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Facebook About-Face

When old and new media work together to promote literacy, all is well in the world. One such example is the Local Books iPhone app I've swooned over before. Another is the facilitation of reading by Facebook, the very nexus of the modern media trend that threatens to destroy traditional reading.

In December '09, OnlineCollege.org compiled an impressive list of "Awesome Facebook Apps for Serious Bookworms". The oxymoron is plain; but, thus, encouraging! Here are some highlights:

Visual Bookshelf: lets you recommend books and catalogue your own list

aNobii Books: connects you with like-minded readers based on your reading list

Comic Books: provides information on new releases, discussion boards, reviews, and screencasts

Books Geek: publishes your friends' comments about the books you’re reading

World Books: challenges you to read one book from every country

Which British Library Reading Room are You: self-explanatory...

Sell Used Books: a book swap app, with free shipping

Random Reads: lets you search for, recommend and organize books from Random House

Recommend-A-Book: search books by keyword, title, author or ISBN number and recommend them to other users

Collaboration between the print and online publishing worlds is win-win. Rather than fretting over pricing models, statistics over how many eBooks are sold for every hardcover, and battles between independent bookshops and behemoth retailers like Amazon, publishers should be focusing on the simplest ways to mix the best of old (quality content) and new (ease of dissemination and collaboration). Now go make a Shelfari profile.

Corkboard

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am....  burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes....  who bound themselves to wireless devices for an endless ride of opiated information from CNN.com and Google on sugary highs until the noise of modems and fax machines brought them down shuddering, with limited and vulgar verbiage to comment threads, battered bleak of shared brain devoid of brilliance in the drear light of a monitor....who texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge lost battalion of platonic laconic self proclaimed journalists committed to a revolution of information, whole intellects underscored and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all under the gaze of once brilliant eyes."

-from Tweet by Oyl Miller, McSweeney's

Pass the peace pipe: An armistice

Of late, I've resigned myself to the fact that eBooks are poised to edge out their paper counterparts. According to Wired, Amazon officially sold 143 eBooks for every 100 hardcovers over the course of the second quarter of 2010. The very infrastructure of the publishing company I work for is built on shifting material online. Fisher-Price is buzzing about the tablet-style touch screen iXL Learning System, to be released this holiday season, "hailed as the iPad for the fresh-out-of-diapers set." Bibliophile or no, I'm not blind to the book digitization trend, its inevitability, nor its copious advantages:

• lower production and distribution costs
• facilitation of interpersonal engagement, through multimedia content and connection to social media
• potential for enriched learning
• portability
• "Books are the items most standing in the way of my imagined life of portability." -Tanya Paperny on LitDrift

My yielding to the technological and commercial reality, however, does not concurrently relegate physical books to some cobwebbed attic. Quite the contrary. I think books will become objects of beauty, the province of connoisseurs (I will be one of them). Max Magee of The Millions wrote,

"In a sleek, shiny, distant future, books may feel old and impossibly large, with too much physical mass and all these fussy pages put to use for the simple task of storing a tiny amount of data, data that is not searchable or copy and pasteable or malleable and interactive in the ways we expect of our data....  And yet there is and will always be some beauty in books. And there will always be people who appreciate that beauty....  [Books] are something like snowflakes or at least stamps, so many and so few alike."

Magee predicts that features like deckle-edge pages, embossed lettering and archaic monograms, aesthetic details that celebrate the art of book production, will become more prevalent and elaborate.

Jan Swafford, in a Slate article titled "Why e-books will never replace real books," takes the same stance. He cedes the many benefits of electronic books, even announcing that his next book, on Beethoven, will be "three-dimensional," accompanied by a website with links to music, background content, and a blog. He concludes,

"So real books and e-books will coexist. That has happened time and again with other new technologies that were prophesied to kill off old ones. Autos didn't wipe out horses. Movies didn't finish theater. TV didn't destroy movies. E-books won't destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print."

I am comforted by these writers' support of the notion that physical books will never be just relics. We can celebrate the beauty of books without relocating them to behind museum glass. We can own an iPad and a bookshelf in tandem. Or in my case, multiple sagging-near-to-collapse bookshelves.

Waffle Brains

Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, is concerned. Though her research as director of the Center for Reading and Language Research has not yet been conclusive, many signs point to a disturbing verdict: digital reading, as opposed to its paper-based counterpart, may actually short-circuit our brains. Wolf writes,

"We need to understand the value of what we may be losing when we skim text so rapidly that we skip the precious milliseconds of deep reading processes. For it is within these moments—and these processes in our brains—that we might reach our own important insights and breakthroughs. They might not happen if we’ve skipped on to the next text bite."

According to Wolf, the formation and development of complex brain pathways by reading takes years. She states that "there is no genetic guarantee that any individual novice reader will ever form the expert reading brain circuitry that most of us form." Thus, the brain of a reader who uses only a fraction of their available cognitive resources is less maturely developed than that of a reader who expends intellectual effort in proving multiple layers of meaning. And, just like a muscle, lack of exercise leads to atrophy. Our societal glut of immediate information, coupled with the effort to reduce that information to its tiniest magnitude, could have measurable physical effects.

Playwright Richard Foreman asks, in contemplation of the question, "How is the Internet changing the way you think," asks,

"Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button?"

Maybe as Pancake People we're also developing Waffle Brains- little nutritional value, light as air, perforated by empty space.

Corkboard

"Featuring a book on your bookshelf is akin to displaying a trophy. You’ve accomplished something in reading a book; it feels like a victory. The opportunity to display your literary conquests in unique or unexpected ways is something I will greatly miss with e-readers."

-The Book Bench

Corkboard

"The digital evolution, or revolution, or whatever it is, we're in the middle of it right now. Everyone wants to know where it ends up. But it's hard to know where it ends up when you're in the middle of it." 

-Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal

Cover Up

One fundamental difference between print and online periodicals: the concept of a front page. Magazine covers have no digital counterpart: the homepage of a magazine's website contains images, links, lists, ads, all competing for your attention. But a magazine on a newsstand makes one singular bold effort to magnetize:

99% of the time I decide what magazine to buy based on its cover. Do I like the featured celebrity? Do the headlines intrigue me? Sometimes I'll pull it off the shelf and flip through it, but more often than not my decision is made based on that initial visual contact. Much thought and muscle go into the design of an issue cover; and when the market receives it successfully the payoff is huge. No one will forget the Rolling Stone cover of Yoko and John:

or the LIFE moon landing chronicle:

Striking cover images can live in infamy unlike the nebulous homepage of a magazine's website, constantly shifting and changing and being updated and scrolled through and commented on and retweeted (I still don't know what that means). The American Society of Magazine Editors put together a "10 years in 2 minutes with 92 covers" video re-telling of the past decade.

With the migration of journalism from print to online, I consider the loss of magazine covers a considerable one. Editorial content is the heft of a publication's value, yes, but how memorable is a list of links accompanied by thumbnails on an iPhone or Kindle? Even print pubs are taking a cue from their digital cousins and offering readers cover customization: Wallpaper* Magazine is hawking the chance to "play art director for the day" and Graphic Arts Monthly offered five different covers for its January issue based on a survey of its 70,000 subscribers, each reader receiving the copy whose cover story pertained most specifically to them. The magazine industry has had flames licking at its edges for some time now- evidenced by Out of Print titles and magazine graveyards, plus magazine aggregate sites like Maggwire. But I'm fighting the trend tooth and nail- editors, and your design teams, you can still have my dollars!

Corkboard

“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if it’s a hardback, paperback, e-book or library book. Read.”

-John Grisham, addressing the graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Psst...

Middle school, for me, meant many things. Brown bag lunches with triangled tuna sandwiches and bags of Fritos; my own locker- bedecked with magnets and a plastic purple mirror; "exams" rather than tests; gym class- and a gym uniform. And note-passing.

The ideal supplies were wide-ruled notebook paper shorn of its curlicued frill, and neon highlighters. But one could make do with computer paper and pencil. We'd pick a friend- the addressee- and set to work composing a note. The real work then ensued. There were several complex ways to tuck and pleat your way to note-passer repute. The faux-envelope:

The fancy faux-envelope:

The knot:

But what mattered wasn't what the note said, or with what intricacy it was folded, but the connection between two students. It was bonding to form a devious liaison.  Even more so because there was actual effort behind the minor rebellion; the same can't be said about text messages, apparently the note-passing du jour. Just like my parents always gushed over handmade beglittered construction paper birthday cards, physical pen-and-paper notes express more than a few lines on a mobile screen. Mama Tulip blogger reminisces about her

"notes written and passed back and forth during class, notes I penned while sprawled on my daybed, listening to The Cure. Notes sent to boyfriends and best friends, a paper trail of my becoming that I kept in a shoe box under my bed....  I thought about that box and about all the notes I wrote, folded up and passed in my lifetime… and then it occurred to me that passing notes is something my kids probably won't do. I mean, in this day and age, passing notes is practically archaic. The thought makes me feel weepy. Also, old."

I've lamented the increasingly widespread abandonment of paper, from the Open Siddur Project to the superfluousness of bookmarks for eReader users. I've even waxed poetic about my love for paper itself. So even in this more recreational domain, note-passing, I feel a sense of nostalgia, plus a sadness for the generations to come whose computerized goofing-off will never be as fulfilling. It's more of a feat to hold an arts and crafts session on your desk then wait, hovering, until the perfectly timed moment to stick your hand across the aisle, than it is to punch some buttons and press send. I can only hope the middle-schoolers of today and tomorrow will set the phones down, and haul out the glue sticks and magic markers  for their parents' birthdays.

Corkboard

A case study...

"I have been using the Kindle since October, the iPad for one month, and I still buy books, lots and lots of them.

It’s a paradox of choice. In the evenings, after work, trying to figure out what suits my mood, I sit with all three of them. I am reading Nabokov’s “Despair” (the dead-tree version), trying out a free sample on the iPad (trying out samples is simpler on the iPad), and am midway through “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the Kindle. I still prefer the Kindle to the iPad for reading books, because with the iPad there is always so much more to do. I use it primarily to follow blogs like yours.

But, believe me, books (the hard copies) are not going anywhere. They rule."

-Anuradha Raja

Audiobooks

I don't like audiobooks. I never have. Reading, for me, is as much about the texture of the pages and the smell of the binding and the annotative margin scribbling as it is about the consumption of content. Listening passively to one person's interpretation of a text saps, for me, the individualized magic out of a book. What if I had imagined a character had a lower, or whinier, or more nasal voice? What if the inflections with which the narrator reads don't match up with how I had interpreted a passage? "Oh, I see" can become:

• "Ohhh... I see..."
• "OH, I see!"
• "OhIsee".

And so on. But I am one of those unfortunate motion-sickness-plagued bibliophiles who torturously suffer through long car and bus rides without the alleviation of a book. So when I was younger I'd suffer, instead, through an audiobook or two, making a tradeoff between two types of suffocating boredom.

Many, however, greatly enjoy listening to audiobooks. My uncle likes to listen on his commute to work; my mom and her friends, who by virtue of living in the suburbs spend more time than average behind the wheel, aren't opposed to the idea either. And they may be onto something. In a March Vanity Fair article, Christopher Hitchens writes,

"The concept of “books on tape” is entering a period of high attainment. Whatever may be said about “the decline of print,” about which I’ve been hearing glum predictions for dec­ades, a whole new world of bibliophilia is being created around us, not on paper but in the ether. Book clubs are formed in which members gather to listen. Internet reviews are circulating, comparing various readers of different classics. I recently had a conversation with a scholar of Henry James, who was gravely revolving the merits of David Case versus those of John Rowe as the best (or should I say most “sound”?) renderer of Marcel Proust. Fresh audio-literary stars are beginning to be born."

Hitchens's observance of the growing popularity of audiobooks doesn't encourage me to purchase one rather than its textual progenitor, but it does reassure me that wind exists yet in the sails of the traditional publishing world, albeit in an alternate form. I'd so much rather see audiobooks on shelves than vooks or blooks. Especially if they're performed by the authors themselves. And technology is (terrifyingly) moving in the direction of gauging accent and timbre and even sarcasm so that future interpretations of texts even by computers may be closer to what the author intended. The trouble, of course, is that writers sometimes do not wish for a singular translation unto their readers; as Hitchens quotes Emily Dickinson: "A Pen has so many inflections, and a Voice but one."

Despite his reluctant praise of Martin Jarvis's readings, Hitchens concludes, "To slide in a tape or a CD rather than cracking a hefty volume and making marginal notes? Mere hedonism!" Couldn't agree more.

Email Vacation

Amy E. Martin, a recent graduate from the MFA Design program at the CCA in San Francisco, wants you to take a week-long vacation from email. I happen to be doing just that, starting tomorrow: I'm off to Paris for 7 days! Martin, a graphic designer and web developer, describes her thesis work as "generating explorative studies of potential futures for email". One manifestation of the project, a result of her one-week email sabbatical, is inbox Magazine:



Martin writes,

"Coming back from my week-long email vacation last year, I realized I had not missed anything important and that checking my email once a week would probably suffice. To that end, I started thinking about email as a weekly publication instead of an always on application. I took all of my emails from that week of December 1, 2009 through December 7, 2009, organized them and laid them out as a set of magazines."

I think Martin's onto something. Her eschewal of the modern concept of constant technological engagement is refreshing in its mental emancipation, but also in its potential for revival of traditional print. She has reincarnated new media's version of written communication (emails, text messages, Tweets) into a print format. Martin's magazines fuse old and new publishing trends in a creative, intellectually sophisticated way. Reading them requires us to reexamine how we view writing, and reading. She clarifies,

"This prototype demonstrates email in a completely different, more readable, less urgent context and although it’s not practical for mass consumption, it does highlight the one-directional, informational nature of many email messages."

I like the idea of acknowledging the ubiquity of modern modes of composition, but transforming them into print-friendly configurations; the caveat is avoiding the sacrifice of quality writing, which Twitter novels and cellphone books and the like fail to heed.

Martin's email vacation idea, the motivator behind her creation of the magazines, could stand everyone in good stead. She asks, in her website challenge to sign up so she can track your progress and you can trigger an autoresponder to people who email you in your absence,

"Email bankruptcy, overload, overflowing inboxes, obsessive checking, rechecking and endless spam... By 2011, there will be 3.2 billion email users. Email's in charge of our days and our nights. It has taken over. Why? What is so compelling about email?"

Martin's reimagining of electronic text into print text is her response to this conundrum. Mine? I'll put down the mouse and pick up a book. Signing off for a full week.

University of Nevada study: Books in the home

On a recent visit to my parents, my dad and I walked over to the public library. While he went in search of the titles on his list, I wandered to the nearest shelf and scanned the rows of books for a volume thin enough to be read in entirety while I waited. My fingers found Anna Quindlen's memoir How Reading Changed My Life. I settled into a rocking chair, and read it through. I found many lines poignant enough to jot down in Notes on my iPhone to be transferred to my Moleskine of quotes; the measure of a worthy read. One such line that has stuck with me:

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

I've written before on the indispensability of books in my living space, but always from the standpoint of aesthetics, and maybe comfort. But a new 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, a University of Nevada associate professor of sociology and resource economics, declares that books in a family's home in fact correlate with more and better schooling for children. Some key findings, via Nevada News:

• "Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level."
• "The difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education)."
• "Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit."

I am fortunate enough to have been raised in a bibliophilic family, with parents and aunts and uncles and cousins who love reading. My childhood home has bookshelves in multiple rooms stocked with volumes of every stripe, from beach-worthy creased paperbacks to a tired encyclopedia collection to a Shakespeare tome to dense non-fiction hardbacks whose very jacket descriptions are a mental strain. Visits to the library were regular, trips to the bookstore were standard. To this day one of the first questions I ask my dad, to catch up: "What are you reading?"

This study, entitled "Family scholarly culture and educational success", implies that my book-soaked environment would have been sufficient to fuel me for 17 years of academic success even if I weren't also so lucky as to have two college-educated parents whose intelligence motivated me to reach for the A. I would always wonder, "How do they know all these things?" whether it be how to flute a pie crust (okay, that was a recent one) or how to sew a button or what 'encomium' means or how airplanes fly. My parents are naturally smart, yes, but their affinity for reading was also a key factor in my awed perception of their intellect.

Edan Lepucki, blogger on The Millions, has the same notion of books-on-display connoting something meaningful about their owner:

"If a stranger came over to our apartment, and there weren’t books, or–oh no!–not enough books, what would that say about me and Patrick? If my copy of Handmaid’s Tale or his copy of The Power Broker weren’t on display, how would anyone understand us? Some people have a cross in their home, or a mezuzah on their doorjamb. I’ve got nine books by Vladimir Nabokov."

Evans's data are from 70,000 cases from 27 nations. Her conclusions are wide-reaching geographically, but also metaphorically in the examination of the current state of the book world. I don't imagine that the breadth of a parent's eReader library would have the same impact on a child as a visible, touchable 500-book library. I would have had no idea whether my parents were reading email, or browsing The New York Times, or scrolling through New Yorker cartoons, or reading a digital version of Paradise Lost.

The takeaway? Go buy a book. And put it on a shelf.

Local Books iPhone App

When modern technology and traditional publishing work in tandem, wondrous things can happen. The Local Books iPhone app gives me hope that cross-pollination between the old and new media worlds exists.

Launched this past January by LibraryThing, a major social-networking-through-books website, Local Books is free and lists bookstores, libraries and book-related events based on your zipcode. The venues are wide-ranging, from public and academic libraries to chain bookstores and indie bookshops. The events include author signings, speaking engagements, kids' storytime, and book discussions. The app allows you to search and sort by date, distance, and name of location, plus add results to a list of stored Favorites. You can also adjust the search range mileage and the time frame. Sounds like a bibliophile's dream.

But Carolyn Kellogg's review in the L.A. Times is hesitant. She writes,

"As good as the venue listings are, the search function seems, in this iteration, a little creaky. Searching for "skylight" and "skylight books" turned up venues more than 999 miles away, but never delivered the Skylight Books in nearby Los Feliz."

But ultimately Kellogg concludes that Local Books has the potential to serve as a literary Urban Spoon- that is, without the nifty slot-machine-like spinning feature. Local Books' potential relies partially on users' supply of "delicious info," as Kellogg continues the restaurant database metaphor. That is, LibraryThing subscribers can submit the information that feeds the Local Books app, forming a direct engagement between the old and new worlds of publishing. I like the idea that the literary community is fueling this service, a fact that becomes clear in the mishmosh of listings: Barnes&Noble juxtaposed with the Free Library of Philadelphia with Joseph Fox Books. I also like the idea that I can use a mobile device to access a hard copy book. That's what modern publishing should be aimed at; leveraging its technological capacity to benefit its traditional cousin. Finally we're playing nice.

Blogging: Not In My Backyard?

"Riveted" is the only word with which I can describe the way I read, clicking from page 1 through to page 10, Emily Gould's tell-all article "Exposed" from the May 25, 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine. I don't even remember the waves of web browsing I rode to get there- maybe a link from PopSugar, via Entertainment Weekly, via 815 Sentences About Lost? I lost track. It was the cover story, but somehow I missed it when it published these (almost exactly) two years ago. Gould is undeniably a talented writer, and her ruthlessly honest recounting of the personal and professional turmoil she experienced in her tumble down from faux-stardom as Gawker gossip blogger was magnetizing: in dishing brashly on her and others' lives, Gould wrote often vicious aspersions of vulnerable media figures while simultaneously assuming she deserved shielding from the online voyeurs she catered to.


But those reasons aren't what really propelled me to read the piece from first sentence- "Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe."- to last- "I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking [the negative comments] out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave [my blog] open." I think Gould's frank examination of modern society's absorption of technology like a dishrag mopping up spilled milk touches on a key concept too often overlooked: the eradication of writers' privacy.



Privacy issues borne by the Internet's highly-connective nature have centered on Facebook and other social media tools. But what about the destruction of the protective barrier between writer and reader? Anyone writing on a digital platform arguably exposes themselves to the judgement of a vast, unknown audience. I have no way of taking a name-tagged head count of who even reads these posts, just as the physicians who compose research articles for the journal websites published by the company I work for have no control over the medical community's response to their work. Gossip bloggers like Emily Gould, and her manifold counterparts on Gawker-kindred sites from Jezebel to Philebrity to TMZ- subject themselves to the brutality of the public's backlash, as Gould experienced and admitted was justified.

But what about bloggers, and online journalists, and authors maintaining homepages, who are just trying to adapt their craft to the new medium? These people haven't sacrified integrity, as Gould and other bloggers at times have, for page hits. Yet appraisal comes with the territory of writing online, doesn't it? From the aggravation of a flooded inbox- which New York Times essayist Ben Yagoda writes about in The Perils of 'Contact Me'- to nasty comments on blog posts- scrapbook hobbyist and mom Jillian Deiling Cassity responded directly on her blog Scrappy Jilly to one such antagonizer- perils abound for even the most innocent of online writers.

To be heard, writers in 2010 need to migrate to an online platform. But that means the danger of encountering the dark underside of the Internet, even when such animosity is unprompted. One commenter on Gould's article wrote:

"I ask myself why, in a world where we are so aware of the greater picture around us, a certain small-minded blog culture is so thriving? Is it just a need for entertainment? For connectedness? In part, I see it as a need to create a small and manageable focus in a world where there are such incomprehensible and insensible happenings occurring."

I agree. And I also think the potential for anonymity on the Internet emboldens both the bloggers and the responders who slander, whereas the honorable, ethical writers trying to carve a path for themselves through the brambles of the current state of publishing are doing just the opposite: highlighting their bylines in hopes of discovery. The paradox is when these phenomena overlap, and the good guys get hurt.

Why I'm Afraid of Twitter

In a January 1 New York Times editorial entitled "Why Twitter Will Endure", David Carr wrote,

"Some time soon, the company won’t say when, the 100-millionth person will have signed on to Twitter to follow and be followed by friends and strangers. That may sound like a MySpace waiting to happen — remember MySpace? — but I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay."

He backs up this bold statement with several articulate arguments:

1. It's a source of "incredibly vital, timely information... from really bright people in their respective fields".
2. It's a means by which we can glean succinct, pithy information in lieu of spouting-off, because of the 140-character confines and tools like the hashtag (which collects comments by topic).
3. It's a source of "algorithmic authority", in his words, "meaning that if all kinds of people are pointing at the same thing at the same instant, it must be a pretty big deal."

Okay. Fine. I cede those points. It's an effective, efficient mode of communication in an information-inundated technological climate. But in the milieu of writing, it is also a loss of voice. And what do writers have if they don't have their voice? Every writing instructor and magazine editor has imparted the fact that cutthroat editing, writing short and sweet, is a greater challenge than writing lengthily with eloquence. So I'm not implying that the Twitter platform is fundamentally opposed to strong writing. But the users, as a vast whole, are.

I support the use of social media products like Facebook and Twitter for just that- social media. But the threat of corrosion of quality news media and literary craft is undeniably due, in part, to the spreading-like-a-virus use of these communicative tools. Why painstakingly construct a well-reported and -composed piece of narrative writing to spark debate when an economical 140-character message blasted into the digital cosmos will accomplish the same? I'm not claiming that award-worthy writing is dead, or dying. I'm just worried that the overlap in usage- social and professional- in a creative product like Twitter is working toward a level medium in which we'll forget there was ever a difference between the two.

Perhaps the most worrisome: Carr wrote his editorial January 1, the first day of a new decade. A coincidence? Or is his message, then, harbinger of our publishing future?

Edible Book Festival 2010

Sometimes it seems like there's no end to the reimagination of traditional publishing. Cell phone novels? Poetry television? Movie trailers for books? We're on the cusp of a new epoch, and it's anyone's guess as to what the landscape will look like in even five years. Some of these ventures I disparage for their corrosion of valuable writing; some for their utter ridiculousness. But there's nothing wrong with a dose of whimsy.

And so I applaud the efforts of the Topeka, Kansas library's fourth annual Edible Book Festival 2010. Organizer Brea Black called the caliber of the entries "amazing". That's a combination of "witty", "mouth-watering" and "literarily sophisticated."

Cooking and booking: two passions of mine, and many others. Thinking creatively about moving publishing into the future has no downside; especially when it leads to edible solutions!

Stalking the Stock

"Birds of a feather flock together," the saying goes. Translation: you can judge people by the company they keep. I've taken this a step further: I cop to judging people by the literary company they keep.

The first thing I'm drawn to in someone's apartment, or house, or office, is their book collection. I can't help but pass some light judgement based on their reading material. The New York Times' Book Bench blog has a feature called The Subconscious Shelf wherein readers submit snapshots of their bookshelves for analysis.

The "Subconscious Shelf" bolsters my view that you can judge people by their (book) covers. You can glean what genres and time periods and authors interest them most, yes, but you can also gauge their personality: a Dave Barry collection amid the great classics suggests a sparkle of wit in an otherwise serious academic; a Dan Brown novel among contemporary Pulitzer- and PEN/Faulkner- winners conveys a desire to treat the modern literary landscape democratically, politics-driven award committees be damned. The way a reader organizes their shelf also speaks volumes: are they scatter-brained-professor disheveled, fastidiously color-coded neat, architecturally inclined?

Stacked Up TV Productions is another initiative in highlighting readers', in this case specifically writers', shelves. The company's blog explains,

"A mashup of MTV’s Cribs, Oprah’s Book Club and The Paris Review, each five-minute Stacked Up episode features one of your favorite writers giving an insider’s tour of his or her library. We’ve found the best way to know writers is by the books they keep."

Readers beget writers, so what better tool of analysis of a writer than to "read"- evaluate- their collection of books? Of course, this appraisal is lost with the advent of eReaders. With covers masked and physical book collections dwindling in favor of Kindle- and Nook-loadable texts, the opportunity to uncover even a tidbit of insider information about a reader is dissolving. That is, unless we can outpace technology's seam-ripping of the integrated reading community and simply ask someone, "What do you like to read?"

Corkboard

"Never before in the history of the known universe has there been so much information available to us humans. And never before has it been so difficult to process all the information we receive. Some consultant recently told me that the average American is bombarded with 4000 messages a day (fact-checkers, back me up on this.) Those of us who are informationalists—people who work with information professionally—must be assaulted more often. The toughest challenge, I find, is wading out of the cresting information river to experience media for frivolity’s sake or simply escaping the churning waters altogether for a few moments. If I manage to do either, it's usually after tending to the dishes in the kitchen late at night. Then I head to bed, look at that stack of books, feel a pang of guilt, and shut out the light. I do miss reading. Nowadays, we absorb."

-Mother Jones Washington bureau chief and Politics Daily columnist David Corn