I confess that I’ve not listened to an audio book since I listened to an album-length version of The Hobbit that we had when I was a little kid. Roger Ebert makes me think I’ve been missing out. This is quite an endorsement:
I’ve been a lifelong reader. My love for physical books is old and deep. I also love audiobooks, and have listened to probably 300 of them. Sometimes they stay with me better than the printed ones. I avoid abridgments in most cases, and listened to Simon Callow read all 12 novels in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time twice. Every word. It became part of my experience. Now I’m re-reading it in print, and I can hear the voices.
I tried to read Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and never really got into it. Then I listened to Sean Barrett reading it, and it was so enthralling that if it was playing in the car I’d leave the engine idling for half an hour in the alley while an chapter finished. I started James Joyce’s Ulysses several times and always bogged down. After I heard it performed by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan, I got it. It’s all voices. Hearing them from readers who knew such people, I could finally hear them in my mind.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys is so long I certainly would never have read it, although I own two hardbound editions. I get slowed down by the period spelling and language use, and the unfamiliar expressions. I listened to Kenneth Branagh’s performance, and it was like being confided in by a naughty, delightful friend. Pepys is human, flawed, sinful, determined to improve. A gossip. A statesman. A rogue. He joins the crowd in my mind.
That makes me want to seek out some audio books.
Like many people who spend too much time online, read fewer books than I’d like. It’s not that I don’t read as many words as I once did. I read blog posts in Google Reader, updates on Twitter, message board posts in many places, email, and long articles in Instapaper. And my temptation is often to play a computer game, watch a TV show, or catch up on various online reading when I have leisure time. While I enjoy all that stuff, it’s just not the same as diving into an interesting nonfiction book or a gripping novel.
For years I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my incentives to align with my abstract desires and start reading more books. My new theory is that I’m more likely to read books if I check them out from the library. I am a deadline driven person, and when you check books out of the library they come with a deadline. You have to give them back whether you read them or not. The other difference is that buying a book is a commitment. You spend money on it, and so it’s worth looking into carefully to make sure you’re buying something that’s really good. Books are sacred. On the other hand, if you check out a book from the library and it’s not your cup of tea, you put it down and drop it off on the way home from work the next day. No pressure.
So today I went to the library and got a library card and checked out Rosecrans Baldwin’s novel from last year, You Lost Me There. I knew his name from The Morning News and I have enjoyed his commentary on Layer Tennis matches so I picked up his book on a whim and now I have until April 25 to read it. We’ll see how it turns out — first I have to finish reading this issue of National Geographic from last September.
Kids who grow up near books do better in school than kids who don’t, on average.
I was entertained by the meme that spread through the economics blogosphere a few weeks ago, in which the bloggers listed the books that influenced them the most. The main take away for me is that when it comes to reading, I swim at the shallow end of the pool. Most of the books on their lists that I have read I have forgotten almost entirely. Maybe reading blogs by people who read and really thought about these great books will make me a little smarter. Anyway, Adam Bramwell goes through the various lists and chooses winners. Entertaining.
Most of the posts about the throw down between Macmillan and Amazon have talked about the “agency model,” as opposed to the model that Amazon prefers for the Kindle. Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains how the model works:
At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different from hardcopy books. Ebooks are just another repro technology. Furthermore, online ebook sellers like Amazon aren’t publishers; they’re distributors or booksellers.*
The difference between the agency model and Amazon’s plan for world domination is that Amazon wants to license the ebooks in its Kindle program, control their content, and set their prices. That is: it wants to be the publisher, not a distributor or seller. This might be doable if Amazon were out there negotiating to buy rights at market prices. It isn’t. Amazon expects to have the rights just handed over, as though it were doing the conventional publishers a favor.
People are weighing in since Amazon “capitulated” (their words) to Macmillan yesterday. The most entertaining rundown was written by John Scalzi. The most insightful was written by Tim Bray.
Author Charlie Stross explains the business reasons why Amazon pulled all Macmillan books from their online store last week. It’s the best overview of the dispute and why readers should care about it that I’ve seen.
Also check out this post by Jim Henley, in which he links to a bunch of reactions and runs some of the numbers in the dispute, and explains in concise terms exactly what’s at stake:
There are $7-8 in incremental costs coming off of every hardcover book as we move from print to bits, with some small new incremental costs for ebook production. So call it $7 a book.
One way or another, that $7 is going to be split among authors, publishers, retailers and customers. The question is, who gets how much?
Update: Macmillan wins, for now.
I’ve been seeing snippets of Cormac McCarthy’s interview with John Jurgensen all week and I finally got around to reading the whole thing. You should too, it’s inspiring.
If you’ve ever been curious about what kind of money you can make writing computer books, check out Peter Cooper’s post What I’ve Earned (and Learned. Having written a number of books myself, I find his article matches up pretty well with my experience.
Google founder Sergey Brin takes to the pages of the New York Times today to explain the value of Google Books:
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.
Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.
As an author, I’m completely supportive of Google Books, and I agree with Brin in that I wish there were many such services. Recently an out of print, foreign album I had been searching for in any format for years became available via Amazon MP3. In one day, this band’s music went from being completely inaccessible to being available to essentially everyone with an Internet connection. Google Books’ arrangement is slightly different, but the concept is the same. Most people create things in order to reach an audience, and Google Books gives authors of out of print works an opportunity that simply does not currently exist. It’s unlikely that a better opportunity is worth holding out for.
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