In an earlier blog post, I cursorily asked why more authors don't self-publish, using today's tools to eliminate a publishing house as a middleman. In the wake of a recent tiff between Amazon.com and Macmillan, two authors whose books were temporarily removed from the online retailer as a result of the dispute have answered my question, outlining the continuing need for publishers.
Sci-fi and fantasy author John Scalzi presented his argument in the format of "a deeply slanted play in three acts" that outlines all the resources a publisher brings to the table, answering an author's questions: "Won't I need an editor? Or a copy editor? Or a cover artist? Or a book designer? Or a publicist? Or someone to print the book and get it into stores?" Relieving a writer of these responsibilities frees him to focus on the book's content, from which all else proceeds. A publisher also brings to the table the funds necessary to hire these human resources, which an author might otherwise be left to search for on Craigslist.
I'm a writer. How is it worth my time to self-edit, do my own layouts and production management? … All my value add come from the auctorial process, the actual writing. That's where the unique product and brand identity come from. Not flowing words into columns and managing margins.
He also points out that the Internet is not a medium in which a single voice can be heard as loudly as a publisher's can: "Given how much distribution I'd lose [by self-publishing], I'd have to make a lot more per unit sold to offset the economic hit."
Can authors self-publish? Sure. But the number of hands development stages a manuscript passes through is not easily reproduced by a single person. Traditional print publishers may be undergoing either an extinction or an evolution, but their resources will continue to prove a necessity to establishing a successful product and readership on large scales.
In a later version of The Elements of Style, Strunk and White, for better or worse, advised authors to "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs." This recommendation needn't be taken literally or extremely, lest writers neurotically avoid any clarification to their words — but the point remains that a sentence needs a subject that should not be lost or confused amidst countless modifiers.
With all the discussion and analysis over the week-old Apple iPad and its implications for the mobile and e-reader markets, I think an important aspect has been overlooked: what would Strunk and White think of the iPad's unveiling?
Non-duplicated content from the ninety-minute press event was culled to compose the above 180-second montage. Such extreme editorial decisions will of course be slanted in its selections, with a result that's more amusing than telling. Still, the degree of rhetoric employed by Steve Jobs and his colleagues is remarkable. Would Strunk and White have us believe that so much bluster is obscuring a lack of concrete foundation?
If print news media is on the way out, then magazines will be the ones to turn out the lights. Their longer features make for more timeless content and in-depth analysis than daily, disposable newspapers can offer. Sudden events are often chronicled in newspapers, as I witnessed just this week when I visited the Leominster News Agency newsstand and found shelves upon shelves of yellowed papers from the day after Election Day 2008. But whereas newspapers will tell you what happened, magazines will tell you what it means.
The year 2010 marks the beginning of a new decade (though not the new decade, depending on who you ask), making it an appropriate time to look back at what one magazine called "The Decade from Hell". The Magazine Publishers of America have chosen their own medium to represent the last ten years, arranging covers from 44 different publications into the following montage:
The chronological gap between events you recognize may lead you to wonder, "What about all the intervening years?" They're all there, but at just two minutes in length, the video moves them along pretty quickly.
Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger has died at age 91 in New Hampshire. [Obituary continues]
J.D. Salinger, a World War II veteran, is best known to me as much for The Catcher in the Rye as he is for his reclusion: after the success of Catcher (now required reading in high schools across the country, including mine), he shunned the publicity he had earned, even well before his work was associated with the death of John Lennon. At the time of Mr. Salinger's passing, he had not published anything in more than forty years. Even his character in the novel Field of Dreams was replaced by James Earl Jones' fictional author, Terence Mann. Though both novelists share reclusive traits, the book is worth reading for how large a role Mr. Salinger has in it; even if it is a work of fiction, it does much to humanize the the mythological author.
The New York Times recently announced that it will start charging for online access in 2011. My friends have been weighing the pros and cons of digital readers, dealing with bulky newspapers while commuting, and the amount of articles they'd be reading before having to pay.
I feel that train commuters are likely to be among the first to take advantage of portable e-readers like the Kindle that are finally maturing. Print advertising revenues have plummeted thanks to CraigsList, Amazon.com, and eBay, so traditional newspapers and magazines have suffered financially in the past several years.
However, the move to subscription-based journalistic content has been fairly gradual, and there's likely to be resistance from readers accustomed to free articles for their RSS feeds. Also, it hasn't yet been proven that battery-powered devices are that much more friendly to the environment than recyclable newsprint. The popularity of microblogs on Twitter and short, text-based mobile updates may be transient as smartphones like the iPhone gain full Web-display capabilities.
As part of my career in the news industry, I've been following these developments closely for the past decade or so and attended many professional conference sessions on the topic. Computerworld still has a biweekly print magazine, but TechTarget, my current employer, is online only and maintains numerous specialized Web sites for business IT audiences.
Progress is inevitable; let's just hope that news organizations reinvest in the staffers needed to produce in-depth, objective content to help citizens and organizations make informed decisions!
Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100. [Story continues]
The impact of Mrs. Gies' actions cannot be understated: a third of the manuscript she preserved was published as the book The Diary of Anne Frank, which became the first or most personified exposure to the Holocaust for many people. For readers, Anne's diary changed World War II's victims from people to persons.
The book has also seen countless adaptations on stage and screen, and was used prominently in the 2007 film Freedom Writers, based on a true story, which featured the character of Miep Gies. In one scene, a high school student calls her his hero. She responds, "Oh, no. No, no, no, young man, no. I am not a hero. No. I did what I had to do, because it was the right thing to do. That is all … Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room."
I hope, first and foremost, that we never find ourselves in the world Mrs. Gies did — but, if we do, I hope we can follow her example and wisdom.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, is currently being held in Las Vegas. I've long had my calendar bookmarked in anticipation of yesterday being the release of Plastic Logic's Que e-reader, as its 8.5" x 11" dimensions poses it to become for periodicals what other e-readers are doing for books. From the Que's Web site:
Product Specifications
Connectivity: Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g), USB, Bluetooth ® 2.0
Memory: 4 GB (Approx. 3.6 GB available for user data)
Display (viewable area): 10.5-inch diagonal, 944 x 1264 pixels at 150ppi, 8 gray levels
User Interface: Full Touchscreen, Virtual Keyboard
Battery: Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery, charging via computer or wall charger
Dimensions: 8.5" x 11" x .3"
Weight: Approximately 17 ounces
Supported Formats
QUE has native on-device support for PDF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, ePub, and TXT
Using the QUE software on your computer, QUE supports printable formats such as Microsoft Office 2003/2007
The Que's touch-screen interface sets it apart from the Kindle and Nook, which rely on traditional physical input. I believe doing so eliminates a cumbersome layer between the user and the content, and the Que's ability to annotate and highlight text is an expected feature of print media, which e-readers are trying to improve upon. Given that touch screens are available on as affordable and versatile a device as the Nintendo DS, I see no reason not to apply this technology to more practical purposes.
However, the device's price tag definitely identifies it as for "business professionals": models are available at either $649 and $799. And beyond the hardware is the software — which, if previous demonstrations are any indication, still have a ways to go.
It takes a lot of clicks on Plastic Logic's various Web sites before you finally arrive at the page to pre-order the Que, which ships in April 2010. Oddly enough, the page's domain is http://buyque.barnesandnoble.com/ specifications/ — Barnes and Noble? What involvement does the publisher of the Nook have in this competing product?
The Barnes & Noble nook has recently drawn attention to the e-book market, but let's not forget the falling circulation of newspapers and magazines. They too are trying to adopt to this digital age, yet their attempts to persuade me of their savviness fall flat.
Does anyone else find this example unappealing? Maybe it's the use of a CGI hand instead of an actual, physical user demonstration, but the interface for these digital magazines strikes me as cumbersome and loaded more with bells and whistles than with practical features — as though the device were aimed at luring print luddites, not existing IT connoisseurs. Nothing at the homepage of the SI Tablet, as this particular model is apparently called, dissuades me from that opinion.
Some futurists predict that the last print newspaper will be circulated in 2050, after which all written communication will occur digitally. I hope the day is longer off than that, as a healthy democracy will long have room and need for print journalism.
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