The new Amazon Kindle, next to a pencil, which isn’t included. Or useful.

Pundits have been predicting for years that ebooks and ebook devices will eventually, finally, once and for all free us from the tyranny of having to carry around more than one book when we travel. This neotopian vision of a paperless, rights-managed future took one giant stumble forward last week with the launch of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader.

For those of you who think that books made of wood just aren’t portable enough, and want a book that you can’t loan to a friend, will be utterly ruined if you drop it in the bath, and looks like it was made by the props department from Space: 1999, then perhaps the Kindle is for you.
Whither the name ‘Kindle’, I’m not sure, but I think any word that connotes ‘burning’ probably shouldn’t be part of a book product promotion (unless you’re promoting International Slushpile Bonfire Day).

The Kindle looks small and convenient when placed on a volume of Encyclopedia Brittanica

GalleyCat has a nice roundup of the early coverage. Much of the press has focused on the (oogly) design, the not-so-great price point for downloadable books (compared to library books you don’t keep either, or to paperbacks you can keep), the lack of support for the .epub format the publishing industry is getting behind, the fee for converting your own documents into the Kindle’s proprietary format, and the fee for reading newspapers and blogs that are free on the Internet.

What’s not being discussed much is that, gadget-lust aside, you’re paying US$400 to be locked into a book club.

The ideal Kindle buyer, and really the only person who could squeeze value for money out of the deal, is the frequent traveller who regularly buys hardcover books but doesn’t want to keep them, likes to read newspapers but could do without the paper bit, can’t be bothered walking over to the airport newsstand or bookstore, and is completely disinterested in participating in the ‘pass it on’ economy.

If you do regularly buy hardcovers, the ‘Kindle Editions’ are around $15-18 cheaper than the list price, but Amazon often sells those hardcovers at a discount already, so you’re only saving $5-10 — which means you’ll need to buy at least 40 books to ‘break even’. If you’re a regular paperback reader, you’re only going to save a couple of dollars off each book, so unless you expect to buy well over 200 books in the next few years, you’re paying a premium for the convenience. If you regularly buy secondhand, you’re too much of a cheapskate to even consider a Kindle.

One of the big selling points of the Kindle is its wireless connection to the Amazon store, allowing you to buy and download books in less than a minute. It uses an existing radio-based broadband service instead of WiFi so it can connect virtually wherever you can get a cellphone signal (in the US) — indeed, almost anywhere you could take a book. Amazon is eating the cost of this service, which is why they’re charging you to read blogs. As author Seth Godin discovered, they don’t want to include any free content, even (in Godin’s case) at the author’s insistence. They’re probably only breaking even on the hardware, so they need to turn a profit on every transaction.

Since you asked, my cash is staying in my pocket (ok, technically in my overdraft) until an ebook reader meets at least a few of these criteria:

• A clamshell design with two display screens (you know, like a book)
• Purchase and download books at bricks-and-mortar stores
• Freely download the text of books I already own
• Option to ‘return’ (delete) a finished book for credit, or ‘give’ the book to a charity
• Recommend books to friends with similar device, with free sample chapters
• ‘Trade’ books among friends at discounted rate
• Something that doesn’t look like a broken control panel from an air conditioning unit

Ebooks are not going to ‘replace’ paper until they fundamentally improve on the experience of reading. That has to include improving the experience after you finish reading the book.

Ebooks potentially offer publishers (and authors) the opportunity to make money on the secondhand book market, and this isn’t being exploited. Instead, they’re trying to force customers to change the way they think of books, which is only going to result in making reading an even less attractive pastime than it is now.

Postscript: The photo at right, featuring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, ran in NewsWeek’s evenhanded and objectively critical article on the Kindle launch, “The Future of Reading“. The photo was taken by Nigel Parry / CPI for Newsweek.

I include it here as an example of what can happen when your PR people don’t read the excerpted text closely. Roll your mouse over the image and you’ll see what I mean.

It doesn’t matter about the subject, the author’s place in the political spectrum, or even the book’s readability: used bookstores literally can’t give [it] away.

Reactionary or radical, we’re still talking about books with an incredibly short shelf life, most of which are already completely obsolete by the time they see print, written and published because of petty grudges and assumptions that “the public needs to know”, and generally about as relevant as a copy of TV Guide from 1980 by the next election cycle.

Last night, I walked in on a reading at my local Barnes & Noble by Carl Bernstein, the other half of the Washington Post Watergate investigation team, literally begging his audience to buy copies of his latest book on Hillary Clinton, and offering refunds to anyone who didn’t like it. This is a man who understands that the volume for which he slaved for the last year is going to be worth all its weight in used Kleenex by next Christmas, much less by next November 4.

It doesn’t matter about the subject, the author’s place in the political spectrum, or even the book’s readability: used bookstores literally can’t give away the flotsam from the last six years of books in support of or in opposition to the Bush Administration, and Elvis help anyone writing a book about any other aspect of politics less than fifty years old.

Another important aspect of publishing in general was illuminated by a comment from a lawyer representing Eagle and Regnery:

No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers.

Just consider that the next time you’re certain that you’ll be able to quit working and write full-time based on the royalties from your first novel.

Even so, I look forward to the results of this lawsuit, if only for the entertainment value. In fact, were I to find someone dumb enough to take the bet, I’d put down $10 on one self-evident fact: the authors discover that the number of copies given away or seriously discounted through various Eagle-owned book clubs and newsletters matches exactly the number of copies that would have had to be remaindered and chopped back into toilet paper due to a lack of interest. At that point, I wonder how well they’d take to comments referring to “half a loaf”, or if former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich plans to play the world’s smallest violin for them while regaling them about the success of his books 1945 and To Renew America.

– Paul Riddell buys all his books remaindered, while the smell of despair is still fresh.

Today, October 15, is Blog Action Day, when thousands of bloggers will burn thousands of tons of coal to blog about the environment. Apparently it doesn’t matter whether you’re for or against it.

Personally, I’m for the environment. From my loungeroom window I can see a huge pile of it. I really feel for the plight of New York publishing professionals, who on a clear day can see New Jersey, and have to take a cab twenty-four blocks just to buy a picture of the environment.

Writers are a scourge on the environment, consuming incalculable resources that could be better used building a monorail around the Tropic of Cancer. But maybe I can convince you to make a difference, just for one day. How?

• Don’t print anything. Do you really need to print out an entire draft, just to jot down notes to yourself like “great scene!”, “love that transition”, “what a powerful theme” and “I could fall in love with this character” in your beta reader’s handwriting?
• Don’t mail anything. Save paper, save postage, reduce the postal system’s transport costs, and spare the slush reader at the other end the matches and lighter fluid.
• Don’t go to your critique group. All that smoke you’re blowing up each other’s asses is sucking the oxygen out of the Amazon, not to mention giving you ass cancer.
• Don’t blog anything. All those packets of data whizzing back and forth around the world, just so you can share your me-too’s on the latest pointless “this calls for immediate discussion” meme (it’s a unit of information, a wave and a particle, a floor wax and a dessert topping). It’s all liberals back-slapping other liberals on how enviro-literate they are — because conservatives would rather lock puppies in a garage with a running Hummer than read your opinions on recycling toner cartridges.
• Just switch off your computer. Go outside and read a book. You can blog about it tomorrow.

It’s fitting that this year’s visual theme is piracy, as libraries themselves are veritable Aladdin’s Caves of copyright abuse, blatantly encouraging their customers to read the books cover to cover, even take them home, without paying a cent up front — all the while generating fat profits from “late fees”, which can run to several dollars, depending on how many months pass before you find the book again under the couch and guilt yourself into returning it.

Readers outside the US may be surprised to know that America’s little flirtation with democracy back in the 1770’s spawned a subculture of special interest groups, full of fundamentalist nutbags and politically correct DoubleThinkers who believe it is their obligation to get elected to their local school boards so they can tell librarians that salacious word-porn like Catcher in the Rye shouldn’t be available to children who haven’t been fully indoctrinated into their parents’ worldview yet. In the more enlightened European nations, like Australia, we have virtually done away with such interest groups, trusting in the entropic force of government bureaucracy to make the process of objecting to library books so onerous (and devoid of public soapboxing) that only the most media-friendly soundbite protest has any chance of success.

The Banned Books campaign’s public message is opposition to censorship — their tagline is “Free People Read Freely”, which they’ve registered as a trademark so you can’t use it freely — but the real message is Trust Your Librarian. Apparently, letting the government or special interest groups dictate what books are or aren’t available in your local library is “censorship”, but letting the librarian decide is called “selection”.

It’s an important distinction, because while people may organise local opposition to local pressure to ban a certain book from a local library, there is no national campaign to throw open the floodgates and ensure that every book is available at every library. With limited buying budgets, and the constant pressure to justify the library’s existence by stocking the kind of populist nonsense that people actually want to read, librarians must balance their desire to build the New Library of Alexandria in Cowpoke, Iowa, with the very real problem that they don’t have time to read, let alone consult the public over most of the new titles they order.

Librarians want the selection process to be completely opaque, not because they relish the unchecked power to shape the reading habits of the tiny percentage of the population who use the local library, but because attending local council meetings to debate the literary merits versus subtle homosexual agenda of a 24-page children’s book is a fsckin’ waste of time.

The proponents of Banned Books Week would like to encourage you to mark the occasion by (re)reading a book that was banned at some point but is now freely available, ostensibly to celebrate the moral victory of elegantly written smut over mindless prudishness. If you’re going to do this, though, do it in style — skip Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses, and go straight for Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. This will serve several purposes:

• You’ll challenge yourself to decide where exactly you draw the line on freedom of speech
• The availability (or lack) of these books will demonstrate how anti-censorship your local library or bookstore really is
• You’ll find out for yourself just how bad these books are

I would advise against borrowing any Sade from a local library, if indeed you can find one, because the pages are likely to be so encrusted with stains of a dubious nature that the FBI could use it as a DNA database.

If you support Banned Books Week, there are several web badges on their website that you can display on your blog. Here’s another one you can use, courtesy of me:

If, however, you believe that books aren’t banned often enough, here’s an image you can use:

I think you know which one I’m using.