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Archive for April, 2009:

One of the intriguing things about Europa Editions is what the New York Times has called its “frankly retro publishing model.”

But before we can appreciate how bold it is to be “retro” in publishing these days, let’s remember what happened to the industry, especially in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the days of infamy, when the independent institutions of New York publishing—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper & Row, Penguin, and others—were being swallowed up by massive international media conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, CBS, and News Corporation.

 

              

Suddenly book publishers, who were accustomed to seeing profit margins between 3 and 4 percent, were expected to contend with their conglomerates’ film, cable television, and other media subsidiaries, which typically saw gains of between 12 and 15 percent. Under this enormous pressure to increase their margins, and with financial and marketing people now weighing in heavily on publishing decisions, editors became consumed by the hunt for the next blockbuster book (think Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus). Meanwhile, they could no longer “afford” to publish a title that was projected to sell fewer than 15,000 – 20,000 copies, regardless of its literary merit. In effect, the business of printing books, which had long been guided by a cultural mission to make literature and ideas available to the general public, was surrendered to the great, equalizing jaws of the market.

Publishing veteran André Schiffrin explains how market theory transformed the industry in “The Corporatization of Publishing” (The Nation, June 3, 1996) and at greater length in his memoir, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).

So how does Europa reconcile its seemingly lofty cultural mission (to foster through literature the dialogue between nations and cultures) with the equally formidable task of turning literature in translation into a viable business venture in the United States? Looks like I’m still honing in on the answers . . .

Thanks to the blog Première de Couverture, I was made aware of the beautiful books put out by Les Allusifs, a Montreal publisher that specializes in international fiction translated to French.

I love everything about these bold and stripped-down designs, which are by the Montreal firm Paprika—but especially the colors. One thing that makes this series work so well is that the design is very consistent, but each cover is also unique, which keeps things interesting. The Dada-esque illustrations are by Alain Pilon.

They look really good all together in a pile:

Paprika won a lot of recognition for these designs, and you can read some comments on the work here:

• STEP Design 100 Judge’s Selection
• Graphex 2008 Judge’s Choice
• AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 2007 competition

A virtual office is a computer simulation of a physical office. As much as possible, it needs to replace all the functions that are found in physical work area, where people communicate, work together, keep lists, and store things. In my vision of a true virtual office, I would type my username and password into a login screen and be sucked head first into my computer. I would spend the rest of the day working with virtual replicas of my colleagues.

That not being possible, there are other interesting options for a “distributed workforce”—a group of workers in which each person is in a different physical location, often in a different city. When our company searched for a virtual publishing office, my favorite by far was a configurable, three-dimensional, animated workspace called Qwaq. Although it sounds like a duck, the service is one of the most serious attempts to create a useful, Second Life world for business users. I highly recommend Qwaq to anyone who can find a use for it.

Once you sign up, you can start setting up individual offices, conference rooms, and auditoriums. You can connect the rooms with doors, and suddenly you have a fully functioning office floor. Each worker is assigned an avatar (an image that represents the worker), which can walk around a room, change rooms, or even wander out into a park. On the walls are screens where you can project Word or Excel files, for example, so not only can you mingle with your colleagues’ avatars but you can look at the same documents with them and get serious work done.

When we signed up for a trial, our avatars were like the ones in the picture, but in the current Qwaq demo video the avatars look like people. The first thing I did was set up an office with a desk. I added a few furnishings. I put a Word document on a screen. Then I called a colleague and invited her to try it with me. After she signed in, I looked around the office and didn’t see her. I called her again. “Where are you?” “In a field,” she said. So I left the office and walked into the park.

As I remember, it was perfect weather, and the field, scattered with trees, stretched out forever. I felt discouraged at first, but in the distance I saw a small pink color. Pressing hard on the forward arrow key, I began to jog toward the pink spot, just to the left of a tree. As I approached, I saw it was, in fact, another avatar, the avatar of my colleague. I found her. And then, as we headed back to the office to create plants, configure our bodies, even jump into the sky so we could look down onto the office, I almost forgot that what we really wanted was a place to store files, share calendars, and hold video conferences, an office that provided the mundane but practical needs of our business.

While I do like gadgets, I don’t consider myself to be a fanatic, and when the Amazon Kindle e-book reader first came out, I was not one of the clamoring fans. I did warm to the idea of the Kindle, though, mostly when I realized I could eat with both hands and read at the same time. I preordered a Kindle and was fortunate enough with the timing to qualify for the second generation Kindle (the Kindle 2).

Here’s another confession: I did very little research on the Kindle before ordering it. I had just heard it was great, that many felt they read more since buying one, that sort of thing. Now, another main reason I bought a Kindle was because I assumed it had a backlight that would allow me to read in bed or in dark rooms. Imagine my surprise when the Kindle arrived, and it had no light! Later I learned this was intentional: the Kindle is supposed to mimic actual paper as closely as possible, plus a backlit screen can cause eye strain. Still, it would be nice to have the option.

My initial impression of the Kindle was, I must admit, a bit more negative than positive. There were some little things I didn’t particularly love about it: the lack of a backlight, the small size of the screen (you can adjust the size of the text, which does help, but it seemed I was turning pages every few seconds), and the inability to adjust the contrast or grayness of the screen (the screen is a wee bit dark for my eyes). It’s a bit of a challenge to buy something sight unseen!

Despite my first reaction, I have grown to appreciate and enjoy my Kindle. I have now read about five books on the device and am fully comfortable with it. I won’t give up actual physical books, but it’s very handy to have the Kindle. The price of $359 is still quite steep, though, and makes it inaccessible to most people. Plus you should really get a case, which will run you an additional $30, but I suppose that is better than dropping the thin sliver of a Kindle and breaking it. If prices come down to around $200, I think we’ll see a lot more Kindle owners.

What do you think about the phenomenon of the Amazon Kindle or of e-book readers in general? Do you have a Kindle? How do you like it?

It began so innocently. I remember thinking, we’ll look on the Internet, check out the reviews, and choose a virtual office. I knew very little about the subject, but really, how complicated could it be?

Enough that I nearly drove one of my colleagues insane. After months of research, talking with people, free trials, and moments of fatigue and near surrender, we realized the perfect virtual office—one that worked without glitches, was easy to set up and organized for our type of work, and had all the features we needed now and for the feature—was found nowhere in the products we tried, remaining instead a mere vision, a feeble hope, on some hazy horizon of the future.

Like finding the perfect cell phone or car, the perfect virtual office existed only in the promotional materials of the products.

There was another complication, too, a form of near torture. New products seemed to appear weekly, and the ones we tried were later updated and improved.

So at Thomas Riggs & Company our quest dimmed from religious fervor to the practicalities of business. And although we never found our sought after paradise, we did learn an important truth: when looking for a virtual office, as important as finding a good product is understanding your present and future business needs. All virtual offices come with a distinct set of features, and the better you understand what your business is going to do with the office, the more likely you will make a good choice.

What we also found, and what you might experience as well, is that the virtual office that most grabs you and sets off your imagination might not be appropriate for your work.

In my next post I’ll talk about the most interesting virtual office we tried. To the despair of those around me, I found myself talking endlessly about the product. So fascinating, so cutting edge, so utterly useless for our work.

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