… or, How I’ve almost helped the publishing industry.

Regular readers of this site know that I enjoy books. From that information, it should be clear that I’ve been very concerned about the recent deluge of bad news emanating from the publishing industry. I feel especially bad when I read most book-blogs these days: the gentle entreaties to get out there and buy a whole mess of books if I can always makes me feel as though I am as capable of providing support as a damp washcloth.

All of the unresolved, free-floating, penitential anxiety I have — a legacy of my fundamentalist upbringing — seems to have coalesced around this subject. So, consider this a confession of sorts; of course, since the particular strain of faith-based shame I was brought up under originates from the New England, puritan branch, I know I’m damned no matter what I do. Nevertheless, here are all the ways I came this close to helping out the book industry in 2008.

- Good: I bought a lot of books. Bad: Most were used books:
Well, what do you expect from a guy who publishes an (admittedly irregular) series called the "100 Penny Review". What can I say? The local friends of the library continues to have these really huge book sales on a regular basis, which I can’t seem to avoid. Twenty-five cent paperbacks are my kryptonite. Of course, none of those twenty-five cents actually goes to the authors whose books I’m buying; no, the library gets the lot! Which brings us to…

- Good: I read a lot. Bad: I borrow books a lot:
While I have as acquisitive nature as the next guy, I’m not above borrowing books from the library. (I also borrow movies and CD’s, but that’s another blog post.) Again, I’m not directly contributing to an author’s income, nor the bottom line of any big publisher — and yet, I’m getting the benefit of their products. And, as it turns out, libraries aren’t even profit-generating capitalist ventures, but rather a shared public resource. So, I might even be some sort of communist, too.

- Good: I finished a lot of books this year. Bad: I did not burn them:
Here’s a place where I’ve accumulated a large quantity of guilt, based on the fact that I’ve yet to come up with a satisfactory resolution to one of the greatest ethical questions of our age: what does one do with books that one is finished with?

Okay, I know what the ethical answer is, of course. I just can’t bring myself to follow through with it. I treat my books gently — even the ones I know I’ll never re-read or refer to again — so I always wind up with mint condition books that I have no further use for. The problem is that any functioning book that’s not currently on a shelf in a bookstore is a dangerous object. I’ve been handing them off to friends and co-workers, donating them to the library, thereby depriving he publishing industry of valuable income. Every book given is a book that will not be purchased.

Obviously, the only ethical choice here is to burn used books. This would guarantee that any of the new books I’ve purchased will have had one and only one reader, which is how books are meant to be used. If you want to read a copy of William Gibson’s Spook Country, by god, you won’t be getting it from me.

Except that I’m not really set up for book-burnings. They generate a lot of smoke and ash, and I’m not equipped to deal with all that. It seems to me that this should be a service provided by the community. That way, we can all come together to help the publishing industry in a safe, fire-code appropriate way. Actually, we could probably just stand in a circle and heave books on to the smoldering remains of our book-business-destroying local libraries. That ought to do it.

I’ve been keeping track of all of the new books I’ve read over the past couple of years, but I haven’t done much with it. There was an incomplete series of posts from a couple of years ago, but nothing ever came of it. However, I’m going to try to kick in to the festivies by doing a single post that lists the things I read for the first time in 2008, plus a few comments. This could be a little long, so I’ll put everything after the first five behind the jump.

1. Welcome to the N.H.K., by Tatsuhiko Takimoto:

I was drawn to this book because it’s about the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan, which I’d heard about back in 1997 or 1998. (See also William Gibson’s Idoru, which briefly references the topic.) Overall, not the best book in the world, and a lot of the subject matter made me kind of uncomfortable. Still, it’s short, and written by a self-professed hikikomori, so there’s some insight into the whole deal, I suppose.

2. Shultz and Peanuts: A Biography, by David Michaelis:

Never get too close to your heroes, they say. And yet I keep reading biographies. I guess I understand why some elements of the Shultz family were not too happy about this book, because in some ways it makes Charles Shultz seem like an entitled, emotionally manipulative jerk. Then again, we’ve got 40 years of Peanuts cartoons, which sort of balances out.

3. The World According to Garp, by John Irving:

Nope, I never saw the movie. I also haven’t read much critical analysis of this book, either, except to say that I know there’s something deep going on with all its dismissal of autobiographical novels, coupled with the fact that it’s a writer writing about a writer. Hey, it’s a novel that takes place largely in the northeast, wherein adultery is a key plot element: well that’s unique! No, really, it’s actually an okay book.

4. Doctor Who & The Loch Ness Monster, by Terrence Dicks:

Yes, I’m a Doctor Who fan. But, in spite of their long and storied history (I don’t have time to get into it, but you can find more information online), I’ve only ever read one of the famous novels put out by the Target group in the UK. I stumbled over this one in a used book store, and decided to see what the fuss was about. Yeah, they’re okay, but without the mist of nostalgia, there’s not much point for most readers.

5. Our Gang, by Philip Roth:

Previously Reviewed.

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent New Year’s Eve catching up with a tremendous backlog of RSS feeds, del.icio.us links, and analog-style newspaper and magazine articles. I have, therefore, seen 2008 reviewed so many times that it sparked a burning desire to review the year gone by - except of course, it’s too late now. Desperate to look back at some sort of year gone by, I turned to the year that it currently is. Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

The first morning of 2009:

I had gone to be slightly early, thus missing out on the televised festivities. The led to two very positive aspects of the following morning: Number one, I was not hung-over, and number two, I was not killed by a drunk driver. A+!

The first pancakes of 2009:

Deciding to celebrate my excellent morning, and finding $7 in cash and loose change amongst my belongings, I ended up going out for breakfast. The pancakes I purchased were light and fluffy, but also somehow exceedingly dry. I should have known this might be the case when they were delivered to my table accompanied by twice the normal allotment of maple syrup. Still, they weren’t all that bad; at least they were very filling.

First newspaper of 2009:

It was $5.49 for the pancakes ($5.88 after taxes), and I was drinking water, so I had enough left over for a newspaper. It was a rather thin issue, since there was no business section to speak of, due to the holiday. The comics left a lot to be desired - I didn’t laugh once, while reading them. The same could be said about the classified ads. This was a real miss.

First trip to the bathroom of 2009:

The main details of this trip are not important, as my expectations were for an ordinary, workman-like instance. Aside from the absolutely frigid seat, not much to report here. D-.

First nap of 2009:

At around 4 PM, weary from the day’s exertions, I decided to take a brief nap. However, it wound up stretch until 11 PM, leaving me disoriented and not at all well-rested. Worse still, I found I was unable to go back to sleep, meaning that when I arrived at work the following day at around 7 AM, I was totally wiped out. This nap gets a failing grade, as one would expect.

For the past week or so I have been house-sitting for a friend of mine, who is currently traveling somewhere near the International Date Line. (Happy New Year, Mr. G… the dogs are doing well, by the way.) At about 3:45 am, this morning, I was awakened by the sound of the house’s electrical vampires suddenly shutting down with a series of grunts and clicks.

Thus I found myself in total darkness, in a strange place, with no idea where the matches, flashlights, or candles could be found. I don’t believe in omens, but damn — I am desperately hoping that this is no foreshock of future events. That darkened, unfamiliar house? That mysterious, caliginous dwelling? That better not be an attempt a foreshadowing, 2009.

I managed to dress myself (and feed the puppies) by light of a cell phone. Then I made my way back home through the cubic mile of cotton (to borrow a phrase from the great Larry Niven). Winding my way through darkened streets, made unfamiliar by darkness and fog, I felt very much as though I had stumbled out of one metaphorical frying-pan into a whole other metaphorical fire. This also better not be a sign of things to come, 2009.

Space and time might be entirely different dimensions, but my morning of obscured vision has given me a distinct appreciation of just how much I take the obscurity of the future for granted. Even as I write this, I know that I have no way of knowing what the next second — or the next year — will bring, in just the same way that I have no clue what that object with the sharp corners that I stepped on was when I got out of bed, this morning.

Some say that our inability to see into the future is a blessing; I think it’s over-rated. I think that if we could perceive the future (assuming that there’s one to perceive), we’d develop a philosophical attitude towards the universe. Of course, I’ve only got Slaughterhouse 5 as a guidepost, here. So it goes.

2008 was a good-yet-terrible year. We elected a new president — yay, we’re powerful! But we’ve also been slammed by an economic downturn that’s bad and may yet become even worse — boo, there’s nothing us ordinary folk can do about it! Except that it may have influenced our choice of president — so, huh? It’s complicated.

I don’t expect you to be much different, 2009. Why bother coming at all? Why slide inexorably across the face of the world, leaving new calendars in your wake? Social construct that you are, you’re not even unique.

But dammit, 2009, we need you. Human lives are often a prolonged cycle of beginnings — we start, and we start, and then we start again. If we’re going to continue to hope in the face of overwhelming evidence that we’ve no reason to, we need to be able to draw a line, to consign the past to the past. We need to sweep the dishes off the table in a grand gesture of little practical worth, just to make a point. We convulse ourselves, making list upon list, as if to say, "This is what we shall remember. And the rest can go jump into a lake." Nonsensical as it may seem, we’re packing our bags for the future.

So, 2009, I ask the same thing of you that I ask of every year: please do all you can to be as few people’s worst year ever as possible.

Happy New Year.

The era of big trade shows seems to be over. One of the first big indicators of this was the announcement of the scaling-down of the big E3 show, back in 2006. E3, of course, is a name familiar to the hard-core gaming community. Media-wise, it was something like a video game industry Super Bowl — everyone looked forward to it as a premier event.

For all its flashy hideousness however, it was still just a trade show. And, in spite of the ensuing laments, it’s probably best that E3 was allowed to shrink. Frankly, the whole thing was numbing; after dozens of announcements of games that weren’t due to be released for another year or more, often getting canceled along the way, who could give a damn?

But things really started looking bad for trade shows in general when Apple announced that it was pulling out of Macworld after January, which was a little like hearing that Santa Claus is planning to disassociate himself from Christmas.

There’s been a lot of talk about how trade shows simply aren’t a cost-effective way to engage with the public anymore. This may be true (I’ve collected at least a thousand bucks worth of t-shirts and other tchotchkes over the years, and I’m sure my meager influence on corporate procurement hasn’t returned the investments of the swag-givers a jot), but can individual events, conference calls, and big-hype press-releases ever match the level of spectacle that the old trade show offers?

Perhaps not. And, perhaps that’s why there seems to be a lot more attention being directed at next year’s CES event than I remember seeing in a long while. Not that CES lacks the kind of pedigree one might expect for a big event. After all, some of the most famous consumer electronics products in history got launched at the show. The Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64 — hell, even the humble VCR — were all had their public debuts at CES. And there seems to be every indication that Windows 7 will be on the menu for next year’s show.

With some media outlets gearing up to cover CES in a big way, it seems that CES is set to come into its own as an premier showcase once again. Because, in the end, the main benefit of trade shows is not simply that they provide a place for vendors and consumers to get together and cut deals; they are also big, bright red bull’s-eyes for media companies that require fodder for hundreds of pages and dozens of hours of soft-news pieces.

Trade shows are easy news. Send a reporter or a camera crew, let them hang around a few hours, snag a couple of media kits, and you’ve got yourself some glitzy filler right there. Events sponsored by a single corporate entity stretch the credibility of all but the most pathetic junket-whore; whereas the multi-vendor trade show still exudes some thin sliver of respectability.

Of course, these things aren’t run for the benefit of media outlets. And who cares if G4 or EGM shows up to cover E3? Their viewers and readers are already going to buy whatever it is the vendors have to sell. Frankly, all the palaver feels a lot like the industry is trying way too hard to attract an already captive audience. In the end, spending all that money just wasn’t worth it.

But don’t expect the trade show to disappear completely. Or, at least, do expect something to take its place. Fan-led conventions seem poised to become the next bastion of event-based marketing. Look at all the attention that Comic-Con has been getting. These are festivals whose primary purpose is to allow fans to come together and celebrate their hobbies, to buy merchandise, and to meet celebrities. Hey, why not try to hock your stuff to them, since they’re going to be there anyway?

It’s more democratic, at least. Most trade shows are open only to industry professionals, which are a valuable audience to be sure; but fan conventions are open to the general public, who are the end-of-the-line consumers for most of this stuff anyway, if we’re talking about entertainment products. It’s a match made in synergistic, marketing heaven. (Man, that actually sounds like a terrible place to be.)

But who cares? See you at PAX!