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

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

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!

Mark My Words

I'm a bookmark rotater. Every time I start a new book, I slip in a different page-saver. I think of reading as an experience: each book has its own feel, smell, appearance and thus merits its own bookmark.

I have stacks of them in various drawers throughout my apartment. Creased and folded thin paper ones from Borders, sturdy laminated ones from elementary school art class, glossy cardboard American Girl Dolls ones, elegantly artistic ones straight from the check-out line at Barnes & Noble, or some stamped with readerly quips ("Ssh! I'm reading"). Some of my bookmarks aren't bookmarks at all: Phillies tickets, a swatch of red-hearts-patterned stationery paper that caught my eye. If I start a book somewhere away from my stash, I'll use a PostIt or a receipt or even a tissue. But it's always different, a marker linked to that particular text. Of course I reuse my bookmarks- their recycling is what infuses them with that treasured lived-in quality- but from one reading to the next, each deserves a breather.

It's been a while since I bought a new bookmark, but not for lack of temptation. I love these from swissmiss:

Obviously the migration of reading to a digital platform eradicates bookmarks. Saving your place becomes automated, and dog-earing a random page becomes a computerized mimicry:

"On any content page, use the scroll wheel to select the small triangle in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click the scroll wheel and you’ll see the small triangle now looks like it was folded down."

What about my Phillies tickets? What about those American Girl Dolls bookmarks I've saved for over a decade? What about the comfort and familiarity of seeing a book sitting on your nightstand with a marker sticking out as a symbol of those hard-earned pages gone by, and the reward that is the rest of those pages to come?

Computerized bookmarking in general is a useful tool: flagging websites for future reference, highlighting or recording a note in Word to track your reading progress. But electronically bookmarking for-pleasure reading is just one more depersonalization of the reading experience. I'll take the frustration of bookmarks slipping out into the bottom of my purse over scroll-wheel-clicking any day.

A thorn in the flesh?

The extent of my experience with video games: playing Crash Bandicoot and Jeopardy with my sister and friends on our PS2 in high school, plus a game or two of Rock Band at a frat house in college. Add to that many a couch-side observation of frantic, near-foaming male friends' tooth-and-nail battles on the faux-football field or -race car track, and that about does it.

But the recent trend of video game adapatation of literature may force me to acquaint myself more familiarly with the console. This past November, MediaBistro blog GalleyCat cited the B&H Publishing Group's creation of Bible Navigator X, a Bible Reader for Xbox 360. Yes, you read that right. According to Aaron Linne, B&H Publishing Group's executive producer of digital marketing:

"The Xbox isn't just secular entertainment anymore. We can use technology that other people developed to study Scriptures through a new medium. Some people are just more comfortable with a controller in their hands than a book."

The application is available for $5 or 400 Microsoft Points, the currency of the Xbox Live marketplace. Bible Reader users can search, bookmark and adjust settings for big screen readings or customized reading themes.

My initial reaction was skepticism at the sacriligious undertones of manipulating the Bible with technology normally reserved for gory car theft games and virtual wrestling matches. But, really, how different is this venture from the Kindle's digitization of texts, or "cellphone novels" written with and read on mobile phones? (Among best selling novels of the last 3 years, 4 of the top 10 novels in Japan were written with cellphones, like the entire bookcase's contents below.)

The video game lit genre is here to stay: Electronic Arts and Random House recently teamed to release a video game version of Dante's Inferno, in which players can explore the circles of hell interactively in addition to on the page. Much like the vook, these video games meld literary quality and enhanced new media features with the aim of providing a rich, multi-faceted experience of a text. But unlike the vook, games allow readers to physically participate, justifying the hijacking of literature as raw material. Furthermore, the games aren't trying to edge out books from the publishing world, but rather supplement them.

Here's my video game aficionado friend Billy on yet another benefit of video game adapation of books:

"Ask a middle schooler or high-schooler if they remember anything about The Crucible, The Things They Carried, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984, etc, and they won't be able to recount it with either the vividness or enthusiasm they'll be able to tell the story of Link and the Triforce (Legend of Zelda), the moment Sephiroth killed Aeris in front of Cloud (Final Fantasy 7), minute details about the T-Virus (Resident Evil), etc etc. All of these have intricate plots with the same kind of research, details, development, and copious amounts of dialogue one expects from either a book or movie. But you are far more invested."

Just as with every other new age form of literature I've addressed, these intellectualized video games will never replace tangible paperbacks for me. But I'm willing to cede their beneficially immersive treatment of text. I'll consider them less a thorn in the flesh of the publishing industry, and more an aggravatingly itchy tag in the back of my shirt.

A strange case indeed

Today I finished the first complete book I've read in a digital format: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I read it in Google Books. And I hated every minute of it.

As Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, says in a New York Times forum on eBooks,

"People read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read. Reading on screen requires slightly more effort and thus is more tiring."

Each of these troubles came into play for me, totally detracting from my enjoyment of the material. I chose the title for its compelling storyline and short length, in an effort to fortify myself against the enemy. Didn't work.

I've acknowledged a resignation to the fact that I'll eventually buy an eReader. All technological innovations with staying power become mainstream and thusly lose their classification as an "innovation", easing into an assumptive part of our lives. I never thought I'd have one of those cell phones that lets you check email on the go- texting wasn't even prevalent until I went to college; never thought I'd have a DVR to record TV shows and movies- growing up, if you didn't watch a show real-time, you didn't watch it. That is unless you taped it on a clunky VHS, whose agonizing fastforward and rewind functions made it near impossible to find the segment you were hunting for, or else you miraculously caught the show on re-run.

Some day, quite probably, eReaders like the Kindle will be ubiquitous. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said of the Kindle's success in a Slate interview,

"The business is growing very quickly. [But] this is not just a business for us.There is missionary zeal. We feel like Kindle is bigger than we are."

Bezos goes on to say that he never reads "books on paper" anymore "if he can help it". Granted I didn't read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on a Kindle, but rather my computer screen. My reading experience consisted of scanning a table of contents and scrolling up and down. I could search for a word or phrase within the book if I wanted- but when have I ever recreationally read a piece of fiction and wished I had the capability of locating every mention of the main character's name, or the word "night"? Maybe students would appreciate that function, but my current perspective is that of an average reader. Even for my job as a publishing assistant I can't imagine having to parse a passage- we're concerned with the life of the material after its composition.

Beyond Google Books' reading enhancements, gadgets like the Kindle offer (pseudo)annotation, bookmarking, collaboration with other readers, etc. But "if i can help it" I still won't be reading another "book on screen" any time soon, even with the debut of devices like the iPad and the two-screen eReader enTourage eDGe, or any of the other products publicized at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January- see a slideshow here.

This Christmas marked the first time Kindle eBooks outsold physical books on Amazon.com. Digital reading is here to stay. But so are traditional readers like me. And I'm not moving an inch just yet.

The white perimeter

From "Marginalia" by Billy Collins:

"We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge."

I'm going to avoid the term "neat freak". Also "OCD" and "anal retentive". But I like things neat. My files at work, both print and electronic, are organized into sub-sub-categories, and my apartment is always uncluttered. My mom got me in the habit at a young age of making my bed every morning, and that fastidiousness grew to translate into every other corner of my life.

I've gotten better. These days a little jumble adds welcome color. My bedroom desk is besprinkled with Post-its, an odd paper clip and stray flyers or tickets, and well-thumbed magazines are drunkenly accordioned on my coffee table. Gone are the days of the rainbow-coordinated sock drawer and the oh-so-ginger transportation of books to avoid creases or crumpling. I remember when a classmate doodled on my empty notebook page in middle school before the teacher started class, I flipped to a fresh sheet when the time came to take notes.

But when it comes to annotation- or marginalia, as coined in 1832 by the keen margin scribbler Samuel Taylor Coleridge- I've always been a subscriber. In an eloquent post on the Guardian's Books Blog, Toby Lichtig expresses his fondness for "defacing" books with the smears and scrawls that herald ownership of that book. He writes:

"I'm not just talking about highbrow jottings: notes and queries, references and witticisms, the literary art of "marginalia". No, in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains."

I wholeheartedly endorse Lichtig's contention: your imprint on a book connects its flesh to yours. Your jottings, relevant or not, and your "mutilation"- Lichtig talks about torn covers, bathtub-submersions- will be forever bound to your experience of the book. In the manner of the if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods commonplace: if you don't leave your thumbprint on a book, what does it matter if you've read it?

My annotative habits include underlining resonant quotes, dog-earing pages with provoking passages, occasionally scribbling a phone number if the open book on my lap is the only available writing surface. I, too, can claim responsibility for a coffee stain or two, a dirt smudge from a book riding around in my purse. Needless to say, neat freak or not, leaving traces in a book I own is an inextricable part of the reading process. Not all readers and writers agree:

But I'm with Lichtig, and Coleridge, and the herds of twitching-pen-armed readers eager to eat the books they read. I know eReaders like the Kindle have annotative capabilities- I made my friend show me how she organizes notes on the psychology journals she reads for her grad school program- but what does a computerized list of remarks have to tell me about who, or where, I was when I read something? Or my mood? Or what was going on in my life? The organic nature of reading a real book owes much to this practice of annotation, in my mind, and I'm not giving it up without a fight. Or, at the very least, a considerable price reduction.