Kindle Takedown?

In case you haven't read it already, here's Nicholson Baker's semi-takedown of the Kindle 2 in the New Yorker.

I found that many of his criticisms were no more than esoteric nitpicking (few people get in a snit about fonts), and the epic snobbery that only New Yorker writers can truly effect ([P]ost-Gutenbergian revalorization? GMAFB!). Also, he never touches on what's to come. He comes across like one of those old curmudgeons who used to kick the wheels of horseless carriages, and spit out of the sides of their mouths, saying "ain't nothing special."

Although, I will agree that books look nicer on an iPod, with the added benefit of being able to read at night, while listening to music, and being able to check your email...

Then again, maybe that defeats the purpose.

But as for the Kindle, time will tell, or the Apple Tablet (Tapplet) will.

Self Love (Kindle Edition)

Call me behind the times, but I just learned about Amazon's Digital Text Platform. Basically it is a vanity press for the masses. You want to self-publish? Why pay some blowhard a couple thousand bucks to print and hundreds of copies of that book of yours that nobody wants to read? Now you can publish those books that nobody wants to read, but for free!

Then again, looking at the state of the publishing industry today, and the sales for even bestsellers, You might be better off with the percentage you get from Amazon than the little to nothing the publishers will leave you with.

For enterprising editors, those with a modicum of talent and the wherewithal to scrounge up a few willing authors, I think it may be a great way to enter into the world of publishing with a low cost approach, where, should a work suddenly start to sell, both the editor and the writer stand to gain, without the need to pay for the massive overhead and associated costs that come with publishing the old-fashioned way. Indeed, the case can be made that with all that overhead saved, an enterprising duo might even be able to afford to hire a freelance publicist or two to whip up interest in their work.

Something to think about.

Kindle Thoughts: Part 2

A little while ago, Roy Blount Jr., President of the Authors Guild of America, took not a small amount of umbrage regarding the Kindle 2, and let the world know in a New York Times Op-Ed titled The Kindle Swindle. In a nutshell, his position was that the text to voice capability of the Kindle amounted to larceny on a grand scale since the audio reproduction of a work somehow violated copyright (in some alternate universe, perhaps?), and it all boiled down to outrage over dollars being snatch away from starving writers from the sales of audiobooks that would no longer happen now that the Kindle 2 had come to town.

I have touched on this topic before in an earlier post, in regards to how this copyfight will only be a lost cause for the Author Guild due to the interests groups involved, but I wanted to expand a bit on other reasons why I feel the Authors Guild's case lacks credibility. Let's start with that Roy fella.

Go back a hundred years and Roy could have been the president of the saddle maker's guild. For some reason, he seems to think he can kibosh an entire emerging technology because it seems threatening to his way of life. Well that is not going to happen. As has been proven time and again, disruptive, emerging technologies will displace older modes, if not immediately by force, then over the long term as old school die-hards start dying off. For now, however, Roy wants the status quo to remain intact, and fears that that consumers will choose to listen to books on their Kindles rather than plonking down $49 for an audiobook.

If this were the case of a truly superior product being undermined, I might have pity for old Roy. But what Roy doesn't comment on in his Op-Ed is the state of audiobooks right now, and that state is not all that great.

To start off, I want to state that I love audiobooks. Growing up I saw them as somewhat pointless. I mean, you read a book, you don't listen to one. But as I got older, with so much less time for the written word, I started to see their utility, and began to really enjoy them.

Since embracing audiobooks as the equal of regular books, I have listened to a number of excellent productions, but I have also come across a lot of pretty terrible audiobooks as well. And that is the crux of the issue.

Honestly, publishers have been lazy for years. TMore often than not, when I sit down and turn a title on, it feels as if the publisher just sat one person down in front of a microphone, and had them read. Oh sure, they get another person to edit and master the audio, but that is it. It's done, and done very cheaply. Few are the audiobook publishers who approach an audiobook as they would a radio drama, by actually bringing in a cast, using sound effects, and producing something very close to real theater of the mind. It doesn't take much, really, and it's not as if the BBC sound library is that hard to get.

The audiobooks that do go the extra mile in production are worth every penny. I bought the BBC Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, and found I enjoyed the story even more than I did when reading or, later, when watching on film. It was an awesome experience. But it was not an experience the Kindle is ever going to replicate with a text-to-speech function added in to assist customers with disabilities. And it is not and experience the Kindle is going to replicate by the simple fact that the Kindle is a clunky little beast of a thing, at least compared to normal audio devices.

You see, I use an iPod shuffle for my audiobook listening. I'd never wear a big old Kindle around me head. Nor would I prop a Kindle up in the passenger seat so I can listen to the book. There may be people who might do this, but not many, and definitely not this one. The physical shape and size of the Kindle make it impractical as an on the go listening device. Sitting down, it's wonderful, but not otherwise.

Still, even if I am wrong, and people start plugging in headphones and listening instead of reading on the subway, it only says one thing...audiobook makers have to up their game. It is the prime rule of the marketplace. And this is what truly scares Old Roy.

So along comes Mr. Kindle, and the publishers and the authors guild are angry that the audiobook business may actually require them to work a bit now. They suddenly have to think about their product, and to think about the audience, especially how to win over that audience. And it makes them angry, because things should be easy. The rest of the publishing business is hard, but this one part was not supposed to be hard. It was supposed to be cream for them. Suddenly it's not.

What's worse, at the same time publishers are trying to cling to the easy pickings, the audiobook market, they seem to be overlooking the fact that publishing itself has just become insanely cost effective, and that what was a low margin, high error business may soon be a high margin, low error business in short order. Luckily for the publishers, retailers like Amazon and Indigo are stepping up to save them from themselves.

A shift to e-books will save the industry. Not today, and not tomorrow, but sooner than you might think. Not just by rationalizing costs and doing away with wasteful production, distribution and returns practices, but by producing content in a format that the current new generation of customers actually uses and is familiar with.

Any one of us old dinosaurs who grew up addicted to the old dead tree media may be cool with chucking ten books in a bag for a trip somewhere, but our days are numbered, because I can guarantee that just about any teen I know (and I am high school teacher, so I know more than a few) vastly prefers media, of any sort, they can put on their phone, or their iPod. They won't buy a Kindle, that's for darn sure, the Kindle is for us dinosaurs, a transition technology to get us into the 21st century, but these youths can and will buy titles for their own devices.

Just yesterday one of my students was showing me The Watchmen on his Nokia. Not the movie, but the comic book. He reads all his comics on his phone and on his computer. He can't buy them that way, yet, so he is obviously turning to the grey market, and getting them as torrents. But he represents a real market that actually exists and could be utilized if only the publishers weren't too busy hiding under their beds spraying Lysol all about in order to hide the tangy scent of urine permeating the air.

Kindle Thoughts: Part 1

You know, I used to love having a massive library. I had thousands of paperbacks, and even more hardcovers in my apartment. Since I was in the literary interview gig, all publishers sent me review copies, so I was getting ten to fifteen titles a week, and just adding them to the pile. I loved it. I would look around in contentment, and imagine shelves on every wall, with books arranged from floor to ceiling.

But my wife most certainly did not look around with contentment. Where I saw names, and unique dust jackets, she saw dust, and towering piles of objects that could very well be lethal to a curious, energetic infant or toddler.

I thought long and hard about it, and realized that after I had read a book, it would just sit there, forever more. I didn't reread books, because I like to move on to something new. Those books were not priceless treasures, well used and well loved, or objets d'art to be admired, they were simply fetishes.

It took me about a week to haul box after box to my car and over to the library. I'd decided that those books, just sitting around my place, would only ever sit there, shifted about from time to time, but unused and still. Better, I thought, would be to allow others a chance to have them and use them and benefit by them as I had.

So for people like me, this is where the Kindle fills a deep, desperate need. In the past I had always collected stuff, like a pack rat, and never let anything go. One day I realized...I was a prisoner of my stuff! It was like this Zen realization that I had this great psychic pressure on me emanating from all the stuff I owned. Stuff I carted from place to place, stuff I said I might use one day and never did. So I started a radical de-stuffization of my premises. I filled the downstairs lobby with all this stuff and even put a "free stuff" sign. The landlord and I even had an argument about it; he telling me to clean it up, me practicing my sign language and stomping back upstairs.

An hour later everything was gone, and I had never felt better.

Still, I like to read. I like to read a lot. On my laptop, my Google Reader will bring in an average of 600 to 700 articles a day, sometimes up to 1000 a day, and I will scroll through them and read about a third on a good day. Plus I will dip into a novel, read a magazine article, read emails, etc. But on the go a laptop is cumbersome, and power hungry. A Kindle, however, is not. In fact, I could read all my stuff, switch between novels and magazines, and have access to a massive library all in one tiny book sized gadget.

With a Kindle, I can have my library and read it too.

And the best part is, the tyranny of stuff has no hold on me any more!

Now all I need to do is get my hand son one of those things...

A Knockout in the First Round

In response to the Authors Guild's strident demands that Amazon eliminate the text to speech function on the Kindle, The National Federation of the Blind has initiated a very sharp and fierce protest, saying that disabling the text to speech function severely discriminates against the blind, seeing impaired and dyslexic. As these two interest groups square off, it appears that one may be entirely outmatched.

So! Says the Author's Guild. That text to speech function sure is nice, but it infringes on our copyright, and and ability to earn royalties from audio books.

Yes! Says the National Institute for the Blind. But taking away this function eliminates our ability to ever engage hundreds of thousands of works.

It's like the last Democratic Presidential Primary all over again. What to do when special interest groups go to war over who is more aggrieved? Last year it was Women vs. the African American Community, and depending on who you supported, you were either racist or sexist. But for a long time, the two sides were pretty evenly matched.

But in this instance, I think the Author's Guild doesn't stand a chance.

In the case of Writers vs. The Blind, Seeing Impaired & Dyslexic, there is no way the writers can win. It's undeniable that many, many books never make their way to braille or audio format. The Kindle has, for perhaps the first time in history, eliminated the great barrier in education and access to common culture separating those who can see well from those who cannot.

To the seeing impaired, the Kindle is a lot like Andrew Carnegie, going about the country bestowing the gift of words on those who had forever been denied the privilege. The United States, and Canada, are the way they are in great part because of the democratization of access to books through the public library system.

Back in my undergrad days, I worked a job that was sort of like Para-Transpo. I helped clients with disabilities drive or walk to where they needed to go. One of those clients was blind, and we became friends. He was Japanese, and years later we even met for coffee in Tokyo... The point is, I got a glimpse of how limited his access to information was. To get text to speech required being at a computer with expensive software. And what with the time he needed to get ready, get to class, and go about his daily activities, he couldn't simply flick through the news, or dip into a book for a few minutes. On the go, there was nothing. He used an old tape Walkman for audio books, but nobody publishes the Journal of Psychology in audio format. The daily newspaper isn't in audio format. Macleans doesn't have an audio only version.

The legitimate uses of the Kindle's text-to-speech technology by far outweigh any damaging effect the technology might have on royalties to authors of fiction and non-fiction. So much so that there is no way they could ever even hope to win their argument on its merits, because IP law in this regard is crystal clear. If the authors guild pushed it, there is no way that writers supporting this action could escape the labels "greedy" and "self-interested."

And even if you make the case that a blind person has the option of buying the audiobook of a particular work, you are asking him or her to pay a 50% premium (Disability Tax, anyone?) for a work they could buy for less and engage with available technology.

So whatever you might feel about possible lost royalties, or whatever, you have to decide between letting the issue be, or being seen as a real tool.