erin!balser

I got an iPhone today. My luck in waiting only 10 minutes to get a phone is completely due to suckers like Matt who waited all day yesterday with a broken service system to get theirs, taking hours and hours to activate a single phone, leaving the Fido flagship no choice but to close yesterday with about a dozen phones left over.

The guilt eats at me.

It really does.

I went back and forth on getting this phone for a long time. What finally broke it for me was that I was truly disappointed that I didn’t have any way to Twitter throughout BookExpo while running around like a maniac. So this is my plan with my little phone. To Twitter and liveblog all the book events I attend, and maybe someday, to move this twittering from my personal account to the account of whichever publisher I’m working for at the time.

Also, unbeknownst to me, the iPhone has an amazing eReader application and public domain books are only 0.99. My dream of reading books from this phone is so much closer than I ever knew! Hopefully publishers will get on board with this format and make their books available to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Any suggestions for making this machine as publishing-friendly as possible?!

The Boston Globe published a piece today that questions that validity of the non-fiction book Bringing Down the House, which inspired the recent hit film 21, starring Kevin Spacey. (I actually just read the book this weekend, and saw the film the weekend before that, but that proves no point other than I have no real social life.)

Both the author, Ben Mezrich, and his editor stand behind his book. However, as with A Million Little Pieces and Love and Consequences before, such a claim has spurred controversy and many readers are feeling betrayed.

While Sebastian Junger claims doing so is “lying,” on Papercuts. His argument is that “nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is; that’s something else.”

Mezrich ever intended for his book to be educational or representational of “the world as it is.” He tells the Globe that he “took literary license to make it readable.”

The Globe writes that such non-fiction trends are

Much like reality television shows, the shift is fed by the sense that what audiences want is reality, but packaged with an excitement and drama that the original facts lack.

And does anyone get truly angry that The Amazing Race, Survivor and the thousands of other shows like them, play with the idea of “reality”? I know it happens, but never with the vigor as it does in the literary world.

Non-fiction books, like reality television, has a spectrum. Television viewers don’t put the Discovery Channel documentaries and MTV reality shows in the same box. Why are non-fiction books treated differently? What literary high ground exists so that movies and television can take extreme creative liberties with “reality” with relatively little controversy and books cannot?

While publishers and authors should never misrepresent their books (and this is totally the case in some books!), readers need to take greater responsibility in recognizing and understanding why they are reading that particular book. Are you reading it to learn something? Or are you reading it for entertainment value?

Such critical thinking could even inspire greater debate around literature, the media and more.

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Papercut, the fabulous NY Times book blog, came up with the “seven deadly sins” of book reviews today–popular words in books reviews, used to sound “intelligent” and “literary.”

The list includes the gems poignant; compelling; intriguing; eschew; craft (used as a verb); muse (used as a verb); and lyrical.

In the comments section, nuanced, subtle, masterful, magisterial, engaging, and luminous, among others, came up.

Would a review saying something like (stolen from Papercut, because it’s way better than the review I concocted!) “Mario Puzo’s intriguing novel eschews the lyrical as the author instead crafts a poignant tale of family life and muses on the compelling doings of the Mob” entice you to pick up the book and read it? Probably not.

If the above words may never be used in reviewing a Sophie Kinsella novel, why should they be used in a review about the latest Ondjaate novel? Wouldn’t doing so further alienate certain readers? I’d argue that not only is this language unnecessary, it can be inaccessible.

I wonder if we need to review how books are reviewed. Who reads book reviews? And why? And, given the changing media and social spaces today, where are book reviews going? How would such elaborate and flowery language translate on Facebook and other social media sites, where you get a sentence to attract readers to your review? Or, more interestingly, Twitter? How would you write an effective book review in 140 characters?

That being said, when such words are used correctly, they’d make for a powerful and persuasive review. But reviewing literature doesn’t mean trying to write literature. Don’t write like you’re smart, just be smart. Then the review will be fantastic.

And if you’re really smart, you’ll show me how to write a review in 140 characters. Or less.

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In defense of (or in solidarity with) his Wired editor, Leander Kahney is giving away his two books, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod for free as downloads.

Bill Pollock of No Starch Press has some interesting things to say about this project here.

“I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books,” Pollock writes.

I can’t help but wonder how much the genre of the books–non-fiction books about technology–will not only affect downloads, but also affect perception of this project and actual book titles. Getting your title out there is always a good thing. But will a book about Apple Inc. by Leander Kahney (who is awesome, by the way) be treated the same way by consumers as, say, the latest literary fiction by Margaret Atwood? I highly doubt it. While technology will play a huge factor in how publishers reach audiences, these avenues will become narrower and more streamlined. A good thing for readers but a more complicated thing for publishers.

You can download the books for yourself here.

A few days ago, Slate posted an interesting article about the history of the phone book. Titled “Why Won’t Phone Books Die?” it chronicled their inception, increasing success and current demise of this information service.

Given the various methods people have to communicate now beyond public land lines–cell phones and email, to name a few–let alone those who have private numbers or no land lines at all, the death of the phone book is a natural thing. Yet, according to Slate, the Yellow Pages Association is refusing to let it die. I know they are worried about their livelihood and their employees, but it’s hard to argue for the preservation of something that is little more than an information service. (Although I did enjoy the historical elements of the Slate article!)

It only makes sense that services that merely provide listings and information move to a digital an more interactive format than an alphabetical index as it’s only search method. Instead of fervently holding on to a dying medium, Yellow Pages should look to the future and capitalize on the technologies people are using to find information. They already have a website I go too far too often for information. Why not grow from there?

This is a tune I sing far too often, but I found this Slate piece really interesting, and it’s well worth a read. Check it out for yourself here.

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Thanks to Joe Wikert, I came across Podiobooks, a website that offers serialized audiobooks for free.

Users can subscribe to a book or books and download the chapters to listen to as they are released. They let you get your books through iTunes, Juice and Transitor. They currently have over 190 titles and 42,000 users. Pretty crazy stuff.

Joe makes the great suggestion of Podiobooks joining forces with the other publishing platforms. Joe’s a smart guy, you should read his blog.

Check out Podiobooks and let me know what you think!

Publisher and blogger Ted Savas recently wrote about the keys to building book success. His advice is so simple and true–and it works.

Savas writes:

The fundamentals for selling any book are essentially the same. Here is the secret: talk about your book as often as you can, with as many people as you can, for as long as you can, wherever you can, even if you don’t sell a single copy when you do. Oh, and there is a follow up: REPEAT–REPEAT–REPEAT.

Nothing about mediums, about budgets, about having a well-known author or a movie deal. Nothing about “doing what you know” or “doing what works” or “reinventing the wheel.”

It’s promising advice for the future of books. The more places you talk about it, the more places people will come across it.

It’s that simple.

PS. Ted Savas’s blog is absolutely great. I’m only sad I didn’t find it earlier!

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As you can probably tell already, I’m a big advocate for the digital world. I get all my news online, I can happily read a computer screen for eight hours and take my laptop to bed with me.

Other advocates use the “virtual is greener” argument when calling for a change from print to screen.

However, the true environmental impacts of a digital world are emerging. Wired editor Chris Anderson argued that “dead-tree magazines have a smaller net carbon footprint than web media.” Yet, Brendan Koernor of Slate argues that Anderson “underestimates the long-term consequences and carbon emissions of logging in old-growth forests, as well as the nasty pollution created by the wood pulping industry.”

Either way, it’s hard to assess the environmental impact of an industry that’s not only rapidly adopting green standards, it’s also facing a digital revolution.

As it is, environmental issues can be easily adapted for both the pro-print and pro-screen camps. This is without any real benefit to those who it matters most–the environment and the consumer.

In the end, it’s about adopting a medium between print and screen wherein the user is happy and where they can make informed environmental decisions.

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A few days ago Timothy Egan of the NY Times responded to Steve Jobs’ statement about Amazon’s Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” Jobs told the Times. “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

I’m one of the people who found this statement really disappointing. I believe Apple is a company that could make an e-book reader work, make it compatible with several other programs on the market and make it sexy. Hell, it could be as easy as giving the iPhone book-reading capabilities.

Anyways, back to Egan. In his refute of Jobs and his declaration of his love of books, he had the following to say:

The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.

Just product? Maybe so. But these products revolutionized the way we consume things. Apple has changed how we interact with technology, with creative industries, and, to some extent, with each other. How can it be “just product” if it’s doing that?

Egan’s statement comes from a desire to demonstrate that reading is above being “just product.” “Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience,” he writes. “It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.”

Egan is confusing “reading” with “books”. iTunes and iPods are products, listening is not. The Mac is a product, everything we use it for is not. iPhone is a product, interacting with friends and surfing the internet is not.

If we had a device that had inter-active cross-references and indices, that let us immediately hook up to others reading the same book, that gave us access to secondary and outside resources through the very book we were reading, that gave us the ability to instantly store and save passages we found moving or thought-provoking, wouldn’t that change how we read?

Yes, reading is more than product.

But, just as with those other products, the right e-reader will be more than “just product.”

We just need to get Steve Jobs on board.

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In my Book Sales and Marketing class recently we had to analyze a publishing houses website for its success in terms of marketing. What really struck me was how passive these sites were. Sure, they give the necessary information–upcoming titles and events and information about the author. There wasn’t any sense of community or any sense of identity with these sites.

What if publishing houses attempted to build an online brand around themselves and built a web community on this? What if the publishing houses interacted directly with readers? Supplied RSS feeds for news and events? Gave the editors behind titles a face with their own blogs? Allowed readers to interact with them through comments on books, on authors, on events, on anything? What if readers followed these houses on Twitter? What if the houses themselves supplied readers with materials and ideas of interest and not just rely on their authors to do this? What is publishing houses–even the big ones!–had personality?

I recently had a teacher tell me that if the old methods work, we don’t need to go outside the box when it comes to book marketing. This type of thinking is just plain wrong. In a world where publishing industry is changing–and changing dynamically–where fewer people are reading books than ever before, publishers need to get better at reaching their readers, and connecting with them in ways the reader wants. Why is everyone so afraid of failure?

I’m sure the average reader doesn’t know who publishes their favorite author–and doesn’t care. I bet we could change this. I’ve seen some change. Coach House has an RSS feed for their news and events and almost every Canadian publisher has a Facebook group. But publishers need to be better engaged and capitalize on these new opportunities being presented to them.

Sure, their website is a great place to buy a book. But it might be a great place to talk about it too.

Does anyone have any great examples of this? I’d love to see one.

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