June links: Book lists, libraries, Kindles, keyboards, and more
* D.G. Myers writes of the five best books of academe. Any of those choices are excellent, although I’m also fond of Francine Prose’s Blue Angel and Jane Smiley’s Moo. Tom Perrotta’s Joe College is also excellent, but from a student rather than professor’s perspective. What’s more amazing is the number of crappy novels about academia out there, many of which are covered in Elaine Showalter’s book Faculty Towers.
* James Wood is interviewed in the L.A. Weekly, including this: “My true enemies skulk in a deep Dostoevskian Underground called the Internet, and never see the light of day — that is their punishment for hating me so much; it matches the sin, as in Dante.”
(Hat tip TEV, which is the go-to place for James Wood news, commentary, etc.)
* Fifteen books in fifteen minutes: D.G. Myers plays, as does Patrick Kurp and Nigel Beale.
* Ray Bradbury fights for libraries, also saying:
The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.
* From the department of “no kidding:” “Kindle’s [Digital Restrictions Management] Rears Its Ugly Head… And It IS Ugly:”
He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.
And it gets worse, as the author points out. But this should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about how Digital Restrictions Management works, as documented previously here, here, and, from the Kindle’s launch, here.
* I hadn’t realized it till now, but two years ago the Wall Street Journal published “A Passion for the Keys: Particular About What You Type On? Relax — You’re Not Alone” regarding the fanaticism certain people feel for their keyboards. As writing a review of the Model M-inspired Unicomp Customizer taught me, I am very much note alone. Anyone who spends a lot of time typing should read both articles.
* China Mieville on “There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks.” Most of this will be obvious to Tolkien scholars already, but they might be of interest to the rest of the world.
* Cory Doctorow warns us about How Internet Gatekeepers Stifle Progress:
[I]t’s not that I hate Amazon or Google, but I do understand that they are fast becoming the intermediary between creators and audiences (and vice-versa), and that this poses a danger to everyone involved in the creative industries.
That danger is that a couple of corporate giants will end up with a buyer’s market for creative works, control over the dominant distribution channel, and the ability to dictate the terms on which creative works are made, distributed, appreciated, bought, and sold.
He’s right, of course. The question for me, as someone who uses Amazon regularly, is whether someone else can come along and sell books better and cheaper than Amazon. So far, the obvious candidates—Barnes & Noble, Borders, Powells, The Strand—aren’t even close, especially on price.
* On watching more TV and yet hating cable companies:
The news is certainly good for the cable business: whatever its problems, Americans are absolute fiends for its television programming, and Internet video has yet to erode its dominance. On the other hand, what’s good for the cable industry may be bad for America—can watching 151 hours of TV each month produce happy minds and healthy bodies?
Not even cable’s top lobbyist will say “yes” to that one. “As a parent—and I’ll probably get fired by my board—I can’t imagine that those numbers reflect something good for America,” he says with a laugh. “I have to imagine it has some impact on our productivity as a nation.”
This is echoed by “People of the Screen” and “Twilight of the Books.” Incidentally, at least in this respect, I’m an extreme outlier at near-zero for most months.
* As long as we’re on the subject of technology, the WSJ says that Nokia and Siemens aided Iranian government repression in Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology. Apparently their executives never read IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation.
* And people wonder why publishers take such a beating:
1. Platform is the first thing he looks for when evaluating a nonfiction book proposal. On the subject of platform, Ted advises that nonfiction writers should “assume they are self-publishing.” By that, he means that you should not count on any help from the publisher in selling the book. They will distribute it, yes, but once it hits the shelves, you have to make sure it gets off the shelves.
That’s from agent Ted Weinstein. If publishers do nothing but distribute, the question becomes, why does anyone need publishers for nonfiction?
* Slate’s The Big Money published a contrarian view of the publishing business in Books Are At The Vanguard: The dramatic rise in e-readers has redeemed the power of the book.
* More on comments sections.
* An Inconvenient Talk: Dave Hughes’s guide to the end of the fossil fuel age describes the peak oil problems the world might face shortly. If we were thinking ahead, we’d be investing in nuclear power. But, as usual, we’re not.
* Do people read link lists? Like, say, this one?
* Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud.
* Jason Fisher talks about Tolkien and academia and also tells about the latest issue of Tolkien Studies.
* On another Tolkien-related note, the “J.R.R. Tolkien/C.S. Lewis” panel at the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association conference would be really appealing if I hadn’t already gone to Tolkien 2009. As it is, if anyone is going, I’d love to hear about it.
* Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine quotes media economist Robert Picard:
Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories….
And now that journalism faces enormous competition on the Internet, both from other newspapers and from sites like Craigslist, newspapers are seeing their “bubble” pop. I’m not sure I buy this narrative, but the well-paying employment issue is one that I suspect more people should be aware of.
* Premium versus luxury, and the difference noted is to my mind significant.
* Yet more reasons to beware the Kindle 2, this time from a Kindle 1 owner writing on Amazon’s own site.
* When the Thrill of Blogging is Gone details the decline of many a popular blog.
Collectively B&N, Borders, and Books-a-Million operate 1500 or so outlets that are touted as superstores, and if we add in another 100? or so large independent (often landmark) bookstores then there are more places to actually find and hold, even read, a book then ever before. Obscure titles, novels, reference, classics, even comics — hundreds of thousands of titles. It’s a great time to be a bookseller, and reader. It’s a great time to be alive.
(On a similar subject, read this too.)
* The Economist interviews Alain de Botton.
* Why newspapers are important.
* On the value of a liberal arts education:
The great value of a liberal arts education is that it prepares you to be relatively happy even if you find yourself working in a corrugated cardboard factory. Partly because books are cheap, and cultivating the ability to take great pleasure in a well-crafted novel lowers you hedonic costs down the road. But more broadly because the liberal arts might be descibed as a technology for extracting and constructing meaning from the world. If you know your Hamlet, you know that’s all the difference between a prisoner and a king of infinite space.
* Speaking of that, Uber geek publisher and all star Tim O’Reilly (I own a few of his technical books) writes on The Benefits of a Classical Education. Sound familiar?
* Edward Glaeser, who is perhaps my favorite economist, asks why, if the world is so flat, “Has Globalization Led to Bigger Cities?” His answer:
Globalization and technological change have increased the returns to being smart; human beings are a social species that get smart by hanging around smart people. A programmer could work in the foothills of the Himalayas, but that programmer wouldn’t learn much. If she came to Bangalore, then she would figure out what skills were more valuable, and what firms were growing, and which venture capitalists were open to new ideas in her field…
Knowledge moves more quickly at close quarters, and as a result, cities are often the gateways between continents and civilizations.
This, incidentally, is also why I don’t expect schools to go digital, or universities as they exist to shrivel and die as commentators have implied. If knowledge moves more quickly, one can also expect the relative value of places like universities to grow.
* Wow: I got a copy of Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister’s Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams—which is excellent—straight from Dorset House publishers, and the package included a dust jacket-style ad for Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management, with an endorsements that promises it will impart “… insightful business principles for team-based project management… — John Sculley.” The thing is, I couldn’t tell if this is a hilarious joke or perhaps the idea for the world’s worst novel, but the answer appears to be the latter.
The copy on the back says, “With his trademark wit set free in the novel format…”, as though the “novel format” means the same thing to writers as creating an all-new dinner delight with beans, grade-D meat, cheese, tortillas, and iceberg lettuce means to Taco Bell. And John Sculley, the guy widely credited with nearly running Apple into the ground, might not be the best pitchman for a novel that is supposed to show how not to do just that.
