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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!

Cheap art

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In the 1980s I worked as a theater critic. I spent a lot of time in expensive Broadway theaters and ambitious nonprofit repertory companies. But some of my most memorable experiences were at street theater events by groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater. I first saw them in Boston at a time when the manifesto below was relatively new. It’s now a quarter century old but it hasn’t lost any of its truth.

For most of my writing life I’ve had a copy of this poster on my wall near where I work. When we rebuilt my basement office I lost track of it, but recently found it and rehung it. Here it is for you. (I got this image here.)

Happy long weekend, everyone. Make some cheap art!

Miscellany: SAI, Crooked Timber, MediaBugs and “Inception”

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Part Three of “In Defense of Links” coming later this week! Some little stuff in between:

  • I have begun an experiment in crossposting some of my stuff over at Silicon Alley Insider/Business Insider. Same writing, grabbier headlines! As it is, my posts appear here, and then also at Open Salon (where Salon sometimes picks them up). And I pipe them into Facebook for my friends who hang out there. The folks at SAI have picked up some of my pieces before, and I’m curious about how my point of view goes over with this somewhat different crowd.
  • Henry Farrell was kind enough to post a bit about In Defense of Links over at the Crooked Timber blog, and the discussion in comments there is just humblingly good — as well as entertaining. Would every single person who has ever issued a blanket putdown of the worthlessness of blog comments please pay this estimable community of online scholars a visit, and then pipe down? Thank you.
  • Just in time for the release of his new novel, Zero History, William Gibson has a great op-ed in the Times:

    Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory.

    In the ’90s I had the pleasure of interviewing Gibson a couple of times — here’s the 1994 edition, in which we discussed why the technology in his early novels never breaks down, and here’s part of the 1996 one, where he talks about building his first website and predicts the rise of people who “presurf” the Web for you.

    I recently caught up with Inception, and was amazed at how shot-through it is with Gibsonisms. Inception is to Neuromancer as The Matrix was to Philip K. Dick’s worlds: an adapation in everything but formal reality.

20 years of Web-whacking: my SXSW talk

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I had such a great time at South by Southwest last spring talking about blogging that I threw my hat in the ring again for next year.

My idea this time: “The Internet: Threat or Menace?” — a guided tour through two decades of tirades, fusillades and rants against the Internet, the Web, and all the other stuff people do with computers.

There’s rich history here, much of it already forgotten, some of it extremely funny. I’ve read a lot of these books and essays already. I’m eager to try to figure out why so many Internet critiques have that undead-zombie quality: you know they’ve got no life left in them, yet they keep lurching forward, leaving trails of slime for the rest of us to slip on. Yes, of course, there are legitimate and valuable critiques of the Net and what it hath wrought. And a reasonable amount of fatuous utopian hot air as well. I will lay it out and we can all roll our eyes together.

If you want to give me a chance to do this, you know the drill: hie thee PanelPicker-ward and cast your ballot. And spread the word. I will be grateful. If I am picked, I will enlist all of you as collaborators here as I try to stretch my arms around this vast topic.

But I’ll understand if you’d rather just sit back and let me do all the work.

And if enough of you vote, I will attempt to distill the material to its essence.

In haiku.

Oh yes. Many other fine people are proposing interesting sessions at SXSW. Here’s a handful I’ve come across that I recommend to you:

Justin Peters of CJR running a panel on “Trust Falls: Authority, Credibility, Journalism, and the Internet”

Mother Jones’ panel on “Investigative Tweeting? Secrets of the New Interactive Reporting”

Jay Rosen’s “Bloggers vs. Journalists: It’s a Psychological Thing”

Dan Gillmor on “Why Journalism Doesn’t Need Saving: an Optimist’s List”

Steve Fox assembling a panel on “That Was Private! After Weigel does privacy exist?”

My friends at XOXCO have a couple of proposals: Ben Brown on “Behind the Scenes of Online Communities” and Katie Spence with “Tales of the Future Past: Web Pioneers Remember.”

And tons more that I’m sure I’ve missed…

Heather Gold’s “Unpresenting”

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Right before we left for an idyllic last-gasp-of-summer week on the north coast, I took a day-long Unpresenting workshop with Heather Gold, and I want to recommend it highly and enthusiastically to anyone interested in making their public appearances more engaging, lively, and memorable.

Photo by Carlo de Marchis

Gold is a standup comic, solo performer, Web person and, more recently, promoter of the idea of “tummeling” — the art (descended to us from the dim Borscht Belt past) of breaking the ice for a crowd, warming people up to one another so that a comfortable conversation can flow. “Unpresenting” is her name for a style of public speaking that’s less about imparting information (“I am the expert and am here to tell you X, Y and Z”) and more about opening conversation (“Let’s talk about this stuff — I think X and Y — what do you think?”).

You know the old saying about conferences that what happens in the room is a lot less interesting than what happens in the hall outside? Gold’s workshop provides a roadmap for transforming the room into something more like that hallway.

Some of Gold’s advice is practical, veteran-performers’ tips (like scanning your crowd, particularly at its edges, to keep people feeling included). Some of it is more of a simple challenge to understand what it is that people want to get out of a public event. If it’s just your information they’re after, why not just give them a book or a blog post? If it’s more of your in-person gestalt — a sense of who you are, what you’re like, how you move, and what you sound like, not just what you think — then a looser, more conversational mode will provide that a lot more efficiently than a podium-bound recital or (even worse) PowerPoint bullet lists.

As a former theater critic I’ve always been extra conscious of the preciousness of public time. When anyone gives me ten minutes or an hour in front of a crowd I want to make sure I use it well. And so I’ve always spent a ton of time preparing talks, often writing them out (I am, after all, a writer — that’s where I’m comfortable and confident!), so I can feel I’ve done my best to provide listeners with something of value.

Gold got me thinking about different kinds of value I might have been neglecting. I don’t think my presentations are going to change completely, but I’m definitely planning on playing around with more loosely structured and open-ended formats: less lecture, more conversation. And if you get a chance to learn about unpresenting with Heather, grab it!

Redecorating the place

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Welcome to the long-overdue revamp of this blog’s design.

Our new look is courtesy of the Genesis theme framework from StudioPress, which makes things like choosing a column layout really simple. I just fiddled a bit with some of the colors and fonts and style-sheet stuff.

WordPress has become so much more powerful and elegant as a content management system over time — the widget framework for dropping in features like the Twitter box, the navigation boxes and my little book promotions is awfully straightforward. Thanks to all the developers who have brought us to this fine place!

I’ve tested things out on various browser/platform combos but let me know if you see anything funky.

The decade in tunes

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I’m not interested in the argument over whether this new year’s marks the end of the decade-with-no-name. Since we celebrated the end of the millennium 10 years ago, I think we’re stuck. And you can bet that when 2019 rolls over to 2020 we’ll do the same.

My list, for your pleasure, is the decade in music — my personal bests. It will be no surprise to longtime readers here. This is the stuff that stuck with me through the years, that kept my body moving, my mind working and my heart opening. I’ve made most of these entries in pairs (or more) — because I can.

RUNNERS-UP:

  • Beck: The Information (2006)
  • The Decemberists: The Crane Wife (2006)
  • The Gaslight Anthem: The 59 Sound (2008)
  • Richard Thompson: 1000 Years of Popular Music (2003)
  • Wrens: The Meadowlands (2003)
  • XTC: Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2) (2000)

TOP TEN (IN ELEVEN):

(11) Garage Band and Rock Band: Apple’s software put remarkably high quality basement-taping music-making tools onto every Mac. Rock Band may be a toy, but it’s irresistible, and it schools young minds and bodies in the notion that music is to be made as well as consumed.

(10) Pernice Brothers: The World Won’t End (2001); Discover a Lovelier You (2005) — Definitely the sleeper in this bunch for me. When I first heard Joe Pernice’s work in 1998’s Overcome by Happiness I was impressed but a bit bored. Over time I came to appreciate, then crave, the combination of lush pop arrangements and astringent lyrics.

(9) They Might Be Giants: No (2002); Here Come the ABCs (2005)– For me this decade was all about raising a pair of twin boys. TMBG’s forays into children’s music were that process’s soundtrack — and frequent tonic. “No” offered my three-year-olds an early introduction to absurdism, and its charming animations proved an endless diversion. (“Robot Parade” introduced them to the term “cyborg” — and gave them a chance to misremember it as “borg-cy,” which we will never forget.) And even though, by the time “ABCs” came along, the alphabet had long been mastered, the music (and great accompanying videos) won over kids and grownups alike.

(8) The Long Winters: When I Pretend to Fall (2003); Putting the Days to Bed (2006) — Sharp tuneful alt-rock with an edge and a brain. My only complaint about singer/songwriter John Roderick? Low productivity!

(7) The Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat — The Friedbergers, brother and sister, moved from the more forthright songwriting of their early tracks to the increasing obscurity of their more recent work. But along the way they created this masterpiece of baroque verbiage and extravagant music.

(6) Tobin Sprout: Lost Planets and Phantom Voices (2003) — Deep autumnal soundscapes and pop paintings from a maestro of gentle melody. The former Guided by Voices songwriter, far less profligate with his talent than that group’s leader, Robert Pollard, hasn’t put out an album since; he seems to be concentrating on painting these days. Too bad!

(5) Green Day: American Idiot (2004); and The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine (2006)– Two punk operas about Bush-era America. Green Day’s megahit album drafted Who-style song suites and hook-laden power-trio riffs in the service of a narrative about disaffected no-future youth; the Thermals channeled a Buzzcocks sound for their grim portrait of a young couple trying to escape a fundamentalist/fascist America.

(4) Mekons: Natural (2007) — These veterans kept producing challenging, creative work through the decade. Each album, from Journey to the Edge of the Night (2000) to OOOH (2002) to Natural, improved on its predecessor. Natural is the band’s version of pastoral — a contemplative, acoustic-heavy set of laments for the end of nature.

(3) Frank Black/Black Francis: Dog in the Sand (2001); Bluefinger (2007) — FB/BF has been as prolific with his songs as he is fickle with his stage name. These albums were his peaks of the decade. Dog in the Sand ranged from fierce Stones-style rockers to the almost unbearably beautiful “St. Francis Dam Disaster.” Bluefinger used the story of Dutch glam-rocker Hermann Brood as the spine for a memorable set of Black classics.

(2) The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema (2005), Challengers (2007) — I do not know how A.C. Newman and his cohorts do it, but each album adds to my respect for their genius. When I read somewhere in an interview that Newman is a big fan of Eno’s “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” it all made sense.

(1) The Mountain Goats: Tallahassee (2003), We Shall All Be Healed (2004), The Sunset Tree (2005) — Don’t think I’d have made it through these years without John Darnielle’s music. Thank you. Happy new year!

Levy: “Say Everything” 2009’s “best technology-related business book”

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Forgive this author a moment of own-horn-tooting.

It was always flattering and humbling to me to hear Dreaming in Code spoken of in the same breath as The Soul of a New Machine. With Say Everything I also had a model in mind: Hackers, Steven Levy’s groundbreaking and still-valuable account of the pioneering mavericks of hacker culture — which first taught me, back in the early ’80s, that there was a fascinating and important cultural story brewing in the computer rooms I’d haunted as a high-school student. In fact, we considered titling the book Bloggers, partly as homage to Levy’s work.

So you can imagine my delight at reading what Levy had to say about Say Everything in an article on the year’s notable technology books in Strategy and Business:

Say Everything is not only a delightful history of the form but a surprisingly broad account that touches on a number of major issues of the past decade, quietly making a case that blogs now play an indispensable role….

Rosenberg’s approach is to tell the stories of the storytellers, constructing his brief history of blogging by way of the bloggers themselves. He does this so well that it appears almost serendipitous that each aspect of his subject is almost perfectly embodied by the story of one or two individuals….

Rosenberg is a mensch, resisting cheap shots even when his subjects behave badly. But he is quick to puncture pretense, whether it comes from the self-importance of bloggers suddenly thrust into the public eye, or the snobbery of mainstream media dismissing citizen postings because their authors lack the training or credentials to participate in a national discussion…

Ironically, Rosenberg’s extended encomium of blogging also turns out to be an implicit defense of another allegedly endangered form: the book. Only by such an extended and well-organized presentation can Rosenberg both give us a comprehensive account of blogging and successfully argue for its importance. The pages of Say Everything provide not only an expertly curated burst of information, but also entertainment for several evenings. The book provides thought and provocation. It illuminates the deep economic challenges of the Internet. And, as is the case with blog postings, Rosenberg speaks with the clarity and wit of an authentic voice — even after the highly filtered, far-from-real-time processing of a major publisher. That’s why I think Say Everything is the best technology-related business book of the year.

OK, </blush>. And thanks!

Mac life after Ecco

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For years I organized my life with the wonderful, now-orphaned and somewhat antiquated Windows outliner Ecco Pro. For me Ecco was versatile enough to function effectively as both a todo-list manager and a repository for random information, scattered ideas and research. It really could do it all.

I’ve always used both Macs and PCs but this year I’ve migrated my main workspace over to OS X. There were many compelling reasons to do this, but I’ve had to struggle with finding an Ecco replacement. (Yes, I could run it on my Mac in a Windows virtual machine, but it’s a bit kludgy, and it’s time for me to move away from this program that, despite the efforts of many devotees, doesn’t look like it will ever be fully modernized.)

So far, it’s looking to me like there is no one Mac application that can serve in both roles (todo list and information organizer). OmniOutliner is a pretty good all purpose outliner, and it has a companion, “Getting Things Done”-based todo list program called OmniFocus. Though I’ve made my peace with OmniOutliner, I have not fallen in love with OmniFocus. It follows the David Allen GTD approach a little too rigidly for me, it has various features I don’t need and it’s missing some that I do want (as far as I’ve been able to tell, for instance, it lacks the ability to make some item vanish until a certain date when it reappears–what I call the “out of my face” tool).

So I’ve begun exploring various combinations of other tools. Right now, it’s Evernote for research/information and Things for todo management. I’m also going to look into Tinderbox, Yojimbo and some other applications that look promising. I know the Mac ecosystem is full of great products that sometimes have only small followings, so if there’s one you’re especially enamored of, do let me know.

I’ve also been playing around with Thinklinkr, a new Web-based outliner. It has one huge plus: It’s got an absolutely top-notch browser interface (it’s the only browser-based outlining tool I’ve found that is as responsive and fast as Ecco on the desktop — bravo for that!). At the moment, though, it’s a somewhat rudimentary tool; it lacks various features one might want, and it looks like it’s being aimed at the (important but different) market for collaborative outlining rather than personal information management. But it’s definitely worth a look if you’re into outlining.

My UC Berkeley Journalism School talk: This Wednesday

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Just a note for those of you in the area: Come on down to the UC Berkeley School of Journalism this Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 6 p.m. if you’d like to hear me give a talk about blogging, journalism, and MediaBugs.

There will be only a little overlap with the talks I’ve been giving about Say Everything and the history of blogging (like my Hillside Club presentation over the summer).

This time, as befits the forum, I’ll be looking at the roots and nature of the long history of confrontation between professional journalists and bloggers, pointing out some positive directions that may lead us beyond the now well-worn grooves of that conflict, and offering some introductory perspectives about MediaBugs and how it fits in to that larger narrative.

I hope to see lots of you there! Details here.