Not So Fast: E-Books Will Not Kill Physical Books After All

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A piece over on the Washington Post "Wonkblog" today touches on a trend that I've been noticing among my friends - both in the real world and on the internet.  It seems that everyone I know who wants an e-book reader already has one or two of them.  If not, they have already downloaded the e-book reader apps for Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, Bluefire, OverDrive...you get the idea...to their smart phones, iPads, Macs and PCs and will not be buying a standalone reader at all.  

So, as it turns out, the Nook will not be the savior of Barnes & Noble, after all.  As B&N has finally admitted, it just won't happen, so they are shedding that hardware business.  

The huge drop in the number of e-reader sales translates, of course, into a leveling off of the growth of the sales of actual e-books.  And, as the article points out, this is mainly because e-books do not readily adapt themselves to all reading situations.  They are not great for reading in bed, for instance.  Nor for reading long, detailed, heavily footnoted non-fiction books that the reader will want to keep on the shelf for future reference, or if they like, as  "trophy" books.  They are perfect for reading while traveling or commuting to and from the job on public transportation.  They are great for reading in a waiting room.  They are wonderful for snatching a page or two of reading while standing in one of those slow-moving bank lines.  They just don't work everywhere.

As the article puts it:

But the fact that that leveling off is already happening with e-books suggests that the ratio of printed books sold to electronic books is going to stabilize at a higher level than it had seemed likely a year or two ago in the era of extraordinary e-book growth. 

Read the whole Washington Post article here (I find it ironic that Amazon's founder just bought this newspaper).

I admit that I like this trend.  It means that print books are very likely to continue to dominate the publishing industry both in sales and prestige.  As an avid reader and book collector, I like that.

The Pitcher

Whether they will admit it or not, most guys still react to a heart-tugging baseball novel the same way they reacted to one when they were kids.  Almost every boy, at one time or another - even if only for a moment - has probably dreamed of becoming a professional athlete, and in my day, that usually meant dreaming of major league baseball.  And, reliving those dreams for a day or two via a good baseball novel is still quite a kick for guys like us.  The Pitcher, William Hazelgrove’s new novel allowed me to escape into that world again for a little while last week.

Ricky Hernandez is a kid with an arm.  Not yet in high school, Ricky is already throwing a baseball a consistent 74 miles an hour.  And, on those rather rare occasions he gets the ball over the plate, he is pretty much unhittable in his youth league.  The problem is that opposing coaches know how wild he is and they give the take sign to even their best hitters when Ricky is not on his game.  The results are predictable.

Ricky’s mom, fighting an illness that has the potential to prove fatal, knows that her son has the natural ability to be special if only he can learn to control his pitches.  Because the boy’s father is no longer living with the family, she diligently relies on books and diagrams to coach Ricky – a strategy that most definitely is not working.  But desperate times call for desperate measures (as the cliché goes), and she decides to grab the attention of the former World Series MVP who hibernates across the street in his garage.  She knows that if Ricky does not make his high school team in the open tryouts that are just a few weeks away he might never played organized baseball again.  It is not going to be easy, however, even if she does get some MVP coaching.

William Elliott Hazelgrove

The Pitcher is one of my favorite reads of the summer, a summer during which I needed to find something about baseball to feel good about again because of the doping scandals and the sheer awfulness of my hometown team.  William Hazelgrove has done it.  I am pleased to find that my love of the game is as deep as ever; it only took The Pitcher to rekindle it.

Bottom Line: The Pitcher may be labeled as a YA novel, but readers will not really notice or care about that.  The book also touches on issues not related to baseball that impact Ricky’s life – especially alcoholism and living in America as the first generation child of an “illegal alien.”  There is a lot going on here.  Baseball fans, this one is for you.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Bob Wills Is Still the King

I just want to share a little taste of what I like most about living in Texas (except for the decade I worked in Africa and Europe, this has always been home for me).  The scene shown in the video just below is representative of the kind of live music I can find with four or five miles of the house on any typical Sunday afternoon.  I am only limited by my reluctance to climb off the couch.  This particular event was an outdoor one, but most take place inside a "joint" of some sort.

"Bob Wills is still the king," is more than just a saying for many Texans.  Wills was largely responsible for popularizing Western Swing in the thirties and forties, and to me, his classic songs still sound fresh today.  I love the lyrics to these old songs but really have a soft spot for instrumentals like this version of "Boot Heel Drag."  



Featured here are Jody Cameron (steel guitar), Kevin Carter (fiddle and vocal), Jim Sloan (guitar and vocal), and Harlan Kubos (bass guitar).

Thoughts from a Rare Book Dealer Who Hates Physical Books

Proving that it takes all kinds, here's an interesting (serious?) article in The Guardian in which a British rare book dealer confesses to the world that reading on the Kindle has "turned him off paper books."

Forced, because he inadvertently forgot his Kindle at home while traveling, to read an actual physical book on an airplane, Rick Gekoski seems to have suffered some sort of mental collapse.  Just listen to him describe the horrors he was forced to endure:

It has been a few years since I read an actual book on a plane, and I was astonished at how cumbersome, how intractably wrong, it felt in my hands. I found myself – which I have never done before and heartily disapprove of – folding the book in half so that only the page I was reading was visible. That gave me a cramp in my right hand, and the pages wouldn't stay still, quite, as I read. I found myself swaying slightly, as if at the Wailing Wall. Then I went back to the two-handed double-page-opened position – even describing it makes it seem like an obscure sort of manoeuvre, rather than a natural function – but I still couldn't settle down. The book was too fat. It was too heavy. It spread out too widely. It was as if I had taken an unruly small pet onto the plane and couldn't keep it under control.

Never again. I would even prefer to watch a tiny film on one of those seat telly thingies than read a book on a plane.

Surely there is a place to report this kind of physical abuse at the hands of sadistic publishers that still insist upon printing books.  If not, there damn well should be.

Mr. Gekoski admits to still buying some hardcover books, both those he wants to annotate and use for future reference and those he knows will be one-time reads.  But he sees the day when even those dwindling purchases are likely to disappear forever - and remember this man is a book dealer!  Let's hope he is the exception, and not the rule.

I own an e-book reader (Sony) and have for years.  I have every e-reader app known to man downloaded on both my iPad and iPad mini.  Some of the apps are even on my smart phone.  But I only read e-books when traveling or when a publisher insists on sending review copies out only in that format.  And, more importantly, I find the electronic reading experience to be hugely inferior to that of reading from a physical book.  I retain less, my mind wanders more, and I have to re-read whole paragraphs at a time after realizing that I haven't yet absorbed a single word on the page.

No offense intended to Mr. Gekoski, but I am hoping that this is more of a tongue-in-cheek piece than it appears to be on my first reading.  If not, I have to say that the joke is on him because it does make him look rather silly.

Saving Paradise

I read a lot of crime fiction.  Crime fiction has, in fact, become my “comfort genre,” the kind of book I turn to when my reading has gone stale and needs a kick-start to get it rolling again.   But that also means I have grown very familiar with “the type,” those male detectives who sometimes all seem to have been spawned by the same dysfunctional family.  They can be so alike sometimes that they become dangerously interchangeable in the mind of the reader. 

Not so with Mike Bond’s Pono Hawkins.  Pono, a Special Forces vet who spends his days surfing Waikiki, giving surfing lessons to the less talented, and writing for surfing magazines, is different.  He is a “reluctant detective,” an amateur who wants to solve a murder because everyone else is so overeager to call it an accident.  And, frankly, Pono has fallen a little bit in love with the pretty young woman whose body bumps into him early one morning as he wades into the surf in search of the next good wave.  This is personal – very personal.

Sylvia Gordon, an investigative journalist for The Honolulu Post, was onto a story big enough to get her killed.  It is obvious even to an amateur like Pono that the young woman was a threat to some very powerful people.  When his own nosing around gets their attention, as it soon does, Pono finds out just how willing these people are to kill to protect their secrets.  Pono, though, is not a man without resources and certain talents, and he is not as easy to kill as the naïve young reporter who was in way over her head.  Game on.

Mike Bond

Saving Paradise is a rousing crime thriller – but it is so much more.  Pono Hawkins is a dedicated environmentalist, a native of Hawaii who very much loves the islands but regrets what they have become.  Pono is a thinker, a man who sees a bigger picture than most, and Mike Bond deftly (and painlessly) uses the character to instruct the reader in Hawaiian history from an insider’s point-of-view. 

Bottom Line: Saving Paradise is a highly atmospheric thriller focusing on a side of Hawaiian life that tourists seldom see – or want to see.  Native Hawaiians have a long history of being exploited by people with money, one that to perhaps a lesser degree continues even today.  Pono Hawkins, a Hawaiian with a prominent white ancestor, will tell you all about it.  

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Movie Trailer: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Starring Ben Stiller)

Proving, I suppose, that it's never too early to generate some buzz for a new book or movie, a trailer for the new "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" film has just been released to the wild.

This can, I suppose, be considered a remake of Danny Kaye's 1947 version of the same 1939 James Thurber story, but it does not seem to have much resemblance to that old movie musical.  This version stars Ben Stiller and, at least from the trailer, appears to be a more serious role for Stiller than the same rather silly one I've grown a little weary of over the years.

The movie is scheduled for a December release: