A while back I posted about vintage manual typewriters and how they have once again become desirable and popular. Well, if you are attracted to the look and feel of the old manual typewriters yet loathe to give up any modern technology, there is a solution for you—the USB Typewriter (TM).

Jack Zylkin modifies and sells vintage typewriters that can be plugged into just about any modern computer via a USB port. He sells these on his etsy site. In addition, you can purchase a D.I.Y. Kit if you already have an old typewriter you’d like to adapt, or you can send Jack your old typewriter and have him complete the conversion for you.

Some of the published titles are already well-known works, such as Natsume Soseki’s Botchan and Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. The selected works cover a number of genres, including mysteries, poetry, short stories, and novels. Upcoming titles (for which, I believe, the publishing rights are still available), include an introduction to contemporary Japanese poetry, fantasy novel The Mandala Way by Masako Bando, historical novel Tokyo Seven Roses by Hisashi Inoue, and literary biography A Thousand Strands of Black Hair by Seiko Tanabe.

Thanks to the very informative Three Percent blog, which focuses on international literature, for clueing me in about JLPP! I’m definitely going to check out some of these books.

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One thing on which we can probably all agree is that the traditional publishing model is outdated and needs to be modernized.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.

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.

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.

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.

Jeff Mayersohn, a veteran of the telecommunications industry who assumed ownership of HBS last year, is committed to keeping the store on the cutting edge of bookselling. As Mayersohn said in a press release, “My vision is to provide our customers with any book ever written, in any format, and have it either in your hands or at your doorstep—the same day.”

Clearly the revolutionary book machine, brainchild of On Demand Books, is a giant step toward this goal. With access to an ever-growing catalog of more than 3.6 million titles (including 2 million in the public domain, thanks to a new partnership between On Demand and Google Books), the machine creates a library-quality, 300-page paperback in about four minutes.

The machine also has the potential to vastly reduce the book industry’s carbon footprint by eliminating the need for shipping and returns between publisher and bookseller—a benefit not lost on HBS, which offers its own bicycle delivery service to Cambridge and the greater Boston area.

Ah but “The Book Machine” seemed awfully sterile for a robot that promises to perform such marvelous feats and endear itself to all. So the staff of HBS launched a community-wide naming contest, avowing their weakness for outrageous puns and obscure literary references. More than 500 entries poured in, ranging, as marketing manager Heather Gain put it, “from absurd to acronym-happy to raunchy to plain hilarious.”

Ultimately it was “Paige M. Gutenborg” who made her debut on 9/29 and proceeded to wow a packed crowd with her capabilities.

Witty runners up included “Moby Click,” “Humpfry Bookart,” “H.A.L.” (for Harvard Automated Library), “The Gutenberger King,” and “Gutenplenty.” “Bartleby” was a strong contender, too, apparently, but who can afford a $75,000 machine that prefers not to?

McSweeney's iPhone app

Leave it to the clever folks at McSweeney’s to find a playful way to make a mark in the e-publishing realm. They made an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch! Small Chair will offer an exclusive weekly selection of McSweeney’s material to subscribers. The content will pull from all divisions of McSweeney’s empire, including the Quarterly, the Believer, Wholphin, and so on, and will include not only stories and articles but also music, video, and art. Subscribers will also receive daily missives from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency as well as news and announcements.

The six-month subscription costs $5.99, which works out to just under a buck a month. That’s quite a bargain, though Gawker has not wasted any time in making fun of McSweeney’s. Gawker announced the new app in a post entitled “Everything Annoying in the Universe in One iPhone App.” Even though I am a fan of McSweeney’s, I have to confess that the Gawker title and associated article made me laugh. It seems there is no love lost between McSweeney’s and Gawker (or at least the author of the Gawker article). The final two sentences of the article sum up the author’s feelings: “How much do we have to pay to make sure no McSweeney’s ever gets on our iPhone? Is There An App For That?”

 Cushing Academy, a prep school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, has decided that its traditional library is way too yesterday. As reported by the Boston Globe, Headmaster James Tracy believes paper books have become antiquated, in the way that scrolls once became obsolete with the advent of the printing press. What’s more, books take up too much space. So the 144-year-old institution is getting rid of its collection of more than 20,000 books, becoming one of the first schools in the nation to convert almost completely to digital media resources. “We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology,” Tracy said.

The Cushing library will be replaced by a $500,000 “learning center” that includes three large flat-screen TVs for projecting Internet-based information ($42,000); laptop-compatible study carrels ($20,000); and 18 electronic readers from Amazon and Sony ($10,000). Learning will also be facilitated by a $50,000 coffee shop (to be built in the spot where that old dinosaur, the reference desk, used to be) featuring a $12,000 espresso machine.

Outcry is not just from bibliophiles. Even many Kindle enthusiasts and other techy types are chagrined by the sweeping nature of the Cushing decision, wondering why the school could not have struck a balance between books and new media.

Notable among those who see the book purge as “a tremendous loss for students” is William Powers, media critic for the National Journal and author of “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal” (a 75-page position paper written in 2006, when Powers was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy).  In it he argues that paper is not just a vessel for content, or an old human habit, but rather a sophisticated technology that fosters a cognitive reading experience not available through electronic media. According to Powers,

There are modes of learning and thinking that at the moment are only available from actual books. There is a kind of deep-dive, meditative reading that’s almost impossible to do on a screen. Without books, students are more likely to do the grazing or quick reading that screens enable, rather than be by themselves with the author’s ideas.

I’m inclined to agree, but then I think you can hear music better on vinyl, too—while you sit on the couch admiring the artwork on the gatefold cover.

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.

The Iowa-born actor came to fame playing Michael Kelso on the FOX sitcom That 70s Show. In 2003 he created a minor media sensation by hooking up with Demi Moore, who had launched her career on the ABC soap General Hospital when Kutcher was only 4. Also in 2003 he became the creator, executive producer, and host of the MTV series, Punk’d, in which hidden cameras catch celebrities at the receiving end of practical jokes.

Now Kutcher, whose Twitter handle is @aplusk, is becoming a star in the tech sector, too. In April of this year (just as Oprah was sending out her first Tweet), Kutcher won a much-publicized race with CNN to become the the first Twitterer with 1 million followers.  For a recap of the whole “feud,” see Kutcher’s 4/17 victory appearance on Larry King Live:

Some criticized Kutcher’s achievement as a little more than a PR stunt and questioned the means by which he’d amassed a million followers. Still, Kutcher seemed earnest about the democratic power of microblogging, telling King,

“We now live in an age in media that a single voice can have as much power and relevance on the Web, that is, as an entire media network.”

Kutcher also emphasized to King that the brilliance of Twitter is that it is not only a “send out” but also a “take in” medium, through which he is having a direct conversation with his fans.

Now approaching the 3 million followers mark, Kutcher highlighted the potential of Twitter’s “take in” feature recently when he sent out a Tweet asking followers to suggest a joke for a scene in his upcoming movie, The Killers. The jokes flooded in, and apparently one of them fit the bill. As reported by Fishbowl LA, Kutcher’s making no promises that the joke will survive the movie’s final cut. (Also, it remained to be seen whether the contributing fan would receive credit, or payment, for the joke.) Still, the incident must have made The Killers’s screenwriter(s), and perhaps writers everywhere, a little uneasy.

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.

The controversial Kindle incident of 7/17, in which a few hundred U.S. Kindle owners discovered that Amazon had mysteriously removed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from their e-book readers, was not just a thundering irony. Although Amazon has explained (it was a copyright infringement issue), apologized, and promised not to do it again, the episode (referred to by Thomas Claburn of Information Week and others as a “virtual book burning”) has generated heated debate about the nature of e-media, who really owns it, and the awesome—some might say scary—powers of its purveyors.

Writing for the Guardian Book Blog, Sam Jordison observed:

As this story has shown, if someone wants to stop you reading something and they have control of the device you read it from, it’s all too easy [ . . . ] It’s been tough to make books disappear in the past because they tend to be scattered so far afield. Now, it seems, words can vanish at the flick of a switch.

Jordison continued:

The question of whether it is safe or wise to blithely hand over so much of one of our most important industries and so many of our treasured freedoms to the gatekeepers of this revolutionary technology is an entirely modern one. The issue that underlies it, however, is one of the very oldest: who will guard the guards?

Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo posed similar questions about the implications of a company’s power, or a court’s mandate, to disable access to (or ban) art, literature, music, or other e-media at its discretion, noting:

Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely [ . . . ] This may sound like an exaggeration; after all, we’ll surely always have file-sharing networks and other online repositories for works that have been decreed illegal. But it seems like small comfort to rely on BitTorrent to save banned art. The anonymous underground movements that have long sustained banned works will be a lot harder to keep up in the world of the Kindle and the iPhone.

Ultimatley, Manjoo said (citing cyber law expert Jonathan Zittrain), the danger lies with the fact that advances in “tethered technology” (e-readers, smart phones, and other devices that we buy and physically possess, but which are subject to remote control by the companies that sell them) are out-pacing the law.

It will be interesting to see how the law catches up. In the meantime, many readers are finding that the question of whether to embrace the Kindle (or any other e-reader) has gotten a lot more philosophical.

When you think of writer Margaret Atwood, do you imagine her to be embracing the latest technological innovations? Well, she is. The award-winning Canadian author of such novels as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, and Oryx and Crake will be plugging her new novel, The Year of the Flood, at book fairs across Canada … virtually. Atwood will appear in the flesh at Toronto’s Word on the Street festival in September 2009. At the same time, she will participate via video conference in two other book events in Vancouver and Halifax.

In addition to “meeting” festival participants and answering questions, Atwood will also be signing books with LongPen, a device Atwood helped invent (!) that enables her to sign books remotely and in real time. Atwood came up with the idea for the LongPen on one of her many long and grueling book tours. She explained to journalist Anthony Barnes in a February 19, 2006 article in The Independent, “As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, gettting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, ‘There must be a better way of doing this.’” The LongPen made its public debut at the London Book Fair in 2006.

We are gearing up to launch ourselves into our publishing venture, and to prepare, we’ve been doing a lot of research. There are many, many opinions about the current state of the publishing industry and the direction in which it is headed. Some will tell you publishing is on the brink of death; others feel there has not been a better time to enter the industry. What is clear is the industry is in flux and affected by changes in the economy and technology.

A somewhat controversial topic, or at least one that generates a lot of opinions, is that of digital books or e-books. Personally I think that as long as there are books to read, it doesn’t matter whether they are on a printed page or in digital format. I like to switch back and forth between digital and printed books, but there are diehards out there who would prefer to avoid e-books.

I don’t know which format author J. A. Konrath prefers for reading, but in a recent blog post he made a strong case for e-books, explaining why and how publishers should produce them. A few points I found particularly interesting and thought provoking:

• Books cost too much: Konrath details how publishers determine the price of a print book and how that model can and should be changed. He argues that publishing companies are basing e-book pricing on traditional print pricing, which is calculated by profit per unit and doesn’t apply to e-books.
• Piracy should be battled not with higher security and restraints but with cheaper prices and greater accessibility: Konrath believes it is a waste of time and money for a publisher to try fight piracy. If books are cheap and easy to access and purchase (in other words, get rid of proprietary formats), Konrath argues, buyers wouldn’t pirate or steal books.
• In the future, authors may no longer need publishers: Self-publishing in a digital world is easier than ever, so authors may opt to do their own legwork and keep all the profits for themselves. Konrath is testing this premise by selling his unpublished works in digital form online, and so far he is getting positive results.

Konrath is the first to admit he could be wrong on many points, but he presents a persuasive and interesting conversation. Konrath may not be able to predict the future, but it’s hard to argue with his opinion that the publishing industry is in for some big changes.