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.

Free buys word of mouth, which may create the buzz needed to sustain a book long enough to find its audience. [...] Many authors and publishing houses now regularly post a story from a new collection or a free first chapter as a way to entice while still protecting both profit and the value of the art.

Author Jim Hanas is taking this model a step further by giving away copies of his e-book until Labor Day—directly. The One Story blog reports:

In anticipation of the fall release of his newest short story collection, Why They Cried (e-book, Joyland and ECW Press), he’s giving away FREE copies of his first e-book, Single, until Labor Day. Single contains two stories that will appear in Why They Cried, including “The Cryerer”.

The e-book is available for free download in a variety of formats at Hanas’s website. And if you don’t hold with this newfangled downloading business, Hanas adds that you can email or call him: “I’m not kidding. I will help you.”

image credit: iplay.com

Enter I-Play’s video game Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. According to the game description, you can “Find the hidden items on your list triggering character dialogue and progressing the story,” “Recreate Fitzgerald’s famous prose, assemble your own library and earn trophies to share with friends on Facebook,” and “Complete unique mini-games: test your memory, put yourself in the author’s seat, or solve portrait puzzles.”

Here’s a screenshot, complete with some landmarks from the novel:

image credit: iplay.com

I-Play offers a free trial version of the game for download (Windows only). If you try it out, let us know what you think.

And if epic poetry—and fighting video games— are more your speed, there’s always this.

But in the streaming video era, with the publishing industry under relentless threat, the trailer is fast becoming an essential component of online marketing. Asked to draw on often nonexistent acting skills, authors are holding forth for anything from 30 seconds to 6 minutes, frequently to the tune of stock guitar strumming, soulful violin or klezmer music. And now, those who once worried about no one reading their books can worry about no one watching their trailers. (A mother still nursing her 8-year-old: 25,864,943 views; recent best-selling maternal memoirist: 5,124 views.)

The article goes on to examine several ways that book trailers function, from art piece to reassuring the reader that the author is relatively normal to meta-commentary on the nature of book trailers.

Moreover, the article points out that book trailers may play a bigger role in book sales in the future: one recent survey found that only 0.2% of readers discovered their last book through a book trailer, while another found that among teens, nearly 45 percent bought a book after watching the trailer.

All the more reason for authors to overcome their stage fright, perhaps…

image credit - Flickr: bloomimwhom

“Designing a printed book is remarkably different from designing an ebook,” says Charles Nix, a partner in the New York publishing firm Scott & Nix and the president of the Type Directors’ Club.

“Printed-book design is about fixed-size pages and spreads. Those are gone in ebooks. Book designers choose typefaces and point sizes to maximize legibility and comprehension. Those are gone in ebooks too. Some formats, he notes, do allow you to embed a font, but you can’t rely on reading devices picking it up. Book designers finesse layouts and choose paper to achieve a particular bulk, weight, and feel for the finished book. Gone also.”

It’s not just aesthetics, Robins argues. Sometimes the differences affect the book itself:

Nicholas Blake, the editorial manager for digital at Pan Macmillan in London, shows me China Miéville’s The City and the City on Adobe Digital Editions. The City and the City is a highly praised novel and Adobe Digital Editions is a heavily supported ebook platform, backed by the UK’s largest high-street bookshop, Waterstone’s, and with an implementation of the open standard for ebooks, Epub, more sophisticated than many. But The City and the City is set in an uncanny place called Be¿el; and one thing the platform did not permit, at least with its default font, was the character ¿.

And even something like line length can have major effects:

Shorter lines also cause problems for justification (the smooth edges at either end of a page that most readers expect), especially as many e-readers don’t yet do hyphenation. Unjustified text, with the right margin left ragged, may help, but long words may cause problems even then. Blake reports trouble with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the sigh of satisfaction emitted by the automatic doors – a string of “m”s – can disappear off the edge of the screen.

Those of you reading ebooks, have you noticed any weird design issues on your Kindle or Nook? Designers, what other design challenges might ebooks raise?

Via.

In the Stacks, a video book reviewing site, has one solution: use the community fundraising site Kickstarter to raise money. Author and site founder Michelle Zaffino writes:

Last year I created the program In the Stacks video book review (www.inthestacks.tv), which features 60-second long reviews of recent books. The reviews are done by one of the most authoritative sources on the topic: Librarians. In the Stacks is meant to not only be intellectually provocative but also features tastefully sexy librarians, and asserts that women can be both sexy and smart. The 32 60-second spots currently on the website are meant to run like ads, with longer episodes in the works. [...]

With the money I raise through Kickstarter, I plan to make upgrades to the website, pay vendors (which include a graphic designer, illustrator and a few other librarians taping reviews) and collaborate with a developer.

In the Stacks hopes to raise $5,000 by Friday, July 23. But with 4 days to go, only $474 has been pledged so far. Is it because the economy is bad? Because word didn’t spread fast enough? Or does it suggest that—for whatever reason—most people think criticism should be free?

Via.

But conveying actual information is beside the point. The trailer uses the shorthand of Shteyngart blithely jogging down the street with his dog to lure the reader. Beyond providing a commentary on the very idea of a book trailer, Shteyngart capitalizes on his potential reader’s sensibility to set up a syllogism. If you share a sense of humor with a writer, then you’ll probably like his book. You share a sense of humor with Shteyngart. You’ll probably like his book. It’s an interesting end-run around the usual mode of “now we’re going to tell you what this is about.” It worked on me, I spent time investigating his new book, and now the pub date is seared onto my brain. Does it work for you? Check out the trailer below, and let us know. Also you can find several examples of trailers on the FWR site, including some that play it a bit more straight – Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, par exemple.

image: Salon.com

But what happens to the readers in this scenario? That’s what Laura Miller asks on Salon.com. As she puts it, is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?

You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is. Civilians who kvetch about the bad writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of traditional publishing. They haven’t seen the vast majority of what didn’t get published — and believe me, if you have, it’s enough to make your blood run cold, thinking about that stuff being introduced into the general population.

Have you ever read any slush? Does that affect your feelings about self-publishing?

The USBTypewriter is a new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence. Lovers of the look, feel, and quality of old fashioned manual typewriters can now use them as keyboards for any USB-capable computer, such as a PC, Mac, or even iPad!

For the curious, Zyklin’s website offers a demo video and a schematic of how it works. And for those wanting to take the plunge, you can buy a USB typewriter or a kit to convert your own typewriter, or you can send your own typewriter in for conversion. (Via.)

If you don’t have $200-500 to spend on a USB typewriter, but long to work some of that vintage feel into your PC, here’s the next best thing: a free program to make your computer sound like a typewriter with every click.