What might the future of book covers be? The Atlantic (“Has Kindle Killed the Book Cover?“) assesses the current state of the book cover in a Kindle world.

“A digital book has no cover. There’s no paper to be bound up with a spine and protected inside a sturdy jacket. Browsers no longer roam around Borders scanning the shelves for the right title to pluck. Increasingly, instead, they scroll through Amazon’s postage stamp-sized pictures, which don’t actually cover anything, and instead operate as visual portals into an entire webpage of data (publication date, reader reviews, price) some of which can also be found on a physical cover and some of which cannot.”

Why hasn’t the book cover evolved with the rest of the book in the Ebook Age? Is it because the idea of the book cover outdated? Perhaps it’s sentiment on my part (“The cover ‘functions as an emotional visual touchstone’”), but it’s hard to believe that to be the case because a book’s cover is such an ingrained part of what we understand the entire mechanism of a book to be. But perhaps the function of the book cover is overdue for a change.

And clearly, that change isn’t there yet:

“Paul Buckley, Vice President, Executive Creative Director at Penguin—who oversees the development of 800 book covers each year—noted the expense of adding digital features: “Benefits have not yet caught up to the costs of this extra content. Because the viewer’s not going to pay for it.” Publishers’ art departments haven’t traditionally come equipped with highly tech-savvy illustrators and typographers. And even as more digitally-capable designers arrive, so too will their demand for new tools to support their talents.”

With some insight on the ebook creation process, it is easier to understand why book covers have been a lower priority: they’re no longer the primary means of how a book is ‘packaged’ and therefore, sold –

“When Buckley’s team at Penguin designs a book cover, they turn it into a PDF (or sometimes a JPG) and load it onto their server for someone else to send out into the marketplace. But major retailers, like Apple’s iBook store, won’t sell ebooks as PDFs, mainly because these files can’t adapt to different screen sizes. Instead, publishers must offer up their books in a format called EPUB, sometimes by working backwards and converting from the PDF. The EPUB file can then be changed again, as is the case for Amazon’s Kindle. In other words, digital reading doesn’t only have one kind of digital expression, and this poses obvious complications for how books may be aesthetically packaged.”

Basically, nobody has figured out Book Cover 2.0 yet. What comes next?

And yes, you can get the chic Kate Spade Kindle covers in various flavors of Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, or The Importance of Being Earnest. But it’s just not the same.

This is quite simply some of the best ebooks research I’ve seen thus far.

From Pew: The rise of e-reading. The survey was based on about 3000 people, from late 2011/early 2012, and provides some rather interesting data on our e-reading habits.

Now, there is a lot of information to take in here (Here’s a link to the full, 68-page report). But for ease of use, here are some of the key findings –

• Over one-fifth (21%) of American adults had read an ebook in the past year.
• Readers of ebooks read more books in general (24 for readers of ebooks, 15 for readers of non-ebooks)
• Readers of ebooks were more likely to buy than borrow books.

As the study notes, Christmas was unsurprisingly a boon to the tablet market (see: iPad, Amazon Kindle Fire). What relation was there between tablet ownership and book reading?

“Interestingly, there were not major differences between tablet owners and non-owners when it came to the volume of books they say they had read in the previous 12 months.”

Who are the book readers?

“Overall, those who reported reading the most books in the past year include: women compared with men; whites compared with minorities; well-educated Americans compared with less-educated Americans; and those age 65 and older compared with younger age groups.”

And how are those book readers reading? This was interesting to me — more are reading on a computer and less on a tablet than I might have guessed –

• 42% of readers of e-books in the past 12 months said they consume their books on a computer
• 41% of readers of e-books consume their books on an e-book reader like original Kindles or Nooks
• 29% of readers of e-books consume their books on their cell phones
• 23% of readers of e-books consume their books on a tablet computer.

Book vs. ebook preference was also quite interesting. Ebooks win in terms of portability and convenience, but non-ebooks still win out in the more social person-to-person kinds of book reading. Clearly, ebook sharing has some ways to go still.

“In a head-to-head competition, people prefer e-books to printed books when they want speedy access and portability, but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others. We asked a series of questions about format preferences among the 14% of Americans age 16 and up who in the past 12 months have read both printed books and e-books.

As a rule, dual-platform readers preferred e-books when they wanted to get a book quickly, when they were traveling or commuting, and when they were looking for a wide selection …When asked about reading books in bed, the verdict was split: 45% prefer reading e-books in bed, while 43% prefer print.”

The study has some fairly nuanced insights on why people read what they read.

• 26% of those who had read a book in the past 12 months said that what they enjoyed most was learning, gaining knowledge, and discovering information.
• 15% cited the pleasures of escaping reality, becoming immersed in another world, and the enjoyment they got from using their imaginations.
• 12% said they liked the entertainment value of reading, the drama of good stories, the suspense of watching a good plot unfold.
• 12% said they enjoyed relaxing while reading and having quiet time.
• 6% liked the variety of topics they could access via reading and how they could find books that particularly interested them.
• 4% said they enjoy finding spiritual enrichment through reading and expanding their worldview.
• 3% said they like being mentally challenged by books.
• 2% cited the physical properties of books – their feel and smell – as a primary pleasure.

And lastly, we do seem to get a lot of our book recommendations from people we know. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what percentage of that 81% comes from social networks (Facebook, GoodReads, etc.)?

Facebook wants a trademark on the word “book”, because … why not?

Ars Technica (“Facebook asserts trademark on word “book” in new user agreement“) has a handy primer on the legal nitty gritty:

“Facebook, as far as we can tell, doesn’t have a registered trademark on “book.” But trademark rights can be asserted based on use of a term, even if the trademark isn’t registered, and adding the claim to Facebook’s user agreement could boost the company’s standing in future lawsuits filed against sites that use the word.

“Unregistered marks are quite common in the US,” University of Minnesota Law Professor William McGeveran told Ars. “Rights arise from use, not registration (though registration does give you some other advantages). That’s how Facebook can try to claim ‘book.’” If you see a ™ next to a name, that indicates an unregistered, claimed trademark, whereas an R in a circle signifies a registered one, McGeveran notes.”

What does it really mean? Hopefully nothing. But it sure sounds like dangerous precedent to me. After all, here’s this, per CNN: “Facebook closer to winning ‘face’ trademark” –

“Facebook has also waged wars against sites using the word “book.” In August, Facebook sued start-up site Teachbook.com — which claims it is merely a teacher’s community. The social networking giant also forced the travel site PlaceBook to change its name to TripTrace this past summer.”

I had planned for the second part of today’s headline to be a joke. Except it turns out it’s already true (Engadget: “So why did Facebook just trademark ‘Face’?“)

Melville House (“Facebook asserts trademark in the word ‘book’“) chimes in on some of the possible worrisome implications.

“That’s not to say that worse isn’t to come, though, particularly as, no matter how ridiculous the claim, many of their opponents are likely to settle out of court rather than taking on a company the size of Facebook. It’s terrifying to think of businesses claiming ownership of words in this way, and more so when you consider the sneaky way in which Facebook is going about this. It hasn’t yet registered ‘Book’ in the trademark database, though it has registered ‘Face’, ‘Wall’ and ‘Like’, as well as more specific terms like ‘FB’ and ‘Facebook Pages’. But by asserting ownership of ‘Book’ in their own user agreement, they make acknowledgment of that ownership binding for all users of Facebook.”

I don’t really know what else to say about this, so here’s an internet meme.

Good question from the Guardian: “Can literary fiction survive the ebook age?” And if it can (it will, by the way), what does literary fiction have going for it that other genres don’t …?

“Literary fiction can be about anything, so long as it’s beautifully, intriguingly, surprisingly, gorgeously written, so long as it’s brilliantly constructed – from the word, to the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the novel and beyond.

What is unique about literary fiction? Basically, it has to be good”.

Good fiction will always have its place, but that isn’t to ignore that it has its work cut out for it when it comes to getting recognized in a very, very crowded ebook marketplace.

From the literary fiction writer’s perspective, it ain’t easy. Check out this semi-recent article from the Wall Street Journal: “Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books” –

“It has always been tough for literary fiction writers to get their work published by the top publishing houses. But the digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers.

Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.”

In other words, quitting one’s day job for writing is sadly becoming less and less viable an economic reality for many. WSJ shares some useful shorthand dollars and sense figures:

“In some cases, independent publishers are picking up the slack by signing promising literary-fiction writers. But they offer, on average, $1,000 to $5,000 for advances, a fraction of the $50,000 to $100,000 advances that established publishers typically paid in the past for debut literary fiction.

The new economics of the e-book make the author’s quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.”

Conversely, some survival of the fittest could be the natural order of things when it comes to a flooded fiction market, according to E.L. Doctorow –

“Novelist E.L. Doctorow … says the industry may be transforming away from big corporate-owned publishers back to a cottage industry like it was many years ago. The shakeout could help prune an overcrowded market.

 ”Writers come up from nowhere, from the ground up, and nobody is looking for them or asking for them, but there they are,” says Mr. Doctorow. “If there is a weeding out that’s going to occur because of such difficulties, it may be all to the good.”

Of course, such sentiments are easier to say, when you actually are E.L. Doctorow … but, point taken.

What might a data-driven approach towards book reading look like? We took a look at BookLamp earlier, and here’s some news from Publishing Perspectives: “BookLamp Infographic Visualizes the Thematic Flow of a Book” –

(Click on the image to the left for a large version of the book map, courtesy of Publishing Perspectives)

“BookLamp.org – aka the Book Genome Project – breaks a book down into 32,160 data points and quantifies everything from density and pacing, all in aid of book discovery. Now the team of razor-sharp engineers have put their skills to the test in putting together a visual infographic of thematic flow of a book.” 

Presumably, this sort of thing gives readers a rather unique perspective of books that they are reading, or have read, or want to read. I’m still not crazy about the actual visual representation itself, but the idea of being able to visual a book’s content by thematic flow is pretty nifty — and lots of credit to them for an impressive amount of work that has gone into the BookLamp project so far.

How exactly does this work? Publishing Perspectives has a bit more on the inner workings (“Is BookLamp’s “Book Genome Project” the Future of Discovery?“)

“We do this by taking the full text provided by a publisher in a digital format and running it though our computer,” explains CEO Aaron Stanton. “Our program breaks a book up into 100 scenes and measures the ‘DNA’ of each scene, looking for 132 different thematic ingredients, and another 2,000 variables.”

Can a computer really ‘read’ a book as well as a human being?

“Stanton thinks so. “Our original models are based on focus groups,” he says. “We would give them a highly dense scene and a low density scene, for example, and ask them to assess them, which gave us a basis for training the models. Then we looked at books that might exceed the models and tweaked the formulas. In this way, our algorithms are trained like a human being.”

Here’s a neat one from the Guardian: “The ebook that forces the reader to pay attention” –

“Visual Editions’ iPad version of Marc Saporta’s 1960s novel,Composition No 1. Visual Editions is a London-based publisher specialising in beautiful books: it published Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, cutting wedges through a paper book to reveal new stories, and a magically, playfully typeset volume of Tristram Shandy.

Composition No 1 is made up of 150 unbound pages, which may be read in any order. Each page consists of a single short text; it’s up to the reader to draw a continuous story from them. So far, so experimental. But the electronic edition shuffles these pages for you, speeding them past so fast that they become indistinguishable. Only by touching and holding the screen is the page revealed. Once released, the page whips away again and cannot be revisited until the whole book is completed. In this way, the design enforces – indeed, embodies – physical and mental attention. A fitting metaphor for the book in an age of distractions.”

Pretty avant-garde stuff. One might argue that such an approach is trading one kind of distraction for another, but, well, I do love experimental reading forms.

Their concept of Visual Writing is rather intriguing –

“We publish books that use visual writing. There is a rich literary heritage for this kind of writing and this very much forms the basis for what we’re setting out to do.

The way we think about visual writing is this: writing that uses visual elements as an integral part of the writing itself. Visual elements can come in all shapes and guises: they could be crossed out words, or photographs, or die-cuts, or blank pages, or better yet something we haven’t seen. The main thing is that the visuals aren’t gimmicky, decorative or extraneous, they are key to the story they are telling. And without them, that story would be something altogether different.”

Check out Composition No. 1 on the Visual Editions website (the second video shows off the iPad version). And here’s the iTunes link for the iPad edition.

The Visual Edition Tristram Shandy looks awesome, by the way.

The Atlantic has something else for us to worry about: “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The magazine article is a slog, but it does give us many things to think about.

We talked earlier this month about Facebook and our friends. But here’s the problem in a nutshell according to The Atlantic:

“within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.”

Just so you know, the article has what might be called an above-average amount of neurosis. Example:

“… the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.”

But, there are certainly many valid points. It would be foolish to argue that what technology gives with one hand in the form of accessibility, it tries to take away with an increased sense of isolation. And yes, there is very much a difference between loneliness and solitude.

Now the debate really becomes interesting when we talk about loneliness and online behavior; specifically the causal link between the two. Spending more and more time on the Facebook is either a contributing factor or symptom of the “loneliness epidemic” discussed by The Atlantic –

“But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years.” 

And yet, we seem to crave loneliness:

“Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different … The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

The great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him.”

I’m still making up my mind about this. Is loneliness really part of the American DNA? Or hey, maybe we should blame Facebook for our loneliness. “[The] fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?”

We (collectively) spend a lot of time on Facebook. The statistics are almost too depressing to quote. The point is, how we use Facebook  is something to think about. But because of its omnipresence, we have a hard time taking that step back and thinking about it:

“More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation.” 

That always-on state has to exact some sort of toll, either on us, or our social relations. Maybe the price is being paid in quality of overall communication?

There’s some correlation (not the same thing as causation) between how we interact on Facebook, and our feelings of connectedness or loneliness –

“If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click communication”—the lazy click of a like.

Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” 

On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting”—correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear.” 

So: are we unwittingly trying to make our friends depressed by showing how cool our lives seem? I know I sure am. No, but really —  I’d be curious what my psychology friends think about how this relates to the upward and downward social comparison theories. What need does posting on Facebook satisfy for us? Facebook and the pursuit of happiness could be a good PhD dissertation for someone some day.

“Not only must we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy—it’s exhausting … Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation.” 

There is something to be said about how our imagined-or-intended Facebook image corresponds to some mistakenness for closeness and distance. What does it mean to be connected? Is there risk in Facebook usage becoming a lazy surrogate for time with real-life social interaction? Maybe Facebook addiction in small doses isn’t the worst thing in the world. But if we want to think about the things that matter most, it’s worth taking the trouble to think about how social a “social” network really is —

“The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.”

Yes, we spend more and more time online. And that time online comes from time subtracted elsewhere. But let’s be honest: technology only makes us lonely if we let it make us lonely, “We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.”

What does it really mean to say that Facebook makes us lonely?

“LONELINESS IS CERTAINLY not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around.”

By the way, here’s a link the UCLA Loneliness Quiz (apologies for the Oprah.com link, it was surprisingly one of the better options available online. Go figure).

——————————

So, how big is Facebook? Comparing it to all of the coffee in the entire world was one sure way to impress at least me: “Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry—one addiction preparing to surpass the other.”

From the New Republic (“Was Oprah Bad for Literature?“). Ok, it’s a provocative question to ask.

Disclosure #1 — After reading the article, I can’t really say I’m all that convinced.

Disclosure #2 — I actively avoid buying books that have the Oprah’s Book Cover sticker. But that’s me.

That being said, here’s the argument:

“Garthwaite looked at the question of whether the Oprah Book Club, over its 15-year life, expanded the book-reading audience. His dispiriting finding was that it did not. Although Winfrey was remarkably successful in getting people to buy the books she touted (and also, to some extent, other books written by the same authors), she did not make readers out of non-readers. Rather, she provoked what’s known in the marketing world as brand-switching. Instead of reading crap, Oprah’s viewers were goaded into reading tonier stuff—mostly literary fiction. In many instances this amounted to reading more demanding crap, but it still represented a step up in literacy. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the profits that help support publication of less lucrative, more high-minded books depend on the sale of a lot of crap.”

Whether Oprah’s Book Club was good or bad for literature likely depends on how one wants to articulate the purpose of OBC. I’m generally going to fall on the side of anything that puts more literature (no, The Road does not count) in the hands of many people. Getting loyal Oprah watchers to read Leo Tolstoy or Toni Morrison instead of trashy romance novels? Sounds good to me. And by most accounts, those Oprah Book Club volumes have sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million copies. That’s a hell of a lot of books no matter how you spin the data.

That being said, I think Jonathan Franzen had a point somewhere (even though he sometimes gives the rest of us snobs a bad reputation).

Also, a recap of Oprah vs. Jonathan Franzen –

“Eleven years ago Jonathan Franzen caught hell for expressing some ambivalence when Oprah Winfrey selected his novel The Corrections for her TV book club. Franzen said that though Winfrey was “really smart” and “fighting the good fight” for the book business, she also “picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional [books] that I cringe, myself” at being selected. He added that he thought The Corrections would prove “a hard book for that audience.” On hearing about these slights, Winfrey cancelled Franzen’s scheduled appearance on her show. Realizing he’d been rude (or perhaps just realizing that his ingratitude would likely cost him some book sales) Franzen apologized to Winfrey, who subsequently chose Franzen’s Freedom as one of the book club’s final selections last year.”

By the way, here is the complete list of all 70 Oprah’s Book Club titles.

The Atlantic (“The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart“) attempts to disabuse its readers of a halcyon era (“pre-Internet”) in which people read more books …

“Well, that time never existed. Check out these stats from Gallup surveys. In 1957, not even a quarter of Americans were reading a book or novel. By 2005, that number had shot up to 47 percent. I couldn’t find a more recent number, but I think it’s fair to say that reading probably hasn’t declined to the horrific levels of the 1950s.”

All this to say: our collective memory of past is astoundingly inaccurate. Not only has the number of people reading not declined precipitously, it’s actually gone up since the perceived golden age of American letters.”

Fair enough. I can think of several better ways than “are you reading any books?” to ask what we’re most interested in, but the historical trend is still interesting.

Naturally, there are caveats aplenty. For example –

“1) This chart does not establish that high-quality literature readers have increased. That is true. 2) There are a lot of factors that go into these numbers and variables that are unaccounted for. 3) The big spike is partially driven by higher levels of higher education attainment. 4) Perhaps the quality of books has fallen, even as the number of readers has grown.”

So, I’m just about through reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections — and a certain scene with a hapless red chaise longue had me thinking: what is the worst literary sex, ever?

(Salon.com has more, if you’re really interested: “The secret Jonathan Franzen influence, hiding in plain sight”)

Sure, there’s the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award, but that’s not what I’m really interested in for today.

Granted, good sex — and perhaps especially bad sex — is intensely and inevitably subjective. But there have to be some universal standards that make bad literary sex bad for everyone … right?

But, I really have no idea. I’d love to know what everyone thinks.

Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (see also: The Guardian, “How to Have Sex with a Ghost“) scores high on the possible Gross Sex Quotient (GSQ) with some oedipal and phantasmagoria mixed in there for good measure. But, I probably like Murakami’s novels too much to call it the worst.

Me personally, I’m going to go with Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint. I thought about quoting the liver passage, but I just couldn’t do it. Yuck:

“Portnoy’s Complaint is told as one long psychotherapy session. It shocked some readers, delighted others. Hardly anyone, though, is indifferent about Alexander Portnoy.

Within a few pages we learn that Portnoy — nice Jewish boy, brilliant honor student — has a problem. He loves himself too much, and one part of himself in particular.”

And, on a slightly-related note: “How Come the Worst Sex Writers Are Always Men?”

“A clue to the dearth of women winners might have something to do with the fact that men still outnumber women at both commercial and academic publishing houses, according to The New Republic’s Ruth Franklin. In 2010, of the 13 large houses that TNR examined, Penguin’s Riverhead imprint came the closest to closing the gender gap between male authors, who accounted for 55% of books published, and female authors (45 %). And the house with the lowest percentage of female authors? That would be Harvard University Press, with a paltry 15%.”