From Publishing Perspectives: “Love Haruki Murakami? There’s An App For That.” The calendar/diary app is U.K.-only which is too bad, because it’s exactly the sort of thing I would spend £1.99 on.

“Vintage Books and Aimer Media have joined forces to create a Haruki Murakami inspired diary app, Murakami Diary, containing six new exclusive short stories by the acclaimed (and often rumored Nobel Prize candidate) Japanese author as well as quotes from earlier works … Quotes and images are found within the diary format. For example, accompanying the diary page for Sunday March 31 is a quote from the novel Norwegian Wood:“[The letter] was dated 31 March. After I read it, I stayed on the porch and let my eyes wander out of the garden, full now with the freshness of spring. An old cherry tree stood there, its blossoms nearing the height of their glory.”

Since I can’t get the first-person experience, I will live vicariously through The Guardian’s review (“Haruki Murakami? There’s an iPhone and iPad diary app for him…“) –

“Nor is it pure marketing content, although its release has been timed to appear alongside the paperback release of Murakami’s last novel 1Q84 and the repackaging of his backlist. Instead, Random House and its developer partner Aimer Media are part of a welcome trend for promotional apps that actually fulfill a useful function. In this case, it’s a calendar, which pulls in entries from Apple’s iCal system, while peppering the year with quotes from Murakami’s backlist of novels and short stories – all sharable via Facebook, Twitter and email.

… The geek in me (both literary and technological) would love to see what Random House might do with a fully-fledged interactive version of one of Murakami’s novels, more around contextual notes and perhaps the musical references.”

I’m always interested in new ways that people are using data to gain insight into readerly behavior. So here’s a neat idea: BookRx is a recently launched experiment from the Knight Lab, which crawls a Twitter feed (assuming one tweets about books), to make book recommendations.

The Huffington Post has a good interview, with some additional information –

“How does it work?

BookRx works in two phases. In the first phase, it analyzes your tweets (in terms of the words, Twitter usernames, and hashtags you use) and compares them to terms that are correlated with book categories. In the second phase, it looks within those categories to find specific books to recommend, again based on correlations with the terms in your tweets. The first phase is very fast but the second takes a few seconds.

What can people’s Twitter word usage tell us about their personalities?
That’s a really interesting question. We’re really interested in how Twitter can hold up a mirror to ourselves, and seeing BookRx’s recommendations might be one way to do that. That’s one of the reasons we show you the terms you used that made the system think you might be interested in a book it’s recommending to you — to make its operation a bit more visible.”

The Secret Sauce of book recommendations has always been rather mysterious, so I do like the BookRx approach. From Mashable, “New Web App Recommends Books Based on Your Tweets” – 

“…  For some, there is something innately unsettling about AI predictions. It is even more disturbing when the computer is accurate. Unlike sites like Amazon and Google, however, BookRx shows you the exact words you tweeted that led to its various recommendations.”

I think the idea for the experiment is very clever. It’s something to keep an eye on, particularly if they have good luck growing their user base — if BookRx is something that catches on, it’ll be interesting to see what kinds of information it can tell us about reading recommendations (and how good, or bad, those recommendations are).

Recently, Random House shared some of its insights into ebook reading habits: (“Who Reads eBooks?“). Younger, well-educated, higher-income women seemed to represent a healthy slice of the ebook reading population. I was surprised at how strong a source word-of-mouth (81%) remains for ebook discovery –

“Over a fifth of American adults have read an eBook. EBook consumers are likely to be book enthusiasts who read across digital and print formats. Most eBook consumers are women, are younger than forty-five, have college degrees or have had some college education, and have upscale incomes. EBook consumers are over 20 percent more likely to have household incomes over $100,000 per year than non-eBook consumers. Preferred genres include mystery/suspense/detective fiction, general fiction, and romance.

When compared to all Americans ages sixteen and up, they tend to rely more heavily on word-of-mouth (81 percent versus 64 percent for all Americans ages 16+) and bookstore staff (31 percent versus 23 percent for Americans ages 16+) for book recommendations.” 

Here is the infographic breakdown below, and you can click on the image for more information from Random House.

What if we could gave away millions of books to children for free? Every day? This news story started to sound less crazy to me, the more I thought about it. Per The Atlantic: “The U.K.’s Biggest Distributor of Children’s Books Is About to Be … McDonald’s” –

“It’s easy to make fun of the experimental McLiterature initiative — in the way that it’s easy to make fun of McDonald’s itself. But the chain is, like it or not, a juggernaut … one that has, as such, immense power over the impressionable kids among its customers. And this could be one way — one small way that, via McDonald’s mass impact, could prove significant — to get kids excited about reading. The initiative, Yahoo Shine reports, was inspired by data from Britain’s National Literacy Trust

…finding innovative new methods of getting books into kids’ hands. And that’s a good thing. But it means a strange, telling twist: McDonald’s expects to distribute 15 million books over the course of its initiative, between now and 2014. Which means that it will become the biggest distributor of children’s books in the entire United Kingdom.”

Will kids go for books over toys? Sure, it’s possible. Most won’t. But, some might. And if even some small percentage of those children discover a love of books who might not ordinarily have picked up a book, then I would say McDonald’s would have done a damn good job. The upshot of the “Happy Readers” experiment, hopefully, is that this could inspire book publishers to think up more creative ways of getting books in the hands of more readers.

Apparently there are no current plans for a U.S. version, which is too bad. The L.A. Times (“Will the kids love it? McDonald’s swaps Happy Meal toys for books“) dreams upon such a possibility … 150 million free books to children? From Happy Meals? Wow.  

Here’s some food for thought, courtesy of Salon: “Study: People can remember more about Facebook than real books” –

“Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of California, San Diego,tested how well people could remember text taken from Facebook updates and compared it to sentences picked at random from books. What they found is that participants’ memory for Facebook posts was about one and a half times greater than their memory for sentences from books.”

I don’t know if I would necessarily arrive at the same conclusions mentioned in the article, though: “Responses to news stories, thoughts about the world. Usually casual, often gossipy, these posts, researchers say, are easier to remember than more formal, edited content.”

Is that really true? I would be very hard-pressed to remember what I read on The Facebook last year, or last week — but I tend to fare better when trying to remember what I read from books. If anything, I would have guessed our very different states of distraction and attentiveness when browsing social networks as opposed to reading a book would make Facebook much less easier to recall. Or, maybe I’m just starting to get old and forgetful.*

I can’t help but wonder if randomly chosen book passages are less emotionally salient than a Facebook status and therefore less memorable. I’d also speculate that the social component of what we read on Facebook probably helps with remembering; maybe it’s that we can put a face to a status update that makes it more memorable. Maybe, or maybe not.

So … what about a Facebook Book, then?**

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Random things that I find myself googling: “Cognitive Decline Sets in Around Age 45”

** Speaking of the first image in this blog post, did you know that you can make a Facebook-book out of status updates? I’m actually very curious: why would someone want to do that?

Here’s some potentially-interesting news, from Gizmodo: “Amazon Has a Patent to Sell Used Ebooks.”

What’s noteworthy about the used ebook patent is that it sounds like a step towards solidifying the tricky issue of what we do with digital objects that we “own.” Think about it — what exactly do most of us do with ebooks that we’ve finished reading? Not much, probably. Sure, Amazon allows Kindle lending but the system is imperfect at best.

Which isn’t of course to say that the used ebook market is imminent (Gizmodo: “Of course many patents never amount to anything at all and are moves to secure intellectual property before another company does“).  It is somewhat telling that the secondary market for the tangible, hardware e-reading devices is more clearly defined than the dearth of options for the more-ephemeral ebooks.

Also, Publishers Weekly (“Amazon Poised to Sell Used E-Books“) mentions ReDigi and their efforts to create a used digital content marketplace (along with the copyright issues hindering those efforts). Never heard of ReDigi before but, interesting.

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For another interesting perspective, check out FutureBook.net (” ‘Ere, mate, wanna buy a second hand ebook? “) –

“What’s actually happening, of course, is not the transfer of a physical object, but the transfer of access rights or data. Data don’t depreciate, so there’s no real reason to discount the product because it’s been used. The straight transfer is therefore rather dull: person A yields it to person B for the same amount he or she paid for it, and person B gets the file via bluetooth or similar rather than via Whispernet or broadband download. Um. No measurable benefit to anyone. Or, yes, you’d end up with a market where people would discount in order to make some money back, and ultimately drive down the value of the book. Not great news.”

Here’s some inspired bookstore marketing for all of those readers looking for last-minute Mayan Apocalypse reading material: end of the world book lists.

I rather like Abe Books’ End of the World Literature – Post-Apocalyptic Fiction list (surprised I’d read more of these books than I thought) –

“Noah’s ark and the flood that wiped earth clean of wicked mankind is an early example of post-apocalyptic writing but the modern genre of end of the world literature can be traced back two centuries to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man published in 1826.

Even though Shelley, famous for Frankenstein, and a few other writers were able to imagine doomsday scenarios in Victorian times, the genre blossomed – if that’s the right word and it probably isn’t – after World War II. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed humanity had the tools for global self-destruction. The 1950s was a decade where the end of world could be found on the end of our bookshelves.

The method of worldwide destruction varies. Readers could encounter a plague, global nuclear war, biological weaponry, a comet collision, or a blinding meteor shower followed by flesh-eating plants. Many authors don’t explain in detail the nature of their book’s catastrophe but, in many ways, it’s unimportant – the thoughts and actions of the survivors are what counts. How do they survive? Do they attempt to hold civilization together? Do they adopt new values? What do they reject and what do they retain?”

Also worth a look: Powell’s Books “Apocalypse Alley.”

Has anyone read The Day of the Triffids?

Do you like timelines? Brainpickings has shared an excellent one: “A Visual Timeline of the Future Based on Famous Fiction.”

According to the handy science fiction chronology: the world of Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is due some time in the next ten years, Ender’s Game not until next century, and Brave New World is another 500 years away, give or take.

And the explanation –

“The visualization is built on a main horizontal axis depicting a distorted time-line of events (in fact we put them regularly, in sequence), starting our future-timeline in 2012. The y-axis is dedicated to the year the novel / book foretelling the event was published.

On the lower half of the visualization you can find the original quotes (shortened)

… In the end, good news: in 802,701 the world will still exist and everything will be more or less ok“

(802,701 is the Morlock-filled era of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine).

The timeline is a massive image. You can click on the tiny version below to see a more readable version at Brainpickings.org.

And here is the link to the original timeline at The Awl.