I have been taking advantage of this development to read some interesting e-books from a variety of genres and authors.  And over the next few days I want to take a moment to offer my quick impressions of these shorter works.

First up is a e-book that was actually free: The Flinch by Julien Smith.

A book so important we refuse to charge for it.

Julien Smith has delivered a surprise, a confrontation, a book that will push you, scare you and possibly stick with you for years to come.

The idea is simple: your flinch mechanism can save your life. It short circuits the conscious mind and allows you to pull back and avoid danger faster than you can even imagine it’s there.

But what if danger is exactly what you need?

What if facing the flinch is the one best way to get what you want?

Here’s a chance to read the book everyone will be talking about, before they do.

What are you afraid of? Here’s how to find out.

I saw this on Twitter and decided to check it out. After all, it was free.  It turned out to be a sort of digital pep talk.  It has an interesting hook and some useful challenges even if it is somewhat repetitive.

I think your reaction depends on a lot on your worldview, perspective, place in life, etc. Reading the reviews you can see that some people thought it was BS while others found it very helpful. I think it is a bit of both. If you need a pep talk to get you out of your rut and start thinking about achieving the things you have always claimed you would, this can be a helpful book.

I think it can be a useful way to realize that success isn’t going to be easy for most people and if you are constantly hesitating and avoiding risk you are unlikely to achieve all that much.

On the other hand there is a lot of repetition and pop psychology that will turn a lot of folks off.

It is not the greatest thing I have ever read but I think it was a helpful wake up call of sorts for me heading into 2012.

But again, it doesn’t cost a thing so what it the risk?

Related articles

• Flinch Harder (chrisbrogan.com)
• The Flinch – A Dangerous Read (cc-chapman.com)

And it turned out to be a sweet, dream-like fairy tale; and at the same time an inspirational story about the power of dreams and the determination to follow them.

Here is the publisher’s teaser:

When a fortuneteller’s tent appears in the market square of the city of Baltese, orphan Peter Augustus Duchene knows the questions that he needs to ask: Does his sister still live? And if so, how can he find her?

The fortuneteller’s mysterious answer (An elephant! An elephant will lead him there!) sets off a chain of events so remarkable, so impossible, that Peter can hardly dare to believe it.

But it is-all of it-true.

It is worth noting that writing a fairy tale is harder than it might sound.  It is not easy to write short elegant, dream-like fairy tales that don’t come off too saccharine or derivative, etc. The best evidence that DiCamillo had succeeded was that I kept reading until I had finished the story without thinking about it; she drops you into this world and you are soon caught up in it and suspend your disbelief as the saying goes. The story feels like a real fairy tale if that makes sense.

DiCamillo’s simple yet poetic prose creates this atmosphere and fills the story with interesting characters who all play a role in the adventure.  And despite knowing from very early on that this story is likely to have a happy ending you want to keep reading to find out exactly how each characters story plays out. There is a rhythm and flow that draws you forward despite much suspense or sense of danger. You are drawn forward by the character’s personality, history and emotions.

Peter is an earnest young man on the edge of being too good or too sweet but who you find yourself rooting for nevertheless. DiCamillo manages to impart the poignancy of being an orphan with the possibility of a family member still out there; and Peter’s pain at having failed somehow to protect his sister.  This carries over to the policeman and his wife who also have dreams of family and a deep need to be made whole. And the magician, and the elephant, etc.

All of the characters have dreams and all are looking for a way to connect the seemingly cruel fate they have been dealt to something larger and more hopeful. And the appearance of the elephant miraculously, or should I say magically, offers the opportunity for these dreams to come true.

The Magician’s Elephant is a classic story and one that I plan on reading out loud to my children and encouraging them to read as they get older.

Cover via Amazon

Miljenko Williams ruminates on Kindle and being engrossed in a good read:

But what I most like about the whole Kindle experience is that in some intangible and inexplicable way it has managed to use digital technologies to turn me away from hypertextuality.

I love the Internet – always will do, of course.  But Amazon’s Kindle has reminded me of the simple pleasure of burying oneself in a text – a pleasure I had lost in an online maze of endless restless clicking.

A simple pleasure indeed.

That wondrous permission we readers sometimes choose to offer up to those deserving writers who with their wisdom regale us and reward us.

That beautiful moment when we choose to allow an author the time and space to lead us through their world.

That is why Amazon’s Kindle is worth so very much more than its technology.

All I can says is, yup. I offered my thoughts along similar lines a few days ago.

Here is the publisher’s description:

Billy Allman is a hillbilly genius. People in Dogwood, West Virginia, say he was born with a second helping of brains and a gift for playing the mandolin but was cut short on social skills. Though he’d gladly give you the shirt off his back, they were right. Billy longs to use his life as an ode to God, a lyrical, beautiful bluegrass song played with a finely tuned heart. So with spare parts from a lifetime of collecting, he builds a radio station in his own home. People in town laugh. But Billy carries a brutal secret that keeps him from significance and purpose. Things always seem to go wrong for him.

However small his life seems, from a different perspective Billy’s song reaches far beyond the hills and hollers he calls home. Malachi is an angel sent to observe Billy. Though it is not his dream assignment, Malachi follows the man and begins to see the bigger picture of how each painful step Billy takes is a note added to a beautiful symphony that will forever change the lives of those who hear it.

A great deal of the Christian fiction I come across is just plain bad (although to be fair maybe I haven’t sampled widely enough) and let’s be honest some of the books that are free on Amazon are free for a reason.  So the first thing to say here is that Almost Heaven is not one of those books that you simply don’t want to finish. In fact, I was so interested in the opening chapter that I just kept on reading it (something I rarely do when I download a free Kindle book).

There are parts, however, that drag and the plot just seems stuck at times. The opening sequence really drew me in, and the later part of the book has some exciting and well done action scenes, but the middle part struggles as Billy Allman wrestles with the tragedy in his life and the angel Malachi seeks to find answers.

In fact, I am not sure the plot device of Malachi really adds much to the story at all. Sure, it provides some spiritual and outside descriptive narrative but it mostly slows the plot down. And to be quite honest, I didn’t find the apologetics aspect of Malachi all that convincing.

But again, Fabry does a nice job of weaving in Christian ideas and characters into a novel in such a way that they seem natural and an integral part of the story rather than forced or awkward. This is to be applauded.

Overall Almost Heaven is a touching and well drawn portrait of faithfulness through suffering and the value of commitment despite the odds.

I have the book on my new Kindle and hope to review it here (hope springs eternal, right?) but I wanted to point out Ed’s interesting perspective on the Kindle:

After seven years of blogging, I had almost stopped book reading entirely.  Blogging is a process that takes up a considerable amount of attention, and I used to tell myself and others that I had no time left for book reading.  Three weeks ago, I bought a Kindle for the First Mate, mainly because the selection of audio books for her was small and the commercial titles rather expensive in CD or cassette format; even the Braille Library is limited in newer releases.  The Kindle has a text-to-speech function that works with most Kindle books, and since she’s already used to the computer-generated voice with her PC, she took to it enthusiastically.

After playing with it for a couple of days to get it set up for her use, I decided to buy one for myself — and I love it.  In the past couple of weeks, I have read The Road to Serfdom, City of Man, Peter Ferrara’s President Obama’s Tax Piracy, re-read The Three Musketeers, The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy, and bought the subscription to Reason.  (The classics can usually be found for free or for under a dollar.) It’s been a wonderful experience in diving back into what had once been my passion as a child and younger man, and I can’t recommend the experience more highly.  Right now, I’m in the middle of A Shattered Peace by David Andelman, a book about the Versailles Treaty and its repercussions all the way to today.

I chose the Kindle mainly because of the price and the text-to-speech feature, which the Sony and the Barnes & Noble devices didn’t have.  Occasionally I get asked about the iPad, which also serves well as an e-book reader, but the iPad is more costly (around $600 to the Kindle’s $139) and has the backlighting that tires out my eyes.  The 6″ Kindle is more portable and more convenient, at least for me.

And so it was with trepidation that I read last week that Amazon.com announced that for the first time, sales of titles for its Kindle e-readers outpaced those of hardcover books. Now, I’m no luddite when it comes to the advance of technology, but I hope I’m not wrong in predicting that the surge in the sale of e-books is merely a fad and not a trend As we grow more and more into a technologically based society, we are losing touch with the sensible world around us. This push-button lifestyle brings us further and further away from simple pleasures; those that may be enjoyed even without electricity.

…

As did my father when I was a little girl, I encourage children to read: read anything that catches their fancy and if Kindles are the only means to this end, then fine. But my suggestion to the young is to pick up a real book, love it, and reread it until its pages are yellow and dog-eared and then pass it on to someone else. Then none of you will have cause to pause when someone asks you that popular question: If you had three books to take with you should you ever be stranded on a deserted island, what would they be?

Mark Goldblatt, author of Sloth, responds from the perspective of a reader and an author. He concludes it is not an either or situation:

As unsettling as such innovations may seem, they needn’t encroach on the experience of traditional readers — not even those seduced by the siren song of a Nook, Kindle or iPad. The option of sight reading, of scanning down the page line by line, without using the cursor, will always remain. But the range of new possibilities is sure to impact how writers write; many will write with an e-book specifically in mind. They will become orchestrators as well as wordsmiths — deciding, in the case of Sloth, what to annotate, but, in the future, deciding what to score, what to illustrate and what to animate. The results will be hybrids… not unlike the way today’s graphic novels are hybrids of traditional novels and comic books.

Not surprisingly, I am in the both/and camp. I love my Kindle and its conveinence.  But I also love books qua books. Just one example, my wife and I love to buy classic children’s books at used book stores and library sales because of both the classic stories and their great illustrations.  And lest all the authors out there are worried, yes we enjoy brand new children’s books for similar reasons.  This is something that can’t be replicated on a Kindle – at least right now.

I don’t know how the various markets will work themselves out but I am not afraid that art and illustration and the joys of books as physical objects will disappear.

What does all this mean? It means by the ancient rights of the Internets I get to step up on my soapbox and unleash a diatribe of my choosing. [OK, I made that part up ... but it sounds good doesn't it?]

But I do, however, feel like I might have some perspective on the whole e-books pricing issue both as a consumer and as someone with philosophical opinions on the matter.

So let us use this handy-dandy notebook! New York Times article on the subject as a jumping off point shall we? If you are game, see below.

First off let me just say that I will try to avoid the grand moralizing that seems to invade a few too many opinions on this matter. For example, I don’t think the Amazon v. Macmillan clash is about morality or ethics or anti-trust law or jerkiness (sorry to get into the technical terms here) but rather is simply two very large companies trying to establish a foundation for future profit and market share.

Now I am a big fan of Amazon in general and both shop there and use their affiliate programs (to be fair I also shop at Barnes & Noble, Borders and any other book store I stumble upon).  But in this case I am largely in favor of the system that Macmillan outlined.

But first, let’s establish that both consumers and authors/publishers are not particularly familiar with how prices actually work. One of the biggest misunderstandings when it comes to economics and pricing is that pricing should be tied to cost (particularly marginal costs).  Far too many consumers insist that prices be tied to what it costs to produce something and frequently very poor ideas about that cost.

Example:

“I just don’t want to be extorted,” said Joshua Levitsky, a computer technician and Kindle owner in New York. “I want to pay what it’s worth. If it costs them nothing to print the paper book, which I can’t believe, then they should be the same price. But I just don’t see how it can be the same price.”

This short paragraph is filled with confusion. First, you aren’t being extorted you are being exposed to the book market. The place where one group of people decide what to charge and other people decide what to pay. Ring a bell?  Also note the complete lack of aknowledgement that a book might be more than the paper it is printed on – as if digital = free. Note to Josh and others: Kindle formatting costs money too as do a gazillion other things involved.

But wait, authors can be just as moralistic and ill informed:

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, it is the consumer who has the sense of entitlement! Yes, lord forbid publishers try the Wal-Mart mentality of making gobs of money by giving consumers what they want! Outrageous that consumers demand lower prices.

Um, Mr. Preston, there are no “real” prices there are is only what the market will bear or what someone wants to charge.  Now, you might want to use the cost and value of books to convince consumers to pay more than they otherwise might but there is no “real” price involved in this debate.

So let’s review:

• Everyone want to make more money; be charged less and keep more (either in the short or the long term).
• Prices ultimately are what the market will bear; they are how buyers and sellers decide what something is worth at a particular moment given a set of circumstances. Over a mind-boggling number of transactions eventually the market sets a price that reflects what people are willing to pay (all things being equal).
• Nothing says that prices have to be tied to marginal cost (the cost of the next widget) although that clearly plays a role in how prices are usually set.

Now that I have laid out my own snark filled condescension let me just say that I don’t know enough about Amazon or MacMillian to say what is best for either company in terms of pricing for a sustainable business model but I will assume they are both acting in what they see as their best interest.

Now back to the agency model that seems to have prevailed in this dispute – at least for now. The reason I support it is because it makes the most sense to me as to how pricing would work where consumers have useful price points to make decisions.

In this model books are most expensive when first released – and are assumed to have the most leverage – and get cheaper over time. A book by your favorite author – or on an important topic – comes out and you simply have to have it? Well, you will pay more for it.  The positive back end of this also applies. After a book goes into paperback and ultimately into the backlist then it should be cheaper - hopefully much cheaper.

The publisher will try to maximize profits when a book is hot but can also look to a long-tail effect where people are a still buying the backlist. In the long term I envision a world where books don’t go out of print.

To me this is about access to the most books possible. I don’t want the fear over the $9.99 price point to keep a publisher from offering an e-book version of a just released book. I want to the choice to pay more for it and I would like the choice later to pay a lot less. If we can start down a path where we experiment with these price points I think the system will work better.

This all takes place in a world where hardbacks and paperbacks are still the way the vast majority of people read books.  Now I understand that as time passes and things change this will not be the case. And I can see where there might be wisdom in moving to a high volume lower price type structure for ebooks. But for right now I just don’t see the industry set up that way and expecting it morph into that quickly is asking too much.

Let me reiterate: this is just the system that makes sense to me and makes things convenient for me as a consumer. I am not saying it is the moral way or the only way that makes sense economically or anything else. I just favor this system because it seems to allow consumers a variety of choices.

Now, if all the people ranting and complaining about books priced above $9.99 are the majority – or a powerful minority – then we are likely to see publishers react to that either by marketing, outreach and education or by lowering prices – most likely a combination of both. Again, that is how it works – buyers and sellers act in their interest and prices eventually reflect what people are willing to pay.

This endeth the rant.

What do you think?

Hearing that the Amazon Kindle had been compared to an eight-track player Alan Kaufman decided he needed a real attention grabber analogy if he was to gather the eyeballs necessary to get Huntington Post readers to click away from pictures of the latest porn actress claiming to be Tiger Wood’s mistress.

Not content for hyperbole he went straight for ridiculous and offensive. That’s right, Kaufman decided to use the Holocaust to make his point:

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

I believe my reaction is best expressed in the language of teenager texters everywhere: WTF?

Is Kaufman really insinuating that e-readers are akin to racial genocide? Even for the Huntington Post this is absurd (but its lack of logic is par for the course I am afraid).

Kaufman tendentiously connects Nazi policies with new technology and the process of putting books into digital form and decides that a literary holocaust is upon us.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.

But his argument is made up of nothing more than his own lack of shame in using the Holocaust to comment on the Kindle and some stream of consciousness paragraphs about the history of the Holocaust, Nazi attitudes about technology and books and a tacked on conclusion that links this all to the Kindle.

I hesitate to even try and counter this argument for fear of giving it more readers.  But allow me to point out a few things that should have been obvious:

1. Considering that no actual human lives are involved, the use of the Holocaust in this column is senseless and borderline offensive.
2. Given that e-readers are owned by a tiny fraction of the populace and the prevalence of physical books – not to mention the continued dominance of their sales as a part of the publishing industry business model – the argument is a stretch of epic proportions.  The mere possibility of digital libraries means authoritarian control and the destruction of literature at the flick of a switch? Huh?
3. And what exactly would happen to all of the physical books still around and being published in droves these days?  So in addition to a entity powerful enough to erase all copies of e-books we need to worry about a sudden urge on the part of the world to burn all existing physical books. Not real likely, no?
4. Finally, most of the post actually has nothing to do with Kindle or e-readers so the whole column is a giant non sequitur and therefor see #1.

Godwin’s Law has perhaps jumped the shark – to combine slang and cliches – but I think Kaufman would have so very much better off had he at least understood the spirit of this internet rule. If you feel you have to use the Holocaust to make your point, please stop a moment and question whether what you have to say has anything to do with the actual historical event or ideas directly connected to it.  And err on the side of not bringing it up.

Of course, it is hard to take anything seriously from a site that makes money by not paying writers, stealing content, and posting porn-like pictures …

But I found Nicholson Baker‘s New Yorker essay incredibly tiresome and rather disingenuous.  Baker spends 6,000 words saying what is rather obvious to anyone who has looked into the Kindle: if you read books for their typogrpahy, illustrations or other visual elements – books as physical objects with all that entails – then the Kindle (like most ebook readers) is not for you.  Oh, and lots of books are not available yet.

Clearly, for Baker reading is a very physical and visual activity.  He wants certain things from a book and the Kindle doesn’t give him what he wants.  Fair enough.  I still love a well designed book and certainly find Kindle’s handling of illustrations problematic.

But Baker completely ignores why the vast majority (at least I suspect) of Kindle owners enjoy using it.  Here are a couple of issue the Baker basically misses:

1. A library on the go.  If you frequently travel and love to read Kindle is a lifesaver.  You can have a library of books while only carrying something the size of a trade paperback.  So many critics seem to miss this very basic point.  Can they not see how handy it is to have a huge selection of books plus magazines and newspapers at your fingertips without lugging them all around with you?  This is not a question of art but one of practicality.
2. Instant gratification.  Baker mentions this in passing but doesn’t explore it.  It is incredibly convenient to decide you want to read a book and start doing so 60 seconds later.  Why is it so hard to see how awesome this is? Finish the first book in a series and want to start the next?  With Kindle you can do so without even getting up.  It was the Amazon store and the Whispernet that really gave the Kindle the buzz.  Again, not aesthetics but convenience.
3. Sometimes it is about the words.  The fundamental problem Baker has with the Kindle is that books are clearly more than mere words to him.  He derisively describes Kindle books as “a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon.”  Sure, but sometimes that is all I need.  In fiction all I often need is the story.  The way the author creates a world out of words.  I don’t need illustrations or a book cover or a certain typography, font, type of paper, etc.  I just want to read the story.  The same is true of non-fiction.  I just want the information – the argument, or the history, or the descriptions. I have found reading the Kindle a great way to get what I want from certain books without the need for a physical copy to lug around or to take up more space in my house. It is really that simple.

It doesn’t bother me that Baker doesn’t like the Kindle.  And I think he makes a few valid points – even if they are hardly insightful or unique.  What I found rather silly is the verbose and snide way he goes about making these arguments.

Yes, we get it.  Some people hate Amazon.  Yes, the iPhone is superior to every other device. Yes, Kindle is propietary. Yes, the Kindle doesn’t handle graphics very well.  Yes, the Kindle isn’t a work of art.  Yes, yes, yes.  I get it.

My response? So what? That is not why I have one.  I fail to see why it was necessary to pen 6,000 words to rehash this rather tired cultural argument.

I don’t know if the Kindle will revolutionize books but I am happy just to take advantage of the convenience it provides.

Perhaps that is just too mundane for Baker but it works for me.

I have just begun to catch up with some blog posts on The Amazon Kindle, Sherman Alexie, and the future of publishing.

I haven’t followed the kerfuffle in detail, but it started with this:

At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”

Ed Champion decided to get a better handle on exactly what Alexie meant and actual got a much more nuanced response.

Now, as a Kindle owner I am not offended by the term “elitist” because I am actually in favor of elitism when properly understood and because I understand that this is an expensive gadget. But I did find the claims interesting.  So I followed some links and tried to get a handle on the arguments.

Since I don’t work in publishing, and I am not an author, I am not going to speak to the larger issues of digital rights or the impact of e-books on writers income, etc. Instead, allow me a little rant from the consumer’s perspective.

First off, let me just say that I find this reaction very puzzling:

Why do you consider the Kindle “elitist?”

I consider the Kindle elitist because it’s too expensive. I also consider it elitist because, right now, one company is making all the rules. I am also worried about Jeff Bezos’ comments about wanting to change the way we read books. That’s rather imperial. Having grown up poor, I’m also highly aware that there’s always a massive technology gap between rich and poor kids. I haven’t yet heard what Amazon plans to do about this potential technology gap. And that’s a vital question considering that Bezos wants to change the way we read books. How does he plan to change the way that poor kids read books? How does he plan to make sure that poor kids have access to the technology? Poor kids all over the country don’t have access to current textbooks, so will they have access to Kindle?

For the sake of argument let’s grant him the price issue.  The only reason I own a Kindle is because it was a gift.  I get the it’s too expensive part.

But the rest of it seems bizarre to me.  Is Jeff Bezos required to figure out the socio-economic, political, and cultural ramifications of the Kindle?  The guy is trying to sell things.  And are you not allowed to build and sell technology unless you have a plan to insure poor kids have access to it?  This whole thing strikes me a caricature of politically correct thinking.  The Amazon Kindle is a threat to poor kids reading habits!!!! What?

This reads to me like a complex argument built to prop up an emotional reaction.  He likes old fashioned books – the Kindle and Amazon seems like a threat to that so he digs his feet in and says “No!”

Alexie seems unable to comprehend that the vast majority of people don’t think this way.  People don’t think about sweeping issue of how technology impacts society.  People think about what helps them or gives them joy.

I read a lot of books. I read books for pleasure, books for work, and books for personal growth.  I read magazines and newspapers too.  The Kindle makes reading more convenient because:

- I can carry a wide variety of books and magazines in one small lightweight device.

- My subscriptions follow me electronically and don’t pile up at home.

- If I need something to read I can get it instantly.

- I can make notes and add highlights (and now access those on the web).

Why is it hard for people to see this?  If you are heavy reader who travels very much at all the Kindle is a lifesaver.

I ride the bus, or take my scooter, to the office to work.  Only having to grab the Kindle is great.  It not only saves the pain in my shoulder that would be involved in carry all of this, and saves me the trouble of having to remember which books to grab, but I can even listen to some nice background music instead of the chatter and noise around me.

And what I find so hilarious is that Alexie’s complaints are elitism dressed up as egalitarianism.  Do you think poor kids give a crap about the socio-economic, political or cultural impact of e-books?  Of course, not.  Sure, maybe they struggle with wanting the latest gadget but not being able to afford it.  And those avid readers often wish they could afford to buy books instead of having to get them at the library, etc.

But the kind of issues Alexie raises are only thought about by those who are politically engaged and have the leisure time to contemplate the impact of consumer products on culture.  It is the same type of attitude that wants to shut down Wal-Mart because they would never consider shopping there. For certain people everything has a political angle and that has to be addressed.

And here is the thing.  I may disagree with some of the politics or cultural concerns and I may agree with some of them.  And, obviously, I think people have every right to voice their opinions and take action based on those opinions. Hate the Kindle?  Don’t buy one.  Want to try and convince others to do the same? Fine by me.

And if you work in the industry, or are impacted by it, I completely understand why you would voice concerns and take actions that you think are in the long term interest of your career and industry, etc.

But don’t expect everyone to think politics/culture/industry first.  Some of us just like reading books and any technology that makes that easier or improves the process is going to be popular.

And any strategy that doesn’t take this fact into consideration is doomed to failure in my opinion.