Category Archives: Books

Look what I found down the rabbit hole

Posted on by

Hi! I’m popping up to grab a bit of fresh air and blink in the light.

I’ve been following links from links on this Kaavya Viswanathan story.

I started with The Analytical Knife blog, and followed a link there to Lizzie Skurnick, fisking a Harvard Independent article based on an interview they did with her.

Skurnick also put up a link to this Slate ariticle by John Barlow, about his short stint as a book packager writer-for-hire.

I made a couple of side-trips on the way, but you’ll have to find them for yourself.

I think I need a rest now. Good stuff tho, all of it.

Package ‘er up

Posted on by

Booksquare has a post up about the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal that raises the question behind the question:

It also makes one wonder why in the world a business like Little, Brown would spend a reported $500,000 on an unwritten book by a first-time author who was starting her academic career at a famously tough university.

For a possible answer, Booksquare links to this piece at Publisher’s Weekly that suggests How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was purchased not as a novel, but as a product: an attractive author with an interesting backstory, matched up with a “test-marketed, packaged” story.

Makes sense to me.

Update: the story gets worse…

Speaking of organic

Posted on by

Here’s a review of a new book, We Want Real Food, by Graham Harvey, which examines the effect of the depletion of soil nutrients on the nutritional quality of our food.

To some extent, we’re able to compensate by taking vitamin supplements, but as I suggested in this post, that’s not an ideal answer, either. In the long run, we need to convert mainstream agriculture to more organic-style practices. No question about it.

Time to merge online with bricks & mortar

Posted on by

A Dutch bricks & mortar bookseller has implemented Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in two of its stores to help it manage inventory — and to help customers shop for books.

I find both applications interesting, but it’s the latter that truly rocks, and here’s why: once you’ve used Amazon’s search capabilities, hunting for a book in a traditional shop seems awfully cumbersome.

So to my way of thinking, any retailer that’s maintaining bricks & mortar outlets should be looking at ways to implement the customer-friendly aspects of online shopping in its physical locations. Being able to search for a product on an in-store kiosk is a prime example. Combine that with the capability to pinpoint exactly where that product is in the store and you’ve mimicked one of the major conveniences of an online store.

I mean, how many times have you stood in line at a customer service desk in a bookstore, you finally get a clerk to help you, the clerk looks up a title on a computer, leads you to the shelf, and then you stand there while the clerk spends another five minutes hunting for the book?

That’s pretty much the brick & mortar book-shopping experience.

Whereas with Amazon, you run a search on a title, click on “add to shopping cart” and you’re done. Don’t even have to enter your credit card info if you’ve set up an account.

The disadvantages of online shopping are that you can’t actually touch an item before you buy, and you usually have to pay shipping. Brick & mortars win hands down on those two counts. Bricks & mortars also have human beings to give you face time should the technology fail you, which is a huge plus when you need it.

So why not build on those strengths, but at the same time become more like an online store?

Another example: why shouldn’t I be able to shop at Gap.com from within a conventional Gap store?

No reason, except that Gap execs haven’t considered the possibility — or grasped what it would mean to its customers . . .

(RFID story found via Publisher’s Lunch.)

Free to code again

Posted on by

The suit claiming that Dan Brown committed a copyright violation when he wrote The Da Vinci Code has been dismissed.

This is a personal disappointment to me, because I can prove that I used the words “Da Vinci” and “code” prior to the novel’s publication, and I was hoping to bring my own suit against Brown, since he obviously plagiarized my vocabulary.

Rats.

I blogged about this lawsuit previously here and here.

And now: reader reviews are crooked (yawn)

Posted on by

A few weeks ago, on the occasion of my birthday, I decided to buy a bottle of champagne.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I didn’t want to buy something icky, either.

So I stood in front of the bank of sparkling wines offered by my favorite wine shop and considered my choices.

It happened that two other women were there, also shopping for champagne. They were apparently friends, and having a lively conversation, recalling different wineries they’d visited. After eavesdropping on them as they discussed four or five different bottles, I decided, on impulse, to consult with them.

I’d picked up a bottle of Konstantine Frank sparkling wine (which interested me because it’s an Upstate New York State vitner) and asked them if they were familiar with it, and whether it was any good.

They were gracious from the start, but also, at first, cautious. The reason soon became clear: they didn’t want to recommend something without knowing a bit about my taste. So wisely, they asked me which of the wines I did like. I pointed to the Veuve Clicquot, heh. “This, only I’d rather not spend quite that much.” And at that point, they relaxed. “Oh,” they said. Now they could help me. They knew my taste was close enough to theirs.

And they recommended a $20 Roederer Estate Brut sparkling wine.

I took it home, chilled it, opened it later that night, and was thrilled. It was delicious — at that price, perfect, in fact.

Which brings me to this 12,000-word article (excuse me, “paper”) at First Monday (tagline: “Peer-reviewed journal on the internet”).

The paper proposes to examine the scandalous behavior of on-line user reviews, with a focus on Amazon book reviews.

First, we have the reviews that are blatant plants. The article authors (Shay David and Trevor Pinch) remind us that

in 2004 both the New York Times (Harmon, 2004) and the Washington Post (Marcus, 2004) reported that a technical fault on the Canadian division of Amazon.com exposed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers, and alarming discoveries were made. It was established that a large number of authors had “gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues or paid professionals.” A few had even “reviewed” their own books, and, unsurprisingly, some had unfairly slurred the competition.

(The authors don’t realize how oh-so 2004 this particular scandal is. Today’s writers are urged, quite blatantly, by their handlers to call in every favor owed them since they left the cradle in exchange for glowing Amazon reviews.)

Next comes the point that many Amazon reviews are essentially spam. The text is copied from one review to another — outright plagiarism is involved in some cases — and often the review is merely a clever pretext for publicizing a website URL. (Rather like the spammers who pretend they love my blog as a pretext for adding their business site url to my comments. Yeah, that’ll work.)

Other reviews are falsely flattering: reviewers give books five stars in order to raise their own reviewer standing. Still others are obviously written more to satisfy a reviewer’s emotional needs than to provide information about a book. (Ya, no kidding.)

And then (worst of all! :-D) are the reviews that are simply crap.

What the paper’s authors don’t consider is whether anyone really takes online user reviews seriously.

I bet not. I bet most people — like me — read Amazon reviews (if at all) for the entertainment value, not to help them make purchase decisions.

It’s simple human nature. In most cases, we take advice from people whose judgement we decide we can trust — a common sense criteria that de facto excludes anonymous online reviews.

That’s not to say we have to know the person giving the advice, but we have to know something about them. Perhaps we’ve observed that they seem engaged and knowledgeable — like the two women I met in the wine shop. A well-written review in a print publication can fall into that category, even if the reviewer’s name is unfamiliar.

Maybe it’s someone with whom we simply identify — a blogger we read, or Oprah, or someone we know from work.

But taking advice from anonymous people on the ‘net?

Maybe some of us do that, once or twice. But I’m betting that people who do quickly learn how useless that advice can be.

And here’s the thing. Even if you do buy a book based on a bogus review, that’s the end of the chain, right there. You’re not going to recommend that book yourself.

So although the Internet can be a medium for word-of-mouth, it’s a foolish marketer who thinks a post on the Internet is equivalent to word-of-mouth.

The real chain is, and always has been, trust.

Or to put another way: the number of Amazon reviews is as much (maybe more) the result of a book’s popularity as the cause of it.

“The most expensive book ever sold at auction”

Posted on by

A 1623 Shakespeare First Folio.

The volume is in its original binding and has the extra attraction of numerous notations. An unknown scholar, probably in the mid-17th century, has underscored or marked hundreds of lines.

Another 17th-century hand, possibly that of a naughty child, has also written something on one page. It reads: “But I desire the readers mouth to kis the wrighteres arse.”

The “future of fiction”?

Posted on by

In the Boston Globe, Sven Birkerts reviews the online novel-to-date by Walter Kim that is being published by Slate.

Birkerts is not persuaded that the novel will live up to its promise of somehow delivering real-time art, i.e., to be a novel and at the same time to “respond to events as they happen.”

I believe that real time and the time of art, the consciousness that makes art, are contradictory concepts-“real-time art” is an oxymoron . . . The traditional aim of art, in response to deeply planted human needs, has from the first been fundamentally contemplative. The work offers a deliberate distancing from the chaos and turbulence of the immediate and allows the reader or viewer to process its tensions through the recognition of underlying patterns.

I suppose so. But that’s pretty, um, abstruse. lol.

He goes on a bit more in this vein, then writes:

And yet, if Kim can successfully deploy some of the energies and capabilities of this extraordinary technology, if he can intensify the participatory dynamic of reading-real-time interaction with real-time output-and win a readership, others will quickly follow.

This gets a bit closer to the crux of the matter. People don’t go to Borders or click on Amazon.com because they decide they need the “prophylactic” benefit of “artistic distance” to keep their sanity “in the face of the boggling complexity of living.”

They — we — buy books because they transport us and affirm what we know ourselves to be.

If writers figure out how to harness the Internet in a way that engages and excites people, and that enables readers to connect emotionally with an online fictional world, it will work.

It’s really pretty simple, in the end. Although not necessarily easy . . .

Rousseau’s Dog

Posted on by

That post title is a book title, so of course I had to blog about it ;-)

The book is by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, it’s about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, and it’s been reviewed by Darrin McMahon in the New York Times (registration required).

The “dog” refers to Rousseau’s delusional tendencies, but he also owned a dog named Sultan, who, McMahon writes, was “the only being with whom he could find the peace of true friendship in England.”