An article in The Wall Street Journal tells about best selling business author Seth Godin who has decided to cut his ties to his commercial publisher and go electronic and/or print-on-demand. He says he’ll hire a professional editor and formatter, and sell his books directly to his hundreds of thousands of blog readers and book fans.
Best Selling Business Author Dumps Publishing Business Model
August 26th, 2010Old published books– Going digital…
August 19th, 2010I am still splashing around in the web water, not always quite sure why I do what I do, but the one thing that has become clear to me is that whatever I write, web-based or hard copy, it has to be digital.
My latest book (just published: a short story collection called Out of the Mountains ) had electronic galleys that came to me by email. I was supposed to print them out and mark them, but some publishers I’m told are asking the authors to do mark-up electronically as well.
But here’s the point: I have at least three books from the early nineteen eighties when I was first publishing that are out of print from the original publishers and were never digital in the first place. A couple of them can be ordered now through the wonders of one-book-at-a-time technology (the hard copy was scanned in as .pdf files), but as I begin to prepare some of my books for e-readers, I wanted to get them scanned in as word processer files so I can make changes and digitalize for e-readers.
I’ve now done one with a pleasant-to-work-with company in Missouri called Golden Images, LLC. If you try them write to Stan Drew, who may be the whole show, but is in any case very responsive to email. The price is less that .50 a page, much less for .pdf files, but I think most of us with old books want the word processor files. Even with Stan’s good work, I am having to go through the book (Higher Ground) looking for anomalies (apostrophes that became Greek sigmas, etc.) but that’s fine because I wanted to see how the book felt anyhow– this was a book that I wanted at one point to make changes in, but couldn’t face retyping. So I’ll take my time and have fun.
More later about the differences in a typewritten book and a word processed book.
New Uses for Old Books?
August 9th, 2010The New York Times Magazine gets cute with an essay called “Creative New Uses for Books.”
Plagiarism versus Sampling
August 2nd, 2010Today’s New York Times has a piece about students who don’t know that they should, according to university standards and custom, credit Wikipedia for quoted paragraphs even though Wikipedia is a group written source. The piece ends with more conventional cases of students who simply, in order to get their degree and get on with life, use papers written by others– old fashioned plagiarism and paper buying.
But much more interesting to me is the first group, the ones accustomed to “saving” images off the web (I do this) and to downloading music and movies– a whole host of materials from the web that we consider fair game for fair use.
The piece suggests that young people raised in this world, themselves perhaps participants in the great group writing project of Wikipedia, really see quotation from sources in a different way from a previous generation with perhaps a different view of self and individuality.
David’s Kindle
July 17th, 2010We’re at the lake with Andy’s brother David, and David has a Kindle. It’s a first generation Kindle, and David says he uses it primarily for reading fiction– pleasure reading. He says he doesn’t use it for anything that he would take notes on. I fooled around with it for twenty minutes, as I have in the past, but this time more serious about turning it on, reading some pages of Booth Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons, turning pages, testing larger font sizes (can I read without my glasses?– yes, but such short pages who wants to?), tried it outside on the hammock, and yes, sun and shade, very readable. He says images and maps, photos of, say, the subject of a biography– all of that is pretty useless, as is the miniature keyboard at the bottom.
And! He has an app for his computer that reads books for Kindle, and he bought a copy of Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions) from Smashwords and loaded it, and there it was, my first ebook sale, sort of. Well, well, well.
Libraries
July 8th, 2010I always loved them, as buildings, as spaces: the dark side of the single standing shelf in the one room woman’s club library in Shinnston, WV, where the grown up books were. Where I met Dostoyevsky.
The awesome lion-guarded 42nd Street Library in New York far more like the Metropolitan Museum than the library where I first took out books. But in some weird way libraries never became my preferred source of books: the books I loved most were in people’s houses (my mother’s set of Charlotte and Emily Bronte with the Rockwell Kent woodcut illustrations; a book of cartoons in my aunt’s house in Scott County Tennessee that were like a twisted version of New York to me– drunk flappers and street urchins, pigeon breasted matrons). I liked to own books. I bought all the Black Stallion books, $2.00 each of birthday and holiday money over several years.
Why did I never bond with libraries? It wasn’t about ownership as much as about intimacy, perhaps. I know people who read constantly from libraries, sometimes visiting several branches in a day to get enough books to tide them over their vacation. And I DID sign out books, stacks of books, but they weren’t mine. I had to return them. There was a vague anxiety about getting them back in a timely fashion, unsoiled, with no dog ears.
Partly, I think I don’t like the social aspect of running into people I know. Reading is deeply private to me. When I read, I leave my body here, and go elsewhere. I trade books on Paperback Swap; I buy cheap used books via Bibliofind and the other places for used books. I look through my husband’s mysteries and thrillers if I’m really at a loss. I hope soon, finally! to have an electronic reader, access to all books, all knowledge, all entertainment, all experience.
Future–shock or stimulation?
June 13th, 2010I was reading an article about the latest in the Future–this time saying that the Personal Computer Age is over, and the age of the Mobile Devices has come. That is to say, the future, according to this article, is with Iphones and Ipads and maybe Google’s fast-rising Android.
All the little colorful devices with their Apps and the fast moving thumbs sending notes around the world like freed-up school kids from my childhood. Snapping pictures, finding out if there’s traffic on the freeway, what’s the weather, where is the nearest public restroom, let me make a reservation at a restaurant, buy a book get the news.
I started feeling sidelined, at best, with my small but clunky cell phone with a piece of plastic broken off, and all it does is take and make calls.
Another article asked, Will the I-Pad replace the PC?
And the answer was an intriguing one: Yes, for consumers, No for creators.
Some of my confidence came back. I have, in fact, been using a compute for more than a quarter of a century. I was sold, completely and totally, when my brother-in-law told me I would never have to retype again. I hated to retype. I had left things in articles and stories that I would have changed otherwise if it hadn’t meant typing up a whole fresh copy of the manuscript. So I got the earliest computer I could, a portable sewing machine sized Kaypro rival called Zorba. I learned the ridiculous, arbitrary code of Word Star. It only took two or three 5 and a quarter floppy disks to hold a whole novel! It was a miracle.
It really was a miracle, too. I had no interest in learning to program, and the world of bulletin boards and chat that some of our friends’ teenage sons were involved in didn’t interest me. In fact, I refused a color monitor fo r several years, wanting to keep the computer as a no-retyping machine. Email caught my attention, though, and then, in rapid succession, all the riches for research of the internet.
I now even keep websites and blog, and, with some reluctance, shop on the internet as well. I own a little netbook for taking to the city with me, and I never use the yellow pages anymore or, really the phone book. Like all of us, I have moved a great deal of my life online. The struggle for me, though, is to keep separate the world of consuming that even the PC thrusts at you (forget the little mobile devices) and the world of making and expressing.
Our Brains on Multi-Task
June 7th, 2010According to today’s New York Times, our brains are being reformatted (our vocabularies too) by our devices, gadgets and, especially, our propensity for multi-tasking: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?ref=todayspaper . For the record, I read this on large sheets of dead tree material at my kitchen table over coffee and Crispix.