Medium, Meet Message; Message, Medium

Yesterday I saw Dave Kellett post about a brand new book he was interviewed for: Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age by Scott Kirsner. “Interesting sounding”, I thought to myself. Bearing in mind the subject matter and given that I have a brand new Kindle burning a hole in my backpack, I figured this book would be my first electronic impulse buy for the reader. Guess what, no Kindle edition! I was set to drop $8-$15 on this book right then and there and see the first book magically appear on my device. No dice.

Maybe I’m giving Scott Kirsner too hard of a time. This book seems to be self-published and maybe he didn’t have the resources for doing this. However, he does have a PDF version for sale from his site for $12. I ran his downloadable sample through the Kindle converter and it came out pretty bad. Lines were broken in funny ways that split up words. It was not totally unreadable but it was bad enough to make it tough sledding to read.

I emailed Kirsner about this, and I’ll see if and what he replies. But folks, the Mobipocket Creator program is a free download (if Windows only) and even if you are vending this yourself, you can take your own HTML source and run it through the program to create a .mobi file that is natively readable on the Kindle. If you are writing books about the online world and digital culture, failing to put the hour or two into this process throws your credibility into question on the topic.

Kindling

I have ordered a Kindle 2. The dude who has the Stallman-esque belief that buying books for the Kindle is in itself an immoral act, get your negative commenting finger ready.

Update: it is here. I started to post “My Kindle is on the UPS truck for delivery” but I got paranoid about the infinitesimal but non-zero probability of the post being seen by someone who knows where I live and would be willing to swipe it. It’s charging right now. I’ll post my reactions to it shortly.

Update 2: My first reaction was “Whoa nellie, this is cool!” My second reaction was “Do I really need bifocals at age 41?”

A Decade of Ebook Arguments

In 1998, I left my job at Intel for a job with an ebook startup called JStream. It was in many ways my dream job, and of every one I’ve held it was the one I’d get excited on Sunday night because I got to go back in on Monday morning. It was a good fit for me because I’m a software developer and also a very avid bibliophile. At the time I took that job, I was in the final few months of producing the original Reality Break radio show. It was also at the point where a number of science fiction publishers were sending me every book they published every month, which sounds fantastic at first until you have to find a place to put them all. Ultimately, I realized there was no way to possibly keep them all, so a number of them were sold back to the Powells Books in Beaverton OR. It was around this time that I noticed that the arguments were confused by conflating two points – the love of reading and the fetishization of physical books. I split the difference in that I loved the reading but I also really love having and touching and owning physical books. Remember that point, we’ll come back to it.

Early on in my JStream days, I had to have the argument over and over and over about how impossible ebooks were to read. If you think back to the state of the art then in handheld devices, were were in the first few years of Palm dominance. The primary argument was screen size and resolution. Back then, I argued against that even when we were talking about 160X160 pixel 2.5″ screens. I read a number of full novels on my Handspring Visor and I found the experience completely pleasant. That was a full decade ago.

Now, I’m in the market for a Kindle in the near future. I’ve been reading up on reviews and criticisms of the device and it’s amusing to me how much of the pushback on the device is basically a retread on all the arguments that weren’t correct 10 years ago and are far less compelling today. “The screen is too small”, for a device with a viewable window that is about the size of a paperback book. “I can’t read it in the bathtub”, which was perhaps the single most common counter argument I heard in the 90s while also being the most nonsensical. You’d think from the fervor this came up that there was no dry reading happening in America. I can’t understand the bathtub use case that would ruin an electronic device but not ruin a paper book. Do people regularly dunk their paperbacks in the bath water?

I ran across this article with the advertising manager of DC Comics warning dire consequences for comcis if mindshare shifts to reading on the Kindle. What amuses me about that is that it’s cast in a “threat or menace” style fear-mongering way with zero mention of getting out in front of this parade. I see no downside in any comics company offering black and white versions of their comics to the Kindle for a reduced price. For any comic that is already in black and white (these tend to be indie books) there is no problem whatsoever. DC could easily take every book they currently publish, create an electronic copy from the inked pages before they are colored and just publish them. Of course they will not be as good an experience as buying the paper copies, but for some audience that is enough. You’d make money from a market that currently does not exist and which you already fear will eat away at sales. Modern day comic sales are already off 50% from mid 90’s. Did it occur to anyone that this might actually be a mechanism for rebuilding the audience that has mostly drifted away? Consider the electronic versions loss leaders in getting kids reading comics once again, and maybe they’ll come back again. Either way, it would cost a few hours of some staffers time per published issue to create an electronic version. The costs of this gamble are so freakishly low, I see no reason why any sensible business wouldn’t just go for it.

As I said up top, I’m a reading lover and I’m a book lover. I have far more books in my house than anyone needs and I’m willing to admit that I’ll probably go to my grave with some of these unread. And yet, I still want a Kindle. I have no problem reconciling the notion of “reading copies” with “collecting copies”, and realizing this Venn diagram is of two non-identical sets. I have hardback copies of all of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” novels. No way am I buying the final volume in the series in Kindle only. This is clearly a book that I want to own going forward.

However, any book that I would read and then consider releasing via BookCrossing or giving away to my local library sale, that’s a book I could have easily read via the Kindle without a paper copy to deal with later. I enjoy reading Max Allan Collins’ mystery novels and I own many but in general I’m not a collector of them. I’d buy them for the Kindle. I picked up a copy of Mike Grell’s novelization of his Jon Sable character at a dollar store and read it as my beach reading last year. That could have been a Kindle book. At last year’s Dragon*Con, I had interviews for Reality Break scheduled with Mur Lafferty and Tobias Buckell and electronic copies of both of their books. That meant either carrying the laptop or printing them out, which is what I opted to do and was a very large pain in the butt. I’d much rather have had both on a Kindle.

I have over 150 different stories, novels and magazines that I’ve already purchased via Fictionwise, including several years where that’s how I subscribed to both Asimov’s and Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Again, I found that an entirely pleasant experience. When I get my Kindle, one of my first actions will be to redownload that entire library of books I’ve bought in Mobipocket format, which can be read by the Kindle natively. Right out of the gate, I’ll have that library to draw on. Between those, the books I am going to download from Project Gutenberg and the electronic review copies people send me, I’ll have a lot of reading on there before I pay the first cent to Amazon to buy a book. I will not cease to buy paper copies of books, I’ll just refine the choices to the ones I know I want to keep continuing to own for a long time.

I love books and I always will. I love reading and I always will. I don’t understand why more people can’t understand the difference between the two and discuss the pros and cons of electronic books more sensibly. The Kindle is a reading device, not a collecting device, and if your counterarguments against it are from the book fetishization perspective, they are not applicable and will be ignored by me. Yes, I wish the Kindle was in color. Yes, I wish it was cheaper. I’m going to buy one as my vote of confidence in this direction. One day in the future I’d love to have the color e-ink device that can read comics and books comfortably. For now, I’m going with what we have and helping to underwrite the future I want.

RIP, Studs Terkel

Sadly, Studs Terkel has passed away, far too young at age 96. He is one dude I wish could have lived to 300. If I were to want to be more like anyone, it would be Studs. I was lucky enough to meet him just shy of 5 years ago. At the time I made a point to go to his reading because I figured with him 91 at the time there may not be another shot. I’m happy to be wrong and that he had another 5 years beyond that. I got him to sign his book Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times and to my complete shame I have yet to read it. In order to commemorate him, I will read the book this week.

When I began interviewing people, one of my big inspirations was Studs. I have come to believe like him that any person has any number of great stories in them. Terry Gross and her ilk are not nearly as big an influence on me as was Studs’ book Working.

Goodbye, good sir. You were a kind soul and a loyal friend to the ordinary person, and this ordinary person appreciated you very much.

More Macropayments

Here’s another example of the macropayment stuff I’ve been talking about for the last few days. John Klima is editor of Electric Velocipede, which I have never read but I know of because he has published William Shunn and I heard about it on his podcast. Now (via SF Scope) I found out about this offer of lifetime “benefactor” subscriptions. $20 normally gets you a four issue subscription to Electric Velocipede, but $150 gets you a lifetime subscription.

To sweeten the pot above the normal lifetime subscription offer – which is generally a wager being placed on longevity – he’s including copies of everything he has previous published (and still in stock, of course, because he can’t give you what he doesn’t have.) This actually reduces the threshold a lot, because without it you are betting on whether there will be 30 more issues of the magazine. If yes, you come out ahead. If no, you are behind. Now, you need there to be approximately 15 more issues but even so you get a care package of stuff right out of the gate. As I understand it, even better is that you are not subscribing to Electric Velocipede per se but John Klima, so any magazines or anthologies he edits, you will get a copy. That seems like a good deal to me.

This is another example of the principle of giving those who will support your projects and pay money an opportunity to pay more all at once for more stuff. Another macropayment in the wild. Thanks, John Klima, for helping make my point for me.

Our Ballardian Present

Cousin Brucie blogs about JG Ballard getting recognized as a visionary for his novels of global disaster. When I started getting into science fiction, it was at the beginning of cyberpunk, with which I was smitten including that of Cousin Brucie. At the same time, I really was getting into the “new wave” SF which at that point was distinctly No Longer New. I loved the works of Michael Moorcock but particularly JG Ballard.

I know Ballard was reacting to a specific literary trope, that of the British disaster novel where the heroes stave off large scale defeat by being plucky and British. There was something fascinating to me about these stories of non-plucky Brits facing global catastrophe and almost always failing to avert it. In the best case, they learn to live their lives in the catastrophe. I think of things like The Drowned World where the protagonist learns to love the post-catastrophe world so much that the “happy ending” is his undoing of the fixes to London by the plucky British engineers.

As much as I love those books, I never wanted to live in one. As time goes by, it is becoming clear that those futures are going to come true to a greater or lesser extent. I’m really hoping for lesser, but if you want a moral and emotional preview of what life might be like when the seas rise and wash away most of what we hold dear, try reading some Ballard. To quote Peter Gabriel:

Lord, here comes the flood
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It’ll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry.

Nicola and Kelley Tidbits

I occasionally blog about my friends Nicola and Kelley. I realized in my list of things to blog about I had several related to them, so I thought I’d collect them together.

1. Both of them urge people to call the California governor’s office and take the phone poll about whether or not you approve of the state supreme court’s decision on gay marriage. I made my call the other day.

I’ve been blase about the issue since I attended Nicola and Kelley’s wedding in 1993. It certainly caused me no ill effects, and I thought it was one of the loveliest ceremonies I ever experienced. As a side benefit my wife and I had a nice little chat with Charlie Stross, long before he was the famous SF mojombo he is now.

2. Kelley posts that she was one of the people interviewed by AfterEllen.com. It’s short but it captures the essence of her. If you want to get up to speed on what makes Kelley tick, start there but please keep going.

3. Nicola and Kelley will be doing a reading in Los Angeles on Friday May 30th at a Different Light bookstore in West Hollywood at 7:30 PM. They are in town to attend the Lambda Literary awards where Nicola is nominated for best novel. I think she’s won every time she’s been nominated, so I’m betting on her.

4. Many moons ago (like 13 years to be exact) I was Nicola’s first webmaster. I set up and encouraged the Ask Nicola section of the site and for many years I hand formatted the HTML for all the questions and answers. That same section is now it’s own Ask Nicola blog site. Check it out, it’s a lot of fun.

I’m sure if I dug a little more I could find more stuff because they are cool people that do much cool stuff. If you watch my Google Reader shared items you’ll see many items from both of them. Enjoy, netizens!

Nicola Griffith’s New Novel Blog

My dear friend Nicola Griffith is performing her own interesting blogospheric experiment. She is writing a novel about Hild of Whitby and to aid in her research she has started a research blog about it. I think this is a smart move. By sharing what she learns, she attracts whatever community there is about that era of history to her. Since this is an esoteric subject, any suggestions brought by that community might be highly valuable. She also builds up excitement about this subject in Hild of Whitby fans if there be any. I just don’t see any downside and a lot of potentially valuable upsides. Check it out if you can. This is indicative of what our online future holds. Any time you want some information, you start by giving what you have. Hello, infotopia!

RIP, Robert Jordan

On Sunday, Jim Rigney aka Robert Jordan passed away. He’d been ill for some time so it is not unexpected but it is nonetheless sad news. I’m not a reader of his, but I did meet him and find him a very pleasant and kind man.

I interviewed him for Reality Break back in 1994. At the time, the fifth Wheel of Time book was out. I read the first several hundred pages of it and still had no idea what was going on. I found a grad student at Georgia Tech who was a big fan and gave me a summary of the series (this was in the days before there were web pages with all that information.) The interview got off to a rocky start when I couldn’t find his hotel room and I knew he thought I was an idiot (because I heard him say it through the door as I walked up.) Nonetheless, when we got it rolling it all worked out, my general ignorance of his work did not show through and he gave me some very interesting insights into his work. When it was done we said goodbye, a week or two later I aired the interview and that was that.

About a month after that, I got a very nice handwritten note from him, thanking me for my time and the very interesting interview. I did hundreds of these interviews, he was arguably the most famous person I ever talked to, and yet he was the only person that every wrote me a thank you note for interviewing him. He was a true southern gentleman all the way through, tough when he needed to be but kind when he thought he should be. He was an asset to coastal South Carolina and the sf/fantasy community, and he will be missed greatly.

Potterless

Speaking of hype that doesn’t affect me…

I’ve never read a Harry Potter book and when I tried to watch one of the movies I thought it was perhaps the most boring thing I had ever seen and I didn’t finish it. On the one hand, as a bibliophile I love to see people so excited about a book to the point where every single town in America big enough for a bookstore freaks out and stays open past midnight on a Friday just so people can buy it. Americans don’t generally read to much nowadays, and I’d be happy to see a general enjoyment of reading creep back in on the back of Pottermania.

On the other hand, I’ve never quite understood why these books hit just right to become so freakishly popular. I don’t much like fantasy books as a rule and I’m not particularly interested in British schoolyard class politics. I’m not detracting from all the people who enjoy it, but I have no particular interest in partaking. As part of the living room renovations we have more room for books, and I’ve been loading up the shelves with stuff from my office. I must have 100 books in here now that I haven’t yet read and that I would read before a Harry Potter. That’s just this room. There are other rooms.

Lesbian Characters You Should Know

Here’s a list of 13 lesbian and bisexual fictional characters worth reading about from After Ellen. What is significant to me is that my friend Nicola made the list with her character Aud Torvingen. New book! I went to the Myrtle Beach B&N to buy it for this present trip and they didn’t have it. I guess I’ll have to give my money to Amazon after all. I tried to shop locally with no success.

And to bring in a note from the previous post, this simple list of 13 items is spread across three pages. Uhhm, yeah, thanks for that.

My Friends Write Books

Two of my best friends in the world are a couple, both are writers and both of them have brand new books out now or very soon. Kelley Eskridge has her story collection Dangerous Space out shortly from Aqueduct Press. It’s not too soon to put in your order. Her debut novel Solitaire was one of my favorite book of the decade, so she is a strong bad-assed writer.

Nicola Griffith’s new novel Always is already out from Riverhead. My wife and I were readers for chemical and scientific accuracy for her novel Slow River which went on to win big awards. After a few science fiction novels, she shifted gears to the Aud Torvingen series, of which this new novel is the third. They are not exactly mystery per se, but more tough novels of a hard woman making hard choices. I really love the books and am looking forward to reading Always. Buy both books, friends. You’ll be glad that you did.

Ebook Detractors Live On

Frequent correspondent Derek sent me this link to an article stating that ebooks are doomed. I suppose I could do some point by point contrarianism, but nine years after I left my job at Intel to go work at an ebook startup I just don’t have that much energy for a real comprehensive job of that. I’ve had the same arguments so many times that it wears on me. In fact, I made a lot of these points just a few months ago. I will dispute this one in particular:

Likewise, do people want to “curl up” with a battery-operated plastic screen?

The obvious answer is no.

And that’s the simple reason why e-books will never even come close to replacing paper books.

The end.

The answer is not obvious to me. I’m a bibliophile and a book collector, and I have no problem curling up with an electronic device. I’ve done it many times. This is perhaps the single most common argument in the anti-ebook camp. I’m only surprised that Mike Elgan did not mention reading in the bathtub.

I’d love to have one of those e-ink devices and would not be the slightest bit bothered by its singleness of purpose. My main problem now is price and value. There is no chance I will pay $700 for one of those. When they are $100 and are open enough to easily allow any open format documents to be placed on them, then we’ll talk. I will admit that I have been tempted by the eBookwise 1150 multiple times and in the right mood, I might have already bought one. If the device used a more common memory card it would be a lower hurdle to a purchase in my opinion, but these guys are playing the hand they are dealt. These devices are what Gemstar was selling when they drove their business in the ground.

I also find the article’s discussion about price points to no longer be a compelling point. My use of any such device would not involve buying $10 versions of what is out in paperback. It would be reading books from Project Gutenberg, ones freely given out by people like Doctorow and Stross, or sold multi-format and open from Fictionwise or Baen Books. I find the experience of reading on a device highly agreeable and have read dozens of books that way. Back before my old Handspring device took a dump for the final time, that was my primary use for it.

I don’t think the received wisdom of the death of ebooks is correct. I’ve been hearing it for a decade now, and while the industry hasn’t advanced much, neither has it gone away. However this always seems to be from the perspective of the media industry who try to sell ridiculously priced electronic editions as protectionism for their paper versions. That’s a model that will not work, I agree. However, I think the value in ebooks is not and never was in that crap. It’s in the things outside of the big media machine, public domain books and such. I just want you early adopters to buy some e-ink devices, so either the prices come down from the volume or so there are used ones I can buy off of you for cheap.

15 Vonnegut Quotes and More

I’ve grown very weary of these interminable top N lists of things, but here is a rare one I cared about and enjoyed. The Onion AV Club has a list of the 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anyone else. Good stuff. On Bob’s Slacktime Funhouse recently, the Lymph Node Institute did two shows that aired the audio track of Vonnegut’s TV play Between Time and Timbuktu. I have the book of the script, kind of a stew of tropes and characters from much of his work. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

I’ve seen notices that Kurt Vonnegut has died. That’s a damn shame, because if there is one voice America needs right now it is his. He was a man with a hatred of war, not because
of being a peacenik but because he was a warrior. His  eloquence and exquisite writing ability expressed that point as well as anyone ever has.

I have most of the books he wrote, and he is one of the few writers I reread. His work is suffused with hopeful pessimism and a misanthropic love for humanity. I wish I could be as skilled as being self-contradictory as him. Apropos  of our recent discussions, I present a quote I’ve seen floating around a lot from his most recent book Man Without a Country (one of the few I don’t own.) I’m trusting this is really him, unlike the sunscreen thing.

… what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was alll the saints I had met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.

Joe, a young man from Pittsburgh, came up to me with one request: “Please tell me it will be okay.”

“Welcome to Earth, young man,” I said. “It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind!”

Goodbye, sir. In your honor I shall try to be more erudite and more kind. If someone ever notices, I’ll just say “That’s the Honigsberg and the Vonnegut in me talking.”

Clevenger Reads Dermaphoria

Craig Clevenger, somewhat inadvertent friend of the blog, has done a reading from his novel Dermaphoria. This was for an episode of KQED’s Writers’ Block. I will read it, as I absolutely loved his novel The Contortionist’s Handbook. The only downside I could tell about Dermaphoria is that it maybe is too thematicallly similar to Contortionist’s Handbook. He has a really compelling prose style and a world view that seems to focus on losers, fuckups and the doomed in the act of self-destructing. I can get in to that. I’d rather read it than live it.

Ebook Readers

I’ve been a proponent of ebooks since I joined a startup almost nine years ago to help build an electronic publishing system. If you’d have told me then that by 2007 the state of the art would barely have advanced beyond that of 1998, I’d have wept openly. The fact that one of the best available dedicated book readers, the eBookwise 1150, is essentially the Rocketbook that was available back then helps with that sadness. There appears to be another jump in that state of the art with the e-ink devices and finally some are commercially available.

The MAKE blog has a Q&A about the Sony device. I like that the e-ink doesn’t consume power except on page refreshes. The Sony claims 7500 page “turns” per charge, which should quite a few books. Wikipedia has a rundown which notes they don’t support straight HTML and appears that getting your own documents on the device will be problematic. That should set off everyone’s spider sense that something is wrong. It looks like a pretty good device but frankly, I’m not going to buy anything from the sleazesters at Sony. I’m especially not buying something that uses their well-known content closedness and DRM strategies. I’ll have to wait for another manufacturer to bring this technology to market.

Update: A few reviews of the Sony Reader from the comments. Wade Roush in MIT Technology Review and Mike Dunn on his blog. Mike says that he is able to read his Fictionwise and Project Gutenberg books on the device without a problem.

One competitor is the iLiad reader which looks pretty compelling and open, with CF and SD cards, as well as wifi. The big downside is the price, which is very close to twice that of the Sony. This might be us getting hammered by the euro/dollar exchange rate, but paying $650 for an ebook reader is ridiculous. Even $350 is nuts, but if people buy enough for them to keep making them perhaps the price will eventually drop into the sub-hundred dollar range which is when it will get really good.

Another one is this weird thing, the Jinke. The docs are oddly translated from the Chinese and I can’t really tell if this is currently for sale or at what price. Let’s score this one as a wild card unlikely to really be of much use. I’d love to be pleasantly surprised, but I wouldn’t lay any of my money on that roulette spin.

I’d love to have an ebook reader that works on this e-ink technology. It needs to be open enough to let me read my own docs, things I have purchased from Fictionwise or Baen bookstores, or downloaded from Project Gutenberg. I’d love to have the iLiad but at the price of the Sony. Does anyone know more about this subject or if something is available at a reasonable price?

Nicola Griffith on NPR

More about my friend Nicola Griffith. This weekend she was on The Best of our Knowledge. It actually airs in my area but I missed it live on the radio (which is not uncommon.) Apparently they have a podcast feed which means that you can get an MP3 of the show, rather than the craptacular unportability that is any Real Audio file (which seems to be the defacto standard for NPR archives.) This episode is not yet in the podcast feed yet, but I suspect they delay it a little. I’ll be on the look out.

One of my friends gets on radio shows with the tagline “Lesbian Crime Writer.” If you have to have your career boiled down into three words, those are three you don’t see together every day. I can’t wait to hear this show, because although I’ve interviewed her about her science fiction, I’ve never heard a radio interview on her since she’s been writing the Aud books, which are more mystery/action/thriller type novels. Right on, Nicola!

Update: Here’s a direct link to the MP3 file of Nicola’s interview. I’ll try to keep WordPress from automatically enclosing it in the feed.