Why People Still Buy Books

I noticed that my sale of print books on The Pitcher keeps pushing past the Kindle copies. They usually sort of play it out like a major leaguer versus a minor league team with the kindle downloads leading the way. But lately the books have been fighting back and staying there. So in our ebook digital I don't know what to do with all these pulpy books and CDS age why are people still buying books? I have come up with a few ideas not based on any science at all.

One. We are creatures of habit above all else. We see this with people who still have land lines and don't carry smart phones. I talked to a man who is a general contractor who never got a cell phone. Business is booming. How does he do it. He says people just get hold of him. And of course there are people who run around with legal tablets instead of IPADS. This is their preferred method. So it must be with books. There are people who like the feel of a book and do not like burning their eyes on screens.

Second would be physicality. Lets face it with a download you do not have a thing. You have some code that produces words on a screen. That's it. You have no evidence you just paid nine bucks for a book. And when you finish reading your code the book disappears versus that book that sits on your shelf or all time and calls out to you every time you pass it. You own something with a book.

Finally people like the experience of reading a printed page. There is a difference. Your eyes engage with the word differently. You have a tactile sensation. I have been reading WILSON the monster biography and I could never read that  in a kindle. Why? Because Woodrow Wilson was a man of the early twentieth century and I just couldn't see him dancing in the light on a screen as compared to me getting coffee and jelly all over him and even dropping him in the tub once.

Or maybe it is because we are not bits and bytes but flesh. We are real. So it is with books.

www.williamhazegrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Kindle and our Libraries of Old

My fondest memories are rolling through the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore and finding new books to read. I always read what I wasn't supposed to be reading because I wasn't supposed to be reading it. Rosemary's Baby or a book about drugs called Tuned Out or just about any flashy cover on the paperback rack. But then I disappeared into the stacks and looked for my Henry Huggins books or Romona and Beatrice or Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys. Then I would sometimes just walk the stacks and find the big picture books from World War II and sit down and pour over the photos of battle and gore and marvel at men who actually went and fought and died.

Finally, I would check out my books and walk home in the crisp twilight with the excitement of the books under my arms. I still feel that excitement when I walk into a library today. Something about a building of books just gets my mind rolling. All that possibility in those carpeted aisles with the lady in the beehive and reading glasses glancing at those that would disturb the inner sanctum. The slightly harried younger woman working behind the front desk that are forever cataloging books or trying to find a missing library card because a mother and her kids are imploding.

Communities are defined by their libraries. It is one of the first things a town builds. And the biggest towns (Chicago) have incredible libraries. And it is hard to believe that world might go away. Maybe not be anytime soon, but the Ebook is the first foot in the door of a world where people don't have to leave home to go the library. The library as we know it with the cranky women keeping order and the pulpy smell of old books could well one day be reduced to a server.  A strange thought.

Amazon  just opened up the Kindle to libraries.That means people like myself can now zap a book into my reader at my kitchen table and never leave the house. The overwhelming advantage of the Kindle or any Ereader is one of convenience. It is simply easier to plunk a book out of thin air and read it. There is none of the driving to the bookstore or library and parking and paying for gas and searching out the book. You simply do it in seconds. This doesn't bode well for bookstores or libraries.

The faint erosion of library traffic will not be noticeable at first. There are simply too many people who prefer books. But as times passes, the people who grew up on Ereaders will not reach for a book the way we don't reach for an eight track tape or a  record. The medium has simply passed. And it is a sad thought that our collective isolation from technology might just spread to even our libraries.

I don't know. Even if all the books are gone, I'll still go to the library and walk the stacks. Me and the lady in the beehive with that sweater she is forever pulling together, looking over her glasses. Shhhhhhh. People are reading. For now anyway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...one mans fight to get out of suburbia

Got the Kindle Finally!

All my books are available on Kindle (Kindle Books)so I figured I better go get one. I had been eyeing them for a while and when I went past the GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign on Borders I swung in and eyed their KOBOS and almost bought one for the low price of seventy bucks. But after talking to the salespeople who would soon be walking the streets they let me know in their own way the KOBO ereader was not so great. Well, it's kind of slow one saleswoman said in beneath her breath. Say no more. After asking about several books Borders didn't have I beat it out of there and headed for Best Buy where I bought my KINDLE!

I haven't read one book on it  yet but today is the day. But I went into my library to grab something and there were all my books. I usually don't even think about them but suddenly they looked antique. Don't get me wrong I will still be a book reader of pulp and circumstance. But I know the way I look at CD's or records that the old delivery vehicle is on a time limit. Books will not be relevant to my seven year old the way they were to me. It is just a fact.

And maybe because I had to wrestle with the kindle environment for the last few weeks (In Kindle Purgatory)getting by books out there that I came to understand more about the power of the digital word. Even going into Borders hit me differently. Of course Borders is going out of business. The brick and mortar modality of selling books is already behind the curve. Those books just sit on the shelf and don't say a word. I can shoot out my chapters to people and they may ignore them they may delete them they may block me, but I just did something pro active while the muted pulp sits on the shelf.

The word I got was that Borders got into the Ereader market too late and that was one of the reasons they went down like the Titanic. The truth is publishing is changing at nanosecond speed and authors bookstores and publishers are still adjusting. Whoops. My phone just went off. That was my Kindle newsletter. I guess it's time to open the box and fire up my ereader. Maybe I'll try The Help. Everyone is reading it and of course it is the book Borders did not have. Guess I'll just download it. There...Done.

William Hazelgrove Website
Rocket Man Kindle or Paperback

Catcher in the Rye for the Recession Generation....

The Difference Between a Kindle and a Book

Listen Up IPOD people there is a difference between a Kindle and a book. Take music. The IPOD is not the same as a stereo or a car stereo or an album or even a CD. The IPOD is a delivery vehicle that gives us thousands of digitized songs through really tinny headphones. Yeah I know the new rage of BOSE headphones and now we all look like it's 1979 again and Rob Lowe is putting the headphones on Demi Moore in his swinging bachelor pad. But even then it is different. You are not listening to music resonating in a room, you are listening to it resonate in your ear.

But back to books and the Kindle. Same deal. A delivery device that gives you thousands of books. But there is a difference. When you read on screen your eyes tend to scan. You do not move along the page the same way as the old pulp and ink page. A book is a holistic experience. It is physical and the words look different on the page. Your mind takes those words and converts them into an image or a scene and you create the story. The way those words are arranged on the page, the visual textual feel of those words contribute to the scene. Also the speed in which you read those words contributes to the scene.

You usually sit down in your chair or at your kitchen table. You have your cup of coffee. The page makes a sound, it crinkles under your fingers. You see it as a permanent object. The music of the words starts to play in your quiet sanctum. The artistry of writing is visual.Take the Kindle. You flip it on. You fire up the page. You see the electronic symbols. You start to scan down the page. You read quickly where ever you are because there is a lot more to read, thousands of books to read. The words evaporate as you read them. It as if they never existed. Your mind registers a plastic device, not a book.

So right. Kindle readers will knock this down and say it is the same. And it is where everything is going because of the economics and ease of delivery. But like the IPOD where the music quality is diminished by the Skull candy earbud enviroment we become used to the new delivery vehicle and experience suffers. The Kindle will rule the day and reading will suffer. Such is the price we pay for technology.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off July 26th

The Problem with the Kindle

So I have always taken the view that if anyone wants to read my novel on a screen that is fine. But then as I was reading from that dinosaur of pulp and ink...the book....it hit me. Reading fiction from a screen is different than reading it from paper. The message changes. I know this because when I edit novels I work for a long time on the screen, but then I have print it out to read it through. And it changes. I see a hundred things I didn't see before. Now why is that?

Simply put fiction takes a form on the page. The paragraph, sentence, dialogue have an actual shape that we pick up in our mind and transmute to an image. Let's say we read a dangling sentence that is something like, DIE! And lets say that is out there by itself. Our mind will rev up the that one exclamatory word until it becomes a statement with all sorts of connotations. Then let's say we slip into description of a goat cart starting down the road. "The goat cart jerked back as it pulled forward. " The words actually move. Jerked back collides with pulled forward. The sentence is alive and we see the goat cart jerk back and then pull forward.

This takes place on the page. In the world of kindle this takes place, but in a much different form. The glowing screen informs the work or changes the words and changes the image. Our brain interprets that image differently from the text on paper. It just does. Put aside the fact that in a lot of Ereaders text is rearranged with breaks in paragraphs and sentences routinely scrambled. Well this can be worked out, but the lack of physicality to the words existing on paper makes the world inhabited more of a phantom.

Hogwash the converted scream. Really? Take the digital revolution and the IPOD. Listening to digitized music on tiny ear plugs is immensely different than analog music on a stereo in a room with sound dampening furniture and wood floors. The music then comes alive. Compare that with the tinny little buzz that comes out of an IPOD. There is no comparison. Music changed once it became digitized and we weren't quite sure how for a long time, but it just does.

So in the Kindle revolution there will be something lost. I read text all the time on screens, my Blackberry, you name it. But when I settle in with a book in a chair in a library and I see those words on the page take shape, then I enter the world as the author saw it. And that is verisimilitude. Something quietly being lost in the digital age.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/