5 Benefits of the Kindle over the Nook

I bought a Nook this weekend so I could compare it to a Kindle and so I could review the books we will be publishing in both formats.  All in all, I still prefer the Kindle.

1. Touchy Touch Screen.  My biggest beef with the Nook is the touch screen.  Oddly enough, when I was buying the Nook, the sales person at B&N tried to convince me that the Kindle had all these buttons that were easily pushed and made stuff disappear.  I've used the Kindle now for two years and haven't had a problem, ever.  The touch screen on the Nook was so touchy that I lost an entire Sudoku game, just as I was about to finish it.  My fingers were too big/clumsy to type as quickly as I can on the Kindle, plus I had to keep changing the keyboard to access numbers, which made typing in my WiFi password a monumental pain.
2. The Digital Toggle v. A Real Toggle.  The other thing the sales rep told me was it didn't have Kindle's annoying toggle switch.  Yet, I had to push about four buttons on the touch screen just to get to a touch screen toggle on the Nook.  
3. Ease of Purchase.  I guess if you are trying to conserve your book purchasing dollars, the Nook might be better for you, because it takes a bunch of clicks to find and buy a book.  I'm into click conservation and the Nook is click heavy.  Amazon is evilly brilliant in its ease of purchase.
4. Color Touch Screen.  I'm offended by the Nook's implication that I need color.  As a reader, color isn't high up on my need list.  The clarity of print is in the black and white, I'll go to the meaning of the words for color, ambiguity and depth.  I'm a reader and I have an imagination.  If I want color and computer graphics, I'll buy an iPad.  I don't need the smell of a book, I just don't need distractions on my reader.  I guess that makes me a traditionalists out of the eBookers.
5. Selection.  The selection of Amazon blows B&N away.  I know they say they have a million books, but that is only thanks to Google Books which gives everyone a million books, including the Kindle.  I ran a few quick searches and for what I was looking for I was glad I had the Amazon store.

On the plus side for the Nook, it is a functional electronic reader and a great Sudoku game (when the touch screen works).

The Future of the Book -- And It Is Now

I read an interesting article by Hugh McGuire in Forbes about the future of the book. In the article, he mentioned numerous things you can’t do with a book that you can do with a web page on the internet. McGuire muses that books must merge with the Internet and in so doing will become even more valuable.

Much of what he posited as needing to take place is happening. I can easily cut and paste anything I’m reading digitally and post the quote to Twitter and Facebook. Amazon is more than happy to direct anyone clicking on my quote right to the page to buy the book. This is cut and paste. This is deep linking to the book. And it maintains an economic novel that rewards the individual author.

McGuire gets lost in his own argument however when he writes: –You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal written in 1942–even if they are from the same publisher. Wait a minute, I thought books and the Internet would be interchangeable. What McGuire is actually arguing for here is a more refined search, not the merging of books and the Internet. These are two different things. The digitization of books will merge books with the Internet. Accessibility will be the duty of the author and publishers.

The new job of a publisher is SEO. As McGuire pointed out, API’s are applications to make sure that people access your data and not someone else’s data. The future of books is incorporation into the digital mass of information. In an age were anyone can publish anything and have it remain forever, the future of publishing is search engine optimization.

Publishing 0101

One month ago I began an adventure.  All my life I've loved books.  I'm not even sure how many books are in my personal collection.  I know I haven't even come close to reading them all.  When people ask me how many I've read, I say "About a third."  But I really have no idea.

I do know one thing.  Reading has changed me in a fundamental way.   At one point in my life, something like five minutes ago, I would have said that the changes were "metaphysical", but I've read too much neuroscience to say that it is metaphysical.  Reading has created me in a physical way, carving out my neural pathways in a way that is unique.  The authors who have influenced me have allowed my brain to run down their neural paths, so I'm part Aristophanes, part Chaucer, part Shakespeare,  part Philip Roth, part Henry Miller, part Jack Kerouac, part Dostoyevsky, part Tolstoy, part Camus -- well, you get the idea.    I would be remiss if I didn't mention my wife, JulieAnn, the author that I met because of her book and writing -- talk about positive and passionate changes in my neural pathways.

So as an attorney and lifelong bibliophile, I decided to do something.  I decided to start a digital press.  In a way it was my response to the problem I saw that was addressed in Book Glutton this morning.   How do you write and read in the age of Facebook and Twitter?  The interplay of ideas and thoughts are what make us and I wanted to pass out the building block of deep, rather than superficial ideas.  My press is barely a month old and we will begin publishing within the week.  (Website, a week or two away)  I have the rights to publish  over 40 books, all by authors who have been previously published.

I feel the weight of trying to wrestle even a small portion of the unruly stream of words into a channel that can be used to irrigate the thoughts, feelings and lives of potential readers.

Writing for Money

Question and Answer with Christopher Hitchens in the New York Time Magazine:


Did you write the book for money? 
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.


I'm reading Hitchen's memoir, Hitch-22 and found the above quote about why he wrote the book.  Now, if writing for money means I get to hang out and play word games with Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, then definitely, I need to make sure that I write for money.  


For an author, money can be a motivating force to improve your craft.  In our society is also the economic indicator of how many people the writing reaches.  More money = bigger audience.  Hitchens the journalist understands this well.

Yet, I personally like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen's reason for writing fiction, because I think they are correct. 


[Fiction is the] ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’: this, we decided, was what fiction was for. ‘A way out of loneliness’ was the formulation we agreed to agree on.


Writing is about creating a connection with other people.  No writer I've ever met is content with their words being stuffed in a drawer or a hard drive (although they often end up there).   Pleas to artistic desire or writing compulsion are nothing more than screams for connection.  No artists writes a book so no one else can read it.  


No audience, no art.  


No audience and it is artistic masturbation, while possibly pleasurable, much more productive and fun if shared.   So in an indirect way Hitchens is correct, money means more connection and that is what writing is all about.

Hell

I finished a book this week -- Hell by Rob Olen Butler.  I don't write much about the books I read, probably because I read more than I write.  My brother (who is also reading it, as is my wife) described the book as Dante's Inferno for the 21st Century -- a more accurate description after finishing the book would be Dante's Divine Comedy for the 21st Century without the terza rima.

A theme throughout Hell is the inability to actually get inside someone else's subjective, interior thoughts.  Satan in all his anticipatory sadistic power can't do it.  The denizens of Hell certainly can't do it, but with Butler's post modern irony, the reader of Hell gets to spend a lot of time in everyone else's head -- well at least Butler's head.

This isn't the first time Butler has played around with the concept of what is going on in someone else's noggin.  An earlier foray takes the phrase "in someone else's head" quite literally in Severance, a compilation of short 240 word epigraphic epitaphs of the last words going through the minds of the beheaded (apparently you have enough oxygen after being beheaded to get through 240 words before it is lights out.).  Butler goes a step further in Intercourse giving the reader the internal monologue of participants in the sex act.

Writing itself is an act of disclosure, an act of placing at least a portion of one's thoughts on the screen or page.  Imagine your last 240 words after the knife slices through your neck.  Remember your last internal monologue in the throes of passion.  Imagine what your own hell and your own redemption would be like.  Remember the darkest or scariest thought you don't dare speak.

The writer's hell is the rejection of the interior.   The writing gets thrown out in a desperate attempt for readers to accept the internal and often fractured offerings of the author.  Every time I type a word, I want someone to read it and even more importantly, understand me, but somehow writing and reading is more transformative.  Intaking the words through reading alters the words into a new subjective reality that is far beyond the author's control or ability to anticipate.

My wife is a writer.  She's married to me because she is a writer, because she put her words out there for me to read.  For a bookish soul like me, maybe that was the only way to change me, by getting her thoughts inside my head in a form I was used to.  This week she finished her latest novel, TDTM.  The book has been created from out of the mist of our daily life together and  those pieces are scattered throughout.  Our discussions about the book have influenced the plot.  When I read it, my internal thoughts will register something different because of that experience, but it will connect me to other readers as we share the communal aspect of having heard the same story.

A book is the closest a human can come to entering someone else's mind.

Great writing organizes the subjective thoughts of the author, but remains true to the interior mind as the thoughts are edited on to the page.  The trick of great writing is to create enough flow with the reader that you hijack their thoughts.  The writer also wants to create a parallel thought pattern in the reader -- See, here I am writing, you are reading, we think similarly and you know where this can go and you know what it means and you listen to what I write, knowing this isn't your thought, but mine, but you understand because you think like this too at times.  Pulling it off with one stream of conscious sentence if easy.  Maintaining it for the length of a book is hard.

JulieAnn's friend, Emily Pearson, has written a memoir, Dancing With Crazy.  Of all the writing, a memoir is by its nature the most personal.  Every word in the memoir has impact and meaning for the author, because the author knows what every word represents -- an entire interior reality is constructed around each word, each paragraph, each incident.  The problem is that the reader doesn't have access to all of that interiority.  As the three of us discussed her memoir, there was agreement for the need for an edit from the right editor to give her work its full impact.  The editor would help bring her distinctive voice to a much wider audience.

I'm nearly 50 years old and for the first time I think I finally understood why an editor is so important for a book.  The great editor, like the great writer, helps organize the words so the interior thoughts of the author come through on the page.  The editor points out the author's own internal blind spots and brings to the book something  the author doesn't have -- an external point of view.  The combination of the editor's external and the author's internal is the bridge from the writer's mind to the reader's interior.

Again, with a writer for a wife, I get to see this editor/writer dance.  JulieAnn recently finished line edits on her book that is about to published, Falling Back to Earth.  The editor's comments and changes at this juncture are the fine tuning on the book's ability to connect to the reader.  The occasional editorial aside that a scene is suspenseful or moving makes me realize that something magical is taking place with JulieAnn's words, someone else is seeing the beauty, depth and struggle that I have become so familiar with in our marriage.

Which brings me back to Hell.  All week long a phrase that I have uttered often and with heartfelt meaning has been transformed by another human being.  Robert Olen Butler has taken up occupancy in my head.  He appropriated a word and amplified it for me, so that I hear nuances I was deaf to before.  I don't know that this is what he intended or even if it is what he meant, but it is what he did to me.  For a writer and for a reader, this type of Hell is heavenly.

The Bankruptcy of Publishing

Ok, I'll admit that the title of the blog is for one primary reason -- I'm testing out how Google works. I really do want to talk about how I perceive the publishing industry is changing from my perspective in Ogden, Utah, but I also want to see how titles and labels effected Google's search engines. Which actually is a great segue way into what this post, inspired by a blog post by my lovely and talented writer/wife, is actually about --- How does a writer get heard in the digital age?

When I was growing up (a long, long time ago in a county pretty dang close), musical taste was dictated by two things -- Kasey Kasem's American Top 40 (the morbid Seasons in the Sun at the top of the charts week after week) and the Friday Night Battle of the Records which lead to the perennial champions -- Goodbye Yellowbrick Road, Cherokee People and much to my adult chagrin and childish delight, The Bay City Roller's Saturday Night. It frightens me that I remember that.

Musical tastes were spun out of the mass media, record label machine into my head through the only radio station that played anything remotely young and pop-ish in the early 70s. If you wanted to make it big in the record biz, you were going to need to sign with a big label. Today, we have Pandora and the record industry is a lot like a very nice vase that got dropped on a very hard floor from a very high height. Forget labels, American Top 40 and Friday Night Battle of the Records and think DRM (Digital Rights Management), iPod, indie and bit torrent.

From what I can see, the publishing industry is also a vase that is hitting the floor and it is as if I'm watching the pieces scatter in slow motion. Terminology has not caught up. The Wall Street Journal just this week called digital publishing "Vanity Publishing." Digital publishing is the same as regular publishing at least to the extent that it has vanity and non-vanity versions. J.A. Konrath sells some self-published books, but authors have often self-published and that is technically different from vanity publishing. Konrath is also published by -- and this is a very important point -- Amazon Encore.

What did traditional publisher's do? They prepared the product for mass marketing. They mass marketed the product through the current media -- TV, print and radio. They sold the book to libraries. Libraries were the repositories for the community's books. We shared books as a community. The books we read were determined by teachers, friends and word of mouth.

Amazon is acting just like a traditional publisher. Only a couple of things have changed. The cost of distribution has shrunk to pennies if it is digital. The mass market is disappearing. Traditional advertising has diminished and fractured. Libraries have shrunk. Amazon steps in and is not only the publisher, but the book warehouse, the delivery truck, the book store and the promotional advertising media promoting the books and even a really massive pay as you go library -- all rolled into one digital company. Amazon also changes the community so that you can connect with a community of your very own idiosyncratic tastes. Your friends and word of mouth aren't relegated to a quiet little rural town in Utah. The writer's reviews and Amazon rankings and referrals carry more weight than the publishing equivalent of American's Top 40 -- The New York Time's Bestseller List.

The rules of the game have changed, but the ultimate game for the writer has not. The writer must write. The writer must write words that other people want to read -- and other people need to talk about it so that the writer gets read. The task of writing (and reading) is as David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen concluded -- an act to assuage loneliness and separateness of being human and provide connection with someone else, somewhere at sometime who felt the same way.

The words are the only salve for mortality.

A 220 Volt Plug

The compulsion to write is really a compulsion for connection. My initial thought was that I'm a 220 plug in a 110 volt world -- no connection is actually possible. In the scrambled mass of neurons that is my brain, this thought took me to one of my more ill-fated home improvement efforts.

I was working on a basement apartment in a house I'd just bought. I turned off the power to the entire house at the circuit breaker because I was going to be working around a 220 volt electrical outlet. Why? I have no clue, it was too long ago. What I do remember is that I stuck my rubber gripped pliers on the wires and got knocked back across the room from the electrical jolt. I hurt my hand landing on some tool, but was otherwise unharmed physically. An inspection of the pliers showed that the live wires had melted a nice pattern on the metal pincers. For some unknown reason the house had been wired with this solitary 220 plug separate from all of the power at the circuit box, thus leaving the wires live unless turned off at another circuit box hidden on the side of the house.

Long story for a stretch of a metaphor, I suppose, but I'm coming quickly to the conclusion that writing is a lot like that 220 plug. You throw words out there and you don't know if the power is connected or not and whether the words will shock and repel the reader, melt themselves onto the reader's psyche or if there really just won't be any juice in them at all.

Nothing like hanging out at a writer's conference to question whether words can conceivably have any impact at all. Mostly we are all hanging around, hoping for the happy accident of writing something that can melt metal.