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To e-read or not to e-read, that is the question!

You could choose to buy no e-reader at all…  both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are rolling out applications that bring their e-book stores to phones and other gadgets… Amazon.com’s app selection is particularly bountiful: It has ones for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, Windows, and OS X. Barnes & Noble has ones for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows. They’re not comprehensive recreations… But all the apps are free, and they all work on one or more devices you already own… I do most of my e-reading on other devices. And my single most-used e-reading device is my iPhone, simply because I take it with me nearly everywhere and can dip into any e-book I own in seconds, often while I’m doing something else at the same time… Both companies also have synching technologies that keep track of where you are in a particular tome: I can read a few pages on an iPhone, pick up on my Mac, and then finish a book on an actual Kindle. And I do, frequently.(techland.com)

Sorry, economy, but Harry’s on to something. Something good. Something smart. Especially for newbies to the digital reading experience. Try it out on hardware you already own. Figure out if you like it. Or still miss books printed on trees. Get your feet wet. Buy nothing. Save your money for nachos. And an airplane ticket to lands exotic. Happy reading…

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are to be published in ebook form for the first time this week – but not by Penguin, Fleming’s print publisher. The 14 books, including Casino Royale, Live and Let Die and From Russia With Love, are being published independently by Ian Fleming Publications, the family company that owns and administers the author’s literary copyright. The Fleming ebooks would be priced “in line with the lowest-priced Bond paperback editions available on the market”, the company said. (via guardian.co.uk)

Corinne Turner, Managing Director, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, comments: “Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond novels to be read and enjoyed by everyone, and we are always looking for opportunities to introduce new audiences to Bond’s adventures. Fleming loved good, new technology, and I am sure he would have been thrilled by the idea of his books being available electronically.(via bookshed.eu)

The universally successful 007 brand has made the transition from print to digital. Feel a trend here?

Update:

What started with a couple of takes spawned a longer, broader curated artifact mashup on the same topic: Bond dumps Penguin, goes digital

Have you been debating the best e-reader to buy? Wondering if this is just a bizarre fad or the future or reading? iPad, Nook, Kindle? Here are a few choice samplings from Ars Technica’s review of the Amazon Kindle 3.

During a stint in California, I once wandered into a ramshackle San Diego bookstore and began browsing the back shelves in search of dusty treasures. After some time, the owner—who appeared to be an aging hippie—popped up at my side like an apparition, giving me a terrific start. He talked at me about his store. “I don’t sell books,” he said, leaning uncomfortably close. “I smell books.” To prove his point, he took a volume off the shelf, pulled it to his nostrils, and inhaled deeply, lovingly, bibliophilically—the book as bong hit.

It’s not all good news. The Kindle interface still feels like something that escaped from 1985 and time-traveled into the future. Text-based interface with no mouse or touchscreen? Black-and-white screen? Small delays between issuing commands and seeing their results? Check, check, and check—and if you try to do much with the Kindle beyond straight, front-to-back reading, these limitations will feel… limiting.

All the same words were there, but the experience was strangely sterile. My California booksmeller would have understood. Whatever e-books are and however useful they may be, they aren’t “books.” Instead, we get the content with little to no attention to form and to design. Everything about a book is distilled into odorless words; all else is waste to be thrown away.

Perhaps the reader of the future won’t look like a Kindle, but more like a multifunction tablet (think iPad or even the new Barnes & Noble Nook). In either case, both classes of devices are now good enough, and the content is finally varied enough, that it’s possible to envision the wholesale shift to digital texts. Plenty will be lost—including the smell—but so much will be gained… Book lovers will mourn the change and carp endlessly about typography, design, cover art, and the facing page format, but music and movies have already showed us that people will make the switch to digital convenience even at the expense of quality.

via Ars Technica

The Word Made Flesh – book trailer from Tattoolit on Vimeo.

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is a full-color photo-and-text anthology edited by Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor, forthcoming October 12, 2010 from Harper Perennial.

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is a guide to the emerging subculture of literary tattoos — a collection of 100 full-color photographs of human skin indelibly adorned with quotations and images from Pynchon to Dickinson to Shakespeare to Plath. Packed with beloved lines of verse, literary portraits, and illustrations — and statements from the bearers on their tattoos’ history and the personal significance of the chosen literary work — The Word Made Flesh is part photo collection, part literary anthology written on skin.

Special features include a reprint of a short story by Donald Barthelme (along with the tattoo it inspired on the author’s daughter), an interview with Brian Evenson about seeing his own work tattooed on someone else, Shelley Jackson’s SKIN Project and Rick Moody’s Shelley Jackson tattoo, Jonathan Lethem’s homage to Philip K. Dick, Tao Lin’s Tao Lin tattoo, and much much more.

I’m not much of a tattoo fan, but this trailer (and the concept for the book) is totally intriguing. If it’s piqued your interest too, stop by tattoolit.comto see more tattoo photos, read about the book, and find out how to attend the launch party at the powerHouse Arena in New York on October 20th. You can also follow this dynamic duo on twitter (@TattooLit) and Facebook. What are you waiting for, a message from God?!?!

Update: Feeling curious-er and curious-er? Check out these additional The Word Made Flesh sightings:

Each photograph appears with a statement from its owner, describing the tattoo’s history and significance. Commonalities emerge: inspiration, whimsy, a certain gloom… The literary tattoo… still bears some connotation of punishment. But… it is also a way of using literature as a public symbol of character. (New Yorker)

Jenny Hendrix reviews The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide, edited by Justin Taylor and Eva Talmadge:

The literary tattoo is at least as old as Hester Prynne’s scarlet “A,” and like any tattoo still bears some connotation of punishment. But as with Hester’s, it is also a way of using literature as a public symbol of character. It also invites serious considerations of font and typesetting, even to the point of recreating a specific edition of a book. …

As with any form of self-publishing, the literary tattoo takes pluck. [Bold mine!] Montaigne wrote, in a phrase I imagine no one has tattooed themselves with, “Only fools have made up their minds and are certain.” But it seems to me to be a wonderful group of fools that, like the memorizers in “Fahrenheit 451,” carry the written word with them everywhere.

via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

The publishing industry’s changing landscape (engadget.com)

Not to be outdone by Amazon, Borders and Barnes & Noble have entered the publishing racket.

Earlier this month Barnes & Noble launched a self-publishing platform called PubIt! that will compete directly with Amazon CreateSpace and indirectly with Apple’s iBookstore.

In an attempt to do for indie writers what InstantAction has done for indie game developers,… the world’s largest bookseller is hoping to expand its importance in the digital realm by giving wannabe authors the ability to upload and sell their material through B&N’s website and eBookstore… the real kicker here is this won’t be limited to the Nook; pretty much any e-reader, tablet or PC will be able to tap in and make purchases, so the potential audience is quite large. (engadget)

Of course, Kindle too ensured that their electronic books are universally accessible by developing apps that work across devices and platforms, but B&N’s open publishing model is smart. Sure, Nook has been a bit of a sleeper next to the Kindle, and B&N doesn’t want to limit the potential market (or perception) by being number two in the reader market. Or number three when the iPad is thrown into the mix? Whatever the logic guiding this policy, it’s welcome and overdue. Limiting media to Kindle or iPad, though lucrative in the short run, is a major turnoff for the consumer. It’s like saying, “Here, buy our glossy print book, but you can only read it at home. Not at work. Not on vacation. Not on the bus. At home!” Okay, so it’s not exactly like that, but it is perceived as unnecessarily restrictive. And if B&N can manage to open up the electronic publishing industry, I’m confident that consumers (and authors) will respond.

Okay, enough prattling and jab-jab-jabberwocky… What’s the bottom line?

[PubIt!] is essentially designed to give independent writers a venue for hawking their masterpieces, with PubIt! converting files to ePUB for use on a wide range of e-readers… Published titles will be available for sale within 24 to 72 hours after upload on the B&N eBookstore, and the company’s pretty proud of its “no hidden fees” policy… PubIt! ebooks will also be lendable for a fortnight… (engadget)

Using the service, authors can publish and sell eBooks through the Borders eBook store, as well as other partner eBook retailers… Authors can sell works of any length and chose [sic] the price within a price range set by the retailer. Authors can add content by typing in the platform, by copying and pasting it into an online form, or content can be fed from an existing website or blog. The content will be saved as an ePub file.

There are two tiers of pricing for those looking to get published –$89.99 and $199.99. Under the basic package, BookBrewer will assign the book an ISBN and make it available to major eBook stores at a price set by the writer. Royalties will be based on sales and will vary with each retailer. The higher priced package comes with a full version of the ePub file, that authors can share with friends, family and press and submit to other eBook stores. (mediabistro.com)

Trailer for The Double Life of Veronique (video via youtube.com)

This is an exceptionally poor trailer for a remarkably good film, Krzystof Kieślowski‘s The Double Life of Veronique (La double vie de Véronique). I watched it for the second time a few nights ago and was dazzled all over again. Irène Jacob, who also stars in Kieślowski’s Red (Three Colors Trilogy), plays both leads, Weronika, a spritual and somewhat mysterious Polish soprano, and her doppelgänger, Veronique, an often melancholic French music instructor. Both women are intuitive and inexorably fueled by conviction and curiosity. Despite intriguing bookends to the film in which Weronika and Veronique overlap obliquely for a few seconds, their lives echo — almost rhyme — without knowing one another. The audience is left to decipher the uncanny link between them.

Cover of The Double Life of Veronique

Despite Kieślowski’s death in 1996, his films continue to provide essential oases in the Hollywood-saturated film industry. He ignores dramatic cliches and conventions in favor of a more stripped-down, more honest storytelling. As drawn to character as to plot (if not more so) Kieślowski invites us to wonder and question and yearn. The Double Life of Veroniqueis filled with this yearning. What am I talking about? In Annette Insdorf’s film commentary packaged with the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, she describes “rich characters moving through landscapes and situations that force them to grapple with something beyond their immediate circumstances…” Insdorf, a professor in the Graduate Film Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and author of the Kieślowski biography Double Lives, Second Chances returns to this idea in an interview with the Columbia University Record:

“you’re made aware that there is something more at work than what the eye can see. At the risk of sounding fuzzy, I’ll suggest that there is a spiritual dimension embedded in his sensual textures… There’s a kind of yearning nostalgia for a world beyond the reach of the characters.”

Kieślowski’s unique screenwriting, directing and editing are complemented in The Double Life of Veronique by Zbigniew Preisner‘s mesmerizing operatic composition. This ethereal, haunting score weaves Weronika and Veronique’s parallel stories — as well as several layers of storytelling (puppeteering, children’s fiction, adult fiction, musical performance) — into a hypnotic and haunting tapestry. A tapestry that can be taken down from the wall when the film ends and taken to a chair by the hearth, wrapped around you while you ponder what you’ve just experienced, while you hum and question in the afterglow. Unless, of course, you can’t resist the temptation to leave the tapestry on the wall to watch all over again. I did!

Related articles

• doppelgängers in the double life of véronique (cmlt280.wordpress.com)
• Krzysztof Kieslowski – interview for Three Colours Blue (guardian.co.uk)
• the december project: the decalogue (saturdaynightscreening.wordpress.com)
• The White Stuff (slate.com)

“Technology has made virtually anything possible,” says Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the publishing industry magazine The Bookseller. “If you look at it conceptually – there’s a five-link chain between the person who writes and the person who reads. You’ve got Author-Agent- Publisher-Retailer-Reader. Theoretically, the three middle bits could all now vanish and the author could write online directly to the reader.”

However, he continues, “A more likely possibility is that just one of the three central links will vanish on-line. It could be that Amazon, the retailer, becomes the publisher. Or that the agent becomes the publisher, or the publisher becomes the retailer, and you go to a publisher’s site to buy the book. One of those links will certainly disappear on-line. We just don’t know which.” (The Independent)

John Walsh’s article “E-books: the end of the world as we know it” offers no new insights, but a handy summary. More intriguing though are the comments which are worth a wade through. A few flaring tempers, a few snarky jabs, and plenty of voiced growing pains as we tramp through the clumsy not-altogether-painless publishing revolution.

Related articles

• Demise of Borders highlights vanishing print infrastructure (teleread.com)

South Africa, Johannesburg: Fashion show (photo credit kool_skatkat)

Amazon predicts that it will sell more e-books than paperbacks by the end of next year, and that they will eclipse both paperback and hardcover sales combined shortly thereafter. “I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told USA Today… [So] paperbacks and hardcovers may soon become a minority in the world of books. (Mashable.com)

Is Bezos bluffing in order to help drive the market? Or is he spot on? One day soon we’ll know, and in the mean time we’ll keep worrying, celebrating, laughing, panicking, arguing…

Ever wish you could sit down with a couple of bestselling authors and ask them what they think about the whole digital/traditional publishing debate? Here’s your chance. Sort of…

Tim Ferriss (Image: Scott Beale)

Tim Ferriss (@TFERRISS) and Ramit Sethi (@ramit), both New York Time’s bestselling authors, dish up raw, unfiltered and honest impressions of today’s book publishing world. They discuss both the benefits and the drawbacks of traditional publishing and self-publishing, and — though this video only offers one-way info flow — you could always shoot them follow-up questions via Twitter.

Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweekclimbed to the coveted top slot on The New York Times, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, and Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich popularity continues to drive more than a quarter million readers to his blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com every month.

If you’re wading into this brave new world of digital publishing, it might make sense to listen to these guys!

Publishing Updates for Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss publishes The 4-Hour Body.

Tim Ferriss publishes The 4-Hour Chef.

Related articles

• The 4-Hour Chef’s Not So Simple Path to Buzz (virtualdavis.com)