Open Letters Monthly has an article called In Defense of the Memory Theater, by Nathan Schneider in which he argues that books on shelves perform the function of reflecting memories back at us.  They are a constant reminder of the various events, stages, and emotional states of our lives.  We look at our shelves and can instantly catapult ourselves back in time to events surrounding our reading of various volumes.

Schneider mentions a 16th-century memory theater that used images and symbols of the cosmos to inspire observers and enhance their intellectual powers.  Books, for Schneider, do something similar when they are visible on our shelves.  I agree up to a point.  I am often taken back in time by my own books upon their shelves.  But so am I transported by nearly every object in my home.  Objects all have this power.  Books are not exceptional in this regard.

Schneider also goes on to worry over the ongoing movement toward ebooks and electronic reading devices.  Frankly, this entire subject matter is beginning to bore me slightly.  I like reading whether it’s from a book, an e-reader or from a magazine.  But Schneider’s concerns are that corporate entities are wielding absolute control over these devices and can take things away as easily as they give them to us.  Amazon famously deleted copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles recently.  He also worries that all of this electronic cloud computing reliance sets up the perfect environment for totalitarian control of literature and publishing.  It certainly might.  If a book burning can be accomplished with the press of a delete button that is a very dangerous thing.

I think Schneider’s arguments about the Kindle being a catastrophe would play better if he had gotten the facts right about the device.  It is apparent to me that he has not used a Kindle yet, so it is a leap for him to write about Amazon keeping user notes and annotations in an inaccessible proprietary format when in fact the Kindle stores these things as a simple text file that can be read anywhere.  If you are going to write about e-readers you had better get your technical facts straight.

He makes the point that one’s books should last forever.  A corporation should not be able to take them away or disappear one day leaving you with a bunch of proprietary ebook files that can no longer be read.  Sure.  He’s right.  But realistically if one wants to preserve one’s proprietary ebooks, there are all sorts of hacks and conversion methods for doing that.  No one really needs to be at the mercy of a corporation where ebooks are concerned.  Hack them and save them as text files.  Simple.  Stop worrying so much.  The fact of the matter is that people don’t even want their music to last forever any more.  The forever thing is going away.  Perhaps it’s a loss.  Perhaps not.  It sure makes moving a lot easier!

There’s an enormous amount of intellectual snobbery masking a lack of technical understanding.  Mr. Schneider’s article is pretty good at making one think a little bit more about what makes books so good at what they do.  But he trips over the new publishing technology he is afraid of.

Is it ethical to steal an eBook if you’ve purchased the hardback version?  Sure.  Stealing the hardbacks themselves is much more fun though.  Is it ethical for a publisher to charge what they charge for hardbacks?  No way at all.  Sorry publishers, your pricing sucks and you know it.  So, certainly it’s ethical to steal an eBook if I’ve been robbed by the hardback price already.

Now of course all the minimum wage proof readers in New York City will pounce on me and call me terrible names because they dread being turned into temp workers.

But stealing books is a real talent.  You need a big army jacket that has lots of giant pockets inside and out.  It’s best to steal them from large grocery and discount stores.  eBooks are too easy to steal and you never really know what’s waiting for you on the other end of a download link anyway.  The photo is of me demonstrating my own book-stealing technique.  I have amassed quite the respectable library this way.  But I never lend books out because they seldom make their way back home.

Here is an effort by a New York Times writer to answer the question of whether stealing ebooks is ethical or not if you’ve already bought the hardback.

But here’s a better piece at The Millions about an eBook pirate who’s pretty clear about what he likes.

Also, if you want to see how stealing books actually improves the world and culture, read The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño.

I sat down with my Kindle e-reader on Saturday morning to read the Los Angeles Times.  There was an article about an L.A. used bookstore called Iliad Books.  Sounded nice.  So I went.  What should I find but a section of books about books and publishing.  There was a copy of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making by Adrian Johns. The author’s main thrust is to examine how books in early modern England influenced and largely caused the development of the modern scientific method and the general acquisition and spread of knowledge. He wonders why readers assume that books are accurate and fixed. This is an interesting inquiry in light of the recent changes in publishing which involve ever-changeable electronic publishing and web postings. The history of the effort to make books fixed and true representations of their authors’ intentions and ideas is a fascinating one. It includes an analysis of widespread piracy that dogged publishers of books from the very beginnings of printed material.

Thinking about the nature of books and their history, along with the underworld of book manipulation, piracy, copyright, and the conveying of knowledge is essential as publishing undergoes its greatest changes since the beginnings of the printed page.

There’s been a huge battle of the ebooks going on between Amazon.com and publisher Macmillan.  Last week, Macmillan, in response to rotten Apple’s announcement of $14 and $15 ebooks on its new iPad, insisted that Amazon give Macmillan the right to choose its own higher ebook pricing for the Kindle ereader device.  Amazon got peevish about the deal and simply de-listed all of Macmillan’s books.  I thought that was a nice nasty smack in the kisser for a doomed publisher at the time.  I was feeling so good about Amazon and its Kindle and so snitty about Apple’s iPad that I was within 60 minutes of plunking my digital money down on a brand new shiny Kindle.  But wait!  Amazon caved!  They rolled over and gave Macmillan what it wanted.

So now, dear reader, your Kindle ebooks from Macmillan will cost more.  Frankly, I was always kind of miffed by the whole $9.99 price tag on Kindle ebooks.  Too high.  Ebooks are invisible.  You can’t stack them and put boards across to make a coffee table.  Ebooks don’t have nice covers or fancy paper that you can bend and spill coffee on.  I don’t know about anyone else reading this blog out there, but when I walk into a book store I’m just a customer.  I don’t frankly give a damn about how the publisher is doing or how Amazon is getting along, or care a whit for Steve Jobs’ health, or the status of your average mid-list author and how he or she’s going to pay their mortgage.  I don’t give one syllable of a damn.

I just want a good price.  I’ve been involved with technology and code and content since the WWW went live and I can tell you without hesitation that no ebook is going to remain in your digital library for 10 years.  You are going to lose it and forget it and wonder if you ever even had it.  Most of the books I owned when I was nine are exactly eight and a half feet away from me right now.  There’s Pinocchio on its shelf off to my right.  It’s a huge hardback with giant illustrations and is as beautiful as the day I first saw it.  Ask yourself where that diary is that you were writing in Microsoft Word back in 1996?  It’s in the same place your ebooks are going.  Nowhere.  An ebook is worth about $2.  But publishers don’t want you to know that because they are afraid that these ebooks will replace all the hardcovers and paperbacks they sell for anywhere from $8 to $50.  How will these publishers explain to their authors that ebooks are only worth $2?  Where will all those big advances and royalties go?

Poof.  Ebook prices should be heading down not up.  An ebook costs a publisher nothing to produce beyond the editing, layout and marketing costs.  It doesn’t have anything to print, warehouse or ship.  As online systems and ebook formatting software get more powerful, the cost of producing these things gets even lower.

So Macmillan will not sell me any ebooks for $14 and Amazon will be very lucky to sell me a Kindle sometime this year if at all.  I think the problem here is the publishers.  I think publishers are too frightened of cheap ebooks.  What they should be doing is giving ebooks away if you buy the print version.

Here’s another thing the publishers don’t want you to know:  you can avoid giving any of these people your money by just reading free ebook versions of all the world’s greatest literature.  Just go to Project Gutenberg and you can download more books for your computer or ereader than you will have time to read in your life.  That’s how you drive prices down.

Apple really could be preparing to announce something pretty extraordinary for content publishing, creation and consumption today.  Its widely rumored tablet device will very likely put most other ebook reader devices out of business simply because the Apple product will be a real computer, useful for reading and for creating.  It will most likely build a seamless content-creation universe that ties directly to online sales platforms.  It will be a ‘publishing’ tablet really.  Not just an e-book device.

Wired is covering the Apple press conference event all day with blog entries.

I have not purchased any kind of an e-reader device, in spite of the hysteria surrounding them, specifically because of Apple’s plans.  There is no way under the sun that anyone else is going to compare favorably to what Apple is about to drop on us today.

Cartoonist Lucy Knisley has a comic online called ‘Downloading Optimism: Pessimism Virus Detected.’ It’s a funny but very direct assault on the tendency in some quarters to fret and worry about the emergence of digital books and online reading as the driving force behind the new world of publishing.  She doesn’t understand why some of our most creative writers and artists are feeling so gloomy about their prospects in a digital publishing world.

She’s been reading enormous amounts of online text since she was a little girl.  Her point of view is dead on the money.  One little thing I know is that I began publishing for kids online back in 1995.  The kids came and were reading lots of stories.  Let’s say a bunch of them were only 5.  Well, they’re 20 now, and they are making it plain that they want their books on screens just as often as they might want them on paper.  You ignore them at your peril.

I found this comic via Boing Boing

Here’s a stop-motion film about the making of a book called The Complex of All These.  It was made at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York and consists of 3,000 photographs taken over a 2-month period.

Via Dangerous Minds

John Grisham on NBC’s Today Show discusses his new book, writing novels versus short stories, and so-called predatory book pricing by large retailers like Walmart, Target and Amazon.com.  I like Grisham in this interview.  He’s a good interview and he seems sharp.  He talks about how it’s much more difficult to fix a problem in the middle of writing a novel than to do so with a short story.  So he advises writers to ‘not have a problem.’  The trick is to thoroughly outline your entire novel before you even start to write it so that you know every single thing that happens along the way.  Pretty sound advice in most cases.  Not all.  Some of the greatest novels in the world were written by writers who had absolutely no idea where the novel was going from page one.  It depends on what kind of book you’re writing.  I think his advice is perfectly good for most books that are intended for sale in a grocery store.  Certainly.  But writers should never listen to famous writers.  They’re full of crap.  You write what makes you sweat and drink lots of coffee late into the night and bang your fingers on your keyboard until they hurt.  Or not.  Whatever.  I hate outlines.  Especially in word processors.  Awful things.  They destroy good minds and belong mostly in PowerPoint presentations for corporate managers.  I’m not sure what the hell Grisham is talking about quite frankly.  But then again, I’m not selling thrillers in the grocery store either.

But what mainly interests me in this interview is the discussion about ‘predatory pricing’ by the giant retailers.  Apparently, if you listen to publishers, this spells doom for publishing and book selling as we know it.  When asked what he thinks about his latest book being available for nine dollars at Target, Grisham says:

It’s shortsighted. Short term, they know what they are doing, I think. But if a book is worth $10 then suddenly the whole industry is going to change. You are going to lose publishers and book stores, and though I’ll probably be alright, aspiring authors are going to find it difficult to get published.

Yeah? So what.  So we lose publishers and book stores.  Who cares?  The key in Grisham’s statement is where he says, ‘…and though I’ll probably be alright.’ He means writers will be alright.  The big scary fact of the matter is that we simply don’t give a tiny damn whether or not a publisher prints a book or an author does.  Publishers read, accept, edit, design, print and promote books.  At least they used to.  I don’t care what anyone tells you, but we do not need the editors.  Writers can do that.  You write the book and you edit it and you’re done with it.  Readers are getting used to reading writers without editors.  That’s why blogs are so popular.  No editors.  If you have an editor poking around in a blog, trust me, it’s not a blog.  It’s a corporate front-end.  A writer can also design and print a book.  And sell it.  Writers are publishers.  No reader cares about Penguin.  They care about the guy holding the gun.  The guy holding the gun is put there by the writer.  Writers will make guys, guns and gals forever.  It’s what they do and it’s what readers want.

I don’t care if the guy with the gun says, ‘I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Mr. Peabody.  Smile, because it’s the last thing you’ll ever do.’  Or if he says, ‘I’ve been looking for you.  Smile.  It’s your last.’

The writer can pick.  The editor can go watch Kitchen Nightmares.

There is absolutely no excuse for a writer to work hard on a story, hammering it into existence from nothing, polishing it and making it exactly what he or she wants it to be… and then sit around to wait for some agent or publisher to get back via the U.S. mail so that said writer can be allowed to move on and send out yet another plea for acceptance.  This is old technology.  Twentieth century.  It’s gone.  In this century a writer writes and edits and publishes and sells.  His book can sell in Target for nine dollars or three dollars.  Magnificent.  Literature available to people who don’t make lots of money.  What a novel idea!  If you’re griping about Target selling books for nine dollars, you must not be buying books.  Go watch His Girl Friday and pretend that typewriters still make newspapers.

And you know something else?  The guy with the gun doesn’t care.  He’ll always be there.  He’s not going anywhere.  All the publishers and book stores could burn and all the editors could go to their early graves, and you know what?  The guy with the gun is still gonna getcha.  He’s going to find you wherever you go.  He’s alive.

The excellent literary blog called The Elegant Variations has a 4-part post that reprints an essay by Susan Bell about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to The Great Gatsby through his close work with editor Max Perkins.  Bell discusses the absolutely crystal sharp writing in Gatsby that was the result of meticulous rewrites from Fitzgerald and a strong editorial viewpoint from Perkins that the author was more than willing to acknowledge after publication.

Critical reaction at the time of the novel’s publication noted its incredibly polished writing:

For H. L. Mencken, the novel had “a careful and brilliant finish. . . . There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort. . . . The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.

Here’s another quote from Bell’s essay:

In autumn 1924, Fitzgerald sent Perkins the Gatsby manuscript. The editor diagnosed its kinks, then wrote a letter of lavish praise and unabashed criticism. “And as for the sheer writing, it is astonishing,” wrote Perkins. “The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry are most extraordinary.” A crucial problem, though, was the hero’s palpability. Perkins explained:

Among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.

The Nation has a fascinating essay by Elisabeth Sifton called The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes.  She writes about the tidal changes facing the entire book industry from publisher to bookseller to reader.  Here’s a short excerpt:

“Books have had a kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very structures of learning, commerce and culture by which we have absorbed, stored and transmitted information, opinion, art and wisdom. No wonder, then, that the book business, although a very small part of the American economy, has attracted disproportionate attention.

But does it still merit this attention? Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we’ve been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren’t necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.”

The image is of Sherlock Holmes disguised as an old bookseller in the film, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.