The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy is coming soon!

I found this to be perhaps my favorite chapter to have worked on thus far, since it was a nice opportunity to deal with two of my favorite topics — literature and philosophy — at the same time.

The mass popularity of Stieg Larsson’s crime/mystery novel series intrigues me. The novels make for fun reads to be sure. In particular, what had me thinking about Larsson’s Millennium trilogy were the conditions under which we think of a book as “popular fiction” as opposed to “literature.” We read fiction and we read literature, and perhaps we have to an extent internalized what those distinctions might mean. But it’s also extremely worthwhile to ask ourselves — why do we think of what we read the way we do?

Here’s a quick chapter sneak preview:

“How do we go about deciding what the difference is between fiction and literature, if there even is one? And does it matter? Could it be that this distinction is made for us, well before we ever reach the pages of a book? We can use our experience of reading Larsson’s crime novels to consider our own definition of literature and how we come to think of literature. Larsson has provided clues for us to think about his novels as more than merely crime fiction, as Blomkvist says: “Because this isn’t some damned locked- room mystery novel.” But if we know what such a book isn’t, then what is it?”

The questions of what literature is, and why we think of it as such, can lead to some rewarding discussion. I hope people will enjoy reading it — and the philosophical interludes that range from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein — and take the chapter as an opportunity to reflect on the act of reading itself.

And, of course, the brand new David Fincher-directed adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is set to debut in December 2011. Check out the cool movie trailer in the meantime:

There’s already been some intrigue revolving around the movie trailer, something of a bit of a game of musical chairs with Sony, as Wired reports (Wired: “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trailer: This Time It’s Official“). That notwithstanding, the movie looks like it could be very good. I’m interested.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is set to hit bookstores, November 8, 2011.

Amazon had some good news this week for college students who like to save money, announcing a Kindle Textbook Rental program (Huffington Post: “Amazon Kindle Textbook Rental Offers Deep Discounts To Students“). For all those non-English major types who have to deal with hefty textbook prices every semester, Amazon’s foray into the online textbook rental business potentially means savings of up to 80% off of the egregiously high list prices. At first blush, there’s a lot to like. Students renting the Kindle textbooks can customize rental periods for how long they’ll need the books — anywhere from 30 to 360 days — and of course one of the best selling points for the Kindle is that rented texts are going to be available on any platform that supports the Kindle app.

Wired (“A Quick Guide To Kindle Rentals and the World of Digital Textbooks“) has a great breakdown about all of this in more detail. Among the reasons why Amazon’s approach with Kindle textbook rentals could work is the fact that it isn’t solely dependent on the Kindle device itself:

“Textbooks haven’t had much success on e-readers, partly because their bright-color, high-detail illustrations don’t translate to E Ink or even most color tablets. That’s a cost a textbook publisher can’t get back, and a student still winds up paying for.

Amazon gets around this through its PC and Mac applications, which can show off those illustrations in color and at scale. The E Ink Kindle becomes an ancillary device here, much like the mobile phone app is for a paperback novel: you can study up and make notes on the go, but most of your reading will be on the machine where it’s easiest to type notes and where you do the rest of your schoolwork.”

Moreover, there is a lot of truth to how the digital textbook market is a much different thing than the market for other kinds of ebooks, with its own set of problems. There hasn’t been one solution that’s clearly won out over others, at least thus far. Primarily, it’s a difference of how the books are read:

“Textbooks, though, are a constant reminder that the book industry is both gigantic and fundamentally weird. Textbooks have less to do with trade paperbacks than distant relatives in the same family. The publishers are different; the readers are different; and most importantly, the ways that readers buy and use their books are different. And even within the subdomain of textbooks, reader expectations and behavior vary wildly.

Textbooks are typically built to last forever, but are constantly updated and reissued. They’re chosen by teachers, but bought by students. They’re read for information, not pleasure.”

And could this new Kindle textbook initiative have something to do with the rumored upcoming Amazon tablet? (I’m guessing, “yes”).

Keep in mind that the Kindle DX was originally marketed as the device for ebook versions of textbooks (check out this Wired article for some good background thoughts on the Kindle DX and textbooks). MacWorld (“Amazon unveils Kindle Textbook Rental“) makes a useful point on the economics of ebook textbook rentals — “since there’s no ‘used’ aftermarket for ebooks, students often found that used paperback textbooks could be priced competitively compared to their Kindle editions” — Kindle textbook rental prices makes more sense from a buyer’s perspective.

And here’s something that hadn’t occurred to me until I read it: Information Week (“Amazon Tablet’s Secret Sauce For Beating Apple“) speculates that Whispersync could be the real story within the story:

“Whispersync is Amazon’s syncing service that works in tandem with Whispernet, a free cellular-based network piggybacking off Sprint that 3G Kindle users can already connect to for free. Up until this week, Whispersync has been used mainly for bookmarking Amazon e-books. It allows readers to pick up where they left off reading, even when switching between different Kindle devices and platforms.” 

 To me, what makes Amazon’s Kindle Textbooks interesting and useful is the fact that the company made the right choice when it comes to user note-taking. Notes and highlights from the texts are still available even after the textbook rental expires:

“We’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere–even after a rental expires,” said Limp. “If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.”

As this theory goes, while this use of Whispersync is certainly useful for books, it could be a much bigger deal when it comes to movies, music, and other digital content — in other words, a potentially very useful cloud service that could make an Amazon tablet something quite competitive in relation to an iPad. Hmm. Sure, it’s all speculative, but it’s an interesting theory.

Here’s a link to Amazon’s Kindle Textbook Rental program.

I think this website is great: The Book Cover Archive. While there is some debate about what book covers mean in the eBook Era (New York Times: “In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover“), and perhaps the proliferation of ereading devices mean a loss of an important visual element in the social life of book reading — to “project your own literary tastes” as the Times notes — I’m of the opinion that book covers become even more important than ever. What with the thus far fairly limited design options with ebooks, the ebook cover affords an opportunity for some creative latitude, both in form and function. Digital book covers are something that I expect will become more a topic of interest in the nearer future. A book cover isn’t everything, after all, but there’s something about an elegant book cover that adds something to the reading or owning of a good book, isn’t there?

And, the Book Cover archive blog ain’t bad. I’ve added it to my RSS reader list. For the true bibliophiles at heart, it’s really kind of engrossing.

And check out their Top Ten Covers of the 200s post.

Time magazine posed a question worth thinking about: “Is a Bookless Library Still a Library?” This certainly gets into interesting existential questions about what makes a library a library — thinking about a library as simply a collection of books can be somewhat limiting, after all. It makes more sense to be thinking about not only what a library is, but what a library does.

In this case, the occasion for reflection is the opening of Drexel University’s new bookless Library Learning Terrace, which has led at least some people to wonder: ”when books disappear, does a library lose its definition?”

This is somewhat of an overstatement — the books don’t truly disappear, but are moved from one medium (print) to another (digital). The role of libraries is changing, as the nature of their collections change. Some discussion (check out: Inside Higher Ed: “Bookless Libraries?“) rightfully centers on this shift from thinking of the libraries strictly in terms of a place, and more of a structure or system in which information is found:

“The history of libraries … has been marked by evolution: They were founded as places where materials were collected and stored. Then they shifted their focus toward connecting clients with resources.”

Of course, the “bookless” library is not without recent precedent. There’s Kansas State University’s Fiedler Engineering Library, which opened back in October 2000. There is also the University of Texas at San Antonio’s own bookless library here. While San Antonio makes a point of claiming its library as being the first, actual bookless university library, perhaps this is much ado about nothing (Inside Higher Ed: “A Truly Bookless Library“)?

“The fact that San Antonio has actually built a literal version of what many in the industry hold up as symbol of the inevitability of the electronic as the prevailing medium in academe may be commendable, but it is not ‘earth-moving’” 

Not earth-moving, because in terms of ‘booklessness’, we’re really talking about a matter of degree. Libraries everywhere are of course all dealing with this very same issue — “reimagining the physical space of the library” – that is part and parcel of the shift from print to digital.

And perhaps what garnered the most popular attention thus far in terms of bookless libraries, was Stanford’s Engineering Library last summer. In actuality, Stanford’s move was to change over about seven-eighths of their physical books on the shelf into digital form.

A fair question to ask at this point is: what’s the big deal, anyways? I think it’s because we like our libraries. We have a sentimental attachment to the library as a place of shared learning. And when change happens, in any context, we seldom do get to see dramatic changes, because big changes are an accumulation of many small changes along the way. But the notion of a ‘bookless’ library is somewhat dramatic. Stanford shares some reflections on the clash between New and Old (Stanford University: “‘Bookless’ library at Stanford looks to the future“), which even the idea of a bookless library elicits:

“It makes a lot of people nervous, the idea of a bookless library …  In fact, some people really don’t like that phrase. But it is very interesting; it’s gotten a lot of press because it creates a sense of tension between the old and the new.”

For a more measured response on booklessness, The New Yorker (“The Dawn of the Bookless Library“) has some reflections on what all of the fuss is about. Yes, perhaps the distinction is merely academic. Or, perhaps it isn’t: “it isn’t some sort of thought experiment (if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear, will it still make a noise? If a library contains no books, is it still a library?) or Borgesian symbol.”  

Some of these observations might seem obvious in retrospect, but you know, sometimes we need reminders about the obvious, too. While it makes for better (or at least more passioned) debate to think only in terms of either/or, this/that, there is something almost démodé about framing the debate simply as Old vs. New, Print vs. Digital –

“Books aren’t obsolete; they’re so ubiquitous that they can’t even fit into a traditional campus and, like mushrooms, branch underground to cover entire states. In that light, reactions to the “bookless” Stanford library seem to be missing the point. They’re more a sign of how Manichean gut-feelings about literature are these days—either the digital world is an insidious devil, reluctantly acquiesced to or assiduously avoided, or the Internet is about to usher in a renaissance of reading, and digitization is a kind of messiah shedding light and learning on the world. Everyone knows there’s a middle ground but, when the whiff of a word like “bookless” floats about, no one ever seems to be standing on it.”

And in other news, the Los Angeles Times reports on a proposed bookless library plan incorporating a “Netflix-like system” of book loans (Los Angeles Times: “Tomes’ time might be up at Newport Beach library“). The bookless library approach could make sense, but as the Times notes, not every library experiments works — in particularly mentioning the Long Beach Library and Baltimore County library plans of years past: “The question is whether people are ready for bookless branches.”

NPR has a brief feature this weekend on the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School: (“Students Get Up Close And Personal With Rare Books“). I have to say, I am in favor of their pedagogical philosophy:

“We insist that students touch and smell and shine light through items, and investigate them to understand the book in history, and understand the book as history,” Suarez says.

The Rare Book School, which has a collection of some 80,000 printed items as well as a collection of printing presses, emphasizes the study of books as objects of cultural and historical importance. Naturally, any study of the history of the book must also cover the present and future of the book — which can give a much-needed historical appreciation of just how quickly book technology has evolved in recent history:

“The classes that bring students into this underground treasure trove mostly deal with antiques, but the program also explores the preservation of materials that were born digital. That might sound easy, but consider this: In the late 1980s, the BBC created a modern-day version of the 900-year-old Domesday Book, using a then-cutting-edge technology — laserdiscs.” * 

Michael Suarez, director of the Rare Book School, has some interesting thoughts on the differences between the study of printed vs. digital books (UVA Today: “When a Book Is Not a Book“). Digitization surely has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. More problematic is when people begin to accord the digitized image of a printed page the same status as the book itself; when that happens something is lost along the way:

” The book as a physical object holds more than the words within, he argued. It has social codes that display what kind of book it is …  The way a book is made contains historical evidence that is lost in the digital format. For book historians, each book also holds bibliographical codes and clues. Handmade books are each unique in ways that can’t be reproduced online.

‘A book is always a communal object, a coalescence of human intentions, Suarez said. ‘If you know enough, every book is alive with the judgments of its makers.’”

You can check out the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School website here. The website even helpfully has included reading lists online. If you are looking for some good food for scholarly thought, you might want to check out a couple of the reading lists on digital books here and here.

And, the Rare Book School Wikipedia page isn’t bad at all, filled with some background context, such as its beginnings at Columbia University, and nuts and bolts information about RBS.

————————————-

*We took a brief look at the BBC Domesday Project not long ago.

Byook is a French company which has brought their own take of what an ebook reading experience could be: “Byook brings stories to life incorporating pictures, animations, and sound effects throughout captivating texts.”

The first book they’ve launched in byook-form is Sherlock Holmes, and the famous locked room mystery, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

I also really, really liked their video. It’s definitely worth the 58 seconds:

The technological enhancements have somewhat of a light touch, which leaves more to the imagination while reading and perhaps helps to blend into the reading of the story. It’s interesting to see the varied approaches of the ebook form –unlike other enhanced ebooks we’ve looked at, the primary action with the byook is still the reading of the text. Perhaps its the influence of their video, with its quaint and charming old-fashion aesthetic, but this approach seems well-suited towards fiction, and perhaps even certain classics.

What new byook books will we see? I hope to see more from them. I did manage to find a product catalog (link goes to a pdf). Here’s a link to Byook on iTunes.

Could be interesting. The name “Byook” really doesn’t roll off one’s tongue, though. Just sayin’.

The other day, we took a look at Al Gore’s Our Choice enhanced ebook, from Push Pop Press. I felt there were a couple of other enhanced ebooks worth a closer look at.

For one, there’s The History of Jazz from 955 Dreams, an interactive timeline, which does a splended job of packing in interactive content such as images, audio and video into its design. As far as enhanced ebooks go, The History of Jazz is more of a coffee table variety of book, if one were to think of it as a book. But 955 Dreams raises a good point: “Reading a book on Jazz is like learning how to fly a kite indoors. The subject is rich with characters and music that a traditional book does not do it justice.” There are limits to how much  you can get out of reading a book about jazz or looking at pictures; jazz was meant to be heard, and experienced through hearing. The best part for most users (readers?) is likely the curated music list of Essential Songs, Essential Albums and over 45 hours of video content, which provides a compelling way to experience the evolution of jazz. (here’s a link to it on iTunes)

TechCrunch reports on the success of The History of Jazz, which might certainly portend future partnering of book and music content. The 955 Dreams co-founder reflects on how the experience of listening to music taps into a different psychological or emotional from that of reading a text: “Emotional experiences around music are so fulfilling. If you create those experiences, people will buy music again … You pay for the experience, not the music,” (TechCrunch: “955 Dreams Plays The iPad Like Jazz“).  And the folks at GigaOM (“Can Tablets Resurrect the Album? One Start-up Hopes So“) wonder if this could be more than just a story about a neat ebook, but perhaps a new form of music publishing. Interesting. Here’s some video of the iPad version in action on YouTube.

What might or might not constitute an enhanced ebook is certainly a topic up for debate. To that end, The Wall Street Journal provides a survey of recent major publisher efforts: “Testing Enhanced E-Books.” The focus in this case is upon the recent Mickey Mantle biography from Harper Collins, “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.” This approach to enhanced ebooks, to borrow a metaphor from another medium, is something akin to the DVD extras you’ll find with movies. The enhanced edition of the Mickey Mantle biography in this case includes audio and video content, including an unique video analysis of The Mick’s right and left handed swings. (Here’s a link to the enhanced edition on iTunes)

The enhanced e-book of The Last Boy includes 30 minutes of video that provide unique analysis of Mantle's left and right handed swings

Along similar lines, Mashable has a brief article on Scribner and Simon & Schuster Digital’s enhanced ebook effort with Nixonland (Mashable: “Traditional Publishers Release Enhanced E-books for iPhone and iPad“). In this case, the enhanced ebook version of Nixonland treates multimedia as something along the lines of “bonus content” to the ebook itself. The video content, which does inclue 27 video clips of Nixon history taken directly from the CBS news archive, stands alone from the book itself. You can find a link to the enhanced version of Nixonland at iTunes here.

In keeping with the U.S. History enhanced ebook theme, there is also an enhanced edition (or “vook”) of JFK: 50 Days, which has a similar commingling of historical video content to supplement the book itself.

While it’s mostly been nonfiction that we’ve seen get the recent enhanced ebook treatment, fiction books have at least some presence. Penguin created an “amplified version” of Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. I’d sure be curious to see what the reader response to this has been, because in terms of pure features and added content (video clips, music, an interactive Character Tree, and multimedia Diary from Ken Follet) the amplified version of The Pillars of the earth is potentially kind of cool. Me personally, I’d probably read the old-fashioned book version first before the amplified version, but that’s mostly for the same reasons that I would prefer to read a book before see any movies based on it. Check out the Penguin website for the amplified version of The Pillars of the Earth here.

To be sure, there’s varying degrees of enhanced ebookness.The major publishers are in something of an arms race at the moment to crack the code of what might be the next big thing in ebooks. So,stay tuned.

The best enhanced ebook might just be Al Gore’s book, Our Choice, from Push Pop Press.

By the way, what do we mean by an enhanced ebook, anyway? I can’t help but notice an increasingly blurred line between apps and ebooks — are they apps based on book content? Are they books that have app-like features? Hmm. (This is a topic I’m very likely going to have to revisit again soon). Generally speaking, an enhanced ebook is a combining of text with images, audio, and video in an interactive way. And who knows, what we now consider an ‘enhanced’ ebook may well become de rigueur for all ebooks in the not-so-distant future.

But, we digress. Back to the Our Choice ebook (for a side by side comparison, you can visit the official Our Choice website, which features both the app and the print book). It is an awfully nice-looking, well-designed ebook, “that talks, spins, moves, and folds, featuring video, interactive infographics, maps, and more, all seamlessly interwoven with the text in a way that helps bring the concepts to life”  (Huffington Post: “Al Gore’s ‘Our Choice’ App Reinvents Books, Reading“). With over 400 photos, charts, illustrations, it’s the visual elements that really seem to create an unique digital reading experience. A nice feature included in the ebook/app is an Al Gore-narrated guided tour of how to use the book — which I’ve included a link to right below.

On the reading experience itself, GigaOM (“Our Choice: The First in a Wave of Truly Enhanced E-Books?“) had some helpful observations: “because the book in many ways resembles a textbook rather than a linear story, the ability to jump around back and forth between sections and elements makes perfect sense here.” Part of the fun of the reading, if I had to hazard a guess, is that the sort of nonlinear reading that works so well for this ebook is akin to how one might browse the internet for content — some reading of text, some watching of videos, and other multimedia content. It approximates the web-browsing habits we’re all accustomed to, and brings that sort of learned behavior into ebook reading. Makes a lot of sense to me.

I noticed a couple of reviewers remarked upon the ebook’s museum-like quality, thanks to the interactive elements. As a means of educating an audience — which is of course the main point of Al Gore’s book project — the part book, part documentary approach seems extraordinarily effective.

David Pogue from the New York Times (“Al Gore Invents a Showpiece E-Book“) had a very positive review, among other things noting:“The interactivity, the zooming into graphic elements and the videos aren’t a gimmick. They actually add up to a different experience. The book feels more Web-like.” 

Interesting way to put it, that. Making books more web-like. Could this be the start of a new trend? One of the features I found particularly cool: geo-tagging, which allows you to see where in the world any photo within the book was taken, is a nifty addition, which is also thanks to the Push Pop guys and their background working with the iPhone Maps app from their days at Apple.

The ‘breath-powered ebook‘ made some news a couple of months ago (blowing into the iPad’s mic means that on screen, “the blades of a wind turbine turned, with electricity moving to a house and then into a storage battery. Stop blowing, the blades slow down, and the flow of power reverses“). It’s a little gimmicky. But hey, it’s a cool gimmick.

Push Pop Press, would seem to have developed a digital publishing platform, meaning we could be seeing more neat enhanced ebooks like this from more publishing. What could this mean for the future of ebook publishing? We’ll see. For now, the ideas that could come from re-imagining what a book is and what a book could do are rather exciting. From the Huffington Post (“Al Gore’s ‘Our Choice’ App Reinvents Books, Reading“):

“It was about re-imagining the book,” said Matas. “Without any limitations of paper, how would we completely redesign the book and make it something that feels completely natural?”

You can find the Our Choice app/ebook on the App Store here.

The Wall Street Journal (“Amazon to Battle Apple iPad With Tablet“) brings news that an Amazon tablet could be coming as soon as October of this year. Rumors of an Amazon tablet have been ongoing for quite some time (for just one variation upon the same theme, The New York Times: “On the Lookout for an Amazon Tablet“).

WSJ takes the opportunity of this news for some reflections on the complicated relationship between Amazon and Apple, which only looks to become more competitive going forward: “Amazon and Apple are frenemies”—both friends and enemies—said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester Research analyst. They “rely on each other as partners”—Amazon, for example, sells digital books via its Kindle app in Apple’s iTunes Store—but “at the same time, they aggressively compete for customers’ attention and dollars,”

The most interesting questions revolve upon two main issues: what will an Amazon tablet do? How much will it cost? Click here for more from Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, who provided some well-thought out reasons on how and why an Amazon tablet could compete with Apple’s iPad.

This is the first time we’ve seen fairly concrete details about the new Amazon device, hence the news. From WSJ:

“Amazon’s tablet will have a roughly nine-inch screen and will run on Google’s Android platform, said people familiar with the device. Unlike the iPad, it won’t have a camera, one of these people said. While the pricing and distribution of the device is unclear, the online retailer won’t design the initial tablet itself.”

And keep in mind that Amazon does have its own Android App Store. On that topic and more, Engadget dares to “over-specunosticate”with some useful, in-depth thoughts on how the Amazon tablet might shape up (“What the Amazon Kindle Tablet Might Be Like“).

Personally, I like the Kindle because I like it as a reading device. So, one of the more pressing questions is what effect an Amazon tablet  might have on the Kindle, the company’s bestselling product. Would people buy both a Kindle and a tablet? What would the differentiation be between a Kindle and an Amazon tablet? Would people be interested in owning both? Also tucked away towards the end of that same WSJ article is further confirmation of a touch screen Kindle due out later this year. That’ll make for some interesting revisiting of this topic we looked at a few weeks ago.

If I could contribute my own rampant speculation, I could see Amazon making a move similar to the strategy they had used with ebooks and the Kindle, in which the company took a loss on each book sale, in order to stimulate interest in then-still-new device by offering an attractive price point. Conversely, perhaps the Amazon tablet itself could be sold below cost, and the company elects to make up the difference selling the rest of their digital content such as books, movies, music, etc. (For those that are interested, Ken Aulettta had a good breakdown on the ebook pricing wars in The New Yorker: “Publish or PerishCan the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?“).

The New York Times has some interesting background on the decision for Amazon to go with a Kindle vs. Android platform for an Amazon tablet device (“Amazon’s Tough Decisions on Its Android Tablet“). Would consumers and developers tolerate yet another app ecosystem? Based on the experience from HP and Blackberry, the answers seems to be ‘no.’ And, further on the need for the tablet device: “If the Kindle wants to compete with Apple and its highly popular iPad, Amazon realized that it needed to offer services and products beyond just video, music and books. It also has to give customers access to games, social applications and other third party products.”

PCWorld (“Amazon Tablet: Why it’s a Big Deal“) has a good rundown of the main questions surrounding an Amazon tablet: The Content Problem; The Price Problem; The Android Problem; and The iPad Problem.

Much can happen between now and October, the Amazon tablet’s speculated released date. A lot of it is based on rumor, hearsay, and conjecture — but hey, that still counts as news nowadays, right?

Update: And, the Wall Street Journal has another good one (with the caveat that this is all heavily based upon speculation): “Should You Wait for the Amazon Tablet?“

Here’s a cool little website (thanks to kottke.org for the link) that lets you search for and discover intro books for any topic: bestintrobook.com

It’s a simple idea, easy to use. I tested it with several topics, and the results were decent. It does best with general topics. So keep that in mind if you happen to be exploring very broad species of book subjects, such as “philosophy” and not so much for something more specific such as “existentialism.”

The random book option is a nifty way to discover new books and topics.

You can browse the library of topics here.