Tag: ebooks

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Fahrenheit 2009 and rising

rogue-poster-crocodileGoogle and China:
wrapping up the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009

Response to the three posts on the Frankfurt Book Fair was good. The digital debate was less a debate and more of a statement of claims. Digital reading got thumbs up for being less burdensome than lugging around lots of books and because it simply is the way things are moving along. Though I suspect that it’s not so much the weight of the books than the posture of the reader that has an effect on the back. Goethe, in his “Garden House” in Weimar, had a strange contraption built with a saddle that allowed him to work in an upright position…

But the digital content issue was mostly avoided, and that is a big one, because it means control of the gateway and distribution. I cannot help notice an incredible confidence in the fair-mindedness of behemoths like Google. Yet, the “in” and “out” problem has not been resolved or even noticed apparently. So let me put out one more question: When has anyone been able to argue with the EULAs and still get service from, say, a software company? And who reads the EULAs thoroughly? Once you’re “in”, you have the bennies as long as Google allows them to be fed to you. When you are out, you are, in Brave New World lingo, a savage.  And my experience with many large companies, especially in the USA, has been that once you are out, you are a nonperson, though this term comes from another famous dystopia. You either accept and sign, or be damned.

(Google tends to ignore privacy and rights, including copyright, until getting rapped on its many fingers: In Switzerland, finally, Google View has run into a brick wall named the Officer for Data Protection, who demanded that the company be more careful with its anonymizing of photos. The Swiss are taking their privacy seriously, which is a good thing, even with the cute little Google).

The big cheese

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“Be there and shut up”: Regina Berlinghof with dissident journalist Dai Qing. (Thanks to Regina Berlinghof)

As for China: Again, the growth figures make economists clap their hands and foam at the mouth. Better growth than ever before, heavens, if only the west could do the same… Regina Berlinghof, who was mentioned in Part III Chinese Checkers, received a very high-level visit, namely a remarkable Chinese dissident, journalist Dai Qing. Her extraordinary career is a profile in courage and outspokenness. Of course, one of her main thrusts is environmental – she opposed the megalomaniac Three Gorges Dam project –  which is not terribly sexy these days. “She was first invited, then uninvited, and ultimately was not allowed to speak,“ writes Berlinghof. “She came by my booth and was delighted to see the action, and she thanked me.” Dai Qing was one of the writers to make a statement at the pre-Fair meeting that irritated China’s powers-that-be

It seems the Lilliputians managed at best to tickle the giant.
The online edition of the New York Times ran an article on China at the Book Fair. Here is a grand statement from that source: “Unlike the exquisitely choreographed ceremonies during the Beijing Olympics, the fair presented a messier and more ambiguous portrait of China on the rise — a country still deeply uncomfortable with its own discordant voices, yet eager to become more competitive with the West in the realm of ideas.”

Let us be a little more precise: exquisitely choreographed with a truncheon. And one can only delight at the euphemistic “uncomfortable with its own discordant voices.” The article mentions several prominent dissidents, notably Dai Qing and Liao Yiwu. Liao is an author and musician who was not only prohibited from traveling to Frankfurt, but was also asked to not shoot off his mouth. Apparently, the article closes, Liao Yiwu is optimistic: “Only by going through these incidents, it seems, can we become known to the outside world,” he told the New York Times. There was a time, when any dissident bogus or genuine was celebrated and put on the front page of every newspaper, as long as he or she came from a Communist country. Today, things have changed. If an obvious hoax with a hot-air balloon can occupy so many column inches for so long, how long does Liao think his name or his depressing book about the Capitalo-Communist revolution in China will be news, if it ever is. What Mr. Liao does not understand — and what the China’s media managers understand full well: The Cold War has been declared over, criticism and containment is out. Business models have taken over, and if the bottom line is good, no one will complain. We are experiencing what Marx rightly called the “fetishism of commodities.”

(That closes Frankfurt for now. Thanks for reading)

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Fahrenheit 2009 Part II: Digital Debate

 

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Michael Jackson and Countess Donhöff at eye level

The Fair is business, but it is also a celebration of the convergence two creative impulses, that of the book printers and designers, and that of the authors themselves. A children’s book by a South Korean authoress catches my eye, a tale about a girl with a fox on her head. A simple tale, not trying to be funny, just delightfully illustrated. Non-book articles are also a source of genuine creativity, but Hall 4.0 is just out of my two-day range, so I can only gaze briefly. The business of bookselling, too, requires genuine skill. Many publishers still have the courage and backbone to do less popular projects, Michael Jackson thus finds a spot next to a bio of Hitler-opponent Countess Marion Donhöff (biographies are big anyway, I suspect we are always curious about what other people are doing). On that score, the Book Fair never seems to change. But each year, it has a few big issues to confront

Off the books: liber digitalis 

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Enthusiastic lip service about iPhone cookbooks

The big buzz, of course, is the inexorable progress of the digital soldier ants through the old, old market structures of the printing industry. Its all about  eBooks, iBooks, Web-based books and Internet-based business models, and the biggest elephant in the room: the Kindle, born on the 19th of October. A small amount of space, about 2000 square feet (about 200 square meters)  is devoted to “Books & Bytes.” It exhibits several possibilities for reading electronic books, but none yet really replicate “the book feeling.” You can’t thumb pages quickly (yet), or find a page serendipitously. And if they fall over the side of a bed, for example, they may well break. Vodafone is promising to send end-users novels on their mobile phones (I’ll try and then report), and three experts in the field of cooking – there we go again – discussed the sheer brilliance of having recipes with great pics beamed to your iPhone. “You can take it along with you when shopping…”  one of them says. Next innovation down this line: the plastic cover to protect the device from spatter. Whatever: I suspect that next year, Amazon and Google, once odd fellows, now giant players, will probably own half of Hall 3.0… And watch for the next development promised by the Wi-Fi Alliance (Intel, Apple, Cisco are the main culprits) from Silicon Valley: Wi-Fi Direct. This system will, if I understand it correctly, piggyback Wi-Fi from one enabled device to the other, no need for Bluetooth, no need for Wi-Fi in some cases, no fuss, no muss, and a lot of electronic garbage from the last generation of innovative junk.

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Those pesky hardcopy books
 All this e-stuff naturally raises the hackles of more traditional folk. Philosophers, perhaps, should start getting involved, but they are too busy these days eking out a living as taxi drivers, key account managers, down-and-out editors and business gurus. The authors’ societies (and hence the authors and rights holders) are justifiably worried. Google’s book digitizing project is quite controversial… The Fair edition of The Bookseller has an interview with Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, regarding the pending Book Settlement. He is naturally eager for rights holders to sign into the Google library – and admittedly there are some who believe firmly that Google is acting as the world’s e-brarian out of pure altruism, just as there are those who believe that Windows Vista is an improvement over XP.  “Rights holders are obviously free to make whatever decision they wish,” says Turvey (thank you master!). “We believe the public benefits when rights holders have the choice to participate or not in its (the Settlement’s) terms and there is competition in the digital book space.” Right. The question is, what happens to the rights holders who decide not to cast in their lot with Google. Turvey is not clear about that, but he does have a very nice smile on his face. He must be a nice man. And he works in the upper echelons of a company with a very cute name.
Google-Store
Future libraries for the digi-incrowd

 

The hellish vision: A digital content aggregator puts together novels and fact books that can be downloaded onto books with Wii-like pages that replicate turning. No fuss, no muss with those greedy authors, sourpuss editors, bean-counting lawyers  and grumpy literary critics. The lovers of real books will simply become the savages in the year X of Our Google. And that is the point made by Dr. Christian Sprang, legal adviser at the Stock Exchange Association of the German Book Trade at a debate on the thrid day of the Fair. He wants rights holders to have an opt-in option, not just the opt-out one. And Professor Roland Reuss simply says Google has broken the law by digitizing books without permission.

Interlude

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Joseph E. Hanhart, still in the savannah of real print

Niches.  The last refuge of the real book in the future? The Book Fair is full of them, and some still smell of printer’s ink, of hot presses, of red wine and even a touch of sulphur. Meet Joseph E. Hanhart of Editions Heuwinkel from Carouge (by Geneva), Switzerland. His bright blue eyes are full of humor, he still holds books in a firm yet loving manner. He publishes art books in varying sizes, each done with great care. The program also includes books on yoga and on Switzerland. He feels the market does need the diversity and he is optimistic. “In nature, you have brush and you have tall, visible trees,” he points out, “and without the grasses, the weeds and all that stuff, those tall trees could not survive.” But nature and human nature are two different shoes as they say in German.  We will eat up our entire planet, suck out its entrails and raze its forests just to get hamburgers cheaply and fuel to run our cars.

And so we get onto talking about bigger things. Hanhart is a genial storyteller in at least three languages. He suddenly mentions the 450th anniversary of the University of Geneva, which was founded by Calvin. One of the speakers was Stephen Hawking. Someone in the audience asked what god was doing before his seven days of heavy labor. “Preparing hell for the likes of you,” answered Hawking. Asymmetrical juxtapositions replacing dialectics.

 

Please check Part III: Chinese Checkers

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