Today's NY Times covers virtual book tours, the increasingly popular practice of book authors touring blogs instead of touring the non-virtual bookstores of the US and staying in non-virtual and expensive hotel rooms. From the article's midst:
[Booktour.com] was founded by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired and the author of "The Long Tail"; Adam Goldstein, a 19-year-old sophomore at M.I.T.; and Kevin Smokler, a publishing expert credited with creating the first blog book tour. That was for "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by the science writer Mary Roach, in 2003. Since then, Mr. Smokler said, "It's become de rigueur for public relations to include blogs and online media as part of regular touring."
kottke.org was one of the tour stops for the Stiff book tour (here's the entry) but I also participated in the first blog book tour more than a year earlier, for a book called Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard, written by Greg Knauss and published by So New Media, a small publishing concern lovingly run by Ben Brown and James Stegall and now, sadly, defunct. The Rainy Day Fun... tour was the inspiration for Kevin in putting together the later tour. Not sure why the Times indicated otherwise.
And if you want to go back before most people were aware of these blog thingies, author M.J. Rose recalls participating in a virtual tour circa 2000:
So the NYT finally did an article on Author blog tours, which if memory serves, some of us have been doing for a quite a long time... in 2000 I did one that included Salon and BookReporter.com and a few other places that updated regularly and operated the way blogs do even though then we didn't call them that.
Update: So New Media is still going strong...just their old domain is no longer working. (thx, greg) And hey, Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard is still available ($5!) and still funny. I'm planning a re-read now that I'm a total bastard and soon-to-be toddler wrangler.
A summary of one of the several Chinese knockoffs of Harry Potter, courtesy of the NY Times:
Snape breaks into Hogwarts and rescues Lucius Malfoy from Azkaban Prison. Harry believes that he can defeat Snape and Voldemort only by strenuously practicing charms. Professor Slughorn, inspired by a book from the East provided by Cho Chang called "Thirty-Six Strategies," devises a plan enabling Harry to seize Snape in the Ministry of Magic. But Gryffindor's sword, which hung in the headmaster's office, assassinates Professor McGonagall.
When Harry confronts Voldemort at Azkaban, the Dark Lord tries to win Harry over as a fellow descendant of Slytherin. Harry refuses, and together with Ron and Hermione, kills Voldemort instead. Now what will Harry do about his two girlfriends?
In another of the books, Harry is assisted by Gandalf. No appearances by Han and Chewy, AFAIK.
Back in April, I pre-ordered Harry Potter 7 from Amazon. They guaranteed delivery on its release date, Saturday July 21 before 7pm or they would refund the cost of the book...the details of that offer are here. All day Saturday until shortly after 7pm, the UPS tracking information indicated that the package containing my copy of the book was "IN TRANSIT TO FINAL DESTINATION", which is UPS-speak for "the UPS guy/gal who will deliver your book does not yet have it in his/her possession"...the magic phrase for that action is "OUT FOR DELIVERY".
At some point after 7pm, the UPS status page updated to say that a notice was left at 3:36 pm, implying that a delivery attempt was made and no one was home to receive it. (Amazon's tracking page says that UPS told them "Delivery attempted - recipient not home".) No such notice was left. My door buzzer did not ring at 3:36 pm (I was home all day on Saturday) and the doorman of the building next door who takes the deliveries for our building when people aren't home reported no notice or delivery attempt. Here's the complete tracking info from UPS:
Location // Date // Local Time // Description
NEW YORK, NY, US // 07/21/2007 // 3:36 P.M. // NOTICE LEFT
NEW YORK, NY, US // 07/20/2007 // 12:00 P.M. // IN TRANSIT TO FINAL DESTINATION
NEW YORK, NY, US // 07/19/2007 // 4:51 P.M. // DESTINATION SCAN
NEW YORK, NY, US // 07/19/2007 // 4:50 P.M. // ORIGIN SCAN
US // 07/19/2007 // 1:34 P.M. // BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED
Maybe I'm lying about being home or maybe the person trying to deliver the package made an honest mistake, but it's curious that a delivery attempt could have been made when the package was not even "OUT FOR DELIVERY". Here's what I think happened. I think UPS's network was overwhelmed by Amazon's Potter-volume in some parts of the country and they had no way to deliver all those packages. (The forums for the book at Amazon and Google Blog Search are full of similar complaints from others...warning, spoilers! UPS even offloaded some of the volume to the USPS for "last-mile" delivery.) So, UPS just marked all of those packages they had no intention of delivering as "oops, we missed you, you must have been out".
Let's go back to Amazon's guarantee, which states that the refund "does not apply if delivery is attempted, but no one is available to accept the package". Amazon would be pretty angry with UPS if they cost them a bunch of money due to refunds and, more importantly, the loss of a bunch of customer goodwill...maybe Amazon would switch a larger portion of their formidable package output to another carrier, for instance. So UPS intentionally misclassifying those deliveries covers their ass with Amazon and covers Amazon's ass with regard to the refund.
My copy of the book from Amazon will be here sometime today (UPS doesn't deliver on Sunday), by which time I'll already have mostly finished the copy I bought at Barnes & Noble about 7:30 pm Saturday evening. The extra $20 isn't a big deal to me and neither is having to wait all day to start in on the book. But this book was a *huge* deal for Amazon (2+ million pre-orders out of a first printing of 12 million) and for their customers who desired their instant Potter gratification. Amazon should be hopping mad at UPS over this; UPS shifted the blame from themselves to Amazon's customers...who are in turn going to blame Amazon, doubly so because Amazon probably won't might not issue refunds for those "missed" deliveries because they don't need to. A customer service-oriented company like Amazon shouldn't take this kind of crap from their shipping vendor...incidents like these will erode customer goodwill and eventually their customer base, the retention of which is one of Amazon's stated primary goals.
Update: I've asked Amazon for a refund and am waiting on their reply. From the emails I've gotten from readers so far, it sounds like Amazon is being liberal in the refund policy, as one would expect.
Update: No word from Amazon yet, but the USPS (not UPS) delivered my book Monday morning. It had a UPS sticker on it with instructions to the Post Office to deliver it to me. No update on the UPS tracking page that its been delivered. I'm tempted to leave it unopened in its custom Amazon box as a collector's item. Maybe I can get JK Rowling and Jeff Bezos to sign it.
Update: Amazon issued me a refund for the book.
Bad news from McSweeney's: their distributor filed for bankruptcy late last year and now they're out $130,000:
As you may know, it's been tough going for many independent publishers, McSweeney's included, since our distributor filed for bankruptcy last December 29. We lost about $130,000 -- actual earnings that were simply erased. Due to the intricacies of the settlement, the real hurt didn't hit right away, but it's hitting now. Like most small publishers, our business is basically a break-even proposition in the best of times, so there's really no way to absorb a loss that big.
To try and make up the gap, they're having a big sale and are also auctioning off some "rare items" like original art from Chris Ware, proofs from issues, signed copies of things, a painting by Dave Eggers of George W. Bush as a double amputee, and so on. In addition to Ware and Eggers, there's stuff from David Byrne, Nick Hornsby, and Spike Jonze. I've long admired McSweeney's for their editorial and business approach...it would be a shame to see them go out of business because of another company's financial difficulties. So give them a hand by purchasing something, if you'd like.
Let's say you're interested in movies and New York City. Then you could do worse than check out the Celluloid Skyline exhibit being displayed in Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central from May 25 through June 22. The exhibit is based on the book of the same name by James Sanders, an exploration of how New York is portrayed in film. The exhibit includes "scenic backing" paintings made for movie sets in the 40s & 50s, film footage of films set in NYC, production stills and location shots, and other artifacts of NYC's intersection with film. Sanders was kind enough to send me a photo of one of the scenic backing paintings:
I left the tool chest in the foreground for scale...the paintings are three stories tall! I'm always down for a trip up to Grand Central so I'll definitely be checking this out.
Miranda July, who you might remember from her film Me and You and Everyone We Know, has a book coming out in May, a collection of stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You. The book has a web site that's one of the most effective and creative I've seen in a long time. Here's a screenshot of one of my favorite pages, just to give you a taste:
The really intriguing thing about the site is that it breaks pretty much every rule that contemporary web designers have for effective site design. The site is a linear progression of images, essentially 30 splash pages one right after another. It doesn't have any navigation except for forward/back buttons; you can't just jump to whatever page you want. July barely mentions anything about the book and only then near the end of the 30 pages. There's no text...it's all images, which means that the site will be all but invisible to search engines. No web designer worth her salt would ever recommend building a site like this to a client.
Yet it works because the story pulls you along so well; July's using the site's narrative to sell a book that is, presumably, chock full of the same sort of narrative. If you think the site sucks and quickly click away, chances are you're not going to like the book either...it's the perfect self-selection mechanism. The No One Belongs Here More Than You site is a lesson for web designers: the point is not to make sites that follow all the rules but to make sites that will best accomplish the primary objectives of the site.
We're leaving tomorrow for a trip of the relaxing sort, so I went to the bookstore this morning to collect some reading material. I had decided not to read anything that felt too much like work or that I had to think about. What I needed was fiction like television: passive but engaging. Having procured a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code in the B section, I wandered over to the Rs. Robbins. Roth. Rowlandson. Salinger. Hmm. No luck in the Teen section either. Finally I hit paydirt in the Kids section: the 1085 pages of the first three years of Harry Potter's adventures at Hogwarts.
Perfect.
So, I'll see you in a week. Posting will be light until then, but feel free to enjoy some random posts from the last 9 years of kottke.org, peruse the Best Links of 2006 list again, look at some of my photos from Anguilla in 2004, dream of NYC in the snow (will it ever again?), imagine if Manhattan visited other US cities, or visit the many fine sites in the sidebar of the front page. I'll send you a postcard when I get back.
Took in The Art of the Book lecture at the 92nd Street Y last night. Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd ("a modern day Truman Capote" I heard him described as afterward), Dave Eggers, with Michael Beirut moderating. One of the most interesting comments came late in the proceedings from Dave Eggers, who described one of the main goals of the McSweeney's design staff as attempting to design the books as well and as beautifully as they could as objects so that people would be compelled to save them. That way, even if people didn't have time to read them soon after purchase, they couldn't bear to throw/give the book away and would instead put it on their shelf in the hopes -- McSweeney's hopes, that is -- that the buyer would at some point pull it down off the shelf and give it another try.
This design goal runs counter to the design process behind most contemporary book jackets, which are engineered almost entirely for the purpose of eliciting in the potential buyer a "buy me" reaction within two seconds of spotting them. McSweeney's, as a champion of authors, wants the writing to be read while most major publishing companies, as champions of their shareholders, want books to be purchased. People buying books is important to the goal of getting the writing within them read, but McSweeney's emphasis on designing books to last in people's homes is a clever way to pursue that goal after the sale.
The recent New Yorker piece on Will Wright is a thorough profile of the game designer, but also functions as a bibliography of sorts for the games he's created over the past 20 years. Bibliographies are something normally reserved for books, but Wright draws much of the inspiration for his games from articles, books, papers, and other games that a list of further reading/playing in the instruction booklet for SimCity wouldn't feel out of place. Because I like utilizing bibliographies -- they allow you to get into the head of an author and see how they sampled & remixed the original ideas to create something new -- I've created one for Will Wright. Sources are grouped by game; general influences are listed seperately.
SimCity
The Game of Life, John Conway.
Montessori school. "It's all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori -- if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design."
Urban Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester. "This study of urban dynamics was undertaken principally because of discoveries made in modeling the growth process of corporations. It has become clear that complex systems are counterintuitive. That is, they give indications that suggest corrective action which will often be ineffective or even adverse in its results. Very often one finds that the policies that have been adopted for correcting a difficulty are actually intensifying it rather than producing a solution."
World Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester.
The Sims
A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander. "By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design."
A Theory of Human Motivation - Abraham Maslow. Paper on human behavior and motivation.
Maps of the Mind - Charles Hampden-Turner.
Other Sim Games
Gaia hypothesis - James Lovelock. "The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological theory that proposes that the living matter of planet Earth functions like a single organism."
The Ants - E.O. Wilson. "This is the definitive scientific study of one of the most diverse animal groups on earth; pretty well everything that is known about ants is in this massive work."
Spore
Powers of Ten - Charles and Ray Eames. "The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic."
Drake Equation - Frank Drake. "Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space."
SETI. "The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe."
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick.
Panspermia - Freeman Dyson. "This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson's notion of Panspermia - the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic "spores" of life from other planets. (Dyson's concept is also the origin of the game's title.)"
The Life of the Cosmos - Lee Smolin. "[Smolin's] theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole."
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - John Barrow, Frank Tipler, and John Wheeler. "Is there any connection between the vastness of the universes of stars and galaxies and the existence of life on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way?"
The demoscene. "The demoscene was originally limited by the hardware and storage capabilities of their target machines (16/32 bit micros such as the Atari and the Amiga ran on floppy disks), they developed intricate algorithms to produce large amounts of content from very little initial data."
General influences
PanzerBlitz - Avalon Hill. "PanzerBlitz is a tactical-scale board wargame of tank, artillery, and infantry combat set in the Eastern Front of the Second World War."
Super Mario Bros. - Shigeru Miyamoto. "[SMB] encouraged exploration for its own sake; in this regard, it was less like a competitive game than a 'software toy' -- a concept that influenced Will Wright's notion of possibility space. 'The breadth and the scope of the game really blew me away,' Wright told me. 'It was made out of these simple elements, and it worked according to simple rules, but it added up to this very complex design."
Go. "[Go] is a strategic, zero-sum, deterministic board game of perfect information."
--
Sources: Game Master, The Long Zoom, Master of the Universe, Interview: Suzuki and Wright, Spore entry at Wikipedia, Will Wright entry at SporeWiki, Will Wright Interview.
Update: This interview with Wright at Game Studies contains a list of references from the conversation, many of which have influenced Wright's body of work. (thx, phil)
At the end of my Eyes on the Prize post from earlier this week, I asked people for their favorite books on the American civil rights movement. Here's what I got back:
Thanks to everyone for the recommendations; these all sound great.
From a Guardian review of Heat, Bill Buford's new book on, in part, celebrity chef Mario Batali:
Batali would play Bob Marley songs on the sound system, knowing the New York Times restaurant critic was a fan. He would berate staff who failed to recognise celebrities, who must be served first and given special treatment. To make a humble fish soup called cioppino, he would rummage through bins and chopping boards, collecting left overs (tomato pulp, carrot tops, onion skins), then price the dish at $29 and tell the waiters to sell the hell out of it or be fired. Short ribs prepared in advance, wrapped so tightly in plastic wrap and foil that they wouldn't spurt sauce if stepped on, would keep in the walk-in fridge for up to a week.
Maybe that's why a recent trip to Babbo was not the top-shelf experience we expected.
I know everyone's upset about her new book. I'm not going to use her name, but you know who I'm talking about; she's blonde, leggy, confident, radically conservative, radically full of shit, and you hate her with the fire of a million suns. But she's also a huge troll. Wikipedia defines a troll as:
...someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy and antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion.
And the best strategy against trolls? Ignore them. If I see one more blog post, newspaper column, or debate on TV attempting to refute this woman's claims, I'm going to scream. Claims? What claims? She wrote that book to piss you off and get you to respond, thereby legitimizing her ramblings. That smile of hers? That's her celebrating a victory that you handed her without any effort. YOU'RE SMARTER THAN THAT...KNOCK IT OFF!
This list of the 50 best book to film adaptions that I posted yesterday inspired Michael Hanscom to mark which of the movies he's seen and which of the books he's read. Here's my list:
1. [BM] 1984
2. [BM] Alice in Wonderland
3. [M] American Psycho
4. Breakfast at Tiffany's
5. Brighton Rock
6. Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
8. [M] A Clockwork Orange
9. [BM] Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. [M] Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [M] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. [M] Doctor Zhivago
15. [M] Empire of the Sun
16. [M] The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant's Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. [M] The Godfather
21. [M] Goldfinger
22. [M] Goodfellas
23. [M] Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. [B] The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. Jaws
26. The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. [M] LA Confidential
29. [M] Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. [BM] Lolita
31. [M] Lord of the Flies
32. The Maltese Falcon
33. Oliver Twist
34. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
35. Orlando
36. [BM] The Outsiders
37. [BM] Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. [M] The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List)
43. [M] Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. [M] The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly
48. To Kill a Mockingbird
49. [M] Trainspotting
50. The Vanishing
51. Watership Down
Note: In the cases of more than one movie adaptation (e.g. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), I marked it as viewed if I'd seen any version of the movie. Also, like Michael, I have no idea why the "top 50" list has 51 items.
The Smoking Gun just published a long article (via 3qd) alleging that James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is not as non-fictional as he's claimed on Oprah and in countless other interviews. From A Million Little Lies:
Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."
In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls. "I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true."
TSG became interested in Frey when they attempted to locate his mug shot after his Oprah appearance, had difficulty locating it, and started to dig a little deeper. Along the way, they uncovered several instances in Frey's book that appear fictionalized or significantly embellished. When contacted for the story by TSG, Frey hired a lawyer and published some of his confidential correspondance with TSG on his blog, at the same time commenting:
So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won�t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.
TSG alleges that he also admitted in those conversations that parts of his book were untrue.
The Smoking Gun has a pretty good reputation with these sorts of things, so I expect this to be taken pretty seriously by the media and probably Frey's publisher and fans. A James Frey message board is already buzzing about the piece. If it holds up, TSG should get some recognition for it...this piece is as good as any investigative piece I've seen in a newspaper or magazine. I haven't gotten around to reading either of Frey's books...has anyone out there read them? What's your impression of the books and TSG's allegations?
If you're like me, you're waiting patiently for that day in early January when you can go more than 10 minutes without seeing a reference to some best of 2005 list. If you're also like me, you love lists so much that you can't get enough of them. So, with apologies to that first part of me, here's a final 2005 lists from me: a few movies, weblogs, books, and musical selections that I enjoyed this past year (in no particular order).
Music (not necessarily released in 2005)
Ladytron, Witching Hour. This one grew on me a lot.
Kelly Clarkson, Since U Been Gone.
Fischerspooner, Odyssey.
Bloc Party, Silent Alarm.
Royksopp, The Understanding.
Diplo, Megatroid Mix. (download)
Boards of Canada, Campfire Headphase.
Mark Mothersbaugh (and others), The Life Aquatic soundtrack.
Stars, Set Yourself on Fire.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
Kanye West, Gold Digger.
Sigur Ros, Takk.
BBC Philharmonic, Beethoven's Symphonies.
Two disappointments: Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better and Broken Social Scene by the band of the same name. I enjoyed Franz's debut album and You Forgot It in People so much, but the follow-ups fell flat for me. Still trying though...
Movies (not necessarily released in 2005)
Primer.
Garden State.
Crash.
Revenge of the Sith.
Sideways.
Million Dollar Baby.
Deliverance.
Cinderella Man.
King Kong.
Didn't see a lot of movies this year, unfortunately.
Books
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami.
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen.
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson.
Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke.
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan.
Pieces for the Left Hand, J. Robert Lennon.
Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner.
I read a ton of non-fiction but always enjoy the small amount of fiction I do read more.
Favorite weblogs. Compare with last year's list.
Waxy. Despite a year-end Yahoo! slowdown/hangover, still one of the absolute best.
Collision Detection. Enthusiasm about technology without the irrational exuberance or Web 2.0ness of other tech/tech culture blogs.
del.icio.us inbox. Not technically a blog, but I love this ever-fresh flow of my friends' favorites.
Robotwisdom. The original weblog was back this year after a 1.5 year hiatus. Jorn still has it.
The Morning News. Also not technically a blog, but TMN has been delivering high quality content on a daily basis for a long time now.
Flickr friends. Still the most fun on the web.
Cynical-C. Can't remember where or when I found this one, but almost every single thing on there is something I'm interested in.
Scripting News. I skim most of his opinion stuff, disagree with 90% of the rest of what I do read, but Dave has his finger on the pulse of the part of the web I care most about. He gets links so quickly sometimes that I think he's actually part RSS aggregator. "He's more machine than man now." "No, there is still good in him..."
Boing Boing. There's stuff I don't care about here, but the best of BB is really good.
3 Quarks Daily. The most accessible smart weblog out there.
Marginal Revolution. Quirky economics. Interesting everyday.
Goldenfiddle. I dislike celebrity gossip, but gf makes it seem interesting somehow. Damn you!
Youngna. Rationally exuberant.
You may notice that there are few "pro" blogs on this list. The best stuff out there is still being generated by interested, enthusiastic amateurs. When you're producing media for a profit, there's a certain vitality that's lost, I think...a loss I've been struggling with on kottke.org for the past few months. kottke.org was on last year's list but doesn't appear this year...here's hoping for a better year for the site in 2006.
On the plane on the way back from Vietnam, I was reading this article about how bookstores are preferable to shopping for books online[1] when I ran across this quote from David Sedaris:
One thing about English-language bookstores in the age of Amazon is that it assumes that everybody has the Internet. I don't. I've never seen the Internet. I've never ordered a book on it, and I wouldn't really want to"
This seems almost impossible and might even be a joke, but it would go a long way in explaining how he gets so much work done. He's got continuous complete attention while the rest of us have only partial.
[1] Which article was not very convincing since it included this passage:
[Odile Hellier, owner of the Village Voice bookstore in Paris] said that she thinks the act of buying books in a store rather than online is essential to the health of our culture.
"My fear is that while the machine society that we live in is very functional, very practical, and allows for a certain communication, it is a linear communication that closes the mind," she said.
She said that although Internet sites perform many of the functions of a bookstore - recommending similar books or passing on personal impressions of a book - nothing equals the kind of discovery possible when visiting a store and scanning tables covered with a professional staff's latest hand-picked selection.
I always chuckle when someone (usually grinding an axe) describes the web as so flat and with little social aspect. I love bookstores, but in many ways, shopping for books online is superior.
I got an email this morning from a kottke.org reader, Meghann Marco. She's an author and struggling to get her book out into the hands of people who might be interested in reading it. To that end, she asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to put her book up on Google Print so it could be found, and they refused. Now they're suing Google over Google Print, claiming copyright infringement. Meghann is not too happy with this development:
Kinda sucks for me, because not that many people know about my book and this might help them find out about it. I fail to see what the harm is in Google indexing a book and helping people find it. Anyone can read my book for free by going to the library anyway.
In case you guys haven't noticed, books don't have marketing like TV and Movies do. There are no commercials for books, this website isn't produced by my publisher. Books are driven by word of mouth. A book that doesn't get good word of mouth will fail and go out of print.
Personally, I hope that won't happen to my book, but there is a chance that it will. I think the majority of authors would benefit from something like Google Print.
She has also sent a letter of support to Google which includes this great anecdote:
Someone asked me recently, "Meghann, how can you say you don't mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?"
I replied, "Well, it seems to be working for Jesus."
And here's an excerpt of the email that Meghann sent me (edited very slightly):
I'm a book author. My publisher is suing Google Print and that bothers me. I'd asked for my book to be included, because gosh it's so hard to get people to read a book.
Getting people to read a book is like putting a cat in a box. Especially for someone like me, who was an intern when she got her book deal. It's not like I have money for groceries, let alone a publicist.
I feel like I'm yelling and no one is listening. Being an author can really suck sometimes. For all I know speaking up is going to get me blacklisted and no one will ever want to publish another one of my books again. I hope not though.
[My book is] called 'Field Guide to the Apocalypse' It's very funny and doesn't suck. I worked really hard on it. It would be nice if people read it before it went out of print.
As Tim O'Reilly, Eric Schmidt, and Google have argued, I think these lawsuits against Google are a stupid (and legally untenable) move on the part of the publishing industry. I know a fair number of kottke.org readers have published books...what's your take on the situation? Does Google Print (as well as Amazon "Search Inside the Book" feature) hurt or help you as an author? Do you want your publishing company suing Google on your behalf?
When you're out to eat with friends and family, it can be challenging to decide what to order off the menu. There are often too many choices on the menu, everything sounds good, nothing sounds good, you're unfamiliar with a particular type of cuisine, you'd like have what that woman over there is having but you don't know what that is, etc. etc.
Luckily, a group of authors has recently released a series of pop science books focused on solving this particular problem. Here are some lessons on ordering food from those books:
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Glance quickly at the menu and order whatever catches your eye first. Spend no more than 2-3 seconds deciding or the quality of your choice (and your meal) will decline.
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The key to ordering a good meal in a restaurant is understanding the economic incentives involved. Ask the server what they recommend and order something else...they are probably trying to get you to order something with a high profit margin or a dish that the restaurant needs to get rid of before the chicken goes bad or something. Never order the second least expensive bottle of wine; it's typically the one with the highest mark-up on the list (i.e. the worst deal).
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
Take the menu and rip it into 4 or 5 pieces. Order from only one of the pieces, ignoring the choices on the rest of the menu. You will be happier with your meal.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Poll the other patrons at the restaurant about what they're having and order the most popular choices for yourself.
Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
Order anything made with lots of butter, sugar, etc. Avoid salad or anything organic. A meal of all desserts may be appropriate. Or see if you can get the chef to make you a special dish like foie gras and bacon covered with butterscotch and hot fudge. Ideally, you will have brought a Super Sized McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal into the restaurant with you. Smoke and drink liberally.
I spent the afternoon at the half-day session that GEL has added this year (it was formerly just a one-day conference). There were twelve different sessions described as "hands-on experiences" to choose from and I attended the gadgets session with Dan Dubno, who is a self-described lunatic when it comes to gadgets and technology products. I'm not much for gadgets, especially new ones...I'm a fairly late adopter among my tech-savvy friends. But some of the stuff I saw today...wow. Aside from the thinnest touch-screen tablet PC I've ever seen, the thing that blew me away was the Sony Librie, the first commerically available electronic ink e-book reader. Here's a photo I took:
What you can't see from the photo is how insanely crisp and clear the text on the "screen" is. It was book-text quality...it looked like a decal until you pushed the next button and the whole screen changed. It was *really* mind-boggling and you could instantly see how most books are going to be distributed in the very near future. Despite looking like a computer, when you were reading, it felt like a book because of the resolution (a very odd sensation). And it's not only for books...I was told that there's e-paper that's capable of full-color 24 fps video. Can't say enough about how blown away I was by the Librie. (Now for the bad: 10MB storage capacity, uses Sony's Memory Sticks for more storage, and the content self-destructs after 60 days. If Sony opened this up and used normal flash memory like everyone else, this thing would be huge. Enormous. It's a TV, video player, book, magazine, gaming platform, and hybrids of all of the above. Instead, they'll probably keep it closed and someone else will capitalize on it.)
Anyway, if you can handle navigating the Japanese menus, you can get one from Dynamism for $600 (which I would totally do if I still had my old job).
Mike Godwin recently interviewed The Baroque Cycle author Neal Stephenson for Reason magazine. Stephenson had this to say about the role of science and technology in the US:
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from [science and technology]. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
I've haven't read any of Stephenson's novels, but I've become a fan of his through reading interviews like this one. I can see why he's both beloved amongst geeks and starting to become more widely read. The Baroque Cycle trilogy sounds fascinating and right up my alley, but 2700 pages seems a little daunting, especially when I feel like I should read Cryptonomicon (928 pages) first. Then again, I was pondering reading Infinite Jest (1088 pages) again, so maybe I should just dive in.
In this interview on ESPN.com, Malcolm Gladwell offers his view on the upcoming Super Bowl and how the lessons of his most recent book, Blink, might apply. My favorite suggestion relates to training quarterbacks to deal with stressful situations:
I'd run them through a live-fire exercise at Quantico. I'd have them spend the offseason working with a trauma team in south-central L.A. It is only through repeated exposures to genuine stress that our body learns how to function effectively under that kind of pressure. I think its time we realized that a quarterback needs the same kind of exhaustive preparation for combat that we give bodyguards and soldiers.
Field goal kickers could benefit from this as well. And poor 4th quarter free throw shooters.
Earlier in the interview, Gladwell supposes that "Joe Montana's heart rate barely got above 100 in any of his fourth-quarter comebacks." I remember reading about a study where researchers hooked heart monitors up to various NASCAR drivers while they took practice laps around the track. The drivers' heart rates were slow and steady in the straightaways and increased markedly in the turns due to stress. All except for Jeff Gordon...his heart rate remained slow and steady all the way around the track.
Thanks to Jorge for the link.
Michael Hawley gave the Poptech audience a wonderful tour of Bhutan and the giant book that resulted from his journeys there. A couple of photos of the book at Poptech:
Turning the pages involved a short walk. If you'd like to own this baby, it's available for only $10,000 on Amazon.
In this thread from last week, I floated the idea of a kottke.org book club and there was a small positive response from you, the readership. Since I don't have the time to coordinate a proper book club, I'm going to do this in the easiest way possible. I just started reading McSweeney's 13, "a beautifully designed anthology of contemporary art comics" edited by Chris Ware. When I finish it, I will post about it on kottke.org and ask for comments. You're welcome to read along and join the discussion when it happens.
Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker staff writer and, along with Dave Eggers, the patron saint of a certain segment of the weblog community, has a new book coming out early next year called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking:
How do we make decisions -- good and bad -- and why are some people so much better at it than others? That's the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus. Leaping boldly from example to example, displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Gladwell reveals how we can become better decision makers--in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life. The result is a book that is surprising and transforming. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.
The book is based on his 2002 New Yorker article The Naked Face, which spawned a kottke.org thread in which Gladwell comments to defend his honor. No surprise that I'm really looking forward to Blink; I loved The Naked Face and enjoy pretty much anything Gladwell has written. If anyone from Little, Brown is reading...I'd be happy to receive a copy for review on this here site.
The Corporation, which just won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, is a film that explores the following question:
In law, the corporation is a "person". But what kind of person is it?
Unsurprisingly, a corporation doesn't make for a very well-adjusted individual (emphasis mine):
Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.
I don't think all companies are like this, but it certainly is an interesting idea to explore. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins asserts that the larger organism exists in order to propagate the genes and not the other way around as we, the organism, had always assumed. In the same way, corporations have traditionally thought of themselves as the most important entities in the economic ecosystem, but it might be more healthy for society in general to think of them as the organisms that ultimately benefit the humans that comprise them (humans = the genes in the corporation organism).
This thought fits in nicely with one of my favorite quotes on the subject of business from Ludicorp's about page quoting Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus in Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity:
A business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.
Thanks to Devin for the pointer towards The Corporation, which will also be out in book form as The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.
Listening to NPR this morning as I struggled to regain enough of my consciousness to stumble into the shower, I heard Colson Whitehead read a selection from his new book, The Colossus of New York. In it, he described weary evening commuters vying for seats on the subway like pigeons scrapping for seed. That characterization strikes me as inaccurate. Commuters dash down stairs to catch an arm in the door before it closes and pack into already crowded cars rather than be left on the platform, but even in the busiest stations at the peak of rush hour, people don't squabble for seats like pigeons for food.
If you want to see pigeon-like behavior, watch instead the tide of evening commuters racing to spin through the turnstiles at Times Square/42nd Street, swerving around confused tourists, colliding, dancing from turnstile to turnstile, searching for the fastest way past the fumbling metrotards and exiting passengers shooting out of the station into the chaos.
Looks like Google branching out into searching more than just web sites. The Google Print FAQ says they're experimenting with "publications" (books? magazines?):
Google's mission is to provide access to all the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.
Google Print isn't referenced anywhere else on their web site so it's unclear as to whether it's a planned beta, an ongoing effort, or already over, but it sounds like an effort to counter Amazon's full-text book search efforts.
Update: Reader Xavier writes that Google Print is still working. A search for "1,000 knock knock jokes for kids" (with the results restricted to the print.google.com domain) yields this page for the book. A search for a common word like "the" reveals that around 8000 books are available, including Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Crime and Punishment, and Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Customized Classics takes novels & stories that have passed into the public domain (A Christmas Carol, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Alice in Wonderland, among others) and prints personalized paperback versions of them on demand..."starring YOU!" Instead of "Call me Ishmael" or "Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?", you could get "Call me Jason" or even "Oh G. Gordon Liddy, G. Gordon Liddy! Wherefore art thou G. Gordon Liddy?" They've even modified Romeo and Juliet to make a "happy ending" version:
SCENE IV. IN THE SEPULCHRE.
[Romeo and Juliet awaken, rubbing their eyes]
Romeo: What uncommon commotion stirs these folk? Ah, blessed apothecary, whose potion miss'd its mark!
Juliet: And perhaps 'twas the keenness of mine love that hath dulled the dagger's blade.
Romeo: What sayest thou we hasten to Verona?
Juliet: Come, prince, love, husband, shining angel! Let's leave this cold sepulchre for Verona's warm embrace.
[Exeunt Romeo and Juliet hand in hand]
This is exactly the type of thing that gets Michael Eisner's panties in a wad w.r.t. Mickey Mouse, but I think it's fantastic. (thx Jenn)
I've been keen on book design lately, especially the covers. I love looking at all the new arrivals at the bookstore and have been following a few sites that talk about book design on a regular basis (Cheshire Dave's book cover reviews, Readerville's most coveted covers, Rebecky, etc.). When I IMed Lance about his book of stories from Glassdog (and other places) and related my book design preoccupation to him, he said, "well, why don't you design a cover for my book?" And I said, "holy crap, yes!" and here we are:
You probably can't tell from the smallish picture, but the cover is a cross stitch pattern (detail here). It doesn't look so nice thumbnailed on the web, but the design should be quite effective when observed on the real article held at arm's length. At least that's the hope since I haven't actually seen the book yet...Brown is on the case and it's being hurriedly UPSed to my present location.
You may order the book with the above cover or with your choice of three other covers (two by Lance and one by Heather Champ)...with more cover designs on the way.
I was just at the Barnes and Noble on 48th & 5th. Jimmy Fallon and his sister were there signing copies of their new book, I Hate This Place: The Pessimist's Guide to Life. As I browsed through a couple of magazines, I noticed three girls standing in the bargain books aisle. Well, everyone in the store noticed them standing there because one of them was crying and shrieking uncontrollably and her two friends were taking turns calming her down or revving her up.
"Oh my God! I can't believe Jimmy Fallon kissed me!!"
"I know!!!"
[They all scream.]
"I'm never going to wash this cheek again."
[Sobbing intensifies. The girl is alternating between trying to regain her composure and going completely bats with the crying. She's having a hard time standing.]
This goes on for a minute or two. Then a woman, dressed to the nines and obviously a lifelong New York resident, annoyed that these silly girls are between her and whatever purchases she wants to make, pushes by them while loudly announcing to the rest of the store, "my God, I don't understand what the big deal is, seeing some guy and then crying like a baby, yelling, and blocking the aisle. I hate this fucking store."
One of my favorite books, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, is being turned into a three part NOVA special to be aired on PBS in late October & early November. Here's what I wrote about the book back in April 2001:
The Elegant Universe (paperback version) is easily the most accessible book on modern (and postmodern?) physics I have ever encountered. The examples, metaphors, and analogies Brian Greene uses to explain the concepts of general relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which are extremely complicated and difficult to understand (even for physicists), can be understood by anyone with a bit of curiosity and determination. Even when he attempts to explain superstring theory, which combines and greatly magnifies the complexity of relativity and quantum mechanics, he lays everything out for the reader, explaining, restating, and then restating again in plain English the most difficult concepts in physics. Highly recommended.
I'm quite looking forward to the PBS series.
Salam Pax, our man in Baghdad, has written a book called Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi and it's available for preorder on Amazon. One unusual thing I noticed is if you look at the current list of related books on the Amazon page, four out of the five authors listed have weblogs: Neal Pollack, Virginia Postrel, Charles Stross, and Tom Tomorrow.
Physicist Edward Teller, who helped develop both the atomic & hydrogen bombs and alienated many of his friends in the process, died yesterday at 95:
Few, if any, physicists of this century have generated such heated debate as Edward Teller. Much of it centered on his decade-long effort to produce the hydrogen bomb, his ardent promotion of nuclear weapons in general, his deep suspicion of Soviet intentions and his opposition to curtailment of nuclear testing.
His frustrations in seeking to win support for development of the hydrogen bomb led to his testimony that helped deprive J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the development of the first atomic bomb, of his security clearance. The result in much of the scientific community was a backlash against Dr. Teller that clouded the rest of his life.
I just finished reading about Teller in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb; I had no idea he was still alive.
BTW, if you read to the end of the article, it says that Walter Sullivan, the author of the piece, who was "a science writer and editor for The New York Times, died in 1996." An obituary within an obituary.
Sweet howling fantods! It's a new book by David Foster Wallace called Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity:
One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math's most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity.
Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? The nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's answer to this question not only surprised him but also shook the very foundations upon which math had been built. Cantor's counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities created controversy in his time and may have hastened his mental breakdown, but it also helped lead to the development of set theory, analytic philosophy, and even computer technology.
Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.
It's from a new series of books called Great Discoveries that aims to "[bring] together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs". I'll take more of that, please.
Thanks to Mary for stopping by yesterday on her Virtual Book Tour for Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The Tour moves on to crabwalk.com today; Josh is running an interview with Mary:
I have a very utilitarian bent. I think the things that people have ended up doing after death, however grisly, are great. It's good to be helpful to others. So there is that message, that you can be useful after death. I've gotten letters from people who've said, "Now I'm going to donate my body to science."
Particularly in the beating-heart cadaver chapter, I really came down strong on the side of being in favor of donating organs. It would be such a waste for someone in that situation not to donate with 18,000 people waiting for organs. But for the most part, it's meant just as a fun and informative read.
(And I apologize to all the cycling fans who thought this post was about the Tour de France. Visit the Tour de France blog, the 2003 Tour de France page @ Wikipedia, or follow the action live at VeloNews if you're into that.)
[This is a guest post by Mary Roach as part of the Virtual Book Tour for Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.]
So I wrote this book (buy from Amazon) about the bizarre, amazing, heroic things dead people have managed to achieve in their careers as research cadavers. And I find it all quite impressive and inspiring. You would think, given how I feel and what I know, that by now I'd have contacted the local medical school to fill out a willed body donor form. I have not. I'm a cop-out. I tell people it's because my husband is squeamish and would reather not picture me on a slab, in pieces. This is true, but it's not the whole story. You know what it is? I'll tell you. This is pathetic. I'm having a hard time with the thought of being old, withered, revolting and naked -- did I mention naked? -- in front of strangers. I don't mind their taking out my spleen, cutting off a leg -- none of that bothers me. I simply don't like the idea of healthy young people looking at me and being quietly disgusted by my withered flesh and dilapidated hull. (I mean, I'm 44, and already it's happening!) It's embarrassing. Of course, you can't be embarrassed when you're dead. I'm presumptively embarrassed -- the way I am when I come back from an aggressively hip party and imagine all the things that were said behind my back. Though I'll never hear them, and quite possibly they were never said, they're unsettling nonetheless. How disappointing to realize that even death isn't free from neurotic insecurity!
Very few people donate their bodies to science. I'm curious as to the reasons. What keeps you from doing it? Surely most people have better reasons than mine!
The Virtual Book Tour is still chugging along and tomorrow (Wed.), author Mary Roach will be joining me as a guest editor here on kottke.org. She'll be talking about subjects related to her book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Welcome Mary.
I've been reading a lot over the past few months, both online and in book form. Not unusual, but I've noticed that I retain a lot more from my online reading than from the offline. My recall of names, facts, circumstances, themes, and lessons from articles I've read online is excellent, but not so good when it comes to books. Part of it is that I approach book reading as a leisure activity and not as work or study, although I'm not sure the opposite is necessarily true for Web reading (partially perhaps, because I do use the web to brush up on design and programming issues -- work stuff). But the bigger reason for the difference is probably due to the nature of what the task of reading entails in those two media.
Books are self-contained. There are 332 pages in my copy of The Selfish Gene (incl. endnotes). There might be a bibliography, but unless you're in the library, reading up on any of the 200 or so references contained therein would prove challenging. Everything you get with a book is in between its front and back covers.**
With the web, you're always in the library. It's not always a proper library (some of the "reference" materials can be a little sketchy), but it's better than nothing. And the materials you want are very often hyperlinked right in the material you're reading for instant research gratification. Web reading is a deeper and more active type of reading. I can completely research a particularly interesting topic, jumping from site to site to Google to site and back to Google, hunting down exactly what my brain is jonsing for, and skim over the stuff I'm not so keen on. I'm not dependent on the author of the book to give me exactly what I want; I can "write" my own book of sorts, editing the subject matter as I see fit. It's this active reading -- researching really -- that I think is responsible for the much higher rate of retention with online reading.
** "Ha ha, not quite!" you're rightly saying to yourself. You've got your whole lifetime of experience and a healthy imagination to draw upon. Two covers my ass, books are as full as you want to make them. That's one of the drawbacks of reading on the web for me. My recall is excellent, but I typically don't stop to ponder like I do with books. There's always that next thing to click on or research. I don't have to work out for myself on which points Dawkins disagrees with Stephen J. Gould...I can just go and read for myself. I might recall more from web reading, but I think I get more from books. (Although, online research while reading a book is a very potent combination...if you remember to ponder before scurrying off to the web for easy answers.)
See also:
The internet is shit (seemingly arguing for libraries instead of the internet...like we should have either one or the other, but not both or the universe will explode)
The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? (NY Times)
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (James Gleick)
Project Gutenberg (reading books on the web)
Report: Online Training 'Boring' (Wired News, "Studies have shown that onscreen reading retention is 30 percent lower than with printed material.")
Digital Divide (pbs.org)
As We May Think (Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly)
The Virtual Book Tour is off and running with author Mary Roach and her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The idea of the VBT is to have authors tour web sites much like they do bookstores. kottke.org is a stop on this tour (view the tour schedule)...Mary will be taking over the posting duties here next Wednesday, July 16.
kottke.org also participated in the first virtual book tour for Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard by Greg Knauss.
Update: Keep an eye on the Amazon Sales Rank for Stiff to see if this virtual tour business directly affects sales.
The word on the street is that this book by Veronique Vienne (published by Yale University Press) will be a retrospective of Chip Kidd's work as a book jacket designer and will include many full-color illustrations of his work. I have a thing about book cover design so I'm pretty jazzed about this.
Update: Ben writes in that there was a bit about Mr. Kidd in the first issue of Radar magazine...which I unfortunately missed and is not online.
Edward Tufte has a new 24-page pamphlet out called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint on how to improve your PowerPoint presentations:
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
I love the cover image.
I just had a horrible, horrible thought. What if books had advertising in them? Not product placement in the story like "quoth the raven, eat at Burger King", but real honest-to-goodness ads every three or four pages, just like in magazines. Publishers could print two versions of every title:
1. A normal version of the book at the current regular price; let's say $36 for a hardcover.
2. A version with advertising that costs, oh, 50-75% less than the normal version. That same hardcover would cost $9-18. The ad version of the same book in paperback might go for only $4.50.
Supported by advertising, publically available texts like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels could be free. Free books!
Financial issues aside, I believe the world is a better place without advertising absolutely everywhere. But if advertising makes books more affordable -- and in some cases absolutely free -- and therefore accessible to more people, it's hard to argue that it wouldn't be a good idea.
In trying to determine which MetroCard has the best value for its holder, Grant has done some great analysis of the various options (PDF) for the New York City subways and buses. After reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, this reason for people not buying the 30-day unlimited card for $63 even though it's the best value rings true:
For some folks, being in a position where they don't have the full price of a 30-Day Unlimited MetroCard on them, and won't until payday, is so common as to almost be a non-story, yet it is often rarely mentioned. Even when people know they should buy the unlimited card because the per-ride cost would be cheaper, they simply can't. They don't have the capital.
In the book, Ehrenreich observed many people who were living month-to-month in motels because they couldn't afford the lump sum payment (1st & last month's rent and security deposit) for an apartment even though it would have been much cheaper in the long run. Grant's MetroCard analyses and suggestion of establishing a MetroCard fund -- into which you put a couple of bucks a day for the purpose of purchasing a 30-day unlimted ride card each month -- are excellent. I wonder...what's the best way of getting this information into the hands of the people who need it most?
I didn't think much of this article (as it features some muddled analysis by Jakob Nielsen), but the title -- "How the web makes 'desk-chair generals' of us all" -- put me in mind of something I read in Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet about war and technology.
The Crimean War was the first conflict in which the telegraph was utilized, both by the armies in the field and by reporters sending news of the conflict back home. Instead of taking weeks for news from the front to reach home, it happened in a matter of hours. Two things happened (stop me if this sounds familiar):
For the first time, French and British governments could communicate directly with commanders on a distant battlefield. This was further bad news for [British commander in chief] General Simpson, who was so exasperated by trivial inquiries from his incompetent superiors in London that he is said to have complained that "the confounded telegraph has ruined everything."
-and-
The telegraph was to cause further complications when it was used to send reports to London from the front revealing the chaotic nature of the campaign. The war was very badly organized, and although public sentiment in Britain was in favor of military action, there was widespread exasperation at the government's mismanagement, spelled out in dispatches from the front line by the Times's reporter William Howard Russell.
With today's technology (Internet, sat phones, etc.), the intertwingled feedback loop between the front and the public and the government is so short and tightly coupled that the loop has almost vanished entirely. I don't think that makes us all desk-chair generals, but it sure feels like it sometimes.
Readerville has a great thread in their forums called Most Coveted Covers, a frequently updated list of well-designed book covers. Related are Edward Tufte's book reviews, Book Design in Canada from Cardigan Industries, and an interview with Chip Kidd on Identity Theory.
Some talented authors have been turning their attention lately to writing books for the younger set. Michael Chabon, recent Pulitzer recipient for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, penned Summerland, Neil Gaiman (American Gods) wrote Coraline, and Dave Eggers helped compile The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002, a book aimed at the high school & college aged. Add the Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books to the mix, and there's a lot of good reading out there for young folks.
Contrast that with movies. Movies for kids are about one thing: marketing. Disney and Nickelodeon movies are vehicles for CD, DVD, toy, and clothing sales. Independent films are little help; most of them are aimed toward adults. I'd love to see some talented directors like P.T. Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, or Spike Jonze do some high-calibre films for young people. Unfortunately, anyone who tried would face problems finding distribution and studio support (Brad Bird's Iron Giant had some difficulty with that).
I went to a Dave Eggers reading/signing a few weeks back and he told us about a forthcoming book from McSweeney's by William T. Vollmann called Rising Up and Rising Down. The book clocks in at a daunting 3,500 pages spread out over 6 volumes and chronicles the history of human violence. The length of the book guarantees I'll never read it, but I love that meticulous labors of love like this are able to get published. The completeness offered (I would assume) by a book like Rising Up and Rising Down is rarely seen these days.
I ran across a great book in Paris called Starstruck (buy @ Amazon):
"In 1999, on a visit to Boas's home in Lancaster, the editors of Dilettante Press discovered rows of meticulously assembled scrapbooks lining the sagging bookshelves of Boas's bedroom. The albums revealed a vast personal archive of over 50,000 images of famous people. This discovery resulted in an internationally acclaimed photo exhibition and the book, Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan."
The photos in the book are mesmerizing, especially the older ones that offer a look at celebrity that you just don't see much of anymore. I literally could not put it down.
Stumbled upon a great design bookstore today: Librairie Leks on Rue Pierre Lescot near Les Halles. Excellent selection of contemporary books on graphic design, typography, photography, and fashion.
I'm reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States while I'm here in Paris. I'm reading it more critically than I did a few years ago, but there's still some great stuff in there that pushes my buttons pretty hard. Here's a bit talking about Jacksonian politics in the 1830s:
"The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Like so much in the American system, it was not devilishly contrived by some master plotters; it developed naturally out of the needs of the system."
Update: I fixed a typo in Zinn's quotation that changed the entire meaning of it (I had previously omitted the "not" in the last sentence). Thx to Nathaniel for catching the mistake. The people responsible for the error have been sacked.
It seems that David Sedaris really isn't a big fan of Dave Eggers:
"In conversation, Sedaris is rather like his writing: funny, sharp-witted, but seldom really mean. Except when the subject moves to a certain young writer whose first book's back cover featured an admiring blurb from Sedaris himself. An act for which he received little thanks. 'Dave Eggers is a huge pain in the ass. A huge pain in the ass,' says Sedaris. 'I went on a tour last year and he had just been on one before me, so I was visiting a lot of the same bookstores he'd been to. And I would go to stores that were actively unselling his book. Like, someone would go to the counter with the book [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] and the staff would say, "Actually, that book's not very good. No one likes that book. You should read this instead." Because Dave Eggers would have been in that book store the week before and yelled at the people who worked there and treated them horribly. He's a horrible person...but he's a really good writer.'"
(Thx Nichol.)
My mom and her friend Cindy have arrived safely in Paris. I'm so excited for them to be here, even moreso than I am for myself being here. Neither one of them has ever been to Europe before or even to any big cities like Paris (with a subway, &c.). Last night we had dinner at the Brasserie Balzar down the the street from their hotel. Best onion soup I've had here yet. The Balzar was a favorite of ex-pat Adam Gopnik while he was living here and is featured in his Paris to the Moon.
While I was out this afternoon, I picked up a copy of The Best American Science Writing 2002. I enjoyed the hell out of the last two editions, so I figured this one can't miss. They had a whole load of similar books at the bookstore, so I whipped up a Listmania! list of them all: Best American Writing 2002.
A site I've been working on for the past few months (on and off) has finally gone live. susanorlean.com is the online home of Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker, author, and Meryl Streep impersonator (or is that the other way round?). In addition to the design, I also exercised my Perl muscles in building a little widget to let Susan upload her articles without going through me all the time.
This was a great site to work on because it was fun to do, the client was really enthusiastic about it, and it introduced me to Susan's writing (The Orchid Thief is recommended). After working on dozens of corporate Web sites with buzzword-compliant copy, it was a delight to read through <
