Reading more on an e-book
While his sample size is hardly representative, Brad Stone’s recent article in the New York Times suggests that e-book fans are reading more because of the device.
There a few notable points made, but this one I particularly like:
Ms. Howard now buys books any time she wants. She recently downloaded a fantasy novel at 2:30 a.m., immediately after finishing the previous book in a series. She reads during her snippets of daily downtime, like during the wait to pick up her 9-year-old son from school. Her new reading pace is one novel a week.
This, friends and neighbours, is what digital fiction is all about: making it easier for people to find stories, to buy them, and to read.
Sure the people Stone interviews are gadget geeks—one of them works for Microsoft—but that’s beside the point. These are people who would otherwise not be reading much at all. There may be an element of ‘I’ve just spent three hundred dollars on this hunk of plastic so I’d better get some use out of it’, but even if that’s the case, so what? Potential audiences reading more? Who could be opposed to that?
This guy:
‘Given the fact that people now have the Internet, almost 24-hour football entertainment in the fall, tennis matches from around the world, TV shows out the wazoo, and movies, do you really believe that people are going to be reading more because they can get it on a screen?’ said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, owner of imprints like Farrar, Straus and Giroux and St. Martin’s Press. ‘I don’t see the scenario.’
So there you have it. A major US publisher is not interested in bringing stories to readers. Sure, e-books is small bikkies next to paper, but—holy crap!—there are readers out there! Do such people really want to shoot themselves in the foot like that because they don’t like the idea of a screen? Well, actually they don’t. Macmillan run their own e-books site. Although it’s hardly full of household names, it does show that such dismissive statements from the top are at least partly disingenuous.
Reluctantly dragging their feet to e-books seems the order of the day. And don’t expect them to like it. Extraordinary.
And, for the record, there’s no TV shows coming out of my wazoo.
E-Book Fans Are Proving to Be Enthusiastic Readers – NYTimes.com.
Read MoreRemasters
I’ve been on a remasters binge lately. First the Beatles and now I’ve been retracing the Peter Gabriel back catalogue (long overdue since those remasters are already seven years old—but hell if he takes ten years to make a record, then I get ten years to buy it, deal?).
It strikes me that a big factor (cynics may argue the only factor) in a remastered catalogue is the packaging. The sound is cleaner and crisper, but—even to a would-be audiophile like me—doesn’t differ all that dramatically from the old copy-and-dump CD resissues. It’s just a bit…cleaner.
Some remasters throw in additional tracks, though I’m dead against such butchering. I still can’t believe they destroyed the end of Plastic Ono Band. The perfect final song (My Mummy’s Dead) followed up with a poorly recorded sax-sleazy single (Power To The People). I’m sorry, but it’s a fucking insult. I’ll cling to the old one, thanks.
But, aside from any ill-advised ‘value-adding’, a remaster’s packaging is a different story: lavish, lovingly crafted, paying due homage to the original, but bringing into effect a brand new and beautiful object. Some go all out to recreate the old vinyl packaging to the letter, others remix the old design elements into something new and contemporary.
It’s a bit of a sham, I know, but it works. We get excited and buy—yet again—all those old records. We listen to them intently and rediscover the music that had become a bit old hat.
So this wallow in remaster land has got me thinking. What if we remastered books?
In some ways we already do. Sometimes a new edition will include a newly written introduction, though these are rarely worth more than a casual glance. I have a lovely collection of Italo Calvino books from the late nineties. Vintage issued redesigned covers to make them consistent. This is about as close as publishing gets to the remaster and it happens a fair bit: when Random House bought up Venero Armanno’s back catalogue a few years back, they did a similar trick.
Slavish redesign of old covers hasn’t taken off in books the way it has for records, possibly because there’s less emphasis on covers in the industry as a whole. Covers are usually done in house without significant author input and are not standardised worldwide. It does seem strange since a book cover is just as important as a record cover for attracting interest and generating sales.
These redesigned catalogues whack a new cover and leave it there, but the texts themselves are still printed off the same old templates. A truly remastered book should start there. What font? What paper? Do we slavishly copy the first edition from the original plates or do we create a wholly new edition from a digital master?
I’d love one day to see a forum post somewhere about an author’s back catalogue remastered; something that gets those book nerds drooling over their keyboards:
‘Didn’t you hear? It’s not just a reprint. They’ve taken the original text and created a new digital master in Baskerville eleven point and printed it on this creamy 100GSM paper!’
Read MoreCultural Learnings from Amazon
Okay, so I’ve been through the process of transmogrifying text into Kindle friendly format. It’s not too difficult to do, but there are a couple of significant things to note:
Alas, people outside the US can do everything except sell Kindle-formatted texts. Amazon requires a US bank account to complete the final stage of the process. There are unofficial mutterings that this will soon change, so watch this space.
The formatting process is pretty easy and they take the time to display exactly how the text will look on a Kindle: handy when you don’t actually have one yourself. But it looks like sales will be tightly controlled through Amazon themselves; no flogging the formatted texts for sale on…say…your own e-commerce web site. I’m not surprised. Amazon have made it clear that the Kindle is a closed ecosystem. You want in, you play by their rules. It’s their device, so I don’t begrudge them doing what they like, but it does occur to me that when you combine a closed sales system that with a proprietary format and DRM, the net effect would be lower sales.
In his recent article for the Monthly, John ‘Satan’s Work’ Birmingham argues that modest e-book features for the iPhone are already superior in quality to the Kindle and that the rumoured tablet, if let loose, would render all this mucking about with Kindle format useless anyway. I’m not so sure. The iPhone App store is just as closed as Amazon’s and the tools for creating and displaying texts are wrapped up in software developer hell: the kind of place that terrifies even more techie writers like myself.
It’s not a DIY thing.
At the moment, formatting your text for the iPhone involves actually creating your own e-reader application. This means not only a greater initial outlay to hire someone to develop the application for you, but also that different texts use their own systems and rules governing how the text is displayed, how pages are turned, etc. Lack of consistency between titles doesn’t seem that great to me. While I read a lot of text on the iPhone, I have only bought a handful of e-books for it, and I haven’t really read them yet, mainly because the titles available (typically public domain classics) haven’t really grabbed me.
That fact though that these discussions are finally happening suggests that the e-reader may finally finally be maturing into something people might want to actually invest in. That’s a positive. Conditions are ripe for a kick-arse reader to capture the popular imagination and possibly to allow writers the means to reach a wider audience.
All we need now is the right device.
Read MoreKindle in Australia
Mattia Dempsey, editor of Bookseller+Publisher writes in Crikey that Amazon’s Kindle is finally being made available to international buyers meaning for the princely sum of around A$313 non-Americans too can read Amazon’s version of books on a screen.
While it’s good to see such devices attracting interest and more than likely a few buyers at home, Amazon are yet to convince me that their device, with its closed system and proprietary file format for books with DRM, is worth pursuing as an alternative format for selling digital fiction (other than PDF).
For what it’s worth, the design doesn’t exactly float my boat either. But I’ve read enough glowing reports from readers to concede that chunky exterior may mask a more elegant internal design. That’s beside the point anyway.
What interest me is how tightly Amazon dictate the terms of use for the device and its preferred proprietary file format. While the Kindle can display PDF files, all indications are that it does so badly. It apparently fares better with Word documents, but that’s an impractical solution for e-book distributors. Independent publishers and writers can transmogrify their files into Kindle-friendly format, but I notice the process requires an Amazon account. Hmm.
I’ll keep investigating and see how easy it is for independents to tap into the Kindle market. I may even report back here.
Read MoreTwelves Part Nine – Long Long Long
The long song is generally maligned in the critical music world. Dismissed as overblown, egotistical, superfluous, or simply loathed for its mere existence, long songs get a raw deal in both their critical appraisal and the popular imagination.
Well no more! I’ve always had a soft spot for long songs. Proper long songs, not crappy dance remixes or dubious ‘song suites’, not fat pompous paeans to King Arthur or any such nonsense. A long song is a song that unfolds slowly, taking its time to get to where it’s going, then gently relaxes and winds down to its denouement.
So again there are rules to compiling.
I chose eight minutes as the starting point for this twelve mainly because it takes some real commitment to the long song form to top the eight minute mark. Any idiot can write a six minute song and even seven minute ‘epics’ are not ridiculously rare. You’ll notice there are really only a couple of songs below that could be squarely classified as prog rock. I like a couple of proggy bands, but most I find a bit dull and pointless. That’s not a slight against prog rock. Compared to the vast quantity of music commercially available, I find most bands across the board dull and pointless, I mean how many bands can one follow?
So no song suites or medleys, that’s cheating. I have avoided most live reworkings with two notable exceptions. The version from Ummagumma is the first version I’d heard of ‘Careful with that Axe Eugene’. I wasn’t even aware until recently that there was a studio version so to me this one is definitive. ‘In Your Eyes’ live is practically a new song to what now sounds like a brutally chopped version on So. There have been quite a few live issues of the song, but the best is on an old live video with Youssou N’Dour taking the duet, so that’s the one I’ve chosen. Other versions go even longer.
We do have the long intro and outros and gargantuan solos, but I’ve avoided any really gratuitous stuff in favour of songs that hang together as songs.
One of the most common features of the songs that have made the list is that, to my ears, they don’t sound all that long. A few songs, like ‘Gravitate To Me’, I first heard on cassette and had no idea the song ran so long until I bought the CD years later.
Other songs like Morrissey’s make a point of their length, but here again it just doesn’t feel like a long song to me, despite Moz’s unfortunate chorus (To be finished would be a relief…), the song takes its own sweet time to build to a big drums, big guitars cacophony. I know a lot of people really hate that song. Their loss.
And finally I got an Art of Fighting song into one of my twelves. That rectifies a horrible injustice. Though they are undoubtedly an acquired taste, I love that band. It’s a crime I’ve never caught them live or they probably would have made the concerts twelve.
And what does one say about ‘Sir Psycho Sexy’ that the song itself doesn’t already? An eight minute letter to Playboy, jizzum references and all, unflappably funky and filthy. And you thought this would be a prog rock list…
The long version of Revolution has never been officially released; however, it was leaked onto the web earlier this year. As an historical artefact, it’s interesting in that it bridges the gap between Revolution 1 and Revolution 9, but what I didn’t expect is that it would be a great song in its own right. The familiar song disintegrates and deconstructs before your ears and evolves into a sound collage so slowly, it makes sound collage listenable.
The songs are in order of running time, shortest to longest.
- Stairway To Heaven — Led Zeppelin (8:03)
- Gravitate To Me — The The (8:10)
- Sir Psycho Sexy — Red Hot Chili Peppers (8:17)
- Nagambie River Wine Song — Augie March (8:19)
- Silverfuck — Smashing Pumpkins (8:43)
- Careful With That Axe Eugene — Pink Floyd (8:51)
- Waiting — Art Of Fighting (9:29)
- Firth Of Fifth — Genesis (9:38)
- Revolution (Take 20) — The Beatles (10:47)
- The Teachers Are Afraid Of The Pupils — Morrissey (11:21)
- In Your Eyes — Peter Gabriel (11:44)
- The Dajon Song — Gomez (13:28)
At a total running time approaching two hours, it’s a long haul to listen through the list, but what a ride.
Read MoreThe Books
