According 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.
Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Our Brains on Multi-Task
Monday, June 7th, 2010The Beauty of Non-Specialization
Monday, April 12th, 2010I write occasionally about how I began life as a book maker: how I loved to cut little pages and staple them together, color the covers, invent trademarks, and even, if I didn’t lose interest, writing an actual story to fill the pages.
It would appear that I am ending the same way, as a full service book maker. Yes, I have a book coming out from a university press in a couple of months, published in the conventional way, and yes, my book on writing novels is about to be published by a smaller press, and yes, I intend to continue to get attention (and cash) from large commercial presses.
But this digital age is allowing me to have a wonderful time making books again. I am formatting some of our Hamilton Stone Editions books for e-readers; I keep web sites with information and reviews for Hamilton Stone and for myself. I am learning how to do a (hard copy) book cover using templates provided by printers, and how to make a book block that is readable and attractive.
One of the most wonderful things about childhood has always been that healthy human young are generalists: they dance and sing and throw balls and cook and run and pick flowers and pretend and make art and act and tell stories. Growing up is, from one angle, all about specializing. By the teen years, some of us are athletes, some are Brains, some are artsy, some are musical, some already making money.
So I feel that this digital world is enlarging my scope again.
Smashed!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010I’ve got a book uploaded to Smashwords.com! It cost me some time, but no cash. Take a look at Trespassers– and tell me what you think! We’re going to put up more books from Hamilton Stone if this seems worth the trouble.
Smashing a book
Saturday, March 27th, 2010I’m working on an experiment with a Hamilton Stone Editions version of one of my books. Using a site called Smashwords , I’m rather painstakingly turning a word processed manuscript (already published in hard copy) into a format that Smashwords will then run through some software called The Meatgrinder, and spew out the other end several versions readable by Kindle, the Nook, and more. Everything from EPUB to .pdf.
There is no charge upfront, and the service is not exclusive, as best I can read their information. The publisher/writer gets back a little if anyone buys/downloads a book. On the other hand, you don’t own the files in the specially formatted versions.
So the experiment is, does this work? Is it worth the labor (my favorite phrase: Is the Game Worth the Candle?), and will anyone conceivably buy the books?
If anyone has any experience with Smashwords, please let me know! Most of their books appear to be self-published single book deals, lots of science fiction and other genre, but more and more small publishers seem to be using it. This is, in my mind, a stop gap, something to do while things sort themselves out.
But I want our books available to read once I buy an e-reader!
Niffenegger won’t go electronic!
Friday, March 12th, 2010I just read Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time-Traveler’s Wife , a really good love story with a two hanky ending. Of course, it’s also speculative fiction, and clever, and all that, but mainly, it’s love, with the tiniest hint of pedophilia that no one could object to. Niffenegger herself is an artist and art teacher, and on her web site there are FAQ’s that include a question about why her books aren’t available as e-books, and she explains that as someone who creates books as physical objects as an artist as well as writing them, she on principle insists that her books remain objects. As an artist, she makes a good point. For me, it has never been the books, although I’ve always loved illustrations, but rather the trip: you go in that place and go far, far away. So I’m anything but doctrinaire about the object, having always preferred paperbacks, for example, to hardcovers.
Reading More into the Future of Reading
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Riding the train into New York last evening to teach my NYU novel writing class, I was wishing for an e-reader, as I often do (I was already carrying my little Acer netbook so I could check email later). Then– as I even more often do, I drifted into a nap, so I don’t know if the desire for all the books in my library in my hand at every moment was just part of a pleasant dream or a real plan.
The irony of course is the hundreds of people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).
She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine . This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading: the instant hard copy books but also e-books (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950′s!). I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books– I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books. Nice, don’t you think? Or at any rate, not bad.
Universities have been picking up on the possibility of instant books much faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010 New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet. See my article reviewing The Business of Books.
Poetry Books online: The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye
Saturday, February 20th, 2010Chalk Editions is doing poetry online– you download the books of poems that they publish, or read them online. They have an interesting statement of their reason for doing this here– they aren’t thrilled with the coming crash of physical books, but are determined to move forward. As an example of what they do, see Halvard Johnson’s latest collection of poems, The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye and Other Sonnets at Scribd.com– we’re considering at our cooperative press Hamilton Stone Editions how to get into the e-book market, so I’m going to look again at Scribd.com.
Steamboats are Ruining Everything…
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010… is the name of an interesting blog by Caleb Crain that seems to have been originally about the nineteenth century (I found it when looking up information about translations of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons). He’s interested in a lot of the same issues as I am here, and has published a book of selected blogs with Lulu, available at Steamboats at Lulu. This seems like a great way to use the self-publishing technologies, to make a hard copy of selected blogs.
Lulu, by the way, is a good free-upload publishing place– they produce books for e-downloads or print or photo books, or just about anything– great example of putting the means of production in the writers’ hands, with the question arising next, how to get the products in the hands of readers.
Writer’s Block versus Writer’s Blog
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010It’s nothing new that it’s hard to get started on creative work in the morning, when you have a morning to work. But for a writer who uses a computer, the call of the Internet is a serious Siren’s hiss. I have been aware of this all along– the danger of using the same environment, the same machine, for writing and other activities. So easy to check email, to look on Facebook to see what random people you know who also happen to be on Facebook are doing. To work on a project other than creative work.
I tried hard– I went for years avoiding the Internet (I started using a computer more than twenty years ago), insisted on a black and white (or actually bronze and tan) screen monitor instead of color. But email was too convenient. Having links to my work available online was too wonderful. Experimenting with giving free writing exercises was too empowering.
And, I tell myself, back in the day, there were distractiuons, too, weren’t there? Pencils to sharpen? Coffee to make? And, especially, angst to experience– the high drama of writers’ block! Now, instead of suffering, I answer email.
Or blog.