Books Archives
November 21, 2007
"My wife wants a Kindle. She's dead to me now..."
I'm feeling a bit guilty about yesterday's Kindle post, which was sarcastic. But since then I've been tracking 'Kindle' on twitter and I've seen no more than two or three positive opinions of the gadget amongst hundreds and hundreds of Kindle-related tweets (my favourite: "my wife wants a Kindle. She's dead to me now"). And opinions are like arseholes, aren't they?
Anyway, thinking about it, I'm still full of reservations and questions: why not pre-load it with loads of great books from happy publishers? Why the frankly clumsy pay-to-read model for blogs and newspapers: wouldn't publishers have jumped at the potential for a really big audience and a rev share on advertising? Why not aim for ubiquity by allowing the thing to read the millions of PDF eBooks that are already out there? Why no social features: share this book, message my friends... Why no special Harry Potter or Dan Brown launch editions? Why nothing to really get your teeth into?
The Kindle - which I really wanted to be a thing of beauty, a lovely package - has made it into the world loaded with compromises and hard-to-grasp niggly bits instead of mind-blowing content and really persuasive ideas.
Its reception - at least from the vocal geeks I've been reading - has been almost universally negative and, returning just for a second to my Segway comparison from yesterday, Bezos has some experience of a brand that never recovered from the kicking it got from the early adopters who should have loved it but laughed instead.
November 20, 2007
Kindle. Segway for books?
Some people are calling Amazon's Kindle 'iTunes for books'. I'm calling it 'Segway for books'. Not because it's got two wheels and a giro-stabiliser but because it's got Jeff Bezos on it. Jeff is a fascinating and clever man (I'd like to meet him one day. I tried to once but a bizarre canapé-related incident caused me to miss him as he went by. Always felt I could have nipped the whole messy Segway episode in the bud if it weren't for that shrimp on a stick).
Anyway, Segway I mean Kindle. Over-complex (just look at this lot), over-priced and over... er... there. I can't help thinking there must have been some Segway engineers on the committee that decided you could email documents to Amazon for conversion to Kindle format and then wait while they email them back to you so you can transfer them via USB to the device...
What worries me is that in a year or two we'll all be sitting round asking: "why didn't they just do a really simple implementation of the obviously awesome electronic-paper and sell it cheap to seed take-up of the book format?" or "why didn't they get Apple to do it?". Having said that, I would like one (Amazon PR people looking for UK bloggers to try it out might be reading this).
And while we're talking about Amazon and Apple, have you seen this quite brilliant and painstaking bit of brand demolition using an Amazon list? Someone explain to me the peculiar network dynamic that makes an Amazon list the right weapon for this whinge.
Pic from Esther Dyson's photostream.
January 12, 2007
Xmas presents we liked 1: Carl Hiaasen's Flush
Easing myself back into blogging in '07 with some reviews of the best Xmas toys and books and stuff (maybe some of the total rubbish too – one of my most popular entries ever is this Rainbow Art slating from a couple of years ago).
Hiaasen is a slick, funny thriller writer – one of the elite of sophisticated American thriller writers who get good reviews in the broadsheets and sell by the wheelbarrow-load in supermarkets too. His kids' books (this is his second) are brilliant. Now that it's OK for serious writers to knock out children's books (see Elmore Leonard's equally great Coyote's In The House – the Harry Potter effect, I guess) we're going to see lots more of these crossover works from established adult auhors.
This one is a fast and funny crime thriller with a green theme (sewage, greed, the everglades) and has the usual mix of Hiaasen types: the stoical hero, the wise rogue, the venal capitalist and assorted meatheads, innocents and sidekicks. The principal characters here, though, are kids and the environmental theme is one they easily connect with. I'm reading Flush to my seven year-old girl and eight year-old boy and it's a real pleasure to read something that's sharp and grown-up while still within their range.
I usually stop at one chapter per night but the kids are finding it easy to push me to read another with this one. It's also really interesting to learn that a writer can paint a very convincing, quite dark and urban canvas without the usual cast of prostitutes, drug dealers and rapists. The wild side, here, is limited to booze and tattoos and I haven't found myself explaining any dubious practices to the kids. The best book we've read together since, well, probably since the last Hiaasen: Hoot (which also has a green theme – endangered owls and greedy property developers).
September 12, 2006
Things I love...
The Dover Press free samples. Always something useful, always something bonkers. Next time you're in the West End go into the Dover shop in Earlham Street – a proper goldmine of graphic ephemera (including all those fantastic woodcut creatures from the O'Reilly books).
June 27, 2006
A new book from Adam Wishart
My friend Adam has written a book. It's about cancer and he weaves together the story of his own father's death from cancer with a history of the disease. The reviews are in and they are spectacularly good.
January 19, 2006
Books and bombs
Will books be replaced (or even substantially substituted) by ebooks and hand-held readers? Robert McCrumb in The Observer thinks so. Maybe he's right. A better question – do they need to replaced – is rarely asked. Instead, we line up around our entrenched positions – apocalyptic-Luddite or euphoric-futurist – both conveniently informed by the same brittle, reductive view of technology that says: "It is possible therefore it will happen".
Arguing from the potential of a new technology is almost always a mug's game. A technology's potential – positive, negative or indifferent – is always and necessarily hedged around by its alarmingly complicated context: social, economic, political.
This context invariably derails new technologies, sending them down various dead-ends or permanently mitigating their scary/exciting (delete where applicable) potential.
A crass but real example: nuclear weapons. Arguing solely from the death-dealing potential of the hydrogen bomb would leave one wondering what the hell we're still doing here. The planet should, by now, have been laid waste a thousand times over.
We're still here not because the bombs are crap but because the context – the whole, spinning galaxy of stuff that provides friction for events – didn't let it. Likewise, books will persist and they'll do so mostly because the massive economic friction provided by the culture and the market will hold back the alternatives. Books have five hundred years of resistance to annihilation to call on. They're tough. They'll survive.
November 16, 2005
Sophisticated kids' fiction
Elmore Leonard, A Coyote's in the House
Carl Hiaasen, Hoot
Under the seedy glamour and wise-cracking cynicism of your classic American crime novel there's usually a pretty basic story with all the ingredients for a great kids' book – a hero, a journey, a challenge, a resolution blah blah. I don't know why nobody thought of this before but Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, two of the best living crime writers, have both recently had a go at this new sub-genre (what shall we call it? Kids' Crime? Kid Noir?) and with great success. I think the Hiaasen is my favourite but it's close.
Both feature classic crime fiction heros: brave, laconic, drily funny (although Leonard's happens to be a dog and Hiaasen's a thirteen year-old boy) and both stick to the well-trodden landscape of modern crime noir: Hiaasen's suburban Florida and Leonard's Hollywood. I guess these books are aimed at young teens but my 5 and 7 year-olds have been laughing like drains at Hiaasen's Hoot at bedtime over the last few nights. It's such a good read that we've wound up reading two chapters instead of the usual one on several occasions. A real pleasure.
The Hiaasen features a bunch of endangered Burrowing Owls which, it turns out, are a cause celebre in real-life Florida and the Leonard is illustrated by Lauren Child, which is a bonus.
September 18, 2005
Will Self in The Wood Between The Worlds
I'm reading the kids the first three books from The Chronicles of Narnia at the moment and very very brilliant and engrossing they are too (never read them before). From his Independent column I learn that Will Self's a C.S.Lewis fan. The good thing about the paper's otherwise-annoying paid-for service is that the free taster is just long enough to include the punchline of a very good coincidence gag (but not the part where he talks about Narnia and The Wood Between The Worlds, which sort of makes this whole entry pointless, I suppose. Sorry).
July 05, 2005
Things were different in the 1950s
My mother-in-law gave us a little bundle of gorgeous 1950s I-Spy books so I looked them up and found this nice memory of their production back in the Sixties and Seventies from Ralph Mills who was assistant to Big Chief I-SPY in an office above a hardware shop in Paddington.
June 10, 2005
Mouse superstar
Is JK Rowling the only kids' book gazillionaire? I'd like to think there's room for more than one kids' book superstar – someone, maybe, who makes their money (more quietly than JK) from multiple national markets and formats and from a younger, less bankable audience? If there is, it's probably Lucy Cousins, creator of the astonishing Maisy (if you have kids and you haven't heard of Maisy then you're probably a Mormon, or a vegan or something).
Maisy's a sophisticated heroine, in a deceptively crude style (always shown, Egyptian-style, in profile). She's brightly coloured and lives on her own, although she seems to be about 4 (maybe 5) She does exactly what she wants (including, occasionally, driving a bus or flying an aeroplane). Oh, and she's a mouse. And a global marketing phenomenon, obviously.
June 08, 2005
Thinking Ethics: The Book
A couple of months ago I went to Geneva to spend a weekend talking about business ethics with a bunch of thinkers, theologians, business leaders and other brainy types. Beth Krasna, who organised the event, has now turned it into a book, edited by Tim Hindle and published by Profile (the people behind the Economist Books) which you can, of course, buy from your local branch of amazon.com. The book is an impressive distillation of the compressed, chaotic multi-strand discussion we managed that weekend. If anything's missing I'm pretty sure it didn't happen.
May 03, 2005
The Last Pooh
Listen. You're going to think I'm a bit stupid for raising this. I mean right now, two days from IMPACT and all that. Anyway, I'm watching the New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh on Playhouse Disney. Pooh, Piglet and the gang are playing ice hockey (Eeyore is in goal). Why do I find this so annoying? I guess it's because Pooh is the most perfect, most complete English language children's book character The 20th Century produced (name a better one, win a tenner). It's reasonable to assume, though, that he's now walled up in Disney's Enchanted Castle of Copyright forever. Disney's is probably the last Pooh.
No one will ever get to reinterpret Pooh, no one will ever 'revoice' him or provide a new look for the bear – he is, forever, Disney's. A compliant US legislature (and, thus, WIPO and the rest of the global intellectual property establishment) will, presumably, happily extend copyright protection indefinitely and 'new media' versions (games, online and so on) of Winnie-the-Pooh won't even need extra protection because they'll inherit the automatic protection provided to software products (and don't get me started on DRM). Free Pooh! (actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it always used to wind me up that there was a gopher in Disney's Hundred Acre Wood too. A gopher).
April 13, 2005
John Berger is back
When I was young, I used to love John Berger. Then I went off to college in the Big City and quickly learnt that he was out-of-date: a crusty old humanist in the cold universe of infinitely deferred closure and inaccessible meaning (and all that). So I put his books up on a high shelf and tried to get on with the unloveable Red Brigade of deconstructivists and post-structuralists I was supposed to identify with now. It didn't really work (I did my best) and, twenty years on, the old Bolshevist has conspicuously and happily outlived the 'theory' nihilists. In London this month, there's a celebration of the man's life & work.
Sean O'Hagan wrote a lovely piece about him for The Observer last week and here are a couple of emotional pieces by the man himself from The Guardian: one about his old friend Cartier-Bresson (another sad old humanist) and one about Fahrenheit 9/11.
When I was about eighteen my Dad, who used to visit a village in the Haute Savoie close to Berger's, walked the couple of miles up the mountain to Berger's fantastically remote house – no electricity and no running water at the time – to ask him to sign my copy of Another Way of Telling. Berger was out but his wife promised he'd sign and return the book by post so my Dad left the book behind. When he told me he'd troubled the great man in his mountain hide-out I was mortified but, after a couple of weeks, it turned up, politely and tidily inscribed. I'm looking at it now.
February 10, 2005
Book Review: file sharing and open source licensing (and 'a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika')
Steal This File Sharing Book by Wallace Wang, Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing by Andrew M. St. Laurent (and Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman).
Starting with Steal This File Sharing Book. I would really like to tell you that this is a great book. Or that it cleverly updates Abbie Hoffman's yippie freeloader's bible, Steal This Book (Stealing it from amazon is going to present some problems, though, I guess). Or even that it'll help you understand file sharing. Sadly, I can't. I'll keep it around but it's tough to imagine a use for it beyond this review. I wish Wang had provided a history of file sharing technologies. I wish he'd thought more about the future (beyond version updates and law suits). I wish he'd found the time to discuss the ethical context and I wish he'd been a bit less morally ambivalent about file sharing. Where Hoffman is morally certain (thieving from dumb corporations and dumber Governments is a good thing), Wang worries the issue and leaves the reader frankly at sea. I'd also have liked some discussion of new rights models (GPL, Creative Commons and so on) and of new methods like BitTorrent. I wonder if file sharing is one of those topics that really doesn't warrant a book at all?
This is more like it. Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing is a small but perfectly formed 194 pages on every kind of software license you've ever heard of, including the non-free and nearly-free ones. Actual licenses, annotated and explained, are the body of the book with plenty of legal asides and some gentle (legally-phrased) criticism where necessary. I'm not about to release a software product but if I were I'd buy this unpretentious book and since software licensing seems to be the bleeding edge of the fast-changing rights landscape (can landscapes have bleeding edges?), where all the interesting work is being done, I think this book should interest a lot of non-techies too.
January 04, 2005
New year's resolution: unload that big pile of review copies
Here's a list of geeky books I've currently got for sale over at amazon.co.uk. Go on. Buy some. They're all brand new and every single one is cheaper than you'll get it anywhere else – sometimes four or five pounds less than amazon.co.uk. I've highlighted the ones I think are really good in bold (that doesn't mean I understand them).
You can also get an up-to-date list of things I'm selling here any time (I think).
December 03, 2004
Disney and Winnie-the-Pooh
Have you ever visited the Hundred Acre Wood? You can, you know. It's a real place, hidden in the Home Counties and quite recognisably Pooh's domain. All the landmarks are there, even the sandy place where Kanga and Roo lived. If you were brought up with Pooh it's a quite amazing experience. It's quaint, of course – very English – cream teas, a nice gift shop, the original Pooh Sticks bridge. It has absolutely nothing to do with Disney, though. It's a non-Disney attraction. No one dressed as Tigger, no rides, no attractions, no hotel (no entry fee): just a fading trace of Winnie-the-Pooh's origins, the place his creator lived and played, where Christopher Robin grew up.
I haven't been there for years. I only mention it, really, because I just read that Pooh and his friends earned Disney $5.3 Billion in the last year. There's something in that collision (unstoppable licensing powerhouse and quiet, half-buried English childhood treasure) that takes the breath away, something very descriptive of the whole business vs art, capital vs culture thing. Disney took a tiny, local, very modest cultural phenomenon and made from it the second richest fiction franchise in history. Is that a bad thing? No. Are the Pooh purists wrong when they say Disney ruined the characters? Yes. Disney's forty year investment in Winnie-the-Pooh has taken him a long way from his quiet Surrey origins but without it generations of kids might never have heard of him.
A much bigger concern for me is Disney's ruthless campaign to extend copyright protection for their properties into the distant future – a kind of sequestration that threatens to close off large parts of our literary and entertainment culture for good (I've written about this before). I guess $5B of annual income from one character is going to make you a little protective of your assets but it makes me sad to know that, in a period of unprecedented graphical and technical experimentation, we'll probably never see another interpretation of Pooh. Wouldn't it be marvelous to see a new Pooh from a studio you've never heard of or an illustrator with a new angle? (I guess I'm thinking of how much Helen Oxenbury's gorgeous new interpretation of Alice adds to the Tenniel originals).
(Obviously, you'd have been upset if I hadn't linked to this useful medical diagnosis).
October 25, 2004
Outstanding
Measuring value-for-money on a scale of 1-10, this Neal Stephenson interview (conducted by the Slashdot groupmind) approaches infinity. A generous, clever and funny man.
Thanks to practically everyone for the link.
April 15, 2003
"a striking new bird for the future"
The last time Penguin gave its Puffin kids' imprint a new logo was in the year I was born, 1963. In the same year Puffin published Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and The Opies' Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes – a good year. The old logo is evocative – it rushes me back 35 years to a small shelf of carefully organised Puffins in my bedroom. The new one "bears a stronger resemblance to its ornithological roots. It is a softer more curvy design and the lozenge and the tone of the colour version tie it much more strongly to the Penguin logo" according to this press release...