Wednesday July 28, 2010
E-Reading: A Personal Gadget History
I’ve been using a cell phone for almost ten years. I know this because I didn’t buy one until I moved to New York, and that was ten years ago this fall. I bought it because my only friend in New York told me all the pay phones in the city were broken and/or filthy. I had been entirely functional in Memphis—even as a weekly newspaper reporter—without one. So I bought a Nokia 8260 at an AT&T store near Madison Square Park and used it to find my first Manhattan apartment—a sublet above the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Chelsea. Here’s what the 8260 looks like, in all its monochrome glory.
I didn’t read books off the Nokia 8260, but since then I’ve had nine more mobile devices—about one a year, tame for a gadget nerd—and I’ve read e-books off six of them. When you look at them in order, it’s kind of mind-blowing how quickly we went from the Nokia 8260 to the iPad. Here’s a personal timeline.
2003: Nokia 3300
I shudder to think that anyone saw me using this beast, but it didn’t seem so crazy at the time—sort of like parachute pants. Nokia’s idea was to create a texting/mp3 playing monster that would become the new Walkman. In my defense, I got this baby for free from some swag pile. And I didn’t read any books on it.
2004: Motorola MPx200
In its day, this phone was the shit. A flip phone running Windows Mobile, its casing was like the plastic around a big rotary desk phone from the ‘50s. I felt like Ethan Hawke in Gattaca using this phone—like a messenger from the Deco Future. I bought it on eBay and—I now remember—I had to buy an external camera attachment for it so I could start a photoblog. Remember how novel that was? I also started reading e-books on it, using the Mobipocket application. Mostly Project Gutenberg stuff. Windows Mobile—like a lot of other Windows products—is such a tragedy. Here Microsoft had a mobile platform and a developer community in 2004, but they couldn’t get their act together in the three years before the iPhone was introduced. Then Apple came along and made the same basic idea so damned consumable that Windows didn’t stand a chance.
10 days in 2004: Motorola MPx
This was the hot phone of 2004. Just check the archives at Gizmodo and Engadget. The cool thing about it was that it had a full keyboard and a double hinge that allowed you to open it up like either a standard clam-shell or like a little keyboard. I got to play with a prototype for ten days in 2004, after I convinced GQ to let me write about it. I didn’t get around to reading any books on it, and the interface seemed a little wonky—but, hey, it was a prototype. The story ran, but the phone never shipped. I felt so bad I never pitched GQ again.
2005-2006: Audiovox SMT5600
Another Windows Mobile phone. I clearly remember showing this to some publishing acquaintances—with real jobs at the Big Six—who were baffled that I was reading books off this thing (again using Mobipocket.) E-books were dead, right? It seemed so. I owned this phone when I first began distributing Single, my first e-book, directly from my site. And if you want a laugh, check out these instructions I posted for reading an e-book using the notes function on an iPod. This was just four short years ago.
2006-2007: Samsung D307
I plead temporary insanity. I think I was seduced by the full keyboard and the dual-hinge design. (Perhaps I was trying to work through the trauma of the GQ/MPx debacle.) In any case, you couldn’t read books on this, so I moved on.
2007-2008: Samsung Blackjack
Back to Windows Mobile and Mobipocket. Now you can say what you want about Mobipocket, but a function it had—that most current reading apps lack—is the ability to auto-scroll. You could get the speed just right and let the words roll by. I liked reading that way. Unfortunately, on the way to the mainstream, e-books picked up some print nostalgia, culminating in the iBookstore’s cloying little page flips. I’ll be glad when those melt away.
2008-2009: AT&T Tilt
It didn’t have a dual-hinge, but the Tilt—an HTC Kaiser in disguise—fulfilled the promise of the MPx with Windows Mobile functionality and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. But this was the last Windows Mobile phone I will likely ever own.
2009-present: iPhone 3GS
I’m no Apple fanboy, as you can tell by my late adoption of the iPhone. I think their computers are overpriced and that most of the price goes to advertising. (I think they may have more inherent value than Windows machines, but I still feel like you’re paying for more advertising and brand aura in a Mac, which bothers me on a metabolic level.) That said, I do think the iPhone interface is the most revolutionary change to come to personal electronics since the mouse. I have never owned a Kindle, or a dedicated e-reader, but as soon as I got an iPhone, I knew the e-reading revolution was for real this time. (And Amazon did too, as evidenced by their quick purchase of Stanza.) I’ve probably read as many books off the iPhone as I did off all my Windows Mobile phones combined. And, for the first time, I actually started to buy e-books.
2010: iPad
Yeah, I bought one. The day it was released. I may have even delivered the first ever literary reading from one. And I understand how important it is to the e-reading market, since I’ve sat with people who are incredibly tech-savvy who still cannot contemplate reading a book off an iPhone screen. The iPad will bring e-books to them and to a legion of novices who find the device intuitive and, well, book-sized. But here’s my secret. I still mostly read off my iPhone. What do I read, and where do I get it? I’ll break that down in a later post.
Posted by jim at 07:11 AM || Comments
Monday July 19, 2010
Nobody likes the slush pile. Let’s get rid of it.
Lately the poor slush pile has been getting lots of ink. Laura Miller worries the public can’t handle its horror. The Awl traces its history. Tin House tries to slow its relentless accretion and sparks a backlash in the process. I believe the heat the journal took for requiring submissions to be accompanied by a receipt from an independent bookstore was well-deserved, by the way. The shrill plea came off as tone deaf because it ignored a) that anyone who’s heard of Tin House is, by definition, a book nerd, and b) that Tin House readers and Tin House submitters are likely the same set, so alienating the latter also pisses off the former, which—well—hastens the inevitable demise of Tin House.
But I’m not defending the eternal openness of the slush pile. In fact, I think we should do away with the slush pile entirely. Some of you, particularly those of you who work for literary journals—or habitually submit to them (interesting verb, that)—are probably scrolling down to the comments now to register your complaints. The open slush pile, you might argue, is the foundation of democracy and freedom of speech. If everyone can’t submit to any publication at anytime, what will happen to America and, worse, to Literature? But you could also argue (and I might, although I’m not married to this point) that this cant is but the populist face of journals’—and indeed any curatorial endeavor’s—discernment and, yes, elitism. The slush pile is like the Republican canard that everyone should defend the rights of the ultra-rich, since you might one day become ultra-rich—although really, no, you probably will not.
I don’t think it’s necessary to go this far, however, to justify the end of the slush pile. The fact is, it isn’t working for anyone. Not for publishers, certainly, but not even for writers.
Here’s how it works, from a writer’s perspective. You go to a journal’s website, fill out that robo-form they all use and upload your doc. Then you wait. And wait … and wait. Months pass—during which time you receive at least one e-mail from the journal begging for money—and then you receive, in all likelihood, an automated response. Maybe not. Maybe you get a few lines of feedback. That’s the upside. The situation can be much worse, however, if the journal requires a receipt from a bookstore, a buck (which I can see as a reasonable speed bump a journal might place on submissions), or $20 (an unconscionable practice employed by at least one lit site that miraculously manages to retain a decent reputation).
What’s the best possible outcome? Your story is accepted, and maybe a year later it appears and is distributed to the journal’s meager readership, who probably won’t read it because they only bought the journal in the first place so they could submit their work to it. I’m not saying the journal contributes nothing. It provides a few reputation credits and exposure, perhaps, to editors and/or agents in a position to do something with your work. But it isn’t providing readers, per se, at least not efficiently. In the eighteen months it takes a story to go from submission to publication, most writers could accumulate as many readers as most journals deliver by posting it to their Tumblr. If the story has to be submitted to four of five places before it’s accepted, the value of the journal’s circulation declines accordingly. And, at the moment, these two routes—self-distribution and the submission path—are mutually exclusive. Put it out there and it’s out of the game. More on that in a minute.
How is the slush pile working for publications? Not so well, it seems. The cost of wading through it—even just the social costs of maintaining an army of volunteer readers with vague promises of CV lines—has to be enormous. And it’s wasteful, since—as any honest editor will tell you—most submissions fall into the category of “not even close.” The fact that journals feel honor-bound to keep the slush pile open in deference to some ideal of accessibility, yet know that most things in it will miss the point entirely, is—I would argue—at the root of a love-hate relationship editors have with their would-be contributors. This low-grade contempt then can be seen coming out, all sideways, in passive-aggressive gestures like Tin House’s receipt policy.
So let’s drop the pretense and kill the slush pile. Manuscripts considered by solicitation only. (As most of them are now anyway, let’s be honest.) How will writers and editors find each other then? Simple. Writers will put their work out—on blogs or in writing communities or wherever—and editors will find it. This addresses, I think, two new realities.
The first is that writers don’t really need journals for distribution. Now, instead of tying up work for eighteen months, they can put it out there, and maybe it will find an audience. Maybe it will even gain value by the time a journal decides to sink money into it, which will benefit the journal in the end. The second new reality is that journals no longer need to be sent work to find it. It is everywhere. How will they sort through the work that’s out there and find what’s best for their publication? Well, I think that could be solved in all sorts of novel ways—nominations, tagging schemes, fostering writing communities—all of which would be less ridiculous (and probably less expensive and time-consuming) than the slush pile.
While I think abolishing the slush pile is a good idea—and perhaps an inevitable one as editors realize that their role isn’t to create content, but to shape content that’s already there—there are two tightly-help beliefs that are keeping it from happening. Both, however, are fallacies.
Fallacy 1: If something is available for free, people won’t pay for it.
Long after the disruption of the music industry by Napster, we can put this one to rest. Every song ever recorded is, in principle, free. Yet people buy music from iTunes and listen to it on Pandora. Why? Because convenient access and curation have value. If an established literary brand—or an upstart—decided to put the efforts they now put into the slush pile into discovering and promoting the best fiction already on the web, readers would reward the effort.
Fallacy 2: If something is already online, people have already seen it.
Are you kidding me? I miss half the updates my wife posts on Facebook. The fact is that we’re so inundated with data—and there’s so much of it out there—that being “previously published” on the Internet drains content of very little of its value, and promoting deserving work from smaller circles to larger circles is the proper function of modern curators.
So let’s do it. Let’s kill the slush pile. Or, rather, let’s stop duplicating it by asking writers to e-mail it around the country and the world. Let’s, instead, commit to filtering it where it lives. Death to the slush pile. Long live the slush.
Posted by jim at 06:48 AM || Comments
Friday July 09, 2010
Why I am exactly like Rocket from the Crypt—but with e-books
It’s becoming evident—now, even to me—that what I really wanted to be was a rock star. Preferably in the ’90s. I have these e-books that look like records and cassettes. A desire to write like the Pixies rock. The fear of being Eddie Vedder. All the symptoms are there. So, rather than fight it, here is how my Summer of (Free) E-Book Love—which I just announced yesterday—was inspired by Rocket From the Crypt.
If you’re not familiar with RFTC, they’re what you’d expect to get if you crossed Danzig with Bruce Springsteen. But that’s not important to this story. What is important is that leading up to their major-label debut—1995’s Scream, Dracula, Scream!—they went on a six-week-long free tour in support of their self-released LP Hot Charity. Admission was free for the entire tour. How awesome is that?
I’m not going to tour this summer—I don’t have Interscope to foot the bill—but I am going to try to give away as many free e-books as I can between now and Labor Day, in anticipation of the fall release of Why They Cried. In particular, I’ll be recommending Single, my first e-book. It contains two stories that first appeared in One Story and the Land-Grant College Review, both of which will appear in Why They Cried. It’s a great advance sample of the collection.
So how am I going to give more of these away? I’m open to ideas, help, and suggestions, but I’ve started by posting instructions for downloading Single on every platform, from the Kindle to plain old paper. It’s easy to forget that most people have still never read an e-book. I’m instructing friends all the time how to get at my books, so it made sense to post these instructions all in one place. I’m also happy to help anyone who’s having trouble accessing my books. Think of it as e-book tech support. I’ve even set up a phone number for such requests at 347-WHY-THEY. You can also e-mail me or reach me on Twitter. And I really am open to ideas. It’s the Summer of (Free) E-book Love, for chrissakes. Anything goes. Spread the word, give me one of those Facebook thumbs-up on this page—I understand this is how publishers will now determine author advances—and shoot me your ideas via e-mail or in comments. And thanks for reading.
By the way, Scream, Dracula, Scream! totally rocks and I completely recommend it if you’re exactly like me, only younger.
