• The Confessions of a Book Pirate piece at The Millions has spawned over 150 comments.  Many of them are well worth your time.  Others are sub-literate.  The two sides of the debate seem to be “ebooks aren’t worth much so why should I pay” with “you’re stealing my books!”  It’s a lot of fun to sift through all that noise.

• Marian Schembari has a very interesting post up at Digital Book World.  She challenges the anti-piracy plan that Macmillan put forward at the DBW conference.  It’s interesting, if for no other reason than it offers a glimpse into the mind of a young consumer who is willing to play ball with traditional publishers if they get their act together.  (Thanks to HarperStudio and Debbie Stier for the link.)

• Finally, a post on the Book Oven blog offers an optimistic take on the potential of the iPad.  “But for people like my mother, asking her to play around with her computer until it works kind of like asking me to play around with a German dictionary until I speak German. It can probably be done, but it’s not going to happen.”

That’s all.  I’ll be back tomorrow with more happy thoughts from the analog world.

• Farhad Manjoo looks at how Amazon can reach into its customers’ Kindle devices and delete books. ” The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here’s one way around this: Don’t buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.”  I think you all know where I stand on  this:  Amazon has shown, again and again, that it doesn’t care much about its customers’ rights.  None of this should be terribly surprising.

• At The Word Hoarder, Rich builds off my post on ads in ebooks, saying “Does the desire to place paid ads in book reflect a strategy to squeeze more dollars out of readers by making a substandard product the new norm (book with ads) and thus making a traditional book (no ads) the premium product?”  I think he’s right on here.  The hope is to create a “freemium” model (the buzz term of the moment in online circles, thanks in no small part to Chris Anderson’s book Free, which I mentioned last week) of books, where the casual fan can grab a book for little or no cost and have the cost of the book subsidized by advertising, while the hardcore book buyer will buy the ad-free “premium” version of the book for roughly what it costs now.  Lots of people I know, smart people, even, have said that this model is the future.  I remain a skeptic.

• Much has been made of this James Wolcott article on “cultural snobbery.” “Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices.”  I think this same point has been made here and here, by the way.

All three of these stories point to something fundamental about ebooks and reading:  ebooks and online/electronic reading experiences are fundamentally changing how we view the act of reading.  Reading has always been among the most private activities.  Other than when we are very young or very old, we read our own books, alone, in isolation.  And then we take that solitary experience and carry it out into the world.  It occurs to me that having read a book and never discussed it is like having only half experiencing it.  It’s not real until I’ve hashed over it with others (usually my wife, the best reader I know).  I doubt I’m alone in this (ironically!).  This is sort of the reader’s equivalent to the realization at the end of Into the Wild:  “Happiness is only real when it’s shared.”

As I’ve said in the past, I think there are ways that ebooks and online reading can enhance our enjoyment of books, but as Manjoo, Rennicks and Wolcott show, there are also ways in which they threaten it.  The next ten years should be fascinating to watch if for no other reason than to see the way this issue plays out.  What do you think?  What excites you most about ebooks?  Is it the instant access and portability?  The ability to share and discuss titles in new ways?  What worries you most?  The control you’re giving up by going digital?  The expense of reading devices creating even more of a literacy gap between rich and poor?  Tell me in the comments.

Is this sort of collaborative or social reading the future?  At the moment, the consensus seems to be that the future of ereading lies not in browser-based reading experiences (ie, any platform that requires you to read on a computer) but rather in handheld devices like the iPhone or the Sony Reader.  It’s clear, though, that this sort of browser-based reading experiment might provide a way of creating real communities around books and around something most of us have considered a solitary activity — reading.  While I enjoy reading a novel without interruption or commentary, the case is different for non-fiction books.  I might like the option of seeing more indepth examples than an editor thought appropriate to include.  Imagine further if those examples came from other scholars on the subject.

Take, for example, Kaya Oakes great new book Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, the book I’m currently reading and enjoying.  Oakes’s book is 210 pages with notes, and while I think it’s more than enough for the average reader, I find myself wanting to know more about specific anecdotes or people mentioned in the book.  If I were reading the book on a Book Glutton-like system, I might be able to put a note up asking for more information on those subjects.  Oakes herself might be able to respond, but even if she chose not to, someone else might.  Maybe another author like Michael Azerrad might weigh in with further thoughts on what made The Minutemen and SST Records so unique.  Or maybe Mike Watt himself would drop in an anecdote or quote that didn’t make it into the book.  It’s this kind of possibility — the possibility for a real network or readers to make the act of reading the book more informative and more enriching — that really excites me about Book Glutton.

Don’t get me wrong:  I love the solitude of reading.  As a culture, we’re not getting anywhere near enough solitude or time for contemplation.  And I’m not arguing that the form of the book change all that much.  I think authors need an endpoint, a place where the book is done.  I see everything happening after that as being at the impetus of the reader.  I suppose I see this kind of reading experience as somehow supplementary to what we now think of as reading, something extra for people who want or need more.

Vroman’s will be hosting Sarah Dunant at All Saints Church on Wednesday, July 22.  Two tickets are free with purchase of the book which will be released tomorrow (If you don’t want to purchase a book, tickets are $5 a piece).

Photo by motdin (Creative Commons License) via Flickr

By now you’ve no doubt heard about Amazon’s plan to put advertisements in some ebooks.  (Click here and here to read the actual patent applications.  They’re really hot reads!)  Anybody with an iPhone can see how this might work:  it’s already working for the popular Apple App store.  Want the ebook for free?  Get a version with Google-ad-like advertisements peppered throughout it.  Don’t want the ads, pay full price (They also seem to be paving the way to put ads in POD books, harking back to a generation or two ago when a cheap paperback might subsidize itself with cigarette ads).  Here in Los Angeles, the Arclight Cinema, the best movie theater in the world, charges a bit more for its movies than does the competition, and one of the reasons is the lack of ads for Coke or Vonage or Levis before the movie (you still get ads for future movies, but most people don’t mind a few of those).

But would this work for books?  I don’t think so.  To begin with, reading a book, even an ebook, is different from surfing the web.  It is absorbing in a completely different way.  The wonder of literature, for me at least, is how it can transport the reader into a consciousness other than his own.  In order for this to occur, some absorption must take place.  The reader must lose himself in the narrative.  I imagine this would be significantly harder with an ad popping up every now and then, pulling back toward life.

Another problem with this is that “relevant ads” might not really exist for all books.  Just because I wanted to read John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven doesn’t mean that I want more info on the Mormon Church or Ski resorts in Utah.  We already see how these kind of ads are clunky and so often wrong on sites like Facebook (try mentioning something like herpes in your status update and see if a raft of pharmecuetical and dating ads don’t pop up in the sidebar), and at least on those sites, there’s a user, someone actively entering information.  With a book, the subject matter is fixed.  I can’t wait to read Ulysses and hear about “Great Prices on Flights to Dublin!” I pity the algorithm that has to deal with a book about consumerism like Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

Then there’s that whole “Some places should be free of advertisements” thing.  I think this is the most important one of all.  Reading is a refuge.  To soil it with even the most briliant, unobtrusive and relevant ads would be wrong.  Of course, I’m a guy who has slowly been trying to eliminate all ads from his life, adding adblocker to my web browser, watching TV only on DVD, not buying magazines or newspapers.  If you want to advertise to me, you better make your ad seem like content (and I don’t mean those lame “special advertising sections” that look like fake articles).  I guess I think books are sacred.  Am I crazy?

What do you think?  Could you deal with an ad in an ebook?  What if it were a briliant ad, like the Volkswagen “Pink Moon” ad?  And if you say no to these questions, would you be willing to spend the $10 to avoid them?

• Bryan Gilmer, a writing teacher at UNC Chapel Hill, published his own hardboiled crime novel, Felonious Jazz, for the Kindle.  When he lowered the price to $1.99, his sales jumped.  He writes about the experience at The Millions.  Click through to the post to read my comments, as well.

• The Guardian has a great post about whether bookstore shelf talkers actually sell books (They feature a great shelf talker for A Fan’s Notes (one of the best ‘loser fic’ books ever) from Green Apple Books in San Francisco).  I can say that, contrary to what the ridiculous commenters say, shelf talkers really do drive sales.  I remember when I was working at Book Soup in West Hollywood, and the owner of the store, Glenn Goldman (who was also the buyer) did a double take when looking at the sales for Lucky Jim.  “Is someone making a movie based on Lucky Jim?  We’ve sold a ton in the last two weeks.”  No movie, just my shelf talker.

• Also from The Guardian (they were on a roll over there) comes this great post about “the most famous fictional character.” The post uses Sherlock Holmes as a jumping off point.  The blogger then goes on to suggest some alternatives, including Don Quixote, Odysseus, Harry Potter, Hamlet, and James Bond.  Interestingly, when I put the question to my coworker, she immediately said “Sherlock Holmes.”  Who do you think is the most famous fictional character?

• Books on the Nightstand is running a summer reading challenge relating to the new book Beowulf on the Beach by Jack Murnighan.  The challenge is pretty straight forward:  from Memorial Day to Labor Day, read at least one of the classics covered in Beowulf on the Beach, then blog about it on your blog.  The winner gets a signed copy of Beowulf on the Beach.  Click over to their post for complete details.

For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.

This is common sense:  as ebook demand rises, so does ebook piracy.  Pirates, after all, aren’t interested in products for which there is no demand.  Demand creates value, and once something is valuable, it’s worth stealing.  The reaction on the internet has been interesting to watch.  The ebook evangelists are all saying “so what,” pointing out that piracy is a sign of popularity, a kind of “progressive taxation” on the most successful.  Others are even pointing out that it can lead to increased print book sales.  Indeed, Cory Doctorow, who famously gives away his ebooks to sell more print books (a strategy that anecdotally seems to work at the moment but that will become increasingly less viable as market share of ebooks increases), is quoted in the article:  “‘I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy,” Mr. Doctorow said. “It’s obscurity.””

Others, such as Michelle Lemay, one of the owners of  Inkwell Bookstore in Cape Cod, MA (@michelleinkwell), have noted that despite those trumpeting its welcome side effects, piracy has a very negative effect on sales at small independent stores.  She tweeted: “piracy hurts sales though; 2008 manga sales down 17%” and pointed to this article in Publishers Weekly.  She also noted that the manga fans who normally shopped at her store seemed to see nothing wrong with finding the comics they liked online for free, and suggested that it’s difficult to educate kids about piracy when their parents are downloading music ripped from file-sharing sites like RapidShare.

So what to do about this?  How can we stop people from effectively stealing from writers, publishers and booksellers?  Writing on the Booksquare blog, Kassia Krozser makes the case for publishers to “reach readers where they live.” She goes on to map out a model:  “There is strong evidence (Exhibit A: iTunes) that consumers are happy to pay for digital product…as long as certain conditions are met: price, selection, and convenience.”

I think this is key.  For bookstores and publishers, the answer has to be this:  make it more appealing – in every way – to buy the ebook than to steal it.  Make your ecommerce site simple and direct.  Make your customer service flawless.  Offer the books people want and be as competative on price as you can be (Publishers, we indie bookstores could use a hand from you on this front). Make the experience reader-friendly, in every sense of the word.  And then go a step further.  Make shopping with you more like joining a club.  Make it seem exclusive.  In fact, everything I’ve just written really applies to brick-and-mortar bookstores, in general.

Don’t rely on educating or guilting your customers into shopping with you because:  a) It won’t work, and b) It turns people off.  People simply don’t like to be lectured to or guilted or threatened into doing something.  Harlan Ellison might be a hell of a writer, and he’s more than reasonable to request that people pay him for his work, but when he says “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he’s risking turning people off (plus he sounds kind of crazy).

The challenge for bookstores and publishers is pretty simple:  find out what people want to read and how they want to acquire it, and then meet those needs.  If you don’t, you will go out of business, but it won’t be because of piracy.

• The Onion dissects the new textbook Kindle DX:  “Not for me. Nothing beats the feeling of learning off paper.”

• Is the Espresso Book Machine the future of print?  The machine can print any of the half-million titles in its inventory in about five minutes.  If it worked and if the cost were right (and I haven’t seen one yet, so I can’t say), this would solve many of the problems currently facing the publishing industry and independent bookstores:  fewer returns, an inventory every bit as comprehensive as an online retailer, ability to customize books and self-publish, and still have that book smell that everybody’s crazy about.  (Link via the excellent blog if:book.)

• For cover art aficionados, the Art of Penguin Science Fiction is a pretty great site.  You could easily kill the rest of your workday there.  I encourage you to do so.  (Via the excellent Tumblr blog The Daily Meh.)

• Boing Boing has a couple of good book links this morning, including Thomas Allen’s pulp cover photography art and a nice writeup about Amy Stewart’s new book, Wicked Plants (which we have signed copies of).

• I’m enjoying My First Dictionary, a very funny blog mashing vintage children’s book images with oddly off-putting text:  “Lois is alone in the house.  She’s the only person in the house.  Isn’t she?”  (Thanks to Anne for the link.)

• If you’re like me, you’ll enjoy the ZineWiki.  It’s a pretty amazing reference for the known zines.  Somebody will have to add an entry for my short-lived but much-loved baseball pitching journal Filthy.

• You’ve no doubt heard that Amazon has launched a new Kindle aimed at college students and people who insist that a newspaper be presented in its old, pre-digital layout.  While there may be a great many benefits to an ereader (not the Kindle per se, but a device that could read ebooks and access the internet and receive text messages and…), I find Jeff Bezo’s wacky futurism to be, well, wacky.  Remember when he pitched the Kindle 2 on that TV ad The Daily Show?  His big selling point was “You can read with one hand!” Thank god, because I’ve been reading with two hands for years, and I just can’t take it anymore. Today, at the launch of the Kindle DX, Bezos envisioned a brave new world of… “lighter backpacks.”  Lighter backpacks?  That’s the best they could do?  This is supposed to be a groundbreaking technology and one of its main benefits is a lighter backpack?  I think the focus on the physical aspects of the Kindle miss what’s really interesting about ebooks — the potential for interactivity, for new forms of storytelling and information sharing.  Why this focus on the physical aspects of the device?  Maybe because they know that the exciting stuff doesn’t work well or is technically illegal on the Kindle.  Distract them with the bells an whistles and hope they don’t see that the engine is broken, right?  Who cares how heavy your backpack is?  (And for the record, I already read the New York Times on a portable ereader.  For free.)

photo by Carolyn Kellogg

After a gorgeous day off yesterday (What did I do?  I went to a bookstore.  The day after the Festival of Books.  On my day off from my bookstore job.  I’m a dork, I know), I’ve had some time to process the Festival of Books and I think these were the take-away lessons for this year:

• There are plenty of readers out there. While no official numbers have been released, it felt busier and bigger than last year’s festival.  Standing at the top of the staircase and seeing throngs (I love that word, throngs!) of people below was awesome.  So, too, was the enormous What Are You Reading wall, which asked festival-goers to scrawl the name of whatever book they happened to be reading at the time.  If there’s something wrong with the book business, it isn’t because there aren’t enough readers.  It really is incredible to see so many people turn out for a book event, and it really underscores what my colleague Emily Pullen, from Skylight Books, said on Saturday afternoon:  “It’s a misconception that L.A. is not a book town…It’s got an amazingly rich literary culture. New York is the home of the big publishing houses. But there are so many great, amazing and energizing authors who live in L.A.”
• The future of bookselling lies with independent bookstores. During my panel, I said that I was preparing for a future in which the vast majority of books would be digital, with hardcover becoming a boutique industry, aimed at collectors and aficionados much as vinyl is for today’s serious audiophiles.  I thought I’d expand on this point a bit, as it isn’t nearly as cut and dry as I tried to make it sound at the panel.  My esteemed fellow panelist Richard Nash eloquently said that the future of the book business would be less about controlling content and more about monetizing the conversation about that content.  This is the strength of independent bookstores.  We nurture and support local literary communities, we listen to the marketplace (or at least we ought to), and we provide a natural place for conversation about books to take place.  As I said at the panel on Saturday, for independent bookstores, it’s never been simply about selling the books.  Rather, we aim to add value beyond the book itself.  This is why we’re constantly trying to book new and innovative events (like our Book Buses), why we’re committed to meeting our customers online as well as in our stores, and why we continue to participate in events like the Festival of Books.  Tod Goldberg pointed out that Borders and Barnes & Noble were both conspicuously missing from this year’s festival.  For Borders, this is understandable.  You wouldn’t fault a dying man for not showing up to your birthday party, right?  But the absence of both chain stores simply reinforces my point.  Selling at the Festival of Books (and other events like it) is what we do to survive.  For Barnes & Noble, it appears it’s a PR move, something done to brand themselves as part of the LA literary community (and by the way, we made money this weekend).  Moving widgets has never been the strength of the indie store.  We’d be the first to admit that we don’t scale very well, but talking about books?  We can do that.  The trick is figuring out how to make money at it.
• The ebook tipping point is here. There were lots of conversations about ebooks this past weekend, prompted, perhaps, by a table in the green room reserved exclusively for representatives of Amazon’s Kindle ereader.  Not even Alyssa Milano had her own table.  While there was much skepticism amongst the hardcore bookish types, I was sensing a lot of excitement from festival-goers.  One person at our panel asked about the future of ebooks, noting that the electronic version of his book includes embedded audio and video.  Obviously, if “enhanced ebooks” become the norm, then not only publishing but also storytelling might get turned on its ear.  I think that moment is still a ways away, but it is approaching.  As a bookseller, I’m excited about the possibilities, and I’m hopeful that ebooks will attract new readers.  And of course, all of this makes Amazon’s purchase of Lexcycle (the makers of the popular ereader app Stanza) all the more troubling.  As indies, it’s imperative that we find a way to compete in this world (especially as Amazon has left us openings on issues like DRM, transparency and ebook affiliate programs).
• Here comes everybody…literally. All weekend long, people were coming to the Vroman’s booth and handing us copies of their books, their CDs, pamphlets about their books and CDs, fliers about the pamphlets about their books and CDs.  My informal, totally non-scientific poll says that approximately half the people at the Festival either have published a book or are hoping to publish one.  Adding to this were the many booths occupied by iUniverse and other companies that specialize in self-publishing or print-on-demand books.  As I said in the panel, the barriers to publication have never been lower, but in many ways, the barriers between an author and his or her readership are higher than ever.  The proliferation of the author is further proof that publishers need to be playing matchmaker, as Richard Nash called it, as there are a lot of readers and a lot of writers out there.  How the two will find each other is the fundamental question in publishing for the next ten years.
• Tod Goldberg is a funny dude. But you already knew that, right?
• The Festival is better when it’s not so hot. This year’s weather was lovely:  warm sun and a cool ocean breeze.  More of the same next year, please.
• Twitter was made for festivals, conferences and conventions. As with Winter Institute, I loved reading tweets from other folks at the festival.  It gave me at least some idea what was happening at the dozens of panels I didn’t make it to, and it made me feel like I was at the only event that mattered.

That’s what I got from this year’s festival.  As is always the case with these events, I didn’t get to meet everybody I had hoped to (I’m kicking myself for not dragging my exhausted, post-book bus self to Venice for the Granta party at Equator Books), but I had a lot of fun meeting so many people I knew only from the internet.  As a bookseller, the festival is exhausting, but also very rewarding.  I can’t count the number of times I overheard people saying “Oh, Vroman’s, they’re my favorite bookstore,” or something to that effect.  It was a tremendous weekend, and I extend a big “Thank You” to everybody who went to the Festival.  For those who were there, what were your favorite moments?