Lost - and Found - in My Kindle

I've been more dependent these past few weeks than ever on Kindle books because I've gradually developed eye problems again, and I'm finding it a little difficult to read the print in physical books right now. The good news is that I finally got into my retina doctor yesterday and, after a long and thorough examination, she assures me that the macular degeneration in both eyes is as stable as ever, so that's not the problem. Thankfully, that condition has not worsened in over five years now. 

Turns out that the problem is related to the cataract surgery that I had two summers ago, especially in my right eye. The problem is not related to the surgery itself or to the replacement lenses; it's only that the eye-capsule that holds the lens in place in my right eye is clouding up. Unfortunately, that is almost as bad as having cataracts themselves, but it's relatively easily fixed. So late this afternoon I'm going to have my eye doctor take a look, and I'm hoping for a simple, quick bit of laser surgery to get me back to reading "real books."

And, that leads me to the point of this post....finally:

I've discovered all kinds of lost gems hiding deep inside my Kindle, books I have never read and have forgotten all about. I barely recognize some of the titles, and couldn't begin to tell you when I acquired them or why. This morning I started one from 2014 by Catherine Ryan Hyde called Take Me with You that I'm completely charmed by after reading only its first twelve pages. The writing is perfect, the four characters I've encountered so far are all likable as heck, and the story is already setting up nicely.

This is the book's synopsis from Amazon:

"August Shroeder, a burned-out teacher, has been sober since his nineteen-year-old son died. Every year he’s spent the summer on the road, but making it to Yellowstone this year means everything. The plan had been to travel there with his son, but now August is making the trip with Philip’s ashes instead. An unexpected twist of fate lands August with two extra passengers for his journey, two half-orphans with nowhere else to go.

What none of them could have known was how transformative both the trip—and the bonds that develop between them—would prove, driving each to create a new destiny together."

This may be exactly the kind of feel-good story I need right now for so many reasons. August Shroeder, a man who spends his summers on the road, is definitely a guy I can identify with, so here's hoping.

But now I can't help but wonder what else is in that little electronic gizmo, good stuff I hoarded and intended to read at some point. That's the main problem with e-books; it's just way too easy to acquire books that almost immediately disappear, seldom if ever to be seen again. According to Kindle, I have 366 books, 5 book samples, and 60 periodicals, either already downloaded or up in the magic cloud in the sky, just waiting for me to open them up and read. But if Kindle can be believed, 235 of those books remain unread (I'm not yet convinced that's really true). 

I'm determined now to start reading from this stash on a regular basis...and I'm betting I'm not the only one sitting on this kind of book "gold mine." Do you guys have similar stashes of your own?

A Late Mid-Year Look at My 2020 Reading Goals

I started adding up the numbers this afternoon to see what kind of progress, if any, I’ve been making toward meeting my 2020 reading goals. After getting over my initial disappointment at the lack of much real progress, I realized that, considering the on-again-off-again slump I’ve been in for most of the year, I shouldn’t be all that surprised by what the numbers are telling me.

 

Coming into the year, my goals were simple enough:

 

1.    To read more American and World History (1)

2.    To read more translated works (4)

3.    To read from my own bookshelves (12)

4.    Read more literary classics (1)

5.    Read books published between 1920 and 1979 (7)

6.    Read the earliest books from series I stated mid-way (7)

7.    Read more foreign titles not from Canada or the U.K. (5)

 

As you probably guessed already, the numbers in parentheses represent the number of books from each category that I’ve read to this point in the year. Even if I manage to double those numbers by the end of 2020, I’m going to be way short on my goals for several of the categories.

 

And I know why this is happening. In the past, the vast majority of my reading has been done in physical books that I either purchased for myself or acquired from the local library. Now that both libraries and bookstores are locked up tight, and physical books are so much harder to get hold of, I’ve been forced to read more e-books than ever before. Library e-books tend to be more recently published ones than not, and bookstore e-books are so expensive that I don’t buy all that many of them. (Just last week I purchased too e-books that, with tax, ended up costing me right at $32. I’m sorry, but that seems outrageous to me, because it is almost the cost of physical copies of the same two books, one of which was published in 2020 and the other in 1985.)

 

The result is that of the 64 books I’ve read to-date, 41 of them were published in either 2019 or 2020. And that doesn’t play well with some of my goals. I was a bit surprised to see that I’ve read 26 e-books and 25 physical books, a smaller number of e-books than it’s felt like I’ve been reading. But, throw in the 13 library audiobooks I’ve read this year, and it all starts to make sense why two-thirds of my reading has been confined to books published in the last 18 months. Library holds for e-books and audiobooks are a wonderful thing right now, don’t get me wrong, but choices are so heavily weighted toward newer books that it’s easy to find yourself reading almost exclusively nothing but bestsellers and other “hot” titles. And that’s what has happened to me since March.

 

Other tidbits that jump out at me:

·      5 abandoned books (a much lower number than usual for this time of year)

·      39 books written by men, 24 by women, and 1 co-authored by one of each

·      4 books by British writers, 4 by Canadians, 2 by Iranians, 1 by a Nigerian, 1 by a Swede, and 1 by a Frenchman

 

I love crunching numbers almost as much as I love reading – as you can probably tell.

Bookstore Sales Plummet and E-Books Are Saving Authors

While looking around the internet news sites this morning, two articles that seem to be flip sides of the same coin, caught my attention. The first piece is titled "Bookstore Sales Plummeted 5.7% in 2019" and the second "The Invisible Army: How E-Books are Saving Authors."

The gist of the first article is that brick and mortar bookstores in the United States fell almost six percent from 2018 levels, meaning that total bookstore sales were down about $600 million in the year-to-year comparison. The article says that the numbers were compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Interestingly, the article says that the only "huge" bestseller during all of 2019 was Where the Crawdads Sing, a book that continues to rank high on the bestseller lists well into 2020. (And now American Dirt may not be the bookstore savior that it was destined to be before the P.C. cops started squawking about it.)

Keeping in mind that these numbers do not reflect hardcover sales via Amazon or even the Barnes & Noble website, I'm not sure that this tells us much of anything about the overall health of the publishing and bookselling industries. But what it does say is that fewer books are being purchased at the brick and mortar storefronts - and that's not a good thing because it means that those locations will likely be carrying smaller and smaller inventories while trying to make up for lost book sales by selling all the other junk that already clutters up the B&N stores. 

The Invisible Nicola May

The second article is a longer piece written by Nicola May, a romantic comedy author from the U.K. who regularly tops the Kindle bestseller list. According to May, she could "walk into a roomful of readers, booksellers and authors" without any of them having any idea who she was. She calls herself a "lone field marshal in the invisible army of e-book bestselling authors." 

May's main point is that without Amazon she could not afford to write at all because the books chains completely ignore authors like her. Her secondary point is that not only are the chains ignoring authors like her, they are ignoring readers who love the books being written by e-book-dependent authors like her. May has been practicing her craft for 23 years, but would still be unpublished (other than her own self-publishing efforts) were it not for e-books. 

May does lament the fact that e-book-only authors like her get very little love or recognition from the powers-that-be for the huge sales many of them are amassing. No big book awards come their way, and she doesn't expect that kind of thing to change, really, but as she puts it, "...I'm still smashing it with readers and paying more than just the rent."

So there you have it. It seems like there are two separate bookselling worlds out there, one that pushes print-books out the door as quickly as possible, and one that sells a huge number of e-books written by authors who remain relatively anonymous to the rest of the world. The good news is that, at least for now, there seems to be room for both worlds to simultaneously exist, a fact that readers and writers alike should celebrate. 

Macmillan's War on Libraries and Library Patrons Moves to Absurd Stage

German-owned publisher Macmillan’s war on libraries and library patrons accelerated last week when the publisher went through with its plan to limit e-book sales to only one copy per library for the first eight weeks after publication. It matters not whether the library is serving a community of 5,000 patrons are one of hundreds of thousands – it’s one copy per library. So don’t bother getting in line to stream a new e-book anytime soon for anything published by Macmillan or any of its divisions, including Henry Holt & Company; Bloomsbury; Faarrar, Straus and Giroux; North Point Press; Picador; Metropolitan Books; Graywolf Press; St. Martins; Tor; and Forge, among others. 

Macmillan is apparently under the absurd impression that if library patrons are unable to get a free copy of an e-book from their local library they will run right out and purchase a copy of their own – at what many consumers consider to be the inflated price that publishers charge for e-books today. We all know that’s not going to happen. Personally, I read about 125 books a year on average, with approximately half of those 125 being books published in the year that I read them. Of those 60 or so books, maybe half of them are e-books that I get either from my county library system, directly from publishers as ARCs, from the Amazon First Reads program, or via Amazon purchases. Simply put, I read way more books than I can afford to read, and if I have to buy them they are not as likely ever to be read and reviewed or otherwise featured on Book Chase at all. I don’t kid myself into believing that what I do is all that important to the bottom line of a giant publisher like Macmillan. But I do know that there are hundreds of book bloggers out there and that, taken as a group, we are important contributors to the publicity that authors and publishers so desperately need if they are going to sell books in today’s market. 

I am just old school enough that I still much prefer a hard copy or quality paperback version of a book to its frailer e-book cousin. I often read an e-book that I end up loving so much that I add a hard back copy of the book to the permanent collection on my personal library shelves. E-books just don’t give me a sense of permanency, and I doubt that they ever will. I never know if I own them or if I’m just renting them long enough for a new format to come along, replace them, and make all my e-books obsolete. After all, music publishers have gotten away with that little trick for years, so can book publishers be far behind with some kind of “planned obsolescence” scheme of their own?

Libraries, too, are a source of free publicity for publishers and their new books. It’s already bad enough that libraries are charged three to four times the price that consumers pay for e-books, even though that makes a little sense considering how many times the e-books are being read and that they never wear out. Many, if not all, publishers limit the number of times an e-book can be checked out before it has to be repurchased by the lending library; again, that makes some sense to me. But this new scheme of Macmillan’s is (I sincerely hope) going to backfire on the publisher and its authors. I doubt that the increase in sales is going to make up for the reduced number e-book copies that libraries are going to purchase for “older” books when they are finally allowed that privilege – books whose marketing buzz is already over. Libraries have limited budgets and they base their book purchases on expected demand from their patrons. So why would they buy books that no one is asking about anymore?

One final thought: How many bestsellers, do you think, were constructed largely out of sales to libraries? Libraries, taken as a whole, buy lots of copies of books and what they buy can be enough to catapult a book onto the bestsellers lists almost instantly. Perhaps even more important, library sales can mean the difference between an author working years for very little return and making a nice income for their efforts. I can’t imagine that too many Macmillan authors are happy about this misguided approach, so let’s hope someone at the top comes to their senses soon.

Libraries Must Draw the Line on E-books - Sari Feldman, Publishers Weekly

Librarian Sari Feldman

Because so few avid readers can afford, or have the space, for all the books they want to read, they are highly dependent upon their local libraries to fill in the gaps. I have read an average of about fifty library books per year for the last ten years, so that’s most certainly the case for me.  And I’m not talking about just tree-books, I also check out e-books and audible books. Sometimes the titles I’m interested in are readily available; other times I find myself waiting for more than fifty others to read a copy of the book before my turn at it finally comes. That’s frustrating - but apparently, it’s not frustrating enough for Macmillan.

About a year ago, Macmillan placed a four-month library “embargo” on e-books published by its Tor imprint.  Now, it seems that the publisher has become convinced by its embargo that releasing new e-book titles to public libraries sooner than four months after publication depresses sales of the titles to the consumer, and it has indicated that the embargo is likely to be extended to titles released by any and all other Macmillan imprints. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the Tor imprint, anyway, so the Macmillan trick hardly impacted me.  But there are plenty of other Macmillan titles that I do want to read – and I don’t want to wait four months to read them just because I can’t afford to buy all the books I read in a given year.  I sympathize with the publishers, and I understand that they are searching for the business model that will maximize profits in an environment in which readers have wholeheartedly embraced e-books and audiobooks. I get it.  But I think that Macmillan is taking it too far.

According to librarian Sari Feldman’s recent article in Publishers Weekly, public libraries are already paying “three to five times the consumer price for two-year accessto e-books” to pretty much all publishers (but only Macmillan actually embargoes titles for four months). She gives the example of Elin Hilderbrand’s The Rumorselling to libraries for $84 per copy and to consumers for $14.99. At first, I was also against access being limited to two years, but I suppose that compares to something close to the average shelf life of a physical library book, so it does make some sense.  But those inflated per-copy prices are a big reason that I’m lined up behind 50-150 people on the more popular titles that I don’t jump on right away.  Do publishers make more money by selling fewer copies at five times the price than they would make by selling some higher number of copies to libraries at the consumer price? That sounds like a question out of Economics 101, but I doknow it would ease the pressure on public library budgets everywhere.

And now, according to Feldman, Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster have placed a two-year limit on copies of audible books sold to libraries for streaming purposes.  Can the other major publishers be far behind? 

That brings us to the super villain of retailing, Amazon.  Amazon, via its Audible service, is said to be aggressively pursuing exclusive agreements with publishers that would preclude those publishers from selling any copies at all to libraries of “the most highly desirable audio content, including from major authors such as Margaret Atwood and Michael Lewis.” The only good news in audio books that Feldman shares with us is that “four of the Big Five publishers – Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster – have thus far committed to a no-embargo policy for new release titles” (on audiobooks).  That’s something, I guess.

But between the usual evilness of Amazon and the greed of Macmillan, the cracks in the public library business model are starting to become obvious. Despite what politicians and retailers like to believe, there are millions and millions of people who love their local libraries and depend on them to provide the reading material they cannot afford to purchase for themselves.  Too, I am particularly concerned with publishers deciding to limit ready access to audiobooks because so many sight-impaired people depend on them for entertainment and access to current trends and thought.  (And since I have the beginning stages of macular degeneration in both eyes, this hits very close to home.)

Maybe it’s time for public libraries to ask for some help from the Federal Trade Commission before things get even worse for library patrons.  And maybe it’s time for library patrons everywhere to speak up for themselves.  This is what we pay all of those childish do-nothings in Congress to help us with, after all.

"The Day the Ebooks Quit Working"

I cannot claim to understand all the technicalities involved in the process, but according to a recent BBC article, "Consumers who bought ebooks via Microsoft's online store are losing access to their libraries."  Of course, Microsoft will be offering some compensation to consumers unfortunate enough to have purchased or obtained free ebooks directly through the Microsoft browser, but that really offers very little consolation in the long run.  And it serves as a reminder that you really don't own ebooks that you purchase with DRM (digital rights management) included no matter where you buy them, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, included.

In Microsoft's case, it is simply a matter of the company deciding finally to abandon the ebook business for good (after their third failed attempt to compete with Amazon and B&N).  But if three MS attempts teach us anything, it's never to say never when it comes to MS and ebooks, and I would not be at all surprised if they find their way back into the business again at some point.

Amazon has already been known to selectively and purposely reclaim ebooks from readers on more than one occasion, once because they oversold the number of copies of 1984 they were authorized to sell and once because of a dispute with an individual customer of theirs.  From what I recall, Amazon deleted enough copies from customer libraries to get themselves back into compliance with the publisher contract, and I'm assuming that they simply compensated those customers who lost their copy of the classic.  In the other case, the company was in a dispute with a customer over its return policy (claiming that the customer was returning up to 50 items a month), and decided to kill his Kindle by deleting his ebooks and refusing to sell new ones to him until the dispute could be resolved or given up on.  

So there were legitimate reasons in both cases for Amazon to delete something from a customer's library - maybe.  But it doesn't make me feel any better knowing that, for any reason, ebook retailers retain this level of control over something I thought I bought from them for my own. Instead, it appears that I only leased the ebooks stored away in my Kindle.

This is where I get confused as to how all of this works, so if anyone can explain it to me - or correct any misunderstanding I have - I will greatly appreciate it.  In the past, I have received some ebook ARCs from publisher with DRM protection set to kick in at a certain date, and when that date comes the books are no longer readable.  If all the books I buy from Amazon have similar protection, but without a specific date-trigger encoded, it sounds as if Amazon still has a way to trigger the DRM and kill my books.  And that's even if I have a copy on another drive as backup?  

I don't know how it works, as you can see.  But I'm assured that work, it does.  And that makes me angry.  Ebooks are not cheap; they often cost as much as a quality paperback copy of the same book, paperbacks that I can do with as I please without fear of Microsoft or Amazon or Barnes & Noble knocking on my door late some Saturday night demanding their books back.  

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell - Robert Dugoni

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell was a nostalgic read of sorts for me because it reminds me so much of my favorite John Irving novels Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Robert Dugoni's characters aren't quite as quirky and off the wall as so many of Irving's are, but this episodic coming-of-age novel is every bit as dramatic as either of those novels. Sam Hell starts a little slowly, with young Sam Hill's problems being of the kind lots of "different" kids face in the world: bullying, isolation, self-doubt, etc. - but as Sam grows up, his problems become ever-increasingly serious ones. And by the end of the novel, the reader is left breathlessly wondering just how much Sam will be asked to endure before things get better, if they ever do.

Sam Hill is born with red eyes, pupils so red, in fact, that he startles even the attending nurses at his birth. And, kids being kids, school is pure hell for the boy soon adorned with the nickname that he will wear into adulthood: Sam Hell. Sam's eye color will, however, play a major role in what kind of man he will become, and he would tell you that those eyes and the way people reacted to them made him a better man than he would have been without them. Sam would also be quick to credit his fierce mother, a woman who devoted her life to making sure that her son always got a fair shake in life despite the way he looked. She was not always able to make that happen, but Sam always knew that he could depend on her to go down swinging. 

Author Robert Dugoni

Sam is lucky enough to find two people in grade school who in their own ways are as different as he is.  One of them is the only black child in both the school and the neighborhood from which it draws its students; the other is a little red-haired girl who takes great delight in being the born rebel that she is.  These two will be Sam's best friends for the rest of his life, and the three of them create a little self-contained support group that the rest of us can only wish we could find somewhere.

Robert Dugoni has created some memorable characters here, and my comparison of The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell to a John Irving novel is just about the highest praise I can give to a novel.  I recommend this one.

Kindle Unlimited Is Crap

I realize that I'm going to offend some people when I say this, but here it comes: Kindle Unlimited is pretty much a garbage service.  Hell, let's take it a step further: So many of the e-books being sold by Amazon are self-published crap that browsing the site for new, unknown e-books is largely a waste of time.  In fact, I quit browsing through Amazon for new books a long time ago because the experience, even on a good day, is frustrating...and don't ask me what word I would use to describe it on a bad day.

So now I use Kindle Books only to go through the back catalogs of authors I'm already familiar with or to buy titles I already know about.  That's not good for me, for authors, or for Amazon.  But this story from BoingBoing tells me that the situation is even worse than I imagined:

Amazon's Kindle Unlimited service allows subscribers to download as many books as they want, and then pays writers based on the number of their pages that readers have read. 

The service surveils your reading habits by checking the "furthest page visited" status on every book in your library, meaning that if you skip to the last page, the book considers you to have finished the whole thing. 

Crapflooding scammers have therefore supplied a glut of "books" that run up to 3,000 pages (the longest Amazon will permit), filled with garbage, which open with a link to the last page. By paying (or tricking) people to download their "books" and click the link, they rack up 3,000 pages' worth of credit to their author accounts. At $0.005/page, it can add up.

So now we have idiots uploading 3,000-page "books" and tricking people into downloading them from Kindle Unlimited.  Then through more trickery they manage to get people to click over to the last page of the book so that it appears that the entire book has been read.  Bingo: that means a nice little payday from Amazon of $15 for every crapbook unwittingly downloaded by a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.  

I like e-books and I read a lot of them.  But I hate shopping or searching for e-book titles amid the huge mound of garbage that Amazon is content to dump on top of the real books for sale.  Self-publishing can be a good thing, but more often than not, it is just the opposite.  Most unpublished books are unpublished for good reasons, and they deserve to stay unpublished - they are that bad - and I don't need them polluting the haystack I have to search through every time I want to buy an e-book.

But as long as Amazon is willing to pay scammers to puff up its own sales figures, that's the world we live in.  And I'm sick of it.  I'm looking at you, Mr. Amazon.

College Students Not Crazy About E-Textbooks

I remember about a year ago reading (and posting) about the news that e-book sales were no longer increasing on a year-to-year basis.  At that time, such sales, while not actually in decline, seemed to have reached plateau levels. Well, this year the news is that every single one of the major e-book publishers had slight declines in e-book sales when the numbers are compared to the previous year. None of the drops are significant in terms of percentage sale, but it is striking that the decline happened straight across the board to all of them without exception.

Today I ran across this article from the Los Angeles Times about a claim that fully 92% of college students prefer printed books to e-books.  That surprises me a little considering the exorbitant amount charged these days for college texts because, for the most part, e-book versions of college texts are considerably cheaper than their printed versions.  But I know from experience that printed books work much better than e-books when it comes to detailed study, highlighting, page-marking, and the like, so the survey makes sense.

The finding comes from American University linguistics professor Naomi S. Baron, author of the book "Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World." Baron led a team that asked 300 college students in the United States, Slovakia, Japan and Germany how they preferred to read.

Physical books were the choice of 92% of the respondents, who selected paper over an array of electronic devices.

Interestingly, this L.A. Times article is based on a book called Words Onscreen that I reviewed way back on January 20, 2015, so the claim is not a new one.

Here is my review of that book. 

Alexa, Read My Kindle Book

I received an interesting email regarding my Amazon Echo yesterday, an announcement from Amazon that Alexa could now read most of my Kindle books aloud to me.  

I was a little skeptical at first but a quick glance at the Echo app on my iPad indicated that the majority of the books on my Kindle can be accessed this way.  The primary exception seems to be those books downloaded to my Kindle as "personal documents" rather than as "books."  That pretty much means that I won't often be able to use the Echo to read ARCs aloud since most publishers push those to Kindle in the document format rather than in Amazon's standard Kindle format for books.

It is all pretty simple.  Just say something like "Alexa, read my Kindle book (title inserted), and she's off and reading. The reading can be stopped via the usual "stop" command and resumed at the point the reader left off by saying, "Alexa read my Kindle book."  The only problem I've run into is that some of my book titles are the same as song titles, or they contain place names or compass points that confuse the Echo into looking for directions, etc.  When that happens, the user has to work with the Echo until the correct title is understood and accessed.  And sometimes that demands a good bit of patience.

But although I find the "pause" and "resume" commands useful, I do wish that I could specify a specific chapter for the app to begin with or jump forward to because, without that capability, the user is forced to use the app for one Kindle book at a time rather than having the choice of switching between books before completing any of them.  The app appears capable of placing only one "bookmark" at a time, meaning that a book only partially read is resumed at page one if another book has been opened in the meantime.

And believe it or not, the robotic rendering of the books is easy to get used to; after a few minutes, it is almost like having someone with a slight foreign accent read aloud to you.  I was one of early adopters of the Amazon Echo and I have been pleased with all the improvements made to the app software since I acquired it - something that seems to be happening at an ever accelerating pace these days.

In my estimation, this is good news for Kindle users.

Ebooks with Soundtracks and Sound Effects - Are They for You?

Depending on whom you listen to, ebook popularity is either fading or sales numbers for them have reached a plateau. Either way, that's probably good news for brick and mortar bookstores everywhere.  But don't expect ebook publishers and sellers to just sit back and watch what is happening to ebook sales.  Instead, publishers are looking for new ways to enhance the experience of reading an ebook - and what could be better, some of them say, than sound effects specifically produced for the ebook you are reading?

According to The Independent, popularity of soundtrack enhanced ebooks in the U.K. is second only to their popularity in the United States (where have I been on this one?):

So if ebook popularity has faded slightly, how have soundtracked books captured a growing market? Their growth, it seems, goes hand in hand with a resurgence in audiobooks and podcasts. Both have been given a leg up by improved access through iTunes and landmark releases such as the now-classic Stephen Fry-read Harry Potter series and true-crime genre-reinventing podcast Serial. It appears that we still want in-depth, long-form stories, simply in new and different ways from the printed page alone. Some 10 per cent of those surveyed by Nielsen said that they were willing to pay extra for new and interactive ebook features.

Not everyone agrees with the concept, however, and some of spoken out rather loudly about the BookTracks app.  Here's a bit of what Tech Crunch's  Paul Carr has to say:

It, hopefully, goes without saying (not least because so many people have already said it) that Booktrack is a laughably stupid idea. The whole point of reading fiction is to remove the reader from reality — for the physical book to drop away and the sights, sounds and smells of the story to play out in the mind. As such, soundtracks and animated arrows urging you to read at a fixed (“it’s adjustable!” the PR will be yelling at this point) pace are an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction. In fact, they’re so at odds with the way that people read books that one has to wonder whether the company’s founders have ever done so.

YouTube Demo Video

So there you have the two very different points-of-view. I do think I'm going to download the app to see for myself if this is something I might on occasion enjoy. Take a look at the YouTube promotion for BookTrack and read the two articles, and if anyone out there tries it, or has already tried it, please do let me know what you think of the app - and the overall experience.  Thanks.

Printed Books Are Still Popular

I spotted an interesting article from Shreveport Times columnist Gary Calligas this morning.  In it, Mr. Calligas, who publishes a free monthly magazine for "mature adults" and hosts a Saturday morning radio show aimed at the same audience, talks about his fear that the youngest generations are now doing pretty much all of their reading on one electronic device or another.  According to Calligas, and I agree with him here, such youngsters are completely missing out on the more tactile pleasures associated with reading a book - pleasures that they will never even know they are missing unless someone makes sure that they get a few physical books in their hands before it is too late.

He greatly encourages grandparents (many of whom personally know nothing of the advantages of electronic reading) to buy books for their grandchildren - books they can discuss with them and enjoy together, no matter the age of those grandchildren.  He goes on describes what he saw at a local library sale:

"I was so happy to learn many seniors who were grandparents or great grandparents buying printed books for their grandkids. I know their grandkids are going to be thrilled about receiving them for an upcoming special occasion. One gentleman told me his grandson needs to learn more about American and World History from other sources than what they are teaching in school. So, he added these books will give him the opportunity to talk with his grandson about those certain times in history and to comment on their importance."

In fairness, Mr. Calligas does mention that many young people are driven to reading e-books more as a matter of convenience and lower pricing than for any real pleasures to be derived from electronic reading itself.   He is quick to point out, too, that he has tried reading e-books and neither enjoys reading them or finds the process to be an easy one.

Gary Calligas

All of the author's points are well taken, but I do think that most of us these days, young people included, tend to read both e-books and tree-books.  About one-third of my own reading, for instance, is done via a Kindle or an iPad app allowing me to access my e-books.  On the other hand, my youngest grandson, a seventh-grade student, does his reading exclusively with physical books.  He loves the heft and feel of the books he's reading and especially enjoys collecting them in series.  I enjoy the convenience of having a large number of books on one device without having to worry about finding shelf-space for them all.  (When I want to add a book to my permanent collection, I buy a physical copy even if I have already read it electronically.)  I realize that this is only anecdotal evidence, but I've noticed the same reading habits in my granddaughter, a high school junior who much prefers physical books both when it comes to reading for pleasure and when it comes to reading for study - as I well know since I'm the one financially supporting most of her reading.

Personally, what I'm seeing is that the market share of e-books may have very well peaked for now.  E-books will always be around, and they certainly have their advantages, but at least for now, the very existence of the physical book is not being threatened - despite all the dire predictions otherwise that were so common just three or four years ago.  And that is a wonderful thing.  

These are wonderful times for readers.

E-Book Prices Are High and They Are on the Increase

I've had a feeling for a while now that e-books are getting more and more expensive.  Every time that I price one of the more recently published e-books, the price is so close to that of a hardcover edition of the same book that I opt for the hardcover - or nothing.  

CBS Money Watch has pinned the sharp increases to one decision:

The higher prices have rolled out over the past several months as Amazon (AMZN) struck new e-book distribution deals with the country's biggest publishers, which gave the latter the right to set their own prices, said Peter Hildick-Smith, chief executive of industry researcher Codex Group.

[...]

With the new deals, the publishers set the prices for e-books and pay Amazon a percentage for serving as a transfer agent. The publisher "doesn't have the depth of pocket" to offer the same discounts as Amazon, Hildick-Smith said.

I don't have anything against e-books, and in fact, I prefer e-books over physical books when I don't expect the book to be something that would ever earn a portion of my limited bookshelf space.  This is especially the case with most of the Advance Review Copies of books that I receive  - something that most publishers see as a way to keep their promotional budgets under control.

But would anyone actually prefer to pay the same price as a hardcover, or more, for an electronic copy of a book?  Honestly, I have a hard time imagining that.  And that's exactly what Terry Pratchett's publisher did when pricing Mr. Pratchett's last novel (according to that CBS article it is $11.99 for the e-book and $10.65 for the hardcover).  That just seems weird to me.

As CBS amusingly phrases it, "Readers...can't be blamed for thinking that publishers have lost the story line."  I agree.  Do you?

 

New Fonts for E-books...Can Page Numbering Be Far Behind?

For the last four or five years, I have consistently read more e-books than in the year before.  Too, I have migrated all the way from one of the original Sony Readers, to an upgraded Sony Reader, to a Kindle Paperwhite, and even to a Kindle Fire in the last few years.  So it's not like I'm even remotely close to being anti e-book.

But that doesn't mean that I love everything about reading e-books. For instance, I have never liked the generic font used in e-books, and I absolutely hate it when an e-book does not have real page numbers.  Who wants to be bothered with "position" numbers, percentages of completion, and estimated reading time remaining?  Well, for one, not me.

So it's good to see that positive changes are on the horizon.  According to this Wall Street Journal article, for instance, the font issue is well in hand:

The upgrades aren’t just aesthetic. Typography can affect how fast you read. Some fonts propel the eye forward; others cause fatigue. Using eye-tracking tests, Amazon determined that its new font, Bookerly, allows readers to progress 2% faster than its previous default, the clunky but well-performing workhorse font Caecilia.

Bookerly has received positive reviews but the typography world is even more excited about something else Amazon is releasing at the same time: new software that dictates how text appears on the page. This is the company’s first crack at introducing hyphenation—splitting a word in two to fit more characters on a line and eliminate the wide spaces that occur when there are too few words on a full-justified line. 

These may seem like little things, but if e-books are ever to approach the readability comfort level of books on paper, this is a really big deal.  

Now let's outlaw the publication of e-books that do not include real page numbering...come on, I know you guys can do it.

Free Previews of Future Bestsellers

Good news for fans of e-books...

Starting tomorrow, the major online booksellers (Amazon, Apple, and others) will be offering free downloads of two compilations featuring long excerpts from books that are to be published later this year.

Buzz Books 2015 Fall/Winter is said to feature new work from the likes of Geraldine Brooks, Mitch Albom, and Alice Hoffman.  In addition, YA readers will be able to download Buzz Books 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter.  All told, the two compilations are said to include excerpts from 54 forthcoming releases of fiction and nonfiction.  

I downloaded the 2014 catalog about this time last year and really enjoyed browsing the work of a bunch of new-to-me authors.  I suspect that this kind of thing appeals largely to avid readers who are forever adding to their TBR lists.  If you're one of those, tomorrow is the day to get your free copy.

(Tip:  Those of you with NetGalley accounts can download the compilations right now.)

Even if the Sky Falls Down

Susan Jackson Bybee’s Even if the Sky Falls Down was a nice surprise because I had no idea what to expect from it.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I will mention that I have been an internet buddy of Susan’s for about eight years now and I knew that she had been working on a novel for a while.  I will also confess that if I had not enjoyed Even if the Sky Falls Down, I would probably have chosen not to review the novel at all.  Thankfully, that did not turn out to be the case, because as she proves in her debut novel, Susan Jackson Bybee is a writer.  No doubt about it.

Lily Thompson, formerly a teacher of English to kindergarten students in Seoul, South Korea, badly needs a job.  She loves children and cannot wait to get back into the classroom, but after several job interviews she has come to the realization that the cast on her broken leg is scaring away potential employers.  And now, although Lily really wants to stay in Seoul, figuring that children are children wherever they live, she is desperate enough to interview for a job in the Korean countryside.   But when she learns that she will be working with some of the oldest people in the country rather than with tiny children, Lily, after initially turning down the job, only reluctantly accepts it. 

And she will never be the same.

Part of Lily’s new job is to complete the project that her Canadian predecessor has been forced to abandon in which a group of elderly people are asked to provide an oral history of their experiences during Korea’s terrible civil war.  As the weeks go by, Lily is surprised by how deeply she is bonding with some of her students (and vice versa) and that the process is teaching her as much about herself as it does about Korea’s past. 

Susan Jackson Bybee and Friend

But it is by inserting short transcripts of numerous oral histories into Lily’s story that Bybee deftly changes the novel from one in which readers are likely to focus only on the immediate problems of its central character into one filled with a score of interesting characters.  Each of the elderly Koreans has a unique story to tell and, for the most part, they tell their story in a voice that displays a personality and temperament all their own.  They are survivors and their stories are a reminder that, as always, not all the victims of warfare wear the uniform of one side or the other.

Bottom Line:  Even if the Sky Falls Down is a nicely plotted debut novel that I enjoyed and learned from.  I look forward to more from Susan Jackson Bybee.

Amazon Is At It Again: Kindle Convert

Amazon has just announced a new piece of software (that goes for $19 now while it is on sale at an introductory price) that will allow the user to convert his own tree-books into Kindle-compatible e-books.

When I first saw the headline, I thought this might be something useful for people like me who own a few books that were printed in the second half of the nineteenth century.  But then I read the details and spotted a few "problems."

1.  The software only works on computers running Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Mac (and Linux) users need not apply.

2.  So first I have to drag out that Windows 8 PC that I hate so much BECAUSE it uses Windows, and then wait forever for it to finally finish its frustrating start-up procedure.

3.  Then I have to very slowly and precisely scan each page of the book so that the software can convert everything into an e-book for me.  (Do you have any idea how long it will take to scan a 500-page book, even two pages at a time?)

4.  Then, depending on how much luck I had in scanning every page correctly, I have to hope that the software will do its own job correctly - and by then I will have already invested what are likely to be several hours in the process.  (I wonder if individual pages can be rescanned if I mess up somewhere around page 360.)

5.  Today's flatbed scanners don't really lend themselves to massive scanning projects like those this software requires.

I have a better idea, PUBLISHERS.  Why not make an e-book available at no extra cost for every new tree-book that I purchase from you?  Sure, I know you will kick up the price of the physical book a few bucks...but shouldn't, say, three dollars cover this since you are going to sell many more e-book copies this way than you otherwise would have? 

Or, AMAZON why can't you do this for all the tree-books I've purchased from you already?  You did something very similar with all the music CDs I have purchased from you in the last decade.  You want to lock me in as an e-book and tree-book purchaser?  Just say yes.  Do it.  Then I would have my permanent copy of a book on the shelves, where it belongs, but have a spare reading copy always at my fingertips.

The Kindle Convert software is still somewhat intriguing, I admit, but it is a nonstarter for me because of the scanner limitations with which I would have to cope in order to make the process work.  And no matter how good the software might be in the future, if it remains incompatible with Apple's operating system...no thank you.