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Dinner (beef stew and mashed potatoes, if I recall correctly) was smelling delicious and ready to be eaten. We wanted to watch a movie. We’ve got a subscription to Zip.ca, and I have a habit of listing every avant-guard movie from 1927 I can find, with the odd bit of candy. So we often have some difficult films to choose from. It’s not that difficult is bad, but let’s just say that every time the Criterion Collection screen comes on, my wife groans; and as wonderful as Kurosawa can be, some nights one just wants to watch Adam Sandler get kicked in the nuts.

Anyway, there we were with two choices: Bicycle Thief and Doctor Zhivago.

Not knowing which to choose, I asked Twitter, and from thence flowed a stream of opinions, a 50-50 split between the two (we went with Bicycle Thief; a bit on the dismal side, to be honest). At some point, my wife yelled: “Stop looking at Twitter and watch the movie!” … because I kept a running tally, shouting out “another for Zhivago” and “oh, so-and-so thinks we made the right choice.”

This story was related by my wife to some non-Tiwtterites, who were in awe of this strange and magical tool that elicited such information, like some digital Oracle of Delphi.

Just a few days ago, I had yet another Delphesian experience on Twitter. I needed a third book to fill out an online book order and get free shipping (the other two books I wanted – Bolano’s 2666 and Elise Blackwell’s Hunger – are not available as ebooks in Canada). And so, I asked Twitter.

And here, for the record, is a list of what the Oracles of Twitter answered (Note: where links were not provided, I will link to whatever comes up first in the Google):

@jbeswick: “The Atomic Obsession” – great read

@seancranbury: goddammit, hugh! Monstrous Affections
or this is really good Unknown Soldier Vol. 1: Haunted House

@janinelaporte: True Deceiver is great. Buy that one Hugh to get your free shipping

@seancranbury: how’s this? Monsieur Pain

@danwagstaff: I keep hearing great things about True Deceiver by Tove Jansson + Blue Fox by Sjon.

@karenjones4: six pixels of separation is great! :) im a media hacks listener! Heard good things about Blue Oceans Strategy, next on my list.

@FNHPodcast: How about “Vulcan 607”

@michaelerard: governing the commons, by Elinor Ostrom.

@jenni_fleur: “Recital” by John Siddique….UK poet.

@chebuctonian: Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

@jmcd77: War of Art

@somisguided: eating the dinosaur by chuck klosterman

@dknippling: When in doubt about what book to get, get Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds.

@jforrest: Zeitoun

@marianslibrary: Have you read 13 1/2 by Nevada Barr? It’s a thriller.

@chriskingstl: Bohumil Hrabal, “I served the King of England”; anything by Robert Walser; anything by Charles Nicholl (Reckoning, The Lodger…)

@D3WEY: that’s a shame it’s amazing like climbing literary mount everest — have you read Updike’s Rabbit series?

@ShireenJ: Mine. :P Seriously though, “Lifeliner” has had good reviews and is a fast read.

@openmargin: The Collaborative Habit by Twyla Tharp?

@jambina: new Michael Chabon?

@lorissa: If you enjoy fantasty reads, I’d suggest The Name of the WInd by Patrick Rothfuss.

@subumom: Have you read the Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa?

@echobase77: Mistborn by @BrandonSandrson!

goldenpen80: Try Razor’s Edge by Maugham, if u haven’t already. Short, sweet, and absolutely sublime.

I chose Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, well before all the other recommendations came in. I’ll let you know what I think of it sometime.

Well, the real world got in the way of my grand plans to write a nanowrimo novel. But here is Chapter 3 in any case. This is lifted from a chapter I wrote, and liked, in a collaborative Nano novel a couple of years ago…and was in my mind as I started this new one.

***

Rain pours down, glowing like yellow bullets in the headlights, smashing into the windshield, and the wipers, on high, extra high, wash against the glass, past E’s lower-lip-biting face, over and over and over, thwack thwack thwack thwack like the sound of some manic drummer, some heartbeat, some constant beating against the night, an endless fight against the rain that will not let up, that comes harder and harder and so hard she thinks she must be drowning in it by now today. Eiko is shaking, cold, hands cramping against the wheel. She leans right up against it, her nose almost touching the leather of the wheel, so that she can see better, so that she can get under this rain, get closer to wherever it is she is going–she doesn’t even know where. Just away from where she had been. She wants to escape where she has been–the sirens, the shouts, the sounds of collapsing buildings, the shattered glass, the falling masonry, the million pieces of paper that floated down around her.

She keeps looking in the rear view mirror, her eyes flashing up and to the right, but no one is following her. There is nothing but dark back there, an empty universe of inscrutable black, but she can’t help herself, can’t help checking, verifying, assuring herself that she is alone. She doesn’t even know who would follow her, or why, but she can’t help herself, can’t help checking. The manic windshield wipers keep flailing thwack thwack thwack thwack in a losing battle against the rain. She’s crying, wipes at her tears.
Was she driving away from the noise? From these memories? Dreams? Images of a crumbling city? She didn’t know, didn’t have time to think, could not remember.

She knew only that she had to keep driving, driving away from what was behind her, that if she let her mind wander, at this speed, in this dark, with this rain, on this windy, unknown road wherever it was, she was lost. If she thought too much about it, she would lose control of the car. She would smash into the dark trees that flashed at her from either side of the road, reaching out at her as her headlight poured into them, those trees that flashed for brief seconds, one after the other, again and again, trying to slow her down, get in her way, and then flying past her as she kept speeding along. The road was getting worse, smaller – one lane now, bumpier, winding more, and she shifted down, and up again as she tore around the bend, and there was a big thunk from beneath her, and she was momentarily weightless, head flung up and back, everything seemed to stop, even the wipers, and she hung there, waiting waiting waiting for something, feeling a sudden sense of relief, a sense that the end might have come, that this dark panic in her gut might melt away, might be washed away with warmth and calm that she knew existed somewhere, had once felt, and she waited for the cramps in her shoulder and neck muscles to loosen and relax, waited for sleep, sleep with no more of these dreams.

The car landed, and she bounced up and down again, and back into position, nose inhaling the leather of the steering wheel, teeth cutting into her lower lip.

The paved road had turned to gravel, and now she could hear the rocks and stones bouncing up from below her, hitting the undercarriage of the car like bullets, an asynchronous rat-tat-tat-tatat percussion to go along with the constant thwack-thwack-thwack of the windshield wipers that continued their assault on the windshield in front of her.

She turned another corner, felt the car skidding under her, sliding towards the trees, and she shifted down, spun the wheel, as the tail of the old Mercedes got away from her, fishtailing right, and then left, the full nature of her momentum, now beyond her control. This was it, she had time to think, we think we are in control, pointing in one direction but a false move and everything we are doing is undone, beyond our control, not under it. We don’t control these machines. And she felt something welling up in her, fear that was already there in her throat now took over her whole body, this is it she thought, maybe I won’t have to run anymore. But whatever she did–she could not have told you if you asked, and if you did she would smile and giggle a little, and say, I have no idea! Ha! I was so scared! – but, somehow, somehow she managed to get the car straightened, and she realized she was crying, the tears coming down like the rain outside, with no windshield thwack-thwack-thwack to wipe them away.

She wiped at the tears no more than a second–her hand covered her eyes one beat, a moment so short the wipers made only one thwack, maybe two–and then she opened her eyes, clear of tears.

And saw him standing in front of her, illuminated in the road, standing tall, taller than any man she had ever seen, dressed in white, drenched with the rain, but just standing there.

As she slammed on the clutch and the brakes she had time to study him, as the car slowed, and began to skid straight ahead towards him.
She did not have time even to spin the wheel – not that it would have made any difference – and as the fender hit his legs she watched his face, a kind face, crumple in pain and exertion, his fine features that reminded her, for some reason, of the black-and-white picture of her father standing, legs spread, hands behind his back, in military at-ease pose, outside their house in the mountains in Akita Prefecture, with his linen shirt and pants, and wire-framed glasses. The body hit the windshield, bounced into the dark, and the car, suddenly was stopped, and silent, except for the windshield wipers, thwack-thwack-thwack. She turned the wipers off and jumped out of the car, the wind and rain hurling abuse at her. She slipped in the mud, grabbing at the hood of the car as she raced to get to him.

He was lying on his back, lit by the bright lights of the headlamps, drenched.

He must be dead, she thought, and she knelt beside him, crying again now, and took his face in her hands, wiped his black hair from his eyes. Hello, she said, hello hello please hello are you all right hello … she had never killed a man before. She thought she might be sick.

Hello, he answered, eyes still closed. Yes, he said, I think I am OK. I think so.

He lifted his left arm, flexed his fingers, then lifted his right arm and flexed that hand too, eyes still closed. Hands work, he said. Let’s try the legs. Left, then right, he lifted them, nodding. Yes, he said. Feet OK now. Oh, I will have a headache.

Stay, don’t move, Eiko said. What’s your name?

Daichi Okada, he answered.

Don’t move, Okada-san.

He did, he moved, he sat up.

Yes, he said, I will have a headache. He opened his eyes and looked into hers, a gentle smile on his face. He felt his forehead with his hand, tapping and pressing it, then the top of his head, the back of his head.

“All my parts are in the right place,” he said.

Eiko laughed and cried at the same time, and she hugged him and kissed his neck, and then realized what she was doing, and pulled back, bowing her head. I’m sorry, she said. I’m just happy you are alive.

I know you from somewhere, he answered. And touched her cheek, briefly.

Did he really do that, she thought to herself. Yes, yes he did, he did touch my cheek.

She studied him, and yes he looked like her father from that picture.  But he can’t be her father. Her father has been dead seven–no, eight–years, and he had gray hair when he died. This man is in his thirties or forties. She tells him she does not think it’s possible that he knows her, and he replies, What do you mean, exactly, by possible?

Unsure how to answer him, she helps him to his feet – he groans, but nothing seems broken – and helps him to the passenger seat of the car. He is drenched, his back is covered in mud from the muddy dirt road. She opens the trunk and finds two towels – why did she bring them, she wonders – and gives him one, closes the door, and then installs herself in the drivers’ seat, using the other towel to dry her hair.

What were you doing out on the road like that?” she asks.

Well, it’s my road, a private road, so really I should be asking you that question.

She does not answer but instead starts the engine again, starts the windshield wipers. She doesn’t know how to answer, except to start driving again, which she does, and he doesn’t complain.

“I was looking for an Epiphany,” he says.

Again she does not answer, she’s not sure what this man means, what he wants, why he was out on the road.
That’s my dog, he says. Epiphany. My wife named him that, it was a joke.

She liked to tell people on the phone that I was out looking for Epiphany. But of course, Epiphany is always escaping. That’s the nature of that dog. I’m always chasing after it in the rain. Always looking for an Epiphany.

But that doesn’t quite make sense, Eiko answers.

I know, she was a sweet woman, my wife. She’s dead now. She thought it was funny, even if the article messed up the joke. She died in
the war. I miss her. And if Epiphany wants to spend the night in the rain, that’s her problem.

What war? Eiko thinks but does not ask.

Up here, he says, just a little further, on the left. She slows, and he guides her into the driveway, a small opening in the trees that she never would have seen. This pathway is even smaller than the small road, and the branches of the trees actually caress the side of the car as she continues on, another layer of percussion in the night drive jazz show she’s been listening to since she can remember. Thwack-thwack-thwack rat-tat-tat-tatat shish-shish-shish-shish … They drive, slowly now – she feels safe, and whatever she was driving from is far behind them – down this little winding drive, until finally they come out into a clearing.

Her headlights illuminate a little shack with a kerosene lamp burning in the window, and beyond it she can see rocks and the sea. The rain has stopped, she realizes, but the wipers are still on, thwack-thwack-thwack. She turns them off.

Come in, he says, Let’s have some warm coffee and pie.

A dog barks, runs at them, tail wagging.

Epiphany, Eiko says. And the man says, Yes.

He opens the door to the little shack, and she feels the warmth inside: books lining the walls, Brahms wafting from unseen speakers. She steps inside. It is small, open, with a little kitchen, and a loft with a ladder and a bed; two chairs by a desk and piles of books, a microphone on a stand. She is shivering, cold and wet deep in her bones, but she feels the cold (and the fear, and the panic) seeping away. Epiphany curls up in the corner, and Daichi Okada closes the door.

Coffee, he says. And pie.

Technorati Tags: nanowrimo, writing

I’ve started to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month, aka nanowrimo (wherenin mad people try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month). I’m asking for help proofreading it, using Bite-Size Edits. Could you, would you cast your grammarian’s eye on a sentence or two?

I’ll post the proofread stuff here once in a while I guess. Note: proofread is no guarantee of any kind of quality!

***
Lot’s Wife: Chapter 2

“It was very kind of you to offer me a ride,” she said, opening the door. “And very nice of you to drop me off here.”    

I told her it was my pleasure and that I would happily give her a ride any time.

I blushed as I said it, “I mean…”

“Yeah right,” she smirked at me, scrunching her nose and making one of those non-committal faces so I didn’t know whether she thought it was funny, or suggestive, or what, but she certainly didn’t chastise me.

“My husband just left me,” she said. “What sort of woman do you think I am?”

“An attractive one,” I answered. “But I didn’t mean…”

“You men,” she said and patted my knee. “Only one thing.” She gathered her bag. “See you around! And thanks again.”

She opened the door and got out into the rain. Before she slammed the door shut, I called to her, “Hey, I didn’t get your name?”

She poked her head back into the car, looking genuinely surprised. “You want to know my name? Really?”

I was taken aback. It was as if she’d never been asked the question before. She blinked at me, looking fragile for the first time, finally looking like a woman whose husband had just left her, finally looking like she was upset.

“Of course I do,” I said.

She seemed to think it over for a few seconds. “You can call me Iris,” she said.

Then she smiled again as if it were all forgotten.

“My name is Oscar,” I called out as she shut the door, but it was too late; she was already running under the awning to a grocery store. And then she vanished inside.

***

Iris didn’t want to know my name — not then anyway — but I’ll tell you while I have your attention: my name is Oscar Writh. I was thirty-one when I met Iris (I’m a bit older than that now, but not much), and I worked then part-time as a dishwasher, which I guess I should explain. People wonder about it. The pay is terrible and the hours are bad, but I like washing dishes, and it’s something I’ve done for years. I like it; it’s comfortable and not demanding, and the requirements are clear. Dirty dish becomes clean dish. It’s very simple and requires little judgment, just diligence, and that’s something I appreciate.

When I am not washing dishes, I am a musician and composer of the kind of music that no one likes to buy, and only a few people like to hear: atonal improvisational stuff, the sort of stuff that is “big” in Japan and parts of Germany. Or at least, the kind of stuff that gets me flown to Tokyo and Berlin (or: Osaka and Munich) once in a while, and paid decent amounts of money (for a dishwasher) to give performances and the odd lecture about finding music in the everyday, and other esoteric kinds of subjects that handfuls of people clap about when I am done. So, I wash dishes for money and create music that sounds an awful lot like an industrial kitchen to fulfill the needs of my soul.

This is important because I had been working on a piece called “Lot’s Wife” for the past six months. It was the most ambitious work I’d ever done, certainly the most draining.

I’d always been fascinated by that poor nameless wife of Lot, who gets one mere line in the Old Testament, but who has always been to me the most arresting character in the whole book. She breaks my heart. The one who got turned into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking back. You’ll remember, God is about to rain fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities filled with iniquity–not 10 citizens are deemed good among the people there. Some angels come to take Lot and his family out of Sodom and warn him, Look not behind thee, neither stay thou in the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. The fire and brimstone comes, Lot and his family are whisked safely out of the city, and what does Lot’s wife do? She does what I would have done. She does what we all want to do. She looked back.

I can’t help looking back. I’m doing it right now.

But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

That’s the first and last we hear of Lot’s wife, bless her soul, in the entire Bible, save for Jesus’ entreaty that we remember her as an example of what not to do.

But I’ve always wondered if Lot even conveyed the instructions from the angels to his family. Did he even tell her not to look back? As for Lot, well he made some questionable choices, wasn’t the best father, and yet, he never got turned into a pillar of salt. Unlike poor, nameless, Lot’s wife.

Oh, about the car: it was borrowed from my friend, Paul Whinstone, a biblical scholar at Concordia University, an ex-Jesuit (yes, they still exist) who played in a Dead Kennedys cover band. That’s completely irrelevant, but I wanted to make clear that dishwashing, atonal improvisational music and car ownership do not tend to coincide very often. That’s completely irrelevant, but I wanted to make clear that dishwashing and atonal improvisational music and car ownership do not tend to be found together very often.

***

I ran into Iris again a week or so later, at the grocery store where I’d left her off. She was examining grapefruit.

“Hello,” I said.

“Oh, hello, it’s my rainy-day taxi driver, Oscar.”

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

I was just happy that she was being so friendly, so I didn’t press her on it. I assumed–with a dash of pride–that she might have known of me from my music, as outlandish an idea as that was. Eventually we found ourselves at a cafe just down the street from the grocery store and not far from my little apartment.

We chatted pleasantly, about art and music–nothing personal. After a while she said, “Oscar, I was wondering if you could do me a favour?”

I said of course.

“It’s a strange request.”

She wanted me to take a bag to her husband. She hadn’t spoken to him since he left her on the corner, but she had something of his that she didn’t want any more.

I guess I was skeptical and asked her “Why me?”

She answered: “I think it’s easier if a stranger does it. I don’t want to see him. And I don’t want to ask someone close to do it; it’d just be strange. And, well, it just seems like if you have a car, it might be … but don’t feel obliged.”

It would be another chance, a few more chances to meet Iris. A drive to a house in Westmount, or TMR perhaps, ring a doorbell, pass a bag over to someone. What could be easier, right? Right.

***

It was a grey October day close to Halloween, the trees had just in the past week shed their yellowed leaves, and I had that nostalgic feeling I get every time the seasons change. I thought of old girlfriends, long-past sadnesses, and the strange sensation of growing older, but not wiser, something that had just recently begun to preoccupy me. It was a Kafka sort of day, when everything seemed a little off kilter; I had the faint desire to weep, though not about anything in particular. So I was already in a bit of a strange mood when I came upon Iris at our meeting place, a bench in Jeanne Mance Park.

She was sitting alone, with a huge, black suitcase at her feet.

She wore a woolen hat, a blue pea-coat, a striped scarf. Her nose and cheeks were rosy with the cold.

“Hello Oscar,” she said as I approached, standing. She looked deathly serious, like she had looked when I asked her her name.

I started to lean in to kiss her on the cheek in greeting, but she stretched out her hand to shake mine.

Chastened and a little stung, certainly disappointed, I pulled up and nodded formally as if she were a headmaster or an army officer.

“Here’s the package,” she said, all business.

“I see that. It’s smaller than I imagined,” I joked, but she did not smile.

“And here is the address,” she handed me a folded piece of paper. “The directions are there–exact directions, very specific directions–so make sure you follow them.”

I opened the paper to find tiny writing in black ink with what seemed to be a paragraph of directions; I couldn’t quite make out the letters.

“Where is it I’m going?”

“It’s on the paper,” she answered waving a hand at me. “I have to go, Oscar. I am sorry.”

I tested the handle of the suitcase; it was brutally heavy.

“What’s in here?” I asked.

“Thank you again. This means a lot to me. Goodbye, Oscar.” She turned and started walking away.

“Do you have a phone number?”

“So I can tell you when the mission is accomplished?”

“No.”

“How will I find you?”

“Don’t worry about that, Oscar.” She kept walking without looking back. “I’ll find you.”

***

I lugged the case to the car. It was unbelievably heavy, and I had to rest it on the ground several times before I got to the car. I struggled to get it in the trunk, finally succeeded. The car sagged noticeably with its cargo. I installed myself in the front seat to examine the directions Iris had given me.

I’ve started to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month, aka nanowrimo (wherenin mad people try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month). I’m asking for help proofreading it, using Bite-Size Edits. Could you, would you cast your grammarian’s eye on a sentence or two?

I’ll post the proofread stuff here once in a while I guess. Note: proofread is no guarantee of any kind of quality!

Lot’s Wife: Chapter 1

“Do you want a lift?”

I’m not sure what inspired me to ask. It wasn’t something I’d ever done before, but it was something my dad used to do on rainy days once in a while, when he saw women walking up the hill, especially if they were carrying grocery bags. It never occurred to me till now that there might have been something flirtatious about it – which would have seemed preposterous to me at the time, and still is, sort of, though now that I’m older I’ve come to realize that old people feel much the same the young do, as impossible as that seems when you’re just working out what it means to be an adult. But no, I don’t think he offered for any other reason than that it’s the gentlemanly, friendly thing to do. He was from a small town, grew up on a farm, and probably it was the kind of thing you did back when he was a young man, if you saw someone walking in the rain. I’m sure his father, a man I never met, would have thought it crazy not to offer a lift to someone walking in the rain. Most of the time the puzzled women just shook their heads and smiled, No thanks. Though I remember some of them getting in. This was before full-bore hysteria about sex and strangers seeped through everything, staining our world with mistrust. And anyway, I was sitting there in the car, an angelic little blonde-headed boy with a father who could have been a grandfather smiling at the wheel. Maybe it only happened a couple of times, but it made enough of an impression on me that it’s stuck in this brain of mine. I never asked my father about it, never got the chance to ask him, and I guess I was thinking about him in that vague way sons of long-dead men do sometimes, just wondering what sort of man he would have wanted me to be, and thinking maybe of the kind of son I would want to have one day, the sort of gentlemanly lessons I’d give to him, the importance of politeness, and the value of considering the people around you, of doing kind things for strangers. And so I pulled over – it was just pouring, really belting down, there were flood warnings in some of the expressways around the city – and said:

“Do you want a lift? It’s pouring.”

I didn’t expect her to say yes; I expected that slightly surprised/confused smile that I just faintly recalled from those years long ago. I also half-expected her to just ignore me, or even start running from this sicko madman offering to help a stranger out of the rain. I should say here, by way of context, that I am a nice-looking man. I don’t look like a rapist or jerk, whatever that looks like. I’m disarming, I think, certainly in this kind of situation with strangers. I have an open sort of face and kind eyes and I’m pretty sensitive to what others around me are feeling. I was thirty-one at the time—if any of these details are important to set the scene. So: Nice-looking, average kind of early-thirties man with kind eyes stops car in the rain to ask harried-looking woman hiking up a hill in what the radio says is one of the great rains of the century. So, I rolled down the passenger window (what’s the word for “rolling down a window” now that they are all electric?) I wondered to myself, recalling my family’s big red & wood-paneled station wagon, our first with electric windows, that likely was the scene of those childhood offers of rides that started this whole escapade), and leaned over to her.

“The radio says it’s going to keep raining like this all day,” I shouted. “And it’s a big hill – can I give you a lift to the top at least?”

We couldn’t really hear each other, what with the rain pounding on the roof of the car, and other vehicles spraying loudly past us, but I communicated the invitation, and she, after some hesitation, and after pointing down the hill and shouting soundless explanations, got in and shut the door.

It was probably when she first got in that I wondered what sort of sexual intentions my father might have had for being so gentlemanly. I don’t mean that he would have had any intention intentions, but I’m willing to bet that any man in the universe who invites a strange attractive woman into his car will consider the possibility that it all might end in sex.

I don’t know why I keep dragging my father into this, he has nothing to do with it, and I shouldn’t sully his name – or any man’s, for that matter – with my own particular convictions. Let me get away from the abstract, and tell you exactly what I thought, or at least do the best I can of recreating those thoughts, in the sequence that they came to my mind: 1. She is attractive. 2. It would be nice to end up having sex with her.

Of course I didn’t actually expect that we would have sex, but I was certain as soon as I rolled down the window, or, rather, as soon as I slowed the car, or rather, as soon as I saw her struggling up the hill without an umbrella, that if we did end up having sex I would be more happy with the outcome than sad. Now that I’ve painted myself as a bit of a perv (if, in my defense, the most common garden-variety perv, an affliction of 48% of the world’s population over the age of 13 – or, what do I know, probably 94%), I should probably get a few other things out of the way: I was single, mostly, though there was a girl I was in the process of falling out of love with, who had moved to London, England for a job selling metal futures or hedging contracts or something. We still talked regularly, still exchanged electronic missives with xo at the bottom. But you know how it goes, when you realize the person on the other end of the phone, on the other side of the world, is having more fun without you than you’re having without her. So that was all finished but for the final phone call, or painful meeting, or God help us, the parting email. And for the past few months I’d effectively been a single man trying to figure out how to have all the fun that I was supposed to have as a single man.

I’m sorry about all this: this whole story is about this drenched woman walking up a hill, and not about me, but I can’t help myself.

So, let’s get back to the specifics: kind-looking man, with sex not wholly absent from his mind, invites harried, soaked woman into his car. She gets in.

“It’s pouring out there,” I said.

It was the third, maybe fourth time I said it, and I should mention another thing about myself: when I first meet someone – especially an attractive woman – it’s very often as if every interesting thought I’ve ever had gets temporarily removed from my brain, and I am stuck making stupid comments, and frantically searching my mind for any question other than, “What do you do?” After waiting for a stream of cars to pass us, I pulled out into the road, as always, struggling to think of something to say. I began with an easy one, though I was already using lots of processing power to come up with my next conversational piece: “So where are you going? I can probably drive you there – if it’s not too far away. “It’s really pouring out.” (Time number five).

“Thank you, I’m …” She trailed off, then asked me: “Where are you headed?”

I told her, and she said that would be perfect, mentioned an intersection nearby where she wanted to be left off.

Now, let me tell you a bit about her.

She was not what you would call a striking beauty, but she had that aura about her that it didn’t matter … dark hair, dark skin, Eurasian? Middle Eastern? North African? Not fair in any case. I could go on and on about what she looked like, I suppose, but I think you understand what I’m trying to get at. She was dressed in the international attire of artisticy types–late twenties, or early thirties–and she sat in my car. She was pretty, and I was happy, happy to be charming and flirtatious with a woman I had rescued gallantly from the rain.

I mentioned that it was pouring, but the rain was really extraordinary, and after about five minutes it got so bad that I had to pull over.

“Wow,” she said.

“I haven’t ever seen anything like this.” It’s been that kind of day.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“No,” she said, not unkindly. “I’ll bet you don’t know what I mean.”

“Oh?”

“My husband left me standing on that corner,” she said. “He left me, he’s gone.”

“Do you mean left left?” I asked.

“I’m not really sure, but yep, that was the impression I got,” she said. “Would you like a fig? These are really good figs.” She pulled a bag of fresh figs out of her knapsack, and handed me one.

I accepted and popped the whole thing in my mouth. She bit into the fig and sucked the contents, making smacking sounds.

“God, these are good figs.”

“You don’t sound very upset about your husband.”

“My husband?” Or, ex-husband I guess. Soon-to-be ex-husband. Yeah, well. If you knew him, you’d understand. God these figs are amazing.”

They were, I agreed, tasty figs.

Il y’a une petite article dans L’Actualité (Sept 09) sur Book Oven et LibriVox:

« Le numérique ne tuera pas l’édition traditionnelle, mais il va la changer », dit Hugh McGuire. Cet ancien ingénieur en mécanique âgé de 35 ans lançait en 2007 un autre collectif, Earideas, qui recense les balados (podcasts) de l’heure sur le Web. Et voilà qu’il vient de créer The Book Oven, un nouveau type de maison d’édition. « The Book Oven offrira une plateforme d’autoédition, qui permettra à un auteur de collaborer avec des rédacteurs, des réviseurs, des recherchistes, des photographes, des maquettistes », dit Hugh McGuire. [more...]

Here’s a bit of a confession, in the world of the web that I have been exploring with great excitement since 2004, the thing that has interested me least is marketing. Blogging, podcasting, wikis, Twitter, Identi.ca, community filtering and big online datasets, and many other things have been thrilling to me because of the sorts of things they allow individuals and groups to do that they never could do before. Any artist with a tiny tiny bit of tech savvy can now get their work out to the whole world. Anyone with a message has nothing standing in their way. Even more exciting, groups of individuals scattered across the globe can collaborate on massive projects in ways never before possible. You always wanted to write novels? Well nothing is stopping you now. What about exploring your world of bespoke tailoring? Turns out there are people who want to read about it. Host your own radio show? About music, or about health problems in Africa, or interviewing old timers in rural areas – all of this can be done, at almost no cost.

What has been called Web 2.0 has changed the dynamics of the universe. While there are some who think that Web 2.0 is just a marketing term, it was very real to me. I set up my first blog in July 2004 (using blogger – then I migrated to Wordpress); and made my first Wikipedia edit in September 2004. Uploaded my first Flickr photo in October 2004. Made my first podcast in September 2005. These were my 1.0 to 2.0 events, when I went from being a consumer of the web to a creator as well. It was a thrilling change, and I am still awed by the great possibility that comes with the web.

But something funny happened with all this wonderfulness. The marketers got hold of Web 2.0 – or what some call social media. (Note: I should admit that some of my best friends are marketers). And frankly, the thing which has interested me least about the new web is marketing. Or at least, the only thing about the new tools of marketing that excites me is that it is now so easy for one person or a small group with good ideas to find people who want those good ideas. But the marketing side of social media, well, it’s just never been my thing.

So it was very puzzling to me when I started developing a friendship with Mitch Joel. He is, after all, Canada’s digital marketing rockstar, a world recognized thought-leader in how new digital channels change our relationship to brands, and how companies and people need to adapt.

So what was I doing enjoying spending time with Mitch so much? At first I chalked it down to Mitch’s history as a music reporter in Montreal – marketing guru or not, you gotta like someone who made a living for years interviewing Gene Simmons and the guys from Whitesnake. But that didn’t seem to be enough; after all, unless someone told you about Mitch’s background, you’d never know that his youth was spent attending metal concerts for a Montreal newspaper.

A couple of years ago, Mitch and I, and fellow-Montrealer Julien Smith started having lunches together once in a while, then it became a regular thing. And these lunches were always the highlight of my week. We would pontificate about the future, about what technology changes meant, and rage on about things that were changing too slowly or companies that just didn’t get it. These lunches were thought-provoking and engaging and inspiring. They were great, even if Mitch was a marketer.

One time, Mitch and I drove back to Montreal from a conference in NYC. And in the car Mitch said something that made it click for me, made me understand why I liked Mitch the marketer so much. He said: “I want to totally change the way marketing is done. I want marketing to be about getting people who love something together with the people who have it.” (I am paraphrasing my memory of the quote). And in a flash, it all made sense to me. I understood why I like Mitch so much.

My greatest interest in the web is the ability it gives to people to create wonderful things. And Mitch’s real interest is helping connect wonderful things with the people who want them.

Having been knee deep in the web for a few years now, I am always surprised that what seems so obvious to we webby echo chamberists is not necessarily so obvious to the rest of the world. And I’ve long thought that someone needed to pen a book that would explain to people – primarily to businesses – what the hell all this stuff means.

Mitch has a new book out today that does just that: Six Pixels of Separation. What’s so refreshing though is that he has written it as a business owner and entreprenneur, and not as a pundit. As a webby person, I found his insights about business to be deeply satisfying; as an entrepreneur, I found his take on the web to be extremely useful. He talks not so much about specific tools or channels (though he does that too), but instead about people who have used these new channels to do wonderful things (disclosure: my project LibriVox.org gets a mention).

The world has changed, and will continue to change. That has implications for anyone with an idea they want people to hear about, a thing they want to sell, a cause that is important to them, a group of people who depend on them. It has implications for individuals, and multinationals. Six Pixels of Separation is a great guide to the changing world.

My colleague, co-founder, and the chief architect and getter-doner at Book Oven, Stephanie Troeth has proposed a moderated panel at SXSW this year called:

Beyond Publishing: When Every Book is Connected to Everyone

We have an all-star line-up who have agreed to join us (if SXSW agrees to give us some space to talk):

• Kassia Krozser co-founder of Quartet Press
• Peter Brantley, Director of the Internet Archive
• Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media
• and me, co-founder of Book Oven and LibriVox

The description of the panel is as follows:

What happens when every book is online, linkable, and connected to every writer and every reader? What happens when the book is liberated from being words on paper, unbound from a format that’s two thousand years old? What happens to how we read and how we write?

For more info, or to comment on or vote for the panel (please do!), see here.

Roberto Rocha of the Montreal Gazette has a good article about Book Oven and the new publishing landscape, with a nice pic out the window of the office (with me blocking the view, unfortunately):

Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters into his own hands, head to the print shop, and hawk the book himself.
Rejected auteurs today have it easier, with a handful of websites that let them write, edit and print books bound like the pros.

Call it Self-publishing 2.0. And it’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of the book world, which is itself enjoying a nice growth period despite the recession and the glut of competing media choices.
“Like in any other media, when you the make tools of publishing easy, people will take advantage of it,” said Hugh McGuire, founder of Montreal self-publishing start-up Book Oven. “It’s just now coming into public consciousness.”

McGuire is one of the leaders of the movement toward digital empowerment in books. When it officially launches (it’s in beta testing now), Book Oven will let people collaborate in the writing, editing and proofreading of a book, all through online tools. When it’s ready, book lovers will be able to buy a copy on the website, either in electronic or paper format. [more...]

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a long-winded manifesto about the term “self-publishing.”

Book Oven Open for Cooking

We’ve been toiling away behind the scenes on the Book Oven for a few months. Now we’re ready to show you what we’ve been cooking. But there’s still work to do, and we want your help in building a new model for publishing.

Are you a writer? An editor? A proofreader? A small press? A designer? An agent?

If so, what would be the ideal web tool to help you get your manuscripts through to finished product? We want to build it, and we want to build a global community of book lovers and makers of books who will come together to make better books.

Bite-Size Edits

Our first offering is Bite-Size Edits, a new way to proofread text. You can help proofread other peoples’ texts, you can proofread your own text (in private) using Bite-Size Edits, you can invite a small group, or open up your project for proofreading by the world.

And, if you can believe it, Bite-Size Edits actually makes proofreading fun. And addictive.

But don’t just trust me, try it.

There is more to Book Oven (though for the next couple of weeks there will be an extra step to see the rest of it…).

Cloud-based Book Publishing

We call it “cloud-based publishing,” but the name doesn’t matter. The web has given us the ability to connect and collaborate in new ways. It’s given us the ability to make and distribute our art and writing to a global audience of billions, at almost no cost. We think this means that millions of people can engage with books in ways they never did before. And we want Book Oven to be a place where book lovers of all stripes come together to help make (and buy! and read!) better books.

Background: LibriVox

Back in 2005 I started a project called LibriVox.org — to get volunteers to make audio recordings of public domain texts. LibriVox started as a crazy idea, but it has evolved into a big, vibrant platform to help groups of people get together to make and publish audiobooks (it’s actually pretty complex, with recording, proof-listening, project management, metadata allocation, uploading, cataloging etc). We’re now the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, all run in a totally distributed way by “strangers” from all over the globe. It’s worked because people naturally find things they are good at and enjoy – editing audio, recording texts, organizing projects, organizing files, prooflistening, and much more.

And what’s amazing is the creative ways people find to organize themselves to do interesting things when they have the right kind of platform.

Background: Books and Digital

In the mean time, there has been a revolution bubbling in the book world, and digital has arrived: ebooks, print-on-demand, and online sales mean you don’t need thousands of dollars to make & distribute a book anymore. You just need the time and passion and skill.

One of our myths is that writers work alone. In fact, they collaborate all the time: writers share their work, get feedback, editors help them sculpt their language and content, proofreaders clean up their copy, designers make it pretty, other designers make beautiful book covers.

A Space to Collaborate on Books

Book Oven was born of this inspiration: to make an online space where writers could gather a group of collaborators (editors, proofreaders, designer) around their work to help take a raw manuscript through to finished product, and then, if they wish, to sell it through online channels (though of course, if they wish to ship the final manuscript to a publisher, they can do that too; or they can just keep it for themselves).

That’s what a bunch of us have been working on for a few months: Stephanie, Yanik, Antoine, Marie-Eve, Suw, Andy, Dan, Chris, Frederic, and me … and a few others.

So, What is Book Oven?

Book Oven is: an online space to create, collaborate on, and sell books.

In the end, though, it’s about building communities: the smaller communities that form around writers and their works, and a larger community of writers, readers, editors, proofreaders, designers, and book lovers of all kinds.

How far along are we?

We are excited to show you what we’ve built so far. It’s pretty exciting, we think, but there’s more to do. We hope that you can help craft the long-term vision. Right now, you can upload your text in certain formats, build your team, comment on and edit your text, read/annotate in our (we think) beautiful interface. You can also play around with Bite-Size Edits.

But there is much more we want to do.

In the coming months we’ll be tweaking the interface, making things easier & more obvious, adding new features.

We’d like your help

We hope you’ll have fun with Bite-Size Edits. We hope that you’ll poke around in Book Oven. We hope that you’ll start a writing project, and invite some colleagues, friends, editors, reviewers to help you out. We hope that you’ll be tolerant of bugs when you find them, and let us know about them. We hope you’ll be mindful that we have many more features we plan to build, and that we’ll need your help in figuring out what the essential features are.

Above all we hope that you will think of Book Oven as your space, a place where you can contribute to building a new community and platform where you will, we hope, make and help make many great books in the future.

Questions?

If you have questions, problems, confusions etc … please do send me an email:
hugh@bookoven.com

Or ping us on twitter: @bookoven or identi.ca @bookoven.

If you have some specific feedback about Book Oven, bugs or feature requests, you can tell us about it here:
http://feedback.bookoven.com/

Looking forward to seeing you in Book Oven!

August 22 is Ray Bradbury’s 89th birthday. Here’s the opening of his short story, The Long Rain, about summer in Montreal:

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

It’s been … wow, almost three weeks since BookCamp Toronto, and I guess I should get around to writing out some thoughts. So in no particular order, here are some of my personal reactions to the event:

1. What a great event
I have been involved as a participant and an organizer of numerous unconference / camps: barcamps, podcamps, democamps. But there was something amazing about this one, and certainly for me personally it was the most rewarding camp – or indeed conference of any kind – that I’ve attended. (With the caveat that, as an organizer, I am probably biased, but still … that was my personal reaction).

2. Engagement from industry
One of the most powerful things about BookCamp, compared with other events I’ve been to, is that this was not just a grassroots group. There was high-level engagement from the publishing industry, with publishers, editors, senior VPs, production managers, marketers, and interns, and everything in between. It was great to see the honest debate and conversation being lead by these insiders, who are truly grappling with the future of their business and their passion. This is something different from almost all the other “camps” I’ve attended (with the exception of BookCamp London), where it is often a grassroots gang talking about the future, with very little stake in existing business. BookCamp felt a very relevant meeting for a big industry in the throes of change.

3. Mixing publishing insiders and outsiders
One of the things of which I am most proud was our success in getting dialogue going between book business insiders and passionate outsiders. Along with the publishing big wigs, there were free culture advocates, open source proponents, artisanal bookbinders, librarians, web developers, readers, standards and accessibility experts, writers, bloggers, podcasters, technologists, marketers, newspaper folk, booksellers, and on and on. It truly was the open, mixed crowd we were hoping for, and I think the beauty of the event is that we managed to create an even playing field, where everyone got to talk as equals, all driven by the desire to see a healthy future for books.

4. Getting the numbers right
We worried about numbers. Too many people? Too few? How do we feed everyone? Will they fit? Well, we had some 350 sign up, and about 225 show up (good stats for a free event). Some sessions might have been a touch too big, but all the sessions I attended were full of lively discussion, and I think everyone who wanted to talk and engage were able to do so. We had just enough lunch, and everything worked out just fine.

5. No powerpoint
One of the best decisions we made was to discourage powerpoint presentations. If you are planning a discussion-centric event, I urge you to not provide any powerpoint capabilities. Powerpoint is so often a conversation killer.

6. Great session moderation
We gave some guidelines to session moderators: 1. focus should be discussion, 2. no power point, 3. 15-20 mins of intro, then open up the floor to discuss. This model was embraced in all the sessions I attended, and worked swimmingly I think.

7. Kick-ass organizing team
It truly was a pleasure to be a member of the team who put this together. Mark Bertils did so much work to make sure the on-the-ground set up was in good shape, and to keep the wiki up to date and information flowing well to attendees. Alexa Clark took care of the food, and it all worked out perfectly. Erin Balser organized all the volunteers, and info management on the day of the event. And a special thanks to Mitch Joel, who when I asked him: “Should we do a BookCamp Toronto,” answered, without blinking: “Let’s do it.” Also: Judy Dunn and UofT’s iSchool were perfect hosts. And Morgan & Michael at BookNet Canada were brilliant and understanding sponsors for the lunch.

8. Venue
U of T iSchool was a great place to hold the event.

9. Post-event Party
That was fun at the Bedford Academy, even if we got there before they were ready for us.

10. The Americans!
It was nice to see so many of our colleagues make the trip from south of the border, and contribute so much to the event.

So thanks again to: all the attendees for being so amazing, my co-organizers for being so on the ball, the session moderators for being so wonderful, and for everyone else who helped make this such a success.

For more BookCampTO posts, see Mark’s list.

Photo credits: Sniffles, Fiacre1, LexnGer.

This is my presentation at the BookNetCanada Tech Forum in March, titled: Time, Love & Books. Sorry, there is 1 slide only, for you Powerpoint buffs.

I talk about audiobooks, time acquisition, LibriVox, Google, the link, and the digital archaeology of love. And Hinton, Alberta.

Link to the vid.

One of the reasons I started LibriVox, I think, was so that I could make an audio recording of “The Dead,” by James Joyce, from his collection Dubliners.

It is a story of such grace and skill; the build up slow and good-humoured and banal, but when that last section finally comes, it contains so much nostalgia, so much melancholy, so much revelation. All of us have had those moments, when what we thought we knew got thrown on its head, our own tiny place in the world gently exposed, and the wide, huge and lonely universe – of which we still remain a part – becomes clear and cold and expansive for just that brief moment.

Almost four years after LibriVox was born, I finally got the courage to record the Dead. I don’t think it’s catalogued quite yet, but here are the mp3s for those who want to listen to an audio version of one of the most beautiful-sad short stories ever written.

• The Dead – Part 1 [mp3]
• The Dead – Part 2 [mp3]
• The Dead – Part 3 [mp3]

Happy Bloomsday.

[Thanks to Kayray for the editing, and to Gesine for making sure I finished on time].

One of my favourite podcasts/radio shows is CBC’s Spark, with the lovely Nora Young. Spark covers technology and society, and Nora is a wonderful interviewer of wonderful guests. So I was thrilled when Nora asked me to talk with her about the future of books in the digital age, after our experience of putting on BookCamp Toronto, which happened June 6 at UofT’s iSchool.

Here is the full interview.

There’s a nice article, and some goofy pictures of me, about BookCampToronto in the National Post:

While some may bristle at a group of outsiders spearheading discussion on the future of books, the industry response has been positive.

“I really think I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but book publishing needs to stop being so insular. We need to stop just looking at our own industry for inspiration,” says Deanna McFadden, marketing manager, online content and strategy for HarperCollins. “The people who are doing BookCamp in Toronto are all smart people who understand where the industry is and where we need to go, and are really looking at innovative ways for us to keep book publishing alive and healthy.”

That seems to be at the root of Book-Camp Toronto — not a hostile takeover, a rejection of traditional books for e-books or putting big publishers out of business.

“I care deeply about books and literature and the publishing business,” McGuire says, “and I’d like to see a thriving future for writers and readers and people in between.” – Check back in two weeks for our letter from BookCamp. And check The Afterword and Twitter for live coverage. [more...]

For some reason the article is posted twice, with different pics.

I’ve been invited by Mike Shatzkin to join a panel at BookExpo Amercia the details of which are as follows:

Digital Debut Tool Time
An insider’s presentation of new and soon-to-be-mainstreamed web-based entities providing innovative digital services and tools to authors, publishers and readers.

Moderator: Mike Shatzkin – Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc
Presenters:
Peter Clifton – President & Ceo, FiledBy, Inc.
Mark Coker – founder & CEO, Smashwords, Inc.
Hugh McGuire – co-founder, BookOven
Neil Jones – founder, Cooler Reader

You can catch us pontificating between 9:30AM and10:30AM on Friday morning, May 29, 2009 at the Jacob Javitz Centre in New York City.

Ug. Apple iPhone App store rejects Eucalyptus ereader app … because you can read erotic texts from the public domain. As we say in Quebec, QQF? I presume this will get sorted out, but still …

If you’re wondering why Eucalyptus is not yet available, it’s currently in the state of being ‘rejected’ for distribution on the iPhone App Store. This is due to the fact that it’s possible, after explicitly searching for them, to find, download from the Internet, and then read texts that Apple deems ‘objectionable’. The example they have given me is a Victorian text-only translation of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. For the full background, a log of my communications with Apple is below. [more...]

The round and round email thread with the app store is a treat to read.

(For the record, I downloaded Fanny Hill on Stanza on my iPhone.)

Books are going digital. New York Times had an article about the implications, which reminded me of that famous saying about not knowing history and doomed repeats. Things to remember:

a) this means that if people want a book for free, it’ll be gettable free
b) there’s nothing anyone can do about that
c) the music business has been through all of this before
d) it would be a good idea for the book business to study the mistakes made by the music business

Here is a great video from the Globe and Mail about the history of Napster, music downloading, and the rise of the mp3, from their great series: Download Decade:

So along with a few others, I’ve been organizing BookCampToronto, a:

conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

The event is June 6, but it’s currently full (huge flood of demand), but send an email to bookcampto@gmail.com if you’d like to get put on the waiting list.

I asked Book Oven’s wonderful designer, Marie-Eve Bélanger to come up with a logo, and this was the beauty she produced:

Sweet, eh?

From an old unpublished novel, for a lark, here is Chapter 3:

Vivianne stood inside the walk-in refrigerator, with her back to me, her small wiry body tight and ready to pounce, her mass of curly blond hair bobbing with her head. She wore her crisp white chef’s jacket, with loose-fitting black-and-white checked pants, held a note pad and pen in her little hands. She swore in creative flourishes, in English and French, at the produce.

“Nothing,” she said, turning to me finally, “is personal in my kitchen. There’s no such thing as private personal business in the kitchens of Révolution”

Genevieve, the manager responsible for scheduling had failed to accommodate my request for time off for driving classes; she had referred my application for Tuesday nights off to Vivianne. I pressed my case. She walked past me out of the refrigerator.

“This is a collective kitchen. We,” she continued, sweeping her hand around the room, as if showing me her kitchen and staff for the first time. Julie rushed into the kitchen, taking her pink, puffy winter jacket off and she hurried by us, muttering an apology for her tardiness, which Vivianne ignored. “We are a team, a unit,” she continued. “One for all, Oscar. It’s like a, like a … battalion in, you know, a … an army here. The marines. No man left behind, that sort of thing.”

[more...]

Previously, on Blind Spot:
Chapter One
Chapter Two

Have I ever mentioned that I wrote a novel? I finished Blind Spot in 2005, sent it out, got a stack of rejections. It’s been sitting in various formats of a drawer for years now, and I figured it was time to release it into the wild.

The about goes something like this:

A novel about learning to drive, dying student drivers, terrorists, the CIA, an anarchist driving instructor, and one, or more, murders.

And here is the beginning of Chapter One:

He talked about the car crash all through the evening shift. Sylvain was shaken, true, but there was something reverential about his tone, as if he felt honoured to be the universe’s first chosen beholder of these deaths, and now that the two of us were alone, finishing the last of the kitchen clean-up, he grew more animated in his descriptions, more precise, more excited. His eyes sparkled as he spoke.

It was incredible, he said. Just incredible. The blood, the bone fragments. The damage done to a human body.

The sound of the crash had woken him at 7:12 a.m. that morning, and he had rushed out of his Villeray apartment, wearing only a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, despite the cool of the October morning. He expected survivors, he said, and took his cell phone with him, dialing 911 on the way down the stairs. The little red car had smashed head-on into a poorly-placed concrete divider, and as he rushed towards the steaming metal, Sylvain lost hope of finding anyone alive. The damage done to the automobile was frightening, and he braced himself for the carnage he would find inside.

“Have you ever seen a really bad car accident?” he asked me, suddenly. “I mean close up, I mean with the bodies, I mean before it gets cleaned up? Have you ever seen what actually happens to people?” He wasn’t interested in my answer to that question, and he pushed on with an uncomfortable mix of glee and horror, giving me more details I didn’t want to hear. The smashed windshield, jutting bits of metal, and descriptions of blood and bodies, the angle of one of the victim’s arms. “Pointing in all the wrong directions,” Sylvain said. “It was so weird.” He rested his chin on his mop, sombre and somehow pitying my lack of knowledge of the world. “You have no idea, Oscar,” he said, and the lights glinted off the shining tile of the floor, “how terrible it really is. How really terrible when you see it up close like that. These were people talking and breathing and all of a sudden they’re gone. I’m not religious,” he continued, cleaning again as he spoke, paying close attention to the floor, moving the mop in slow figure eights, the cleansing symbols of infinity, over and over in front of him. “But it’s scary seeing a body moments after the soul disappears. You have no idea.”

I did have an idea but instead of saying so, I just nodded. [more...]

It’s available in multiple formats:

• I’ll be publishing chapters weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• I’ll be podcasting each chapter weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• You can download the pdf (free!), or epub ebook (free!)
• You can buy the softcover.

I’ll be exploring more channels for getting it out there (Smashwords, Shortcovers, Podiobooks etc.) in the coming weeks.

And of course kind feedback is always appreciated.

My write-up of Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, over at the Book Oven Blog:

I’m back from TOC and still mulling over the problems, and maybe some solutions to problems in the publishing business. There are lots, but a fundamental problem seems to be that most publishing houses have never had much to do with their readers. Their clients, traditionally, have been book stores. And outsourcing relationships with the people who are your reason for existence is a bad idea.

If you look at the talk around the perilous state of the publishing business, and the challenges of ebooks and DRM and digital and the web, it ends up being this old sad story of: “How do we maintain our financial viability when fewer people are reading?” And not, “What do readers want and how can we best provide it?” [more...]

Announcing BookCamp Toronto, Saturday, June 6, 2009 at the MaRS Center, 101 College Street.

BookCampToronto is a free unconference (definition at wikipedia) about:

The future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

For more information, and to register, suggest sessions, please visit the wiki.

BookCamp Toronto is inspired by BookCamp London.

The Toronto version is being organized by Mitch, Mark B, Erin and Alexa. And me!

[x-posted at Book Oven & Huffpo]

As the death watch continues for the publishing business and perhaps even the book itself, a group of writers, technologists, publishers, agents, designers, booksellers, and social architects convened in London for BookCamp, a one-day thinking session (bookish experimentation) about what the future of the written word might be.

The event was organized by Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin UK; James Bridle, of BookTwo, and Bookkake; and Russel Davies.

Thinking about books

If the amount of thought and enthusiasm generated that day — and evening — is any indication, I think we’re going to be OK. The book is alive and well, even if defining “book” is becoming more complicated; and the publishing business, bracing itself for the biggest shake-up since the paperback, will come out the other end, transformed certainly, but alive nonetheless. That’s my projection anyway.

An open slate

If you’ve never been to a “camp” or “unconference,” you should find the next one near you, show up and dive in. These un/conferences vary from place to place and event to event, but tend to share a few characteristics: they are free, they are open, and the sessions are not formally presented by the organizers, but rather decided by participants. Everyone is supposed to contribute. The result is that you get a much wider mix of people and perspectives than at industry conferences.

BookCamp London started with a blank grid: 6 timeslots and 5 spaces (or 5 spaces, 6 timeslots?), with participants asked to fill in the grid, adding sessions they’d like to discuss. (For some reason I didn’t write anything in. First time I’ve ducked that responsibility at a camp.)

The sessions

Sessions included (paraphrasing titles): Talking to Terrified Writers about the Web, the Book as Social Object/What Happens When Books Are Free?, EBook Gadgets, Is the Web Making Writing More Oral?, Social Networks and the Book, Encouraging Kids to Read. And more.

Fellow-BookOvener Suw Charman-Anderson lead a session about the Book as Social Object; or, What happens when all books are free? The group struggled with this difficult question: what happens if writers can no longer make their money from just selling books? The answer wasn’t so clear, but several things are certain: ebooks are coming; DRM won’t stop infinite reproduction on the web; no one likes DRM; and no one really knows how the business is going to work in a decade. But music, for all the worries about the industry at the corporate level, is thriving. How will writing evolve?

The next session I attended was Bookkake: How to Start a Publishing Company in Your Bedroom. James Bridle,Bookkake founder & BookTwo writer, has published new editions of five public domain titles, using ebooks, print-on-demand, and covers designed from photos on Flickr. An inspiring view of indie publishing’s future.

Michael Bhaskar of Pan Macmillan hosted a session on the web and the increasing orality of text, how text is taking on characteristics that we once associated with oral communications: quick feedback, ephemeral, linear, disposable ; Mark Johnson and Kate Hyde of HarperCollins (and Authonomy and BookArmy) lead a discussion of social networks and the book, that the successes and challenges they’ve had with their initiatives.

Speaking of books ….

In addition to enjoying talking with these smart people, I had great conversations with too many more to list, but some particularly good ones with Peter Collinridge of Apt Studio, Anthony Topping, of lit agents Greene & Heaton, Lucy Crichton, Alex Ingram, digital buyer at UK bookseller Waterstones, Naomi Alderman, and Adrian Hon. It was also nice to see some familiar faces, Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr, and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr, as well as Cory Doctorow, who I’ve crossed paths with numerous times online, but never met in person.

It was a great event, and I am very happy I decided to make the trip to the UK. Well worth it, and a real encouragement that what we’re up to at the Book Oven, behind the curtain, is on the right track. My only complaint was that it lasted one day, and not a week.

Can you see the future?

While there are nerves about the future of the book business, the overwhelming sensation I had leaving bookcamp was optimism. What else could be the result of spending a full day with so many bright people, excited about books, and actively shaping their future?

For some other thoughts on bookcamp (I’ll try to keep this up to date, as I see links) see:

• PenguinBlog
• Chocolate and Vodka: here, here and here.
• The Rosemoirs
• Going Underground’s Blog

[Photos by: Matt Biddulph, Annie Mole, and Russell Davies]

Just posted over at LibriVox:

Just in time for your 2008/09 new year’s celebration, LibriVox has reach another great milestone, by cataloging our 2,000th book, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. VI.

The rest of the series can be found here:

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

LibriVox is an all-volunteer project to record public domain audiobooks, and give them away for free. We are among the most prolific audiobook publishers in the world.

We reached 1,000 books on October 31, 2007, after 26 months; the second thousand came 14 months later.

Congratulations to all the readers, coordinators, proof-listeners, moderators, and techies who have helped build LibriVox into one of the great communities online. Thanks to Internet Archive for hosting our audio files, and to Project Gutenberg for making thousands of public domain texts available online. And thanks to all our listeners for listening.

If you’d like to volunteer to help make audio recordings of every public domain text in the universe, you could take a look at our volunteer page, or jump right into our forum.

[X-posted at Huffpo & Book Oven]

Question: What would happen if, tomorrow, every publisher, and every book store, went out of business? What would you do?

The Big Stores

About fifteen years ago I walked into my first of the new breed of big book stores, Chapters in Toronto. I thought to myself: how can the book business support such a huge store? How can book selling pay for all this real estate? How can there be so many books?

At first I was encouraged by these stores. The choice of titles seemed endless. They were comfortable, well-designed. There was attention to detail. The coffee-shops were a nice touch, especially in the old days when you could get a stack of books from the shelves, get a coffee, and flip through books to your heart’s content. If these book stores could be profitable, I thought, maybe there was hope for humanity after all.

Soon these big book stores were everywhere: Barnes & Noble and Borders in the US, Chapters and Indigo in Canada (now merged, but with separate branding to create the fiction of competition), Waterstones in the UK, and others elsewhere. They invested massive amounts in real estate, getting huge commercial spaces in prime locations in major cities, and bigger spaces in the suburbs. They stocked their stores with a dizzying array of books.

Boon or Bust?

But things started to go a little sour early on. The first indication that the new book behemoths might be bad for the long-term health of the book ecosystem came quickly, when the little guys started going out of business. Economies of scale and and pricing clout meant that the big stores could charge less than their smaller competitors; and because of their size, their selection was always bigger. Following their in-store caffeine partners, Starbucks, they liked to choose their locations near existing successful independents. The little guys couldn’t compete, and went out of business, or got bought up, and absorbed into the book selling borg.

So now, there are precious few independent books stores left even in big cities.

The indie stores weren’t the only ones complaining. Because of the volume that goes through these stores, they could squeeze the publishers, on cost of books and return policies. They could charge for prime shelf-space. Small publishers found it harder to get the attention of the readers. But even the big publishers complained about the policies of these stores – and a little later, the other behemoth on the scene, Amazon.

Then there’s that odd feeling of being in a book store staffed by people who don’t know much about books. Any inquiry about a more obscure title more often than not ended up in front of a terminal. It seemed as if book stores, if their hiring policies were any indication, no longer cared much about books.

More: as time went on, it turned out that book sales weren’t really the most profitable kind of business these stores could do. Solution: reduce the shelf-space for books, increase the shelf-space for candles and trinkets. In Canada Chapters/Indigo has reduced book shelf-space from 75% to 60% (with Canadian fiction losing, and publishers cutting their lists in consequence). If the trend continues, books will be the minority in bookstores, and we might consider renaming them smelly candle stores that carry books.

The book business has stopped caring much about books.

Step One: Make Profit

These big stores are public companies, and big businesses. Like all businesses listed on stock exchanges, the people running them (boards of directors, and executives), have one central responsibility: to increase shareholder value.

The problem is that “shareholder value” has been defined almost exclusively as: “increased profits.” The owners of shares of Borders or any other large company don’t give a shit about books. They care about increased profits and increased share prices. The same is true in all businesses listed on stock exchanges. Mutual fund managers and institutional investors don’t buy stocks because of what a company does; they buy stock in companies whose stock prices will rise. And stock prices rise when profits go up.

But extracting profit is not necessarily related to long-term creation of value. In the book business (selling and publishing) what we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades might be considered a stripping of true value, in order to deliver shareholder profit.

The “fault” does not lie with the big companies. They’re driven by a particular motive – profit. It’s built into the DNA of public companies, and the way stock exchanges work. There’s no use blaming them, might as well blame beavers for chewing through trees. But we should all remember that these companies are not driven by “value,” if you define value as healthy long-term prospects for readers and writers.

The state of the book publishing business is dire. Publishers are cutting back staff, editors are getting fired, or leaving. Amazon is putting the squeeze on everyone, and bookstores across the land are having a hard time, with major closures expected.

The Future?

So the rest of us, readers and writers and lovers of books, entrepreneurs and technologists, those of us really interested in the voracious appetite of the powerful and relatively affluent group, are going to have to come up with new and different ways to get books written, published and in the hands of readers.

Imagine: what would happen if every publisher in the world went out of business tomorrow? If every book store closed it’s doors?

Here’s what I think: I think we would see a flourishing of innovation and the kind of excitement the book business has not seen since the printing press was invented. These companies (sellers and publishers) aren’t all going to close their doors, but a good number might.

Lamentable? Maybe. Or maybe this is a fabulous opportunity for something new.

I’m optimistic. New technologies are coming along that change the economics of books: ebooks, ipods, print-on-demand, the web, and more to come yet. The readers are there, maybe fewer of them, but no less passionate. The writers are there. And let’s face it, if the doom and gloom in the business is right, whatever model these companies were using hasn’t worked all that well.

So it’s up to us — all of us who care about books — to figure out what the book business is going to look in the next decade or so.

Exciting times.

I think this guy was on to something, when he wrote this in 1980:

In the information society (1) information, the axis of socio-economic development, will be produced by the information utility … a computer-based public infrastructure … (2) self-production of information by users will increase; information will accumulate, (3) this accumulated information will expand through synergetic production and shared utilization and (4) the economy will change structurally from an exchange economy to a synergetic economy …

The Information Society: As Post-industrial Society, Masuda, Yoneji; World Future Society

Find in a library

My friend Oana Avasilichioaei recently released her latest book of poetry, feria: a poempark (amazon link):

Oana Avasilichioaei deftly dismantles language and landscape in a whirling collection of poetry. feria is a poetic frolic in Vancouver’s Hastings Park eluding boundaries of landscape, time and narrative. Avasilichioaei writes and rewrites over this image, interpreting its evolving layers. Park and book coincide, and the author finds herself asking what is natural, what is language, and whose voices are we listening to. This is a book that pulls the reader into a wild ride, leaving you breathless but exilirated by the end.

Part of the project included shooting a beautiful film, which was done by another friend of mine, Theirry Collins:

[Also published at Huffpo]

I just came into possession of an iPod Touch, which is more or less the iPhone without the phone part (my friend Matt got an iPhone, so I inherited his Touch). I got the little gadget the night before a trip to San Francisco, and I loaded it up with audiobooks from LibriVox, podcasts from earideas, TEDTalks videos, and a host of public domain texts from Gutenberg to keep me busy during the plane ride.

It’s a beautiful little machine, which we expect from Apple. As an iPod it’s as good as you’d like — with the nice addition, for me, of video. But the biggest shock for me was how pleasing it was to read novels on the thing. I was surprised by how much I liked the elegant ereader application, Stanza. I read Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and I started reading – and continue to read – Tolstoy’s War & Peace. I even chose a number of times to read on my iPod in bed, instead of the paperback non-fiction & hardback fiction books I had brought along. War & Peace is, actually, a dream to read on the iPod. (Who would have thought?).

Reading digital text on a small handheld device is nothing like reading text on a computer (desktop or laptop). A mobile device is much more comfortable, for plenty of reasons. You can lounge and arrange yourself as you like; you can whip the device out while standing in line of passport control, and in the most cramped of subways (always annoying trying to hold a paperback open in a sardine-crowd). There’s an almost unlimited number of books you can pack into it. And the chunk of text displayed seems about exactly right for my own internet-frayed attention span, with the pleasant effect that I am propelled forward from page to page.

I tried an experiment too, listening to the LibriVox version of War and Peace while reading along, which was a relaxing immersive experience on the plane (though after a while, the slow speed of the audio compared with my reading became too distracting). But this could be a wonderful tool for those learning to read, language students, those with learning disabilities, and auditory learners reading dense, difficult texts, Kant for instance.

The iPhone and nifty apps like Stanza have convinced me that there is a real future in ebooks, one that I’ve always thought was more theoretical than actual. I’m a book person, paper and print. I love the smell, feel, texture and experience of reading a book. I always will, and I don’t think that ereaders will ever replace books for me. Ebooks have too many drawbacks.

The also have plenty of advantages, and now that I know I actually enjoy reading on an iPod, I’m pretty sure that ebooks on handheld mobile devices will continue to be one part of my reading habits.

Teleread reports that Apple is cutting iPhone production, and that will have negative impacts on the uptake of ebooks. They’re probably right, but for me — a former skeptic — the compelling case for ebooks has been made. I like ‘em.

Whether it’s the iPhone in the next year or so, or something else in five years, I’m sold.

I was at the annual meeting of the Open Content Alliance (hosted by the Internet Archive) when news of the big settlement between Google and Authors over use of out-of-print and orphan works in Google’s Book Search.

The Open Content Alliance is an open, public domain version of Google’s book scanning endeavour, which is dedicated rather to making a commercial tool in the service of Google.

So the OCA was pretty worked up about the agreement and what it would mean. I’ve not yet processed the agreement and it’s implications (generally I am skeptical that it is the best outcome for the public in general, unless alternate sources of scanned books remain viable). So I was happy to see that Harvard announced it would not join Google’s efforts, for the right reasons. According to Harvard University Library Director Robert Darnton:

“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries.” [more...]

[via Teleread]

What a wonderful, elegant little book, by James Wood:

How Fiction Works, James Wood; Farrar, Straus And Giroux

Find in a library

Dylan Wittkower, LibriVox’s resident philosopher and reader of such gems as Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, and JS Mill’s Untilitarianism, has edited a new academic/popular text, The iPod and Philosophy.

I have a blurb on the back of the book, getting the pole position ahead of Clay Shriky (!).

What a wonderful site is BibliOdyssey … :

Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart….eclectic and rare book illustrations derived from many digital repositories, accompanied by some background commentary.

A cornucopia of eye candy for biblionerds. You can buy the book too. Pure visual joy.

[Cross-posted at HuffingtonPost & the Book Oven Blog]

The modern publishing business has been in existence since about 1800, but things are not looking so rosy in the ink-stained world. The publishing business is scared: if stagnating book sales and the creeping digital shakeup were not enough, the market meltdown has many tightening their belts while trying to figure out the future.

Still, there is no indication that books are going away, or are any less useful, needed or wanted now than they were 200 years ago. Books are still essential. People still love them.

The book publishing business has a great advantage over other big media industries. For various reasons, publishing is late to the digital party. So it can look to all the many mistakes the music business made in the past decade, and decide how to move into the uncertain future. Here is some unsolicited advice to ponder while ignoring the Dow.

Five Lessons Publishing Should Learn from Music

The Internet, Napster, and Bit Torrents have all shaken up the music business, but it was the iPod that put the final nail in the coffin of the old business models: radio doesn’t matter anymore, and barely anyone can remember what a CD is for. All of a sudden, the world is full of people who want to fill up their little white devices with music. In the book business, we’ve yet to see an iconic, affordable ereader that people love. When we do, the game will change. Kindle Two apparently shows promise. The new Sony Reader is getting lots of good reviews. And Stanza, the new ebook app for the iPhone, makes Apple’s handheld the most popular ebook reader in the world. What’s more, Stanza has converted many ebook skeptics I know personally. Question for publishers: do you want to be where the readers are? Then find out where they are, and go there.

2. Think Beyond DRM

Big media has reacted to the web with alarm and terror, and their favorite answer to the challenges of the future has been digital rights management (DRM). This has been a disaster for media customers, and it’s not doing much good for the music business, is it? Have you heard any happy reports about how DRM is saving music? Nope. In the case of book buyers, DRM stops many people from embracing ebooks, because it makes things too complicated, and limits what you can do with them. We want to read our books on different devices, how and when we want. We don’t want to be treated like criminals, or told what devices we’re allowed to read on. Experiment a little, make some gambles, see what works best. Try it without DRM, you might like it.

3. If You Help Us, We Will Buy

The music business and Hollywood made a big mistake by fighting online distribution. If, early on, big media had built (or allowed others to build) the tools to let us all download movies and music at reasonable prices, we would have come. Instead, the they fought digital distribution with every bit of litigious animosity they could muster. Result: alternate/illegal means of getting entertained filled the void.

So, to publishers: Make your stuff available online. Make it easy to find. Make it easy to buy. And don’t insult us: if a physical book – with the cost of production, distribution and retail overhead – is worth $20, a digital book is not. Cut the price accordingly. Take your margin, but don’t abuse your customers with outrageous prices for ebooks (otherwise, we will find other ways to get our books).

4. Don’t Be Afraid of Free

Do you remember how in the olden days, the publishing business lead a massive effort to shut down public libraries, because free was the enemy of the publishing business? How they fought to stop people giving a gift of their favorite books to a friend? Me neither. Libraries help readers, they help publishers, they help books in general. And giving away a book is one of the most powerful marketing signals in the universe. The mainstream book business seems to live in terror of free, and yet free access to books has traditionally been the cornerstone of the publishing business. You don’t have to give everything away, but remember how much good “free” has done for you in the past.

5. Find Out What Your Customers Want

Then build your business around that. This is the most important point. Readers love books. They love reading. They love writers. We will support the publishing business, and writers, but you have to find out how we want to do it. Don’t try to shoehorn us into an old business model that doesn’t make sense with new technology. Your job is not to force customers to behave the way you want them to. Your job is to find out what your customers want, and then deliver it to them. Times are changing. Find out what we want, what we need, and then help us get it.

There are some encouraging signs that the publishing business are trying to make some good changes. Let’s hope they keep going in the right direction.

[cross-posted at the Book Oven Blog]

Bookkake, is “an entirely print-on-demand, and web-oriented, publisher,” launched by James Birdle. Either he’s a pervert, or a good marketer, but he’s starting with … well, let’s call them saucy books.

Interestingly his first batch of books are all old classics, and out of copyright, such as John Cleland’s 1748 porn classic Fanny Hill (which, incidentally, is available in audio at LibriVox, and I highly recommend hearing this one in audio as well as reading the original). Bookkake is launching with five titles: Fanny Hill, plus Liber Amoris by Wiliiam Hazlitt, Memoirs of a Young Rakehell by Guillaume Apollinaire, The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, and Venus In Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

I expect to see many more of these small indie publishers popping up (do you know any others?), and for all the worry about the publishing behemoths collapsing under their own weight, this is the future of interesting publishing, I have no doubt.

Says James:

The website, which is at the core of my approach, comes with extensive extracts, high-resolution covers, all the social media dooh-dahs and, most notably I think, entirely free ebook editions of every title.

Right on. Bookkake has a blog, where you can follow progress on the project.

[cross posted at the Book Oven Blog]

There’s been much teeth gnashing and lamenting over the impending collapse of the publishing business. See, for instance, the exhaustive New York Magazine article titled The End, with the lede: “The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after.” Readers are reading less (supposedly) and buying fewer books, sales are stagnating, and the Internet is ruining everything.

Well, the traditional publishing business might be in for a rough ride, but I think we’re poised to see a flowering of a new kind of independent writing, book-making and reading, driven by the web but rooted in the old-fashioned book.

Take a look at the music business. I don’t think there has ever been a time when music was more varied and vibrant than it is today. Yet this explosion of music and access happened as the major record labels have shed great rivers of tears over the demise music, the end of civilization, and fears that soon all we’ll hear are the sounds of crickets chirping in the silence. And instead of figuring out how to better serve their voracious fans, they started suing them.

Music itself is doing just fine, thank you. Musicians are making music, and listeners have a richness of choice and quality never before seen. The new business model is still evolving (hint: live shows, inexpensive drm-free downloads & web-based CD sales, and connecting with fans in new ways online). In the indie world, things are great. Says Derek Sivers ex-of CDBaby: “Despite the moaning you hear from the major labels, independent artists are selling better than ever. Even physical CD sales are up 30% over last year!” If your metric of success of a cultural space is the amount of new material produced, and the amount of new material being consumed, we’re at a zenith.

If your metric of success is the number of record exec Ferraris, things are looking bleak.

I think we’re going to see something similar happen in the book publishing world, as a new generation of writers and readers wrest the tools of publishing from the big companies that have gobbled up all the little guys. It’s happened already in journalism (with blogs), encyclopedia (wikipedia), but books, because they are harder to make, are hanging on as a kind of last bastion. Things are changing: Ebook readers are getting better, print-on-demand is becoming a viable alternative to traditional publishing, and in 2007, Japanese sales of books to cell phones grew 331%, Korea’s growth was even bigger. The web is the most powerful tool of distribution we’ve ever had. You’ve heard it before, but every individual can reach a global audience of billions just by pressing “publish.” We’re now seeing new ways to engage with literature, fan-made translations, and we are just getting started. Eoin Purcell was “amazingly not depressed by the [New York Magazine] article,” and I think that’s the right reaction. Even within the belly of the corporate publishing beast, some are working hard to transform things.

There’s going to be a shake-up, no doubt. It’ll be ugly for publishing companies that don’t adjust.

But if your passion is writing, reading, books and literature, I’ll bet things are about to get much more interesting for all of us.

Publishing is dead. Long live publishing.

Covers is a beautiful weblog dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design, run by Fwis, a design firm based out of Brooklyn, NY and Portland, OR. They post pics of covers, comment on them, and invite outside commentary.

Some other nice covers can be found here and here.

Matt just released his beautiful new book, Ojingogo. (I don’t think you can buy it online yet.)

I’m not a great reader of graphic novels, but I must say I love Drawn & Quarterly’s store on Bernard, and the attention graphic novelists, their publishers, and their readers give to the object of the book. The D&Q bookstore exudes a love of books, everything about them, that’s rare to see these days. Why not pop in and browse for a while, before buying a few books, especially Ojingogo?

I just spoke with someone in the publishing business about the discouraging state of Canadian fiction. Not the writing, but the business side. I’m not sure what has happened in the rest of the world, but: Chapters/Indigo has reduced space for books from 70% to 60%. The rest is candles and calendars and crap of one kind or another. And what they cut was mostly fiction – anything literary, and especially anything new from “unproved” writers, has much less shelf space. There are precious few independent booksellers left in Canada, so as Chapters/Indigo goes, so goes Canadian publishing.

The result is that publishers aren’t taking many new writers. The big presses have kicked out their smaller performers; who are now getting picked up by the mid-range presses, meaning that mid-range presses aren’t taking new young writers any more, and small presses are swamped with manuscripts from both published and unpublished writers…with nowhere to sell their books.

All of which makes me think that something is badly broken in the publishing business. People still want to write; people still want to read. But there’s little room left in the mainstream book business for anything but top sellers. And smelly candles, of course.

The book business needs a shake-up, I think.

I just finished writing a book review, for Books in Canada (I’ve suggested they fix their site). My reviewing technique, which is the same technique I used writing papers on texts in university, and is probably total overkill, is to make notes of important passages while reading, and then copy all those passages out (in university I mostly did it in long-hand). Then I review all the key passages, sketch out (on a yellow pad of lined paper – God’s gift to the thought process) the article, roughly identifying the subjects of each paragraph. Then I associate each quote with a different idea, and then start writing, using quotes when and if needed.

It’s a great way to really get to know a text, and it’s such a satisfying process (and one of the reasons I am planning to go back to school in the fall: I miss really working through a serious text, I do it so rarely now).

Anyway, if you’d like to check out the most interesting (to me) passages in Doidge’s book, here they are.

Michael Geist has an article in the Toronto Star about Canadian book 2.0 projects. The two projects cited are Evan’s Wikitravel Press, and LibriVox.

About Wikitravel Press, says he:

For example, Wikitravel, one of the Internet’s most acclaimed travel websites, was launched in 2003 by Montreal residents Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. Using the same wiki collaborative technology that has proven so successful for Wikipedia, the Wikitravel site invited travelers to post their comments and experiences about places around the world in an effort to build a community-generated travel guide.

In less than five years, the site has accumulated more than 30,000 online travel guides in 18 languages, with more than 10,000 editorial contributions each week. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons licence that allows the public to use, copy or edit the guides.

Building on Wikitravel’s success, Prodromou and Jenkins recently established Wikitravel Press, which introduced its first two titles earlier this month. Wikitravel Press represents a new approach to travel book publishing based on Internet collaborative tools and print-on-demand technologies that should capture the attention of the industry for several reasons…

[there's more]
And on LibriVox:

Canadians are also playing a leading role in reshaping the creation of audiobooks. Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web developer, established LibriVox in August 2005. The site is also based on concept of Internet collaboration. In this instance, LibriVox volunteers create voice recordings of chapters of books that are in the public domain. The resulting audio files are posted back on to the Internet for free.

The LibriVox project, which does not have an annual budget, has succeeded in placing more than 1,200 audio books on the Internet, including Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, works from Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and hundreds more.

He finishes:

New technologies are rapidly reshaping the book industry and it is exciting to see how Canadians are quietly playing a leading role in the re-imagining of how books are created and distributed.

Been a while since I wrote a longish piece on LibriVox. Peter Kerry Powers, a Professor of English and chair of the English department at Messiah College, wrote a piece about audio books, and LibriVox, here. I commented on that post, Peter answered here, and this was my comment to on his second piece (i’ve edited it slightly, some of it is in direct answer to Peter’s stuff, so you might want to check out what he had to say, but I think it all should make sense on its own):

i’ll defer to your analysis of dickens, but the wider point is that the roots – some ancient, some more recent – of text literature is oral. so “reading” is a particular type of experience of literature, but not the only one, not the oldest one. as to the value of these different experiences of literature, I think that’s up to those who experience it to decide and describe. Certainly reading text and listening are not the same thing, but how one values one or the other is surely a matter for the individual to assess. If audio books *result* in a decrease in (paper)text reading, then I will be with you in decrying the loss of a certain type of skill and experience, one that cannot be replaced by listening (or by reading online for that matter). But I don’t think it’s the case that audio books result in less reading; I suspect the opposite, but I have no proof of that.

As for myself, some of my own most formative experiences of literature involved my mother reading to me: RLS’s Kidnapped; The Trumpeter Swan; Stuart Little; The Hobbit; and countless others. It never occurred to me to criticize my mother for stumbles, substandard reading or non-NPR intonations. Some of the philosophy behind LibriVox is a recreation of that interaction: not a professional performance of a text (there are plenty of those available), but instead an intimate experience of someone reading to you – with all the little warts and idiosyncrasies that come with intimate readings.

For someone who aggressively promotes this philosophy, check out Miette, an occasional LibriVox volunteer, and one of the first audiolit podcasters in the universe. She is at once “professional” in sound and approach, and also intimate and personal. Her stuff is very much: Miette reading to you; rather than Miette performing a text. See:
http://www.miettecast.com/

The other issues you’ve raise all relate to a common problem – this is true of much of the web in general – which is a misunderstanding of what LibriVox is for. Mainly, you are looking at LibriVox as “provider of audio books,” in the model of a traditional publisher whose job (at least as it is usually understood) is to produce books that readers want to purchase.

It might be easier to consider LibriVox not as a publisher, but rather as a library, at least as far as our relations to the listeners are concerned. That is, you would not go into a library, pull out five random books, and say, “I didn’t like these books, this library is no good, the books here are all crap.” This is the same impulse people have when they say: “bloggers are self-obsessed, they rant and rave and have bad grammar, and I will never waste my time reading blogs because they are stupid.” … It’s true that some blogs are stupid, but not true of any I read, not true of this blog. So the problem is not “blogs”; the problem, among others, is that people don’t know how to find blogs that they like reading. And they are faced with a similar problem you express about LibriVox, because they say: “Well, you say there is good stuff on blogs, but how do I find it in the sea of crap?” You and I know the answer, but it’s not so clear how to express the ways to “find” good blogs to read in a general sense. In the non-web world, when you open a newspaper, you are guaranteed a certain quality/type of writing by the masthead; ditto when you open a Penguin Classic or a Vintage Paperback or when you walk into a certain section of the books store. The web world works differently, and the “guarantee” is delivered differently, in my case from something like “network authority.”

But getting back to LibriVox, our objective is:
“To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.”

So we evaluate how we do things based on that objective. And partly for reasons of various kinds of idealism, but also in large part for pragmatic reasons, we’ve decided (rightly, I think), that criticism, ratings, particularly bad ratings are a hindrance to our objective, not a help. The main reason is that recording texts is difficult, and putting them out into public is a traumatic and sensitive thing for many people to do. Criticism, especially unsolicited negative criticism, turns people off from recording. But, we have an objective, stated above, and that objective is not: “To make the best audio …” or “BBC-quality audio …” Rather our objective is to record “all public domain texts.” We need all the help we can get, and we do what we can to “protect” our readers from harsh criticism that will stop them from participating.

So in fact, I think it is entirely fair for you to say that (some) LibriVox recordings are dull. Or annoying. Or both. I agree with you, or rather, that has been my experience of some LibriVox recordings. But I have the same experience with any random collection of text or audio books or music or art. And that’s what LibriVox is, a random collection. If fact, I personally find random collections of professionally-read audio books have a much higher quotient of dull and annoying than a random collection from LibriVox, but that’s my personal preference about style: humanity over professional performance. And certainly for me, it is totally incorrect to say *most* LV recordings are dull or annoying.

A few points of interest come out of this:
a) there are plenty of professional, “high-quality” audiobooks available for a price; our books are free if anyone wants them (and if they don’t, no matter)
b) if you compare our catalog to older “free” audio lit projects, projects that DO have high “standards” (eg literalsystems.org), our catalog is much bigger … which means that we have provided a resource, that would not be there otherwise, for those who want it. whether people like or use the resource or not is another question.
c) in our large catalog, there is an impressive amount of beautifully-read stuff, searchable by reader, some great ones include: david barnes, andy minter, karen savage, gord mackenzie, kara shallenberg … the list is much longer.

So the *result* of our fundamental policy to take all comers, and turn away no one, results in a strange catalog filled with lots of stuff that sometimes *is* dull, or “badly” read, or hard to listen to, for some people, especially if you are expecting a certain style of audio. But that does not mean that these more idiosyncratic readings don’t have any value. And our approach also results in a large number of good recordings (mine, for instance, I think fall somewhere between badly-read and good … they seem worth doing to me; certainly my more recent ones are “better” than older ones); and a surprising number of extraordinary recordings, that I would put toe to toe with any professional recordings.

Now your problem is finding the good stuff, and I sympathize with it. I think we could/should probably do something like an informal “recommendation” page. But again, if you look at our objective, helping people find good LibriVox stuff is not our “job.” …Our job is to make the audio, and make it available for free. .

It’s the “job” of the rest of the web to start sorting out this resource we are providing, and sorting the good stuff. Metafilter is a work-around starting point, but eventually someone will put up a site that sifts thru librivox audio and finds the really good stuff. And if you follow links from our catalog page, you’ll get to the Internet Archive, where our audio is hosted, and there you will find some ratings. But we don’t publicize that.

There is more to write on the relationship between ratings & an open project like LibriVox, but the ink in my pen is running out, and I wanted to touch on a couple more of your points.

In particular: “To some degree I think he’s suggesting that Librivox is really more like a blog service where readers can express themselves via recording.”
This is another misreading of what we are up to. LibriVox has a particular objective (quoted above). It is not for self-expression, etc., tho that might motivate some people. It’s got a very particular purpose, to provide a complete library of public domain books, in audio format. So, people are motivated to pitch in for lots of different reasons, but our decision-making about how or why we do things always has to answer to our objective.

“It’s also the case that in reading a published work, the reader puts himself/herself in the position of performer/artist who is interpreting the work of another artist.”
That is one way to look at it. You could also say, “the reader puts him/herself in the position of human who is doing their best to make a public domain text available in audio format.”

Now I know you’ll probably say I am picking at semantic bones there, but the first motivation/role is not the same as the second, and they will result in different approaches to recording, and different results. And you can argue with me about the “value” of the first or second motivation, but in the end it doesn’t matter because I (and, generally, people who buy into what LibriVox is trying to do) disagree with you. And you might further say I (and the rest of the gang) are wasting our time, but it is our time to waste.

Now if *everyone* said: “you’re wasting your time,” I and others might start scratching our heads, and wondering if this open project idea was kind of stupid after all. But we get enough emails & blog comments from people saying: “wow, what wonderful work you are doing,” that it’s easy enough to shrug the shoulders at those who say otherwise. And, amazingly to me, our audio books get downloaded thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of times. For instance, Hobbes’ Leviathan, published by us 2 days ago, has been downloaded 1,671 times! In 2 days! … Which, you, as a writer of books will recognize is the kind of number that DOES appeal to the ego and excitement of the people who participate in LibriVox, for all sorts of non-altruistic reasons. Which is fine, because that kind of excitement helps us with our objective.

Finally, to Puccini and Pavarotti, if I were them, I would be horrified to know that someone was telling people to stop singing in my name. That doesn’t mean I want to listen to bad opera, but there are so many reasons people don’t sing opera any more, so many reasons people don’t read any more, so many reasons people don’t celebrate literature, and I don’t want to be another contributor to all the things that discourage reading (or opera). I would much prefer to find ways to help encourage people to share literature, to discover great books – and mediocre books too – and to spread literature, to get closer to text, to reading, to the sounds of words and the ideas behind them; in the case of LirbiVox those people are behind the microphone, and on the other side of earphones…

And in its essence, LibriVox is not about audio books, it is about people, of all types and all skills, reading and recording public domain texts, and making them available for free for anyone who wants to listen. We work hard to help that happen, and whatever happens next is something we spend much less time worrying about..

From the NYTimes:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service…

Good for them… LibriVox is sort of associated with the Open Content Alliance.

Went to Craig Silverman’s book launch for Regret the Error … looks great. Good crowd of mtl geeks and other folk. Blurb from the introduction to the book, by Jeff Jarvis:

Craig Silverman’s examination of the art of the correction in his blog and now this book could not come at a better time for journalism. For the public’s trust in news organizations is falling about as fast as their revenues (and, yes, those may be related). One way to earn back that trust is to face honestly and directly the trade’s faults. The more – and more quickly – that news organizations admit and correct their mistakes, prominently and forthrightly, the less their detractors will have grounds to grumble about them

And what a pleasure to answer this question: “How do you know Craig?” … My answer: “Oh, he wrote about LibriVox in the New York Times.”

LibriVox is doing another national novel writing month (nanowrimo) novel … why not sign up for a chapter here.

background:

During the month of November 2007, LibriVox volunteers write the serial novel The Yellow Sheet together, based on the guidelines of the National Novel Writing Month. Each volunteer writes one or more chapter (we do one chapter per day, so 30 chapters in total), and authors record their own chapters (on the day after they’ve written the chapter). At the end of the project, a novel of at least 50,000 words is released in text and audio form on the LibriVox catalogue. Please remember that both your writing and the recording wll be in the public domain.

Warning:

Transcriber’s Note: These memoires were not written for children, they may outrage readers also offended by Chaucer, La Fontaine, Rabelais and The Old Testament.

Found that on the Gutenberg page for The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova … I owe the audio of chapter 10 from vol 1, over at LibriVox.

From the Telegraph:

All the novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize could be made available online in a radical move being considered by publishers, it was reported today…

Negotiations are said to be in progress with the British Council to digitise the six shortlisted novels so they can be downloaded in full, all over the world.

It is hoped the initiative will capture new audiences – particularly in Asia and Africa – who may be unable to access the actual books….

Those behind the venture hope it will boost, rather than detract from sales of the hard copy as readers who download the novel online, may be inspired to buy a paper version for themselves.

More than 10,000 publishers have already signed up to Google’s book-scanning project, which makes part of selected books available online. Initial results from the programme have suggested that publishing the tasters has increased sales of the books.

Note: emphasis added.
Questions/comments:
-does that mean online for free?
-hey, googlebooks (maybe) proves the point that giving it away might sell more (will be nice to have more than doctorow’s anecdotal evidence)
-I was just saying the other night that the open movement is not/will not be successful for any moral reasons, but because it will be better at doing certain things.

(vie michael geist)

I’m as much of a copyfighter as the next guy, and have some street cred in public domain, free culture circles. I think that big companies abuse copyright, and that draconican copyright systems stifle innovation and creativity, and further are no good for artists and creators. But I’ve never argued that copyright should be discarded, especially as it relates to commercial applications.

I’ve heard about Google Books, and despite my thoughts on copyright, it always seemed a little bit … gauche … to me. A multi-gazillion-dollar company like Google saying: “Hey everyone, we’re going to scan all you books and make them available to the world.” And tough turkeys, to you publishers, writers and your copyrights. We are Google and you shall submit. it seemed to me that they were bullying publishers, and deserved all the lawsuits they got for copyright infringement.

But, actually, I’d never landed on Google Books, never really looked at it.

I just did.

I did an old fashioned Google Search for “wallace stevens domination of black harmonium” (actually, to find it’s copyright status) and then I followed this link to the Google Books scan of the 2003 Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, by Christopher Beach.

I was kind of shocked. The whole bookMuch of the book is there online for anyone to read.

Some thoughts/questions:
1. does Google have an agreement with the publisher?
2. wow … search for any phrase in any book is soon to be reality.
3. are *all* books really going to be available through the graces of google?
4. what’s google’s deal with big publishers? little publishers? poets, little writers?
5. what do publishers/writers think of google serving ads underneath the scans of their books?
6. will google privilege google books links over, say, gutenberg in their search results?
7. … more, questions, …?

UPDATE: some answers, from Google Books:

For books that enter Book Search through the Library Project, what you see depends on the book’s copyright status. We respect copyright law and the tremendous creative effort authors put into their work. If the book is in the public domain and therefore out of copyright, you can page through the entire book and even download it and read it offline. But if the book is under copyright, and the publisher or author is not part of the Partner Program, we only show basic information about the book, similar to a card catalog, and, in some cases, a few snippets — sentences of your search terms in context. The aim of Google Book Search is to help you discover books and learn where to buy or borrow them, not read them online from start to finish. It’s like going to a bookstore and browsing – with a Google twist.

First: you can get updated about new releases via twitter, by following http://twitter.com/librivox (seems not to have updated today?)

Next: The last few LibriVox releases are all pretty cool.

South! The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917
by Ernest Shackleton

Shackleton’s most famous expedition was planned to be an attempt to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea south of the Atlantic, to the Ross Sea south of the Pacific, by way of the Pole. It set out from London on 1 August 1914, and reached the Weddell Sea on January 10, 1915, where the pack ice closed in on the Endurance. The ship was broken by the ice on 27 October 1915. The 28 crew members managed to flee to Elephant Island, bringing three small boats with them. Shackleton and five other men managed to reach the southern coast of South Georgia in one of the small boats (in a real epic journey). Shackleton managed to rescue all of the stranded crew from Elephant Island without loss in the Chilean’s navy seagoing steam tug Yelcho, on August 30, 1916, in the middle of the Antarctic winter. (Summary from Wikipedia)

As the last section of this project we include a short original recording by Ernest Shackleton about the expedition.

Democracy in America Vol. I
by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he found a thriving democracy of a kind he had not seen anywhere else. Many of his insightful observations American society and political system, found in the two volume book he published after his visit, still remain surprisingly relevant today.

Star Born
by Andre Norton

Andre Norton’s “Star Born” pictures a human colony in another galaxy, driven away from Earth generations ago by a repressive government. Considered outlaws, the colonists are in permanent hiding.

They have developed friendship and cooperation with a local race of “mermen” who are equally at home on land or sea. But that race only took to the sea to escape a malevolent power that hunted them and killed them violently for sport – Those Others.

With a global decline in the population and reach of Those Others, contacts are few and the humans have no direct knowlege of them. So it is a major surprise when Dalgard, a human scout on his coming-of-age expedition, along with his “knife-brother” Sssuri of the mermen, run into a party of Those Others who are bent on reclaiming hideous weaponries left behind in one of their abandoned cities… and find that they are being aided by new arrivals from Earth!

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

(from Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby)

Says da boing:

The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they’ll print any of over 200,000 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron.

[more...]

Technorati Tags: book, stephenson

… LibriVox began in a vibrant section of Montreal called the Plateau, where 32-year-old Hugh McGuire lives with his wife…McGuire hangs out at Laika, a café and bar around the corner from his house that is popular with Montreal techies. At Laika, open source gurus, community WiFi evangelists, and A-list Web designers drink coffee, eat brunch, work on their laptops, and swap ideas…

Apparently in the print version of the mag, there’s a big pic of Laika – I’ll scan & post it when I get it (coming in the mail). See:

The Wealth of LibriVox:
Classic texts, amateur audiobooks, and the grand future of online peer production
by Michael Erard

(thanks to Heri for the heads up).

Vonnegut is dead. I scoured my shelves for a copy of Palm Sunday to quote some gems about writing well, but I could not find it! … Must have lent it to someone? But here is the passage about writing an anti-war book:

I said [I was writing a book about Dresden] to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

Here is a wonderful interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., aged 82, on the great Australia Radio National show, Late Night Live, with Phillip Adams.

Touch, Listen (2007)
Dennis Yuen & Morry Galonoy
Bookcloths, Davey board, decorative paper, linen threads, ink, long-stitch binding, voice XML, PHP, syndication from [b]LibriVox’s [/b]public domain podcast stream of audio poetry

Books are meant to be touched.

Poetry is meant to be listened to. Tel: (617) 850 9366

Each is an art form that should be experienced intimately and personally through our senses.

Touch, Listen explores the book as a tactile art object meant to be held, touched and physically interacted with, and its hypothetical content, in this case, poetry, meant to be performed and listened to. Separating the forms allows us to experience each one as an extension of our ideas, thoughts and feelings, as well as content to its own form.

April is national poetry month.

see: Touch, Listen (2007)

Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday. When I was a teen he was one of my favourite writers, and I’ve read many of his books, a number of them several times. Been a long while since I read one, but I read parts of Breakfast of Champions in 2002, when politics had changed so drastically in the USA, and it was hard to imagine anyone publishing such a revolutionary book.

Other great novels that I loved include Slaughterhouse 5, and Galapagos, though there were many more on my bookshelves at one time; and his collection of non-fiction writing, Palm Sunday has some wonderful essays, including one of my favourite articles on good writing.

I’ll have to look through my bookshelves again, and see if there’s an old gem I should read again to remember the virulent, pall mall smoking humanist, who once wrote about anti-war books that you might as well write anti-iceberg books (tho that didn’t stop him).

With all the icebergs melting, maybe that means we might be turning the corner.

I’m trying to read 52 books in 2007, a book a week. I’ve still got a little cushion, but I’m slowing down. Been lucky, with lots of good books. Here’s a list, with a one-line review, link to more detailed review. Starred books are particularly good.

52 Books in 2007 – Q1 Results

1. *A Clockwork Orange (f), by Anthony Burgess
   Wonderfully inventive, dark satire about a hyper-violent future.
2. Kafka on the Shore (f), by Haruki Murakami (review)
   Disappointing outing, tho still worth a read for Murakami fans.
3. The God Delusion (nf), by Richard Dawkins (review)
   Cheap, lazy book by a once-great author. Please: more science, less pop psych and bad philosophy.
4. *Programming the Universe (nf), by Seth Lloyd (review)
   Is the universe a big computer? Fascinating book.
5. *Lullabies for Little Criminals (f), by Heather O’Neill (review)
   Beautiful novel about kid growing up in the skanky streets of Montreal.
6. A Beginner’s Guide to Anarchism (nf), by Ruth Kinna (review)
   Decent intro to anarchism, but missing key connections, especially to the hacker world.
7. Now is the Hour (f), by Tom Spanbauer (review for Books in Canada)
   Coming-of-age-in-the-small-town-60s story of a teen figuring out he might be gay.
8. The Human Stain (f), by Philip Roth (review)
   Slick and assured writing by a great American novelist, lacked something, not sure what.
9. Prochaine Episode (f), by Hubert Aquin (review)
   Twisted tale of a Quebecois spy, or a writer, or a lunatic, or all three.
10. King John of Canada (f), Scott Gardiner (review for Books in Canada)
    Canada gets a king. Satire ensues.
11. *The Wealth of Networks (nf), by Yochai Benkler (review)
    The text to read for a comprehensive and detailed study of the open movement in all its guises.
12. Slow Man (f), J.M. Coetzee (review)
    Man gets hit by car, loses leg. Metaphysical musing, good Coetzee; not great Coetzee.
13. Crazy about Lili (f), William Weintraub (review)
    Fun fluff about a young McGill student in the 1940s, and his friendship with stripper Lili L’Amour (a fictionalized Lili St-Cyr).
14. America at the Crossroads (nf), Francis Fukayama (review)
    Maybe the neocons were a bunch of idiots after all. So says a former neocon.
15. *A Complicated Kindness (f), Miriam Toews (review)
    Mennonite girl smokes pot and screws. Funny, sad, and fantastic.

Technorati Tags: book, weintraub

Technorati Tags: book, fukayama, nonfiction

Matt asked me for some LibriVox recommendations for a long drive to Toronto. I whipped up this list, and, well … it’s not authoratative or anything, but if you know about LibriVox and are wondering what to listen to, here are some that I have enjoyed (I’ll update the list periodically):

NON-FICTION

• God and State, Mikhail Bakunin (solo)
  seminal anarchist text, v well-read.
• China and the Chinese, Herbert Allen Giles (solo)
  Wonderful exploration of Chinese culture, beautifully read.
• The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  classic political text, still relevant.
• Poetics, by Aristotle (solo)
  the great Greek gives you the low-down on how to write a story. Wonderful idiosyncratic reading.
• Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo (solo)
  a meditative book on tea, flower arranging, art, life, zen, and more. published in 1906. beautiful.

FICTION

• The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells (solo)
  Alex Foster’s great rendition of curious Wells tale of the nasty man who disappears.
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (solo)
  RLS’s cautionary story of scientific hubris.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (solo)
  dashing adventure in the age of the French Revolution.
• Parenticide Clube, Ambrose Bierce (solo)
  very funny, but very very dark.
• Heart of Darkness (solo)
  conrad’s tale read by a young woman w american accent. odd but it works, somehow.
• Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, John Cleland
  very saucy Victorian pornography.
• War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (solo)
  the great sci-fi adventure.

NOTE: I love the collaborative projects (read by many different people) but a well-read solo book is probably a good place to start with LibriVox.

Here is a list of free audio books released by LibriVox … in the Month of March!!!! (books of particular interest are in bold):

1.Lines Written in Early Spring by Wordsworth, William
2.Byways Around San Francisco Bay by Hutchinson, W. E.
3.Clue of the Twisted Candle, The by Wallace, Edgar
4.Twilight of the Idols, The by Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ludovici, Anthony M.
5.Pollyanna by Porter, Eleanor H.
6.Contes en vers by Perrault, Charles
7.Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers by Lea, Elizabeth E.8.Ideal Bartender, The by Bullock, Tom
9.Sense and Sensibility by Austen, Jane
10.Otto of the Silver Hand by Pyle, Howard
11.Ballads of a Bohemian by Service, Robert W.
12.Legend Land V 1 & 2 by Various, LYONESSE
13.Épîtres de Pierre by Anonyme
14.Plague Ship by Norton, Andre
15.Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush by Moodie, Susanna
16.Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome, Jerome K.
17.Story of the Middle Ages, The by Harding, Samuel B.
18.Hound of the Baskervilles, The by Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir
19.Hollow Needle, The by Leblanc, Maurice
20.Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Einstein, Albert
21.Master Key, The by Baum, L. Frank
22.West African Folk Tales by Barker, William H.
23.On the Popular Judgment: That may be Right in Theory, but does not Hold Good in the Praxis by Immanuel Kant, D.E. Wittkower, ed.
24.Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books by Kant, Immanuel
25.Ring o’ Roses: A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book by Brooke, L. Leslie
26.At the Back of the North Wind by MacDonald, George
27.Ghost Story Collection 003
28.Familiar Letters on Chemistry by Liebig, Justus, Gardner, John (ed)
29.Letter Concerning Toleration, A by Locke, John
30.I’m Nobody – Emily Dickinson
31.Jack and Jill – Alcott , Louisa May
32.Omnilingual – H. Beam Piper
33.The Sign of the Four – Arthur Conan Doyle
34.The Iliad for Boys and Girls – Alfred J. Church
35.Short Poetry Collection 026
36.The Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius
37.The Antichrist – Friedrich Nietzsche
38.Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges – Gerard Manley Hopkins (Robert Bridges, ed.)
39.Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Edith Oenone Somerville
40.Fables de La Fontaine, livre 02 – La Fontaine, Jean de
41.The Devil’s Pool – George Sand
42.O, it was out by Donnycarney – James Joyce
43.The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Emmuska Orczy
44.Collected Works of Saint Patrick – Saint Patrick
45.The Spinster Book – Myrtle Reed
46.The Glugs of Gosh – C. J. Dennis
47.Thurley Ruxton – Philip Verrill Mighels
48.Miracles – Walt Whitman
49.Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
50.The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
51.The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
52.On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
53.Candide – Voltaire
54.The King in Yellow (part 2) – Robert W. Chambers
55.The Autobiography of Mother Jones – Mary Harris Jones
56.Short Poetry Collection 025
57.The Story of My Life – Helen Keller
58.Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope
59.Moby Dick, or the Whale – Herman Melville
60.Ophelia – Walter de la Mare
61.Bohemian San Francisco – Clarence Edwords
62.The Sayings of Confucius – Confucius
63.The Monkey’s Paw – W. W. Jacobs
64.Librivox’s Short Story Collection Vol. 011
65.The Island of Dr. Moreau – H. G. Wells
66. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, by Immanuel Kant
67. Oomphel in the Sky, by H. Beam Piper
68. ?
69. ?
70. ?
71.The Junior Classics (Technically April 1, but it was ready March 31 and the servers weren’t cooperating)

and here is the catalog.

LibriVox had a March Madness campaign – a concerted effort to finish as many public domain books as we could in the month of March.

We finished SEVENTY!

Yes, 7-0 works of great literature. That’s pretty crazy. I didn’t do much to contribute, I must say, but I am proud as punch.

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Robin mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, and I think I posted already, but I met Freddy last night. He’s making a fantastic graphic novel of Orwell’s 1984 (see: gutenberg australia’s ebook).

Freddy is selling these posters for $12 a pop:

And here is the opening scene (you can get it in B&W or colour):

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Technorati Tags: book, fiction, montreal

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Technorati Tags: book, fiction, japanese, murakami

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OK, I’ve just launched a little experimental project, let’s see how it goes. It’s called LibriVox:

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?
LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

There some more info here.

So if you know any podcasters, literature buffs, actors, librarians, teachers, readers, writers, radio announcers, or anyone at all who might be interested in donating some time to read a chapter of a public domain book and record it to the net, please send them to LibriVox. If you want to get directly in touch, try: librivox(at]yahoo(dot]ca.

So this is for all you bloggers who read and comment on this site occasionally: (eponym, fling, andre, mike l, martine, seb, wirearchy, danielle and the rest)…

let’s see where it all goes!