Archive for category eBooks
Richard Nash: “Novels Break Algorithms”
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Writing and Prose on April 17, 2010
As Richard Nash points out on his blog, this is “the speech Chris Anderson of Wired says is the best he’s ever seen on book publishing…”
Nash, who was kind enough to once leave a couple of comments here, spends about half-an-hour talking about the future of book publishing at an event at Toronto’s Mars Centre.
It’s interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it rather forcefully argues that people will be reading more and not less, so much so, that supply is no longer the problem in the publishing world – it’s demand.
It also contains the strangely reassuring phrase “novels break algorithms”, an idea I think appeals to our sense that there is something ‘beyond’ about art that exists somehow above or separately from both pop culture and technology.
It really is excellent, and if you’re interested in what will happen to ‘the book’, it’s well worth the time. The video itself is just Richard standing at a podium speaking , so you can just put it on and listen to while doing something else.
(Sorta’ related: for reasons I can’t quite figure out, this post I wrote a couple of days ago on the economics of scarcity vs. the economics of abundance got a lot traction).
The Future of Reading: Bookfuturism
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on December 11, 2009
As Tim says in this introductory post to Bookfuturism, there have been few spaces for people who are: a) interested in the future of reading; b) refuse to engage with either an overly conservative ‘books are the basis of humanity’ rhetoric or a ‘books are obsolete artifacts of the past’ one. This void is what Bookfuturism seeks to fill. As he suggests about this artificial, polemical battle between supporters of musty old books or flashy new screens:
They both LIKE arguing against the other. A more sophisticated point-of-view — which is also not just that of the distinterested critic, or the market watcher, or the tech insider — where is the space for that, really? Where is the community? Bookfuturists refuse to endorse either of these fantasies of “the end of the book” — what Jacques Derrida calls “the end as destruction” or “the end as telos or achievement.” We are trying to map an alternative position that is both more self-critical and more engaged with how technological change is actively affecting our culture.
While I don’t think I yet know enough or am articulate enough to contribute directly to the discussion, I know I’ll be reading and occasionally leaving some of my classically off-topic, rambling comments. What I’m most interested in these days is whether electronic reading will attempt to morph the form of the book for electronic purposes or if, instead, we’ll see that the book remains something attached to models of print and it’s notion of a text contained between two covers with an emphasis on narrative cohesion.
Anyway, exciting stuff! Looking forward to it. The home page of site is here.
Unboxing a Bad Column
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, eBooks, Electronic Reading, newspapers, Pop Culture on October 30, 2009
I know I’m not the only one who’s been waiting for the unboxing column or post. Unboxing, if you’re unfamiliar, is the phenomenon of documenting taking a new, usually technological product out of its box, paying close attention to the packaging and conveying the feeling of ‘getting new gear’.
It’s the sort of thing dying for a good, insightful piece about the contemporary fetishisation of tech, and the blurring of identity, branding and desire. Alas, so far, we’ve all come up a bit short. I even know the perfect person to write it: a close friend, whose dissertation includes the ideal mix of the psychoanalysis of Lacan, the material bent of Marxism and the ‘hope’ of Ernst Bloch – but, alas, I can’t seem to convince him.
Of course, all that said, you know who really shouldn’t write a column on unboxing? Russell Smith. At least, that’s the impression I get reading his infuriating and exasperatingly stupid column this week.
I could tell you what the column is about. But then, I’m sure that without even reading the piece, you’ve already guessed its approach: it’s about boys and their toys and how sad it all is. It’s trite, supercilious fluff and takes the classic newspaper columnist approach and decries how ‘everything has gone wrong’ and how we should all shake our heads because, and I quote “oh, come on, every single thing about this is horribly sad.”
Rather than trying to understand the unboxing phenomenon (sorry, throwing out the word ‘fetish’ doesn’t count), Smith simply seeks to pass judgement. Instead of dealing with some of the reasons that cause people to so grossly idolise objects, so lubriciously love their stuff, Smith simply jumps to the part where he essentially tells you that he is not like this.
But not only is it bad writing. By jumping to evaluation, Smith is simply seeking to assert his position of intellectual authority. And while all analytic writing tries to do that on some level, there’s a distinction between clarifying and condescending, between smart, empathetic critique and simplistic condemnation. If you don’t explain why someone should hate something, instead relying on an assumed set of values that prioritises ‘that which came before’, you’re not a writer – you’re just an ass. You focus on judgment and miss any sort of actual analysis.
You might even delineate the distinction by trying to describe his column:
- Descriptive: Russell Smith is a contemporary culture columnist who has written on ‘unboxing’.
- Analytic: Russell Smith’s approach to unboxing reveals that he is invested in maintaining the privilege of ‘the writer’ and ‘the intellectual’ against the increasingly vocal, technophillic masses.
- Evaluative: Russell Smith is a fuckwad.
See how that works? The really useful part is the one in the middle – and it’s the part that Smith missed.
Why am I so worked up about this? Well for one, it highlights the all-too-common approach of non-techie media to ‘geek culture’. Too often, they attempt to understand cultural phenomena outside of the context of late capitalism, postmodernism etc., appealing to their readers’ most basic sense of ‘what is good and right and true’ – here meaning anything from ‘don’t play with toys’ to ‘go and read a book already!’ – to condemn a practice that requires a far more nuanced critique.
But it’s also another attempt to construct a relationship between print and authority, cementing a link between whose opinion counts and the medium it appears on. If the web has disrupted the concept of expertise, then columns decrying the brevity of Twitter, the narcissism of Foursquare, the emptiness of video games etc. are attempts to reassert the link between authoritative publications and authoritative voices. Smith’s column is an example of the very worst, precisely because it fails at doing analysis better than it appears elsewhere, displaying how simplistic analysis and kneejerk commentary have become the domain of print rather than the web.
To be clear, I think unboxing is a strange thing, something that should be criticised, if not occasionally vilified. But what Smith misses is that the loving affection given to the physical object is as much a historical reaction to digitization as it is an insidious effect of capitalist fetishism. Publicly salivating over your new iPhone may be a slightly sick, perverse attempt to recoup wonder; at the same time, it might also be the modern equivalent to ‘the smell of books’ or ‘the feel of paper”: a physical, sensual reminder of the wonder the medium can hold.
And the unboxing of the New Liberal Arts book shows how fetishising the object, when not co-opted by the dehumanising effects of capitalism, can actually bring one into a community, connecting one to others. It’s Penumbra’s fellowship, made manifest.
But, of course, we cannot claim that there is some good in all this newness; we cannot strive to find the hope in the slightly sad, intensely materialistic videos of geeks. We have to find a way to condemn.We have to find a way to instill fear. We have to find a way to reassure our readers that the things they believe still hold true.
After all, we have dead trees to sell.
Debating the Ebook (Again? Oh shut up.)
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on October 21, 2009
Thanks to Tim suggesting AAAARG.ORG, a repository of critical theory PDFs, I’m now sorely tempted to buy that cheap(er) Sony Reader so I can read me summa’ that fancy-schmancy aca-ma-demic stuff (if it works, of course). Still, the eBook remains a hotly debated idea, most frequently over whether it actually works as a form unto itself, or if it’s an attempt to simply recreate an ‘obsolete’ form.
Recently, Brian Lam (or, as I say in my mind, “BLAM!”) essentially called them pointless, suggesting that the future of media is a mixture of text, video and audio, which renders the Kindle et al D.O.A. I would agree – were it not for the question of attention. On a very simple level, that’s the appeal of an ebook to me: it’s the convenience and portability of digital with the focus on print. The display does one thing and it does it slowly. When, like me, you can’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes, that seems a distinct, if very specific, advantage.
For this reason and more, I was intrigued by the debate in the NYT today called “Does the Brain Like E-Books?” – in particular, Alan Liu’s suggestion that our notion of reading is still constrained by the kinds of metaphors we use to contain print and images:
My research group on online reading (the University of California Transliteracies Project) has come to realize that we need a whole new guiding metaphor. So many of today’s commercial, academic and open-source reading environments are governed by metaphors of what I call “containing structures.”
For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.”…
My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate.
The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.
Interesting, right? That the new metaphors of containment are about reading spaces and communities of readers.
The rest of the debate is interesting too, but contains far too much for one post. If nothing else though, it encapsulates a lot of the discussion we’ve been having over the past year or so.
Stories About Our Time: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, eBooks, Electronic Reading on October 8, 2009
How do we construct narratives about the digital age? And what themes and ideas will characterise ‘dot com fiction’?
“Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore” is a cracking work of short fiction written by Robin Sloan, one of the three people behind what is probably my favourite blog, Snarkmarket. Characterised by Sloan as “a short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation”, the piece is part fantasy, part sci-fi – and all good. It’s also possibly one of the few pieces that would fit Margaret Atwood’s otherwise condescending term ‘speculative fiction’.
For good reason, much of the reaction from the ‘sphere has been glowing praise. So far, however, I haven’t seen much in the way of a literary or analytic response. And while there are many people who argue that ‘analysing’ literature is to deny the pleasure of reading, I’ve never found it to be the case. The more I love a work of fiction – the more it works that strange, inarticulable magic on me – the more I enjoy diving into it and expressing all of the things it made me think.
So what follows are some of my scattered thoughts about the story. It will spoil the story if you haven’t read it, so you might want to do that first; it’s both very quick and well worth the half-an-hour of your time. And for those of you who, like me, have real problems with your attention spans, there’s a great audio version on Escape Pod that makes a bus ride so much better.
So:
- The paragraphs are short. Like a good blog post, the story is full of quick, punchy graphs. The prose too is very clear, but in 1st person. I don’t think this is a story that would have made sense with long paragraphs of description written in 3rd person omniscient. I think there’s a reason for that.
- The conceit of the story is, of course, that books and their readers are hiding a secret and that the protagonist teases it out using computers. Put another way: the aggregation of information in books by computers reveals a piece of information (or, content) that ‘supersedes’ its forms.
- This happens via a three-dimensional visualisation of ostensibly ‘two-dimensional’ texts. The clear implication is that, though Penumbra intends his face to be found, it can only happen through print’s ‘successor’.
- No. Wait, that’s wrong. It’s not that the information can only be found using computers; it’s that it can only happen so quickly using computers. That it has happened so fast means a change has been initiated. It’s not that print has been rendered obsolete; rather, it’s function and position in society has changed.
- The description of the Google campus and the book scanner seem to reinforce this idea; “Mr. Penumbra’s shelves don’t seem so tall anymore”.
- Yet, the text goes to great lengths to neither celebrate nor prioritise computerization over print; in fact, there is a suggestion that while computers are great at giving answers they, like all other forms of technology, aren’t so great at asking questions.
- Another way of framing that idea might be: digital information can be organised in non-linear, constantly shifting ways; but in order for that information to remain relevant to people, those networked systems of thinking have to simultaneously become textual (i.e. ‘a text’ is an ordering of signs meant to render something comprehensible). For information to have meaning, there must be a constant blurring print and screen, narrative and database.
- I can’t tell if it was deliberate, but there are a couple of points at which the main character seems to be saying something, but there are no quotation marks. Collapse of print and speech? A textual gesture to a new post-textual mode in which writing becomes performative? (Am I just getting silly now?)
- Of course, the way the text ends is neither a celebration nor a condemnation of print or digital; it’s something else. On the one hand, the immense power of digital is on display; on the other, its fleetingness, its tendency to evaporate the moment it has been created is all too clear as well. But Penumbra also suggests that longevity – to make something that lasts – isn’t the sole domain of the book. So we’re left with the contrast of a particular set of values and investments and their technological predications.
- So it’s interesting that the text rests on ideas about the author: on one hand, the Google Book Scanner peels information off the page and turns it into impersonal data, a fitting digital metahpor for the death of the author (neat point: the death happens for the same reason as it did ‘in Barthes’: language/information operate independently of their author); on the other is the idea that an author speaks, and lives through speaking. After all, the main character tries to understand Penumbra by ‘piecing together’ the information he finds about him. The fellowship is about sustaining life through passing yourself on through books. Is the author dead? Or does something about the endlessly iterative nature of digital texts do something to the now clichéd post-structuralist idea? (though it’s worth pointing out that Foucault’s idea of the author function is still at work here – and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing)
- At the end of the text, the protagonist wonders how he will make himself last and, half-jokingly, mentions “Super Book Store Bros.”. What’s interesting about that, is that the video game is (to me, anyway) the next phase of narrative. Maybe that’s exactly the thing that will last (assuming, of course, that narrative doesn’t become less and less relevant).
- The piece is a story about historical transition, a moment in time between two epochs (in Western societies, anyway). It seems hopeful. This pleases me.
There’s more to be said, of course. But even I get tired of my own overly-simplistic wankery sometimes. If you wanna’ chat about this in the comments, I’d be totally up for it.
More notes. If you somehow don’t know, Robin used this story as a springboard to write a whole book. You can find out about it – and possibly contribute? – here. As part of the project, Robin, almost on a dare, also wrote a story on his flight from SF to NYC. As someone who has had a couple of unfinished stories kicking around for 3 or 4 years now, this makes me feel totally at ease with myself… 
The Electronic Book: More Through Less
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on July 31, 2009
Because life is so utterly elusive all the way down to the end, you have two basic choices if you want to say anything about it. You can say a lot, too much even, and be satisfied that at least you’ve dumped as much clutter on the matter as you could. Or you can withhold, take little tiny pecks at the thing, and be satisfied that the gaping silences are doing the job. -Morgan Meis
Raymond Carver always made the latter choice. Or so we thought. As I’ve mentioned before, it turns out what we believed to be Carver’s style was actually the combination of Carver’s initial ideas and the ruthless editing of Gordon Lish, who not only cut Carver’s stories by up to 50%, but also often asserted his own style on them in the process.
Now, from this piece in the Times Literary Supplement, we know that certain stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are being rereleased by the author’s spouse in a form closer to Carver’s initial drafts [via]. As someone with a deep attachment to both Carver’s work and his style, my reaction to this careens back and forth between “I must read them now” and “I must pretend these don’t even exist”.
But a discussion of the elusiveness of ‘the real text’ is coming at the right time. Despite all the competing visions of what the electronic book should be, one common hope for the ebook is that it will be adaptable, editable, ‘annotatable’ – a constantly shifting vision, unfinished and forever incomplete. At the same time, this utopian ideal always sounds less appealing when applied to fiction. To pick the extreme example, what if Shakespeare went back and had Hamlet neatly and heroically dispense with Claudius? It wouldn’t simply be different; it would be an entirely different play.
But what is the ground underneath our fear of changing texts? We have this historically groomed affinity for fixed stories, partly, I’d guess, because stories are how me make sense of our lives. Change those stories enough and you’re asking people to make sense of themselves again. Regardless of what you think about the issue, it means the fear is understandable: the ways we understand our lives are at threat of being under constant revision.
But, rather than only talking about significant change to texts – where a character or plot event is radically altered – what Carver’s example shows is that editing can open up space; when things are taken away, we also create the new. Whether you like Carver’s stories after or before the edits, his ‘post-edited’ stories work because of the yawning gaps of possibility and imagination that lies pregnant between the words. What if the adaptable novel or story weren’t about a re-writing of key moments or characters, or about a continual wiki-style augmentation and addition, but a paring down of explication so as to open up imaginative possibilities?
The metaphor always is: a text is never finished, it is always being rewritten every time it is read. What if, like so many things in our connected age, technology made the metaphor manifest? And it did so by paring down texts to open them up to more and more ways of reading. To wit, the less you say, the more your reader can imagine.
Will ongoing editing of fiction work in a manner where certain structural and ‘factual’ elements of a story are generally left intact, but others are tweaked, not to change the story per se, but to open up other possibilities of interpretation? After all, there are many books in which readers ask “well, I wonder if the narrator was actually insane” or “maybe that character was a figment of that other character’s imagination”. What if authors picked up on those re-readings of their work and, rather than re-imagining and re-writing the stories, made changes in order to re-frame the appeal of certain interpretive frameworks?
What if the emphasis of the electronic book was always to produce more readings by showing less?
“I’m not sure I want to read books on a tablet. But a magazine…”
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on July 28, 2009
So, everyone is chatting about Nicholas Baker’s 6300-word takedown of the Kindle in the New Yorker. While the piece makes some valid and clever critiques (on the screen: “This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?”), you can’t help but feel that, after having written a glowing, unexpected paean to Wikipedia, Baker is just becoming good at upending expectations. As everyone worries about Wikipedia or praises the Kindle, Baker swoops in and says “not so fast!”.
The timing was interesting, though. The Apple Tablet rumour mill is churning at that breathless, slightly insane pace than only Apple can conjure. With murmurs of an electronic bookstore to accompany its launch, people were ready to say the Kindle was just an intermediary step, a blip until the the true masters of digital media revolutions stepped into the fray. Already, before the existence of the device has even been confirmed, it’s a Kindle-killer.
I don’t know whether I want to read books on a tablet with an LCD screen – and I genuinely mean that I don’t know. I assumed I would never read 6300-word New Yorker articles on my phone but, to my surprise, it works for me, and it works well. But an entire book on a backlit screen? One that, quite literally, does hundreds of things, from being a remote control to a game board to a movie screen? I’m always open to technological change, but I have enough trouble concentrating as it is. This seems suspect to me.
But entirely by chance, yesterday I remembered to check Wag’s Revue, on online literary magazine that has a lovely aesthetic, one that melds a bit of paper and web culture. After browsing the table of contents, I was really keen to read Lili Wright’s essay “The Country I Came From“. But as I sat down to, I realised I didn’t want to read this on my desktop monitor; it didn’t feel right. This was the sort of thing I wanted to read while lying back on a couch or sitting on a patio. I’m not even sure if the site would work on an iPhone, but if it did, the type would certainly be too small to read. Here, it seemed, was a new form in need of a new delivery mechanism.
Of course, in light of the Apple rumours, it was impossible not to think: what would this online magazine be like as an experience on a 9 or 11″ tablet? Well, you’d get:
- a fixed screen-size so that magazine articles were not only easy to read, but page layouts could be standardized. Wag’s could maintain its design but be far more user-friendly.
- unlike current e-ink technology, you would get full colour, and crisp, vivid graphics. The design of a magazine would be emphasised again, but in a new way, one that would also include usability as a key part of its ethos.
- easy page turning: like an iPhone, you’d just swipe your finger.
- and perhaps just as importantly, an online magazine store – possibly even paid magazine aggregators which would collect articles from various sources and put them together into your own personal magazine. RSS Readers are, after all, very ugly.
To me anyway, that sounds great. If the magazine has always been that intermediary between newsprint and the book, between what was once the ‘immediacy’ of the daily and the deliberate slowness of a novel, then perhaps it is most ideal to make the transition to the mobile web.
And I think the magazine has been overlooked in the past few years. While we know they’re disappearing, they certainly haven’t made as large a splash as the decline of the newspaper. But as the newspaper and its physicality starts to seem anachronistic, the cultural analysis central to the magazine doesn’t feel quite as obsolete. Don’t we all still turn to big, long New Yorker articles to reframe the debates we are constantly having in micro on our blogs? In the unending rush of both opinion and information, the magazine still has a cultural function to perform.
So bring on the tablet, and forget ebooks for the time being. Let’s think about the e-magazine.
Words That Shimmer in Ink and Then Evaporate into Pixels
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Theorizing the Web on July 18, 2009
At the beginning, let’s do two things: first, we start the circle here in Toronto, with my pal Melissa’s smart, precise post about what physical books do, can have done to them, and do to us; and secondly, we look at each other and remember: it is a circle.
Then we move to Brooklyn where we wonder about the upside of the fetish, the future of publishing and why books will become like vinyl, rare, precious and filled to the brim with aura.
Then we put on our Marxist caps and wonder about the future of the production of books and the networks and economies that sustain them. (Are we yet to seriously contemplate how the mode of production is changing? I think so. More on this later). Also, part 2.
Then we move into the ether to think about – well no, wait, before we think, we languish in the prose, in the aching spaces of what cannot be said, in the fluid of fiction. But once we are done, then we can think again: what does fiction look like when it both is and is not formally altered by the web, when its content is and is not web-ish, its understated, literary style cut through with fragmentation, a flickering screen and casual talk of different ways of fucking?
We end in San Francisco, 30 years from now, to imagine what the world will look like when, like the personalities that create them, books flicker in and out of existence, like time-lapse photography when the film and projector are on fire.
The book that effaces its history, the text that looks like it is made of ink, but then, shimmering, hovering before our eyes, disintegrates, and fades into a faint, diaphanous mist.
Microfiction
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Rambles on July 10, 2009
You CanLit nerds are probably familiar with Seen Reading, a blog run by Julie Wilson that documents instances of people reading in public. For those who aren’t, here’s the most recent post. Sadly, it was announced today that the site is no longer going to be updated – but the news isn’t all bad. The reason Wilson is moving away from the blog is that she wants to put together some of her microfiction.
Seen Reading, in addition to listing these sightings of people buried in their books, also frames each entry with a little ‘microfiction’. Often just a sentence or so, it’s an imagining of not simply who that person is, but rather, some entirely oblique and fictional happening, conjured by the intersection of seeing that person, with that book, in that setting. It’s a lovely idea. I’m a big fan of highly compressed, dense short fiction. It’s for that reason that Raymond Carver and Jhumpa Lahiri are probably my favourite writers, as, using simple, bare prose, they can say more in a sentence than I can often say in a page.
But more generally, there’s something neat to the idea of microfiction at this point – and I’m not just saying that because of my pathetic attention span. Something I’ve been thinking for a while now – often in relation to Tumblr – is that given the unending glut of images and ideas we’re subjected to, sometimes, it is the fragment that stops you dead in your tracks. Rather than in the stretched stillness of reading a novel, the times I find myself suddenly overwhelmed or inexplicably choked up are those moments when, caught off-guard, I stumble across a photograph or quote on Tumblr that, for an infinitesimal moment, shifts the ground beneath me. In the shock of the oblique, I am profoundly moved. For ages now I’ve wanted to write a post called “Tumblr and the Ache of the Fragment” but have never gotten around to it – but then, maybe this small graf is enough to convey what I wanted to say.
Nostalgic Longing, For Lost Smells and Words Made of Ink
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Rambles on July 3, 2009
Two pieces, each, in their own way, aching for something that has been lost. Particularly when technology is demonised, this romantic, sentimental nostalgia for the past can irk me. But something about the dogged resistance of these pieces felt, for a moment at least, captivating.
[Update]: Below, I said the first link to the Red Room was ‘a tribute to the Walkman’ – it’s anything but. I’m not sure what I was smoking. It actually kinda’ dismisses the Walkman, especially the ending. Instead, the piece expresses the benefits of some older technology – in this case, that the sound of a crackling tape from around the corner can beckon you to follow it.
The first is a tribute to the Walkman on its 30th birthday. Written by Farzana Versey, the woozy prose not only conjures images of listening to crackling, lo-fi music in thick North Indian air, it also reminds me of the power of well-written prose to make the mundane beautiful. I know that both the art of writing and narrative itself will diminish in significance as we enter this next age, but pieces like this remind me that being left behind might not be so bad.
The second is less beautiful, but worth a quick read. It’s on the physicality of the newspaper, something I’ve written on before. But more than that, it’s about the kind of performance of cultural savvy it enables, and the sort of physical social networking that printed texts can engender. You’ll never impress anyone walking into a coffee shop with a Sony Reader, they say, but stroll in with a copy of the Financial Times and people will know you are. They might even talk to you. In my meaner moments, I would totally dismiss this. But that first piece has me feeling more forgiving.
I have a longer piece kicking around on this nostalgia for older technologies but I probably won’t finish it for a couple of weeks yet.
