What’s New at Open Book Systems

Considering Amazon’s new “front door,” its e-reader Kindle, as a stocking stuffer, I think about the $400 price tag and ask “What is it?” and “Is it worth it?” and “Why does it matter?” In fact, it is not just another proprietary e-reader. And unlike the BlackBerry, it is not a handheld device trying to be all things to all people, a cellphone that’s also a web browser, address book, doc reader, record player, with a keyboard so small your fingers get stuck. The Kindle appears to be an extremely slick cash register at the front end of the ubiquitous online content retailer, Amazon. A cash register its users pay to own, and then pay to use.

The e-books themselves are relatively cheap for this device, at $9.99. But when considering the “cost” of individual e-books, aren’t we really focusing on the wrong thing, the list price of an “object”? Publishers and booksellers have this holdover habit of sticking a price onto what in the online world is a completely artificial “commodity”—access and display of a screenful of letters powered by zeroes and ones. In fact, the only covers or pages or boundaries around online books are those deliberately built into them by their developers so that we retro humans will feel that we are dealing with something familiar, so we won’t be afraid.

This price-per-book business model can’t last; it’s an artifact from an earlier age when reading meant holding a thing—a book!—in your lap while decoding its meaning, thinking, memorizing (remember Fahrenheit 451), internalizing. Paying a “list price” begs the point of what’s really for sale here. It’s a distraction that really doesn’t matter in the least.

What’s for sale is us—our attention, our associative thought paths as we navigate around Amazon. It’s all recorded, from first lighting the fire and flipping the Kindle “on” switch, to pressing the “buy” button. At Amazon, I might even be able to buy my own words back again, if I am lucky enough to have my blog listed as one of the otherwise free Internet resources available through this device—for as low as $.99 per month.

The reason Amazon can afford to deep-discount not only its real books, but also its e-books, is that it is holding for itself and its shareholders, presumably for its own commercial exploitation, the priceless value unique to this global online medium of ours, the recorded behavior of its millions of customers worldwide. Us. You and me. Our searches. Our log files (those many clicks behind the patented “one click” that makes shopping so easy). Our searches, profiles, ship-to-and-bill-to buying histories. Upstream from this data, recording what used to be private information kept in people’s heads, not their handhelds, Amazon with its seductive new Kindle “front door” sits in a very powerful position indeed.

Just as Amazon is positioning its new $400 e-reader as a tempting stocking stuffer, news arrives about a drop in the U.S. literacy rate. The Boston Globe reports this morning that U.S. fourth graders are losing ground in literacy, for the first time lagging behind Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, according to an international study recently completed at Boston College. Apparently the children are not alone.  We spoke to a New York City book publicist yesterday, seeking services for an author. She declined, noting that these days, her firm doesn’t do much with “text-intensive” adult books. “Most people are reluctant readers,” she noted, and thus her firm is concentrating on graphic novels, “by far the fastest-growing market in publishing today—it’s just huge.” These are picture books for adults, a kind of comic book on a larger and higher quality scale.  Publishers Weekly reported that sales for this type of book “hit $330 million in 2006, a 12% increase over revised sales figures for 2005.”  Just for the sake of juxtaposition, look at a New York City newspaper from a hundred years ago—at that time there were many independent newspapers to choose from, published every morning, afternoon, and evening—and you’ll find wall-to-wall prose on just about every oversized page, with graphics being the exception rather than the rule, serving avid rather than reluctant readers.

This week’s Newsweek devoted its cover story to Kindle, a new product recently released from Amazon, a $400 e-reader to follow in the footsteps of similar devices such as Sony’s Reader Digital Book and the Rocketbook, promising clear readability thanks to sharp e-ink contrasts, interactive functionality similar to that found in the old Voyager Expanded Books, and, best of all, huge storage capacity and persistent wireless connectivity.

The “always on” aspect is exciting, for there is nothing more frustrating than traveling from hotspot to hotspot and having to pay for each connection. Based on our own airport bookstore purchases last year, we’d save money by paying $400 for the device and then $10 for each e-book title. But we’d have less on the bookshelves in the end, to share with families and friends. Doing all one’s e-info shopping through Amazon promises one-click ease and benefits, to be sure; it will be interesting to see how their portal approach will allow content from diverse sources to propagate through their commercial channel.

While this device represents one further step in freeing books from containers, it also hints at the dark side of the digital divide. On one hand, in the Newsweek article cited above, Google’s Dan Lansing notes: “Say you are trying to learn more about the Middle East, and you start reading a book, which claims that something happened in a particular event in Lebanon in ’81, where the author was using his view on what happened. But actually his view is not what [really] happened. …there are other people who have written about it who disagree with him, there are other perspectives”—and your e-book’s connectivity could provide instant access to those competing perspectives. On the other hand, objectivity is not always the goal: there is the case of Tiananmen Square, where Google apparently helped the Chinese government make sure that a Google search on this placename conducted from within China yields a quiet park rather than the scene of the bloody student revolt in Spring 1989.

Without a foundation in physical containers such as books, all is mutable, as the inhabitants of Orwell’s Animal Farm learned when they watched their 7 Commandments written on the barn wall mutate from “all animals are equal” to “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Roland Clement, artist, naturalist, and former Audubon Society Vice President, gave a presentation in Gloucester today to celebrate Rachel Carson’s 100th, and specifically her book that launched today’s environmental movement, Silent Spring. He noted that the local, U.S.-only ban on DDT that resulted from this book’s publication has had little impact on the chemical’s deadly global effects, and that in fact, today there is more DDT manufactured and sold than in the 1960s. “We are witnessing its effects in terms of diminishing fish and fowl all around us.” He noted that the chemical companies have a far broader reach than they did back when Kennedy was president, when Clement himself testified to a Senate committee on the poisonous effects of DDT. He noted that now these companies participate in and donate to many of the organizations (such as, we assume, his own Audubon Society) which are tasked with preserving nature rather than controlling it through chemicals. He counseled his audience not to get emotional about the loss of birdlife all around us, but to wait for the proper time before acting in concert.

He recently donated his papers to a New England university and is considering publication of further work on environmental activism.