Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

For the last two years, my friend Jennifer Knoch has organized a shadow Canada Reads competition for her blog the Keepin’ It Real Book Club. She gets a smart cadre of her friends and has them defend that year’s crop of Canada Reads picks.

This year it’s no different, with one exception, I’ve been asked to join the panel to take over for Erin Balser, who now works at CBC Books.

You can listen to me defend Terry Fallis’ The Best Laid Plans. We even taped pre-show confessionals in Nic’s closet.

You can go to KIRBC for the rest of the episodes this week. Also, I have a really good looking book club.

——

In other book-related news, I’ve also had the chance to interview the author of two books I thoroughly enjoyed in 2010, Tom Rachman (the Imperfectionists) and Rebecca Skloot (the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks). Both pieces ran in the Post in the last few weeks.

Profile: Tom Rachman

Profile: Rebecca Skloot

Some of the 47 books I read this year

At the start of 2010 I resolved to read one book a week. Well, the year is over and I didn’t quite meet that goal.

I read 41 books in 2010 (Update: I realized that I didn’t add my sprint read of the Scott Pilgrim series to the tally. That would bring it up to 46 47. Close, still no cigar) It’s a pretty respectable number but well short of 52. The problem isn’t the lack of time it’s simply because after a day of reading tweets, blogs, news stories and the odd magazine article the last thing I want to do is read. (more…)

One of the reasons for the popularity of social media app Foursquare is its social gaming aspect. Accruing all those badges, beating out friends and strangers for mayorships is strangely addictive. This New York Times article talks a bit more about that:

While Foursquare has been talked about in corporate boardrooms as the next big thing in social media — it has some 2.5 million users — it has also spawned a more trivial pursuit: a petty and vicious battle over virtual pieces of turf.

Strangers are locked in bitter rivalries. Workplaces have been carved up into virtual battlefields. College campuses have become factionalized. Even some homes have become social media minefields.

Not bad for a feature that was never part of the original concept for Foursquare. Dennis Crowley, a founder, said the idea for becoming a mayor was born from a passing joke made by Chad Stoller, a friend and adviser, about the huge amount of time that Mr. Crowley and his partner, Naveen Selvadurai, were spending in a Greenwich Village cafe, hashing out their Web idea. “You two should be mayor,” Mr. Crowley recalled Mr. Stoller saying, in reference to the cafe. (Foursquare shuns the stuffy “mayoralty.”)

Indeed, Foursquare badges are so popular that the start-up has partnered with some big real-life partners to create badges (The History Channel, Zagats, Discovery). The company also has curtailed creating new badges because they’re apparently inundated with requests.

On Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, annoying as they can be, are also huge. Zynga, the company that created Farmville is valued by some at around $4-billion.

So what does this have to do with reading? While the act of reading is a personal one, what you read is a huge part of the social lives of many readers. Whether it’s keeping up with the latest instalment in a popular series, checking out the latest hipster author or finishing romance novels three at a time, many readers like to share what they’re reading.

E-readers and reading apps could easily add social gaming components easily. We’re not talking about Farmville for the literary set here, but something that could genuinely enhance the reading experience and maybe help spur sales too.

A few examples:

Goal-setting

Earlier this month Foursquare announced a partnership with Runkeeper to distribute fitness badges for running certain distances, meeting goals, etc. This could easily be applied to your reading habits. I set a goal earlier this year to read 52 books this year. Knowing there’s a social badge that exists would’ve been an extra incentive for me to stay on track. Need to read a book by the end of the month for your book club? Develop an app that sets deadlines for reading and rewards you a badge or something similar when you meet your goal. (more…)

Personal note: So my move to a new apartment and a busier than usual summer has meant this blog has gone fallow. Apologies. Well, without further ado, we’re back.

Publishing, unlike some of its other media counterparts (music, film, TV) has a peculiar relationship with obsolescence. For the last 50 years or so technology has helped media by ensuring that every 10 or 15 years or so a technological shift means that people have to re-buy media they already owned.

Bought the Beatles on vinyl great. Wait 15 years and do the same again for 8-track, then cassette then CD… The same goes for the movie industry. Bought that copy of ET for your kids? Well, you’ll have to buy it again now that VCRs are headed to the scrap heap. In 10 years those kids that loved ET will have to buy the film on Blu-Ray or whatever format happens to be kicking around at the moment.

Books have largely been immune to this. Sure, books go out of print pretty quick. I’d say faster than records or films. But once you bought a book it’s yours. You own that book and that ownership is pretty long-lasting. You can find a 600-year-old Shakespeare quarto in readable shape, so that copy of Twilight will probably outlast you, unless you drop it in the tub, leave it on the dock or put it too close to an open flame.

Of course, e-books are going to change this. One of the fears for anyone buying an e-reader is that your books could simply disappear in a few years time when file formats become obsolete.

A few things that could happen:

1. You’ll have repeated purchases. Did you buy Stephen King on your iPad? You’ll want to read him again when that new file format kicks in in 10 or 15 years. What do you do? Buy it again.

2. People will buy physical books. Love an author or the book itself? Buying it means you could have a connection with a real object. Believe me it’ll be easier for an author to sign your real book

3. Publishers will create file formats that deprecate gracefully. If you’ve ever tried opening old computer files you’ll know that file formats go obsolete. How will this work with e-books? I’m not entirely sure. But publishers will have to make sure that their file formats last and can be read down the road. It’s not just for their consumers. It’s for their own sanity as well. Imagine having to convert your entire backlist every five years and make sure the file formats are still compatible?

Hugh McGuire of Book Oven posted this on Twitter a few days ago and I finally got around to writing about it:

The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.

A few of my friends, literary types that they are, totally disagreed. I want to parse this statement a bit because I do agree with it, to a point.

With the success of the Kindle and the iPad, ebooks look like they’re here to stay. Their continued existence doesn’t threaten the existence of the book so much as it is forces us to return to a very basic interpretation of the book.

A book is a physical object, it’s something bound and limited by the covers. It has boundaries and limits. The ebook tries to keep some of these trappings but really they’re fictions. Ebooks need covers and binding the same way that that album you downloaded from iTunes needs liner notes. What you’re getting when you download the ebook version of Moby Dick isn’t Moby Dick the book, it’s Moby Dick the text.

If we’re thinking just about texts then the internet is going to decimate the bookstore and publishing. Heck, it gutted the music industry and has film and TV execs seeing pirates and thieves around every corner, and these are products that are more complex from a bits and bytes perspective. Plain, simple, old words just don’t have a chance.

I think this is what Hugh is getting at with his statement. Of course, it’s easy to see why people get angry about this. People don’t just like books, they love them. I love them too.

Where Hugh and I diverge is that I actually see a very real future for the book. It’s going to come from embracing the physicality of books. Great paper stock, beautiful design, a certain playfulness with the reading experience, all of these are hard, if not impossible, to replicate with your ereaders.

What does this mean for publishers? Don’t skimp on design. Make your books desirable objects. For retailers? Make your stores nicer. I don’t go to your store to get the cheapest price. You’re always going to lose to online retailers on that front. Go boutique. Go niche. Make yourself a real world place that people want to visit. For the reader? Start paying attention to how your book is designed. Admire a nice cover. Appreciate the typography. And, this one can’t be underemphasized, keep buying books.

In five years, more and more ‘books’ might be read online and on ereaders. But you’ll still be buying books, real, solid books printed on paper. They’ll just look a whole lot nicer. Start adjusting now.

Photo from Flickr Commons.

Thanks to pal and author Brian Joseph Davis and Eye Weekly I got my hands on Yann Martel’s much anticipated follow-up to Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil, a few weeks early. I even got to chat about it a bit in Eye’s Pop Fiction Book Club. Part one, part two.

And because that’s not enough reading, a gang of us are tackling Colum McCann’s gorgeous novel Let the Great World Spin over at the Afterword Reading Society.

All this talk of e-books has me thinking about the possible decline of the bookshelf.

Russell Smith a few weeks back wrote about this very topic:

Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.

But of course, the bookshelf isn’t dead yet and there are still some stunning examples of bookshelf as art/decor/inspiration out there.

Design Sponge points us to artist Jane Mount’s gorgeous series of illustrations of people’s ideal bookshelves.

The one below speaks to me current fascination with whales and also has a bunch of books I quite love.

I’m also very fond of this one and

Of course, like Smith argues in his column, what we choose to display (and how we do it) can reveal a lot about ourselves. The New Yorker’s great books blog, the Book Bench, has a regular feature that psychoanalyzes people through their shelves.

Frankly, all this talk of the death of the bookshelf might be a bit premature. If Apartment Therapy can devote countless blog posts to the devilish problem of showing off all your books and refer to them as “the original modular furniture” (how trendy, how moderne) then I think we’ll be stuck with cheap Billy bookcases for a bit longer.

Despite all this talk about its death and decline, the book has a tight grip on our imaginations. Why else would e-book readers simulate the book-reading experience (that page-flip look and noise, book covers, etc.)? The book has talismanic qualities built by centuries of cultural history.

New York Times columnist Rob Walker, he writes the insightful Consumed column, is looking at the idea of the book. It’s a playful survey on how artisans, craft-makers and others play with the book form.

There are ‘pillow-books,’ edible books, book planters and more. All these projects, of course, tap into our very strong psychic attachments to books, both in form and content.

Photo: Artist Thomas Allen uses old pulp novels in his work. More from the Foley Gallery.

What compels people to want to transform animals into mantelpiece trophies, tacky roadside totems, or even diorama specimens? On the one hand, nothing seems as ludicrous as taking an animal and transforming it into a replica of itself. Why kill it in the first place? On the other hand, few objects are as strangely alluring as Flaubert’s parrot, Goethe’s kingfisher, or Truman Capote’s rattlesnake. Or, for that matter, as out of context as, say, Fenway Partners’ upright grizzly bear in its corporate boardroom in Manhattan. - from Melissa Milgrom’s Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy

Photo from Field Museum library archive.

Craig Mod’s essay “Books in the Age of the iPad” is probably the best thing I’ve read about the future of the book in a little while. Very well thought out and lots to digest. Hint, magazine and newspaper folks, it’s relevant to you too.

Excerpt:

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.

Russell Smith laments for the bookshelf, and frankly if people’s libraries were to start shrinking I would too.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog asks a bunch of people what they’re reading.

Finally if you want to mix-up your March Madness with a little bit of literature… BAM! This year’s The Morning News Tournament of Books is on. I’ve got my giant foam hand in the air for Let The Great World Spin.