An Unexpected Reading Experiment

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up the audio version of Marsha Pessl's 514 page book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and planned to enjoy it over the next three or four weeks of my daily commute to the office. I was unfamiliar with the book when I spotted it on the library shelf but it looked more interesting in audio than any of the others around, so I grabbed it and started listening to the first disc on my way home. I knew it would take me a while to complete the book because the audio version is 17 discs long, something around 19 hours of listening, I would guess.

I found out yesterday that the book must have been placed on the shelf by mistake because there is a list of people who have requested that it be held for them. That meant that I was unable to renew the book yesterday for another two weeks, about how much time I needed to finish the last nine discs in the set. I hate people who keep requested books longer than their allotted time, so I couldn't bring myself to just hang onto Special Topics and pay the fine when I finished it up...just didn't seem right.

But I caught a break when I spotted a copy of the actual book on the shelves, so all is not lost. This is a coming-of-age debut novel and the first half of the book is largely spent in character development and the set-up of a mystery revolving around a beautiful, but strange, high school teacher. The second half of the book promises to be a good bit different, I think, from the first half and now I'll know for sure.

But here's the "experiment" part. I've never read a book this way, half in audio and half in physical book form. I doubt that many people, if any, ever have and I'm wondering how the two halves will compare. Will I find that I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more than the second half? If so, should the credit go to the reader (who is excellent) or to the writer who may have lost her way in the second half? Will the overall "feel" of the book remain the same? Will my opinion and rating of the book go up or down as I finish it?

I'm already finding it much more difficult to get into the "rhythm" of the writing than I expected it would be. The reader gives such a flawless, conversational reading of the author's words that I was surprised at the "density" of some of the writing. That rhythm is coming to me slowly, but surely, and my reading is going much better now, I'm relieved to see.

So my reading of Special Topics in Calamity Physics will be 248 "pages" of audio and 266 pages of reading, an almost perfectly even split, not something I'm ever likely to repeat...should be interesting (at least to me).

The Travesty of Daylight Saving Time

Just when things were starting to seem normal again the rug gets pulled from under the millions of early commuters in this country. Finally, they were able to see at least a touch of daylight in the mornings before they entered their often windowless workplaces. But not tomorrow, thanks to the idiotic Daylight Saving Time legislation that our brilliant representatives decided to make effective even earlier this year.

My work commute starts at 6:10 a.m., Houston-time, every morning and for the last two weeks it allowed me to watch the sun come up and to arrive at the office under enough daylight that I actually felt that I was not arriving for work in the middle of the night but at the start of a new day. It is amazing how much better that made me feel about the workday ahead of me. But that all ends tomorrow morning thanks to all those congressional brainiacs we insist on returning to Washington D.C. over and over again. I'll be trudging to the front door in the dark tomorrow morning. Thanks, guys.

It is not just commuters like me. I really feel sorry for those high school students I often see standing at the bus stop in pitch darkness, especially as cold as it has been around here lately. They, too, were starting to see a little daylight before that old yellow bus stopped to pick them up. No more, guys. Congress knows better than that.

John J. Miller, writing at NRO Weekend, has a nice recap of how we reached this insanity and shoots down all of the original arguments for implementing DST and for keeping it alive. But as he says, maybe we should keep our mouths shut because we surely don't want Congress tinkering with the law any more than it just did:

"But maybe we should keep that troubling little fact to ourselves, before Congress decides to impose the National Bedtime Hour."

I'm starting to understand how Charlie Brown felt every time he approached that football and Lucy snatched it away from him at the last second.

Authors Who Want to Give Away Their Books

Publishers and authors seem to be coming around to the idea that giving away copies of their product might, in the long run, put a lot of money in their pockets. I've heard of four instances in the past few days where a book has been made available for free download on the internet. So, unlike the fossils running the music business, it appears that publishers are fast becoming aware that good things happen to those who make the public aware of their existence by giving them something for nothing.

Oprah and Suze Orman paired up to make a year-old book of Orman's available for free download for 33 hours last week, an offer that over 1.1 million people decided to accept. The result: hard copies of the book are selling as well as ever and the book is doing very well on Amazon's best seller list despite its age. Orman's financial help books are not the kind of thing that works best on a monitor screen, so that makes perfect sense. I suspect that many of the people who downloaded the book are going to want their own hard copy of the thing. And, maybe best of all, hundreds of thousands of readers have been exposed to Orman's work for the first time. This is all good for her.



Random House did something similar for three days with Charles Bock's debut novel, Beautiful Children, a 432 page book, in a move that will expose Bock to more readers than he could ever have dreamed possible for his first novel.

Avideh Bashirrad, a Random House marketing executive, says the free download, which follows a similar experiment by HarperCollins, is a way of "introducing new readers to the book who may decide to buy a copy after sampling it. After all, in a bookstore you can browse as much of a book as you want to before deciding to buy it, and we want to give people a chance to do the same online."

Bock, 38, says, "The more people reading my book, the happier I am."

Does he fear he'll lose money if they read it free? "If someone wants to try to read all 432 pages online, I'd say "Good job,' but I figure they'd want a copy of the book at some point."

As for printing it out, "it'd probably take a ream of paper and a whole printer cartridge."

And, as mentioned in the article, Harper Collins has already tried the same thing.

There is even one author, Charles Sheehan-Miles, who has set up a site to give away his own work. Why? Well, he sees it this way: "...the biggest challenge most authors face isn't online piracy. It's not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely -- no one has ever heard of them."

I have to agree. It's hard to make the argument that on-line piracy is a bigger problem for a new author than plain old "obscurity" is. The whole download took less than three seconds and I do plan to read at least some of the book. It was very unlikely that I would have even known of the existence of this author or his book in any other way, so this has to be a plus for him in the long run.

This just might be one new marketing trend that will be good for both readers and writers. It's good to see so many so willing to take a chance on the possibilities.

Titlepage.tv - First Episode

I discovered a remarkable new website last night that I really enjoyed. It's called Titlepage.tv and it has just produced its first video program, a simultaneous interview of four authors: Richard Price, Susan Choi, Colin Harrison and Charles Bock. It has good production values and promises to be a nice addition to the web for book lovers all over the world.

Now the really good news is that the videos are going to be available as podcasts. I didn't discover the site until pretty late last night and that didn't leave me the time to watch the whole show right then. But I noticed an icon below the video player that was labeled "Video podcasts in iTunes" and found that clicking on it automatically started an upload of the program to my iTunes directory. The upload took about 21 minutes but from that directory it only took a few seconds to transfer a copy of the video to my iPod so that I could watch the program during my lunch hour today (and now I have a copy of my own). How great is that? Check it out; I think you'll like this one.

Did She Commit a Crime?

To be fair to the publisher of the fake memoir, Love and Consequences, I mentioned yesterday it does appear that the company is doing everything it can to recall all the books shipped to bookstores and to get it all behind them as quickly as possible. The thing I still find hardest to believe, however, is how Riverhead Books could drop the ball this way. How were the fact-checkers so easily duped into believing this story? Wishful thinking?

(Photo Credit: Sol Neelman - International Herald Tribune)

Blomberg. com has a follow-up article detailing Riverhead's efforts to make things right. I wonder what kind of financial hit they will take from this fiasco because publishing, then pulping, 24,000 hardcover books has to cost a small fortune.

``Love and Consequences'' was published just last week to widespread praise. Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group, had printed about 24,000 copies, of which 19,000 were shipped to stores.

Now the deeply embarrassed publisher is moving fast to control the damage. The book's page on the Penguin Web site has been deleted, the author's book tour has been canceled and, most significantly, the books are being recalled from bookstores.

In addition, Riverhead is defending itself from charges of sloppy fact-checking. According to a statement from executive director of publicity Marilyn Ducksworth released yesterday:

``Prior to publication the author provided a great deal of evidence to support her story: photographs, letters; parts of Peggy's (i.e., Seltzer's) life story in another published book; Peggy's story had been supported by one of her former professors; Peggy even introduced the agent to people who misrepresented themselves as her foster siblings.''

Now I have to wonder whether Margaret Seltzer's dishonesty has cost the job of one or more Riverhead editors. If not, should it? Does Riverhead have grounds to file criminal charges against this con artist for signing a contract with them under fraudulent circumstances? She apparently did much more than simply lie to the publisher; she got others to lie for her, misrepresented photos and faked letters. Shouldn't she be charged with a crime? Can she be sued in civil court for the losses that Riverhead is going to suffer as a result of her lying?

The first paragraph of the article says it all... like athletes on steroids? "Incentives to cheat continue to outweigh the fear of getting caught." Everybody else is doing it...here we go again.

Lies and Liars: Is It Worth It?

How does anyone in her right mind believe that she can still get away with this kind of thing in a world in which almost everyone is hooked to the internet? We live in a world of instant news, pictures are lifted from other publications and spread across the world instantly, and unusual stories like the one this woman is telling get instant attention from media outlets of all types and locations.

It is astounding that she got away with her scam as long as she did and her publisher and editor should be ashamed that they were so easily duped. Unbelievable.

In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

...

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published "Love and Consequences," is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Seltzer's book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Oregon, where she currently lives.

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

Read the complete Herald Tribune article and you will be even more astounded that Margaret Seltzer believed for a minute that she could pull this con job off. Just when you think you've seen it all...here we go again.