Cites & insights Crawford at large.

              Cites & Insights September 2011 1

Cites & Insights

Crawford at Large

Libraries • Policy • Technology • Media

Volume 11, Number 8: September 2011 ISSN 1534- 0937 Walt Crawford

Bibs & Blather

Does Your Library Use

Twitter or Facebook?

If so, and if it’s a public library or library system, I

could use your help.

I’m working on a book on public library use of

social networks ( to be published by ALA Editions in

2012. If you’ve already responded to my post on

Walt at Random, feel free to ignore this section. Oth-erwise,

I could use responses to the following— sent

to waltcrawford@ gmail. com by September 14, 2011

if possible.

Basic Information

Library/ district official name; State, province or

country; Service area population; Your name, title

and email address; Whether you’re willing to have

your comments used as direct quotations or only as

background.

Comments on Twitter or Facebook ( or both—

indicate which):

Whatever you feel is worth saying about how your

library uses the social network, how much time is

spent preparing items and responding to items ( if

you do that), whether one person or many post, the

feedback you’ve gotten from your patrons, whether

it seems worthwhile— and whatever else you think

is worth mentioning.

Comments on the relationship between the two ( if

you use both):

Do you use them for different purposes, or are Face-book

statuses basically longer versions of tweets ( or

maybe the same)? Other comments on the differ-ences

and similarities as your library has used them?

Thanks!

I can’t guarantee your comments will be used— I’d

expect that no more than 2,000- 3,000 words of the

book will be comments from these emails. I will list

you in the acknowledgments ( unless you ask me not

to do so) and your comments will definitely help as

I prepare the subjective portions of the book.

I’ll look up your library’s home page and go to

your Twitter and Facebook pages, to pick up basic

numbers ( followers, following, tweets, likes, visits)

and five recent items from each service as examples

of trends and practices— unless you’re in one of the

states for which I’m doing full sweeps, in which case

I’d do that anyway.

( The original post said “ six or eleven states.”

That’s now at least 16 and quite possibly as many as

24 states.)

And If You’ve Stopped Using

Twitter or Facebook…

There may not be any such libraries, but just in case:

If your public library/ library district has used

Facebook, Twitter or both, and has stopped using

one or both, I’d love to get some feedback, to help

me prepare that book.

Same basic info, plus why you stopped using

the social network and any other comments.

Inside This Issue

Writing about Reading...................................................... 2

I’m not assuming that there are any “ failure sto-ries.”

It won’t surprise me at all if I don’t get any

responses to this negative query. On the other hand,

while I can see the Facebook and Twitter accounts

in the states I’m studying in depth, I have no way of

knowing about former accounts that have closed—

unless people tell me.

More Tweaks

Another tweak to Cites & Insights in PDF form be-gins

with this issue. It may be more visible than the

tweak introduced some time back— a tweak nobody

has yet identified. It could be thought of as a rever-sion,

but that’s not quite true. No prize for guessing

either or both tweaks, but I’d love to hear from you

if you believe you know what they are.

Cites & Insights September 2011 2

Meanwhile, this is another single- month ( but

also single- essay) issue, so I do expect to be back

within the next four to six weeks.

Writing About Reading

A Future of Books and

Publishing

What do I believe is going to happen with books ( of

various stripes) and publishing in the future? Since

I’m not an industry pundit, a publishing guru or a

futurist, I don’t have a reasonable answer to that

question. Neither, I think, does anyone else, unless

that answer is “ it will be complicated, probably

more complicated than it is now.”

That’s not the answer you get from most pun-dits

and gurus, to be sure, because simplicity sells—

a dramatic single- path future always gets more pub-licity,

even though it’s the least likely scenario in the

real world.

In the April 2011 installment of WRITING

ABOUT READING I offered some of my beliefs and

biases about the present and future of reading and

writing. Those beliefs and biases didn’t add up to a

coherent vision. While I don’t pretend to know

what’s likely and don’t believe in a single predictable

future, this might not be a bad time to set forth

what I’d like to see happen. This isn’t the future of

books and publishing, it’s a future of books and

publishing. I believe parts of it are probable. I sus-pect

at least one part is improbable. The bulk of this

PERSPECTIVE is another set of notes and comments

on the changing state of the publishing industry,

this time focusing on contrasts and comparisons

between print books and ebooks. My flawed vision

of one possible future is a preface of sorts.

What Could Happen

Let’s project ten years out with some notes on

“ while I’m still alive”— say 35 years out. ( Hey, I’d

only be 101 at that point.) Here’s one set of possibil-ities

I might find attractive.

Ebooks and Print Books

Both forms of long- form textual narrative will

thrive, both having U. S. annual sales in the billions

of dollars and probably, at least within 35 years,

worldwide sales in tens of billions of dollars. ( This

would be a huge increase for ebooks, unless you de-fine

that market extremely broadly.)

People will read in the formats they prefer for

various uses, and for most people the plural “ for-mats”

will be the right term. I’d like to think some

digiphiles will get over their proclamations that

they’ll never, ever read another print book, but that

probably won’t happen. I doubt many people will be

making such pointless proclamations in another

decade, just as I doubt that Amazon will still be

running TV ads that belittle print books. Similarly,

I’d like to assume that few print- oriented readers a

decade from now will assert that no screen- based

text, or no long- form screen- based text, can ever be

worthwhile— and I suspect there aren’t many read-ers

who never read text from the screen.

I’d be surprised, looking ten years out, if most

people who travel a lot don’t own some device rea-sonably

well suited for ebook reading ( not neces-sarily

a dedicated ereader)— and I’m enough of a

Luddite to exclude smart phones and other devices

with screens smaller than about five inches from

that category. I’d be astonished if a majority of first-world

citizens uses dedicated ereaders regularly for

book- length texts a decade from now, but I’ve been

astonished before. I’m guessing most book read-ers—

who may or may not be a majority of the

population, now or ten years or 35 years from

now— will use both ebooks and print books.

I would love to see ereaders within a decade

that match print for resolution, which means at least

300 dpi/ ppi— but that resolution doesn’t seem to

matter for lots of people, so I won’t be surprised if

that doesn’t happen. ( Apple’s iPhone 4 achieves that

resolution, at 326 ppi, but I question the suitability

of screens that small for reading books. Again, that’s

me. By comparison, Apple’s iPad is a mere 132 ppi,

the Kindle runs 167 ppi and the Nook Color dis-plays

at 170 ppi.)

The balance? Who knows? It will be different in

each aspect of book publishing ( and there are quite

a few aspects). For example:

 I’ve long expressed a hope that most text-books,

especially those for K12 students,

would move to ebook form— but that’s turn-ing

out to be a tricky road, not only because

publishers love the assured profits of frequent

edition changes but also because, so far, stu-dents

seem not to be thrilled with etextbooks.

This might change, but given the dynamics of

the market, I’d be surprised if half of the

multibillion- dollar textbook market was

ebooks a decade from now. I’d like to see that

happen, especially to get those loads off of

Cites & Insights September 2011 3

schoolkids’ backs, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Will print textbooks disappear within 35

years? Probably not entirely.

 People looking for quick screen- turners ( like

page- turners but on ereaders) seem to be do-ing

nicely with $ 0.99 quickies that might

never be published in traditional form; I

wonder how long that infatuation with “ me-diocre

but really cheap” will last— but given

most network and cable TV, I know better

than to underestimate the staying power of

facile mediocrity.

 I’m guessing nonfiction books, outside of how-to

books and technology- related books, will

continue to be mostly print. Purely a guess.

 I’m guessing “ deep fiction”— books you read

slowly, savoring each page— will continue to

be mostly print. Also purely a guess.

 I wouldn’t be surprised if most mass- market

paperbacks ( the ones printed on cheap paper,

typically around 4.5x6.8” in the U. S.) are re-placed

by ebooks within a decade, and that

seems probable within 35 years. I would be very

surprised if mass- market paperbacks disappear

entirely within a decade ( and wouldn’t venture

a guess for 35 years out). Indeed, I’d be sur-prised

if they aren’t still a substantial market.

 The book- publishing field is complex, and

adult trade books represent about a quarter of

total print book revenues. ( Textbooks are a

larger market; children’s books and profes-sional,

technical and scholarly books com-bined

roughly equaled adult trade books in

2008 revenue, according to the Census Bu-reau.)

I’d bet that children’s books will still be

predominantly print books in a decade; I’d

guess the same will be true for professional,

technical and scholarly books.

 I would guess that most “ traditional” titles a

decade from now will be published in both

print and ebook form, quite possibly with

many books only produced in physical form

as hardbacks for libraries and collectors—

possibly using print- on- demand.

 There will continue to be a healthy market for

fine printing, books that are as much objects

d’art as they are reading material, but that

market probably isn’t a multi- billion- dollar

business now, and it probably won’t be a dec-ade

from now. But, as with vinyl LPs, it’s likely

to be a market that supports a number of small

presses that know what they’re doing.

 I believe there will be a growing “ market” for

extremely short- run print books, micropubli-cations

if you will, most of which won’t enter

the traditional book marketplace. More on

that later.

Number and Source of Titles

If you haven’t heard, there’s been an absurd explo-sion

of “ new” book titles as counted by Bowk-er…

and most of that explosion is outside traditional

publishing. These are books with ISBNs, so it’s still

an undercount, and “ new” is a tricky term. Every

new edition of a book has a new ISBN; an ebook has

a different ISBN from a paperback has a different

ISBN from a hardback has a… and so on. Bowker’s

summary of new titles and editions, 2002 through

2010 ( 2010 being estimates), is startling through-out—

but especially for 2007 and beyond. ( I’ve

rounded all numbers down to the nearest thousand.)

How startling? Even in 2002, there were

215,000 “ traditional” new titles and editions ( in-cluding

30,000 juveniles, for those non- reading

kids)— and 32,000 “ non- traditional” which, accord-ing

to a footnote, “ consists largely of reprints, often

public domain, and other titles printed on- demand.”

In 2006, the traditional count had increased to

274,000 and non- traditional was down to some

22,000. Ah, but look at the last four years:

 2007: 284,000 traditional; 123,000 non-traditional.

 2008: 289,000 traditional; 271,000 non-traditional.

 2009: 302,000 traditional; 1,033,000 non-traditional.

 2010 projected: 316,000 traditional;

2,776,000 non- traditional.

By the way, those non- reading juveniles will have

more than 32,000 new titles and editions this year

not to read, excluding non- traditional titles.

To the extent that the explosion in non-traditional

titles represents public domain reprints, I

suspect it will level off. ( I could be wrong.) To the

extent that it represents print- on- demand titles, I

suspect it will continue to grow— except that a lot of

those titles won’t have ISBNs and won’t show up in

Bowker’s counts. ( That’s also the case now, I believe.)

I anticipate continued growth in micropublish-ing,

which I define as books expected to yield from

one to 500 copies total distribution ( not necessarily

sold, as lots of these won’t be sold at all)— including

family histories and other items of interest to one

very small group of people. Indeed, I’m doing what I

Cites & Insights September 2011 4

can to encourage that growth: my next book will be

The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing, showing

how libraries can help their patrons to produce mi-cropublications

that look as good as mainstream

books. Most of these will be print books… but in

total they’ll make up a small percentage of all book

copies printed. ( Even one million titles, with an av-erage

of ten copies per title, is less than one percent

of U. S. book production.)

For traditional publishing? I wouldn’t be sur-prised

to see the total number of titles decline, alt-hough

as more of these become cheap ebooks that

might not happen. It is worth noting that, for all the

“ death of books” nonsense, there’s only been one

year in the past decade in which traditional titles

declined ( from 2004 to 2005, and then only by

about 9%— to a number still comfortably higher

than 2003).

The Nature of the Beast

Here we get to what I’d like to see happen— but I’m

being optimistic.

I’ve said mean things about the Big Six, that

handful of publishers that includes more than a

hundred imprints and, to my mind, is the “ Big Me-dia

version” of book publishing. To me, Big Media

publishing is bad for books and readers and unsus-tainable—

with its dependence on blockbuster best-sellers,

huge advances for a few authors and “ au-thors”

while dropping respectable writers because

they don’t produce blockbusters, and what I see as a

focus on selling product rather than producing first-rate

books. That includes an apparent trend toward

editing on the cheap and not bothering with page-by-

page typographical layout, at least based on the

sampling I’ve done. I should say here that lumping

all Big Six imprints together in this negative com-mentary

is almost certainly unfair to one or more of

them, to several of their imprints and to quite a few

of their editors and typographers.

Who are the Big Six?

 Hachette Book Group is owned by Hachette

Livre, a French company that’s the world’s se-cond

largest publisher. It includes Time Warn-er

books, Little, Brown and some 18 imprints.

 HarperCollins is part of Rupert Murdoch’s

News Corporation and includes more than

two dozen imprints.

 Macmillan is part of German publisher

Holtzbrinck and has quite a few imprints.

 Penguin Group ( USA) is part of Penguin

Group, currently the world’s largest trade

book publisher and itself part of the British

firm Pearson PLC. It includes a huge number

of imprints.

 Random House, U. S. A. is owned by German

media corporation Bertelsmann and includes

the many imprints of Crown and Knopf Dou-bleday

as well as those of Random House itself.

 Simon & Schuster, with its 35 imprints, is

part of Sumner Redstone’s CBS Corpora-tion—

the one and only American- owned

megapublisher.

I’ve seen estimates that these six companies control

more than 80% of the U. S. trade book market, and

they’re known for publishing the “ biggest author

brands” ( as one publishing consultant calls them).

I would like to see the Big Six model of publish-ing—

or at least the worst of it— decline, in share of

market if not in overall size. I would love to see the

tens of thousands of small or independent publish-ers

come to dominate U. S. publishing. I believe that

would result in better- quality books ( both in terms

of the text within the books and the care taken with

book layout and typography). “ Small publishers”

aren’t necessarily all that small, to be sure: Chroni-cle

Books, for example, is a good- sized business.

“ Tens of thousands” may be an understatement.

I’m including only publishers that operate as full-time

businesses and publish more than one author.

When you add self- publishers, especially those who

use Lulu or CreateSpace as fulfillment agencies, that

total could reach six or seven figures— and today’s

self- publisher can become tomorrow’s small pub-lisher

simply by taking on a second author.

I would hate to see Amazon serve as a choke-point

through which almost all ebooks and a large

percentage of print books must pass. I believe that,

in the long run, that will almost necessarily lead to

problems. I would love to see more competition

both there and with big book distributors— but I

have no idea whether that will or could happen.

There are some things of which I have no doubt

whatsoever:

 Ten years from now, people will read book-length

texts, probably in the billions just with-in

the U. S. That will also be true 35 years from

now. Long- form reading isn’t going away.

 Ten years from now, collector- quality print

books will do healthy business, and that’s

likely to be true 35 years from now. In neither

case will that business represent a substantial

portion of publishing.

Cites & Insights September 2011 5

 Ten years from now, U. S. public libraries will

circulate more than a billion print books each

year, and I’m reasonably certain that will also

be true 35 years from now. Will those books

represent a majority of library circulation? I

have no idea. Will ebooks come to represent a

majority of library circulation— and will li-braries

gain control of that circulation?

Again, I have no idea.

 Ten years from now, some gurus and pundits

will make sweeping predictions involving the

death of X or end of Y and assuming a future

that’s simpler than the past. And the future

will continue to get more complex.

There’s a future for books and publishing— one I

believe would be healthy for writers and readers. I

believe a multiplicity of relatively small businesses

run by people who really care about books would be

better for literature and readers than “ stuff pushers,”

my oversimplified model of the Big Six approach to

publishing.

I almost forgot one thing that may be essential

for that future— but this one seems improbable,

specifically the second half: There need to be lots of

physical bookstores— and, sooner or later, those

bookstores need to abandon the right to return un-sold

books for full credit. That right, which is nearly

unique among retail businesses, makes it far more

difficult for independent publishers to succeed,

since a short- term best- seller can become a medi-um-

term disaster for a publisher. Right of return for

full credit, especially as it’s misapplied to mass-market

paperbacks ( where stores send back the co-vers

and trash the actual books), is bad for small

publishers and ecologically unsound. Will it

change? One can only hope.

Enough of that. Let’s look at some commen-taries

on ebooks vs. pbooks— a discussion that may

seem quaint a decade from now. Or maybe not.

Ebooks Are The Future!

Some items in this group represent the “ ebooks /

ereaders as the only or dominant future” extreme.

Others don’t go that far but do tout the wonders of

ebooks, with or without dedicated ereaders.

What If the Kindle Succeeds?

Hugh D’Andrade wrote this commentary on August

18, 2008 at Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deep

Links. ( That hyperlink may not work even in the

HTML version— Deep Links URLs seem to yield blog

frameworks with no posts. The date should get you

there.) It’s three years old, back when Amazon was

promoting the Kindle all the time, with it dominating

the front page… oh, wait, that’s still happening, isn’t

it? This is a commentary from an odd position— a

reader who generalizes the attitudes of other readers:

Steve Jobs said recently that the whole idea of e- book

readers was flawed since “ people don’t read any-more”.

But for those of us who do read, the e- book

elicits skepticism for different reasons. For us, the

look and feel, even the smell, of a physical book is

part of the joy of reading. Will anyone actually want

to curl up with an electronic device for an evening of

literary comfort?

How does D’Andrade’s commentary wind up in this

section? Because of paragraphs in which he seems

to say that, since the trend toward MP3s has been

“ steady and unstoppable,” that’s also likely to be

true for books. Indeed, he’s apparently all for

ebooks, given his list of advantages:

Ease of access: We have become accustomed to the

fact that we can access millions of songs and albums

instantaneously online, with a single click. The same

is now increasingly possible with books.

Ease of sharing: Everyone loves to share a good book

with friends. Digital books can be shared as easily as

sending an email— and you don’t need to give up

your copy in order to do so! ( Publishers may try to

restrict copying with DRM copy protection, but as

we saw with MP3 files, this strategy will fail.)

Ease of carrying: A single Kindle device can carry at

least 200 books. As the technology improves, you will

soon be able to carry a copy of your entire library in

your bag ( and have a back- up at home), just as you

now carry your music collection in your pocket.

Price: As more people use digital books and as com-petition

increases, the price of digital books will

come down, reflecting the real costs of production —

no expensive printing, no shipping across country or

storing in warehouses.

As is usually the case when price is discussed,

D’Andrade either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about

the 1/ 7th rule— that is, the “ real costs of production”

are unlikely to be more than one- seventh of a physi-cal

book’s price.

Sigh. There’s more to the post— but clicking on

“ Read the entire post” yields the same empty blog

frame as the URL itself, so I can’t comment on it. A

shame, given that the rest of the post includes his

questions for publishers. ( I’m not sure what’s wrong

at Deep Links, but something has gone awry, largely

removing that blog from my source list. It’s a shame,

really: the EFF has useful things to say.)

Cites & Insights September 2011 6

The once and future e- book: on reading in the

digital age

John Siracusa posted this article at ars technica on

February 2, 2009. Siracusa goes way back with

ebooks:

I was pitched headfirst into the world of e- books in

2002 when I took a job with Palm Digital Media. The

company, originally called Peanut Press, was founded

in 1998 with a simple plan: publish books in elec-tronic

form. As it turns out, that simple plan leads

directly into a technological, economic, and political

hornet’s nest. But thanks to some good initial deci-sions

( more on those later), little Peanut Press did

pretty well for itself in those first few years, eventual-ly

having a legitimate claim to its self- declared title of

“ the world’s largest e- book store.”

Unfortunately, despite starting the company near the

peak of the original dot- com bubble, the founders of

Peanut Press lost control of the company very early

on. In retrospect, this signaled an important truth

that persists to this day: people don’t get e- books.

Peanut Press became Palm Digital Media and is now

apparently part of Fictionwise. Siracusa’s problem:

ebooks didn’t— and as of February 2009 still

hadn’t— taken off the way he felt they needed to.

The pace of the e- book market over the past decade

has been excruciatingly— and yes, you guessed it,

unjustly— slow. My frustration is much like that of

the Mac users of old. Here’s an awesome, obvious, in-evitable

idea, seemingly thwarted at every turn by

widespread consumer misunderstanding and an en-demic

lack of will among the big players.

Oh, look, there’s the i- word, in italics even. Let that

pass; maybe Siracusa has something worthwhile to

say, even if he has fallen back on inevitability early

in the article. Where does he go from there? First,

he objects to the term e- book. Then he leads us

through a set of “ paper tigers”— objections to

ebooks that he sets up to knock down. Technical

issues? “ They don’t matter” because people read

stuff off screens anyway.

I’ll say it again: people will read text off screens.

The optical superiority of paper is still very real, but

also irrelevant. The minimum quality threshold for

extended reading was passed a long, long time ago…

I’m not going to tell you that you really do want to

read a novel off a screen. I am going to tell you that

your reluctance to do so has absolutely nothing to do

with the state of screen technology, despite your fer-vent

protestations to the contrary. (… where “ you” is a

statistically average fuzz of an individual, obviously.

Some people have legitimate physical issues with pro-longed

reading from emissive screens— and paper, for

that matter. They are in the statistical noise, however.)

In other words, if you believe you find books easier

to read in print than on the screen, you’re either

wrong or part of a minority so small it’s “ statistical

noise.” Proof of this? Hey, it’s a screed: proof is irrele-vant,

just like optical superiority. The next straw man

up for the burning: Complaints about ereaders. Sira-cusa

seems to object to limitations in current readers

being a reason ebooks didn’t take off as rapidly as he

wanted. That’s not the way the world works: Most

people don’t buy something that’s seriously flawed

because a later generation might be terrific.

Or maybe his real point is that ereaders are ir-relevant.

In any case, now ( on page 3 of the story)

we get to Siracusa’s real case, and, sigh, it’s a classic

expansion of “ it’s inevitable.”

I have some bad news for the bibliophiles. The be-loved,

less technically sophisticated information

conveyance with the pedigreed history doesn’t win.

He goes on at some length. There’s the Next Genera-tion

case, and also the “ the new always replaces the

old” theme, erroneous though that usually is. The

merits? Convenience, “ power” ( searching, etc.) and

“ potential.” And back to a historically flawed “ it

always works this way” argument: CDs entirely re-placed

LPs because they were more convenient;

MP3s entirely replaced CDs because they’re more

convenient. What more do you need to know? Not

only that ebooks inevitably replace print books— but

that you should go out there and switch, regardless of

your preference.

If it seems like I’ve spent an inordinate number of

words vainly chastising the book- reading public for

its stubbornly illogical tastes, rest assured that I be-lieve

the bulk of the blame lies elsewhere. It’s just

that the guilty party’s actions follow a formula that is

familiar to the point of cliché.

Yes, in fact, you have spent an inordinate number of

words telling readers that we’re wrong. That Siracu-sa’s

logic is the only logic that counts. He goes on

for an even larger number of words about how Big

Media gets it wrong, makes it pretty clear that he’s

an Apple fanboy and more. Siracusa says he’s pretty

much given up on print books; I’m guessing he’s

also not a big library user. I won’t comment on the

rest of the article. It’s interesting that there are no

user comments on the story; maybe people stopped

reading before they got to the end? In any case, it

turns out that Siracusa’s principle reason that

ebooks will replace print books really does boil

Cites & Insights September 2011 7

down to “ it’s inevitable”— the digital always, always

wins and wipes out the analog. Oh, and it’s up to

us— those of us who like print books— to go out

and buy ebooks. “ All I ask is that you give it an hon-est

try.” Why? I guess because it’s inevitable. Sorry,

but that’s not good enough.

Don’t Believe the E- book Skeptics

That’s “ Nathan Bransford, author” ( formerly a liter-ary

agent, now a tech worker) on his own blog as of

March 8, 2010. After discussing a Farhad Manjoo

piece on predictions, he moves on to his real topic:

When people make predictions about our e- book fu-ture,

I find myself mystified that some people are so

dismissive of their inevitability. I see blog posts and

comments around the Internet from people who look

at the nascent e- book landscape and think, “ Blech.

Expensive grayscale Kindles in a white piece of plas-tic?

No way e- books are going to catch on!” Some

people admit that they’re going to be a part of our

lives, but do so grudgingly and see them as yet anoth-er

signpost that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.

Here’s the thing they ignore: e- books are only going

to get better.

Hmm. There’s that i- word again. Oddly enough, I’m

partly in agreement with Bransford: Of course

ebooks are catching on. He has five main points.

( His topic sentence, but with my preferred no-hyphen

“ ebook”; my commentary.)

 The ebook reading experience is only going

to improve. Probably true, although when he

talks about “ creative design,” I suspect it’s

more of a mixed bag: Current ebook stand-ards

tend to limit design possibilities, not en-hance

them. Bransford even believes “ fancy

illustrated books” will be better as ebooks.

Maybe, but maybe not. I would note that in-teractivity

seems to be a big deal for Brans-ford;

I wonder whether it is for most readers

and most books.

 Ereaders and ebooks are only going to get

cheaper. Probably true.

 Finding the books you want to read will on-ly

get easier. He refers to things like Good

Reads and Shelfari. I’m a bit less sanguine,

but I hope he’s right.

 People are ignoring the digital trend. And

here we run into the classic Inevitability:

Everything that can be digitized is being digitized be-cause

it’s cheaper and easier to send pixels around the

world than physical objects. First it was music, then

newspapers, then movies. Books are next in line.

 Habits change.

Yes, yes. The smell of books, reading in the bathtub,

writing in the margins, a bookshelf full of books, etc.

etc.

People will still have that choice and there are some

books that simply can’t be replicated digitally. But

when faced with a better option, consumers shift ex-tremely

quickly. Right now the benefits of e- books

are a little murky except for early adopters and those

that can afford the devices. But that’s just right now.

Pretty soon they’re going to be better ( color! design!

portable! interactivity! instantaneous!) and cheaper.

Readers won’t pay a premium for an inferior print

product out of habit and nostalgia in great numbers.

The e- book era is going to be one of incredible inno-vation

and unlimited opportunity, and people who

don’t see e- books dominating the future of the book

world are ignoring the coming innovation and crea-tivity

and affordability. I refuse to believe the skeptics

and pessimists. Books are about to get better.

Now, in fact, if ebooks truly dominate the future of

the book world, then “ People will still have that

choice” is not true. You can’t have both Digital Inevi-tability

and meaningful continued choice. You

can— and I think you will— have a complex mar-ketplace.

Maybe the key sentence is this one: “ Readers

won’t pay a premium for an inferior print product

out of habit and nostalgia in great numbers.” That

might be true— but readers get to define “ inferior”

based on our own preferences, not Bransford’s.

This post does have comments— lots of them

( 121 at this writing). I won’t comment on them, but

if you’re reading, be sure to scroll down past all the

usual “ wonderful post! couldn’t agree more” com-ments

to get to more nuanced discussions. I’d like

Bransford’s commentary more if he wasn’t so wed-ded

to inevitability, as becomes even clearer in his

responses within comments. Incidentally, libraries

do show up— near the very end of the comments—

but only as sources of ebooks.

How I Got Over My Issues and Learned to Love

eBooks

Speaking of libraries, here’s one from a librarian:

Bobbi L. Newman, posting on June 14, 2010 at Li-brarian

by Day.

The idea of an ebook reader has intrigued me for a

while. I wanted one to read my nonfiction on. I high-light

my books, write in the margins and flag pages

( gasp!) so the appeal for me was being able to search

books and my notes fast and easy. I also read a lot of

pdf reports and I wanted to be able to read them on

Cites & Insights September 2011 8

the device and highlight and make notes in them too.

But like many librarians ( and others) I had a problem

with being tied to one device, issues with DRM, pric-ing,

ownership, compatibility and libraries so I kept

putting off committing to a device and reading

ebooks. Three things happened in pretty rapid suc-cession

to change my mind.

The three things? The iPad was announced; she dis-cussed

the situation with a friend who’s a Nook own-er;

and she read a post about reading on an iPhone. A

portion of the “ conversation with a Nook owner”:

I expressed a couple of concerns to her. The first was

about DRM and the limitations of ebooks. She told

me I needed to stop thinking about ebooks as if they

were just like books. She compared it to dining out,

you pay more for something you could have pre-pared

yourself at home, you pay for the atmosphere

and the experience and the convenience. This

“ clicked” with me. Sure I’m not getting the same

things I would I were purchasing a paper book, I’m

getting other things and it’s a trade- off.

Newman concluded that she already had “ the per-fect

ebook reader”— a netbook. She also tries to fol-low

her friend’s strategy to avoid overbuying: Never

buy a book until you’ve read the first free chapter.

Interesting comments— including one person who

says reading on a computer- like device is “ prepos-terous,”

which I don’t get at all.

I have little to say about this post… but the first

followup bothers me a bit more. That post is “ Why I

Love Kindle Desktop for eBooks,” posted the next

day. Here’s the first paragraph:

I really love using Kindle Desktop for reading ebooks

on my netbook. The great thing is there are so many

free books, and I don’t just mean old ones, that I

think everyone should use it even if they never plan

to buy a book, just to take advantage of the freebies.

“ I think everyone should use it” is offputting— but

maybe that’s just me. Otherwise, a good and useful

post with this close ( which really means Newman

doesn’t belong in this section, but never mind):

I’ll never stop buying paper books, I prefer them

for fiction and some nonfiction like travel essays.

But for how I use many nonfiction titles ebooks ac-tually

work much better for me.

Oh, by the way, Newman did buy a dedicated eread-er,

sometime between June 2010 and January 2011.

That’s another story, one not covered here.

Why Dedicated E- Readers, Like Kindle, Will Thrive

This one— which definitely is an “ ebooks are better

than print books” perspective— comes from an unu-sual

source: Tangled WEB, Luke Allnutt’s blog as

part of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty. It appeared

September 14, 2010. The direct topic is whether

dedicated ereaders can survive the onslaught of the

iPad and competitors— but consider the second

through fourth paragraphs:

Why would I want a device where I can only read

books, people asked, when I might want to watch

movies as well? Why would we want to e- read when

we can read in high- definition? Or: Why would we

want to read digitally at all, when print has served us

so well for hundreds of years?

I had to read a “ real” book the other day. It arrived in

a package in the mail, a big chunky carbon footprint

of a relic. When I read it, I struggled to hold its

weight in my hands. I shifted position in bed, trying

to find a comfortable position to balance its bulk, my

finger wedged in the fold, while its hard edges dug

into my stomach. When I placed it down on the table

-- my other hand absorbed with eating toast -- the

pages kept springing shut. I wanted to break its rot-ten

little spine.

I longed for my Kindle, its lightness in weight and

touch, its ergonomic complicity, the softness of e- ink

easier on the eye than the eye- swimming harshness

of ink upon paper. I had become a convert.

“ Eye- swimming harshness of ink upon paper”? “ I

wanted to break its rotten little spine”? Wow. His

real reason for preferring a Kindle is trickier, given

the evolutionary path of most “ dedicated” readers:

namely, that you’re forced to get off the grid.

The beauty of the Kindle is that you’re locked into

the book. There is no email or Facebook to distract

me. I can not multitask. The medium is designed to

focus me on the text and ( almost) nothing else.

Personally, I’ve never needed to buy a new device in

order to focus on one task, but whatever

works… except that most ereaders aren’t that dedi-cated

these days. There’s more ( quoting Carr and

Birkerts) and an ending I regard as odd and unfor-tunate

( as you might guess, this is another one

who’s apparently never heard of public libraries),

after his hope that competition drives the price of

ereaders down to a “ buy 10 books a year and get a

free Nook” level:

That might kill independent book stores, as we know

them now. Well, while I would never want to see

someone lose their livelihood, I always had a hard

time with independent book stores: the snooty staff,

the idea of reading to be seen, the cappuccino and

conversations. Reading, for me, has always been a soli-tary

unencumbered pleasure. E- readers -- with their

vast digital libraries accessible instantly from the com-fort

of my windowless room -- help it stay that way.

Cites & Insights September 2011 9

Kindle 3: e- book readers come of age

Sounds like a product review, doesn’t it? This ars

technica article by Nate Anderson, published in No-vember

2010, may include an actual review, but it

doesn’t start that way. Instead we get a little essay

about booksmellers, based on a supposed “ ram-shackle

San Diego bookstore” owned by an “ aging

hippie” who pushes booksmelling. If this is true, the

clown even had a business card saying “ We don’t

sell books, we smell books.” Which leads up to this:

The Kindle and its cousins strip a book to its words.

Gone are most formatting choices, typesetting pref-erences,

font choices, paper thicknesses, cover stock

decisions. Books are no longer artifacts.

The nature of the digital world, you say? Not quite.

When people ditched their CDs, they lost album art

and liner notes, but those were never a part of the ac-tual

listening experience. The music bursting from

headphone and speakers was still music, was the same

whether it came from a disc or a download. When the

liner notes vanished, the songs remained the same.

But with books, one handles the artifact constantly dur-ing

the reading experience. Losing the feel of that won-derful

paper in the old Oxford blue- backed hardcovers

means losing a part of the reading experience. My

booksmeller would be ( and, somewhere in California,

probably is) aghast at the sterilized world of the e-books,

every word stripped of its tangible context.

Right after that, we learn that Anderson hasn’t read

a print newspaper in years and doesn’t miss them—

and that digital downloads “ have won” and movies

are “ halfway there.”

Then we get an essay on the recent history of

ereaders, issues with the Kindle interface, the “ iPad-ification

of the Kindle” ( so much for Allnutt’s

splendid isolation!)— and a section in which Ander-son

admits that he’s inclined to do other stuff more

readily when he reads on an actual computer than

when he reads a print book. He thinks the Kindle,

despite apps, is still better in this regard. But I find

myself on the other side of this paragraph:

The counter- argument has some merit: if the books

were better written, they could engage our attention

on their own. Yet how many of us can cite some ex-perience

in which we preferred a series of quick- fixes

over something longer- lasting? For those who sub-scribe

to St. Paul’s dictum—” the good which I want

to do, I fail to do”— single- purpose devices may have

much to offer. Think of them as devices even Nick

Carr could love.

I believe— I hope— that if I had a netbook and start-ed

reading ebooks, good ebooks would keep me

monotasking. I know good online articles do that

now— they engage me. I still question the need to

buy a device primarily to avoid temptation.

There’s a lot more— it’s a typically long ars tech-nica

essay— with the payoff at the end, where it be-comes

clear that Anderson’s bought into Digital In-evitability

as the Only Solution:

Whatever e- books are and however useful they may

be, they aren’t “ books.” Instead, we get the content

with little to no attention to form and to design. Eve-rything

about a book is distilled into odorless words;

all else is waste to be thrown away.

The Kindle has become an attractive, easy- to- use text

reader. That’s not a slight; devices like the Kindle

have now become so attractive and functional that

it’s hard to imagine going without a reader in the fu-ture.

With this newest unit, I’m a convert to idea of

e- readers. I anticipate that one will always sit on the

living room coffee table, ready to present me with

several hundred years of terrific public domain con-tent,

DRMed e- books I’m quite sure I won’t need life-long

access to, the occasional PDF, technical docu-ments,

and ( perhaps) the best of the Web through

something like an Instapaper app. If vendor lock- in

disappears and prices drop another buck or two,

then current titles will join the list.

Perhaps the reader of the future won’t look like a

Kindle, but more like a multifunction tablet ( think

iPad or even the new Barnes & Noble Nook). In ei-ther

case, both classes of devices are now good

enough, and the content is finally varied enough,

that it’s possible to envision the wholesale shift to

digital texts. Plenty will be lost— including the

smell— but so much will be gained once the inanities

of non- interoperable DRM can be overcome and

lending rules approached rationality. Book lovers will

mourn the change and carp endlessly about typogra-phy,

design, cover art, and the facing page format,

but music and movies have already showed us that

people will make the switch to digital convenience

even at the expense of quality.

Another story with no comments. I wonder what it

is about very long ars technica stories? In any case,

I’m a lot less ready than Anderson is to dismiss the

“ carping” of book lovers— or to believe that we’ll be

forced to abandon print books. As to his other ex-amples,

CDs still sell in the billions of dollars— and

Blu- ray, where you pay more for quality, is doing just

fine. I expect ars technica writers to understand

complex futures more than, say, Wired’s “ ooh, shiny”

writers; maybe that’s naïve.

Cites & Insights September 2011 10

Buying books and/ or experiences: a consumer view

This final post for this group, by Lorcan Dempsey

on February 27, 2011 at his eponymous weblog,

is— as you might expect— squarely outside the

“ ebooks are taking over!” extreme. It’s a personal

reflection that makes a fine case for dedicated

ereaders— not as the future but as part of the future.

Here’s the start:

A while ago I was interested to observe that I had be-gun

to resist buying paperback novels. Before that, I

would often come away with one from a trip to our

local Border’s ( sadly now closing) or sometimes buy

a mystery novel in the airport ( especially on the re-turn

trip when good intentions about working on the

plane were likely to dissolve).

In thinking about it, I realised that I only wanted to buy

the experience not the physical item. My bag and our

house is already cluttered enough. I wanted the few

hours entertainment the book provided, not the small

burden of owning a bundle of paper to be shelved.

I might be inclined to say “ Psst. Public libraries for

books you don’t want to keep” but those do require

a bit of advance planning. And clearly it’s not an

either- or situation with Dempsey: he follows that

second paragraph with “ Now, of course there are

also books that I do want to own.” But in other cas-es,

well:

I have owned a Kindle for a little while now. If I want

to buy the experience but not the object, then it is a

Kindle purchase.

If it’s actually the same experience for your current

purposes ( probably true for mystery novels; possibly

less true for certain design- rich books, but those are

a minority), then it’s hard to fault that. He continues

with an interesting discussion: He likes being able

to highlight passages on the Kindle and retrieve

them later— and would like to see a hybrid of some

sort: that is, a discounted combination of print and

ebook for those who want both. Referring to one

book he purchased in print form:

There appears to be no discount for the customer

who would like to buy both Kindle and one of the

two paper versions. Now, I am unlikely to want to do

this for very many books but there are cases where it

would be a worthwhile option. I assume we will see

it offered more widely in due course.

ALA Editions does this already, and I believe some

other publishers are doing so— but Amazon doesn’t

make it easy ( or possible?).

I see what Dempsey’s saying about cases where

you want the reading experience and have no inter-est

in keeping the book— and I’m inclined to believe

that, where traveling is concerned, today’s ebooks

and ereaders may already be superior to some print

alternatives. I do most of my “ experience only”

reading from hardback print books, borrowed from

the library. Dropping back to a mass- market paper-back,

usually with smaller print, crowded margins,

inferior paper and the whole shebang, is an inferior

experience, and those library books are a bit heavy

if you’re traveling and reading a lot. Either a dedi-cated

ereader or a good multipurpose device ( e. g., a

netbook or pad) might be a better solution— if you

have the need.

Ebooks/ Ereaders Stink!

That heading’s also an overstatement, but the items

noted here are negative about ebooks, ereaders or

both— or commentaries about negative items. ( In

one case, at least, the writer’s more positive about

The Digital Future than I’d expect— but notes that

people aren’t there yet.)

Nicholson Baker vs./ on the Kindle

Two responses to Nicholson Baker’s “ A New Page“

in the New Yorker, which I discussed in the May

2011 Cites & Insights. The first (“ vs.”) is by Harry

McCracken and appeared July 27, 2009 on Tech-nologizer.

The second (“ on”) is by Marcus Banks

and appeared July 30, 2009 on Marcus’ World.

McCracken’s more sympathetic to Baker’s

takedown of the Kindle than I’d expect: “ Even if you

find much more value in the Kindle than Baker does,

as I do, you may find yourself nodding as he makes

the case for print and ticks off all of the Kindle’s down-sides.”

But McCracken’s one of those who don’t buy

the “ reads like real paper” claim for E- Ink screens.

Like me, Baker isn’t so sure that the conventional

wisdom that an LCD screen such as that on the iPh-one

is harder on the eyeballs than E Ink is true. Ac-tually,

he’s pleased with the iPod/ iPhone Touch ver-sion

of Kindle as a way to quickly dip into a snippet

of a book.

So am I– enough so that I’m flirting with the idea of

selling my Kindle 2, since I do most of my Kindle

reading on the go on my iPhone these days. I’ll let

you know if end up parting with it.

Really? The iPhone as a superior alternative to the

Kindle? I guess…

Banks came to Baker’s piece “ with some healthy

skepticism” given Double Fold, figuring Baker would

just bash the Kindle. “ But that’s not the case. He actu-ally

is hard on the Kindle, but after giving it a very

thorough evaluation and doing lots of research.” Banks

Cites & Insights September 2011 11

usefully highlights the closed- system issue and the

terms- of- service problem with library use of Kindles.

Banks runs in literary circles and finds in some

of them “ an unseemly fetish for paper.” He says,

“ Good writing is good writing, whatever the mode

of delivery.” I agree.

That said... print culture has evolved in exquisite ways

since the invention of the printing press, and it will

take a long time for our comparative clunky digital

media to catch up. But today it’s easy to forget that

standards for publishing books took a long time to

mature post- Gutenberg. And anyway, I bet the scroll

makers were plenty peeved when Gutenberg impetu-ously

unleashed the printing press on Europe….

[ W] hile it’s bracing to worry about the death of the

printed book, I just don’t see it happening. The new

often learns to coexist with the old. But in the mean-time

I hope the Kindle evolves into something that is

less censorship- prone and more flexible. I’ll probably

keep on hoping.

I’ve skipped a useful paragraph because you should

really read the post. I’m not disagreeing with much

of anything here ( big surprise!).

Why I’ll Never Buy a Kindle

I disagree with the tease line for this November 17,

2009 AlterNet item by Benjamin Dangl—” Fancy

new book readers save lots of trees, yes, but I’ll

pass.” The ecological issue is not settled and it

seems pretty clear that borrowing from public li-braries

is the most ecologically sound way to read

( just as bookstore return policies, especially for

mass- market paperbacks represent the least ecologi-cally-

sound aspect of books). But that’s not the

point of the piece.

Dangl is a booksmeller of sorts, riffing on Baker’s

comment about Kindle books being smoke- free:

[ A] lot of book- readers, myself included, enjoy the

smell and palpable history of a book from a library or

used bookstore. There is something comforting

about the shared experience of reading a physical

book many others have read, and will read in the fu-ture.

I like the story of a used book – a folded page,

the markings on the margins, the hints at its past.

Sure, sometimes they smell like cigarette smoke, but

they can also smell like the places they’ve been,

whether it’s a dusty old used bookstore or the tropi-cal

funk of Asunción, Paraguay. You can’t share a

Kindle book and so history doesn’t cling to it the

same way.

Dangl also mentions “ leftovers”— things left in

books by earlier readers. Frankly, I’ll pass. Indeed,

I’ll pass on much of this piece, and I’m a little wary

of this conclusion:

With a Kindle on the other hand, you know where it

will end up – with the rest of the toxic trash heaps that

our newest technical gadgets are eventually destined

for. Baker of the New Yorker writes that the Kindle is

“ made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the

world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate

and air- conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s

fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes,

it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last

boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years.”

But equally wary of the next brief paragraph:

However, the Kindle does save trees, and in a coun-try

that trashes 83 million tons of paper annually,

that’s no small task.

What portion of that paper is books? I’m guessing a

fairly small one. Then we get an odd quote from

Mother Jones, in which a writer chooses to estimate

San Francisco Public Library book circulation by

doing a thought experiment instead of, oh, looking it

up. ( California public library statistics are readily

available, in spreadsheet form, on the web.) The

writer’s guesstimate comes out to about 4.5 million

book circulations in 2008. The actual statistics show

about 10 million circulations in 2009— and if 60%

of those are books, that’s a considerably larger fig-ure.

The point’s well taken, however: shared books

save trees and carbon. But Dangl seems to assume

public libraries are shutting down like crazy.

All in all, an odd piece. I should be more sym-pathetic

than I am. Unclear whether there weren’t

any comments or whether they became invisible

after discussion closed.

Why I Hate Ereaders, And Doubt They’ll Ever Hit

the Mainstream

There’s a nuanced title— on a December 10, 2009

piece by Kat Hannaford at Gizmodo. After a slap at

Sony, Hannaford gives us this “ historical” gem:

Books, in the paper and ink form, have been around

for over a thousand years. You can bet your prized

copy of Cloud Computing For Dummies that when

the first book, the Diamond Sutra, was finished,

those still chipping their chisels into stone, or carv-ing

papyrus downed their tools and said something

along the lines of “ thank the lord, reading’s become

even easier now!” It was a much- needed change, un-like

the electronic books manufacturers like Sony

and Amazon have been trying to flog.

That’s right: Print books were immediately praised

by all concerned as great advances over earlier

forms. Not. In what I think may be Gizmodo’s signa-

Cites & Insights September 2011 12

ture style, Hannaford claims that Sony’s Librie was

the first ereader to come into “ prominence, much

like a curried egg sandwich on a humid day. In a

rainforest. In Indonesia.” Huh? Let’s set aside histor-ical

ignorance— the Librie was far from the first

heavily- promoted ereader, and Sony certainly didn’t

invent dedicated ereaders. She goes on:

A handful of people since then have invested the

amount they could’ve spent on a couple of phones

on one of these devices, but that’s not the last time

they’ve had to dig deep in their pockets, ignoring the

loose change they’d normally spend on a paperback,

searching instead for their credit card or Amazon gift

vouchers.

By December 2009, there were a damn sight more

than a “ handful” of people who’d purchased eread-ers.

But never mind. Hannaford also tells us eread-ers

“ are so physically large you also need to invest in

a manbag just to avoid being mugged” and then

gives us the reason you never see people using

ereaders on public transport ( which might have

been true in December 2009):

They’re impractical and expensive. It’s such a Sony

trait, to reinvent the wheel when the current model

is still going ‘ round perfectly. While Blu- ray may’ve

eclipsed the deceased HD DVD ( RIP), barely anyone

uses an SACD player anymore… Even less people

than that still use Betamax and MiniDisc. They, like

the ereader, are futile exercises in trying to create a

market for something that has little demand.

That’s the crux of my argument. Any company that

attempts to own market share in that area is fighting

a losing battle. Consumers won’t buy an electronic

book when they can get a paperback for the same

price or even less, and when they can lend it to

friends, read it in the bathtub or even sell it on and

make a percentage of their money back.

Our grandchildren won’t be housing first edition

ebook copies of War and Peace in an antiquated Kin-dle,

passed down from generation to generation.

There’s no opportunity to get sentimental over an e-book,

and when it comes to works of fiction and non,

which have had thousands of man- hours injected into

them, surely that’s the reason people read them? To es-cape

for a few hours turning some pages, and then

eventually handing it to a friend with a glowing rec-ommendation

to read it from cover to cover?

It appears Hannaford has a real hatred for Sony, so

much so that she lumps the Betamax ( which ap-peared

before VHS but was outmarketed) in with

the MiniDisc ( which was hit so hard by Big Media

litigation it had little chance to succeed)— and, of

course, ignores such disastrous failures as Trinitron

TV and CDs themselves.

Apparently, she’s not down on ebooks, just ded-icated

readers. In any case, she’s confident that

ereaders will be a “ short- lived industry.” Of course,

by discussing this piece at all, I’m taking Gizmodo

seriously, which may be a fundamental mistake.

Certainly the commenters don’t make that mistake:

Every single one of the comments I read was “ dis-cussing”

manbags, purses or the like. Not one com-ment

had anything to do with the rest of the article.

Are people really ready for Books? My attempt to

give away 100 of them

We skip over 2010 to Brian Mathews’ January 18,

2011 post at The Ubiquitous Librarian. Mathews’

campus ( UC Santa Barbara) does a “ one book” pro-gram

every year:

We purchase a ton of print copies, host a variety

events, activities, and exhibits, and bring in the au-thor

for a public lecture. We also work with our local

public library system and schools ( including high

schools) to push a common reading experience and

dialogue around a thought- provoking interdiscipli-nary

topic.

The 2011 book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta

Lacks, and the library gave away more than 2,000

print copies to kick things off.

In less than 3 hours we gave away 1,700 books. Be-fore

we started there were several hundred students

( and some faculty) waiting in line. This is the fifth

year of the program and it is great to see people get

excited about receiving a book. I’ve enjoyed walking

around campus and seeing those bright orange book

covers everywhere I look.

But Mathews wanted to try something new: The li-brary

also offered 100 ebook versions. It took some

doing— Random House suggested he talk with Am-azon,

and “ the Amazon fortress is kind of hard to

break,” but eventually he got an agreement to push

out copies. With a minimum deal of 100 copies. At

full price ($ 9.99), with no quantity discount. To

make it happen, he needed to send Amazon a

spreadsheet with readers’ email addresses and either

Amazon accounts or Kindle serial numbers. Which

admittedly seems like a lot of extra work in order to

pay full price for a hundred ebooks.

But he was willing to try.

We received some decent press and promotion, and

many of the academic departments blasted out

emails to their students. Our planning committee

was a little worried that we would not reach 100 in-terested

individuals, but that wasn’t a problem. Over

Cites & Insights September 2011 13

the span of five weeks we had 165 people submit

their info for our drawing: 18 faculty members, 33

campus staff, and the rest were students.

Of the 165 people, 22 of them were incomplete en-tries.

I put those aside and then randomly selected

100 from the pool to send to Amazon.

Of the 100 winners, Amazon found that 35 of them

were invalid. Many of them were “ deregistered.”

Long story short— I emailed the 35 invalid accounts

and shared the info that Amazon provided. I gave

them a deadline of two days to fix their account. 17

of them did. The remaining 18 copies were given to

others who were not the initial winners. This was a

bit of effort, especially with people emailing and ask-ing

when their book would arrive or what was wrong

with their account.

In other words, your chances of “ winning” if you

had a complete and active entry were awfully

good— only 25 people ( at most) didn’t win.

Mathews adds some advice for Amazon before

returning to the ebooks themselves.

We promoted the eBook copies fairly heavily and

while I am happy that we were able to reach the 100

marker, I was surprised at how difficult it was to sign

people up to take a free digital version of the book.

With a campus of 18,000 students, 800 faculty, and

1,000+ staff I thought there would be greater demand

than 165 people.

One thing I noticed via the demographics was that

about one third of the student respondents were from

engineering or computer science. I didn’t expect this,

however, it doesn’t surprise me. Perhaps this indi-cates

the population that is quickly embracing digital

books?

The other aspect that stood out was the wide variety

of devices entered into the drawing. There were

about 30 Kindles in the bunch, but the rest were

spread across other platforms ( iPads, Androids, lap-tops,

etc). Undoubtedly, many students are interested

in receiving books on their phones.

Mathews quotes from feedback from a dyslexic stu-dent

who uses audiobooks for all reading and who

says, “ there is still something magical about actual

books that seems to be missing from eBooks.”

Mathews does say “ It’s inevitable that eBooks are

going to be the primary format for general collec-tions

in the future” ( which surprises me, coming

from Mathews) and goes on:

What strikes me about this patron’s comments ( a

young Gen Y- er) is the affinity to print despite her re-liance

on digital editions. I feel like a big part of my

role over the next 30 years of library leadership is go-ing

to be directed toward helping this transition oc-cur—

providing patrons with experiences and oppor-tunities

to make the leap from the page to the device.

But if I’m being honest then I have to admit that I

feel like I am betraying them somehow— I’m definite-ly

not in the “ print is dead” camp, but if I’m going to

buy into the “ Education for the 21st Century” and

the goal of “ preparing students to compete in the

global economy” than this is important. It is my our

responsibly to ensure that they gain exposure and

experience with digital content in all it’s various

forms, including the long form ( books).

Mathews says again in the next paragraph “ the fu-ture

is digital”— apparently only digital. Why? Be-cause

it is, I guess. It bothers me that Mathews feels

it’s his responsibility to “ give the impression to our

campus community that the library endorses eBooks

and that this is something they should explore as

well.” The reader’s preferred format is irrelevant? In

comments, he refers to the transition away from

print ( it’s inevitable, y’know) and says his experi-ment

was about generating interest in reading. But it

wasn’t: It was about pushing ebooks.

The Dangers of E- books

That’s by Richard Stallman, a single- page PDF dat-ed

2011. Stallman has a distinctive viewpoint. Go

read the whole thing ( it’s short), considering his

points if perhaps not agreeing with his solutions. I

certainly don’t.

Quality not Quantity

This short piece, by Brian at Survival of the Book on

June 26, 2011, probably doesn’t belong in this sec-tion

any more than Mathews’ piece does. He quotes

and endorses a comment from Don Linn:

We are, at bottom, a creative business. We are fighting

for share of mind against hundreds of alternatives and

if we do not put our best foot forward with regard to

the titles we acquire, the care we give to the editorial

process, and to the production quality of both our

print and digital books, we won’t ( and don’t deserve

to) survive and prosper. When I see a poorly con-ceived,

apparently unedited or copy- edited, badly de-signed

book, that is produced ( whether in hardcover,

paperback or in a digital edition) in what is obviously

the cheapest possible way, I fear for our future. Re-sources

are limited, but if we can’t produce consistent

quality, then let’s reduce quantities until we can. No-body

wants to buy a bad product.

That speaks, directly or indirectly, to part of my de-sired

future for books, publishing and readers. It’s

my distinct impression that much of Big Publishing

is not a creative process and has gone for quantity at

Cites & Insights September 2011 14

the expense of quality, with poor editing and inade-quate

design. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Getting back to ebooks, Brian recounts two re-cent

anecdotes about ebooks:

First, someone told me that he travels a lot for work

and relies on the iBooks app on his ipad to read digi-tal

books. But he has started buying “ hard copies,” as

he said, as well, because often the plane pulls out

from the gate but then taxis, and while everyone

with “ hard copies” is reading away, he can’t read his

e- book because passengers have been told to turn off

mobile devices. Second, a coworker ( though some-one

not in publishing) admitted that she followed

my advice and read Jennifer Egan’s fantastic book,

the Pulitzer Prize- winning A Visit from the Goon

Squad - but on her Kindle. Well there is a whole

chapter done in Powerpoint, and it’s a surprisingly

touching and sweet chapter, and it simply did not

work on the Kindle. This person feebly claimed, “ I

got the gist,” but she clearly didn’t. Such a shame. A

whole chapter lost? That is just the kind of “ bad

product” Linn references above.

Take it for what it’s worth.

Print Books Are or Should Be

Doomed!

Let’s continue with wildly oversimplified section

headings, this time for the flipside— articles about

why print books should die or will die.

By any other name

This essay by Mandy Brown appeared on January

12, 2009 on A working library. The full title of the

blog: “ A working library is an exploration of— and

advocate for— the reading experience.” Which

makes this particular post all the more interesting.

After a brief scroll- to- book intro, Brown says:

The book is an object of technological invention that

has functioned with only minimal advancement for

centuries. Until recently, there was nothing broken,

and therefore nothing to fix.

That age has ended. We are now ushering in a new age

of books which exist without any physical presence at

all, which can be transmitted across oceans in mo-ments,

in which annotations and criticisms can be

shared in ways no one of the seventeenth century could

ever have imagined. ( Indeed, ways we of the twenty-first

century are only beginning to understand.)

So the age in which books worked just fine has end-ed?

Why? Unless fast transmission is a critical dif-ference

for a book- length text, I guess we must take

it on faith. Brown’s point, as far as I can tell, is that

ebooks shouldn’t be called books, even with “ a sly

vowel up front… as if we’re afraid to really admit

how much has changed.”

Dramatic changes in form require equally dramatic

changes in terms.

The rose can go by any other name because the rose

is unchanging; the book is not so constant. The

ebook is an experiment, a study of possibilities, an

idea in search of a name. We will know we have ar-rived

at a new form when we learn what to call it.

Maybe. Somehow, I can’t get past the simple supposi-tion

that print books are suddenly broken. There’s

not a thing in the essay that justifies that supposi-tion.

So it goes.

Farewell to the Printed Monograph

This March 25, 2009 post by Rhonda Gonzales on @

the Library is commentary on a March 23, 2009

“ News” item of the same name at Inside Higher Ed.

That item discusses the decision of the University of

Michigan Press to make most of the monographs

the press publishes digital- first. It’s an interesting

news piece on what I consider an interesting— and

not at all negative— situation. That is: It’s simply not

feasible to produce traditional press runs for most

niche scholarly monographs ( e. g., 50 of the 60

monographs Michigan publishes each year). The

new Michigan process will provide for printed mon-ographs—

but using print- on- demand technology,

which is almost certainly the appropriate technique

for any monograph likely to sell fewer than 1,000

copies. In other words, Michigan is being sensible:

Preparing high- quality digital editions for books

that simply don’t have the sales volume to support

traditional print technology. The results should be

reasonably priced print volumes for libraries and

scholars that need or want them. Everybody wins.

( The shift also makes the UM Press part of the li-braries,

which also seems sensible.) On the other

hand, it appears that Michigan wants to use site li-censes

for all of the digital monographs— and that

may be an issue.

Not surprisingly, one comment goes much fur-ther—”

The future of publishing is electronic” and

the digital versions should have hypertext and rapid

updating. At the same time, “ Joe Editor” takes a dis-tinctly

dim view of the whole idea…. and a copy edi-tor

slams this idea because it will lead to more un-dergrad

plagiarism.

Rhonda Gonzales read the item “ with a fair bit

of sadness. And a little skepticism.”

1. I haven’t met anyone yet who actually prefers to

read an entire monograph on a computer screen,

Cites & Insights September 2011 15

Kindles notwithstanding. Sure, there are good rea-sons

why a Kindle or other similar device is useful;

like when traveling or reading in bed at night. And

yes, electronic texts are useful for adaptive technolo-gy

and also for full- text searching. But for regular

cover- to- cover reading of a monograph, given the

choice, most of our patrons have indicated they still

prefer print.

2. I am concerned about the price ramifications of

this announcement. Especially the following excerpt:

“ In terms of pricing, Sullivan said that Michigan

planned to develop site licenses so that libraries

could gain access to all of the university press books

over the course of a year for a flat rate. While details

aren’t firm, the idea is to be “ so reasonable that may-be

every public library could acquire it.”

There’s more, mostly having to do with her experi-ences

as head of a smaller academic library. All of it’s

worth reading— but it appears to ignore the print-on-

demand option.

When will the print book disappear?

That question comes from Robert Slater, The Overly

Caffeinated Librarian, posting on November 6, 2009.

He’s been “ itching to try out an e- paper device”

since he first read about them in 2001— and yet,

eight years later, he hasn’t sprung for one.

Lately, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the Kindle being

the harbinger of the end for print books, and wanted

to toss in my two cents. I like the idea of e- paper in

particular, the main selling point of the Kindle and

similar third ( or fourth depending on who you ask)

generation e- readers over other portable devices like

netbooks. However, the idea of a dedicated device for

reading books just doesn’t do it for me ( other than a

good old- fashioned print book, of course – since

that’s a single use device too… :).

Slater does seem to subscribe to the “ tipping point”

theory— that there’s a point at which ebooks will

become the norm— but thinks it’s years and possibly

dozens of years away. He faults the single- purpose

ereader as part of that issue: He doesn’t really want a

single- purpose device.

What we lack ( we being the players in the book indus-try,

from publishers to distributors, including librar-ies)

is that truly magical multi- purpose ubiquitous de-vice

that will finally launch the e- book to the place of

prominence we all know it will eventually achieve.

“ We all know”? Once again, the Oscar Brown, Jr.

classic “ The Lone Ranger and Tonto” comes to mind,

but the key line could be misconstrued as racist, so I

won’t quote it. But Slater’s certain not only that we’ll

get there but that we’re all waiting for it:

E- paper is great for static text ( and low power con-sumption),

but ( right now) terrible for general pur-pose

use as a laptop/ cell phone screen ( grayscale on-ly

right now, with a ridiculously limited number of

shades of grey, and absolutely atrocious screen re-fresh

rates, compared to other display technologies).

Once there’s a way to do both – display static text in

a way that’s pleasant for extended reading ( and con-sumes

very little power) as well as to display full col-or

dynamic content ( possibly even including two

display types on a single device) at a reasonable price

point, I think we’ll see the sudden and massive shift

to e- consumption that we’ve all been waiting for.

But even then, I think there’ll be a fairly long, slow

dwindling of print books, with them still represent-ing

a fairly significant chunk of publications/ sales for

several decades to come ( at least as significant as the

current < 2% of sales that e- books make up of the en-tire

book market). [ Emphasis added.]

Some of us are neither waiting for, nor desire, nor

even expect a “ sudden and massive shift to e-consumption.”

A Book Is Not an Object

Here’s a curious, relatively brief, post— by Steven

Harris on November 22, 2009 at Collections 2.0. Cu-rious

for several reasons. He quotes Cory Doctorow

approvingly on not getting hung up on the notion of

the book as object and, I suspect, correctly ques-tions

some writers who seem to confuse the whole

publishing structure with print books. But:

In fact, I think the greatest objection to ebooks as we

see them now is their potential impact on the econom-ic

aspects of publishing. Many factors contribute to

the fear of ebooks within the publishing market. Ama-zon

subsidizes the cost of ebooks by underselling the

competition, which diminishes the profits that pub-lishers

and writers might realize. Digital content is

easily copied and transmitted across the Internet,

making publishers fear an age of piracy like that expe-rienced

in the music industry. And Google is digitizing

“ all the world’s knowledge,” and seemingly cutting au-thors

and publishers out of the action. None of those

activities, however, are intrinsic to the nature of

ebooks. Those who fear and castigate the ebook as ob-ject

have aimed their emotion in the wrong direction.

I don’t see those connections, particularly where

Google’s project is concerned, and I don’t think they

have much to do with dislike of ebooks (“ fear” of

ebooks?). I have to note two things: Sometimes a

book is also an object— and typographic designers

and layout artists have good reason to fear ebooks,

given that most ebook standards seem to strip away

their efforts. And:

Cites & Insights September 2011 16

… Our current online technology has already demon-strated

its ability to empower many more people to

speak, write, and perform. Some from this expanded

speaker- base will make a good living at their craft.

Most won’t. Some will exert real cultural impact and

influence. Most won’t. If this networked and digital

commerce has the effect of diminishing the profits of a

few blockbusters, I won’t really feel that bad. There

will still be lots of people around who want to tell sto-ries

and create art, even if it is in the form of an ebook.

I don’t think this has much to do with ebooks vs.

print books either. The creation of print books has

been democratized as thoroughly as the creation of

ebooks. ( Maybe more so. I can turn a Word docu-ment

into a handsome print book easily; so far, I

can’t create standard ebook formats as easily.) And,

well, I’m another who “ won’t really feel that bad” if

blockbuster profits are diminished. I just don’t see

much connection between that discussion ( with

which I agree) and ebooks as objectless content.

Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print

Here’s another case where I discussed the original

article ( by Craig Mod) in the May 2011 issue— and

didn’t buy what he was selling. This citation is for a

laudatory discussion of Mod’s piece by Nick Bilton,

on March 5, 2010 on Bits ( a New York Times blog).

Mod may be a book designer and publisher—

but he’s also a programmer. And there’s some reason

to believe that Mod doesn’t care much about actual

reading. He doesn’t think reading requires or bene-fits

from physicality— and he’s not fond of physical

metaphors within ereaders. It’s pretty clear that Bil-ton

is all for this, as he closes his brief comment:

For hundreds of years, we’ve been consuming infor-mation

on static pages, and for the most part, this con-tent

has been presented with a beginning, middle and

end. Nonlinear, digital platforms will prompt a new

range of thinking about stories and how to tell them.

Guess what? Stories had beginnings, middles and

ends long before there were books; a story that

doesn’t have that structure is ( in my opinion) not a

story, but something else. Exploration? Maybe— and

the enormous success of more than a decade of hy-perlinked

“ novels” may say something about explo-ration

as a mode of telling or reading stories.

In this case, I find the comments— lots of

them— far more interesting than the post. I won’t

attempt to go through them all, but there’s one par-agraph—

from a Kindle owner ( who lives it) who’s

also a big physical book reader and buyer— that I

think is worth quoting:

What all this boils down to is that in the view of the

technorati NEW always has to replace OLD, instead

of simply complementing it. Why is that?

Shelf Life

This odd little blog post, by Virginia Heffernan on

March 4, 2010 at The New York Times Magazine’s

“ The Medium,” is mostly an attack on booksmell-ers—

and, more generally, on print books as any-thing

other than carriers of text. Frankly, I don’t find

Heffernan’s writing coherent enough for me to be

sure what she’s trying to say. The first paragraph

seems to be a heartfelt endorsement of the lack of

context of a Kindle:

People who reject e- books often say they can’t live

without the heft, the texture and — curiously — the

scent of traditional books. This aria of hypersensual

book love is not my favorite performance. I sometimes

suspect that those who gush about book odor might

not like to read. If they did, why would they waste so

much time inhaling? Among the best features of the

Kindle, Amazon’s great e- reader, is that there’s none of

that. The device, which consigns all poetry and prose

to the same homely fog- toned screen, leaves nothing

to the experience of books but reading. This strikes

me as honest, even revolutionary.

This— that paragraph— strikes me as fourth- rate

snark, even though I’m not much for booksmelling

myself. The rest of the piece? She trivializes an ap-parently

well- known essay about book collecting—

which is a different pastime than reading— by saying

“ we’re not talking Hello Kitty here.” Huh? Her re-sponse

to Walter Benjamin’s honest assertion that

collectors buy books, in some cases, because of their

physicality and provenance is— well, frankly, inco-herent.

Maybe she’s saying it’s hard to treat ebooks

as collectibles. Damned if I know.

The comments— 22 of them— include a number

that are much better written and more coherent

than the piece itself. Were it not for the comments,

which I commend to your attention ( some pro-print,

some pro- ebook, some more complex), I

might ignore this sad little column entirely.

The End of Books? ( For Me, At Least?)

Will Richardson posted this on April 24, 2010 at

weblogg- ed. The title itself puts the post firmly in

this subcategory— Richardson seems only too happy

to swear off print books, even as he says “ Life feels

better when I’m surrounded by books” and loves

that his kids love books.

But he put the Kindle app on his iPhone and

“ was surprised in that the experience actually wasn’t

as bad as I thought it would be.” Then he started

Cites & Insights September 2011 17

downloading books to his “ shiny new iPad” and

learned about a function in the Kindle app that

“ syncs up all of my highlights and notes to my Am-azon

account.” And concluded:

Game. Changer.

All of a sudden, by reading the book electronically as

opposed to in print, I now have:

 all of the most relevant, thought- provoking pas-sages

from the book listed on one web page, as in

my own condensed version of just the best pieces

 all of my notes and reflections attached to those

individual notes

 the ability to copy and paste all of those notes

and highlights into Evernote which makes them

searchable, editable, organizable, connectable

and remixable

 the ability to access my book notes and highlights

from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

Game. Changer.

There’s more to it, and a fair number of comments. I

won’t argue the points— for Richardson and for his

form of reading ( all books?). When I’m reading, es-pecially

fiction, I’m not annotating or highlighting;

I’m engrossed in the story. The last thing I’d want is

a permanent page of book notes and highlights on

books I’ve read for pleasure. But that’s me.

How many people read all books in this high-lighting-

and- annotating mode? I wonder. Richard-son

thinks about pushing his kids in that direction;

is that really the way people should read books? I

don’t have an answer.

Print Books Are Great!

Another oversimplified heading, this time for items

that appear to focus primarily on the superiority of

print books. ( Trust me: We’ll get to the section

comparing and contrasting ebooks and print books

real soon now.)

Designing Design

This is a book review, posted by Andy Polaine on

March 15, 2009 at The Designer’s Review of Books.

The book reviewed is Designing Design by Kenya

Hara. The book isn’t primarily about books; it’s

about design in general. I note it here because of

these two paragraphs:

“ If putting as many words as come into your head in

some place that’s convenient and easy to access is

your goal, you can house them on the web or on

something like CD. But here I’ve chosen the medium

called a book. That’s because I want to hand it to

people as an object with a resistant weight.”

“ If electronic media is reckoned a practical tool for in-formation

conveyance, books are information sculp-ture;

from now on, books will probably be judged ac-cording

to how well they awaken this materiality,

because the decision to create a book at all will be

based on a definite choice of paper as the medium.”

While I believe print books will continue to be

widely published and used as text carriers because

they work so well in that regard, I think that quota-tion

is also apt for some subset of books— a subset

that, while small, will continue to be important.

2010— the year of e- readers ( or why print media

is here to stay)

Andrew Finegan offered this perspective on January

8, 2010 at Librarian Idol. He links to other essays,

then “ digresses”:

I want to briefly discuss what seems to be a false di-chotomy

between bibliophiles and tech- lovers.

From these articles, and many others, there is a very

conscious sense that this year is going to be a big

year for e- readers…

And here’s the thing. I absolutely love the fact that if I

want to, I will be able to download a new release book

into my device, and have that immediate satisfaction

of being able to start reading it in a lightweight device.

I could happily lie in bed and read a book on an e-reader,

the same way that I read a book. After all, I do

most of my recreational online reading that way.

But here’s the catch. I like to own my favourite

books, and have them on a shelf for my own re-reading

purposes. But moreso, my personal shelf col-lection

is a part of my life. Whenever I need inspira-tion,

cheering up, profound reflection on life, or the

beauty of poetry, I can go straight up, gaze over the

titles, pick one out, and flick through them. My col-lection

is part of my personality, and the visual stim-ulus

of physical books on a shelf is a necessary part

of my natural habitat. It’s my home.

Furthermore, I like to share. If somebody comes over

to my house, and expresses an interest in one of my

books, I’ll take it off, and thrust it upon them, saying

“ Here! Read it, and then come back and tell me what

you thought about it.” For me, the mutual love, or

hatred, or impassioned disagreement over books are

what defines much of my relationship with people.

And, of course, this is all legal, because I paid to

own the book. I can read it, and then give it to a

friend to read, and so on. In the same way, libraries

pay for books, so that they can be shared with a vast

amount of the community. And then, once they

start falling apart, or are no longer en vogue, then

can be sold off in a second- hand book sale, and

somebody can have the pleasure of owning a book

Cites & Insights September 2011 18

that has been physically enjoyed by countless of

other people in the community…

When you download an e- book, you don’t own it.

You own a licence to read it, in the same way that

you would own a licence to use a piece of computer

software. But you may not share it. Unless, of course,

you physically give your e- reader to a friend to bor-row,

so that they can read it that way. You don’t own

the book - you own the right to view the contents of

the book on your device, but that’s all.

And it’s in this respect, that I honestly do not believe

that the e- reader will “ replace” the book, any more

than pay- per- view film has replaced DVDs. I use

iView ( for example) to watch TV and films from

ABC, but I also buy films and TV shows on DVD that

I can share with other people…

And, again, I will doubtlessly have my own portable

e- reader in tow, as a solitary reading device. But I will

never underestimate the power of the physical book

in building communities, friendships, and fostering a

love of literature and culture in the world.

I’ve omitted portions of this post to encourage you

to read the original. I don’t have much to add.

HP, UMich deal means a “ real” future for scanned

books.

Here we are back to the University of Michigan— but

this time it’s the library directly and an interesting

arrangement with HP as reported in this piece, writ-ten

by Jon Stokes and appearing “ about a year ago“

( October 2009 based on the URL) in ars technica.

The arrangement? Michigan is scanning rare

books. Then:

HP’s BookPrep service, currently in beta, will take in

raw scans of books, clean them up to prepare them

for re- printing, and then offer print- on- demand cop-ies

for sale via normal online book distribution

channels like Amazon. This new arrangement mixes

a number of aspects of existing efforts like Google

Books and current print- on- demand ( PoD) offerings,

while being a little different from either, and in the

process it points the way to a real future for the digi-tal

contents of libraries’ special collections.

Michigan will provide the books for free online ( to

the extent that they can legally do so, which will be

the case for rare books dated earlier than 1923 and

many dated later). Those wanting print copies can

buy them, presumably at plausible prices. It’s a good

use of print- on- demand technology and seems likely

to keep print books relevant in a number of ways.

“ People around the world still value reading books in

print,” said Andrew Bolwell, HP’s director of New

Business Initiatives, in a press release. HP clearly

hopes that this statement will continue to hold true

for some time to come.

As the article notes, lots of institutions have been

and are scanning special collections, so this could

be the first of many similar deals.

Hopefully, HP will announce more such deals in the

near future, because there are plenty more institutions

that would love to take the terabytes of raw, high-resolution

scans that are sitting on dusty hard drives

and make them available to the viewing public.

This time there are a handful of comments, some of

them useful.

Why e- books will never replace real books

Jan Swafford’s piece, posted June 29, 2010 at Slate,

carries the title “ Bold Prediction” on the article itself

and the title above as its web page title and tease—

one of Slate’s charming/ infuriating practices. It’s a

claim I’d be reluctant to make for two reasons:

 “ Never” is a very long time.

 “ Real books” implies something about ebooks

that I don’t believe— that is, that they’re not

real books.

That is what Swafford’s saying, as emphasized by the

first paragraph:

Because we perceive print and electronic media dif-ferently.

Because Marshall McLuhan was right about

some things.

We then get a discussion of McLuhan— what he

said, how things have worked out, his hot/ cool me-dium

dichotomy, and of course his seeming claim

that context ( the medium) counts for more than

content ( the message).

McLuhan didn’t think content was unimportant, but

he believed the delivering technology is what ulti-mately

involves and evolves us. “ The ‘ message’ of any

medium or technology is the change of scale or pace

or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” TV

changed the world, in ways good and bad. And a

computer screen is essentially a TV. Have you noticed

the blank absorption on the faces of people watching

TV ( except, of course, for sports and politics)? It’s

much the same as people watching a computer screen.

Pardon me while I scream a little. The suggestion

that using a computer is “ watching a screen” with a

look of “ blank absorption…” Not happening for me.

( Swafford also claims that HDTV is still a cool, that

is, low- information, medium as compared to mov-ies.

I find that claim bizarre.)

Now Swafford discusses the process that “ most

writers” follow:

Cites & Insights September 2011 19

Here’s how it works, with me and with most writers I

know ( because I’ve asked). I’ve used computers for

more than 25 years. I draft prose on- screen, work it

over until I can’t find much wrong with it, then dou-ble-

space it and print it out. At that point I discover

what’s really there, which is ordinarily hazy, bloated,

and boring. It looked pretty good on- screen, but it’s

crap. My first drafts on paper, after what amount to

several drafts on computer, look like a battlefield.

Here, for example, is a photo of the initial first page

printout of this article.

Double- space it? Really? I cheerfully admit that I’m

not a Great Writer, but I also claim that what I pro-duce

on- screen isn’t crap. I do go through one print

review stage ( for books, columns and C& I essays—

not for blog posts) but rarely see the kind of “ battle-field”

revisions Swafford seems to do. I dunno;

maybe I’m just a hack.

I’ve taught college writing classes for a long time,

and after computers came in, I began to see peculiar

stuff on papers that I hadn’t seen before: obvious

missing commas and apostrophes, when I was sure

most of those students knew better. It dawned on me

that they were doing all their work on- screen, where

it’s hard to see punctuation. I began to lecture them

about proofing on paper, although, at first, I didn’t

make much headway. They were unused to dealing

with paper until the final draft, and they’d been

taught never to make hand corrections on the

printout. They edited on- screen and handed in the

hard copy without a glance.

Maybe. I’m fairly certain that people do more revi-sions

on the screen than they did in the days of

handwritten drafts and typewriters. There’s another

paragraph about students’ inability to edit properly

on- screen. Of course, it cuts both ways:

For years, after I got a computer I held onto my ro-mantic

attachment to writing first drafts by hand on

long legal sheets. Then halfway through a book- for-hire

I got in deadline trouble and for the sake of time

had to start drafting on computer. I discovered, to

my chagrin, that drafting first on computer tended to

come out better than by hand. Computer drafts were

cleaner and crisper. But, after that, I also discovered,

paper rules. The final polish, the nuances, the pithy

phrases, the tightening of clarity and logic— those

mostly come from revising on paper.

Hmm. Oddly enough, I find myself arguing with

some of the punctuation and writing in that para-graph,

edited in paper form by someone who teach-es

writing. Has my mind been ruined by writing on

a computer? Perhaps.

Anyway, the piece continues by lauding ebooks

for certain uses and includes a paragraph that’s both

true and by now sort of a cliché, forgiving “ real

books” as an unfortunate choice:

So real books and e- books will coexist. That has

happened time and again with other new technolo-gies

that were prophesied to kill off old ones. Autos

didn’t wipe out horses. Movies didn’t finish theater.

TV didn’t destroy movies. E- books won’t destroy pa-per

and ink. The Internet and e- books may set back

print media for a while, and they may claim a larger

audience in the end. But a lot of people who care

about reading will want the feel, the smell, the

warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spir-itual

involvement of print.

I think that’s true ( substituting “ print books” for

“ real books”), although I have no idea whether

ebooks will eventually “ claim a larger audience”

than print books. Why am I being critical of this

article? Partly because I think it’s important to ad-dress

articles on “ my side” at least as critically as I

address those that regard ebooks as the only future.

An amusing sidenote, noted in a correction:

This article, proudly edited in print form because that’s

what writers do, originally misspelled “ Jane Austen.”

How could that happen?

Lots’o’comments— 145 in all. Some worthwhile

( I didn’t read the whole theme), some not so much,

and of course a few “ only technology matters” bits

of nonsense.

Mashable Readers Choose Real Books Over E- books

Here’s another use of the unfortunate “ real books”

instead of print books, in a July 24, 2010 piece by

Ben Parr at Mashable. That website runs a weekly

“ Web Faceoff” poll— and got the wording right in

the poll itself: “ Which do you prefer: e- books or

print books?”

I’m going to quote portions of two central para-graphs.

See if you can spot the problem:

We wanted to know whether you, the readers, pre-fer

the digital technology of the e- book or still de-sire

the feel of the paper in your hands. After over

2,000 votes…

… the printed word scored the victory! With 41.9%

of the tallies ( 898 votes), the printed book was the

clear favorite over the e- book’s 23.24% of the ballot

( 498 votes). Interesting enough, a lot of you voted

that you like both formats for reading your favorite

novel; 34.86% of you ( 747 votes) said that it was a

tie between the e- book and the print book.

Well, no: Nobody voted that they like both formats

“ for reading your favorite novel.” Roughly 35% of

Cites & Insights September 2011 20

the respondents chose “ Tie: Both have their ad-vantages.”

That’s a clear statement and has nothing

to do with novels.

I’m bemused by one comment claiming the poll

is invalid because it allows people to say they like

both ebooks and print books— it should force them

to choose only one. Really? One post- poll comment

seems to say the results must be really old, since

once you’ve “ experienced the iPad” there’s no going

back. Since the poll was explicitly stated as “ posted

this week,” we have here anecdotal evidence that

some people using iPads are unable to retain what

they’ve read. That anecdata can safely be extrapolat-ed

to, well, one person.

I find this piece interesting because Mashable

presumably has a tech- oriented audience. Other-wise,

the results aren’t remarkable. Let’s restate

them: 58% of respondents read or anticipate reading

ebooks; 76% read print books. In some ways, that

first number is more impressive.

iPad, Meet Your Nemesis

That’s the direct article title for this October 7, 2010

piece by Jim Lewis at Slate— but the subtitle and

web page title is “ Why art books won’t become e-books

any time soon.” It has an odd start, with Lew-is

proclaiming “ it’s becoming increasingly clear that

Kindles, iPads, and the like will soon be the domi-nant

medium— if, indeed, they aren’t already.” ( The

link is to TechCrunch’s version of the silly “ tipping

point” when Amazon reported ebooks outselling

hardcover books.)

I’m not sure what causes Lewis to assume dom-inance,

but since he’s a novelist and mostly just

wants people to read, maybe that’s OK. This piece is

about a different kind of book:

Unless you’re very dedicated, and very well- traveled,

most of the art and photography you’ve seen has

been on the printed page as well. Will these, too,

gradually be replaced with e- books? I suspect not,

and I certainly hope not, but to understand why, we

need to indulge in a little metaphysics.

I could argue that Lewis is simplistic when he says,

“ A book— or, for clarity’s sake, let’s say a work of lit-erature—

is impervious to the constraints of its physi-cal

medium.” I don’t believe it’s that straightforward.

But never mind. He’s saying that this is not true for

paintings, photography and, to a lesser extent, mov-ies

and music. ( Really? Recorded music is inherently

affected by the medium? Not sure I buy that one—

that my experience listening to a lossless WAV audio

file on my computer, or for that matter a 320K MP3

for anything but orchestralmusic, is significantly dif-ferent

than my experience listening to a CD.)

He moves on to “ arithmetic”— the resolution of

various media. Technically, he’s wrong on at least

one point:

Monitors, inkjet printers, and books all make images

out of dots, in the first case of projected light, in the

second and third of light reflected off of paper.

Letterpress books, at least, do not make images out

of dots. But never mind… His comparisons of reso-lution

are familiar. It’s true that movement toward

600 dpi, probably minimal for really good artistic

reproduction of photographs and painting, is pain-fully

slow ( and, given consumer acceptance of 130-

160 dpi as “ good enough,” seems likely to remain

slow). His point on how you see is also good—

problems with color accuracy, the difference be-tween

projected and reflected light, etc. ( That dif-ference

is one reason photos can look so remarkably

vibrant on a big- screen TV or really good monitor:

The resolution isn’t as good, but they gain from the

same effect that makes stained glass windows so

marvelous.)

The article’s worth reading, noting that it’s

about a relatively small segment of the book market,

namely art books and photography collections.

Comments are interesting, with one commenter

persistently arguing the digital case, including

comments on other people’s comments.

The Real Kindle- Killer

Let’s close this section with this piece by Richard

Curtis, CEO of E- Reads ( an ebook publisher),

which appeared May 21, 2011 on e- reads. It’s im-portant

to note that Curtis is both an ebook pioneer

and makes his living publishing ebooks. I’m going

to quote the fun part of the post, but it’s the serious

part— longer and more involved— that I believe is

truly important.

Here’s the fun part:

Behold, emerging from 500 years of beta testing, the

real Kindle Killer. Like so many other reading devices

it’s got a cutesy name. It’s called The Book.

Let’s review some of its features.

* It’s really sleek. At five inches by eight inches, the

Greeks would have appreciated the perfection of its

dimensions.

* It’s light. It weighs 15 ounces, placing it between

the flimsy- feeling Kindle and the weighty iPad.

* It’s flexible: you can roll it up without damaging it.

* Its operating system is 50- pound paper stock

bound on the left- hand seam.

Cites & Insights September 2011 21

* It has no battery that we’re aware of, nor are we able

to locate anything resembling a wireless antenna.

* Its graphic interface is ivory- white and its surface

packs so many dots per inch that we are able to read

eight- or even six- point text clearly in ambient light.

* There is no pixilation whatever.

* How about surface reflectivity? Unlike the Apple iPad,

whose mirrorlike surface will blind you at the beach,

the surface reflectivity of The Book is negligible.

* It’s almost impossible to smudge. You can press

your thumb onto the surface but you won’t see a hint

of fingerprint.

* You can drop the book on a concrete floor but

when you pick it up it will still operate perfectly.

* Bookmarking is a cinch. You just insert a small card

to mark your place, and when you’re ready to resume

reading you pick up where you left off without a

moment’s delay.

* Pagination? Instead of a progress bar, this gadget

reckons your progress in consecutive numbers. Just

like the Kindle.

* The Book smells great.

* It sound great, too. When you activate the page-turning

feature ( the technical term is “ flipping the pag-es”)

you will hear a satisfying pffftt. Just like the iPad.

There are admittedly a few design flaws. The Book is

not backlit and requires supplemental lighting in a

dim room. such as a light bulb. Another small prob-lem

is that it must be operated with two hands, one

to support it and one to activate the page- turning

mechanism. And dictionary and thesaurus lookup

are a little clunky, requiring offsite reference texts.

But these are petty annoyances, especially when you

hear the price. Fully loaded, how much would you

expect to pay for this baby? Three hundred bucks?

Five hundred? Would you believe $ 14.95?

Is he kidding? Not really:

I may be a pioneer in the e- book business, but as far as

I’m concerned the printed book remains the perfect

reading device, and anyone who thinks it’s nothing

but a fifteenth century artifact is in for a big surprise.

But that’s really not the interesting part of the post.

That comes in a discussion of the book industry.

You need to read that discussion— and maybe go

back to my introductory essay. Curtis focuses on the

biggest problem in print book publishing, particu-larly

Big Media- style print book publishing:

About eighty years ago publishers and booksellers

made a Devil’s pact making unsold stock returnable

for full credit. That worked for a few decades, but af-ter

World War II the rate of returns began to soar.

Today it’s not uncommon for 50% of any given print-ing

to be returned to the publisher, and the industry

never solved the problem of what to with returns.

There’s a lot more about how returnability has “ poi-soned

the publishing industry.” I don’t believe his

solution is a universal solution, but I believe it’s a

big part of the future: print on demand. As he notes,

Lightning Source Inc. alone is producing some

10,000 books a day and growing at 20% to 30% a

year— and it’s not the only PoD operator.

Curtis anticipates a future with increased uses

of in- store book machines like the Espresso Book

Machine. I suspect that’s right— and I suspect we

really do need to reconsider returnability. I don’t be-lieve

all books will or should be PoD; it doesn’t

work all that well for the highest- quality art books,

and there will be books desired in large enough

quantities for offset or letterpress to be cheaper. But

his points, in general, are good ones. He closes:

Whether you’re an adult or a child, you want to im-merse

yourself in a book. It’s hard to immerse your-self

in an e- book. It’s the difference between reading

a book and watching one. Have you watched a good

book lately? Not the same thing!

There’s no question that the e- book revolution has

arrived and arrived with a vengeance. Thanks to the

convenience and low prices, the print book industry

has taken a big hit. But it’s still a 24 billion dollar

business, and e- book sales represent only nine per-cent

of the total. There’s plenty of fuel left in print,

and once the new model of business takes hold, one

based on preorder and prepayment, a day will come

when you’re as likely to see someone on a bus or

train reading one of these devices called The Book as

you are to see them reading a Nook or Kindle.

That $ 24 billion figure may be a bit low ( it sounds

like AAP’s old figure, not BISG’s $ 40 billion— but

both AAP and BISG now seem to agree on roughly

$ 29 billion. Those are U. S. figures; the world book

industry is, I believe, at least twice as large.) Still,

I’m encouraged by this resounding endorsement of

print books by somebody who’s an ebook publisher.

Comments? Interesting, including— of course—

one Digital Supremacist.

Compare and Contrast

Now we get to the core of this essay: Discussions

that compare and contrast print books and ebooks.

Yes, much of what’s already appeared could and

maybe should be lumped in to this middle- of- the-road

group— but that would make it even bigger

and less digestible than it already is. If these top-level

headings confound more than they edify, well,

Cites & Insights September 2011 22

at least they split the material into more managea-ble

chunks.

Will books survive? A scorecard…

This misnamed article by David Weinberger appeared

November 21, 2009 at Everything is Miscellaneous

( where else?). Why misnamed? Because it’s about

print books, not books— and because it’s not so much

a scorecard as a slightly bizarre thought experiment.

Namely: If, for each and every aspect in which print

books excel, you posit that ebooks will be as good or

better, then will people still buy print books?

It’s not quite that much of a “ let’s line up a

bunch of straw men and set them on fire”— he ad-mits

that it’s going to be damnably difficult for

ebooks to beat print books as æsthetic objects, sen-timental

objects, historic objects or “ specialized”

objects and he’s uneasy about single- mindedness.

Still, this does seem to be a comparison of the Pla-tonic

Ebook in its eventual perfection with plain old

print books— a comparison that’s tough for print

books to win.

Making it tougher: He then lists at least one ad-vantage

of ebooks that some of us would say is not

unique to them, namely social reading. Really?

There are no book clubs? People never engage with

other people who’ve read the same print book? You

coulda’ fooled me.

In the end, this is an unsatisfactory piece, one

that seems determined to relegate print books to

becoming a tiny set of sentimental relics. His closing

questions are so clearly answered, at least if you buy

into his essay, that I regard them as rhetorical.

Review: Those new- fangled paper books

This piece by John Goerzen appeared December 28,

2009 on The Changelog. It starts right off with a

slight overstatement: “ Everyone seems to be familiar

with ebooks these days.” Goerzen owns a Kindle 2

and obviously loves it— and defuses any potential

anger about his silly essay by saying it’s silly:

Before I begin, I feel it wise to offer this hint to the

reader: this review should not be taken too literally. If

you have an uncontrollable urge to heave a volume

of the Oxford English Dictionary at me as if I am

some European prime minister, please plant your

tongue more firmly in your cheek and begin again.

I won’t quote the whole thing; it’s nicely written and

worth reading. He’s basically reviewing a “ paper

book” from the perspective of a devoted Kindle us-er.

So, for example, he likes the “ dashing use of col-or”

on the cover of the book— but dislikes the ina-bility

to “ scale the font size down from the default.”

He misses being able to look up an unfamiliar

word—” My paper dictionary was in the basement,

so I didn’t bother looking it up…”— and, while not-ing

the lack of interface malfunctions, finds “ severe

stability problems” when reading outdoors in the

wind. For that matter, he thinks it would be imprac-tical

to put a paper book in a ziplock bag to read at

the beach.

Paper does have its advantages. For one, it’s faster to

flip rapidly through pages on paper than on an ebook

reader. If you know roughly where in the book some-thing

was written, but not the precise wording,

searching can be faster on paper. On the other hand,

if you are looking for a particular word or phrase, the

ebook reader may win hands- down, especially if the

paper book has no index.

( Perhaps I should note that several comments on

Weinberger’s “ comparison” mentioned browsability

as an advantage of print books.) He thinks print

books will wear out faster than ebooks—” If my

Kindle wears out, I can always restore David Cop-perfield

from my backup copy to a new one.” As we

all know, it’s not possible for Amazon to go out of

business— why, that would be as impossible as, say,

Borders dissolving. Corporations never disappear.

There’s more, and while it’s partly silly it’s also

reasonably fair. I’m not fond of his library compari-son

( and he doesn’t seem to really care that library

books cost him nothing), but it’s so clearly jesting

that it’s OK. He concludes:

All in all, I prefer reading books on my Kindle, but

still read on paper when that’s how I have a book.

A cute piece. The library paragraph is by far the

weakest ( including use of “ DRM” for late fees,

which is silly), but as an extended jest with a certain

amount of truth, it’s not bad.

Five lessons from my e- book experiment

Shane Richmond posted this on January 26, 2010 at

The Telegraph— and right away I’m reminded of one

of my wife’s big ( and correct) complaints about

some library websites. Namely, there’s nothing on

this page that tells us where The Telegraph is locat-ed,

assuming it’s a print publication at all. ( Yes,

there are library websites that don’t mention the

state, and if the city is, for example, Lincoln, that’s a

real issue.) As it happens, the URL gives it away, and

it’s of a piece with the old Library Association: It’s

from the UK, and since that’s the Mother Country

no identification is required. ( The Library Associa-tion,

since become CILIP, is younger than the Amer-ican

Library Association and much smaller— but

Cites & Insights September 2011 23

Dewey and his buddies didn’t have the chutzpah to

call their group The Library Association.)

Never mind. That’s a digression. On the web

there is no physical location, right?

Anyway: His experiment was to avoid print

books entirely for three months ( October- December

2009). He read nine books on a Sony Reader Pocket

and one on a Kindle.

The result of the experiment? I’m back to reading

books on paper. I’ll explain why in a moment but

here are five things I learned from my e- reading ex-periment.

Summarizing the five things: Weight is an advantage

for e- readers, especially for travel ( when you want

multiple books); page- turning is “ less irritating than

you’d think” ( having to do with the e- ink refresh

delay); being able to search a book is useful; “ text

formatting can be annoyingly sloppy”— all ten

books had formatting problems; availability of titles

is the biggest problem.

The text- formatting problem is one I’ve encoun-tered:

line- break hyphens turning into “ real” hyphens,

so that they appear inappropriately in mid- line. That

seems likely to happen because of conversion prob-lems;

it’s something you should be able to avoid entire-ly,

and I suspect it’s a very temporary problem.

So why is he returning to print books? Availa-bility

and discovery, as far as I can tell— he seems to

have no particular interest in print books as such.

Since his focus is generally technology ( and specifi-cally

Apple products), that’s reasonable.

Publishing and Books in 10 years

By “ switch11,” appearing February 3, 2010 at Kindle

Review— and, as always with “ switch11,” I have mixed

feelings. Partly because this writing seriously needs

copyediting and proofreading. Partly because I know

of no purer cheerleader for ebooks, specifically Kindle

ebooks, as The Solution. Partly because this writer

seems to assume a whole lot more inside knowledge

than there’s any evidence he or she really has.

So why don’t I ignore the blog altogether? Be-cause,

for all the faults, there’s some interesting

speculation. Such as this long list of predictions on

the ten- year horizon.

The first one starts out weakly, as the writer

asks whether there will be more readers and wheth-er

readers will read more books per person. This

paragraph, to me, makes no sense whatsoever:

There’s an important category of readers – those who

aren’t able to find the time to read though they would

love to. eReaders and eBooks are reaching a lot of

these people and getting them to read again.

Say what? People who don’t “ find the time to read

though they would love to” are going to buy dedi-cated

ereaders, much less start reading more? Why?

How? The Kindle doesn’t add hours to the day. Even

if you disagree with studies showing that it’s a bit

slower to read ebooks than print books, it’s almost

certainly not faster. In any case, I really don’t envi-sion

people who “ don’t have time to read” investing

in ereaders.

That’s speculation, of course, as is everything

else here. “ switch11” speculates that ebooks will

have 50% of the book market in 10 years, based

on… well, nothing. It’s also speculated that there

will be 100 million ereaders ( dedicated devices, that

is) in 2020— again, for no particular reason.

There’s more like this, and if you’re fond of Kin-dle

Review’s fact- free approach, you should read it

yourself. Oh, here’s another one where the writer

seems certain, a certainty that makes a bit less sense

in 2011 than it might have in February 2010. I’ll

quote the whole section, grammar and all:

What prices will books be at?

Somewhere between $ 4 and $ 10.

1. The lower bound is $ 4 because even with sales of

books doubling we still need $ 4 to keep quality book

making alive.

2. The upped bound is $ 9.99 – For better or for

worse it has been established as our first benchmark

and it’s a nice, pretty number that a lot of people find

reasonable.

There will be a secondary market of indie authors

pushing free and $ 1 books. However, all established

authors and several ‘ on the verge’ authors will stick

wtih $ 4 and higher – to be able to focus their ener-gies

on writing.

That’s right: Nobody’s going to sell ebooks for more

than $ 9.99. Whoops…

Interestingly, the discussion of “ publishers” is

really a discussion of the Big Six, and ” switch11”

assumes that Publishers ( with that capital P) will

dominate the market.

Free ebooks correlated with increased print- book

sales

This brief piece— by Cory Doctorow on March 4,

2010 at boingboing— is about complementarity, and

it’s an attempt to add real data to Doctorow’s con-sistent

anecdata ( he gives away his ebooks and finds

that his print books do just fine).

Cites & Insights September 2011 24

The piece links to an article in the Journal of

Electronic Publishing, “ The Short- Term Influence of

Free Digital Versions of Books on Print Sales.” That

peer- reviewed article ( JEP is a Gold OA journal)

notes the long- time experience of National Acade-mies

Press ( which makes its publications digitally

readable in a cumbersome one- page- at- a- time man-ner

and has found increased sales of print books, es-pecially

for books that would otherwise be out of

print) and the Oriental Institute of the University of

Chicago ( which offers free digital versions and finds

that print sales haven’t decreased), then adds an actu-al

study with a specific question: “ Are book sales in

the eight weeks following a book’s free digital release

different from the eight weeks prior to this release?”

The study used BookScan to track sales ( which

excludes Wal- Mart but includes about 70% of U. S.

book sales) and organized books into four groups:

The first group consisted of seven nonfiction books

that had digital versions that were released at various

times. The second group consisted of five science fic-tion/

fantasy titles that had digital versions that were

released at various times. The third group consisted

of five science fiction/ fantasy books that were re-leased

together by Random House. The fourth group

consisted of 24 science fiction/ fantasy books released

by Tor Books. The Tor group was different from the

previous three in that Tor ran a special promotion in

which they released a new book each Friday. The

book was available for free download only for one

week and only to those who registered for Tor’s

newsletter. With the other three groups, once a book

was released in a free digital format it remained

available, at least for several weeks, and in many cas-es,

indefinitely.

These are small enough samples to still be anecdata,

but at least well- researched anecdata. In all but two

cases, the books studied were downloadable as en-tire

PDFs; the exceptions, Cult of iPod and Cult of

Mac, involved BitTorrent— with the encouragement

of the author.

Except for the Tor books, each group shows

more print sales after free PDFs are available than

before they are— but the Tor books showed a sub-stantial

drop. Why? That’s not clear.

An interesting study, worth your time to read. In-teresting

comments on the boingboing post—

including a response from one of the study’s authors.

How Green Is My iPad?

I’ve seen a couple of takes on the comparative envi-ronmental

impact of ebooks and print books. This

one, by Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris, ap-peared

April 4, 2010 in The New York Times Opin-ion

section.

It’s based on life- cycle assessment and considers

five steps: material, manufacture, transportation,

reading and disposal. ( Know what the biggest item

in materials is— in both cases? Gravel— either for

the landfills holding the waste from ereader manu-facturing

or the roads used to transport materials in

print books’ supply chain.)

Summarizing, and noting that “ denuding for-ests”

should never be an issue for book paper, the

authors conclude that a single e- reader has the im-pact

of 40 to 50 print books for material consump-tion,

100 print books for global warming… and

somewhere in between for health consequences.

The final paragraph:

All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read

a book starts by walking to your local library.

Publish or Perish

The New Yorker, like ars technica ( hmm: they’re both

from the same publisher), likes to confuse us with

titles. On the web page and URL, this piece— by Ken

Auletta, published April 26, 2010— carries the title

“ The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books.” It’s a

moderately long piece ( a print preview runs 14 pages

with very little white space) and nicely written. I

won’t attempt to summarize or criticize the whole

thing. Of course we get Steve Jobs’ idiot remark “ The

fact is that people don’t read anymore” and an inter-esting

comment from an unnamed “ advisor to Jobs”:

“ Steve expresses contempt for everyone— unless he’s

controlling them.” Sounds about right.

There’s some discussion of the Big 6 and its

pricing and other models, and how Apple and Ama-zon

have messed with those models. I love this bit,

especially the first sentence:

Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting

its own demise; at one major house, there is a run-ning

joke that the second book published on the Gu-tenberg

press was about the death of the publishing

business. And publishers’ concerns about Amazon

are reminiscent of their worries about Barnes & No-ble,

which in the eighties began producing its own

books, causing publishers a great deal of anxiety

without much affecting their business. Unlike Barnes

& Noble, though, Amazon generates more than half

of its revenues— which total about twenty- five billion

dollars a year— from products other than books.

Many publishers believe that Amazon looks upon

books as just another commodity to sell as cheaply as

possible, and that it sees publishers as dispensable.

“ Don’t forget,” the chief of a publishing house said,

Cites & Insights September 2011 25

“ Bezos has declared that the physical book and

bookstores are dead.”

There’s a lot here, including discussions of how Am-azon

might be trying to undermine both print pub-lishing

and print publishers. There’s also plenty to

indict the Big 6 as getting in the way of modern,

survivable publishing in general, be it e- or print.

And consider this paragraph:

Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of

whom do not initially have much commercial prom-ise.

They also give advances on royalties, without

which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to

research new books. The industry produces more than

a hundred thousand books a year, seventy per cent of

which will not earn back the money that their authors

have been advanced; aside from returns, royalty ad-vances

are by far publishers’ biggest expense. Alt-hough

critics argue that traditional book publishing

takes too much money from authors, in reality the

profits earned by the relatively small percentage of au-thors

whose books make money essentially go to sub-sidizing

less commercially successful writers. The sys-tem

is inefficient, but it supports a class of

professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.

I’d love to take that paragraph at face value. Really

I would. But I can’t. It’s become increasingly clear

that some big publishers are only too happy to dis-card

“ midlist” writers— you know, the ones who

actually write their own books but only sell 3,000

to 30,000 copies.

Read the article yourself. I’m not at all con-vinced

that a battle pitting “ three behemoths” ( Ap-ple,

Amazon and Google) against the six behemoths

of New York publishing is workable or beneficial for

writers and readers, although I’ll agree that it’s better

than having either Amazon or Apple as a choke-point

for nearly all books. There’s a lot more here,

and it’s worth reading… with several grains of salt.

Man of the House: He can speak volumes about the

demise of books

Another silly piece, intentionally, and well enough

done that I’m citing it— by Chris Erskine, appearing

August 7, 2010 in the Los Angeles Times.

They say these Kindles and other electronic reading

gizmos will replace books one of these days, and to

that I say, “ NOT SOON ENOUGH!”

I am all for that. I can never get paperbacks or hard-covers

to work. They won’t hold a charge, and they’re

so hard to reboot.

Erskine continues— his inability to upgrade The

Great Gatsby and the ways print books ruin warm

summer days.

Know what I really hate? Days like this— warm Au-gust

afternoons by a lake or an ocean, when there’s a

gnat floating in your margarita, both of you coma-tose.

On a perfect day like this, how do many people