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One thing on which we can probably all agree is that the traditional publishing model is outdated and needs to be modernized.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

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.

If you’re worried about the fate of the literary magazine in this hectic new era of apps and tweets, you might find solace in Electric Literature, a bold new bimonthly with a plan to capture and convert a broad and highly mobile readership to literary fiction. Founded by Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, who met in the Brooklyn College MFA program, the magazine is available on every possible platform, including paper (printed on demand), Kindle, iPhone, and audiobook. Although many literary publications have begun to offer electronic delivery in some form or another, Electric Literature may be the first to blanket the whole field.

By limiting their paper printing costs to exactly the number of copies ordered, the magazine eliminates a sizeable upfront expense as well as the losses associated with unsold copies. Such economy makes it possible for Electric Literature to act boldly in another way—by paying writers an impressive $1,000 per story. As the editors say in their mission statement, the pioneering model is designed to set a simple but compelling precedent: more access for readers, and fairness for writers.

The magazine seems to be off to a good start, thanks to some innovative marketing ideas and their success in landing such big-name writers as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, and Jim Shepard in their first two issues. With some 4,000 readers and growing, according to the New York Times, it’s generating a much-needed spark of optimism across the literary landscape.

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.

Among the most interesting publishing visionaries today is Richard Nash, formerly editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Nash is one of many people who think traditional publishing is broken and needs to be replaced by the new tools and social habits of the twenty-first century. In Nash’s view publishing has to stop selling books as objects (wholly opposite to the current fetish of the object in literary publishing) and consider a different way to get writers and readers together, especially on the Internet.

Nash outlines that different way in a recent Publishers Weekly article. According to Nash, except for the 500 best-selling books, which will be published on the Hollywood blockbuster model, the future of publishing will be based on niche social communities. Reflecting this vision, Nash is starting a new publishing venture, Cursor, which will contain a “portfolio” of online membership communities to which people can subscribe. The first two will be Red Lemonade, a “pop-lit-alt-cult operation,” and charmQuark, a “sci-fi/fantasy community.” Nash explains these communities in Publishers Weekly.

Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Nash is looking for investors, so we’ll have to wait a while to see Cursor in action.

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.

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.

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.

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?