces individual reports about each company it reviews. Other interesting scores: GE/NBC ranks as the most climate friendly media company, while Viacom ranks dead last). Climatecounts also has a downloadable pocket guide (PDF) .

How carbon-friendly is this pesky ebook habit which afflict TeleReaders? Some things to think about:

• Dead-tree books require cutting down trees. (Duh!). Dan Shapley writes, "The paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among United States manufacturing industries, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector’s carbon emissions."  Allen Hershkowitz from the National Resource Defense Council agrees, saying, “The paper industry is the No. 1 industrial pressure on forests."
• Umbra Fisk summarizes the research so far into books vs. ebooks:

A MS candidate named Greg Kozak pitted textbooks against e-book devices [PDF] in 2003. He found that paper production, electricity of printing operations, and personal transportation were the main factors affecting the book footprint, while electricity was the main issue for e-readers; and that books were responsible for four times the greenhouse emissions as e-readers. In ‘04, two UC-Berkeley students evaluated newspaper vs PDA-based e-newspapers [PDF], and decided that a newspaper released 32-140 times the amount of CO2, and used 26-185 times the amount of water. A 2007 study in Sweden (here is the abstract) also looked at newspaper and found that newspaper’s biggest impact was in the paper production, while energy was the big impact for reading on the internet; for e-devices (the Kindle, etc.), production of the e-object is the biggest impact. The study concluded that reading e-newspapers had less impact than an actual newspaper.

• The current book ordering system encourages bookstores to order more books than they can reasonably sell. That increases the number of published copies and consequently the number of returns (and the amount of shipping costs). 
• A number of print books which are bought are not read. In other words, books are produced with the goal to be sold, regardless of whether it is actually read. One cannot blame the publishing industry if people fail to read the books they buy;  but with digital books, energy or resources are being consumed only if the ebook is actually being read.  
• E-ink readers are the ultimate low-energy devices.  Charges last for weeks or sometimes longer than a month. The only additional step they can take is to make the devices run by solar energy (sigh!).

On a more hopeful note, Fisk mentions in a recent green Q&A column that Penguin has set up a Green Penguin  initiative to focus on reducing carbon footprint. About 60% of its paper derives from recycled sources. She also writes that Random House is committed to increase its percentage of recycled paper in the near future. 

Green Web-hosting

Here in Houston where I live, the cost of electricity for renewable energy is about the same as cost for nonrenewable energy. I can’t say if this is a nationwide phenomena. But my current hosting service (which hosted Teleread between 2006 and 2008) uses a data center which had no information about whether its energy was generated by renewable resources. When I emailed my hosting service about whether its data center were green, they said they had no idea.

Umbra Fisk recently wrote about the idea of green hosting, referring readers to this list of recommended green hosting. Here is an fascinating piece by Jonathan Leake and Richard Woods about what kind of carbon footprint a normal Google search leaves.

Climate Change Books, Ebooks and Online Books

• Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. This government report was released 2 weeks ago and synthesizes lots of scientific information as it pertains to the US. (Download PDF). On the same page is a fascinating 45 minute video by the authors of the report.
• Sustainable Energy without Hot Air is a free ebook which is fully online by David JC McKay (PDF is here),  but the online HTML is good too.
• McKinsey Policy Institute issued a PDF report last year about how  the world can move towards emitting greenhouse gases without damaging the economy. (free, but registration is required).
• The 2009 Climate Change Synthesis Report (PDF) provides a succinct update to the 2007 IPCC report, with summaries of lots of research which have emerged since then.
• This free Lancet report details the effects of global warming on mortality (free, but registration is required).
• Leading climate scientist James Hansen has published some influential policy documents about climate change. Mainly advocacy pieces.   (All PDF).
• Discovery of Global Warming – free online book. (Mercifully, HTML!)  Here’s a zipped file of the entire html site.
• Global Warming and Climate Change Demystified is a good print book (available at half.com for $2 + shipping). It looks and reads like a good (but boring) high school science textbook. But that is precisely the point. Climate change  is about science,  not about parroting petroleum industry falsehoods.  This book waded through the issues very clearly.
• Skeptical Science is a fascinating distributed project. Many climate change news sources and blogs become bogged down by the same denialist arguments. Every time I post something remotely about global warming on my personal blog, I’ll receive random uneducated remarks attacking my position. Although I try to stay informed, it can be easy for even knowledgeable people to have a hard time refuting denialist talking points. Citing the famous words of a tobacco lobbyist,  Joe Romm writes of  the modus operandi of denialists: “I don’t have to be right. I just have to prove you might be wrong.”
• Climateprogress is a well-known blog about climate change policy by national expert Joe Romm (He is a scientist,  policy analyst and author of  Hell and High Water). Well worth reading. I wanted to point out how over the time the blog is emerging as another kind of permanent online book. The blog has two or three posts a day, and then certain posts contain an index to related topics.   This introduction to the impact of global warming gives new readers a way to delve into the topic. Another post on achieving 450 ppm is another index page.  Otherwise, this weblog is a happy mess of news and arguments.

Climate Change: The Ultimate Ebook Challenge 

When discussing issues as important as climate change, it seems relatively trivial to complain about ebook formatting on government reports. Yet I cannot resist.

I have downloaded most of the PDFs listed above. Most were huge file which could not be easily be opened up in a browser.

Unfortunately, because many big climate change reports use lots of graphics, they are big and cumbersome PDFs that look crappy  when converted to my Sony  PRS 505. 

I understand that scientists use lots of graphics and charts. But if the purpose of writing these reports is to get them disseminated, why not create  documents in a way that lend itself to html output or portability into other formats? For one of the most important graphics on the Global Climate Change Impacts  report, I ended up just using a screen capture program to insert it onto my blog.  Surely there is a better way.  Recognizing the problem, the IPCC has put up a separate web page consisting only of graphics from the  2007 PDF document; too bad the team of leading scientists couldn’t figure out a way to make the document easily viewable inside a web browser. 

Some of these excellent reports don’t have a TOC even in the PDF version. It is extremely cumbersome to navigate through these things.

PDFs have a lot of usability problems (as Mike Hughes observed). My main complaint is that it is time-consuming to page through 200 pages using Adobe Reader.  I’m not saying .epub or .prc are significantly better.  But after you open  a PDF, you constantly need to use the Zoom feature and click the next/back buttons to get the Reader to look as it should.  Contrast that to hypertext like wikipedia or Discovery of Global Warming which invite you to browse inside and explore the document more deeply.  When you explore a PDF, you are progressing in a linear fashion instead of jumping around. Maybe for other scientists (who are motivated to read the whole thing regardless of format), this is not an issue. But a web surfer used to clicking on links will have problems staying within a single document  without clicking around.

I suspect that accessibility guidelines might determine the preference of government bodies for PDF formatting.  PDFs are generally considered to be more accessible (especially for the vision-impaired). The problem is that to fully digest the information from the report, you have to print it out (and I know that is the last thing climate scientists want readers to do). These sort of government reports are therefore cumbersome to read. Good for finding specific information or going to a specific chapter, but awkward and sluggish for normal reading.

I will be the first to admit that the scientists who wrote this report have more pressing things on their minds than document formats. But producing these large PDF files without having a strategy to make them readable  online only ensures that their impact on the public will be limited. 

Question: If the US government were to issue guidelines  about document formatting to facilitate reading on ebook devices, what  should these guidelines be?

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.

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?