Dunkin Donuts : organic five grain muffin :: romance novels : literary fiction

This is very true. I've felt a very insistent need for plotty, neatly ending, easily digestable books as these tough times have become more real to me. I imagine it is the mental equivalent of needing sweet, fatty goodness in times of stress, and releases similar waves of dopamine or seratonin or whatever it is. Most recently read, for example--and these books are all exactly what they sound like:

Mistress of the Art of Death
An Unexpected Pleasure
Clandestine
Princess Academy
The Curse of the Pharohs

What The Hell Is A Cell Phone Novel?

Am I just being old-fashioned? A lot of my recent posts have revolved around the idea that book reading is a special kind of reading. Specifically, that it is a lot different from the kind of reading one does on the internet, that kind of reading being characterized by its brevity, its short attention span, its schizophrenia (reading an article about the war in Iraq six seconds after you finished catching up on Brangelina's latest adoption). I think I may have gone slightly too far, though. Every other article I read about books or publishing deals with how they are being made to fit into this impatient, disjointed mindset. For example, did you know that 86 percent of Japanese teens read cell phone novels? CELL PHONE NOVELS. Reading something like that I picture Dickens a la text "it ws the bst of tms it ws the wrst of tms LOL TTYL" and I can't help but conclude that if people accept this sort of thing as a novel, the novel will soon die off. This isn't reading! Flipping to a page of your e-book in between checking your email and playing cell phone games is not reading, I cry out instinctively. But it is. Upon checking my outrage and taking an honest look at myself I realize that I very rarely read in concentrated, studious bouts, but more often during commercials, while waiting for something to start, or as I carry out tedious office work and try to pay attention to my audiobook at the same time. I'm sure an earlier generation would have cried out at this just as much, but I know that I still get a lot out of reading. Admittedly it is impossible to read anything challenging this way, so some of the loftiest benefits of reading are out of the question; I probably won't have any philosophical relevations or blazing moments of intellectual clarity, or whatnot. But I am still doing something which is, in fact, quite different from everyday internet reading. Like dolphins and sharks, blurby book reading and normal internet browsing may have evolved similar characteristics to survive in today's tech sea, but they are fundamentally different. I maintain that book reading is special, but in more than one way. Many of its qualities can remain intact even as others are, in my opinion, being destroyed. Even if one reads in distracted bursts, there is an ongoing narrative or argument that requires sustained attention. It isn't like flitting from site to site. And the content is typically more profound than most internet browsing fare. So even I don't fully embrace these changes, I accept them as less than appocalyptic. And I know, in any case, that there's no use in insisting on some artificially inflated standard for readers to live up to. They'll either ignore you or be driven away. Is it better to adapt to what people want, at the possible expense of quality? Yes, I think it is. So I'm going to try to tone it down a bit.

E-Book Love/Hate

I have been avoiding posting on e-books for a while. Strangely, reading article after article about them and how they are taking off and what the newest sales figures are and what new reader is coming out and how publishers are making more books available but how they've been around for ten years and haven't gone anywhere, and what possible obstacles there might be, and who likes then and who doesn't, has inspired more exhaustion than interest in the issue. This has been a strange kind of exhaustion, fueled, I suspect, by deep-seated conflicts within my reader's soul. Recently, though, I had a mini-epiphany about the subject, so I thought I'd try a post.

I was at the airport with my sister, looking for a last minute gift for her Irish boyfriend's parents. We went into a Brookstone-like store, maybe it was a Brookstone's, and I saw it. A Sony reader. Wuthering Heights was up on the screen, as if the express goal of this display was to draw someone like me in. And I liked it. A lot. I can say now that an e-reader, even for someone who loves books as objects as much as I do, is not out of the question for me. It didn't seem foreign or inconvenient in the least--it seemed like a perfectly natural way to read something, in fact it seemed like a great way to read something especially somewhere like the airport. In the spirit of this new openness to the technology, here is a list of reasons I think e-books are about to take off. In an honest nod to the drawbacks that still make me hesitant about the technolgy, and that probably inspire the sense of intertia and reluctance I have to talking about the topic, it is followed by a list of reasons why e-books and -readers still kind of suck.

Why I Love E-Books and Why They Will Take Over the Book World
1.Convenience: Having oodles of books at your command in one little book-shaped package can never be a bad thing. You can easily draw up a recent read to look at a particular passage, you can load enough books to have one ready no matter what mood you're in, you can amass a small library without cluttering up your house, you can buy "books" and have them in your possession instantaneously, and so on.
2.Tech Cred: Books are inherently old-fashioned, and they can never really be exactly in line with modern textual forms without completely losing their identity. A book is not an internet article is not a piece of fanfiction is not a series of text messages is not a blog. However, e-books are on a more level plane with these forms, and could make it easier for the tech-obsessed to cross over into the Wonderful World of Books. It seems a bit trivial, but this is probably the most important factor pushing e-books ahead. As people get used to consuming all of their other information in a certain way, it will only seem natural to bring books into the fold. As for what will help devoted techies develop the sort of attention span that books demand, I don't know.
3.Enriched Possibilities: Just because books are happy anacronisms doesn't mean they have to be completely walled off from technological development. They can retain their character while being enriched as e-books by such features as searchable text, hyperlinks, easy e-dictionary access, etc. The electronic medium, especially when combined with internet access, offers hosts of opportunites to make reading easier, deeper, more in touch. There is some danger here too--I can see excessive distractions interfering with the essentially private, concerted nature of book-reading, but there is good possibility.
4.Environmentally Friendly: I guess. As in no paper. And no planes and trains schlepping everything to bookstores. Though I'm not sure those batteries and microchips and such will be very landfill friendly.

As you might have noticed, I couldn't help myself from qualifying many of the positives above. In addition to those drawbacks, here are some sore points...

Why I Hate E-Books and Why They Will Never Succeed
1.Cost of Readers: During my little airport encounter I was probably equally struck by the insane price tag on the reader as I was by its loveliness. More, I guess, since the price tag overcame my appreciation for the object and caused me not to buy it. Readers are too expensive, period. I guess in theory it should be okay for them to cost about the same as an iPod, but somehow it's not. With the advent of e-reader apps for cell phones, this is becoming less of a problem, though. I have yet to see or be bowled over by an iPhone e-reader, but with the likes of Joe Wikert of Kindleville turning coat, and even though the iPhone is backlit, and isn't book-shaped or specifically designed to make e-book reading convenient, I think its a fair bet that such apps will solve the e-reader problem before we have to worry about Sony and Amazon slashing prices. Still, this might remain an obstacle to serious readers who'd prefer e-ink, features specially adapted to book reading, dedicated and safe hardrive space, etc. Combined with other book-lover qualms, this could sentence e-books to permanent casual-reading status. Which I guess is not a terrible thing.
2.Cost of Books: However, the cost of books will remain an issue. There's been a lot of talk about this at GalleyCat and TeleRead. I remember being offended when I learned that the average cost of an e-book was ten dollars, and just plain scornful when I saw that some publishers were trying to charge more than fifty. I don't care if it's a textbook! People are used to paying a dollar for an mp3. They are used to having a pretty physical book when they pay slightly more than ten dollars for it in a store. Ten dollars is not going to cut it. I don't know the reasoning behind this figure, and I don't really care. All I can think of is how you didn't have to pay to print and distribute the physical thing. Intuitively, this leads to a big price cut--whether or not you can come up with reasons why an ephemeral file is almost as expensive to get to me. My intuition tells me I don't like it. And I'm not going to buy your book.
3.It's Just a File: Like I said, it's ephemeral. I don't like the idea of paying solid money for something I can't touch. I don't have to pay for things I read on the internet. And while I won't have a physical book taking up space, I will have this digital one clogging my hardrive and likely bulking up my iPhone, so I will erase it soon, and then I'll have nothing. And I don't like that. Have you seen how big houses have become in this country? For a lot of people, eliminating book clutter is not a huge issue. And for many more, to lose it would be a sad thing. What could be better than a rich tapestry of book spines shelved on your wall? Pulling them down, loaning them to people, appreciating their feel while you read. I don't think this fetishism is an impenetrable barrier to e-books. I could see myself, as I toyed with the e-reader in the store, taking in my books this way while maintaining an appreciation for traditional books. On the other hand, I don't think the wish to elimiate book clutter is a big enough incentive to mass e-book acceptance as long as important drawbacks remain. Such as their dubious value over time and their troubling impermanence.
4.But My Books!: I'll just say it: they're not books! Strange as it seems to say, books are pretty amazing pieces of technology themselves. They're ideally sized, they couldn't be more intuitive to use, and they present their content in a highly efficient maner. And they're also pretty to look at and nice to hold. As I said before, books are old-fashioned. Maybe it's appropriate that they retain their old form, instead of trying pathetically to mimic the trappings of their flashy new cousins. You can read a book in short installments on the subway or while standing in line, but at bottom books aren't really meant to be consumed like the easily digestible blog posts and online articles that are more appropriate for such times. Books are special. They require commitment, perserverance, private reflection, and prolonged attention. These are valuable things to practice, and they could get lost if we try to make books fit in too well with modern media.

I have tried to make this list more than just a reactionary book person's cry for the past. I didn't succeed, entirely, but I doubt such objectivity is possible for me. I get all frazzled thinking about this, so I don't think I'll be saying much more about the topic, but this has been a good cathartic roundup of my various reactions to all those masses of articles I've read on the subject. I'm sure others will continue dissecting e-books, so I will leave them to it.

Black Wednesday

I love nothing more than a project, a little challenge that requires list making and plotting out, and that can conclude with a pleasant sense of accomplishment. I have been looking at the Recession as this, as a challenge to me and to publishing that can inspire an almost pleasant hunkering-down and working-through. But I began to realize this week that this might be a goal with no neat conclusion. Not a sort of puzzle or a list of conditions to be worked through, but a blank, impenetrable wall destroying what comes against it and blocking further progress. There is no way, with the frightening depth of the layoffs and ill-boding changes in publishing on Wednesday, to equivocate about what is happening and what will continue to happen to that industry. In what led up to Wednesday and in the response to it some very gloomy realities are visible. What struck me most was the anger of posters and commentors: there was a sense that, in many ways, publishing had brought this on itself. I'm not in a good position to determine what kind of impact corporate structure has on the big presses, or how entrenched the seemingly slow-moving, reactionary nature of the business is. Many on the inside seem to think these are serious problems, though. Even without them publishing is facing all sorts of road blocks, and it is pretty easy to be intensely pessimisstic at a time like this.

I have always thought of the Great Depression as the worst possible period to live in: I would rather live during a war, during a time of great oppression, anything, than that time. In my mind it has such a suffocating claustrophobia, like the sense I would get in elementary school when we studied biomes and came to the desert: if you were there and you were thirsty or in trouble, there was nothing you could do. Nothing but sand for miles. What seems so horrible to me about the depression is not so much the horrible deprivation--though that, of course--but the sense that there was nothing to be done about it. I see the stretch of years during which there just weren't any jobs to be had, no desperate measures to be taken, no lows to unwillingly stoop to. Just nothing. I have been separating this sense from my feelings about our current downturn, because I don't think anyone really believes their times will be like history in either its highs or lows. And I know we're not at that point yet. But there is some of that creeping in, the jobs being lost, with no new created, and the jobs that will be lost in the future, unpreventably. Especially within publishing's sphere, a Depression-Era hopelessness seems more and more logical. This is very bleak talk, I know. I still don't entirely believe it, and I feel sure that we'll come out of it more easily and less scathed than those before--not for any rational reasons, again, but because of my sense of relative immunity--because I am young, because I can't help my progressivist mindset. I will still hunker down, and I hope publishing will too. Maybe we will get somewhere.

Sigh

Via the NY Observer: Steve Ross, Collins publisher, "said he was glad the publishing industry and the economy in general are collapsing now rather than when he was first starting out in the early 1980s.

'It'd be absolutely terrifying to be starting out now, to be young and to not have the benefit of years, if not decades, of perspective," Mr. Ross said. "I would have seriously considered leaving book publishing.'

What would he have done instead?

'Law school,' he said. 'Or worse, I would have gotten an MBA.'

Oh boy.