Okay, so maybe you are a confirmed Kindle-hater. And you’re also a writer. You’ve sworn to yourself that you will never, ever, allow your words to be displayed on a Kindle. But as a writer, you don’t always have control over the format of your book. What to do?

At The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg offers 7 ways to “Kindle-proof” your manuscript. For example:

Play With Text, Typeface, and White Space
eReaders currently use two approaches to rendering text. One is quasi-photographic, but the Kindle’s remains the more battery-efficient method of imposing a standard typeface. This makes the effects of a textually playful book like Danielewski’s House of Leaves or Karen Tei Yamashita‘s I Hotel or William H. Gass‘ The Tunnel – difficult to render on a Kindle. If you want to up the degree of difficulty, you can try combining this with step 1, following Gass’ lead in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, wherein text in a range of typefaces and sizes curves and distends and floats around and behind the illustrations. And then there’s white space. Mallarmé may have got there first, but Blake Butler‘s There is No Year is moving the ball forward. It’s available for Kindle, but only the good Lord and Jeff Bezos know how it reads there. (I don’t think I need to point out the irony of the Amazon customer review for A Visit from the Goon Squad that finds “the ‘powerpoint’ chapter…extremely difficult to read on the Kindle.”)

Hallberg’s other tips? Use color and illustrations, play with the physical form of the book (such as putting your pages loose in a box!), and more. He also offers a list of books that are “pretty damn Kindle-proof”–visit his essay for the full scoop.

Of course, “Kindle-proofing” your book means it will never be in a Kindle ad to spark conversations like this.

Image via Rachel Walsh

If Charles Dickens had had a Kindle, what would it have looked like?

That’s the question art student Rachel Walsh tried to answer for her design class, which asked her to explain something modern to someone who died before 1900. Walsh’s explanation involved creating a visual metaphor:

Since a 19th-century author wouldn’t have had any concept of downloads, e-readers, or the Internet, Walsh had to create a metaphor for the device that would resonate with Dickens. Realizing that a Kindle is just a lot of books inside a big book, she created an old-school version consisting of literal little books inside a larger book. She put together 40 tiny versions of classics—a mixture of her childhood favorites and books Dickens supposedly enjoyed—such as Don Quixote and The Catcher in the Rye. Then, she placed them inside a normal-sized hardcover book, and voila: a very portable reader.

Image via Rachel Walsh

Even though we have both a Kindle and an iPad in this household, I kind of wish I had one of these, too!

Beginning RIGHT NOW you can bring in your Christmas Kindle to the Microcosm store in Portland (636 SE 11th) and trade it in for its worth in new or used books and zines! That’s right! Why let fad technology kill print when you can take a stand and fill up your shelves in the process. (Don’t worry, we won’t tell your parents.) And make sure to bring a friend to help you carry all your loot; most of the store’s books are priced in the $2-$6 range so a $139-$189 trade-in (note: going retail for the Kindle at Amazon’s site) you might be carrying your books out in a fleet of wheelbarrows!

Microcosm describes itself as “a not-for-profit, collectively-run publisher and distributor of zines and related work [that] strives to add credibility to zine writers and their ethics, teach self empowerment, show hidden history, and nurture people’s creative side.” Their catalog, mostly nonfiction and how-to, includes such diverse titles as Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified U.S. History, in which “[authors] Michael Hoerger and Mia Partlow collect, contextualize and graphically narrate declassified government documents with food as a theme”; repair manual Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance; Sneakier Uses for Everyday Things, which teaches you “How to Turn a Calculator into a Metal Detector” and “Turn Dishwashng Liquid into a Copy Machine”; home medical guide When There Is No Doctor: Preventive and Emergency Home Healthcare in Challenging Times; and cookbookViva Vegan!.

To me, Microcosm’s books-for-Kindle offer isn’t even their most radical idea. The company also offers a sliding price scale for its books, explaining:

Part of Microcosm’s mission statement is to empower people through the information and resources we provide. One obvious way that people are disenfranchised is by a lack of money. Some people exist on a small budget to focus on activities that they deem vital—like radical activism. Others are caught up in institutional poverty and have no choice in the matter. As a way of catering to these circumstances, we’ve always offered our titles at the lowest prices possible. And over the last fifteen years we’ve had many of our own financial hardships. Many people have suggested that since our prices are so low, raising our prices would be an obvious way to solve our problem. So we’ve come to a compromise—the sliding scale pricing structure. You determine what you can afford to pay for the items that we publish. As a result, we are able to pay royalties to our authors, offer lower prices to those who cannot afford as much as they’d like, and continue to serve our mission statement of making new materials available at the lowest prices possible.

This “pay what you want” price structure reminds me of Radiohead’s strategy of releasing their seventh album online and asking downloaders to pay whatever they wished. This might be the first time this kind of freeware model has been tried in the publishing world! And it’s a strategy in keeping with Microcosm’s apparent slightly revolutionary stance.

What do you think? Would you trade your Kindle for $189 worth of paper books?

Image Credit: Flickr

The following guest post is by Josie Keenan, an FWR intern and second-year student at the University of Michigan.

More and more these days, I find myself bemoaning the fate of books. As Lee discussed in her recent blog “Let’s get digital”, downloadable books have been available for some time now. Digitization is one aspect of the way literature is changing, but what we are reading is also changing. Where novels were once belabored, deeply considered works in which every word of every sentence was deliberately placed, today it seems a more manufacturable task. One can write a novel just by purchasing the right MacBook software.

Similarly, Natalie’s gathering up of the various positions in the literary world on the “revision” of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in her January post “The Difference between the Lightning bug and the Lightning” made me realize that even past literature is becoming an increasingly manufactured entity; one that can be appropriately adapted and suited for digestion by any consumer (though seemingly more for those who prefer delicate, mild tastes over meat and spice).

Image Credit: Flickr

It pains me to call a book a rag, but I can’t in good conscience equate literature with dolls and clothing as mere consumer goods, nor can I justify equating sensational, market-driven literature with the that of George Eliot and James Joyce.

I do not want literature to lose any value, though as I personally hold literature in such high regard perhaps this is a selfish motive. But I also do not want books to become an elitist, exclusionary enjoyment. Ultimately, I believe the purpose of literature to be a unifying one: that the power of a story lies in its ability to communicate an idea or perspective and connect people. I think the soul of literature emerges only when the reader’s soul is similarly engaged. To me, the connective powers of literature are what make it so beautiful.

Perhaps it is not a question of moving forward or backward, but the fact of us going there together. So whether we’re reading stories laced and bound by string and soft leather or clicking through screens at an Oxygen bar, if we’re going there together I suppose I must go. But I might have to step out for some air.

Image Credit: Flickr

Image Credit: Flickr

Let them read (old) books!
Though beautiful books draw my eye, the trump card for me will always be the words on the page. I love books for the story, which means I keep reading my coffee-warped copy of Blood Meridian and can’t part with that Lee K. Abbott collection that leaped into the bath. Public domain appeals to my lit-for-all ideals (of course, when the writer is long past needing the funds to fuel her work). Via GalleyCat, I found an annual list of the authors making their “debut” on COMMUNIA’s Public Domain Day (January 1). Unfortunately, according to TechDirt, even though F. Scott Fitzgerald and Leon Trotsky entered the public domain elsewhere in the world, nothing entered the public domain in the United States due to copyright extensions.

Friends, Romans, countrymen – lend me your e-books.
An added perk to my brother and his globe-trotting Kindle: books on Kindle can now be loaned. You can even arrange to share books for 14-days with strangers through GalleyCat’s Kindle Lending Discussion Board. I expect various other e-book formats will jump on this bandwagon, as this has long been voiced as one of the downsides of electronic vs. ink-and-paper books.

Libraries that download
So many public libraries around the country have digital media – from e-books to audio books to music – available for download, yours may very well be one of them. The NYPL, my local stalwart, has a great list of resources (over 30,000). libraries that have digital sharing. A quick perusal of The Chicago Public Library’s digital offerings turned up an audio version of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories and e-books ranging from Y.A. to McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. Libraries have also banded together to form a consortium of digital resources, as many Ohio regional branches have done with the Digital Downloads project.

University Collections Online
Last, but not least, not everyone can afford to travel to the great library collections of the world, so many libraries are bringing them to you. Granted, you won’t be able to smell the dust on those vellum manuscripts, and no centuries-lost letters will fall out of the pages of Meriwether Lewis’ diary, but if you’re short on airfare funds, this may be the next best thing. I know The Newberry Library, where I used to work, has been scanning many of their 1.5 million books, 5 million manuscript pages and 500,000 maps, as part of a massive digitization project. You can find some of those scanned items, here. About a month ago, Harvard’s Berkman Center announced a digital public library planning initiative. Libraries around the country have long recognized the trend toward digital formats, and I’m guessing the next decade will hold some exciting changes as they rise to the challenge.

My only question: if you drop a Kindle in the bath, can it still be salvaged with a hair dryer?

Image Credit: Flickr

Just about the only thing about the Skiff that really strikes me as intriguing is the partnership they’ve inked with Nielsen and comScore to handle advertising analytics for the device. Presumably, they’ll be able to tailor the advertising in the digital version of a magazine to suit a user’s particular reading habits. Do you read a lot of articles about travel? Expect to see a bunch of ads for Expedia and Travelocity. This is an area that Amazon and B&N haven’t even begun to broach yet, so it’ll be interesting to see how they handle it.

TMCNet.com offers a round-up of recent articles and blog postings about the looming possibility of ads on your Kindle, Nook or iPad, and quotes James McQuivey of Forrester speculating that someone like Google Books will move toward “creation of an ad-supported publishing model.” A large part of why I still gravitate toward physical books is the quiet, calm place they provide. But, I must say as algorithms and models improve, perhaps bad advertising won’t find you as often. If a publisher wants to offer 20% off the second book in a trilogy they know I’ve started, I’d be inclined to accept. Would you pay a premium not to have ads show up as you browse the e-version of the morning paper?

Image Credit: Flickr

Dzanc Books is excited to announce the launching of the Dzanc Books eBook Club. Sign up now and get eleven books for $50! With the proliferation of eReading devices and increased interest in reading books on kindle, Sony e-Reader, Nook, etc., Dzanc Books is making it both easier, and less expensive for readers to obtain our titles as eBooks. Additional information can be found at our website at:
dzancbooks.org/ebook-club

When you sign up for the club, you’ll instantly have access to five downloads, including Laura van den Berg’s story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (reviewed by Liana Imam for FWR), and Steven Gillis’ novel The Consequences of Skating. Even better: Dzanc’s eBook Club would be the perfect gift-that-keeps-giving for one lucky bookworm.

Image credit: Flickr

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that ebook readers read more books:

A study of 1,200 e-reader owners by Marketing and Research Resources Inc. found that 40% said they now read more than they did with print books. Of those surveyed, 58% said they read about the same as before while 2% said they read less than before. And 55% of the respondents in the May study, paid for by e-reader maker Sony Corp., thought they’d use the device to read even more books in the future. [...]

Among early adopters, e-books aren’t replacing their old book habits, but adding to them. Amazon, the biggest seller of e-books, says its customers buy 3.3 times as many books after buying a Kindle, a figure that has accelerated in the past year as prices for the device fell.

And the New York Times notes that ebook readers are sometimes “less isolated”:

“Strangers constantly ask about it,” Michael Hughes, a communications associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said of his iPad, which he uses to read a mix of novels and nonfiction. “It’s almost like having a new baby.” An iPad owner for four months, Mr. Hughes said people were much more likely to approach him now than when he toted a book. “People approach me and ask to see it, to touch it, how much I like it,” he said. “That rarely happens with dead-tree books.”

Okay, it’s not all roses. Recent studies have also found that reading on an e-reader is slower, you can’t show off the cover, and digital typesetting still poses some issues.

And then, as the WSJ points out, there’s the 30 minutes after takeoff and before landing:

But paper pages do have one benefit that electronic devices don’t have: They don’t need to be put away during takeoff and landing on airplanes. On a recent trip to Seattle, 64-year-old Jamie McKenzie, a Bellingham, Wash.-based writer, said he felt a sense of superiority when his seatmate was asked to turn off his Kindle to prepare for takeoff.

“That guy may have had access to 10,000 books, but I was the one who was able to keep reading,” he says.

image credit: flickr.com - goXunuReviews

The Nielsen Norman group (no, that Nielsen) found that reading in electronic format was up to 10.7% slower than reading a paper book. Reports Macworld:

Nielsen’s findings were based on the performance of 24 users who “like reading and frequently read books.” The subjects each read different short stories by Ernest Hemingway on all four platforms, and were measured for their reading speeds and story comprehension. Overall, it took each user an average of 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read a story regardless of the platform and comprehension levels were virtually identical on all four reading formats. However, Nielsen says the printed book was the clear winner in terms of speed. Users were reading 6.2 percent slower on an iPad compared to paper, and 10.7 percent slower on the Kindle 2.

Moreover, the subjective experience of reading in different formats also varied:

The study also asked each user to rate how they liked each format on a scale of 1-7. The iPad, Kindle 2 and printed book were nearly tied at 5.8, 5.7 and 5.6 respectively, while the PC monitor ranked last at 3.6 points. The test subjects said that reading on the PC felt too much like being at work, while they found it more relaxing to read a printed book than on an electronic device.

The full study is here. But I wonder how much these findings depend on what people are used to. In 10 years, if e-readers continue to proliferate, will we get used to reading digitally—and will we enjoy it more?

Via.