Litspot Network

So the other day, I decided to buy a copy of Cherie Priest’s Boneshakers, a novel that received praise  from Publishers Weekly and several other sources. I logged into my amazon account, hoping that I could pick up a digital copy, something I normally buy first, and then if I like the book, I buy the print version.

And like most readers trying to buy Macmillan books on Amazon that day, I found myself in an annoying click-loop that didn’t get me to the checkout. I had not yet read about the little war with Macmillan and Amazon.

The outcome of this war could be just plain bad, or it could potentially be a reader’s worst nightmare.

First, let me say that the kind of electronic editions of books that can be bought on Amazon aren’t really books that you own. The DRM on them basically means that you are paying for the right to read them, not own them. They can be removed from your device, and they cannot be moved from that device. It’s analogous to building a room in your house that can hold 3500 books, and after you have paid to build it, the people who built the room and sold you the books to put in it start putting conditions on reading the books you thought you owned. Pretty bizarre.

Really, the only thing that would entice a savvy consumer to buy into such a raw DRM deal would be other nifty things that Amazon could offer. And they did that. They gave us cheap pricing, a nice base of books transmitted on a free 3G network, built-in dictionaries, text-to-speech functionality (well, for a while it was nice), and customer reviews, all easily accessible. They had a good thing going with the market share that gave them.

But then Macmillan decided that an e-book should cost exactly what a discounted print hardcover book costs. You know the ones I am talking about. They’re in the windows and in neat piles on the tables at Barnes & Noble. The ones that cost money to print, use ink, paper, have fancy color images. And oh, yeah. You own them after you pay. You can give them to whomever you want. You can read them without the person who sold them to you coming to your house and taking them back (thanks, amazon for deleting my copy of 1984!).

See, there’s a difference. And the same people who argue about books going digital say the reading experience and our relationship with print books is fundamentally different, too. The publishing industry has argued that a book is a special artifact, something that is physical and touchable and that reading in print is something that we will always want to do. There is a certain mystique associated with the experience, they argue, that is ancient and quite human somehow. I tend to disagree with this notion. While I am a one of those readers that loves to read a real book, fewer and fewer younger people feel the same way I do. In fact, the success of e-readers (not just the Kindle) are the cause of Macmillan’s repricing and Amazon’s dispute with them as much as their fear that amazon is moving into their territory. The proof is in the balance sheets, and Macmillan’s decision to raise pricing can be read as an admission, of sorts, that the e-market is growing at an alarming rate, or at least one that will eat into their traditional print revenue stream.

This isn’t a unique phenomenon. The music industry has been fighting the same digital content fight for years, and they’re losing for the same reasons that Amazon’s approach will. Macmillan has actually done consumers a favor by spotlighting it.

I know a few musicians who pay the bills making music. They are quick to point out that their record sales are dwindling. Most of their money is made on concert ticket sales, promotional material, bags, shirts, ring tones, you name it. And the ironic thing is that the corporations who produce these records do very little to manage those alternative revenue streams. These are the same companies who have made the same arguments that the book industry is now making. They once claimed that there was “something about a record” that people liked. It was something that you could hold, something tangible–which is exactly why there are hundreds of millions of Americans maintaining their phonographs! Or not.

DRM has been and is currently destroying the music industry. We recorded albums on vinyl and gave them to our friends to listen to, then we recorded tapes and did the same thing. Miraculously, people still made music and record labels still made money. That’s because the average person likes to pay freely for things that they find valuable and (this is important and what the industry doesn’t get) that they own.

It’s obtuse for the publishing industry to try the same failed approach. And it’s worse with print books. Talk to any writer with any of the big publishers. Ask him or her about how book tours and promotions work these days. Writers are free to do them, pretty much at their own expense, except maybe the top one or two percent. Why don’t these companies get that their services in the future won’t be merely (or maybe even primarily) the production of books any more than, say the music industry produces records? or more aptly, in the case of companies more suited to adapt to the shift in content delivery, the movie industry is solely is in the business of producing DVD’s.

Rather than get creative, the publishing houses are taking the low road. They will start by trying to muscle e-books out of existence by not only speaking dreamily about how lovely it is to curl up with a book, but now by trying to make the problem go away by charging the same for the book and the limited license to read the book. The latter is equivalent to producing a booklet of color photos on nice paper, with a nice cover, and then producing a series of jpegs of those photos, and then trying to make the insane claim that they cost the same. Anyone who has made a photocopy and downloaded an image knows that one of those two has no real production cost.

And let me guess. Once the readers react to the pricing on books they don’t own by finding places where they can get the real rights to their texts, the industry will react by trying to legislate p2p e-book transfers out of existence. They might even give the company that they sue a face, maybe one with nice little cat-like Napster ears.

Today, the Author’s Guild and Literary agents lauded the move by Macmillan as one that will be good for the industry. Of course it will. It will nearly double revenue on something that costs zero to reproduce. I am guessing that amazon won’t fight too hard on that score. They have nothing to lose by charging more, really. The readers will pick up the bill.

Pynchon’s latest novel probably got as much press for its unpynchonesque brevity (it clocks in at under 400 pages) as anything else. Considering that Against the Day and Mason & Dixon are nearly 2,000 pages combined, I guess it’s worth a nod that his latest is easily manageable in a week for even a casual reader. And the fact that it is manageable is nearly as unpynchonesque as its length. Yes, there is a wiki for those who can’t keep the characters or plot straight, but Inherent Vice really is Pynchon Lite.

The book even comes with the added novelty of a youtube ad, narrated by Pynchon himself:

That’s not to say that Pynchon fans won’t recognize the staples of his writing in this book. There are plenty of sub plots to get lost in, bizarre character names (Trevor McNutley, Petunia Leeway and Arthur Tweedle come readily to mind), and there’s enough paranoia to make even non-junkies wonder whether they are being watched while they read.

But the most interesting bits of the novel aren’t in it’s novelty, whether typically Pynchon or not.

The real treasure of Inherent Vice lies beneath the typical stuff. Think of it like the lagan that Sauncho discusses with Doc, early on in the novel, the buried treasure that is sunk to be rediscovered. Of course this is a Pynchon novel, so the value of the treasure is less treasure than trash (millions in currency with Nixon’s face it, essentially worthless). But the quest for lagan permeates the novel. It is an act that is at the core of the mystery of the Golden Fang and the sunken city of Lemuria; it’s what Doc does for a living as a PI, on the most basic level; it’s what he does as a stoner (doper’s memory, maan); and on the meta-level, it’s what the reader does with the book. And when Doc insists again and again to the LAPD, the Feds and other “straights”  that they aren’t so different, he’s revealing more than hippie stoner nonsense. He’s making the connection between these characters and the reader clear in their very nature. This, like Hebert Stencil in V., is what they do. It’s what we do.

And the inherent quality points back to not only the epigraph (“under the paving stones, the beach!”), but the title of the novel itself.

One of the great mainstream criticisms of Pynchon’s work is that with all it’s required effort (often to realize some simple pun or that the meaning is that there is no meaning), isn’t worth it. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Inherent Vice is that it’s one of those deceptively easy little books (about as easy as it gets for Pynchon, at least), and I think it’s well worth the effort.

Sept. Asimov's & Bend Sinister

After finishing Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice, I went back to Nabokov.

I took a trip to Chicago to see Bad Religion, who played with Pearl Jam, and put the latest Asimov’s in the bag. I read a decent story, called “Camera Obscured,” the first night. It’s a piece by Ferrett Steinmetz that comments on the video/podcast/blog/feed culture that permeates the lives of American youth.

The trip was short, just one night. In the morning I started Bend Sinister on the patio of the Hard Rock hotel on Michigan, iced venti coffee nearby.

What amazing prose! And how fitting that the first image of the novel comes into view in such musical terms, as Nabokov describes,

The continuation of her voice came into being as if a needle had found its groove. Its groove in the disc of the mind. Of his mind that had started to revolve as he halted in the doorway and looked down at her upturned face. The movement of its features was now audible.

After lunch at the top of the Hancock building, we made our way back home.

The NYT writes:

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Read the rest of the article at the New York Times.

Many administrators look at online courses as clones of the old correspondence course, where students mailed in essay answers to questions and took proctored or essay tests. And early versions of distance learning did follow such models, except the correspondence was done via email. That has led to current views of distance learning instruction as somehow less-than and easier-than classroom instruction. Such views couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Technological advances like VOIP, podcasting, and virtual classrooms make teaching such classes far more prep intensive, and the instruction itself, if presented in a manner that approaches seamless, is far more difficult in many ways than classroom versions of the same course. Imagine trying to teach a class, field questions, and deal with incoming messages and tech concerns as you try to maintain the focus on the material that needs to be covered. It becomes a regular juggling act.

On top of that, course materials need to be reformatted for download, lessons must be tailored to whatever online form that they will take, and often work persists after the class session is complete, to ensure that the lessons can be made available to students in their entirety.

Add to that the typical time spent grading and fielding student questions, and I would estimate that online courses take at least seven or eight times as long to prepare and administer. That’s the case with my online classes.

Is it worth it? The study commissioned by the DoE shows that it is indeed, to some degree. The benefits aren’t difficult to imagine, considering what is left available to students. Entire classes are recorded, and they can return to them at any time, not only to review particular sections of a lesson, but my students have also used such reviews as a way to further engage either me or the class.

It’s nice to see that online instruction is getting some props.

Google books has announced that they are going to accept and distribute creative commons books via their library:

Today, we’re launching an initiative to help authors and publishers discover new audiences for books they’ve made available for free under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Rightsholders who want to distribute their CC-licensed books more widely can choose to allow readers around the world to download, use, and share their work via Google Books.

Creative Commons licenses make it easier for authors and publishers to tell readers whether and how they can use copyrighted books. You can grant your readers the right to share the work or to modify and remix it. You can decide whether commercial use is okay. There’s even an option to dedicate your book to the public domain.

Read the entire announcement at Inside Google Books.

Among the initial list of the uploads that Google noted was Doctorow’s Little Brother, one of the finalists for the Hugo award.

The announcement is great news for writers who want a broader distribution of their work.

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes,

Alice, the software program he created to entice students, is now being used at about 15 percent of colleges and universities nationwide. This month, a beta version of Alice 3.0 will be released, letting students create animated movies and games with new characters from The Sims video games and teaching advanced users the Java programming language in the process. The software is freely available from Carnegie Mellon’s Web site.

Read the entire article at the Chronicle

While the switch to actual coding is still in beta Alice, it’s an interesting way to get students engaged in programming, for sure.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

CourseSmart of San Mateo, California, already makes more than 7000 college textbooks from 12 publishers available to its subscribers online via their computers, but now the company has added “eTextbooks for the iPhone,” allowing students to free themselves from even having to lug around their heavy laptop computers.

Read more at the SF Chronicle

Don’t get me wrong. I like my iphone a lot. But I just don’t see using it to do any serious studying. Maybe it’s my old eyes, but I can’t imagine trying to examine the numerous figures, tables and charts that fill textbooks.

And the urge to text is that-many-millimeters closer to you the whole time.

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Here’s what I put in my luggage to read on a recent trip to Spring Green to see Henry V, at American Players Theater.

August Asimov's & Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice is Pynchon’s latest novel, a detective story that is, like most Pynchon, filled with lots of characters doing lots of drugs, filled with  paranoia, and quests for the sake of questing.

It’s probably his most accessible book to this point, actually, and feels a whole lot like Vineland in many ways. I’ll be posting on it once I complete it.

Asimov’s is something that I recently resubbed to and am enjoying. I subscribed to Analog, too, and I have gotten to a few of the shorter pieces in that journal, but once the semester starts, trying to keep up with both will become increasingly impossible.