A book is a book, part 2

 

My generation often grumbles about “social media” on the internet. But I confess that my surrender to Facebook has bestowed unexpected delights.

 

I taught and coached at Oxbow High School for 16 years. That’s a lot of kids under the bridge. In the past, I would occasionally run into former students, and it was a pleasure to hear how their lives have evolved.

 

Facebook, however, transformed that trickle into a stream of reconnections with nearly 200 “kids” who used to sit in my classroom or wield fencing foils under my command. Beyond brief encounters, I now see pictures of their homes, hobbies and children.

 

Best of all, we exchange ideas, life philosophies, and political rantings. The meaty stuff not usually on the table in chance encounters.

 

So last week, when Bunker Hill Publishing posted my column “A Book is a Book” on their website, I asked my Facebook friends to read it and weigh in with their preferences: books, eBooks, or both.

 

Their responses were so eloquent and interesting, I quickly shot off messages asking permission to quote them.

 

Dan Gilson, who now lives in Alaska, likes his eReader “because it takes up the space of about one book yet can contain the wisdom and entertainment of thousands of books.” He was one of several respondents to mention this valuable characteristic.

 

But, Dan notes, his eReader is “missing something.”

 

“I call it the ‘romantic notion of a book,’” he writes.

 

“When I have a book in my hands, I can flip back and forth between pages, write in the margin, place a bookmark in ‘my spot.’ I can stick pieces of paper containing notes between the pages. I can dog ear pages. I can place the open pages on my chest when I fall asleep.”

 

“When I pick up an old book,” Dan continued, “I can wonder whose hands have held it, whose eyes have scanned its pages.”

 

Keith Stockwell finds that when reading on computers, “I seldom want to read more than a page or two at a time. Something in the nature of it just urges me to flit betwixt that page and some random website, then email, and so forth, like a sparrow by the McDonald’s dumpster.”

 

While he admits that eReaders are nicer, “Books, real dead-tree editions, will always hold a special place. There is something different and warm and calm about them. There is nothing to break (except the spine, I suppose), nothing to fail or have a bad switch or return for warranty, no issues with some formats not being supported.”

 

“It is a book,” Keith concludes, “a thing that simply works.”

 

While Dan and Keith accept both, Tina Gilson differs emphatically.

 

“REAL books only for me,” she writes. “I will never read a book off an electronic device. I love books, I love bookstores. An eReader will never replace the real deal!”

 

This is one of those times when word count limitations here bedevil me. There are so many wonderful reflections on books from my former students…

 

Stay tuned for more next week.

(by permission Journal Opinion)

 

 

 

Rick Santelli may have started the Tea Party with a viral rant though you might be forgiven for expecting much less of this one. It won’t be televised and won’t alter the political landscape but, for what it’s worth though here is one for the road!

I am old enough to remember encountering my first MBA in the aisles of the Frankfurt Book Fair a few decades ago. A callow youth he was then, of vaulting ambition, no Latin and less Greek, and sporting the idea that we publishers were “Brands” and that more and more profits could be made in Publishing with the “right business models”. He even suggested time could be saved by having meetings standing up rather than around an editorial table. I am reliably told he still has not read a book with a reading level above 5^th grade which, as we know and the advertising mantras will tell you, is the ideal target level for all sales “messages”, TV ads and political sound bites included.

Since then we have been afflicted with a variety of systems entirely inimical to books and the welfare of readers. The barcode now sits, like a flat carbuncle, on the back of every book. Useful no doubt for some (it apparently facilitated the invasion of Iraq to a considerable degree with bar-coded tanks and the like amongst other things) and it has no doubt allowed a variety of perfectly sensible jobs to be lost in a variety of sectors from book buyers and book sellers to warehouse folk . Every bookseller now, as it were, should know the value of nothing but the whereabouts of everything.

We have an impossible list of categories (Bisac categories for the cognoscenti) that only have a remote connection to any book you care to name but which allow some to make decisions unleavened by anything that could be described either as a reading activity or as the execution of judgment and taste whilst dictating the shelving of books in such a manner as to be only locatable by computer!

We have not only a system of Just-In-Time inventory compounded by a returns system that is honored, it would seem, only abusively, indiscriminately, and at random. There was a time no doubt that returns made sense as for example when booksellers were encouraged (as they still are in France) to stock a wide range of books which would otherwise be impossible in a small independent bookstore. And that is on top of demands for punitive discounts from chains and the like who in addition don’t seem to care in what condition they return books.

The demise of the independent bookstore hangs in the balance but there was a time when museum bookstores used to reliably harbor the best choice of their specialty, science books in science museums, art books in art museums. Now what do you get slipped in between the endless “impulse buys” and junk toys? A few books that by and large happen to coincide directly with a current exhibition, remainders, and possibly, a few books by staff. I am reliably told that this is often by edict from on high, an edict which often forbids the sale of books associated with allied and similar museums and never mind such things as the sale rate of any item.

There used to be a joke about nuns who no longer sold candles because they kept running out of them. There was a time when booksellers were booksellers and words like “product” and “merchandise” had not eclipsed the word book.  And there has to be a time soon when we take a long look at what we are doing and go back to selling books with content. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to start here at www.bunkerhillpublishing.com .

#Occupy Back to Basics

Our world has definitely become electronically determined and most of us are running full speed into this commercially controlled revolution anxiously awaiting the next device to enhance our lives. Not only are we falling prey to these idiot devices, an apt (no pun intended) description I came across in an article last week, but we are subjecting our kids to them as well. I recently read that a mother was dismayed that her 4 year old was sharing her electronic reader with her 2 year old brother and she observed when her todler was holding his board book, he kept running his hand over the page hoping that it would turn.

In order to gain a love of reading we have to be given the pleasure of being read to. Whether it be, by words alone or words with pictures to highlight the story, nothing is better than being taken on a verbal journey. Just observe a group of very energetic 3 year olds at story time in pre-school or the local library, fully engrossed and quiet.

Yes these electronic devices are helping simplify our lives but let us all be very careful that we don’t let them take total control of them, forever changing the way we find pleasure in certain basic joys.

I was half way through one of two recent Atlantic Monthly articles by the interesting Jonathan Knee when I realized I wasn’t getting the message. Jeff Jarvis’ blog piece on BuzzMachine had led me there. Jarvis had mentioned Rupert Murdoch and I have always had a problem with that man and everything he represents by way of publishing anti-matter.  If the former is one of the great unsolved problems in Physics then Rupert is certainly the same for publishing but I digress.

All three articles are full of words I understand; words like content and value and some words I think I understand like aggregator (I think I do that on Twitter) and words I don’t like and just about understand like Customer captivity . And then there’s the bombshell:

“In fact, the dirty little secret of the media industry is that content aggregators, not content creators, have long been the overwhelming source of value creation.”

Now I think, a book publisher, I have always been a content creator as opposed to a content aggregator, pace my new role as “Cool Liberal” Tweeter at BHPanimalwatch; (honest! That’s what I have been listed as by at least one kind Tweetheart).  But the problem here is both Knee and Jarvis appear to have rediscovered Distribution and Profits but now call them Aggregation and Value Creation. Yes, their exemple du jour, Netflix is an interesting story but it’s no more a panacea than the good warehousing and pre-Amazon distribution they now criticize. We’ve seen it all before methinks.

There was a time when publishing was publishing and content was indeed king, but then knowing folk like wholesalers and mail-order mavens of one stripe or another told us that value creation lay not in the content of the book but in the ownership and branding of said nebulous material and its professional handling. Qui Bono? We asked. Why the shareholders of course. And the Readers? We asked. Who? What? You mean Customers don’t you – those we can capture?  Well no, not really. We just meant Readers. So here we go again with new in-words like customer captivity, as these interesting folk re-raise the question of how to make good corporate money for the few out of what should be the common enterprise of all.

And yes, we have seen it all before and, as all three articles indicate, to little profit; so why the repetition? Still, as an intellectual exercise, the articles are worth reading. You could also go do the daily crossword; or, dare I suggest, buy a Bunker Hill book and read it?

Well, you didn’t expect me to miss that opportunity did you?

 

 

St Augustine once observed his master St Anselm and wrote: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” This was more than sixteen hundred years ago, when reading to oneself was virtually unheard of. In his History of Reading (Penguin, 1997), the translator and editor Alberto Manguel suggests this did not become a habit until the 10^th century, when the Vikings were settling into Northern France and William the Conqueror was not even a glimmer in an Olaf’s eye.

Since then, reading has become a personal affair, a private communion between consumer and book. So used are we to this that we no longer think of the book as a technology, much less an engine for the voice.  True, book clubs have been on the rise of late, but they are formed largely to discuss the individual interpretations and opinions of their members rather than to listen to a recitation.

Not long ago, and just before the new boom in digital and social marketing, these clubs were lauded as the new Eldorado of bookselling. They seem much less threatening now to those of us who cussedly favor privacy in our reading (pace the Patriot Act).  Now they seem quaint reunions of old timers desperately clinging to a reenacted past that includes an absence of television.

So where are we now, with our Kindles and iPads? What can we say after five thousand years of book collecting of one type or another (no pun intended) when faced with something so fragile as a digital connection and a screen which we cannot mark or dog-ear? My private possession of a book is now transformed, a public list of downloaded files that Mr. Jobs and his ilk can seemingly interfere with at will. What I read is quite literally posted property that I can pay to view but cannot own, cannot shelve, cannot take down and put back in a different order.  I cannot look at the spines and see old friends and new acquaintances sharing my life with me. I can no longer have a library of my own.

As a part of this unwieldy market, I will have become a satellite of unpredictable and unknown sources, of what I used to be able to buy, keep, toss, or use as a doorstop. Now I can purchase only its shadow, which I can only have and hold on a screen. Like Plato’s prisoners staring at the wall of their cave, I can only see a reflection of a reality I cannot grasp.  I am no longer in possession of a faithful (or unfaithful) copy of an author’s oeuvre as I would be otherwise.. Now I have sight of something I cannot control or check, compare with another edition or, more mundanely, just lend to someone.

E-books are not published in the same sense as the printed book. We readers are given only piecemeal reproductions and a limited viewfinder. When presses e-publish, we do not publish in multiples but provide one copy at a time vicariously.

This reminds me of another fad from the fifties and sixties, of publishing collections of slides packaged with a book. One put them in a portable viewfinder with one hand and read the book in the other, or so it was proposed.  It didn’t work, but, then again, these slides were printed (if transparent) and tangible documents… Unlike the e-book, which is seemingly as erasable (pun intended) as chalk on a blackboard.

So, for those of you wedded to this new fashion, what to make of Bunker Hill Publishing producing its own e-book versions of our list? More to the point, what are we at Bunker Hill Publishing supposed to make of it? Will we publish e-books without the printed versions? The temptations are there, as the production costs must be significantly less. We independent publishers have to count our pennies.  Can we succeed in giving you, our clients, something physical to treasure in return for your hard won greenbacks, or will we be simply a source of digital files that can only be download?  There are so many questions, and more that we haven’t even thought of asking in the face of something we have little precedent for. For now, let’s settle in for the duration and make the best of a strange new world.