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Tag: E-books

Published November 9, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Expanded Original — Geoff Dyer, author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, on Penguin Modern Classics and the paintings used on their covers:

The use of different paintings meant each book was a “modern classic” in its own particular way. A side effect was that books I was reading for an education in literature doubled as an introduction to art history… Since then the happiest moments in 35 years of museum-going have occurred when I’ve seen these Penguin Modern Classic paintings on a gallery wall. Especially since the cover often showed only a detail of the original. Seeing the works themselves revealed exactly what had been lost, though I invariably saw it the other way around, with the painting as an expanded version of the Penguin original.

Sci-Fi Diet — Mike Doherty interviews Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan, in Caplansky’s Delicatessen in downtown Toronto:

“My cholesterol is in the science-fiction realm,” he says. You’d expect him to be gargantuan, like Misha Vainberg, the gourmand oligarch from Absurdistan who’s always asking his manservant to make him meat pies, but Shteyngart is a slight fellow, with big black-rimmed glasses and a perpetually amused mien. He’s an ideal dining companion, if you’re not a rabid vegetarian, his speech a mixture of astute cultural observations, probing bons mots and moans of contentment.

That Synching Feeling — James Meek, author of  The People’s Act of Love, on e-books and social reading:

Once there were private libraries; then there were public libraries; now there is the ghost library, where poltergeistic fellow readers may not only be reading the same book as you at any moment but actually underlining the page of the book you are reading seconds before you get to it. They may be next door; they may be in Kamchatka; they may be anywhere, so long as they have Kindle and wifi.

And finally…

An epic two–part interview with John Hodgman, whose new book That Is All has just been published, at the AV Club. It is totally worth it, if only for the extended rant about children, mortality, the apocalypse and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

I did a little math, and was like, “Wait a minute, Cormac McCarthy is like 75 years old! And he has a 12-year-old son! No wonder he wrote this book!” I’m like, “Cormac McCarthy, you jerk, you’re not talking about the apocalypse, you’re talking about your personal apocalypse, because you’re an old man who’s not going to get to see his son grow up. That’s what this book is about. And for you, it feels like the end of civilization, and an intolerable world, and you can’t say goodbye to a son that you can’t guide through this awful world that allows you, an old person, to die.” I’m like, “How dare you, Cormac McCarthy, put me through all that when you’re the one going through this personal apocalypse?”

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Published October 3, 2011

Monday Miscellany

I’m sorry for the lack of a weekend post, but to make up for it, here is a Monday round-up to get your week started right…

Owned — Josh Davis AKA DJ Shadow interviewed on the Intelligent Life blog:

My sense of value comes from the fact that music is my life… People always think it’s about money or my personal wealth or something like that. It’s about this art form that’s taken a drubbing in the last decade. I’m not talking about what a wonder it is that music has been democratised. Music between 1960 and 1970: how can you even chart that progress? Music between 1970 and 1980: entire genres come and go, massive leaps. Music between 2001 and 2011: I don’t think there’s a massive difference… We have access to all this music now and I’ve been hearing for 12 years what a miracle that’s going to be and how it’s going to revolutionise music. But I work in the clubs and I’m not seeing any evidence of this shift. People seem to think we own the internet as a collective brain-trust. We don’t own the internet. The internet is owned by the same people that own everything else. They make money from the advertising that you’re being shown as you look at somebody’s life’s work, and they’re not being given a dime.

You can listen DJ Shadow’s new album The Less You Know, The Better on NPR.

And on a semi-related note: Chuck Klosterman on music and nostalgia for Grantland.

The Idiot — Cartoonist Daniel Clowes interviewed at Flavorpill:

If I ever met a young cartoonist who is really amazing I would say just don’t do any interviews, don’t do any public appearances. Just remain a mystery. Because once you do one, then that becomes your opinion on record. Unless you get it exactly right that first time, you have to keep modifying it over the years, because I’m certainly not the same person I was when I did my first interview. I was probably 26 years old. I was an idiot.

Playing the Part — Grant Morrison’s Supergods reviewed at Robot 6:

[M]any creators Morrison discusses are his peers, rivals, colleagues and bosses — it’s nice to get a book like this that’s unafraid to engage in industry gossip from a working creator, but, at the same time, it makes one suspicious of the writer, who becomes an unreliable narrator of his own career. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that early on in the book, Morrison says he was acting a part, an invented persona as a sort of demonic, enfant terrible punk early in his career, publicly sneering at Alan Moore’s work and engendering animosity. How does a reader know he’s not still playing a part?

And finally…

From Business Week: Amazon, the company that ate the world:

Although the decision to design and build its own hardware is a high-stakes bet, it’s equally true that Bezos had no choice but to enter the tablet business. About 40 percent of Amazon’s revenues comes from media—books, music, and movies—and those formats are rapidly going digital. Amazon was late to understand the speed of that transition; Apple, which launched the iPod in 2001 and iTunes two years later, wasn’t. The iPad has only strengthened Apple’s hold over digital media. There’s a Kindle app for the iPad, but Apple takes a 30 percent slice of all content that app makers sell on the tablet and has restricted Amazon from directing iPad users to its website in order to avoid giving Apple its cut. Doing business on the iPad threatens Amazon’s already thin profit margins.

Bezos claims he doesn’t think defensively. “Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,” he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs. “On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think that’s returned,” he says. “Our cultures start in the same place. Both companies like to invent, both companies like to pioneer, both companies start with the customer and work backwards. There’s a like-mindedness.” Pause. “Are two companies like Amazon and Apple occasionally going to step on each others toes? Yes.”

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Published September 21, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

A short interview with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, in The Guardian.

Heart of Darkness — William Deresiewicz on Harold Bloom and his new book The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life:

I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz… Bloom, like Kurtz, ignored the rules and was strong enough to impose his own. Bloom, like Kurtz, was the shadowy genius who had sequestered himself in his private domain and was managing to produce, by methods however “unsound,” more material than all his colleagues put together… Bloom, like Kurtz, was a legend, a rumor, a vaguely malevolent presence (or absence) to be spoken of in awed and envious tones. What was not to like?

Paying For It — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on paywalls and the transformation of the newspaper business:

The newspapers that will survive, and perhaps even thrive, in the years to come will be those that are able to offer the most distinctive products and to tailor those products to a variety of consumption modes, spanning payment methods and devices, in a way that maximizes revenues and optimizes readership. And because an online news site is not a perfect substitute for a printed paper for either readers or advertisers – I cancelled my paper subscription a couple of years ago but ended up resubscribing after realizing that I was missing something – print editions will likely remain a crucial element in the mix indefinitely.

Browsing or Browsers? — The Economist neatly summarizes the effects of digitization on publishing:

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.

And on a related note, The Toronto Review of Books,  edited by former bookselling colleague Jessica Duffin Wolfe, launched this week.

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Published June 14, 2011

James Gleick on the Future of Books

The Book Show recently broadcast James Gleick’s closing address to the Sydney Writers’ Festival, in which the author of The Information discusses the future of the printed book:

THE BOOK SHOW: The Future of the Book with James Gleick

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Published March 30, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

L’Exception Française —  The Guardian on an exhibition in Paris celebrating the centenary of French publisher Gallimard:

Gaston [Gallimard] himself always protested that he had never had any ambition or even vocation to be a publisher. And when in 1910 he was invited to join the “adventure” of the Nouvelle revue française (Nrf), it was an example of what became a rule, letting his friends “guide his life”. Modest, somewhat detached, well turned-out and above all, perhaps, “without side”, he was to prove a magnet for writers of violently contrasting aesthetic and political allegiances. He had charm, and he had luck. He drew towards him, and elected to that most exalted of circles, the comité de lecture, such arbiters of literary taste and intellectual vigour as Jacques Rivière, Jean Paulhan, André Malraux, Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau.

Gallimard, 1911-2011: Un siècle d’édition is at the Bibliothèque nationale de France until 3 July, 2011.

Dry Eyed — David L. Ulin revisits James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce for the LA Times:

“Mildred Pierce” is less a work of noir than it is a straightforward realist novel: dry-eyed, unsentimental, in which a woman finds grace, of a kind, first by surpassing her limitations and then by recognizing them. That’s a metaphor for what it means to be a grown-up, for what it means to have to take care of a family, to sacrifice in the name of a greater good. It’s also an acute portrait of a society in transition — that of Los Angeles between the wars.

A Map of Wrong Turns — Robert Darnton breaks down why the Google Books settlement failed for the NYRB:

The cumulative effect of these objections, elaborated in 500 memoranda filed with the court and endorsed in large part by Judge Chin’s decision, could give the impression that the settlement, even in its amended version, is so flawed that it deserves to be pronounced dead and buried. Yet it has many positive features. Above all, it could provide millions of people with access to millions of books. If the price were moderate, the benefit would be extraordinary, and the result would give new life to old books, which rarely get consulted from their present locations on the remote shelves or distant storage facilities of research libraries… How can these advantages be preserved without the accompanying drawbacks?

See also: John Naughton on the settlement in The Observer.

Geographic Ingredients — An interesting article by Alison Arieff on communities of local manufacturers for The New York Times:

“For decades we have developed a culture of disposability — from consumer goods to medical instruments and machine tools. To fuel economic growth, marketers replaced longevity with planned obsolescence — and our mastery of technology has given birth to ever-accelerating unplanned obsolescence. I think there is increasing awareness that this is no longer sustainable on the scale we have developed.”

Interestingly, one of the companies Arieff mentions is DODOcase who use traditional bookbinding techniques to make beautiful cases for iPads and e-readers.

And finally…

A quick reminder that tomorrow, Thursday March 31st 2011, is the deadline for AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers competition. You can enter online here.

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Published March 23, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Pharmaceutical Sincerity — Michael Bourne on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 40 years on for The Millions:

I can still remember sitting in the basement of my parents’ house in Northern California, practically whizzing myself with delight at that dizzying list of pharmaceuticals. I was fourteen and I’d read Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace and all the other books about and for nice, well-heeled boys whose lives have gone a little off the rails, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was different. It wasn’t just the mind-blowing drug use or the lusty middle finger Thompson seemed to be giving straight America; no, what was so startling, so riveting to my fourteen-year-old’s mind was how sincere the whole thing seemed.

Base Camp — Levi Stahl compares J.G. Ballard to Joseph Conrad (via The Second Pass):

Ballard’s scientists, marooned on far-flung outposts throughout the galaxy, are merely Conrad’s company agents and traders thrown into the future.

Like Conrad’s characters, Ballard’s have been nominally put in charge of places that are only barely understood back home–and whose history, culture, traditions, and dangers are almost entirely a secret. Their knowledge is limited where it isn’t totally useless; their true dominion extends no farther than the walls of their base camp; and the culture they represent is utterly unwanted, even insignificant when set against against the inescapable age of the universe around them.

Disrupting Molecules — Apple designer Jonathan Ive profiled in the Daily Mail (of all places):

Ive is not like other product designers, who too often trade in slick superficialities and press releases. Ive prefers to be engrossed in fundamentals and has very little interest in personal publicity. To him, the way a thing is made is fundamental to its character: his mind occupies a workshop, not an artist’s atelier.

With an Ive product, it is impossible to say where the engineering ends and the ‘design’ begins. It’s a continuum. He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence. It’s what Ive calls ‘effort and care beyond the usual’. He has very few distractions…

…With the MacBook Air, he told me it’s, metallurgically speaking, about as far as you can actually go with aluminium before you start disrupting molecules. A calm and engaging personal manner becomes almost excitable when he describes the outer limits of transforming stainless steel. This Zen-like obsession with materials, with getting to what he calls the ‘local maximum’, is what gives Apple products their extreme appearance.

Semantic Slippage — The Information by James Gleick reviewed in The New York Times:

[In] its ordinary usage, “information” is a hard word to get a handle on (even after a recent revision, the Oxford English Dictionary still makes a hash of its history). It’s one of those words, like “objectivity” and “literacy,” that enable us to slip from one meaning to the next without letting on, even to ourselves, that we’ve changed the subject.

That elusiveness is epitomized in the phrase “information age,” which caught on in the 1970s, about the same time we started to refer to computers and the like as “information technology.” Computers clearly are that, if you think of information in terms of bits and bandwidth. But the phrases give us license to assume that the stuff sitting on our hard drives is the same as the stuff that we feel overwhelmed by, that everybody ought to have access to, and that wants to be free.

Kick Out the Jams — Wired Magazine profiles everyone’s favourite funding platform Kickstarter (via Waxy):

While plenty of people are willing to extol Kickstarter’s earth-shattering potential, its founders are not among them. “We never had change-the-world aspirations,” says cofounder Yancey Strickler, who insists he just wanted to help artists get stuff made. (Strickler’s team approves every project before it’s posted, and Strickler has personally funded 340 of them, making him the site’s greatest patron.) But the world may have other plans for the site. The Kickstarter guys may have kick-started something bigger than they ever intended…[J]ust as Twitter outgrew its beginnings as a humble messaging system, Kickstarter may not be able to maintain its low profile much longer. “The most interesting companies demonstrate emergent behavior,” says Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, which invested in Kickstarter. “People’s use of the service is never what the creators intended.”

And finally… Just in case you’ve been in a dark room with the lights off for the last 24 hours (and who could blame you?),  a US federal judge has rejected Google’s legal settlement with authors and publishers reached in 2008. Read about at The Guardian, The New York Times, or the media outlet of your choice.  MobyLives stops just short of dancing on it’s grave, and Jacket Copy looks at what might come next.

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Published March 18, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Pushing Paper — Ben Kafka asks why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?:

My Norton Anthology of Paperwork would include some of the finest historical examples of boilerplate, alongside selections of letterhead, fill-in-the-blank forms, fine print, and the history of that wonderfully poetic instruction, “last name, first.” Indeed, the boilerplate metaphor could itself be a metaphor for a larger transformation, two centuries in the making, that has taken many of us away from extracting coal and forging iron and assembling boilers toward waiting for an inspector to come sign off on a certificate that needs to be filed with the local Department of Buildings. Paperwork occupies us and preoccupies us, whether we are maritime lawyers or nail-salon owners, congressional aides or human-resource managers, college professors or freelance web designers.

Hard Times — Sam Jordison on the EU investigation into the agency model of e-book pricing and what it means for publishers in The Guardian:

The customer may be unpleasant, but he or she is always right. It’s clear that publishers do need to up their game to accommodate the new demands. There’s also the fact that they’ve been pretty dreadful at digitising the backlists of their living authors, while those of dead authors are widely — and often freely — available. Publishers have to do something to win over…pretty much everyone.

The trouble is that… digital editions still cost money to produce (and indeed that the physical costs of a printed book are only a small percentage of their price), that rights are hellishly complicated, and that authors fear losing out hugely if publishers start putting up their backlist digitally (since they would never go out of print and so never be able to escape their contracts).

And on a related note…

Tearing Their Hair Out — Margaret Atwood discusses e-books with Rosalind Porter in The Globe & Mail:

[P]eople sit there putting words on the page, and some of them make a lot of money for their publishers and others create huge losses because the publishers placed their bets wrong. When people say publishing is a business – actually it’s not quite a business. It’s part gambling and part arts and crafts, with a business component. It’s not like any other business, and that’s why when standard businessmen go into publishing and think, “Right, I’m going to clean this up, rationalize it and make it work like a real business,” two years later you find they’re bald because they’ve torn out all their hair. And then you say to them, “It’s not like selling beer. It’s not like selling a case of this and a case of that and doing a campaign that works for all of the beer.” You’re selling one book – not even one author any more. Those days are gone, when you sold, let’s say, “Graham Greene” almost like a brand. You’re selling one book, and each copy of that book has to be bought by one reader and each reading of that book is by one unique individual. It’s very specific.

See also: Margaret Atwood’s keynote speech at TOC.

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Published February 18, 2011

Margaret Atwood : The Publishing Pie

Author Margaret Atwood used to come by the bookstore where I worked in Toronto. It was always slightly surreal selling books to her, but certainly no more so than watching her on YouTube (YouTube!) deliver a great keynote speech at O’Reilly’s recent TOC Conference:

Atwood expands on her talk in this interview with Gretchen Giles:

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Published February 9, 2011

Too Much Information

That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication we’re living with are unprecedented… The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful.

The New Yorker‘s critic-at-large Adam Gopnik reviews the recent spate of books about the internet and our minds — including Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, and Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers — neatly dividing them into the categories “Never-Betters”, the “Better-Nevers”, and the “Ever-Wasers”:

The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

It is an article unlikely to satisfy either the evangelists or doom-mongers, but it sounds about right to me in a smart-alecky sort of way…
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Published January 26, 2011

Merchants of Culture | Beyond the Book

An interesting interview with John B. Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, at Beyond the Book:

[R]eaders are going to be faced with a growing proliferation of possibilities in terms of the ways that they read and consume the written word, and people will make different choices about that. I think what we will see is some readers will migrate effortlessly into an electronic environment and will welcome the emergence of a variety of different ways to read texts online or in dedicated e-book readers or on iPads or other forms of device that will enable them to read in different ways and different contexts… Others will find it less attractive and will continue to value some aspects of the printed book that are important to them, because for many readers, books are not just reading devices. Books are cultural artifacts. They are social objects. They are indeed forms of art, which they like to own and possess and to put on a shelf and display and to share with others and to return to time and again and read on various occasions in the future. And they will continue to cherish that physical objective character of the printed book. And so, some will not choose to read in an online or an electronic form, because for them, the book matters as an object.

Beyond the Book John B. Thompson Mp3

(via MobyLives)

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Published December 17, 2010

Something for the Weekend

I’ve not been entirely convinced by all of the artists’ books covers I’ve seen coming out the Never Judge…? show at StolenSpace in London (to be fair, I’ve not been to the exhibition in person), but Gary Taxali’s design for The Confederacy of Dunces is just great. I believe this edition will be available from Penguin UK in April 2011. There’s more on the exhibition at Creative Review.

What Font Should I Use? — Smashing Magazine’s 5 principles for choosing and using typefaces.

The Collectors — NPR on e-readers, data collection and personal privacy (via MobyLives):

Most e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer.

“They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page,” says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out…”And it’s not just what pages you read; it may also monitor where you read them. Kindles, iPads and other e-readers have geo-location abilities; using GPS or data from Wi-Fi and cell phone towers, it wouldn’t be difficult for the devices to track their own locations in the physical world.

(It’s also worth noting, as Steven W. Beattie does, that this all applies equally (if not more so) to  Kobo’s new Reading Life app.)

Not Just a Stereotype — Michael Bhaskar, Digital Publishing Manager at Profile Books, offers some final thoughts on 2010 at Book Brunch, dispelling a few myths along the way:

Like many groups, publishers are easily stereotyped, and like such groups too, they find that the media usually plays along with the stereotype rather than discovering the nuances behind it. So we hear about a slightly staid world of boring pedants, blinking helplessly at the on-rushing lights of the digital juggernaut and eagerly burrowing their way back to the 1950s… But this isn’t the industry I know. Far from being terrified of digital, publishing has actually already become well adapted to the digital world.

In his recent study of publishing, Cambridge academic John Thompson makes the point that, from the industry’s point of view, much of the digital transition has already taken place. In the workflows of most publishers the only time we see printed material is at the very end of the process… The day to day reality of a publishing house is one of dealing with digital products…

Wave of Information — Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story, in conversation with Robert Birnbaum for The Morning News:

Sure the novel has survived. Television, radio, telegraph, film—just about anything that has been thrown at it. It’s a very durable form. And the novels are getting better and better. I am shocked at the quality of literature. What I worry about more than anything is—maybe this anecdotal “living in New York”—is the exhaustion of people… The difficulty people have of opening up a book after a day of being bombarded with bits of information, most of it useless. And much, if redundant, certainly information that is ceaseless. Ceaseless waves of it. You come home, the quest for narrative is still there—you want narrative. What’s the water-cooler discussion going to be about? It’ll be about Mad Men, which you can sit there and passively take in—it’s a wonderful show—as opposed to something that requires a mass of concentration and effort. That’s my fear. Who knows, maybe it’s completely unfounded.

And finally…

Carolyn Kellogg chooses her 13 favourite bookplates from Etsy for the LA Times ‘Jacket Copy’ blog (pictured above: Skull and Crossbones bookplates by rxletterpress).

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Published December 3, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Limits and Boundaries — Peter Mendelsund, associate art director at Knopf, discusses his cover design for Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman with The New Yorker’s ‘The Book Bench’:

[O]ften my favorite jackets are the ones done after repeated rounds of failure and rejection. There’s something to be said for the desperation that rejection engenders in me. Sometimes, when the process feels most intractable and hopeless, a kind of last-ditch clarity appears. That being said, it’s also nice when you get it on the first stab.

And on the subject of super-talented book designers… A short Q &A with Coralie Bickford-Smith, Penguin senior cover designer, at 10 Answers.

I, Reader — Alexander Chee on e-books and life spent reading for The Morning News:

Many ponderables remain regarding the e-book. At a personal level, I am someone who has read books in poor light for decades without hurting my vision (despite what my mother claimed), and I’m keeping, well, an eye on that—the iPad gives me headaches in ways reading on paper never did. As a writer and former bookseller, I understand the e-book’s imperfections and limits, and monitor the arguments that it will end publishing or save it, and potentially kill bookstores, which would kill something in me, if it were to happen. But I also believe that the book as we know it was only a delivery system, and that much of what I love about books, and about the novel in particular, exists no matter the format. I’ve lately been against what I see as the useless, overly expensive hardcover, and I admit I enjoy the e-book pricing over hardcover pricing. Still, I’ll never replace the books on those shelves, and there’ll always be books I want only as books, not as e-books, like the new Chris Ware, for example, which would be pointless on an e-reader. This really is just a way for me to have more.

Rage Against the Machine — Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s long and much talked about article on Amazon for the Boston Review:

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?…

The conceit is that that $9.99 price tag is what the market demands. But in this case Amazon is the market, having—with no input from its suppliers—already dictated the price and preempted the standard fluctuations that competition and improved efficiency impose on prices…

Cheap books are easy on our wallets, but behind the scenes publishers large and small have been deeply undercut by the rise of large retailers and predatory pricing schemes. Unless publishers push back, Amazon will take the logic of the chains to its conclusion. Then publishers and readers will finally know what happens when you sell a book like it’s a can of soup.

Talking About My Generation — The LA Times’ David L. Ulin on Gary Trudeau’s 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective:

[T]he trick, the secret of “Doonesbury,” that, in its topicality, its ongoing dailiness, it is really about something more profound. Trudeau highlights that in his introduction: “It’s not about Watergate,” he writes of the collection, “gas lines, cardigans, Reaganomics, a thousand points of light, Monica, New Orleans, or even Dubya.” No, indeed, although such elements do show up here, more important are the people, the dance of generations, their humanity. This is where “Doonesbury” is at its most compelling…

And finally…

Andrew Kuo, who creates off-beat music infographics for The New York Times,  talks about his new book of personal work,  What Me Worry (published by The Standard), at Interview Magazine (thx PMac!).

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