People seem to have very strong feelings about digital media. It seems every day I read articles embracing digital media and articles dismissing it. And even within the differing camps there is discord—Kindle vs. iPad vs. whatever the e-readers from Sony and Barnes & Noble are called. Putting aside the nuts and bolts of publishing costs, I just don’t understand what the big deal is. If you want to read books on paper, then read books on paper. If you want to read ebooks, go right ahead. Can’t we all just get along?

One thing on which we can probably all agree is that the traditional publishing model is outdated and needs to be modernized. So, whichever tribe you belong to, you might find some humor in this tongue-in-cheek article from The Atlantic.

Tim Parks, who blogs for the New York Review of Books, had an interesting post recently about the pressure that writers (particularly non-American writers) feel to reach an international audience and the way this is affecting what and how they write:

There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon . . . [M]ore and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

Parks goes on to describe how this pressure has increased with the advent of electronic submissions, which enable an author to send a new work simultaneously to publishers all over the world, such that international rights may even be purchased before the writer has found a publisher in his or her own country:

An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world . . . This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

The disturbing side effect of this global market consciousness, Parks suggests, is that authors may be inclined to tailor their work for ease of translation and “remove obstacles to international comprehension,” particularly by keeping the language simple:

Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader . . . What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.

It will be unfortunate if the proliferation of literature in translation can only happen through its homogenization.

Written in the aftermath of the 2005 riots in the Paris suburbs and published by La Fabrique in 2007, L’insurrection qui vient was denounced by the French government as a terrorist manual. The text first gained significant attention in 2008, following the arrest of its alleged authors, a group of youths now known as the Tarnac 9, on charges of sabotaging French train lines.

The English translation was published last year in the United States by Semiotext(e), a leftist California press known for publishing such household names in French cultural theory as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Beaudrillard. The Semiotext(e) edition had an initial print run of only 3,000 copies. Incidentally, too, the text is available for free online in both French and English. And yet the book is now in its sixth printing, and M.I.T. Press, its distributor, reports that it can barely keep enough copies in stock.

How has this fringe book become such a hot item? Some initial U.S. publicity for the book was generated by a guerrilla-style reading event in New York last June. But the real force behind sales appears to be the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who launched a seven-minute diatribe against the book last July, which concluded with the inadvertent plug: “I am not calling for a ban on this book,” Beck explained. “It’s important that you read this book, [so] you know [what is coming,] and be ready when it does.” Recently Beck devoted an entire segment to the book, calling it “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.” A Publishers Weekly article cites MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner as saying that the book experiences a spike in sales every time Beck mentions it.

Ironically, while Michael Moore mentioned the book as his most recent read in an August 2009 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, his own “endorsement” had no such effect.

Inundated with a never-ending stream of tech news, it’s easy to confuse apples and oranges, so here’s a simple thing to keep in mind. The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader. The iPad is a multipurpose tablet that can be used for many things, including reading.

In fact, the iPad doesn’t come with an e-reader app. If you want to read a book on it, you will have to download Apple’s iBooks app from its App Store. It will be interesting to see how many people will never bother to download the iBooks app and how many people will never use the iPad for book reading. It’s worth remembering this comment about the Kindle from Steve Jobs in the New York Times.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

It’s not that the iPad won’t be a serious threat to the Kindle and its competitors, such as Sony. It likely will. But the iPad represents a much different sensibility. If the iPad offers a sensual, color-seducing, multitasking heaven for the gadget lover, the Kindle reproduces something humbler. Its E-Ink screen tries to be as much like paper as possible, and as with a paper book, the hope is that you will become absorbed in the text, in the story, that you will, in the magic of reading, get lost in your mind’s imagination of the words.

Without worrying about e-mails or Facebook and Twitter updates, reading on a Kindle or reading a paper book is, by contrast, an intimate, quiet experience.

My own guess is that, even if most people opt for the colorful multitasker, there will still be a market for the intimate and quiet. And one of the most intriguing of the intimate, quiet e-book readers soon to come is the Orizon, made by the French company Bookeen. Its screen, though monochrome and paperlike, is easily guided by the finger, and according to CNET, it doesn’t have the problems with glare plaguing the Sony Reader touch screens. Here is a video of the Orizon at the 2010 International CES.

Two other distinguishing traits of the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and the Orizon are the technology of their displays, illuminated by the ambient light in the room (meaning no bright light shining in your face and perhaps less eye strain), and the resulting low power consumption (providing exceptionally long battery life and a simple way to help the environment). A color version of this type of low-energy, ambient-light screen, Mirasol (made by Qualcomm), will appear in e-readers later this year (important for books with color illustrations). Here is a video demo.

Over the past six months or so, I’ve read a number of e-books on my iPod Touch, trying out Stanza, Kindle for iPhone, and eReader. At this point the various annoyances (text that’s laid out with big distracting spaces between words, typos, boring covers, wading through the copyright info—and sometimes the “about the author” cover text—to get to the first pages of the book itself) are starting to outweigh the convenience of acquiring a new book immediately, portability, and reading in the dark. And the novelty of playing with a new toy has worn off for me.

So I’ve set aside the latest e-book I was reading, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s story collection There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, in favor of some paperbacks I received for Christmas. Not because I wasn’t enjoying the book itself, but because of the less-than-pleasant reading experience. I downloaded it for Kindle for iPhone, and there are no text settings I can adjust to improve the readability. You can choose the text size and color, but that doesn’t change the biggest problem: when the text is justified on both sides, there are big gaps between words. At least with eReader, you can set the text to justify only on the left, which eliminates that problem. eReader also gives you the option to change the font, margins, and line spacing. 

Plus, I missed out on the nice cover of the book, yet only saved 21 cents (my e-book version just uses the title page):

But I really want to love reading e-books! So I’m glad to see publishing professionals calling for higher standards of quality.  The Casual Optimist provides a helpful overview of the dialogue here. Liza Daly’s presentation “Getting Past ‘Good Enough’ Books” really resonates with my own experience as a somewhat frustrated reader of e-books.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy; image by guillaumepaumier via Flickr

Imagine the plight of the French. They want to protect their language and culture. They have what many consider to be one of the most beautiful languages, and their literary history is rich. From Molière to Flaubert to Sartre, the French have given much to the world.

Unfortunately for those who think literature is more than mere Internet “content” to attract advertising dollars, the times are changing quickly. Google is in the process of digitizing every book it can (admittedly to the great benefit of people who don’t have the resources otherwise to obtain certain texts), and soon Google and other American companies, such as Amazon and Apple, might dictate the publishing terms of books both old and new worldwide.

Faced with the possibility of losing control of its literary heritage, the French are mulling over possibilities. Even the conservative French president Nicolas Sarkozy—who has been called “Sarko l’Américain” for his pro-American sentiments—is concerned. He recently said of Google, “We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is.” He said France would finance its own book digitization program.

Amazon is also causing concern in France. Amazon has already battled France over the country’s prix unique du livre, which allows publishers, not booksellers, to set the price of a book. Because of this law, Amazon sells books for the same price as a small bookstore in Paris. Now five of France’s largest booksellers, including Fnac and Virgin, have proposed a nationalized ebook “hub.” There French publishers and booksellers would work together to sell ebooks online at a price determined by the publishers, preventing Amazon and other sites from competing with lower prices.

Guillaume Decitre, CEO of the French bookseller Decitre, said, “If we don’t manage to do this, what’s going to happen? We will find ourselves in front of a platform, or hub, already made by a private company . . . whether Amazon, Google or Apple.” In order to establish a nationalized ebook platform, the booksellers would have to persuade not only the French government but also French publishers, who don’t necessarily have the same interests. In fact, French publishers are thinking about creating their own single ebook platform without the booksellers.

Americans are often mystified by the French approach to politics, and many love to mock it. But if we are entering what comes to be called the Chinese century, it will be interesting to see how Americans react to their own declining empire, their own experience of being a small part of an economic world, this time dominated by Asia.

Recently on a flight from the United States to Europe, I read a book by Paulo Coelho, worked on my computer, glanced at a magazine article about Tiger Woods, listened to Bach and Francis Cabrel on my smartphone, read the paper, and watched part of The Proposal. What’s strange is that, while flying thousands of feet off the ground in a metal tube, it’s normal to have so much “content,” so much power to satisfy our wishes and needs.

And more is coming. Airlines have started offering in-flight Wi-Fi, and someday soon we might be able to make cell calls from the sky.

KLM is now considering one more way to distract passengers: e-readers containing books, magazines, and newspapers. According to KLM, which provides service to numerous countries, passengers would be able to choose material in their own language. The idea emerged from a contest sponsored by KLM, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, and the Dutch social networking site Hyves.

But before dismissing the idea as a gimmick or merely ho-hum, take a look at this video of an electronic magazine of the future, the kind of magazine airlines might one day provide their passengers. Instead of functioning merely as receptacle of articles, this electronic reader, conceived by Swiss media company Bonnier, tries to mimic the pleasure offered by the magazine in its current paper form: the surprise and beauty experienced as we turn the page.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Mirasol Glass Art

In the midst of a revolution, when changes roll over the present with rapidity and disregard, it’s hard to see far into the future. In fact, at best you might be able to catalog various abstract possibilities to come, much like guessing the end of a novel when you’re still on page 20.

Then again, sometimes you see something, and you know you’ve glimpsed the inevitable. That happened to me yesterday.

E-readers are about to change so dramatically that the present Kindle is going to seem like an Etch A Sketch. What makes an e-reader so different from a computer screen is its screen surface.

With no backlighting and an appearance almost like paper, the e-reader screen is easy on the eyes. It’s like reading a paper book. Almost. But at today’s technology, it’s also slow, clumsy, and one dimensional. Like a book, you might say, but being accustomed to the mesmerizing tricks of computers and the Internet and judging by the widespread fetish of the iPhone, people are going to want more.

They’re going to get a lot more, probably by the fall of 2010.

Take a look at this short video below of the new Mirasol screen, made by Qualcomm, which, like the E-Ink technology of the Kindle, is not backlit, meaning the screen is illuminated by ambient light in a room or, if you’re outside, by the sun. Like the Kindle, it is easy on the eyes, it uses very little energy, and can produce a paperlike image for ebooks. But it’s also extremely fast and can stream video in rich color like your computer or an iPhone. It’s stunning.

The screen is likely to be used not only on e-readers but also on cell phones, which should dramatically increase their battery life.

Although another company might beat Qualcomm with a different technology, Mirasol or something similar is soon going to provide all the benefits of the present e-reader while transforming it into a multifunctional device for the Internet, music, videos, and all the things of the future we haven’t yet imagined.

What is the biggest challenge for publishers and bookstores today? The simple answer, of course, is that people are buying fewer books, and when they do buy books, it’s increasingly online. But it’s not as if people are reading less. They might, in fact, be reading more, except now they have a new option: free content in the ever expanding virtual world of the Internet.

I sometimes think of this as an American phenomenon. In the United States attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and people seem more interested in reading blogs or watching strangers lip sync on YouTube than doing something as sedate and tedious as reading a novel. But I was discouraged to learn recently that in France, too, book buying is on the decline.

This week in Nice I found a small book, Lettres à mon libraire (Letters to My Bookseller), that helped reassure me that the world has not completely abandoned the idea of books and the stores that nurture and sell them. For the book forty-five French writers wrote brief letters, verging on love letters at times, to bookstores and booksellers. In the preface François Busnel (a well-known editor and host of a literary television program in France) begins by arguing something seemingly antiquated but at the same time intuitively true for those who grew up in the nondigital world. “Soyons honnêtes: il n’y a pas de livre sans librairie, pas d’écrivain sans libraire” (“Let’s be honest: there is no book without a bookstore, no writer without a bookseller”). He then goes on to pin the problem of bookselling today on capitalism’s commodification of art.

Literature [is] the most useless of activities. That is what we hear every day . . . in this overloaded century, which made speed its supreme value and superficiality its guardian angel, which in metaphysical discourse asked the question “What is this for?” and insisted on profitability as the answer to everything, it is a good sign, I’ve said, that something resists the terrible temptation to declare itself “useful.” Beauty is useless, as poets and philosophers all affirm.

It is in this spirit that bookstores have more than commercial value that novelist Michèle Lesbre, one of the forty-five authors, writes,

Dear bookseller of my youth. I learned that you died several months ago. I couldn’t believe the bad news. Your tiny bookstore, at the top of rue des Gras and under the shadow of the cathedral, in Clermont-Ferrand, was so long the only real sanctuary for those that thought literature could save the world, one day.

True, these passages are nostalgic and in themselves of little effect, as is much of the commentary these days lamenting the decline of reading and wearily pushing against the upcoming digital revolution in book publishing. But if it’s any consolation, books and bookstores are still valued by a lot of people, and in the worst case, when everyone has a Kindle or an Apple Tablet for reading, you’ll probably still be able to find paper books. They’ll be right next to the vinyl record section.

Some big-name publishers are banking on digital publishing. Jane Friedman, who has worked in the publishing industry for some 40 years, most recently as president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, now has a new company, Open Road Integrated Media, that will concentrate on epublishing. Friedman’s cofounder is award-winning movie producer Jeffrey Sharp. Not only will Open Road digitally publish new titles but it will also reissue in ebook format backlist titles from prominent authors, including Joseph Heller, Pat Conroy, and William Styron.

Open Road plans to release and market nearly 1,000 titles its first year of operation. These will include new books and backlist titles. The company will also create videos to support the titles; documentaries that introduce authors and their works will be offered.

The epublication of backlist titles will be supported by aggressive online marketing campaigns. With the traditional publishing model, republication of older titles was done more as a matter of course, with very little marketing. Open Road plans to market the reissued titles using social networking sites and other online channels, such as blogs and Twitter.

For the full story on Open Road, see this article in the New York Times.

I discovered recently, however, that Feedbooks (one of the 13 collections offered on Stanza) generally chooses more attractive covers for their public-domain books. Below on the right is the cover that Feedbooks uses for the same work. Much easier on the eyes, in my opinion. I think it’s the cover for the first American edition, but I’m not positive.

A little more browsing and comparing confirmed my suspicion: someone there is paying attention! Here are a few typical book covers that other ebook publishers use for public-domain works:

You’ve got your generic templates, random stock photography, and the cover to any old edition that’s available. It gets the job done. 

But Feedbooks is clearly having more FUN picking the covers, and as a reader who’s eager to use this technology, I appreciate that. The authors may be dead, but that doesn’t mean their books have to look dead! Check out some examples:

And notice, too, how the Feedbooks versions all provide publication years and summaries, which is really useful when you’re browsing for something to download.

Still, there is so much talk today of the upcoming Apple Tablet, which, according to rumors, is an oversized Ipod Touch that could be used for many things, including ebooks. Compared with the Kindle, it will be beautiful, seducing buyers with its bright, colorful, illuminated screen.

Image by Fire_Eyes via Flickr

Unfortunately I’ve talked to my eyes about it, and they have given me a firm response: no, not in this lifetime, not if I don’t want to go blind.

I thought this was the end of the subject, but then I saw this video on Gizmodo of Microsoft’s rumored Courier, a two-paneled tablet that looks like a true electronic book of the future. It looks a little like the upcoming two-paneled Ausus backlit reader but is much more sophisticated.

No one knows for sure if Microsoft is coming out with this product and whether it will read ebooks, but if it did, I would have a hard time resisting the urge to buy one.

If I could get something like this in the nonilluminating E-ink of the Kindle and Sony Reader, I would be totally sold on ebooks.

Every day it seems another independent bookseller goes out of business. You can blame the economy, Amazon.com, the Internet, or maybe your neighbor, but the facts remain—stores are closing, and people aren’t buying as many books as they used to.

Some booksellers, however, are putting up a fight. Village Books, an independent bookseller in Bellingham, Washington, has embraced technology and plans to offer customers high-tech options in addition to traditional paper books. The store has partnered with Symtio to provide audiobooks and ebooks. Customers will purchase a book in the form of a product card at the store; the card then allows them to download the book wherever they have an Internet connection.

Village Books will also be home to an Espresso Book Machine. The EBM is a print-on-demand book-making machine. Not only can customers purchase, print, and bind out-of-print books but they can also create self-published books. Village Books is banking on the belief that there will be demand for out-of-print local books. There are only a handful of EBMs in retail stores across the nation.

Wednesday night I had nothing better to do than to eat a light dinner—Gouda with cumin, mâche with tomato—and to read a short book I just bought, Insoupçonnable (Beyond Suspicion) by Tanguy Viel, a thriller about family deceit in the south of France. But before doing that, it seemed like a good idea to shut off my illuminating little seducer.

That’s when I saw the news, a bleak tweet stuffed in its 140-character jacket.

 QuartetPress  I truly hate being the bearer of bad news, but it has to be announced: Quartet Press has disbanded. http://bit.ly/17zUsS_about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

How can I explain my reaction? It was something like a heavy object and a thud. And suddenly gone were all thoughts of family intrigue in the south of France. I had a real death to consider.

There was, however, one problem.

I didn’t know anyone personally at Quartet Press. I just thought I did, sort of, in an Internet way. Quartet Press was an ebook publisher recently started with great fanfare and confidence, its little Windows-like flag flying bravely into the new world of publishing. But it didn’t last long enough to publish a single book.

So why did I care?

Quartet Press was to publish romance novels, a project far from our own. They were going to focus on ebooks, while we will be offering both paper and electronic options. But I admired the enthusiasm of its site, its clear desire to do something new, its courage. And, I guess, in the mysterious way the Internet, or a book, makes you believe in what you can’t see, I was seduced by the drama of another new publisher.

Only yesterday morning did I learn the cause of death: higher than expected editorial and technological costs. Kat Meyer, one of the quartet heading the press, said, “The financial risk was increased beyond what our financial backer was able to accept, and the only options we had were to close or to regroup and go forward without financing,”

So adieu, Quartet Press, onetime maker of digitized, illuminated colors on my screen. I’ll miss you, whoever you were.

I have long been a fan of David Byrne. Not only do I consider him to be a genius artist and musician but he also seems to be a thoughtful and keen observer. I was thus quite curious when I discovered he tried out the Amazon Kindle DX and blogged about his experiences.

It appears my assessment of Byrne as “thoughtful” may have been correct, as he goes into a lot of detail about features on the Kindle DX he liked and didn’t like so much. There are no extremes, either; he didn’t think the Kindle DX was the most incredible invention ever, and he didn’t think it was a piece of garbage. Byrne also seems to know quite a bit about other ereaders on the market, and he comments with authority about the available formats.

All in all, Byrne enjoyed using the Kindle DX. Things he didn’t particularly care for, such as the absence of a backlight or its inability to display newspaper or magazine photos well, were not deal breakers. In fact, he offered positive spins on these points: the sacrifice of a backlight means you get an impressive battery life, and if you load your Kindle DX primarily with text, who cares if the graphics don’t look red hot?

Byrne also imagines how the future of publishing will change as ereaders become more commonplace. For the Kindle DX, which offers a larger screen than the regular Kindle and is designed to accommodate textbooks, Byrne muses, “If those textbooks can be sold as weightless $10 downloads the students and their parents will cheer, and the chiropractors will cry.” Again, though, Byrne is positive. Though he believes publishers will grumble at the lower prices ebook readers will demand, he says publishers will benefit from the reduction in distribution costs.

Here are a few facts to keep in mind.

According to Bowker, in 2008 ebooks represented only 0.6 percent of all books sold in the United States. The majority of buyers were men, and more than half were between the ages of 18 and 34. This year ebook sales will still be less than 2 percent of the U.S. book market.

Here’s something else to ponder.

Most people prefer paper. According to a recent survey, only 37 percent of Americans are interested in buying an ereader. Here in France I’m often at the beach and see one person after another stetched out in the sun reading a paperback. Not an ereader in sight.

Yes, ebooks are likely a big part of publishing’s future, but for now dead-tree books, as some people disparagingly call them, are how almost everyone reads novels, biographies, cookbooks, self-help books, and titles in every other publishing category, and that’s not going to change overnight. For many people the battle between Amazon and Sony (and other smaller manufacturers) is taking place on some sparsely populated island of technogeeks.

Not to be insulting. I’m about to buy an ereader myself, and I’ve already picked out the first book I want to read on it (L’élégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery, published by Les Editions Gallimard; in the United States The Elegance of a Hedgehog published by Europe Editions). But when I think of ebooks, I’m often reminded of this video, the funniest in my opinion of the mock battles produced by Green Apple Books.

Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices.

He also imagines degraded moments of nostalgia.

Reading will forfeit the tactile dimension where memories insinuate themselves, reminding us of where and when D. H. Lawrence entered our lives that meaningful summer. “Darling, remember when we downloaded Sons and Lovers in Napa Valley?” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Wolcott seems concerned that, by using an e-reader, we won’t be able to show strangers on a train or in a coffee shop that we’re reading Nietzsche and not Danielle Steel. Or vice versa.

But not everyone wants to use books for creating an identity. Or at least not the books they’re actually reading. Some people prefer the anonymity of the Kindle. And for those wanting to hide certain embarrassing titles from people snooping on their Kindle, here’s a tip from CNET.

So far there have been three rounds. In the first the book and the Kindle test their mettle in the used-book-selling category. The second round explores the experience of purchasing a book. In the third the book and the Kindle go head-to-head in terms of borrowing or sharing a book. Spoiler alert: so far the book is in the lead 3-0. Care to place any bets on the final outcome?

So pop some popcorn and take a look at these clever and humorous webisodes. I can’t wait to see the final score!

The Book vs. the Kindle: Round 2

The Book vs. the Kindle: Round 3

But are there other options? Well, yes. Here are a few that will be coming out soon.

Bebook 2

With both a touch screen like the Sony and a wireless connection like the Kindle, the Bebook 2 is one of the most advanced of the upcoming new readers. It’s produced by Endless Ideas in The Netherlands.

Cybook Opus

The Cybook Opus, made by the French company Bookeen, is one of the most stylish e-readers on the horizon. It also has an accelerometer.

Plastic Logic

If you want a lightweight reader with an 8 1/2 x 11 screen, this is it. Plastic Logic, a company founded in Cambridge, England, recently teamed up with Barnes & Noble, so there will be hundreds of thousands of books to download. Plastic Logic also makes flexible screens. One day you might be able to buy a reader that rolls up.

Editis Ebook

Okay, this one is a fantasy by Editis, a French publisher. But watch this short French film until at least 1:04, when the woman pulls out her magic orange reader. Thanks to the HarperStudio blog, where I first saw the film.