too many Daves

halsf:

Farhad Manjoo’s Slate piece on Apple’s looming e-book crackdown is brilliant - http://www.slate.com/id/2283381/ #apple #kindle

==============

from the Slate piece …

“… since Apple takes a 30 percent cut for purchases made from inside apps, pushing people outside the app is a way to bypass what’s essentially an iPhone tax. … I’m hoping Amazon responds to Apple’s restriction by voluntarily pulling the Kindle app from the App Store. In its place, Amazon should create a Kindle reader for the mobile Web—a fully functional e-book app that Apple couldn’t meddle with.”

Or maybe things can go the other way. When I use my iPhone to call a pizza place, it seems only fair that Apple should get 30 percent of the cost of whatever pizzas I order and 30 percent of whatever I tip the delivery guy.

Apple and Amazon must not comprehend the effect that grabby fights like these have on customers. Imagine a shop where the merchant and the landlord squabble openly over each penny that comes in the door. You’d stay away. And with e-books, you can afford to stay away. The Age of Innocence, which I savored as much as any e-book I’ve purchased for my Kindle, is old enough to be available as a free, legal download from Project Gutenberg. Here’s a list of the top 100 Gutenberg books people downloaded yesterday.

It is at this point that I would need to mumble some shabby excuse about why it’s still OK for me to get The New Yorker on my Kindle. Um, slow reader. Um, text-to-speech. Um, never once got through the whole print edition in all the years I subscribed. Um, it’s how I was able to blog this and this and this. Um. Um. Um. That’s all I’ve got.

Thanks to Hal Espen for linking to the Slate piece. Espen, if you’re in the market, can provide you with sentences like this one: “His primary bête noire is anything he deems postmodernist, and he beats on it like Camille Paglia humping a Madonna mannequin.”

I just added his RSS to my Google Reader.

- David Quigg, 2/4/11

I e-mailed my favorite blogger last night. Today he excerpted my e-mail on his blog. I’m grateful.

As it stands, my words are attributed to “a reader.” It’s an accurate description, but I can’t stay true to my own standards unless I sign my name to my e-mailed critique of “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains,” Nicholas Carr’s piece in the current Wired. If I keep my name off the critique, I will need to stop griping about the sucker punches people throw from the shadows of online anonymity. I like that high horse and I’m unwilling to dismount.

So I’ll post my full e-mail here. As you’ll see, the e-mail refers to “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble,” the title of the post that brought Carr’s article to my attention and prompted last night’s e-mail. The post’s title came from an image Carr used in Wired: “Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory.”

Here, without any further throat-clearing, is last night’s e-mail …

Dear Andrew:

I’m writing because I found “Filling A Bathtub With a Thimble” to be almost entirely unpersuasive. It just struck me, though, that there’s something I should do before I dissect Nicholas Carr’s claims: retrace my steps, tell you how I got here. I’ll do this because my accidental, unpremeditated path feels meaningfully different from the “watching the landscape from a train” experience you described.

This started with my wife sending me an e-mail with an uncapitalized “sullivan” in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail, she pasted your Ralph-the-pig-themed “Emails of the Day.” Reading those, I saw the words “pig nipples” in hypertext. Now, I’m not a prude, but I haven’t ever clicked the words “pig nipples” before. Tonight I did. Why? My best guess is that many of those futile, little thimbles that I’ve splashed into the bathtub of my mind have been infused with this basic idea: “Dear Bathtub: We got these ideas from Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan posts worthwhile stuff. He uses links sparingly and intelligently. We can’t click all links. But Sullivan’s links tend to be worthwhile. Remember this. Yours sincerely, Thimble.”

And so I clicked “pig nipples.” This launched my browser, pulled up “The Sexually Ambiguous, Swimming Pig, Ctd” post, and gave me the pleasure of learning the expression “worthless as teats on a boar hog.” In fairness to Nicholas Carr, I can’t be sure that I will remember that expression two months from now. But I’m OK with that. Truly.

Having finished reading the “teats on a boar hog” post, my eyes drifted toward the right of the screen. I saw your picture. My gaze drifted further right to Megan McArdle’s picture. I thought of my friend Aaron, a doctor with keen ideas on healthcare reform who has been unimpressed by some of McArdle’s work. Right or wrong, the thought of Aaron pulled my eyes away from McArdle and back to you. Under your photo, I saw the cryptically truncated words “Filling A Bathtub With A…” With the interrupting ellipses, those five words were even less promising than “pig nipples.” But I clicked anyway, read through your “Filling A Bathtub With A Thimble” post, and emerged feeling skeptical. Remembering Thimble’s note, Bathtub reminded me that you use links sparingly and intelligently and that I could delve deeper into Carr’s ideas by clicking the link in your post. So I clicked.

As I clicked, I was distracted — not by pop-up ads or by a surfeit of hypertext but by hearing my spaniel pad past. This reminded me that I’d already broken my promise to take the dogs straight out five minutes earlier. When made to wait, our dogs sometimes pee inside. I eyed the spaniel, confirmed that he was settling in for a nap instead of sniffing around for a peeing spot, and started to read Carr’s piece. By the end of the first paragraph, I was completely distracted — not by Twitter, not by incoming e-mail, not by the peril of canine piss but by a flaw in the evidence Carr cites.

Carr opens with a UCLA study in which volunteers “used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics — the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car — (while an) MRI scanned their brains …”

Well, Bathtub was roiling at this point. Bathtub wanted me to stop reading, to forget about Carr. Why? Because long experience has taught Bathtub that Google is useful for learning precisely because it allows users to sprint after information at the moment when curiosity strikes, at the exact moment when our minds are most primed to receive, value, and retain information. And Bathtub somehow doubted that these UCLA volunteers, gamely going along with the experiment, were ablaze with curiosity about the nutritional benefits of chocolate or vacationing in the Galapagos Islands or buying a new car or whatever the other “preselected topics” may have been. So Bathtub didn’t think this experiment had anything to tell Carr or you or me about real-life Internet use.

But Bathtub is nothing if not fair. So Bathtub then reminded me that I’ve always learned better by hearing than by reading and that it would be a simple matter to put Carr’s piece on my Kindle, plug in some headphones, leash up the dogs, go outside, stop worrying about pee-puddled carpeting, and command the Kindle’s little text-to-speech robot man to read Carr’s words to me while the dogs sniffed around the front yard. So that’s what I did.

I ended up believing that Carr gets things right and wrong: right when he acknowledges our agency by writing that “we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture”;  wrong, among other places, when he implicitly denies our agency with the “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” subtitle of his forthcoming book.

The Internet is not doing anything to our brains. We may be doing bad things to our brains. But the things that we are doing have been possible as long as there have been libraries. Any library patron has always been free to read a paragraph, re-shelve the book, grab a new one, skim its preface, re-shelve it, wander to the periodicals section, grab the New York Times magazine, flip to the fancy real estate ads in the back, think of West Egg and East Egg and Jay Gatsby, put down the magazine, head to the fiction section, reach out for Fitzgerald’s classic, realize that he’s never read anything by Fitzgerald’s wife, wonder if this makes him a sexist, decide that it just might, scan the fiction Fitzgeralds until he finds Zelda, grab a copy of Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz, start to read the first paragraph, question his own memory, flip to the author bio to confirm that Zelda was truly married to the Gatsby author, see that Zelda was born in Montgomery, think of the Montgomery bus boycott, remember that he’s been meaning to buckle down and read Taylor Branch’s MLK biographies, head off for the biography section.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

Most of us don’t do that in libraries. But we could.

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

If you’ve read this far, Andrew, you may still be a more patient reader than you imagine yourself to be.

With best wishes,

David

I cross-posted my Saturday post on HuffPost. (Look, kids! Three variants of “post” in an eight-word sentence! Ick. But less ick than my HuffPost headshot photo, which I will replace if my vanity ever manages to trump my inertia.)

Anyway, my post from here was up on the HuffPost Books page the last time I checked. A HuffPost reader commented that my idea amounts to “butchering books and selling them off piece by piece like so many tenderloins and flank steaks …” As the ellipses indicate, I’ve butchered the commenter’s comment. The entire comment is worthwhile and can be seen here.

Here’s the response I posted:

This comes down to truth in labeling. You can sell a tenderloin if you call it a tenderloin. If you put the same cut of tenderloin up for sale at a livestock auction, you’re going to have a problem when the buyer realizes he didn’t buy a living, breathing steer.

Similarly, if my wish came true and people could buy chapters 10, 11, and 12 of Caro’s LBJ book, it would be crucial to label those chapters as part of a larger work.

Serious authors write coherent chapters. Compared to a short excerpt or a single sentence, a chapter should be pretty good at defending itself.

Furthermore, I would hope that buyers of these kinds of instant anthologies would be skeptical. Let’s take me. I’m pretty interested in Afghanistan. If publishers gave me the means, I could put together something like an iTunes playlist of the best chapters I’ve read about Afghanistan. You could buy those chapters. The publisher would get paid. The writer would get paid. But why would you trust ME to assemble that book?

Conversely, let’s take Steve Coll, who won a Pulitzer for his Afghanistan book called “Ghost Wars.” If something happens five hours from now that makes the Andar District of Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province the most newsworthy place on Earth, I would love for Steve Coll to be able to point, click, and publish an instant briefing book that assembles the best existing journalism and scholarship.

If HuffPost’s comment system allowed me a few more words, I would have added some notions I like even more:

While nonfiction should make us cautious, allowing random people to assemble their own version of the yearly “Best American Short Stories” seems benign. And fun. I also get a big smile from the idea of smitten people being able to make the literary equivalent of a mixtape, filling it with lovingly selected poems, stories, memoir chapters, etc.

Meanwhile, Ken Auletta himself will go on NPR’s Fresh Air today to discuss his New Yorker piece. It’s about much more than I focused on: Kindles, iPads, the future of books. As Meaghan O’Connell wrote, it’s “a fascinating, overwhelming story.” I’m eager to hear the Fresh Air interview — even if the show doesn’t humor my request for Auletta to flesh out his claim that “no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books.” That, after all, is what set me off.

Finally, agent Jason Allen Ashlock of Movable Type Literary Group gave some useful feedback on my sell-books-by-the-chapter idea here and here and here.

There came a time last night when I stopped hearing the magic voice inside my Kindle. The Kindle was fine. The volume was fine. The magic text-to-speech voice kept droning. But I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear because I was distracted. I was distracted because Ken Auletta had stopped making sense.

Auletta wrote a piece subtitled “Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?” for the April 26 edition of The New Yorker. About halfway through, Auletta wrote this:

What iTunes did was to replace the CD as the basic unit of commerce; rather than being forced to buy an entire album to get the song you really wanted, you could buy just the single track. But no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books.

Those aren’t exactly fighting words. But they grated on me. If I had to summarize in 140 characters or less why Auletta’s words grated on me, I would just copy what I posted on Twitter on January 26, the day before Apple unveiled the iPad. Here, complete with the distracting pound-sign hashtags which serve a useful function on Twitter, is what I posted back then and what I still believe now:

HOW could #Apple #Tablet fail to be iPod for #publishing? Imagine an album-only iTunes. Sell me a $10 cookbook OR a 25¢ recipe.

Given more space than Twitter allows, I would have invoked the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth chapters of one of the best books I’ve ever come across, Robert A. Caro’s Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Those three chapters tell the story of economist Leland Olds. In the days before America banned child labor, Olds wrote a fierce series of articles decrying the brutality of unrestrained capitalism. By the time LBJ joined the Senate, Olds was a respected federal appointee. Caro documents LBJ’s raw cynicism as he used Olds’ long-ago writings to smear him as a communist. Repugnant stuff. But it’s essential knowledge for any bloggers or commenters who imagine they’ll never have to answer for the words they post on the Web.

Here’s the trouble. I can’t post a link to a site where you can pay money to read the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth chapters of Master of the Senate. You can buy the whole book. I hope you will. It is so damn good. But, just as I was initially, you may be scared away by the book being 1,232 pages. You may balk at paying Amazon $13.57 for 1,232 pages of LBJ when all you really want is the 71 pages about how LBJ twisted long-forgotten writings to ruin Leland Olds. By my calculation, those 71 pages are 5.8 percent of the book. So you might wish you could pay the publisher 5.8 percent of the book’s full price and get those 71 pages on your Kindle or your iPad or your cellphone. That would come to 78 cents. It’s only 78 cents. But it’s 78 cents more than the publisher is going to get if you don’t buy the book at all.

Instead of offering 78 cents, you might offer $7.80. No deal. What’s truly crazy is that you can offer $78 and there’s still no way to purchase only those 71 pages you want. The book is 1,232 pages and it costs $13.57. The book is 1,232 pages and it costs $13.57. The book is 1,232 pages and it costs $13.57 and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

But who cares, right? I can praise those 71 pages all I want, but you don’t want to read them any more than you’d want to pay 25 cents for a single recipe when you can pay a bunch of money for an entire cookbook. Why? Simple. You’re not a student. And, as Auletta noted without any apparent evidence to support his claim, “no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books.”

Let’s take that at face value. Let’s pretend for a second that “no one, with the possible exception of students” wants a 25-cent recipe, that “no one, with the possible exception of students” wants those 71 pages of Caro’s book, that “no one, with the possible exception of students” saw this scene from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and wanted to own the Auden poem that John Hannah’s grief-wrecked character recites.

Yes, let’s assume all that.

Let’s assume only students would want this.

How many students do you suppose there are in the United States alone? The answer — and I’m rounding down here — is a whole hell of a lot of students. Clearly, clearly, clearly, those students represent a big potential market. The money to be made in the student market alone — even if it’s only in increments of dollars or dimes — would surely add up to something nontrivial. Why, if Auletta had a nickel for every time a college professor handed out a photocopy from one of Auletta’s books …

Do I have facts, studies? No. Not one. My enthusiasm for this idea is every bit as blithe as Auletta’s dismissal of it. But I feel confident in predicting that the winners in publishing — if there are to be any — will be the companies that get over themselves and find ways to stop saying no to eager readers who want to give them money.

I was just about to give up on The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the third, fourth, or fifth time since getting halfway through it in 1993. But then I reached the following passage, which almost 30 years after Milan Kundera wrote it is even more arresting thanks to Kindles and iPads and the various other margarines of the printed word:

Something else raised him above the others as well: he had an open book on his table. No one had ever opened a book in that restaurant before. In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

(Comparing the book to the elegant cane of the dandy is not absolutely precise. A dandy’s cane did more than make him different; it made him modern and up to date. The book made Tereza different, but old-fashioned. Of course, she was too young to see how old-fashioned she looked to others. The young men walking by with transistor radios pressed to their ears seemed silly to her. It never occurred to her that they were modern.)

So, at least in its role as a prop for a Kundera character, a Kindle or an iPad is less a book and more a dandy’s cane. What does this mean? Should we care? I don’t actually know. But I’m enjoying thinking about it and, if nothing else, I feel prepared to say that Eustace Tilley would absolutely have an iPad. With a monocle App.