Reading List 2010 and TheMillions

At the close of each year for the past several years, the blog TheMillions has published the lists of books read by a wide variety of people whom they invite to share their year's readings. In that spirit, here are the books I read this year (and I don't pretend that these are by any means high-brow but, for the most part, they are good entertainment).

It is difficult to place one book over another as best or worst (or lesser best); however, I especially enjoyed the Le Carre, Furst, Winslow and Mankell books this year. For LeCarre, the book was very much a return to form even though I was appalled by the ending even though I should have seen it coming. Appalling was what he was after, I think. Alan Furst (with Pellecanos and Kerr) is an author whose new work I look forward to reading each year and this book was no different from its excellent predecessors. Don Winslow has written a sequel to the early 1980s book Shibumi and he gets it almost note perfect. And lastly, the Mankell title which I had purchased for MrsPND (who also liked it) had quite a gory start but the story was entertaining. Having said that, the Swedes are a little wordy. Must be the long winters.

The biggest surprise was the current book, which I aim to finish by year end: The Decline & Fall of the British Empire. There's no sugar coating the history here and Brendon takes the lid off the ineptitude, callousness and brutality of the British empire. Not revisionist history but perhaps more realistic. I don't get given a lot of books (this was true even when I ran Bowker), but on a visit to the publisher Public Affairs a few years ago I had the run of their stock room and picked up Diamonds, Gold, and War about South Africa, which was an excellent early 20th century history of the country. I was less impressed with Meacham's Jackson book and didn't find it particularly deep or insightful. It was hugely successful so perhaps that's just me.

Lastly, the book I most enjoyed this year was Portnoy's Complaint which I thought I had read but hadn't. In October, on a visit to the family manse, I picked it off the shelf and read it almost straight through in a sitting. There aren't too many books that make me laugh out loud but this was one of them.

The number of books read in 2010 was consistent with the past four or five years - which I know because I keep track of them in librarything.com. Already on my to-read shelf (in hardcover) I have 17 titles plus the half of Ulysses that I haven't read. Happy reading.

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997, Piers Brendon
Too Close to Home: A Thriller, Linwood Barclay
The Collaborator, Gerald Seymour
Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy
Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel, John le Carre
Portnoy's complaint, Philip Roth
The Man from Beijing, Henning Mankell
Moonlight Mile (Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro), Dennis Lehane
Spies of the Balkans: A Novel, Alan Furst
Ultimatum, Matthew Glass
The Midnight House, Alex Berenson
Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, Martin Meredith
Lustrum: A Novel, Robert Harris
Ulysses, James Joyce (I am still working on this one).
The Ghost War, Alex Berenson
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
Rogue Island, Bruce DeSilva
Satori, Don Winslow
Wicked City, Ace Atkins
If the Dead Rise Not (Bernie Gunther), Philip Kerr,
The Godfather of Kathmandu, John Burdett
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Jon Meacham
John, Cynthia Lennon
Homer & Langley: A Novel, E.L. Doctorow
The Dead of Winter, Rennie Airth
The Way Home, George Pelecanos
The Given Day: A Novel, Dennis Lehane

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So You Want to Write a Novel: "I'm the talent."

On semi hiatus until January but I saw this via The Rejector:

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Dawn over Haleakala

Dawn over Haleakala Maui, 1992

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

(I originally posted a scanned print of this image however I've now replaced this with a scanned35mm slide. Much better - no schmutz.)

When I was in high school there was something of a tradition that we would drive up to the rim of the Haleakala crater after some important event like the Prom. The trip is less than 40 miles from the base of the mountain but can take several hours because travel is slow and the road twists and turns across the western side of the volcano. Haleakala is dormant and while the crater rim offers amazing views - like this one and of the sweep of the mountain down to the sea on most sides - it is the crater itself which is the real star of the show. Most tourists will travel up in the early hours and maybe catch the sunrise but will invariably travel back down on a bicycle using gravity to speed them on their way.

The smarter tourist will slap on several layers of sunscreen and hike down the Sliding Sands trail to the base of the crater, cross it and then hike back up the a switch-back trail at Halemau'u. Not for the faint of heart this is an eleven mile hike with a 3,000 foot elevation change. The first nine miles are easy; it's the last two miles of switch back trail that kill. I've done this full day hike three times and the last time was in March 2005 with my high school buddy Dave. I went for the weekend and left the office on Thursday came back on Tuesday. It was well worth it and I'd do it again in a minute.

Join me on Flickr

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Kno Tablets Shipping To Select Faculty and Students

David Nagel at Campus Technologies is reporting that the Kno Tablet which is aimed directly at the student market has begun shipping to students and faculty (CT)

The Kno tablet, designed specifically for higher education, will be available in limited quantities via invitation starting tomorrow for $599 for the single-screen model and $899 for the dual-screen model.Kno devices sport one or two 14.1-inch, 1,440 x 900-pixel touchscreens and can display full-scale textbooks , videos, and other multimedia. They also support notetaking, educational apps, Web browsing, and content sharing. Kno is also operating an electronic textbook store featuring "tens of thousands of textbooks from most of the major publishers, with new books being added regularly," according to Kno. The tablets made their formal debut in June 2010 in the dual-screen configuration and went into beta testing with higher education students this fall using software from education publishers Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, and Wiley. The single-screen version was announced in late September.

Also on the kno website there are some videos explaining the use of the product as well as a demo of the unit itself which happens to look like a large iPhone4. Very stylish. (As an aside Nicole clearly needs a boyfriend to drive her around: Three buses!?).

Some may recall that the CEO of Kno is also the founder of Chegg.

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Media Week (Vol 3) No 50: Google eBooks, Smelling Books, Spooky Retail Practices, Manga Censorship

TechCruch has a snarky piece about the Google eBookstore and some of the commentators see through the bias (TC):

Many hopes and dreams were projected onto Google Editions’ vaporware. It would index every published word since the dawn of humanity, and make it possible to search your personal library, and deep-link to individual chapters, sections, and paragraphs. It would somehow singlehandedly resurrect the dying bookstore trade. Instead, when the fog finally cleared, all we got was Kindle Lite.

Oh, it does what it does well enough. You can buy books from Google and read them on your Android, iWhatever, e-reader, or the Web; authors and publishers can upload their own books, with or without DRM; and it’s all been expertly implemented. But now that you can read Kindle books on the Web, Google’s new eBookstore is little more than a carbon copy of Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem — except that you can’t (yet) read DRMed Google ebooks on a Kindle (which remains, I note, the world’s most popular e-reader) or email them as gifts.

From "Thrilled"

Checked out some of my favorites Dickens titles. Looked at the sample, changed settings from scan to flowing text, adjusted font size, line spacing. Decided this is a must for my dad to get his books. Sorry that they've not served markets/authors with copyright issues, but this is a profound value for many. How is it that such a monumental effort to get books into available electronic format is denigrated because one segment of authors (which have multiple layers of legal concerns) is not well served??

From Khalid:

To be fair to Google, this is version one and they tend to make improvements to their services very quickly. Granted, some content will be held-back because of the legal situation, but ultimately the service will very likely be much better soon.

Worst case, Google Books doesn't do very well. But already Amazon are talking about a full Kindle web application and with it the ability for any site to sell books through Kindle. Those features were almost certainly pushed out there or made a higher priority because of Google. So, at the least, the competition has made and will continue to make Kindle better.

And "Harry"

I believe the true "problem" is expertly sandwiched into the article:

"The best is that you get public-domain books for free, though they seem to have missed the Creative Commons train: neither of the books I’ve released for free appears in their catalog. "

Oh....Now this article makes much more sense.

Michael Powell is enthusiastic about the Google eBook store and speaks to Forbes:

I’ve been reading for months that Google, the resident behemoth here, would partner with local booksellers when they launched their eBookstore. Sure enough, it’s happening. And maybe I’m just to used to the old tales, but I’ve found it hard to grasp the plot point. Sure, Amazon.com uses neighborhood booksellers to address scarcity, especially for used books, but ebooks magically eliminate such concerns. Why wouldn’t Google just stomp to the fight with Amazon, flattening those little bricky stores along the way?

When you need an answer from someone with bookstore cred you can do a lot worse than one of Google’s most notable partners — Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore. So I spent the past week emailing with Darin Sennett, Director of Web Stuff at Powell’s. He explained why stores like his and Google are ready to write the eBook of love, not war.

When I think about partnerships between Google eBookstore and publishers, it makes sense. But I have to admit that when I saw Powell’s partnering with Google eBookstore, it made me scratch my head. So let’s start there. What’s the advantage of this partnership for your store?

Our core competency is bookselling. Building an ebook distribution infrastructure from scratch is a gigantic undertaking – not something an independent bookseller has the resources to do. Then there’s keeping up with all the future devices people will want to read on, which means continual focus on technological development. Having Google take care of the heavy lifting lets us concentrate on being a fantastic bookstore.

Number 16 in the reasons to love New York from NY Magazine:

Because We’re Home to Not Only the Publishing Industry But Also to a Woman Who Spends Her Days Smelling Books: After artist Rachael Morrison, 29, started working at the MoMA library, she’d joke that she was “smelling books” all day. She loves being surrounded by all these books in an increasingly digitized age—they already seem like artifacts. She began wondering what it would be like not to be able to smell them anymore. “When you read a book, you become immersed in this way that feels very special and individual,” she says. Unlike when you read something online, where “I always have this sense that whatever I am reading is being read by millions of other people.” So six months ago, she decided to spend her lunch breaks chronicling the unique scent of each book in the MoMA stacks.

(And for my many readers who like pork - check this out in the same issue).

A popular theme at the moment: How eBooks, iPad, etc, etc are changing the whole idea of the book. From the Observer:

These two developments – the Economist's app and Eagleman's "book" – ought to serve as a wake-up call for the print publishing industry. The success of Amazon's Kindle has, I think, lulled print publishers into a false sense of security. After all, they're thinking, the stuff that goes on the Kindle is just text. It may not be created by squeezing dyes on to processed wood-pulp, but it's still text. And that's something we're good at. So no need to panic. Amazon may be a pain to deal with, but the Kindle and its ilk will see us through.If that's really what publishers are thinking, then they're in for some nasty surprises. The concept of a "book" will change under the pressure of iPad-type devices, just as concepts of what constitutes a magazine or a newspaper are already changing. This doesn't mean that paper publications will go away. But it does mean that print publishers who wish to thrive in the new environment will not just have to learn new tricks but will also have to tool up. In particular, they will have to add serious in-house technological competencies to their publishing skills.

Who will be the last book readers from Geoff Pevere at The (Toronto) Star on his visit to The Written Word Festival:

Admittedly, the Written Word Festival is not the best place to find kids who don't read, who are presumably those kids so neurally corrupted by Facebook and cellphones that reading is beyond them.

However, it's a terrific place not only to meet kids who do read but to learn how they read.

Katherine Drotos is 17. She says she'll read “pretty much anything” as long as it grabs her, and if it does she's hooked to the last page. She finds the stuff most likely to grab her on lists: online lists at Indigo and Amazon, and favourite lists posted by avid readers. As for e-books, there's no way. “I can't stand looking at a screen when I read.”

Reading, it is commonly believed, is in crisis. Just google these three words (reading in crisis) and you'll find articles, studies and columns worrying that people, kids in particular, are reading less than ever. The implication is clear: if it weren't for all those addictive, instantly gratifying, ADD-generating electronic distractions, kids would be curling up with 700-page novels. Not uncommon is this sort of sentiment, found in the 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future by Mark Bauerlein: “Young (Internet) users have learned a thousand new things, no doubt. They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven't learned to analyze a complex test, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly.”

Salon has an interesting article about how web stores not only know who you are but manipulate their prices accordingly. Why are we surprised? (Salon):

Online retailers also alter prices, deals, and offers on regular goods that do not traditionally have much price volatility. Groups like Consumers Union periodically track shopping sites to see how and how often they change prices, and find fairly frequent instances of dynamic pricing. "While surfing Barnes and Noble's site, we selected a new hardcover book," the watchdog noted in a 2007 investigation. "[We] placed it in our online 'cart' at a cost of $20.80. We added several other books as well but didn't finalize the sale. Two days later, using the same browser, we found the cart had been emptied. We selected the same titles…[it] now cost $26.00." Ditto for shoes on Zappos and a number of other products.

It is impossible to know exactly what stores change prices for customers after they have clicked to put a product in their shopping cart—or which stores change a price on a customer depending on their browser or cookies. Shoppers despise the practice, understandably, so stores rarely cop to it unless caught red-handed. But many offer disclaimers implying they are aware of price discrepancies. Pottery Barn, for example, answers the question, "Why is the price of an item in my saved shopping cart different from when I selected it?" on its site. The answer? "Prices are subject to change—including temporary reductions as well as permanent increases.

The prices of items in your cart represent the current price for which you will be charged." In short: Dynamic pricing.The practice, if mysterious, is not new. Mega-retailer Amazon offered the same DVD for different prices to different customers in 2000, creating a public-relations disaster. The company claimed it was performing A/B price testing—seeing how many more folks would buy the DVD at a higher price—and said it would always give all customers the lower price at sale. But the incident fostered widespread concern about dynamic pricing, and spurred the first thorough study of the practice.

Clamping down on 'extreme manga' in Japan (Independent):

Japanese comics, which are read by adults and children, are part of mainstream culture and often explore complex subjects, including business, war and politics. A manga version of Marx's Das Kapital recently made it into print, joining Tolstoy's War and Peace, Hitler's Mein Kampf and Shakespeare's King Lear. But although the country's shelves groan with romance and literary manga, it is the genre's hardcore fringe that has long upset conservatives.

Debate has raged for years on the impact of such material on children. Violent manga and anime have been cited in the trials of several notorious Japanese serial killers, but sexual and violent crimes are comparatively rare in Japan.

Exports of comics, animated movies and games have mushroomed in the last decade. Former Prime Minister Taro Aso was a famous manga -fan and the government has bundled popular culture into its "Cool Japan" strategy, which focuses on the commercial and soft-power potential of the industry abroad. Prime Minister Naoto Kan recognised the industry's importance this week when he blogged on the censorship dispute. "Upbringing of youth is an important matter. But it's also important to present Japan's anime to the world," he wrote.

Charming...

From the Twitter:

Smithsonian Celebrates 50 Years of COBOL AOL "Nerdy memorabilia"

From Google and Harvard, a New Way to Analyze the Written Word - NYTimes

Columbia Journalism Review: Media Policy in the Digital Age PND

And in sports, normal service was resumed in the cricket world (BBC).

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Repost: Predictions 2010: Cloudy With A Chance of Alarm

As a prelude to thinking about 2011, here were my thoughts for 2010 posted on January 4, 2010.

As we greeted the New Year in 2009, we knew we were in for it economically and, as I suggested in my prediction post this time last year, one of the most obvious assumptions was that things would get worse before they got better. Contrary to expectations, publishing may have come out a winner in spite of the steady litany of bad news on the magazine, newspaper and television fronts that percolated all year. While recognizing the economic challenges in store for us back in 2009, I also suggested a resurrection of sorts could be had as businesses began to accommodate the fundamental changes that were taking place in the industry as they executed their business plans. Sadly, there have been few bright spots in media during 2009, and after having taken the pulse of views on the near-term future in publishing by speaking to a number of senior publishing executives, my belief is we will not see any appreciable improvements during 2010. While some of their collective views can be attributed to ‘hedging,’ external trends support the lack of optimism whether they be reductions in education funding and library budgets or the increasing reliance on “blockbuster” authors or pricing issues.

Many of the macro trends that I have noted in years past remain prevalent and in some cases have accelerated. For example,

• Educational publishers appear to be increasing – rather than decreasing – their investment in electronic media and more importantly, are beginning to think of their electronic products as distinctly different from their print precursors. In particular, educational publishers have started to talk meaningfully about “databases” and “subscriptions.”

• Newspapers – particularly NewsCorp – have been particularly active in attempting to build paid content models which support the separation of ad-based and subscription-based models. Newspapers aside, even trade publishers – notably Disney - are beginning to experiment in interesting ways with paid subscription models.

On the other hand, my expectations for further compacting of the publisher supply chain and increasing collaboration across publishing segments appear to have run aground. Interestingly, an executive I recently spoke to noted that the separation of publishing units that historically sat together – education with trade with information, for example – has negatively impacted publishing companies ability to learn and benefit from the experience and market testing of their sister companies. Possibly a decrease in access to ‘institutional knowledge’ has, in general, contributed to some media companies’ hesitancy to experiment.

Prognostication being the point of this post, there are some newer macro changes I see that will define the publishing and media space more and more over the next three to five years and it will be interesting to see how these develop.

• Firstly, 2009 was the ‘year of the eBook’ as new devices seemed to launch each week. But the eBook, as we understand it today, only has three more years to run. By the end of 2010, we will be focused on the ‘cloud’ as the implications of the Google Editions product become clearer. This accelerated migration away from a physical good – even with an eBook, the title was ‘physically’ downloaded – will challenge our notion of ‘ownership’, rewrite business rules and provide the first true ‘strata’ for communities (or social networks) to develop around content.
  
  The Apple iSlab (iSlate, iTablet, iEtc) will become a key driver in this development as the company becomes the first consumer electronics maker to apply their design expertise to multi-content delivery. (I don’t count SONY because they got it completely wrong).
  
• A closely related (but somewhat tangential) development will be the realization by publishers that the library market could become a threat to their business models as mobile and remote access is aggressively marketed by companies such as Serial Solutions and EBSCO. Currently, these products are not specifically related to trade and academic titles; however, the implications for all published product will become clearer as patrons’ ease of access to ‘free’ content grows and as the resolution services improve.
  
  Remote access to information products by library patrons is obviously not new, but applied to mobile computing it will change many things about the library model. This trend coupled with the ‘cloud’ concept above, will require an industry-wide re-think of the library business model.
  
• There are hints that the silo-ing of content that has been endemic to information and education for many years could become a trend in trade as well. Examples remain sparse, though Harlequin and Tor are routinely cited as exemplars of this trend.
  
  Subject-specific concentrations of content in trade will become a more broadly viable model; but simply concentrating content is not enough. Trade publishers will begin to license or commission ancillary content that adds a transactional element to their offering (not exclusively in a monetary sense). In effect, this additional content will provide a reason for consumers to return periodically to the site for free reference, news or dictionary content. Thus, this content will complement the subject-specific content that publishers generate themselves. As each segment develops, the ancillary content will also become core content to the publisher and may eventually be produced by them (although, initially, the content may be licensed). Over time other services will be built within each subject silo, and this maturity will replicate the product development seen in information publishing over the past ten years as those businesses established subject specific franchises around topics such as business news, tax and legal information.

Aside from these macro trends that will grow in importance over the next few years maintaining the status quo will still be the operative task during 2010. Here are following are some more specific predictions for 2010:

• Certain segments (financial, legal and tax information and education, for example) continue to be challenged and any business that relies on the library market will face a very difficult time. Funding will be worse in the coming year (fiscal 2011) making retention, renewals and price increases problematic. By the end of this year, we could see some consolidation in the information media space.
  
• We will see the return of an old model of collaboration between magazines and traditional publishers as magazines look for ready-made content. Witness the return of the serial and short story to the pages of periodicals as their publishers look for low-cost content for their plodding (but suddenly more aggressive) migration to electronic delivery. In turn, electronic magazines will offer publishers a more effective, targeted and supportive mode of marketing than publishers have seen in years.
  
• 2010 will be a year of warfare: Publishers against retailers, wholesalers against retailers, retailers against retailers, publishers against consumers. It may be nasty, brutish and short, but will any of them truly understand the stakes? (See macro trend number one).
  
• Finally, we will see consolidation of at least two major trade houses. This is likely to precipitate another combination by year end. An outsider company (not a current trade publisher) may make a major move into the trade market.
  
• Last year, I predicted that out-of-work journalists would become ‘content producers’ and we have seen that develop as companies like Demand Media and Associated Content build market share. I see this trend accelerating during 2010. As magazines migrate to platform models, they become 24/7 publishing operations with a significantly increased demand for content far beyond their capabilities. Where they will succeed is in curating content for their specific audiences; however, much of this content will be produced for them, rather than by them in the traditional manner. In effect, magazines will outsource editorial.
  
• And in sports, Manchester United will retain their Premier League title, winning on goal difference over Arsenal; Barcelona will win the Champions League; and England will win the deciding fourth Ashes test in Melbourne in December.

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