http://www.readersread.com/speakout/
Click on Will electronic reading devices eventually replace books? on the site.
Monday, July 7, 2008
John Updike on print vs. electronic
(SEE THE LAST TWO PARAGRAPHS IN PARTICULAR)
By JOHN UPDIKE
Published: June 25, 2006
Booksellers, you are the salt of the book world. You are on the front line where, while the author cowers in his opium den, you encounter — or "interface with," as we say now — the rare and mysterious Americans who are willing to plunk down $25 for a book. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. At my mother's side I used to visit the two stores in downtown Reading, Pa., a city then of 100,000, and I still recall their names and locations — the Book Mart, at Sixth Street and Court, and the Berkshire News, on Fifth Street, in front of the trolley stop that would take us home to Shillington.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. In addition to the Coop and various outlets where impecunious students like myself could buy tattered volumes polluted by someone else's underlinings and marginalia, there were bookstores that catered to the Cambridge bourgeoisie, the professoriate, and those elite students with money and reading time to spare. The Grolier, specializing in modern poetry, occupied a choice niche on Plympton Street, and over on Boylston there was the Mandrake, a more spacious sanctum for books of rare, pellucid and modernist water. In the Mandrake — presided over by a soft-voiced short man, with brushed-back graying hair — there were English books, Faber & Faber and Victor Gollancz, books with purely typographical jackets and cloth-covered boards warping from the damp of their trans-Atlantic passage, and art books, too glossy and expensive even to glance into, and of course New Directions books, modest in format and delicious in their unread content.
After Harvard, I went to Oxford for a year, and browsed for dazed hours in the rambling treasury, on the street called the Broad, of Blackwell's — shelves of Everyman's and Oxford Classics, and the complete works, jacketed in baby-blue paper, of Thomas Aquinas, in Latin and English! Then I came to New York, when Fifth Avenue still seemed lined with bookstores — the baronial Scribner's, with the central staircase and the scrolled ironwork of its balconies, and the Doubleday's a few blocks on, with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.
Now I live in a village-like corner of a small New England city that holds, mirabile dictu, an independent bookstore, one of the few surviving in the long coastal stretch between Marblehead and Newburyport. But I live, it seems, in a fool's paradise. Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article that gleefully envisioned the end of the bookseller, and indeed of the writer. Written by Kevin Kelly, identified as the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine, the article describes a glorious digitalizing of all written knowledge. Google's plan, announced in December 2004, to scan the contents of five major research libraries and make them searchable, according to Kelly, has resurrected the dream of the universal library. "The explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade," he writes, "has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?"
Unlike the libraries of old, Kelly continues, "this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person." The anarchic nature of the true democracy emerges bit by bit. "Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page," Kelly writes. "These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or 'playlists,' as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual 'bookshelves' — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these 'bookshelves' will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages."
The economic repercussions of this paradise of freely flowing snippets are touched on with a beguiling offhandedness, as a matter of course, a matter of an inexorable Marxist unfolding. As the current economic model disappears, Kelly writes, the "basis of wealth" shifts to "relationships, links, connection and sharing." Instead of selling copies of their work, writers and artists can make a living selling "performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the 'discovery tool' that markets these other intangible valuables."
This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. "Performances, access to the creator, personalization," whatever that is — does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation? Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrity as a summum bonum that an author's works, be they one volume or 50, serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform, or, since even that is somewhat hierarchical and aloof, a series of one-on-one orgies of personal access?
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.
In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant "Aw, shucks," disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.
The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village. "When books are digitized," Kelly ominously promises, "reading becomes a community activity. . . . The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book."
Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.
So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
John Updike's most recent novel is "Terrorist." This essay is adapted from his address to booksellers at the Book Expo convention held last month in Washington.
By JOHN UPDIKE
Published: June 25, 2006
Booksellers, you are the salt of the book world. You are on the front line where, while the author cowers in his opium den, you encounter — or "interface with," as we say now — the rare and mysterious Americans who are willing to plunk down $25 for a book. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. At my mother's side I used to visit the two stores in downtown Reading, Pa., a city then of 100,000, and I still recall their names and locations — the Book Mart, at Sixth Street and Court, and the Berkshire News, on Fifth Street, in front of the trolley stop that would take us home to Shillington.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. In addition to the Coop and various outlets where impecunious students like myself could buy tattered volumes polluted by someone else's underlinings and marginalia, there were bookstores that catered to the Cambridge bourgeoisie, the professoriate, and those elite students with money and reading time to spare. The Grolier, specializing in modern poetry, occupied a choice niche on Plympton Street, and over on Boylston there was the Mandrake, a more spacious sanctum for books of rare, pellucid and modernist water. In the Mandrake — presided over by a soft-voiced short man, with brushed-back graying hair — there were English books, Faber & Faber and Victor Gollancz, books with purely typographical jackets and cloth-covered boards warping from the damp of their trans-Atlantic passage, and art books, too glossy and expensive even to glance into, and of course New Directions books, modest in format and delicious in their unread content.
After Harvard, I went to Oxford for a year, and browsed for dazed hours in the rambling treasury, on the street called the Broad, of Blackwell's — shelves of Everyman's and Oxford Classics, and the complete works, jacketed in baby-blue paper, of Thomas Aquinas, in Latin and English! Then I came to New York, when Fifth Avenue still seemed lined with bookstores — the baronial Scribner's, with the central staircase and the scrolled ironwork of its balconies, and the Doubleday's a few blocks on, with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.
Now I live in a village-like corner of a small New England city that holds, mirabile dictu, an independent bookstore, one of the few surviving in the long coastal stretch between Marblehead and Newburyport. But I live, it seems, in a fool's paradise. Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article that gleefully envisioned the end of the bookseller, and indeed of the writer. Written by Kevin Kelly, identified as the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine, the article describes a glorious digitalizing of all written knowledge. Google's plan, announced in December 2004, to scan the contents of five major research libraries and make them searchable, according to Kelly, has resurrected the dream of the universal library. "The explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade," he writes, "has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?"
Unlike the libraries of old, Kelly continues, "this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person." The anarchic nature of the true democracy emerges bit by bit. "Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page," Kelly writes. "These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or 'playlists,' as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual 'bookshelves' — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these 'bookshelves' will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages."
The economic repercussions of this paradise of freely flowing snippets are touched on with a beguiling offhandedness, as a matter of course, a matter of an inexorable Marxist unfolding. As the current economic model disappears, Kelly writes, the "basis of wealth" shifts to "relationships, links, connection and sharing." Instead of selling copies of their work, writers and artists can make a living selling "performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the 'discovery tool' that markets these other intangible valuables."
This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. "Performances, access to the creator, personalization," whatever that is — does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation? Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrity as a summum bonum that an author's works, be they one volume or 50, serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform, or, since even that is somewhat hierarchical and aloof, a series of one-on-one orgies of personal access?
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.
In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant "Aw, shucks," disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.
The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village. "When books are digitized," Kelly ominously promises, "reading becomes a community activity. . . . The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book."
Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.
So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
John Updike's most recent novel is "Terrorist." This essay is adapted from his address to booksellers at the Book Expo convention held last month in Washington.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Is the Biography Genre Dead?
The following is an excerpt from an article that questions whether the biography, as a genre, is dead or at least not as potent as it once was. I got this article from Paper Cuts, which suggests that there are still people worth writing about, including Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pynchon.
"The death of life writing"
by Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
Published June 28, 2008
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. "Sclerosis" might be nearer.
Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.
However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch's Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials. Since becoming a biographer 15 years ago - most recently of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot - I have read widely within the genre and with professional attention. I also teach on the MA in life writing at UEA, which aims to give would-be biographers a solid grounding in their chosen art. And I get hundreds of titles sent to me every year for review. I have to say I am struck by their recent falling-off. Of course there are always stand-outs, even in a thin year such as 2007 (Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton and Rosemary Hill's Pugin), and 2008 is shaping up to be better, with new work from Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd in the autumn. But the general standard, the mean, the middling, seems to have sunk to a listless low.
Let me give you a taste of what I am sent each week. There are endless lives of saucy 18th-century society ladies, even though it is a full 10 years since the surprise hit Georgiana by Amanda Foreman opened up that particular realm. (The worst moment was receiving a biography of Georgiana's sister, Harriet.) There are plenty of royal mistresses, to the extent that one wonders if there is a boudoir somewhere where they sit all day doing their hair, waiting to be called forward for active biographical duty. Lives on the edge of empire are popular too, probably in response to the academy's continuing interest in all things postcolonial. So each week you can be guaranteed stories about people who ran little kingdoms in clammy parts of the globe and/or were worshipped as gods by confused locals.
While there is a respectable rationale for doing these minor lives, grounded in the argument that hidden or forgotten subjects deserve their restorative moment in the sun, the real reason is more pragmatic. The fact is that anyone really important has already been done, probably several times. The 19th and 20th centuries have long been harvested for any royal, writer, actor, painter or soldier whose life and work could conceivably yield 350 pages of serviceable prose. (That's another problem: the misguided belief that writing a biography requires nothing more than journeyman skill when it comes to putting one word in front of another.) For a while, the 18th century appeared fertile, with its combination of ebullient consumerism and unbuttoned sexuality seeming to offer an easy parallel to our own. Now, though, it is all fished out. Go back any further than 1700 and you run into the problem not just of finding the sources, but of making sense of them. People in the early modern period had such different ideas about what it meant to be a self, especially in relation to others, that trying to corral them into the kind of unfolding psychodrama expected by the modern biography reader becomes tricky, unless you're prepared to gloss like crazy.
The least imaginative response to this lack of good new subjects is simply to go back to the big lives and do them over - and over - again. You can justify this by an appeal to the idea that each decade (actually, every four years might be nearer) needs its own Dickens or Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to this convenient way of thinking, dressing up old subjects in new clothes becomes playful and postmodern, rather than just desperate. Yet Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary, London University, whose The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection reached the Samuel Johnson shortlist two years ago, warns against being taken in by this sleight of hand. "What often happens is that a perfectly solid biography from 1978 gets rewritten with an eye to the intellectual moment, without the addition of a single bit of new information." The result: a George Eliot for the New Labour age (I plead guilty), or a queer Queen Victoria for the noughties, or the six wives of Henry VIII refashioned as the post-feminist heroines from Sex and the City.
Why doesn't anyone say or do something about these acts of biographical cannibalism? According to literary agent Andrew Lownie, who runs the Biographers' Club (a networking organisation for practitioners), it's because the power in publishing companies has decisively passed from the commissioning editors to the sales people. "Their thinking is, if something was once a hit, then let's try it again, even though clearly there's a law of diminishing returns. Anything new or different is looked on with suspicion." Lownie's theory is confirmed by the recent experience of one writer I spoke to. Having produced a first biography that punched well above its weight, he has been looking forward to writing his second, this time on a playwright whose work he knows well. His publishers, though, are having none of it and have suggested instead that he try a life of ... Graham Greene. That Norman Sherry's authorised multi-decker Life has sucked every last shred of marrow from Greene's tired old bones seems scarcely to matter.
What makes it doubly strange is that biography as a genre has a tradition of lively experimentation. Consider John Aubrey's Brief Lives, written in the lee of the civil war. If published today, its zany mix of biography and autobiography, gossip and scholarship would be hailed as wonderfully postmodern. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians of 1918 is a fine example of the short, pithy group biographies that are making something of a comeback. These are the fresh, wayward models that I ask my students to consider when they begin their own biographical projects. (Anyone who suggests embarking on a cradle-to-grave narrative of a royal mistress goes to the back of the class.)
In the interests of balance, I should report that it is not only Hamilton who remains bullish about the state of biography. When I asked Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Austen, Pepys and Hardy among others, she could see no reason to worry. Michael Holroyd agrees that "something has definitely changed", though stops short of calling it a crisis. His reading is that popular history and misery memoirs have temporarily knocked biography off its top spot in the non-fiction hierarchy, and that it's probably a question of waiting out the cycle. Michael Prodger, literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph, agrees that the golden age of biography, in which the publication of fat lives of important people by leading writers were automatically given the hushed attention due to a major minor cultural event, has probably passed. But he warns against uncritical nostalgia: "The fact is that there has always been a second division of biography, good enough without being distinguished. These nearly-books are always with us."
The responses of publishers were more upbeat. This could be because they are obliged to sound perky in public, or it may be that being on the receiving end of hundreds of proposals every year gives them a helpfully elevated view. Thus Jenny Uglow, editorial director of Chatto & Windus, herself a distinguished biographer, reports that "interesting ideas are still coming in, although perhaps we're having to look harder for them than we used to". Arabella Pike, meanwhile, who heads up a distinguished biography list at HarperPress, is justly proud of Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which came out last year. An intellectually bold book, Elizabeth Marsh sets itself the task of plotting "the world in the life" of a humble British woman in the 18th century whose own history happened to collide with that of Britain's emerging empire. It is a fascinating book, which speaks straight to the current preoccupation with globalisation, written by one of our leading academic historians...
Yet, despite this gloomy picture of careless publishers lashing on inexperienced writers, there are signs that something important is about to happen in biography. Jonathan Bate of Warwick University, who wrote a prizewinning life of John Clare, declares that "we are on the edge of a paradigm shift". In fact, he believes that he has already seen the future, in the shape of books such as Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which come at familiar subjects from odd angles. "Instead of old-style literary biography, which tells the story from cradle to grave, these books focus in on just one episode in a life and, in the process, unfold a far richer story." Bate is also justly excited about Holroyd's upcoming A Strange Eventful History, which, rather than concentrating on a single subject, braids together the lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families in order to tell a broader story about theatre culture on the eve of the modern age.
Pike is also enthusiastic about the mutation of biography into new, hybrid forms. She points to the work of Robert Macfarlane, who recently blended ecological reportage with auto/biography so memorably in Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. She also admires Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published this year, which cleverly melds family history and crime writing with social and literary history.
To this list I would add, from two years ago, Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards - winner of the Guardian first book award - which, like work by Macfarlane and Summerscale, managed to become both a critical and a popular success. The book is about Stuart Shorter, an alcoholic, homeless man whose life story seemed to demand that it be written backwards in order to catch a proper sense of chaos. Masters, a young first-timer now working on his second book, happily admits to being turned off by the idea of writing what most people understand as biography: "It would never cross my mind to do the life of someone dead or great - it would be completely beyond me." (If that sounds admirably modest, Masters also added, "Anyway, who on earth needs another biography of George Eliot - it's so boring!") Instead, he urges biographers to "get out and write about the people under their noses - the people whose stories may seem mundane, but whose daily existences are actually filled with Homeric struggles".
I'm guessing that Stuart was written with a small advance. In order for biographers to make these kinds of breakthroughs in form, it may mean taking less money than they might like. Certainly Uglow urges writers to stick up for the projects they want to pursue, even if they don't initially seem like money-spinners. Her own recent book, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, is a masterclass in how these risks can pay off. A biographer with a firmer eye on the market might have passed up the opportunity to write about the artist whose visual renderings of country life went so far towards defining the way the early 19th century saw the natural world. Nonetheless, Bewick ended up as one of the big successes of 2006, mentioned in "book of the year" slots more than any other title.
None of these aforementioned books on its own represents Bate's "paradigm shift", but taken together they do suggest that something significant is astir. Nor should we be complacent that, when the biographical future does arrive, we will necessarily like or even recognise it. The first time I heard about Stuart from Masters's publicist, I thought it sounded glum and dull - a view shared by Masters's then agent, who refused even to take the manuscript out of the Jiffy bag (he was soon replaced). All one can hope, really, is that a small but growing band of writers are financially and intellectually brave enough to strip biography back to its first principle - the recording of lived experience - and consider that brief in the widest possible terms. And even if we don't at first enjoy their efforts, perhaps finding them tricky or strange, at least it means that we will be spared too many more visits from those royal mistresses with their come-hither smiles.
"The death of life writing"
by Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
Published June 28, 2008
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. "Sclerosis" might be nearer.
Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.
However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch's Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials. Since becoming a biographer 15 years ago - most recently of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot - I have read widely within the genre and with professional attention. I also teach on the MA in life writing at UEA, which aims to give would-be biographers a solid grounding in their chosen art. And I get hundreds of titles sent to me every year for review. I have to say I am struck by their recent falling-off. Of course there are always stand-outs, even in a thin year such as 2007 (Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton and Rosemary Hill's Pugin), and 2008 is shaping up to be better, with new work from Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd in the autumn. But the general standard, the mean, the middling, seems to have sunk to a listless low.
Let me give you a taste of what I am sent each week. There are endless lives of saucy 18th-century society ladies, even though it is a full 10 years since the surprise hit Georgiana by Amanda Foreman opened up that particular realm. (The worst moment was receiving a biography of Georgiana's sister, Harriet.) There are plenty of royal mistresses, to the extent that one wonders if there is a boudoir somewhere where they sit all day doing their hair, waiting to be called forward for active biographical duty. Lives on the edge of empire are popular too, probably in response to the academy's continuing interest in all things postcolonial. So each week you can be guaranteed stories about people who ran little kingdoms in clammy parts of the globe and/or were worshipped as gods by confused locals.
While there is a respectable rationale for doing these minor lives, grounded in the argument that hidden or forgotten subjects deserve their restorative moment in the sun, the real reason is more pragmatic. The fact is that anyone really important has already been done, probably several times. The 19th and 20th centuries have long been harvested for any royal, writer, actor, painter or soldier whose life and work could conceivably yield 350 pages of serviceable prose. (That's another problem: the misguided belief that writing a biography requires nothing more than journeyman skill when it comes to putting one word in front of another.) For a while, the 18th century appeared fertile, with its combination of ebullient consumerism and unbuttoned sexuality seeming to offer an easy parallel to our own. Now, though, it is all fished out. Go back any further than 1700 and you run into the problem not just of finding the sources, but of making sense of them. People in the early modern period had such different ideas about what it meant to be a self, especially in relation to others, that trying to corral them into the kind of unfolding psychodrama expected by the modern biography reader becomes tricky, unless you're prepared to gloss like crazy.
The least imaginative response to this lack of good new subjects is simply to go back to the big lives and do them over - and over - again. You can justify this by an appeal to the idea that each decade (actually, every four years might be nearer) needs its own Dickens or Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to this convenient way of thinking, dressing up old subjects in new clothes becomes playful and postmodern, rather than just desperate. Yet Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary, London University, whose The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection reached the Samuel Johnson shortlist two years ago, warns against being taken in by this sleight of hand. "What often happens is that a perfectly solid biography from 1978 gets rewritten with an eye to the intellectual moment, without the addition of a single bit of new information." The result: a George Eliot for the New Labour age (I plead guilty), or a queer Queen Victoria for the noughties, or the six wives of Henry VIII refashioned as the post-feminist heroines from Sex and the City.
Why doesn't anyone say or do something about these acts of biographical cannibalism? According to literary agent Andrew Lownie, who runs the Biographers' Club (a networking organisation for practitioners), it's because the power in publishing companies has decisively passed from the commissioning editors to the sales people. "Their thinking is, if something was once a hit, then let's try it again, even though clearly there's a law of diminishing returns. Anything new or different is looked on with suspicion." Lownie's theory is confirmed by the recent experience of one writer I spoke to. Having produced a first biography that punched well above its weight, he has been looking forward to writing his second, this time on a playwright whose work he knows well. His publishers, though, are having none of it and have suggested instead that he try a life of ... Graham Greene. That Norman Sherry's authorised multi-decker Life has sucked every last shred of marrow from Greene's tired old bones seems scarcely to matter.
What makes it doubly strange is that biography as a genre has a tradition of lively experimentation. Consider John Aubrey's Brief Lives, written in the lee of the civil war. If published today, its zany mix of biography and autobiography, gossip and scholarship would be hailed as wonderfully postmodern. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians of 1918 is a fine example of the short, pithy group biographies that are making something of a comeback. These are the fresh, wayward models that I ask my students to consider when they begin their own biographical projects. (Anyone who suggests embarking on a cradle-to-grave narrative of a royal mistress goes to the back of the class.)
In the interests of balance, I should report that it is not only Hamilton who remains bullish about the state of biography. When I asked Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Austen, Pepys and Hardy among others, she could see no reason to worry. Michael Holroyd agrees that "something has definitely changed", though stops short of calling it a crisis. His reading is that popular history and misery memoirs have temporarily knocked biography off its top spot in the non-fiction hierarchy, and that it's probably a question of waiting out the cycle. Michael Prodger, literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph, agrees that the golden age of biography, in which the publication of fat lives of important people by leading writers were automatically given the hushed attention due to a major minor cultural event, has probably passed. But he warns against uncritical nostalgia: "The fact is that there has always been a second division of biography, good enough without being distinguished. These nearly-books are always with us."
The responses of publishers were more upbeat. This could be because they are obliged to sound perky in public, or it may be that being on the receiving end of hundreds of proposals every year gives them a helpfully elevated view. Thus Jenny Uglow, editorial director of Chatto & Windus, herself a distinguished biographer, reports that "interesting ideas are still coming in, although perhaps we're having to look harder for them than we used to". Arabella Pike, meanwhile, who heads up a distinguished biography list at HarperPress, is justly proud of Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which came out last year. An intellectually bold book, Elizabeth Marsh sets itself the task of plotting "the world in the life" of a humble British woman in the 18th century whose own history happened to collide with that of Britain's emerging empire. It is a fascinating book, which speaks straight to the current preoccupation with globalisation, written by one of our leading academic historians...
Yet, despite this gloomy picture of careless publishers lashing on inexperienced writers, there are signs that something important is about to happen in biography. Jonathan Bate of Warwick University, who wrote a prizewinning life of John Clare, declares that "we are on the edge of a paradigm shift". In fact, he believes that he has already seen the future, in the shape of books such as Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which come at familiar subjects from odd angles. "Instead of old-style literary biography, which tells the story from cradle to grave, these books focus in on just one episode in a life and, in the process, unfold a far richer story." Bate is also justly excited about Holroyd's upcoming A Strange Eventful History, which, rather than concentrating on a single subject, braids together the lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families in order to tell a broader story about theatre culture on the eve of the modern age.
Pike is also enthusiastic about the mutation of biography into new, hybrid forms. She points to the work of Robert Macfarlane, who recently blended ecological reportage with auto/biography so memorably in Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. She also admires Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published this year, which cleverly melds family history and crime writing with social and literary history.
To this list I would add, from two years ago, Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards - winner of the Guardian first book award - which, like work by Macfarlane and Summerscale, managed to become both a critical and a popular success. The book is about Stuart Shorter, an alcoholic, homeless man whose life story seemed to demand that it be written backwards in order to catch a proper sense of chaos. Masters, a young first-timer now working on his second book, happily admits to being turned off by the idea of writing what most people understand as biography: "It would never cross my mind to do the life of someone dead or great - it would be completely beyond me." (If that sounds admirably modest, Masters also added, "Anyway, who on earth needs another biography of George Eliot - it's so boring!") Instead, he urges biographers to "get out and write about the people under their noses - the people whose stories may seem mundane, but whose daily existences are actually filled with Homeric struggles".
I'm guessing that Stuart was written with a small advance. In order for biographers to make these kinds of breakthroughs in form, it may mean taking less money than they might like. Certainly Uglow urges writers to stick up for the projects they want to pursue, even if they don't initially seem like money-spinners. Her own recent book, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, is a masterclass in how these risks can pay off. A biographer with a firmer eye on the market might have passed up the opportunity to write about the artist whose visual renderings of country life went so far towards defining the way the early 19th century saw the natural world. Nonetheless, Bewick ended up as one of the big successes of 2006, mentioned in "book of the year" slots more than any other title.
None of these aforementioned books on its own represents Bate's "paradigm shift", but taken together they do suggest that something significant is astir. Nor should we be complacent that, when the biographical future does arrive, we will necessarily like or even recognise it. The first time I heard about Stuart from Masters's publicist, I thought it sounded glum and dull - a view shared by Masters's then agent, who refused even to take the manuscript out of the Jiffy bag (he was soon replaced). All one can hope, really, is that a small but growing band of writers are financially and intellectually brave enough to strip biography back to its first principle - the recording of lived experience - and consider that brief in the widest possible terms. And even if we don't at first enjoy their efforts, perhaps finding them tricky or strange, at least it means that we will be spared too many more visits from those royal mistresses with their come-hither smiles.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Nicholas Carr - "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?
In this article from the current issue of The Atlantic, the author wonders if Google is making us stupid BECAUSE web reading leads to quick reading, skimming, jumping from link to link, making our minds less able to read long stretches of print---i.e. less able to read books.
This phenomenon is not just psychological: it is equally neurological as our brain circuits are rerouted.
"My mind isn't going---so far as I can tell---but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in tghe narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration oftens starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."
It's the Web that is causing this. Though the Web is a marvelous thing, here we have a huge negative side-effect.
The shape of the neural networks inside our brains are changing, and not for the better.
More later from this article on this subject.
This phenomenon is not just psychological: it is equally neurological as our brain circuits are rerouted.
"My mind isn't going---so far as I can tell---but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in tghe narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration oftens starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."
It's the Web that is causing this. Though the Web is a marvelous thing, here we have a huge negative side-effect.
The shape of the neural networks inside our brains are changing, and not for the better.
More later from this article on this subject.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Scott McClellan - What Happened
There is nothing new or earth-shaking in this book, and it is not a great reading experience, yet reading the book is worthwhile.
Bush misled the country into Iraq. We all know that. McClellan says Bush's purpose was to turn Iraq into a Western style democracy in order to shake up and influence the Middle East. But Bush couldn't say this going in so we went through the WMD/Hussein is a threat to us routine. This misdirection is the source of Bush's Iraq troubles.
The Vice-President was involved in the leaking of the CIA agent Valerie Plame. McClellan was lied to by the White House staff in this matter. This was McClellan's tipping point. The Valerie Pflame thing is what led to the writing of this book.
But here is the thing. I see this book as a DEFENSE of George W. Bush. Through it all, McClellan still seems to say that Bush is a fine fellow. The author goes as far as he can to exonerate Bush for the folly of Iraq and for the Valerie Pflame incident. This is the really curious thing about this book.
Bush misled the country into Iraq. We all know that. McClellan says Bush's purpose was to turn Iraq into a Western style democracy in order to shake up and influence the Middle East. But Bush couldn't say this going in so we went through the WMD/Hussein is a threat to us routine. This misdirection is the source of Bush's Iraq troubles.
The Vice-President was involved in the leaking of the CIA agent Valerie Plame. McClellan was lied to by the White House staff in this matter. This was McClellan's tipping point. The Valerie Pflame thing is what led to the writing of this book.
But here is the thing. I see this book as a DEFENSE of George W. Bush. Through it all, McClellan still seems to say that Bush is a fine fellow. The author goes as far as he can to exonerate Bush for the folly of Iraq and for the Valerie Pflame incident. This is the really curious thing about this book.
Friday, June 20, 2008
This Month in Books
THIS MONTH IN BOOKS
June 3, 1964 T. S. Eliot writes to Groucho Marx: “The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood , and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.”
June 5, 1900 Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), 28, dies in a sanitarium in Badenweiler, Germany, of tuberculosis, compounded by malarial fever caught while he was covering the Spanish-American War in Cuba.
June 10, 1928 Artist and author of children’s books, Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) is born in Brooklyn, New York.
June 17, 1917 Gwendolyn Brooks is born in Topeka, Kansas. A poet and novelist, Brooks will become the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, for Annie Allen.
June 22, 1913 Amy Lowell gives an “Imagist” dinner party attended, among others, by Ford Madox Ford (author of 81 books—32 of them novels), who says he has no idea what the word means and suspects no one else does either..
June 24, 1842 Cynical author, Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary) is born in Meigs County, Ohio. Jack London will say: “Bierce would bury his best friend with a sigh of relief, and express satisfaction that he was done with him.”
June 26, 1892 Novelist Pearl S. Buck, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature, is born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. A few months later, her missionary parents return to China, which will remain her home until 1933.
June 27, 1880 Helen Keller is born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Deaf, mute and blind from the age of 19 months due to scarlet fever, will write fluently about her life: The World I Live In and The Song of the Stone Wall.
June 30, 1857 Charles Dickens gives the first public reading from his works—A Christmas Carol—at St. Martin’s Hall, London.
June 3, 1964 T. S. Eliot writes to Groucho Marx: “The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood , and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.”
June 5, 1900 Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), 28, dies in a sanitarium in Badenweiler, Germany, of tuberculosis, compounded by malarial fever caught while he was covering the Spanish-American War in Cuba.
June 10, 1928 Artist and author of children’s books, Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) is born in Brooklyn, New York.
June 17, 1917 Gwendolyn Brooks is born in Topeka, Kansas. A poet and novelist, Brooks will become the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, for Annie Allen.
June 22, 1913 Amy Lowell gives an “Imagist” dinner party attended, among others, by Ford Madox Ford (author of 81 books—32 of them novels), who says he has no idea what the word means and suspects no one else does either..
June 24, 1842 Cynical author, Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary) is born in Meigs County, Ohio. Jack London will say: “Bierce would bury his best friend with a sigh of relief, and express satisfaction that he was done with him.”
June 26, 1892 Novelist Pearl S. Buck, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature, is born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. A few months later, her missionary parents return to China, which will remain her home until 1933.
June 27, 1880 Helen Keller is born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Deaf, mute and blind from the age of 19 months due to scarlet fever, will write fluently about her life: The World I Live In and The Song of the Stone Wall.
June 30, 1857 Charles Dickens gives the first public reading from his works—A Christmas Carol—at St. Martin’s Hall, London.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
e-books
Are we spell-bound by e-books?
Story Highlights:
Kindle e-book reading device is hyped for pairing with Amazon, cellular wireless
Electronic paper technology allows for easy-viewing, low-power display
Main current drawback is paucity of e-books compared with print editions
(CNN) -- Imagine a magic scroll, one that contains a myriad of stories and tells you a different one every night. One that fetches you the morning news, generates customized crossword-puzzles, keeps an eye on your favorite authors and an ear on the local grapevine. Imagine a living, breathing kiosk of brain-candy and a library of literature that's easy to read and rolls right up into the palm of your hand.
The Kindle belongs to the new generation of e-book reading devices that use Electronic Paper Display.
Before jumping to the K-word, keep in mind the magic. Because while the concept is there, the Kindle is not -- yet. But as far as wireless dedicated e-book reading devices go, it's a promising start.
"Books are the last bastion of analog," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos declared a few days before the Kindle's release on November 19, 2007.
Indeed, sensations such as cracking open a brand-new hardcover or fondling the dog-eared corners of a favorite paperback in a second-hand bookshop die hard. But then, so do trees.
In response to the lingering fetish for the printed page, Bezos sighed: "I'm sure people loved their horses too, but you're not going to keep riding a horse to work."
Amazon's Kindle sold out on the day of its release in less than six hours.
Given its native pairing with Amazon.com on the mainstream market, the Kindle has not resisted comparison with Apple iTunes and the now ubiquitous iPod.
Asked at the Macworld Expo in January 2008 what he thought of the Kindle, Apple founder Steve Jobs scornfully replied: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore."
Ironically, just as the minority of Apple computer owners are rarely less than Mac evangelists, so a minority of amateur bookworms are rarely less than avid readers -- who will read whenever, wherever, however.
Disappearing books
"When you're reading a book," says Kindle spokesman Andrew Herdener, "you forget that it's a container made of up paper, glue, stitching, cardboard, etc -- You get lost in the author's world, and the book disappears.
"We tried to replicate this same feature -- to make Kindle disappear. That's why we used e-Ink and made it wireless, so you don't even notice it's a device."
The Kindle (as in the sparkling ignition of knowledge) was conceived with overtly bookish analogies, from its paperback size and electronic "paper" display to the librarian-monikered Whispernet (based on mobile-phone carrier Sprint's EVDO broadband service) used to beam content into the box.
Like other dedicated e-reader devices, the Kindle focuses on optimizing text display (featuring adjustable font size) and managing contextual references, such as a built-in dictionary, live Wikipedia access and an "experimental" browser that reads only text -- presumably, for less audio-visual distraction.
You can pounce on newly purchased e-books in less than a minute, and subscribe to newspapers, magazines and blogs (in 4-level grayscale), which are automatically refreshed, as long as the internal modem is turned on. You can also send it your own PDF, text or image documents, and even audio files, to "kindle" and read.
But its free-access, unlimited Whispernet capability is what distinguishes the much-hyped Kindle from other e-readers currently available on the market -- which rely on either synching to a computer or WiFi access to the Internet -- making it a standalone, purpose-built, almost magic book.
Not quite magic
The Kindle itself isn't quite magic for three main reasons -- two of which apply to any e-reading device, and all of which can be resolved over time.
Firstly, because of its exclusive partnership with Sprint, it only works to its full wireless potential within the U.S., thus alienating would-be fans in the rest of the world.
Secondly, because these devices focus on text, readers are limited to text-only, grayscale versions of otherwise colorful and lively newspaper, magazine and blog pages that are accessible for free on the Web.
Thirdly, and most significantly, there still aren't enough e-books available to meet the demand. And unlike with MP3s, you can't easily rip your own books into a readable e-format.
Amazon may boast the largest proprietary e-library with 126,994 Kindle books listed on its Web site, but one of the outstanding complaints from e-readers who have purchased any dedicated device is not finding the e-books they want.
Publishing more e-content
Fortunately, some publishers are listening.
Just last week, Simon & Schuster announced 5,000 new titles to be made available for the Kindle in 2008, primarily adult and children's fiction and nonfiction. Apparently, e-publishing pays.
"E-book sales are still a small, but fast-growing segment of our overall revenue," says Simon & Schuster's Adam Rothberg.
"In 2007 we experienced a 40 percent growth over 2006. If current trends for 2008 hold, we expect that we will double or better that growth."
Meanwhile, ecologically responsible Random House, also known for pioneering a comprehensive collection of audio books, currently offers e-books in four dedicated formats, in addition to a selection of Kindled titles.
It has also launched digital initiatives such as iFodors, making travel information and maps downloadable for PDA, online pay-per-page-view and individual chapter sales.
Of course, e-publishing also saves trees -- not to mention the time and costs of manufacturing paper, printing, shipping and handling.
Science-fiction author Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" was published simultaneously in print by Tor and electronically on the Internet in 2003. Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book had been downloaded from his site.
"The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects, and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online," Doctorow writes in Forbes.
"Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an audience. (...) In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word-of-mouth."
And if any doubts still arise about free online access spurring paper book sales, just ask J.K. Rowling how successful she thinks the print version of the Harry Potter Lexicon will be.
No more twitchy little screens
Long before the success of "Brokeback Mountain," Fiction Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx infamously told the New York Times in 1994: "Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever."
Today, no less than seven of her authored books are available in Kindle edition from Amazon.
Proulx was partly right. As an increasing number of people read digitized novels, the screens on which they read them are becoming much less twitchy.
The new generation of e-book reader devices uses Electronic Ink, instead of LCD, to make ultra-flat, low-power electrophoretic displays that are easy on the eyes and look roughly like a super high-resolution etch-a-sketch.
The first dedicated e-book device to integrate this technology was Sony's LIBRIe, which was introduced to the Japanese market in 2004.
A full two years later, the English-version Sony Reader was launched in the U.S. in September 2006. Its current PRS-505 edition, released in October 2007 with 8-level grayscale and now selling for $299, is the closest rival to Amazon's $349 Kindle.
iRex Technologies' higher-end (and much pricier $699) iLiad, launched in July 2006 with WiFi access, pushes its electronic-paper display to 16 levels of gray and allows input via stylus on a A5-size touch screen, so it can actually be used like a paper notebook.
Earlier this year, Polymer Vision announced its combination mobile-phone/e-reader baptized Readius, featuring a flexible 5-inch, 16-grayscale electronic-paper display that rolls up into a handy 115x57x21 millimeters in 115 grams.
Qualcomm's mirasol technology, still in development, uses biomimetics to engineer low-power, flat-panel, color-rich displays viewable in any lighting condition, based on butterfly wings.
Slowly but surely, we're getting closer to the magic.
Silicon Valley-based user-interface engineer Darryl Chin, 31, has been using an iLiad for the past year, but now has his eye on the Kindle.
His wish list for improvement, however, is noteworthy: "Different screen-size choices, both bigger and smaller. Faster refresh rates. A well-thought-out user interface (both menu systems and button layouts). A smaller keyboard, or slide-out/removable, or even virtual (with touch sensitivity), so it's almost all screen."
"The main thing," he continues, "and seemingly always will be with e-books, is content. Give me all the books I want. Like CDs to MP3s, give me everything I can get physically, digitally."
E-book vs. paper book?
Stepping back from the fray, Rita Toews, author of several e-books and founder of the annual "Read an E-book Week" in March, dismisses the false competition between e-books and paper books.
"E-books are great for people who travel a lot on business, for vacationers, or for people with limited space," she says. "They are also the perfect application for material that changes on a continual basis."
"Print books, on the other hand, have their place. Nothing can replace a beautiful art book, or a book of photography. E-books are simply a different format for something we've had for hundreds of years. When penny dreadfuls were introduced in the 1800s they were scoffed at, as were paperback novels in the 1930s."
Also in the 1930s, as farmers were being signed up for rural electrification, one of the most common responses was: "Why do we need electricity? We have lanterns!"
Let there be light, and give us our magic scrolls.
Story Highlights:
Kindle e-book reading device is hyped for pairing with Amazon, cellular wireless
Electronic paper technology allows for easy-viewing, low-power display
Main current drawback is paucity of e-books compared with print editions
(CNN) -- Imagine a magic scroll, one that contains a myriad of stories and tells you a different one every night. One that fetches you the morning news, generates customized crossword-puzzles, keeps an eye on your favorite authors and an ear on the local grapevine. Imagine a living, breathing kiosk of brain-candy and a library of literature that's easy to read and rolls right up into the palm of your hand.
The Kindle belongs to the new generation of e-book reading devices that use Electronic Paper Display.
Before jumping to the K-word, keep in mind the magic. Because while the concept is there, the Kindle is not -- yet. But as far as wireless dedicated e-book reading devices go, it's a promising start.
"Books are the last bastion of analog," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos declared a few days before the Kindle's release on November 19, 2007.
Indeed, sensations such as cracking open a brand-new hardcover or fondling the dog-eared corners of a favorite paperback in a second-hand bookshop die hard. But then, so do trees.
In response to the lingering fetish for the printed page, Bezos sighed: "I'm sure people loved their horses too, but you're not going to keep riding a horse to work."
Amazon's Kindle sold out on the day of its release in less than six hours.
Given its native pairing with Amazon.com on the mainstream market, the Kindle has not resisted comparison with Apple iTunes and the now ubiquitous iPod.
Asked at the Macworld Expo in January 2008 what he thought of the Kindle, Apple founder Steve Jobs scornfully replied: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore."
Ironically, just as the minority of Apple computer owners are rarely less than Mac evangelists, so a minority of amateur bookworms are rarely less than avid readers -- who will read whenever, wherever, however.
Disappearing books
"When you're reading a book," says Kindle spokesman Andrew Herdener, "you forget that it's a container made of up paper, glue, stitching, cardboard, etc -- You get lost in the author's world, and the book disappears.
"We tried to replicate this same feature -- to make Kindle disappear. That's why we used e-Ink and made it wireless, so you don't even notice it's a device."
The Kindle (as in the sparkling ignition of knowledge) was conceived with overtly bookish analogies, from its paperback size and electronic "paper" display to the librarian-monikered Whispernet (based on mobile-phone carrier Sprint's EVDO broadband service) used to beam content into the box.
Like other dedicated e-reader devices, the Kindle focuses on optimizing text display (featuring adjustable font size) and managing contextual references, such as a built-in dictionary, live Wikipedia access and an "experimental" browser that reads only text -- presumably, for less audio-visual distraction.
You can pounce on newly purchased e-books in less than a minute, and subscribe to newspapers, magazines and blogs (in 4-level grayscale), which are automatically refreshed, as long as the internal modem is turned on. You can also send it your own PDF, text or image documents, and even audio files, to "kindle" and read.
But its free-access, unlimited Whispernet capability is what distinguishes the much-hyped Kindle from other e-readers currently available on the market -- which rely on either synching to a computer or WiFi access to the Internet -- making it a standalone, purpose-built, almost magic book.
Not quite magic
The Kindle itself isn't quite magic for three main reasons -- two of which apply to any e-reading device, and all of which can be resolved over time.
Firstly, because of its exclusive partnership with Sprint, it only works to its full wireless potential within the U.S., thus alienating would-be fans in the rest of the world.
Secondly, because these devices focus on text, readers are limited to text-only, grayscale versions of otherwise colorful and lively newspaper, magazine and blog pages that are accessible for free on the Web.
Thirdly, and most significantly, there still aren't enough e-books available to meet the demand. And unlike with MP3s, you can't easily rip your own books into a readable e-format.
Amazon may boast the largest proprietary e-library with 126,994 Kindle books listed on its Web site, but one of the outstanding complaints from e-readers who have purchased any dedicated device is not finding the e-books they want.
Publishing more e-content
Fortunately, some publishers are listening.
Just last week, Simon & Schuster announced 5,000 new titles to be made available for the Kindle in 2008, primarily adult and children's fiction and nonfiction. Apparently, e-publishing pays.
"E-book sales are still a small, but fast-growing segment of our overall revenue," says Simon & Schuster's Adam Rothberg.
"In 2007 we experienced a 40 percent growth over 2006. If current trends for 2008 hold, we expect that we will double or better that growth."
Meanwhile, ecologically responsible Random House, also known for pioneering a comprehensive collection of audio books, currently offers e-books in four dedicated formats, in addition to a selection of Kindled titles.
It has also launched digital initiatives such as iFodors, making travel information and maps downloadable for PDA, online pay-per-page-view and individual chapter sales.
Of course, e-publishing also saves trees -- not to mention the time and costs of manufacturing paper, printing, shipping and handling.
Science-fiction author Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" was published simultaneously in print by Tor and electronically on the Internet in 2003. Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book had been downloaded from his site.
"The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects, and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online," Doctorow writes in Forbes.
"Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an audience. (...) In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word-of-mouth."
And if any doubts still arise about free online access spurring paper book sales, just ask J.K. Rowling how successful she thinks the print version of the Harry Potter Lexicon will be.
No more twitchy little screens
Long before the success of "Brokeback Mountain," Fiction Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx infamously told the New York Times in 1994: "Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever."
Today, no less than seven of her authored books are available in Kindle edition from Amazon.
Proulx was partly right. As an increasing number of people read digitized novels, the screens on which they read them are becoming much less twitchy.
The new generation of e-book reader devices uses Electronic Ink, instead of LCD, to make ultra-flat, low-power electrophoretic displays that are easy on the eyes and look roughly like a super high-resolution etch-a-sketch.
The first dedicated e-book device to integrate this technology was Sony's LIBRIe, which was introduced to the Japanese market in 2004.
A full two years later, the English-version Sony Reader was launched in the U.S. in September 2006. Its current PRS-505 edition, released in October 2007 with 8-level grayscale and now selling for $299, is the closest rival to Amazon's $349 Kindle.
iRex Technologies' higher-end (and much pricier $699) iLiad, launched in July 2006 with WiFi access, pushes its electronic-paper display to 16 levels of gray and allows input via stylus on a A5-size touch screen, so it can actually be used like a paper notebook.
Earlier this year, Polymer Vision announced its combination mobile-phone/e-reader baptized Readius, featuring a flexible 5-inch, 16-grayscale electronic-paper display that rolls up into a handy 115x57x21 millimeters in 115 grams.
Qualcomm's mirasol technology, still in development, uses biomimetics to engineer low-power, flat-panel, color-rich displays viewable in any lighting condition, based on butterfly wings.
Slowly but surely, we're getting closer to the magic.
Silicon Valley-based user-interface engineer Darryl Chin, 31, has been using an iLiad for the past year, but now has his eye on the Kindle.
His wish list for improvement, however, is noteworthy: "Different screen-size choices, both bigger and smaller. Faster refresh rates. A well-thought-out user interface (both menu systems and button layouts). A smaller keyboard, or slide-out/removable, or even virtual (with touch sensitivity), so it's almost all screen."
"The main thing," he continues, "and seemingly always will be with e-books, is content. Give me all the books I want. Like CDs to MP3s, give me everything I can get physically, digitally."
E-book vs. paper book?
Stepping back from the fray, Rita Toews, author of several e-books and founder of the annual "Read an E-book Week" in March, dismisses the false competition between e-books and paper books.
"E-books are great for people who travel a lot on business, for vacationers, or for people with limited space," she says. "They are also the perfect application for material that changes on a continual basis."
"Print books, on the other hand, have their place. Nothing can replace a beautiful art book, or a book of photography. E-books are simply a different format for something we've had for hundreds of years. When penny dreadfuls were introduced in the 1800s they were scoffed at, as were paperback novels in the 1930s."
Also in the 1930s, as farmers were being signed up for rural electrification, one of the most common responses was: "Why do we need electricity? We have lanterns!"
Let there be light, and give us our magic scrolls.
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