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Archive for May, 2009:

There’s a lot of talk about the decline of the publishing industry and how people don’t read books anymore, but one country where reading appears to be alive and thriving is Japan. Part of this may be attributed to the popularity of cell phone novels, books written on cell phones. Anyone with a cell phone and a desire to share a story can upload their novels onto various community websites such as Maho no i-rando for readers to download onto their cell phones. Many of these novels are serialized, with chapters or even single sentences uploaded one at a time, and readers can leave comments about how they think the novel should progress.

So why the popularity of cell phone literature in Japan? Talking on cell phones in public areas such as on trains or buses is generally not allowed, and thus text messaging has become the primary activity. Japanese people spend a lot of time on public transportation in frequently crowded conditions, so the compact size and portability of the cell phone makes it an ideal vessel for various media.

Cell phone novels, known as keitai shosetsu in Japanese, have been in Japan for some ten years now, but they didn’t skyrocket into the mainstream until the late 2000s. Most popular with women in their teens and twenties, the unedited novels tend to gravitate toward themes of sex, love, and violence.

Now many of the popular cell phone novels are published in paper form and sold in traditional bookstores. Book distributor Tohan claims that by 2007 cell phone literature commanded a $240 million market in Japan. There is even an annual Japan Keitai Novel Award with cash prizes.

But in trend-obsessed Japan there are reports the cell phone novel has passed its prime—before the phenomenon has even reached the United States.

Another small independent publisher doing exciting things with literature in translation (among other genres) is Brooklyn-based Melville House Press . Founded in 2001 by husband-and-wife team Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, the company has achieved something of a meteoric rise, winning the Association of American Publishers’  2007 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing.

Many things about Melville House are inspiring:

• It’s run by artists (Johnson is a short-story writer, Merians a sculptor) who proudly position themselves outside the so-called “Bermuda Triangle of American intellectualism.”

• The editors maintain a slush pile (”something the big houses don’t even have anymore“), read these submissions, and sometimes even publish them.

• They work out of offices behind revolving bookshelves (!) in this glass-walled storefront at 145 Plymouth St.

                                                                           

 

Melville House is republishing the novels of Hans Fallada (pen name of Rudolph Ditzen), one of the most popular writers of the Weimar Republic, who declined the opportunity to flee Nazi Germany, was incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane, and died of a morphine overdose in 1946—only to fall into deep obscurity. (See Nathan Ihara’s LA Weekly profile for some of the amazing details.)

Upon discovering Fallada’s novels (on a tip from fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg), Johnson felt compelled to get them back into print and also to “right a literary injustice” where the author’s reputation was concerned. (See the recent interview on Charlie Rose).

This year Melville House has published three Fallada novels: Little Man, What Now?; The Drinker; and Every Man Dies Alone. The first two titles were both previously translated and published in the United States in 1933 and 1952, respectively.  It is Every Man Dies Alone—for which Melville House has provided the first English-language translation, by Michael Hoffman—that has created a literary sensation.

Based on an actual Gestapo file, it is the true story of a German couple’s doomed underground postcard campaign against the Nazis. Fallada wrote it in just 24 days and died before it was published. A thriller and a love story about regular people speaking truth to power: we need more stories—and publishers—like this.

In George Orwell’s 1984 the two-way “telescreen” displays propaganda in everyone’s home and keeps tabs on what people are doing. It’s a disturbing presence intent on control. At the time of publication, in 1949, the telescreen was merely an imaginary tool of totalitarianism. Today we might shrug and say, “a monitor and a webcam.”

In a virtual office, where employees work in separate locations, “presence” can be more beneficent and comforting. Instead of working alone and having no idea if our colleagues are there, we can look at a program—Skype, Office Communicator, or something built into a larger application, such as Groove—to see if someone is at work. We can IM our coworkers, call them, or have a video conference, all from the same presence application. I have been working within a system of presence for some time now, and though I work alone most of the time, I no longer feel quite so alone.

Speaking of Europa and their big hit The Elegance of the Hedgehog . . . It’s interesting to compare how a book’s cover design varies from country to country. For instance, here are, from left to right, the U.S., U.K. hardcover, and French editions:

 

     

 

I was used to seeing the U.S. version (published by Europa), so the more staid U.K. cover (published by Gallic Books) surprised me. I like it — it’s fitting that the wrought-iron design evokes the lobby of an older, upscale building, because the book’s about a girl’s friendship with a concierge. But it’s not super-obvious at first — it could just seem like an abstract design. And the French cover couldn’t get any more French than this. (Full disclosure: I’ve been blogging about French things, and I’m a bit of a francophile, but I don’t speak French!) It’s the classic off-white cover that in France signifies Literature With A Capital “L.” Indeed, it’s part of Gallimard’s venerable Collection Blanche, founded 98 years ago. Francois Luong gave an insightful analysis of the French book aesthetic on his blog last year–check it out. Merci, Francois! 

While I’m at it, here are the Spanish and Japanese editions. Amazon.com thinks that the Spanish translates to English as “The Elegance of the Sprocket Wheel.”

 

   

Imagine you work for a company where every employee is in a different location. You finally decide e-mail and phone calls aren’t enough to function as a team, and you choose a virtual office on the Internet. Now everyone shares the same file directories, calendars, and tasks lists. Things suddenly seem more connected and efficient. You’re happy.

Then one day your Internet connection is out of service, and you can’t connect to the virtual office. In fact, because all your company’s files are there, you can’t work. It’s as if the office lock has been changed, and you don’t have the key.

Or say you’re on a plane from New York to San Diego. It’s a long flight. You get your laptop out and start to work. This is great, you think. Now you won’t have to do that report tomorrow. But then it begins to sink in: you need a file that’s in the virtual office but not on your computer.

If you were a Groover, this would never happen. You would be using Microsoft’s simplest virtual office, Groove, which works on a different technology than most other Internet collaborative tools. Instead of connecting to a website, you install the Groove software, with its file directories, calendars, and discussion lists. You can make separate Groove workspaces for each project and share the workspaces with whomever you want. As long as you’re on the Internet, any change that you make in your version of Groove is instantly made on the computers of your colleagues (or the next time they’re online). You might be in India, but the moment you drop a file in a directory, it’s on the computer of your colleague in New York. When you disconnect from the Internet, all the files are still on your computer. An important feature is “presence,” meaning you always know if someone else is connected to the workspace, and you can send an instant message to the person through Groove.

If Groove’s strengths are its simplicity, offline access, and low cost (once you buy the software, there are no more fees), what are its drawbacks? At least for now, Groove can be installed only on a PC. If you use a Mac, you can’t be a Groover. Another is the inability to create a common calendar for all your workspaces, though a third-party vendor, GrooveIt!, sells a solution to this problem. Finally, Groove’s simplicity is matched by its small number of features.

Overall, Groove, included in some Microsoft Office suites, is a great product for simple needs. We’ve used it in the past. But if you need more features or have a lot of people on your team, you might look elsewhere.

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