Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?
Posts tagged reading
The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books
There are just too many books to read. And while one might make the very good point that you could just wait to buy them when you have more room, there’s something about putting them in a row with other books, read and unread, that creates the cumulative impression of your reading self. Because, when it comes to reading, there will always be more book that you haven’t read than books that you have, and your reading ambition will always be more important than your reading accomplishments. “The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them,” wrote Benjamin. “Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.”
A library of mostly unread books is far more inspiring than a library of books already read. There’s nothing more exciting than finishing a book, and walking over to your shelves to figure out what you’re going to read next.
So, the solution here is to just slow down on the buying, not cut it out entirely, which means things like limiting myself to one book per bookstore visit. As I start to chip away at the huge list of Books I Want To Read, I’m sure that list will deepen and broaden in ways I can’t predict, so eventually the library may be more balanced and not so skewed toward books I haven’t read, but it will never be fixed row of read books. Libraries aren’t meant to be intractable, they’re meant to change, and they change by buying books. As long as I don’t trip over those piles of books on my floor and break my leg, it seems to me that having too many books on your hands is a pretty wonderful problem to have.
Can bells and whistles save the book?
Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.
This article makes a great point. Given our already-scattered and very distracted reading/TV watching/web browsing, we really can’t stand to have yet another distraction to pull us away from a book or e-book’s main feature: the text.
Has anyone else had similar issues with their “enhanced e-books”?
Considering that I generally only use old movie stubs or Metro tickets as bookmarks, I have to say that these “In My Book” cards, which double as bookmarks, are making my current reads a whole lot classier.
Full disclosure: I received two cards in the mail from In My Book to review for free.
Traditional books, dressed to kill…
The immediate future of the book is clear. E (electronic) is for easy; P (print) is for posterity. Book readers today are leading double lives. We are faithful to our libraries at home, but stray towards the delights of digital the moment we board a plane, train or automobile.
The pleasures of E means downloading the new book we fancy, from reviews, word-of-mouth or plain curiosity. The satisfactions of P come from acquiring lovely print editions for our bookshelves. In due course, but not quite yet, the world’s writers and their agents will work out how fully to monetise this double market.
One unintended consequence of this irreversible trend has been to give the hardback a new lease of life. If the ebook is all about ease, and short attention spans, the ink and paper book must satisfy not just the thrill of reading, but the deep aesthetic pleasure associated with owning, holding and even scenting a favourite text. Already, there are signs that some publishers have cottoned on to this.
Not since the palmy days of late-Victorian publishing has so much care and attention been lavished on the hardback. Go into any bookshop now and you will find piles of brand-new hardbacks sporting coloured endpapers, scarlet silk bookmarks, heavy, deckle-edged paper and elaborate laminated boards. If Stevenson, Kipling or Conan Doyle were to wander into Waterstone’s today, they would feel quite at home. Selling to high-end readers, admittedly a smaller market, allows the publisher to charge £35, even £40, for the new edition destined for the library shelf…
The e-publisher’s riposte to beautiful books has time and technology on its side. This is also the age of the book app. 2011 was a milestone year in lots of ways (Arab spring, death of Bin Laden, English cricket revival), but never more so than with Faber’s launch of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land as a book app.
Even the most devout print-conscious bibliophile could hardly fail to be impressed by the possibilities of reading, and listening to, this great poem in many different formats, including two recordings by the poet himself. Agreed: this treatment works especially well with a long poem, but Jamie Oliver also understands, and is profiting from, the market for the book app.
In every Darwinian struggle there must be a loser, an injured beast that slinks away into the undergrowth to die, alone and forgotten. Amid the celebrations for the brave new world of E, we should not forget that other kind of P, the trashy, mass market paperback. That’s where the future’s murky, and where the corporate publishers are really worrying.
I agree with most of McCrum’s stance on the relationship between ebooks versus print books, but I would also add that the mass market paperback may be dying in print, but it is certainly surging in the ebook market.
Amazon To Publish James Franco's Novel
Now he’s announced that he’ll be penning a second book, “Actor’s Anonymous,” which, according to “The Observer,” will be a “fictionalized version of Mr. Franco’s experiences as an actor (and grad student?)”
But here’s the kicker: he’s decided to forgo the traditional publishing houses, and has signed with Amazon.
A book is a bound bundle of mental stimulation and transportation, and when you close it, if you’re reading a really good one, you should feel like you’re coming up for air, waking up from a really good dream.
Gabe Habash
Guy Laramee is an artist who carves sculptures out of books.
Among his works is an incredible sculpture of the Great Wall of China, called The Great Wall (pictured).
According to his artist’s statement, Laramee is inspired by the “erosion of cultures.”
He writes: “So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.”
Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller
In the past, bookstores did have one clear advantage over online retailers—you could read any book before you purchased it. But in the e-book age that advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.
It’s not just that bookstores are difficult to use. They’re economically inefficient, too. Rent, utilities, and a brigade of book-reading workers aren’t cheap, so the only way for bookstores to stay afloat is to sell items at a huge markup. A few times a year, my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist—drags me into one of our supposedly sacrosanct neighborhood booksellers, and I’m always astonished by how much they want me to pay for books. At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent. In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.
The author compares independent bookstores to Whole Foods in addition to the million other things there are to hate about this article.
OccupyEducated Creates a Virtual Library for the #Occupy Movement: What Books Would You Recommend?
..how can the movement preserve the work that’s been done in these physical spaces? One project that is looking at just this question is theOccupyEducated.org initiative. In response to the confiscation and physical destruction of books at Occupy Wall Street, a group of activists have created a virtual library and education center that provides a list of primer books; hand-selected articles and commentary; author interviews and more to come. Occupiers are asked to participate by contributing to new “Top 5” lists for different Occupy topics, and to participate in constructive discussion forums.
The plan is to eventually also include book clubs, author Q&As and local library donation drives.
So what books would you recommend?
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