Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.
(via azspot)
Part of the problem is right there in the name: e-book. In the print world, the word “book” is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, “e-book” refers to the content only—or rather, that’s the intention. Unfortunately, the conflation of these two concepts in the nomenclature of print naturally carries over to the digital terminology, much to the confusion of all.
This is not the case with music, for example, where the medium and the content are separate. The medium changes—vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3—but music is still music. Music is the product. Music is what you’re buying. The medium is just a vessel, and that vessel changes ruthlessly. When a better, cheaper, faster, or more convenient medium appears, the music follows—with or without the content owners.
Regarding Anathem and the dreaded science fiction infodump
I received Neal Stephenson’s new opus Anathem for Christmas. It’s a big, beautiful, absolutely glorious SF book. Maybe I should qualify that with a “so far,” since the book is nearly 900 pages long and I’m only about 150 in. Regardless, it’s a wonderful and I am thoroughly enjoying it.1
But what’s curious about the book is its approach to the dreaded SF convention of the infodump. You’ve seen them before — the few paragraphs of text (often in italics) that quickly bring readers up to speed, telling them about the robots/hyperdrive/fractious interstellar politics that will drive the story. SF movies are particularly bad about this. Take the famous opening crawl of Star Wars, for example, or the beginning of Alien or Blade Runner. Terminator 2 features a bit of opening narration.
Anathem, on the other hand, doesn’t use this crutch. Well, sort of. It’s set on a fictional world that, unlike most in SF, has a long history of several thousand years. In order to bring the reader up to speed with the strange politics, religions, and history, the book has:
- An author’s note, complete with a four-page, 6,000-year timeline
- Dictionary definitions of made-up words spaced liberally throughout the text
- A glossary of terms
- Three appendices
That’s quite a lot! But all this information is more helpful to the reader, in the end, than doing it any other way. It helps preserve the integrity of the narrative and — here’s the best part — gives readers options. Those who want to forgo the timeline and endnotes and blah blah blah can just dive in and let the story reveal itself to them. Others2 can take the big picture approach. This isn’t as elegant as a solution as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’s footnotes, but then again Neal Stephenson’s world is quite a bit more complex than the alternate history dreamed up by Susanna Clarke.
In a way, Anathem reminds me of The Name of the Rose — the monastery-like setting, the world poised on the edge of disaster, the young and naïve (and overeducated) narrator. I hope that the end satisfies just as much.
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Not just the text of the book, either. Despite what has been said here about the coming death of print, Morrow Publishing has created a wonderfully physical object. The text is beautifully set, with lots of little embellishments and accents. And if one removes the (pretty typical) dust jacket, one finds a wonderfully foil-stamped cover that would probably warm the heart of a mathic avout, or at least any terrestrial bibliophile unfortunate enough to live in the 21st century. ↩
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Like me, who can hardly make it through a book without reading the last page first. So far I’ve read all the appendices but managed to hold off glancing at the last page. I don’t think my willpower will hold out much longer. ↩
Suggest Some Books For the Holidays
The 10 Best Books of 2008
Google settles with book publishers, becomes bookseller
The old model buys books from authors and publishes them. It’s dying, just like all traditional print models.
The new model is more like a literary agent: edit, package, and market the text, in exchange for a portion of the profits (NOT royalties). The “publisher” doesn’t actually publish the book—Google and Amazon do, as a print-on-demand service.
Discuss.
At Frankfurt, Many Say Digital Will Take Over Print Books by 2018
Reading between the lines here, it looks like the Internet is making certain types of books obsolete. BUT (and this is a big deal) not everything.
While 39 percent of respondents agreed that online bookselling was the most important industry development in the 60-year history of the fair, some 25 percent forecasted that the traditional retail bookseller would be obsolete in the next 60 years; the literary agent (21%) and the editor (14 per cent) also were said to be facing a slow demise.
See, the doom-and-gloom forgets that people don’t buy book solely for reading. A book is a device for transferring information, sure — just like a newspaper, and those have been facing some issues of their own lately. So perhaps the Scott McClellan expose-type books will be going away for good. But on the other hand, certain categories of books are bought just as much for their physical existence as objects as they are for the information they contain. And those books won’t be going away. We may not have bookstores, but we will have coffee table books, cookbooks, and big honking literary novels. Trust me.
Jay Parini, a writer who teaches English at Middlebury College, from this NYT article about books publishers creating video games to tie into their books.
I doubt that video games will ever replace books, but Parini is right — there’s untapped potential in games, and one day someone will figure out how to exploit them.
Larkspur Press prints Kentucky books the old-fashioned way — with a real impact type, on fine paper, with hand-sewn bindings. We share some authors with them, but they mainly publish poetry and short fiction, with beautiful handmade engravings.
They serve an entirely different market than we do, but I’ve always loved their books. Perhaps I should organize a field trip to visit them.
Publishers should all have a /covers directory
BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow:
… publishers should create default directories called “covers” at their server-root (e.g., tor.com/covers, harpercollins.co.uk/covers, etc) filled with high-rez PNGs or JPGs (or both) named after the book’s ISBN — for Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, it would be http://harpercollins.co.uk/0060530928.png. Tweak your robots.txt file to make sure the search-engines all crawl these directories, so when you search on images.google.com or images.yahoo.com for an ISBN, the publisher’s high-rez would be right there at the top.
Noted.
Just Irresistible: Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle
Tor.com’s Jo Walton writes on how much she loves Dodie Smith’s first novel.
I Capture the Castle is one of the best books about how people form relationships I’ve ever read, and it has one of the best first person voices in the history of the universe.
I read I Capture the Castle last fall on Ashley’s advice. It really is a delightful book — and one that everyone should read.
