On Writing Well →
Book to buy. I should start a list.
Book to buy. I should start a list.
Another book for the growing “to buy” list.
A bunch of famous authors (including Ursula K. Le Guin!) share what they’ve been reading.
The New York Times got its hands on a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in J.K. Rowling’s series, and posted a review on its Web site. And people are mad, MAD, that the ending might be spoiled by reports like this. Case in point:
With who knows what spoilers? That’s not rhetorical; I don’t know what spoilers because there WAS NO SPOILER WARNING EITHER WAY. So I didn’t read it (though in scrolling to the end to see if there was a “with” involved — a sure tip-off to the identity of the book-buyer — I did see the words “Ginny Weasley” and my heart flared with fear, and hope, because Ginny Weasley is AWESOME). But honestly, embargoes are in place for a reason, and entreaties from the author (or the Crying Game director, for that matter) are there specifically for the benefit of the public — the very same public the NYT is purporting to serve with their rushed-to-print review …
Please. Screaming about spoilers implies that the pleasure derived from a story comes solely from plot — and that’s plot in its most basic, pedestrian form: this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Sure, plots hold a reader’s interest, but they aren’t the sole component of a good story. Knowing, for example, (spoiler!) that Rosebud is just a sled doesn’t make Charles Foster Kane a less interesting character, or his losses by the end Citizen Kane any less tragic. In some cases, knowing how things end improves appreciation of a work; (spoiler!) Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense gains pathos when the audience knows that he’s actually already dead.
Anyway, the Times report hardly spoils anything. Below is the nearest thing to a “secret” I could find (spoiler!):
Harry’s journey will propel him forward to a final showdown with his arch enemy, and also send him backward into the past, to the house in Godric’s Hollow where his parents died, to learn about his family history and the equally mysterious history of Dumbledore’s family. … Indeed, ambiguities proliferate throughout “The Deathly Hallows”: we are made to see that kindly Dumbledore, sinister Severus Snape and perhaps even the awful Muggle cousin Dudley Dursley may be more complicated than they initially seem, that all of them, like Harry, have hidden aspects to their personalities, and that choice — more than talent or predisposition — matters most of all.
That hardly gives anything away, and only makes me more interested in reading the story. And that’s because the ambiguities mentioned here tug out what makes Harry Potter’s story so engaging. The older and more experienced he becomes, the more the world strips off its veneer of black and white, so that Harry finds himself in a world of shifting, gray ambiguities. The opening scenes of The Order of the Phoenix illustrate this well: Mundungus Fletcher, supposedly a wizard on the side of good, leaves his post watching Harry to engage in a criminal deal, exposing Harry and his bullying cousin Dudley to the deadly Dementor’s kiss. But then the old neighbor lady — who always seemed like a harmless muggle — turns out to be a spy sent by Dumbledore to watch Harry from the very beginning of the first book! With her help, Harry escapes — and is promptly expelled from Hogwarts for using magic in front of a muggle; never mind that Harry’s used magic expressly to save that muggle from certain death.
If the layers of ambiguity and uncertainty continue to pile up until the end, when the Dark Lord does battle with a nearly-dark-himself Harry, the story will have come to a satisfying conclusion. I only hope that old Draco Malfoy, the snotty rich-kid bully who’s pushed Harry around from the beginning, will finally listen to his conscience and do some good for a change.
Awesome bit of video explaining what exactly the “tesseract,” which figures so prominently in A Wrinkle in Time, means.
An actual tesseract is best described as a four dimensional cube…and is kind of confusing. So, in memory of L’Engle, we met up with Physicist David Morgan who took a little time out of his day to talk tesseracts with the BPP. Put your measley three-dimensional brains to work on this one.
Amazon’s newly-unveiled Kindle is supposedly going to change publishing forever. Based on all the photos I’ve seen, it looks like it’s about the size and thickness of a Moleskine notebook, and while it might not be the prettiest bit of consumer electronics released this year it does come with a smart-looking pleather case.
The most interesting item on its insanely huge product page is this one:
Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
That’s really revolutionary, for several reasons. Because Kindle has its own cell-phone-style network connection, you can get these updates anywhere there’s cell service (without paying data fees, which is nice). Kindle also has a 160 dpi electronic paper display that approximates the way printed paper looks. A portable device that wirelessly downloads articles each morning and displays them on a crisp paper-like screen? This is the device that’s going to save the newspaper industry from the Internet, right?
Well, not really. True, if you were debating about the newspapers vs. Internet a few years ago, someone might have proposed a device exactly like Kindle. (Like Kindle except for one detail: the hypothetical paper-saver would be supercheap, instead of $400 like Kindle.) But the Internet’s threat to the traditional newspaper business has evolved over time. For one thing, Kindle isn’t interactive. For another, there’s still the ad problem: if newspaper content on Kindle comes free, how are the newspapers getting making money? Will there be ads on Kindle?
Web sites are too deeply ingrained at this point for Kindle to get people back to reading the E-newspaper. Plus, unless there’s a very strong and aggressive ad system on Kindle, newspapers won’t be making much money either. Then there’s the ethical problems with Kindle: everything on Kindle belongs to Amazon and the content creators, not you, and you can’t lend Kindle books or articles to other Kindles. Amazon also makes it difficult to upload content to Kindle. Philosophically, Kindle (and other E-book readers) are a change for the worse in the way we think about writing, reading and intellectual property. Mark Pilgrim has assembled a nice collection of the different voices on this issue in The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts).
Kindle is already being referred to as the “the iPod of books,” and people will probably continue to refer to it as such. It’s best summed up by John Gruber:
You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion.
Doesn’t sound like a win to me
I speculated that the newspaper and magazine subscription service was the Kindle’s killer feature. A device that is automatically pushed the day’s paper every morning is the future, right up there with flying cars and an insolvent social security. So I subscribed to The Journal. To be sure, its neat having a copy of the day’s paper always on hand, and the $9.99/month price is fair. But, while the Kindle successfully captures the book metaphor, it is not so good with newspapers.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Self-publishing is the new blogging
Here’s a great article about how the publishing industry has changed, becoming increasingly professionalized.
Writers, young and old, might still come to New York, but today the city is a place you visit to have lunch with an agent, talk to a publisher, attend a conference. You don’t need to live in Greenwich Village and drink at the White Horse to be a writer. Instead, if you’re lucky, you teach in a college, and, if you’re just starting out, you might be enrolled in a “low residency” writing program or taking courses in the summer. These days, after all, writing is seriously organized, almost a business, with schools, grants, fellowships, trade magazines, workshops, and programs of every sort.
Certainly explains why self-publishing companies are proliferating.
Khoi Vihn has a book (sorta):
Digital evangelists: if you have any doubt about the convincing power of print, then order yourself a book of your own making over at Lulu.com — remember to put your name prominently on the cover — and show it around to your friends.
It looks very snazzy, and makes me wonder if we’ll see a rise of micro-publishers — small companies that take a manuscript, edit it & art direct it, then ship it off to an on-demand printer. (Note to self: figure out marketing, bookstore placement, and fee/advance structure.)
Whatever can be digitized will be digitized. Hardware can not compete with software in elegance, simplicity, and cost. From the iPhone to online banking, digital things are superior to physical. Soon the clerk in the bank is not going to be retyping the wire transfer from a piece of paper. Soon we will be electing the president of the United States via electronic voting.
The author thinks books will survive, though — while newspapers/magazines are “dirty,” books are “magical.” Time will tell, I suppose, but probably by the time everyone is carrying an iPhone around all that newsprint will seem rather old fashioned.
Thought provoking article on ownership from Gizmodo. This is especially interesting to me because I’ve been reading so many free Tor eBooks lately.
If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?
People would ask, So what do you do for a living, and I’d reply, I’m a book designer, actually, and they’d nod and squint a little and say something like, So … that’s the covers?
