The Death of the Book that Didnt Happen

Oh it was supposed to go the way of the IPOD. You know the book. It was over. We would all be listening to or reading our books on kindles and those anachronistic tombs would be just hanging around the shelves waiting to start a good bonfire. But...but...it didn't happen. Wait a minute. You mean the economics behind ripping a .99 cent song or spotify didn't apply to books? Come on. People are driven by economics and convenience and it surely is cheaper and easier to download a book than lugging around a pound and half of books in your backpack. So...RIP book.

But then it didn't happen. Maybe it was the college class of advanced fiction or intro English that tipped me off.   I told the students on the first day. Yes you can download the books if you want. How many people have kindles? Crickets. How many people download books to their computers. Crickets. Wait a minute. The vaunted eighteen year old tech savvy demographic was not behaving. At least not for the pundits and doomsayers of books. Then sales of ebooks flatlined and I started doing back to back book signings in Barnes and Nobles around Chicago. I mean lots of them. Twenty or so around the holidays and then I got my second shock.

My books are not discounted. I am not Tom Clancy and my publishers decline to break the price on my hardcovers. So my books cost around 32.00 or 36.00 out the door. People didn't blink. They didn't even ask the price. They just bought and bought and bought. No sign of the Kindle or Nook anywhere. I sold 24,000 dollars worth of hardcovers last season....so why didn't the damn book die? Well...people who read are different animals than those who rip songs from the Internet. Also, we work on our computers. Yeah that thing we lug around and haunts us in our sleep to the point we have to get stoned or take a drink to calm our jazzed brains does not lend itself to pleasure. And reading is pleasure.
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Now there are those who say well virtual reality will replace the book eventually. Yawn. Forget about the research that says when we watch something our brain just about goes to sleep and that words are about the only sparks that conjure up a scene in the tabula rasa of our brain. Virtual reality replace books. Sure it will. Just like we all drink lattes and have tattoos and ear rings and live in urban areas and have sleek new phones and cars. Not. Most people shop at Target. Pay the mortgage. Hope their kids have a better future and if they have a moment for a good story and have a book they will read that over just bout every other delivery device So lets hear it for that old thumbed and yellowed bit of parchment between  the covers. Long live the book...the book....the book. 

What Happened to the Kindle?

You remember that funny thing that lit up and then went dead really fast. Or how about that thing you tried to read in the sun and it was like a black piece of slate. Or that thing where you never knew what page you were on and couldn't tell when you would finish the book or if the pages were marked and you couldn't spill jelly or coffee on it or throw it in your backpack or get it wet or find that one book you know you downloaded but now it is just gone. You know the thing that was supposed to be the IPOD of books. What happened to it?

I know I know. There are a lot of people out there who are happy kindle users but it is weird when the hardcover of my book  outpaces the kindle by four to one. People seem willing to plunk down 29.00 for a hardcover instead of getting an electronic version of less than half the price. The bigger question is why didn't it blow away all those pulpy books especially hardcovers.
Could it be readers are different than people who listen to music and while spotify tore the music biz to pieces the kindle fizzled like a bottle rocket.

The rub on this is the kindle flat lined somewhere and the novelty wore off and people went back to buying books. I am a perfect example. My kindle is jammed with books. And for a while that was my thing. No more books. Just electronic. But I missed marking up my books, I missed bending the pages, knowing how far i had to go...I missed READING a book. It is different. When I asked my comp class  in college who had a kindle? Not one hand went up.

So maybe it will come back. But until then bring on the coffee and jelly and bend back those pages and throw that bad boy by the tub. And the great thing is you don't have to plug it  in. My own kindle sits on my dresser...covered in dust.

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

Reading Huckleberry Finn on a Kindle

It doesn't work. Sorry. I tried. But there are some books that have to be read in paper. I read to half and put it down. Of course I have read the book many times but I wanted to dip back in and I had it on the Kindle and nah. Didn't work. And why didn't it work. It is lighter. It is more convenient. Hell I can even read it in the bathtub with the cat swimming around. Of course one false move and so much for the kindle and the cat. But the biggest reason I could not read Twain's classic in a mini computer format was because the story did not fit the form.

And here is where Jeff Bezos meets the road. Literature is an art all rankings aside. There are other considerations than how many units can be moved and all the digital BS in the world will not change the fact that the immutability of art trumps commerce. It always has. Why do billionaires buy paintings and pay millions for them. Not because of the investment...it is because they want to own art. Something that can not be bought. It is the eternal that makes money seem small and art if it is any good is all about the eternal.

And so it is with Huckleberry Finn. You cannot read about Huck and Jim floating down the river on a flickering screen. Twain did not intend it that way nor did history. Those old crackly pulped pages must turn again for you to hear the splash of that raft and Jim musings on the cosmos and Hucks hard headed deliverance. So I turn back against form and go for content.

Style over substance loses out and the pulp litters the water while the cat swims.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher




 

Downloads Top Album Sales For the First Time

Something we all know has arrived. The download is now preeminent in the music world and those CD players we have are now in the junk heap of history. Sure Sure. People will still buy a physical medium to claim ownership, but that accessibility will trump ownership eventually and the digital medium is proving it more every day. A million kindles sold every week by Amazon. A million. If the writing gets any bigger on the wall there will be no more wall.

Not that books are songs. They are not. Readers are a persnickety group and a lot of people will prefer the book, but when my eighty nine year old father in-law and my eighty year old mother in-law are sitting in their La-Z boys hunched over their Kindle screens then something is definitely up. The speed of this transition is taking away our collective breath and is already leaving authors and publishers scrambling to keep up. The proof is in the download.

The Kindle is not the IPOD. Not yet anyway. You still want a break from the Kindle with a book. I know I do and have read the last three novels in the old paper format. Music has no such physical drawbacks. In fact having all your music in your pocket is fantastic compared to carrying around a bulky CD player or worse a boom box. But, portability is a big factor in the Kindle reader also. You don't lug books, but the tech revolution of the IPOD just doesn't seem as much of a Watershed as the Kindle. It is still a better tactile experience to read a book if not visually as well.

But the Kindle is still evolving. Paper screens may not be far off along with brighter screens that are easier on the eye. Who knows, maybe they will even get that pulpy old book smell puffing out as you read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...a hilarious well written novel about one mans search for the new American Dream James Frey

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

From Scroll to Kodex to reading The New York Times in Wisconsin

Up in a cabin with nothing but my kindle I downloaded the NY Times and read Lev Grossmans piece on the limitations of the digital format versus what he called the the codex  (book) which evolved from the scroll. He says if anything we are not making enough of the change. He is right and he winds up his piece saying the constrictions of the digital format is it's undoing. He is right. You cannot go from the end to the beginning with the kind of ease of a book. You cannot find  a page you wanted and then shoot ahead and back again to the place you wanted to be. Ebooks are just harder to navigate and they do feel contained.

Saying that Grossman finishes up saying that he will stick with the book. It is everyones choice and I understand his frustration. Reading on the ereader is very different. You just don't have that physical book in your lap to tear to pieces and mark up and read and jump around in. It's almost like the story is caged and you can't quite get to it. But here is why the new medium trumps all. Convenience. Humans move to convenience like ships to water. I can think of no better example than sitting up in Wisconsin and reading Levs article and then the entire NY Times Sunday paper in a cabin in middle of the woods.

There was no way for me to do this at my in laws place before. The town five miles away had the Milwaukee Journal and if you drove further to a grocery store you could get the Chicago Tribune. But NY Times, no way. But I read Lev's piece and then Maureen Dowd and here was the big thing, I could drop it on the couch and then fall asleep and then pick up where I left off. I would have never read any of this without the ability to snatch the newspaper out of thin air.

And I have written about the limitation of reading the NY Times on the Kindle and I stand by preferring the paper over the digital. But there is no doubt that conveniencewill trump everything. We are only getting busier and more pressed for time. Going to a bookstore or to a grocery store will be a luxury we will pass on because it's just so much easier to sit in our cabin and start reading. The scroll gave way to the Codex for much the same reason. It was just so  much easier to read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Ebooks level the playing field for Authors

Mass market paperbacks are dying. This is due in large part to ebooks taking away the normal paperback buyer in airports, drugstores and those large racks that used to sit in front of department stores and every convenience store. My second novel came out in mass market and should have been trade. Tobacco Sticks went out the there as a literary courtroom drama set in the South in Virginia in 1946 and had to fight it out with spy novels, thrillers, slasher novels, mysteries and just about every mass genre out there. I had no choice in the matter and the publisher later admitted that trade would have been a better fit for the novel.

The beautiful thing about Ebooks is that the author is in control.  There is only one format and that levels the playing field. No longer is an author competing with hard covers, trade, or mass paperback. No longer is the author stuck in a format that doesn't fit because of publishing realities. The book goes out there as an Ebook and it is on the same footing as every other author. Bestseller or unknown, the reader will receive the same product without the stigma of mass versus trade versus hardcover.

And the book can stay out there. No publisher will remainder your title falling into the dreaded OUT OF PRINT STATUS. You book will not be pushed to the back of the store or worse not displayed at all. One copy will not be stocked while five hundred copies are stocked of other titles. Books will not be sent back to the publisher because they didn't sell out in the first month. The ebook revolution has put the author in the drivers seat finally.

So mass market paperbacks will disappear. Eventually hardcover will  probably go away. The big authors will dominate the ebook sites and will be pushed out there first, but the reader can search for the author he wants and there the book will be for all time in  electronic mass, trade, and hardcover glory. The authors best effort will be there without publisher interference. Can an author ask for anything more?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

In Kindle Purgatory

I own all the electronic rights to my books and so it is my responsibility to get them  out there ready to go for the Kindle users. I had someone else do it for a while until I realized I was shooting myself in the foot by hurting my royalties. So I took it on and entered Kindle purgatory. You now have the words that have been hammered in stone in your books and have been fine thank you very much for years. But now you have to wake them up and explain you are putting them into a different format and would they please behave for people who want to zap e-books into their readers.

Words being words they don't behave. They rebel. Excited by being released after years of being stuck between two dusty covers and fading into pulpy yellow has beens the words now are juiced. They strut across the screen and jump around like Mexican jumping beans. Even the title gets in the act and shoots from one side to the other. The epigraph jumps ship altogether and the dedication is found hiding in the far right corner of the first chapter. The first chapter has mutinied and takes its' place in the back as CHAPTER ONE.

Others follow suit and everyone gets in the act. It is word riot! Think London in the last few days. All the words start rioting and looting. They jump pages, get into other words paragraphs. Chapters poach on other chapters and retaliate by changing the chapters font. Headings head for the hills and page numbers go on strike. There is even some new words who have decided on acrobatics for a living and come in sideways on the margins. The Authors Page goes vertical and decides it would rather march across several pages than being stuck in one lousy paragraph. Author Photo decides he never liked his position all that much and chooses a page for himself and turns black.

So like a cop I take off after my errant words and corral them and bluff them and bride them and kick them in their butts to get them back to their rightful place. Some words have gone hardcore and take no prisoners sticking to their margins or sides like pirates on a gold ship. I have no alternative but to nuke them and start over. They dont' go easy and make a lot of hell for everyone else with page recalibration. Finally I get everyone where they are supposed to be and we go for the conversion.

Most of the words make it, but a few slip by and the Chapter Headings do the rumba with some on the bottom of the page and some on the top. I push everyone around with billy club and we do it again and most of the headings get in line and even the epigraph is fairly centered. I torch the unrepentant Author Page for a web link which like the new guy on the block is very responsive and respectful and does what he is told. The words grumble and show up for work on time and I let them out into cyberspace on the promise they will behave.

Then I turn to the next book and let the inmates out again. Of course they go crazy.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Paperback and Download

Rocket Man First Chapter

The Catcher in the Rye for the fortysomethings. Not quite boomers, five years old during Woodstock, missed the sixties revolution and ended up being mellow in the seventies, partied in the eighties, floated in the nineties, then lost it all in the Great Recession. Welcome to the world of Rocket Man.