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%.”

The big ebook news of the past week: Microsoft is investing a lot of money in Barnes and Noble Nook. $300 million and another $305 million in the next decade, to be exact.

“The announcement was the latest surprise in an unpredictable and rapidly shifting e-book market, which is crowded with technology giants trying to chip away at Amazon.com’s dominance. Amazon once had close to 90 percent of the e-book market, but since then, a handful of players, including Apple, Google and now Microsoft, have edged in.”

What does all of this mean? For one thing, it gives the Nook a healthy cash infusion, and forestalls at least some talk of whether the Barnes and Noble stores might go the way of Borders bookstores. The newest Nook Simple Touch has been well-received (more on that, later).

Interested in news about literature as video games? Of course you are.

From GalleyCat: “Henry David Thoreau Video Game Gets $40,000 NEA Grant” (MarkGage.com, I thought you’d be keen on this one): “The University of Southern California has received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce a video game based on the work of Henry David Thoreau.”

It’s definitely going to be a different type of literary video game, than say, Dante’s Inferno. The official USC project description:

“Walden, a game, simulates the experiment in living made by Thoreau at Walden Pond in 1845-47, allowing players to walk in his virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of living a self-reliant existence, discover in the beauty of a virtual landscape the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher, and cultivate through the gameplay their own thoughts and responses to the concepts discovered there. The game will take place in a real-time 3D environment which will replicate the geography of Walden Pond and the woods in which Thoreau made his home using both game technologies and video. Beyond the replication of a virtual environment, however, the gameplay itself will embody the experiment that Thoreau set for himself, reinforcing the basic messages of his work.”

I’m not going to lie: it sounds kind of boring, as far as video games go. But I’m still intrigued in how one would go about translating a book like Walden, into video game form. I wonder what percentage of Walden game players will play the game without reading the book first?

“Walden, a game posits a new genre of play, in which reflection and insight play an important role in the player experience. While traveling the virtual world of Walden, the player applies themselves to both daily task of maintaining the basic aspects of life at Walden Pond, as well as having the opportunity to focus on the deeper meaning behind events that transpire in the world. By attending to these events, the player is able to gain insight into the natural world, and into connections that permeate the experience of life at Walden.”

Here’s a great — and somewhat lengthy — read from the New York Times: “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You“.

For an article 3+ years old, it’s aged well. There’s a lot worth reading here. For one thing, the Facebook News Feed seems so ubiquitous to us now, but it’s quite remarkable just how significant of a change it was to our online habits just a couple of years ago: “In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?”

Is the trend towards social, social, social indicative of an even more pronounced modern narcissism on our parts? Or, has Facebook (“Facebook” being shorthand for social networks for the sake of simplicity) just made it easier for us to indulge in our narcissism which simply needed a more user-friendly interface? Sure, we understand that human beings are inherently social beings; but maybe we need to rethink what we mean by “social.” For one thing, this magazine piece had me thinking about one question in particular: what kind of social interaction are we talking about? Somewhere over the past few years, it’s become non-ironic to make some sort of distinction between our real-life friends, and our Facebook friends. But when you stop and think about it — isn’t that odd? Sure, Aristotle was thinking about the nature of friendship over two thousand years ago. “Social” to us might now mean being more and more connected, but those connections can vary quite widely in terms of depth –

“But Seery made a point I heard from many others: awareness tools aren’t as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It’s personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some.”

The most interesting part of this discussion to me involved the so-called Dunbar’s Number. For some context:

“In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?”

Whatever the exact number might be, it seems evident that there is a finite amount of space we have in our emotional lives for our real-life-and-Facebook friends. The article has some thoughts on weak social ties, which are quite interesting; but I won’t risk summarizing all of that here at the risk of being reductive.  Ilmo van der Löwe and I were having a fun conversation about social relationships, and fictional characters. And if you think about it: when we’re reduced to merely skimming online status updates, could the people behind the status update become more like fictional characters, than flesh and blood human beings? Turns out there’s some psychology behind this line of thinking (Ilmo’s blog is great by the way, and highly recommended) —

“It is also possible, though, that this profusion of weak ties can become a problem. If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in “parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.”

Could online interaction be slowly replacing some of our in-person interaction? Probably. At the very least, these sorts of observations might give us pause to think that ”social” is not necessarily equivalent to “unqualified good.” The social interactions we have with others play a sizable role in shaping our understanding of ourselves. Understanding the nature of that interaction isn’t by any means an idle exercise — it’s something that can tell us an awful lot about ourselves.

“Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new … ‘You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

What’s so pleasant about that old books smell? Abebooks has a delightful video which attempts to demystify the redolence of old books:

From the video: “A physical book is made up of organic matter that reacts with heat, light, moisture, and most importantly of all, the chemicals used in its production. And it is this unique reaction that causes the unique used books smell …

Chemists at University College, London have investigated the old book odor and concluded that old books release hundreds of volatile organic compounds into the air from the paper. The lead scientist described the smell as ‘A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.’”

The Atlantic (“What Is That ‘Old Books Smell’? Chemistry Has Answers“) read my mind on this one, mentioning Super Sad True Love Story, a depressingly fun satire about our possible near-future –

“Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.”

But, old books are decidedly uncool in Gary Shteyngart’s near future, so that old book smell is Pine Sol-ed into oblivion in order to impress some girl. Figures.

The Telegraph — “The smell of old books analysed by scientists” — has more on the science behind the old books smell at University College London.