booktwo.org

• Bookstores Begin Slow Descent Into Obsolescence - Publishing 2.0 - I am, sadly, forced to agree. Until a few years ago, I loved bookstores. My last blog was all about bookstores. Now I hate them. With very few excpetions - mostly limited ed art stores - they’re poorly stocked, unfriendly and don’t serve my needs. Damn.
• Richard Charkin raises the possibility of switching from RRP-based royalties to Net Receipts - Something my ex-employer did, and agents supported us. It’s a difficult debate, as modern deep discounting will in most cases result in lower royalties, whatever publishers say - but it is undoubtedly clearer and fairer - and it’s technology-driven.
• spreeder.com - online speed reading application - Essential tools for future lit, #X in an ongoing series. (via Lifehacker)

Quite possibly the best thing ever. Do not watch if offended by language, or without headphones in a busy place. Do watch if interested in increasing literacy rates. And booty.

The video is a product of BET, the ‘black interest’ US cable channel, who deserve utter praise for such a forthright and downright hilarious approach. It has, quite predictably, caused a bit of a furore across the pond due to it’s supposed negative stereotyping of black youth. It’s satire. It has a message. People will get the message. Acting on it is up to them. (Via Print Is Dead).

I was quite interested when I heard about StoryCode.co.uk (via Zero Influence - there’s a .com version too). At first sight, I thought it might be a newer, better version of WhichBook.net: a way of classifying books to create a more accurate “If you liked this, you’ll love…” recommendations system. The advantage it has on WhichBook is to encourage visitors to “code” books they’ve read, which are then added to the system along with the data - a great advance on using professionals behind the scenes to classify books, which has only managed a couple of hundred titles in several years for WhichBook, and is all very good and user-generated and modern.

That’s as far as it goes, however, because instead of allowing users any flexibility in how they describe the book, all literary opinion is forced onto a selection of 50 or so sliders, which veer from the confusing, to the pointless, to the incompetent. Confusing example: “Is the story mostly aimed at a mainstream audience or a literary audience?” (Mainstream → Literary) excludes half of the fiction I read. Pointless example: “How much did the atmosphere of the story feel like one you could experience in everyday life or is it more exotic or surreal?” (Everyday → Exotic) might work for actually surreal books, but for most novels, the answer depends on the reader, not the story—but the program won’t know this. Incompetent example: the ‘Plot Type’ category. To what extent is the book a “Rags to Riches” story (None → Plenty), a “Pact with the Devil” story (None → Plenty), a “Brain Vs Brawn” story (None → Plenty)—these aren’t sliding scales, they’re either/or. The results are meaningless. Try it yourself, and see if the results aren’t suspiciously vague (short version: if you put in a thriller, you get a broad selection of thrillers out).

This annoys me because something so long planned - ten years in the making - with a variety of book and web industry heavyweights behind it (see the About page) really should be better than this. It annoys me that something with such a strong and correct rallying call—”inspired by the belief that the Book Trade, locally and globally, is failing it’s readers in the search for new stories and that the power of the internet and the passion of book lovers everywhere can combine into a unique service”—should result in something so poorly thought out.

Digital recommendation systems have come a long way in the last few years, and there are a number of really important lessons which have been completely ignored by StoryCode. The one they get right is user-generation, but they’ve failed to see that for user data to be valuable, it has to be ambient: Last.fm and LibraryThing don’t ask you a bunch of equivocal questions that are highly dependent on the individuals situation and whim: they just see what you’re into, and run with it. It’s powerful, and it works (why do you think CBS bought Last.fm for a small fortune, or Abe Books bought a chunk of LT—particularly when Amazon’s recommendation system is so rubbish).

The second and equally important lesson is that individuals describe things in many different ways—so let them. Tagging, while rapidly becoming a web cliché, works because it is the most flexible system possible, generating reams of long tail classification data that is individually specific but universally applicable. Tagging also provides another incredibly important feature that StoryCode has missed: an incentive to participate. Through tags, individuals handcode their own dataset; my delicious tags for example, allow me to find almost any half-remembered link I’ve ever saved with a couple of terms which are meaningful to me. LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror reveals real things about your reading habits. With StoryCode, there’s no long-term incentive to participate, and mass use is what drives these systems.

So, another book industry initiative fails to learn some of the basic lessons of the internet. We shouldn’t be surprised, but how much time and effort is being wasted here?

Oh yeah, and it doesn’t validate. I’m going to start some kind of button system for lit sites that don’t use web standards. We’re all about standards in literature, spelling, punctuation, typography - we have to get the code right too.

Too long and too important for a Stop Press post:

Google is throwing away information that is fundamentally characteristic of books—metadata that describe and even determine what books are, as simple and trivial as volume numbers, or artifacts of type design, editing, and artistic production. Books are not, in other words, mere bags of words, but vehicles in which ride a wide sundry of other passengers—metadata, artistic expression, whimsy, and error. Books are born and produced in a rich organizational and information-rich social and economic context, and the willing discard of that context carries with it a loss whose surface manifestation may be amusing, but whose deeper ramifications are profoundly disturbing. [Link]

Even if you don’t want to go down the route of scratch’n’sniff ebooks, we have to recognise that books aren’t just the lit. They are an experience. Google is getting it wrong. Can we do better?

Image courtesy of Bekah Stargazing, Flickr and CC. 1,265 results for photos matching book and smell.

Matt Webb, of Schulze and Webb, gives this explanation, which pretty much nails it:

A book is designed and manufactured… We discover a book, somehow. We wish for it. We select it, maybe out of a possible half dozen alternatives. We purchase it, then show it off. We discuss it, reviewing it if it’s great or if it’s terrible. We might sell it on.

A bookstore on the street, a traditional bookstore, now seems quite inadequate. Or at least, inadequate before they started doing evening book talks, supporting book clubs and having employee recommendations. But inadequate—it’s really only optimised for purchase.

Amazon’s success could be seen less about the convenience of being online, and more about the fact it is present in more of your moments of engagement with a book.

Amazon understand that we live alongside books. We cross paths with them at all of these points. If Amazon can be present in more of those, we like Amazon more, we encounter them more, and they do better.

Anyone want to argue with that? There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in making sure Amazon doesn’t become the next Tesco/Wal-Mart and control every aspect of our lives (The Book Depository’s redesign is a small step in the right direction), but if you want to understand why traditional bookshops are failing, why in response publishers are being squeezed until the juice runs clear, and why Amazon seems to have so effortlessly inserted itself into the world; well, there you go.

This quote comes from a talk on Interaction Design. You can read the whole thing here. It’ll explain the picture at the top, too (which is Matt’s).

Why am I reading blogs and wikis and transcripts about Interaction Design and Planning and hacking (the good kind) so much lately? Well, it’s because I’m no longer involved in the acquisition, manufacture and distribution of books - publishing’s industrial age - and I’m trying to understand how we create, connect to and communicate literature - particularly, without just creating more ads. Book 2.0 is now my day job.

Once again, I point back towards booktwo’s opening statement, which I always re-read when I’m not sure what I’m doing. The need to think clearly and openly about these issues, and break from the past. Lagerfeld’s dictum: “Throw everything away!” I’m not quite going to do that, but I admire the sentiment.

“If some Javanese sorcerer or Native American shaman possesses some precious fragment I need for my own “medicine pouch,” should I sneer & quote Bakunin’s line about stringing up priests with bankers’ guts? or should I remember that anarchy knows no dogma, that Chaos cannot be mapped–& help myself to anything not nailed down?” - Hakim Bey

• Is this the end of English literature? - “There were, we must concede, books before there was tobacco in Britain.” But A. N. Wilson is still pretty damn sure there’s a connection.
• Black Garterbelt: Hooked on Dildonics - The Rake on the LongPen. Needless to say, we’re in total agreement.

• Cory Doctorow and David Weinberger in conversation - David Weingberger is the author of the pretty good ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous’, about the new digital ordering of things, which I’ve been meaning to write up for some time. Cory you should know. [Via Zeroinfluencer]
• Playstation Seasons: Yuko Kondo and Studioplum - New experiences of lit: a Steve Aylett story gets a digital makeover courtesy of Playstation and the Manchester International Festival. (Yes, I did use to be Steve’s publisher, but this one’s from the mighty Serpent’s Tail.)

Whenever I have the discussion with people about the future of literature I run into a brick wall: “But I Love Books.”

Well, so do I: here’s proof, if it was needed - the fruit of my Saturday. After months of having them stacked untidily around me, they’re back where they belong, out, accessible - and gorgeous.

I did try thinning the collection, going through the lot in the hope there would be some in their I could bear to part with. I ended up chucking three old guidebooks and a couple of unread proofs. I am incapable.

In the great future lit debate, there’s one thing we keep coming back to, that we hear over and over again: “I can’t read from a screen.” Never mind that most of us spend far more time reading from a screen (as you’re doing right now) than we do reading from paper (especially if you count text messages, display boards, TV titles and subtitles and many other instances).

Is fiction different? Is the novel or other long work uniquely suited to paper? Novelists like Margaret Atwood certainly believe so, in her vociferous opposition to all things electronic, and who better to judge than writers?

Well, it struck me that writers would be a good group to examine in this debate, so I figured I’d start with The Guardian’s Writers’ rooms series, a weekly feature on writers and their places and methods of work, and see how many of these writers compose the works on a computer in the first place, the work never reaching paper until the final proof is printed and makes it to the bookshelf, completing the illusion that this is how it is meant to be.

Here are the results (I’ve left out John Banville because the photo is the same as that for Beryl Bainbridge and he doesn’t say anything specific; all the rest are included):

The haters:

• John Richardson: “I am computer illiterate and write everything by hand.”
• Colm Tóibín: “all in longhand”.
• John Mortimer: “I write with a pen on long sheets of paper. I’ve never learnt how to type.”
• Edna O’Brien: “I write by hand. I do not understand how people can arrive at even a flicker of creativity by means of a computer.”
• Geoff Dyer - surprised by this one, but there’s no computer in sight, and he doesn’t mention one.
• Michael Holroyd: “Early this year I bought a new black laptop which lies somewhere under a pile of papers. It is, I’m told, capable of miracles. I haven’t used it yet.”
• Will Self: “I loathe computers more and more.” (If you’ve never seen Self’s study, do check out his awesome post-it system).
• Antonia Fraser: “My typewriter is electric and so ancient that other typewriters have to be cannibalised when it needs mending.”
• JG Ballard: “I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.”
• AS Byatt - a very papery desk.

The in-betweens:

• Jacqueline Wilson: “I write all my first drafts in gorgeous Italian leather notebooks” - then she types them up on an iBook.
• Hanif Kureishi: “Computers are a mercy for writers, but they do encourage books that are too long. I write by hand first and then type it up.”
• David Hare: “I write things out in longhand, then later put everything on the computer.”
• Beryl Bainbridge: “I got the typewriter in 1958 from a Chinaman… I type it up onto a computer so I can correct it.”

The lovers:

• Carmen Callil: “I write every day, typing straight on to that small computer.”
• Graham Swift - computer taking up most of the desk space.
• Margaret Drabble (Ditto).
• Mark Haddon: “Few schools have cartoons of men with rectal bleeding above the computer workstation” (Yes, he does).
• AL Kennedy: “If I’m doing serious writing I prefer to be in here at night with the low energy bulb and the music, typing on a lap top.”
• Rose Tremain: “The computer desk is an ugly, ancient thing - but I don’t suppose I’ll ever replace it. I’ve written 13 books on it.”
• Ian Rankin: “Under the desk you will see an unused Mac tower (never got the hang of it)” - but he seems OK with the laptop on the desk.
• Esther Freud: “I don’t need any of these things, just my green chair and my laptop.”
• Claire Tomalin - not much room for anything but that computer.
• Andrew O’Hagan: “The laptop is there for work.”
• Diana Athill: “I’m a hopeless dummy about computers, using mine only as a typewriter and for emails, but I do love writing on it.”
• David Lodge: “I found myself doing more and more writing straight onto the computer.”
• Hilary Mantel - a very smart computer.
• Sarah Waters: “All I need in a study is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door.”
• Michael Frayn: “Word-processor” - confirmed by the statement that “I sit sideways on [to the window] most of the time.”

I make that 10 haters, 15 lovers, and 4 inbetweens. (Please don’t take the terminology too seriously, and yes, it’s deeply unscientific. Still…)

More than half those questioned exclusively use computers - and that’s from a severely weighted sample, tending towards older, literary authors, the kind of people you’d imagine would run a mile from the computer. Yet for many of them, the work comes together, is revised and edited on a screen, where it passes in all likelihood via email to their agents and publishers, who may print it out (as may the authors) to read, but still: the work itself is undeniably of the electronic screen, rather than the page.

Food for thought?

• 3:AM Magazine Excerpt: Cat Life - 3:AM’s new Brazilian network brings the first new translation back to the English side. Very exciting, and a model for lit in translation, we hope.
• HarperCollins first to jump on iPhone bandwagon - A failure of imagination I feel, however. The iPhone has a good chance of being the first widely-used eReader - why not offer whole ebooks for it, rather than just samples of pbooks?
• Guardian Bookblog - Bookmarked to mark when it’s removed from my RSS. The Guardian/Observer have great Arts coverage, but unlike much else on GU, the book blog is too full of twaddle to make it worthwhile.