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E-book Links, November 7-12: NY Times’ e-bestsellers; e-book biz in billions; e-ink in color

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  • Kindle 3: e-book readers come of age [Nate Anderson, Ars Technica]: "Now that standalone e-book readers like the Kindle have hit mass market prices (the new WiFi-only Kindle is a mere $139) and have turned into high-quality reading machines at last, the question is what's lost and what's found in the move to e-books? Or, to put it another way, does it really matter that I can no longer smell my books?"
  • Color E Ink to Be Sold in Hanvon E-Reader [NYTimes.com]: "E Ink screens have two advantages over LCD — they use far less battery power and they are readable in the glare of direct sunlight. However, the new color E Ink display, while an important technological breakthrough, is not as sharp and colorful as LCD. Unlike an LCD screen, the colors are muted, as if one were looking at a faded color photograph. In addition, E Ink cannot handle full-motion video. At best, it can show simple animations."

E-book Links, November 1-5: Borrowers and lenders; Stephen King and Kevin Kelly; No no, NaNoWriMo!

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  • Steal this book: The loan arranger [Glenn Fleishman, The Economist]: "Amazon.com says soon you will be allowed to lend out electronic books purchased from the Kindle Store. For a whole 14 days. Just once, ever, per title. If the publisher allows it. Not mentioned is the necessity to hop on one foot whilst reciting the Gettysburg Address in a falsetto."
  • Ebook restrictions leave libraries facing virtual lockout [Guardian, The Long Good Read]: "Publishers have now threatened to prevent libraries from accessing ebooks. It’s a move described by one library boss as 'regressive' at a time when they are trying to innovate as they fight for survival. But the Publishers Association (PA) claims that 'untrammelled' remote lending of digital books could pose a 'serious threat' to publishers’ commercial activities. That is why it has just announced a clampdown, informing libraries they may have to stop allowing users to download ebooks remotely and instead require them to come to the library premises, just as they do to get traditional print books – arguably defeating the object of the e-reading concept."
  • The Trouble with E-Readers [David Pogue, Scientific American]: “You won’t be giving a well-worn e-book to your children. But you won’t be giving one to your friend, either; you can’t resell or even give away an e-book. It doesn’t seem right. Why shouldn’t you be able to pass along an e-book just the way you’d pass on a physical one? You paid for it, haven’t you?”
  • Stephen King: Why E-books Aren’t Scary [Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal]: “Q: How much time do you spend reading digitally? A: It's approaching half of what I read. I recently bought a print edition of Henning Mankell's ‘Faceless Killers’ and the type was too small. A paper book is an object with a nice cover. You can swat flies with it, you can put it on the shelf. Do you remember the days when people got up to manually turn the channels on their TVs? Nobody does that any more, and nobody would want to go back. This is just something that is going to happen.”
  • Tech Book: PW Talks to Kevin Kelly [Publishers Weekly]: "I’m thinking about what remains of a book when you take away paper. I’m pretty sure there’s something there—that the concept of a book exists outside of paper. The issue, though, is not how people are going to enjoy books. The issue is more about business models. For readers, this is the best time in history. There’s never been more selection, more media types, or quality books. There’s never been more backlist books available. This is a high point for readers. For publishers, though, it is a low point, as their businesses are in transition. But I’m very optimistic, because in my research, money follows attention. Wherever attention flows, money follows. So, I have no doubt that if it is screens that are getting attention, money will flow to screens."
  • Better yet, DON’T write that novel [Laura Miller, Salon.com]: Laura shrinks in horror from National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo”). "Rather than squandering our applause on writers — who, let's face it, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not — why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built."
  • A Genre Is Born [Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print]: "Teen Paranormal Romance" category at B&N elicits end-of-civilization fears. "In fixating on a particular category of books — whatever its merits may be — the critics lose sight of the bigger picture: young people are developing a passion for reading, and of paper books, no less."

E-book Links Oct. 18-29: Zimmer goes indie, Negroponte buries print, Nook goes color, Kindle goes on loan

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  • Will physical books be gone in five years? [CNN.com]: Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, said the physical book's days are numbered. "It will be in five years," said Negroponte. "The physical medium cannot be distributed to enough people. When you go to Africa, half a million people want books … you can't send the physical thing."
  • iPad Week: E-Books [Nicholas Jackson, The Atlantic]: "You can get a variety of e-book reader apps for your iPad, including Apple's iBooks, Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's eReader, and Lexcycle's Stanza. Here's the rub: Except for Stanza, each app is tied to one specific online bookstore."
  • Part Two of My TOC Frankfurt "Ignite" Session [Joe Wikert]: "What if we could turn this model upside down and enable students to resell their textbooks for more than what they paid? How? By including all their notes in them as e-textbooks…. What I'm suggesting is a reseller model where the student can package all their notes together with their version of the ebook and sell it at whatever price they feel is appropriate. The key here is to include the publisher and author in the revenue stream; neither of them share in the proceeds of the used book market today but there's no reason they couldn't in the future.”

E-book Links for October 12-17: Kindle Singles, pricing insanity, eSuckers, iBookstore flopping?

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  • E-Books: No Friends of Free Expression [Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print] “I argue that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient—indeed, illiberal—ends. Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies—a 'right to read,' which would complement the existing right to free expression."

E-book Links for October 7th through 10th

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UPDATE: See Alan de Smet’s comment on the “Will technology kill book publishing?” piece: “. Traditional publishers will find themselves increasingly marginalized. To the extent that publishers continue to dominate, they will do so as highly streamlined companies that serve authors, not bookstores or even readers.”

Blogging, empowerment, and the “adjacent possible”

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Learning to make things changes how we understand and consume those things.

When I started reporting the news as a teenager, I read the newspaper differently. When I learned to play guitar in my ’20s, I listened to songs differently. When I first played around with desktop video editing 15 years ago I began watching movies and TV differently.

It’s the same with writing: Learning how to write changes how we read — and how we think. This is from Maryanne Wolf’s excellent Proust and the Squid:

As the twentieth-century psychologist Lev Vygotsky said, the act of putting spoken words and unspoken thoughts into written words releases and, in the process, changes the thoughts themselves… In his brief life Vygotsky observed that the very process of writing one’s thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking. In this sense the process of writing can actually reenact within a single person the dialectic that Socrates described to Phaedrus. In other words, the writer’s efforts to capture the ideas with ever more precise written words contain within them an inner dialogue, which each of us who has struggled to articulate our thoughts knows from the experience of watching our ideas change shape through the sheer effort of writing. Socrates could never have experienced this dialogic capacity of written language, because writing was still too young. Had he lived only one generation later, he might have held a more generous view.

What Vygotsky and Wolf observed about writing, we can extend and expand to writing in public. Writing for an audience is a special and important sub-case: it’s writing with feedback and consequences. Doing it yourself changes how you think about it and how you evaluate others’ efforts. The now-unfashionable word “empowerment” describes a part of that change: writing is a way of discovering one’s voice and feeling its strength. But writing in public involves discovering the boundaries and limits of that power, too. We learn all the different ways in which we are not the center of the universe. That kind of discovery has a way of helping us grow up fast.

So when I hear the still-commonplace dismissal of blogging as a trivial pastime or an amateurish hobby, I think, hold on a second. Writing — making texts — changes how we read and think. Every blogger (at least every blogger that wasn’t already a writer) is someone who has learned to read the world differently.

I’m preparing for some public talks later this month about Say Everything, which is why I’m revisiting this ground. It seems to me that, in our current bedazzlement with the transformative powers of social networking, we routinely underestimate the practical social importance of change at this individual level.

Clay Shirky, for instance, has focused, with great verve and insight, on how the Web enables us to form groups quickly and easily, and how that in turn is reshaping society. In his book Cognitive Surplus, Shirky identifies a spectrum of values stretching from personal to communal to public to civic. The spectrum, he writes, “describes the degree of value created for participants versus nonparticipants. With personal sharing, most or all of the value goes to the participants, while at the other end of the spectrum, attempts at civic sharing are specifically designed to generate real change in the society the participants are embedded in.”

This is a useful framework for discussion. What I think it neglects is the way the act of personal sharing changes individuals in ways that make the other sorts of sharing more imaginable to them. In other words, the spectrum is also a natural progression. The person who has struggled to turn a thought into a blog post, and then seen how that post has been reflected back by readers and other bloggers, is someone who can think more creatively about how sharing might work at other scales and in other contexts. A mind that has changed is more likely to imagine a world that can change.

In his great new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson describes the concept of “the adjacent possible.” This passage is from a recent excerpt in the Wall Street Journal, in which Johnson considers the improbable yet imaginable “primordial innovation of life itself”:

The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

One way to assess the impact of blogging is to say that the number of people who have had the experience of writing in public has skyrocketed over the course of the last decade. Let’s say that, pre-Internet, the universe of people with experience writing in public — journalists, authors, scholars — was, perhaps, 100,000 people. And let’s say that, of the hundreds of millions of blogs reported to date, maybe 10 million of them are sustained enough efforts for us to say that their authors have gained real experience writing in public. I’m pulling these numbers out of a hat, trying to err on the conservative side. We still get an expansion of a hundredfold.

Each of these people now has an entirely new set of “adjacent possibilities” to explore. What they make of those opportunities will shape the next couple of decades in important, and still unpredictable, ways.

E-book Links, October 5-6

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As I mentioned, I’m beginning to explore the e-book universe. One thing I’m going to do is post links here as I find them. Hope that’s useful. I’ll be posting soon with a compilation of all the suggestions I received for sources and authorities in this field. Thanks for those!

  • Aggregating Deep Discount Readers of eBooks [Eric Hellman]: How libraries and individuals could pool resources to acquire rights to e-books: " If a hundred thousand people offered a dollar to Clay Shirky (and Penguin, his publisher) for Cognitive Surplus to be released as a creative commons licensed ebook, certainly at some point they would examine their prospects for future sales and figure out how to say yes."

Mutating books, evolving authors

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The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy and sobering piece this week about how the rise of the e-book is altering the landscape of the publishing industry. It was not, on the surface, a happy picture for authors:

The digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers. Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.

The Journal piece focused on fiction writers, but the implications are similar for nonfiction authors like me. Whenever a wave of change sweeps through an industry, the old ways of making money tend to dissipate faster than the new ways coalesce. There is much wringing of hands. People panic. As a veteran of the newspaper industry I feel like I know this movie pretty well by now.

I also know this: when you do creative work, you are not owed a living. Few things are more ludicrous than a writer with a sense of entitlement. It would be wonderful if the pie available to reward authors were growing rather than shrinking. But we live in an era blessed with an abundance of opportunities to publish — and a relative scarcity of time to consume the products of publishing. Gluts make prices collapse. There’s no way an e-book can or should cost anything like what a paper book costs. Maybe volume will make up some of the difference — but, plainly, not yet.

I don’t see the point in hand-wringing. But I still plan to write long-form non-fiction and hope to earn at least some portion of my living doing it. So I’m going to do my damnedest to try to understand the changing publishing environment and figure out the smartest way for an author to navigate it. Id rather adapt and evolve than gripe my way to extinction.

To that end, I’m beginning a self-education program in the world of electronic book publishing. I know by some measures I’m coming to this absurdly late. Then again, I was worried when I started this blog in 2002 that I was late to that party, too.

So help me out. What are your favorite sources of information about e-books and e-readers? Do you just read about them as part of your wider intake of tech and gadget news? Or are there dedicated sites, publications and bloggers who you rely on?

I’m aware of the venerable Teleread. I’ve been enjoying Tim Carmody’s thoughtful posts at Wired and the Atlantic. I’ll read all the think pieces about “the future of the book” by writers like Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly that come along. Any other useful sources out there I should know about?

I’ll collect my findings and report back!

Carr’s “The Shallows”: An Internet victim in search of lost depth

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One day, immersing myself in my reading was simple as breathing. The next, it wasn’t. Once I had happily let books consume my days, with my head propped up against my pillow in bed or my body sprawled on the floor with the volume open in front of me. Now I felt restless after just a few pages, and my mind and body both refused to stay in one place. Instead of just reading, I would pause and ask, “Why am I reading this and not that? How will I ever read everything I want to or need to?”

I was 18. It would be years before I’d hear of the Internet.

Nicholas Carr had, it seems, a similar experience, quite a bit more recently. He describes it at the start of his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains:

I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

When I experienced this loss of focus, I simply blamed my new condition on my newly acquired adulthood. Carr, apparently, was lucky enough to retain his deep-reading endurance undisturbed from childhood well into his grownup years. By the time it began to slip away from him, we were all deep into the Web era. Carr decided that, whatever was going on, the Web was to blame. It wasn’t something that simply happened; it was something that the Internet was “doing to” his brain.

The Shallows has been received as a timely investigation of the danger that information overload, multitasking and the Web all pose to our culture and our individual psyches. There are serious and legitimate issues in this realm that we ignore at our peril. (Linda Stone is one important thinker in this area whose work I recommend.)

So I cannot fault Carr for asking what the Internet is doing to us. But that is only half of the picture. He fails to balance that question with its vital complement: What are we doing to, and with, the Internet? This imbalance leads him both to wildly overstate the power of the Internet to alter us, and to confuse traits that are inherent to the medium with those that are incidental.

Carr writes as a technological determinist. In asking what the Internet is “doing to” us he casts us as victims, not actors, and once that casting is in place, there’s only one way the drama can unfold. The necessary corrective to this perspective can be found in the opening chapter of Claude Fischer’s great history of the telephone, America Calling. Fischer admonishes us not to talk about technology’s “impacts” and “effects,” because such language “implies that human actions are impelled by external forces when they are really the outcomes of actors making purposeful choices under constraints.” (Emphasis mine.)
[Read more…]

Don’t save your links for the end — it’s more distracting!

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One of the humble yet essential uses of the link is to help us avoid having to repeat what others have already said. I make no great claim to novelty for my “Defense of Links” series; much of what I said, others had already expressed earlier this year when Carr first floated his “delinkification” meme. In particular, Jason Fry’s excellent post at Nieman Lab surveyed the ground well.

Fry talked about the role of links in three areas: credibility, readability and connectivity. “Readability” is plainly the area where Carr had the most provocative and defensible case against links. My motivation from the start was to examine that case closely and evaluate the studies it was based on — to follow the links, as it were.

I found that the studies Carr relied on really didn’t support his case. Just as interesting to me was the fact that a lengthy and in-depth discussion of Carr’s argument had unfolded on the Web without anyone actually looking up the research. Would that have happened had Carr provided links to these studies? (That’s possible on a blog but not, of course, in print. Still, one can publish endnotes online and activate the links, as I have for both of my books. Carr’s book site is quite the link desert, which I guess should not surprise.)

Fry asked a question that several respondents to my series echoed: ” Is opening links in new tabs really so different from links at the end of the piece?” For me, it is: ironically, the end-linking style is, I think, far more distracting than simple inline linking.

If you’re reading along and feel the desire to dig deeper on some point and the link is right there, you can just open the link in a new tab. If it’s not, you don’t know whether the author has provided a link or not. You have an unhappy choice. You can file the question away in your brain to make sure you remember to check once you reach the end of the article (now there’s a cognitive load). Or you can stop reading and scroll down to the bottom of the story to look for the link, which involves reviewing the whole list, figuring out whether the link you seek is actually there, clicking on it if it is, and then scrolling back to the top to find where you were. All of which thoroughly disrupts the deep reading Carr aims to protect far more thoroughly than a handful of highlighted link-words.

For instance, when I read Carr’s “Delinkification” post and saw his references to the “cognitive penalty” of links, I wanted to know where the studies were that supported this claim. There are no links inline, but I knew the whole post was about the experiment of putting links at the end, so I went on a wild goose chase to the bottom of the post hoping to find the studies linked there. (They’re not.) How can this possibly serve the reader’s concentration?

Those with long memories will recall that the original incarnation of Slate, driven by Michael Kinsley’s naivete about the Web, actually employed links-at-the-end as a policy. The magazine gave it up some time later. Turns out Carr’s “experiment” already had some in-the-field results. (You can see what this looks like on this Internet Archive capture of a Jacob Weisberg piece from 1999.)

I got into some of this argument in the comments at Scott Esposito’s thoughtful response to my series. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm provided a nice summary of my lengthier musings. I would also recommend Brian Frank’s rich philosophical take.

Tomorrow, wider thoughts on The Shallows, which of course addresses far more than links!