Category Archives: Books

Has The Publishing Industry Learned Anything from the Music Industry?

May 19, 2011 – 5:46 pm

One of the headlines that caught my attention today is that Amazon has reported their e-books are outselling their print books, and it took less than four years for that shift to occur. This timeline is shorter than most had predicted.

This isn’t surprising, but it lends further credence to the fact that the music revolution of the 2000s is now occurring in the publishing world. After the iPod became ubiquitous with digital music sales, the music industry had to redefine itself. The music industry is still adapting to that seismic shift in customer consumption of content, especially with the nearing announcement of Apple’s “iCloud” to match Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Google’s Music Beta cloud service. (Are there really people that will use these services?)

However, even with the model that the music industry (failed to) give to the publishing industry, is the publishing industry ready for their own seismic shift? I was recently made aware of the so-called Kindle millionaire, Amanda Hocking, and I’ve been reading posts here and there (E-books vs. P-books and What Would You Pay for an E-book?) regarding how the pricing structure of Kindle books, and e-books in general, has affected our consumption of these particular formats of books.

It would appear that the Kindle is playing the role of the iPod, and that the current price points of ebooks are akin to the price points of their musical counterparts, i.e. most songs are 99 cents and most books hover around the $9.99 price point. However, many independent authors have experienced success in allowing their electronic books to be sold for 99 cents.

Will their success drive down prices across the digital board, or will their success be the loss leaders for their own other works?
Ten years from now, will books still be mass-produced or simply made on-demand?
At what point does the ease of access and appealing price point of an e-book overwhelm traditional publishing?
Has it already happened, or are there a few decades left?
Will we soon become a society in which the digerati fight the literati?

If so, which side will you be on?

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Starting the Job Hunt: Princeton Review Career Quiz

April 13, 2010 – 7:36 pm

I picked up the perennial bestseller (10,00,000 copies!) of What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers on Sunday. The top line of the cover lists this version as the “Hard Times” Edition. Seeing that made me wonder, again, why in the world am I doing this, when so many people have been out of work for so long? It’s a question I dismiss quickly. Despite the inherent fears in jumping into the great abyss of an unknown future (well, it’s all unknown), I know this to be the right thing to do at this point in my life. So, in hopes of a good conclusion to this journey, I’ll document some of this process.

In What Color is Your Parachute, author Richard Bolles lists a few sites for career quizzes. While I’m fairly knowledgeable about who I am, what I can do, and the type of job I’m looking for, I thought I’d give a few of them a try. The very first test, all of twenty-four, very easy to answer questions, pegged me. If you’re looking to be told what a good career path might be for you, try the Princeton Review’s Career Quiz. Here are my results, if you’re interested:

Your Interest Color is BLUE
People with blue Interests like job responsibilities and occupations that involve creative, humanistic, thoughtful, and quiet types of activities. Blue Interests include abstracting, theorizing, designing, writing, reflecting, and originating, which often lead to work in editing, teaching, composing, inventing, mediating, clergy, and writing.

Your usual style is YELLOW
People with yellow styles perform their job responsibilities in a manner that is orderly and planned to meet a known schedule. They prefer to work where things get done with a minimum of interpretation and unexpected change. People with a yellow style tend to be orderly, cautious, structured, loyal, systematic, solitary, methodical, and organized, and usually thrive in a research-oriented, predictable, established, controlled, measurable, orderly environment. You will want to choose a work environment or career path in which your style is welcomed and produces results.

Careers from The Princeton Review Guide To
Your Career linked to “Blue” interest:

Clergy–Priest, Rabbi, Minister, Imam

College Administrator

Human Resources Manager

Management Consultant

Occupational Therapist

Public Health Administrator

Book Publishing Professional

Substance Abuse Counselor

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Books Christianity Life Quotes Websites

Feigning Fearlessness

March 31, 2010 – 11:12 pm

Allow me to quote a quote of a quote:

“He was a frail, sickly child, afraid of many things. So he stayed inside his house a lot and read books, mainly adventure stories. One day he was reading a novel by the English author Frederick Marryat. In his autobiography, Roosevelt records what happened:

‘In this passage the captain of some small British man-of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough, it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it.’”

In context (The Art of War for Writers, to be precise), author J.S. Bell is talking about feigning fearlessness in the face of the daunting tasks of living a writing life, to act as if you are one until you become one. Author Steven Pressfield would call this manning your station, day-in, day-out, so that the Muse will find you hard at work and reward you as such.

And while this is helpful and true and beneficial advice, I read more into it.

The warring parts of my soul (some might even say the Jacob hovering above my right shoulder and the Lockeness Smoke Monster hovering over my left) answer the conundrum of feigning fearlessness differently.

Smokey answers: Your bad habits? The things you despise about yourself? The things you always want to change but you never seem to be able to shake them? You’ve been feigning godliness for a long time. Your pretense is not your reality. I know what’s real. You should just give up.

Jacob answers: I know what’s real. I can see behind the facade of your charades. I know your heart, your will. You have, actually, been feigning godliness for a long time, but that makes you just like all the others. And to see that you still try, despite the short hand you’ve been dealt? That you keep pressing on and pressing in and pressing forward impresses me. Don’t forget that. But don’t let it go to your head either.

And I answer: I used to be afraid, and because I was afraid I became numb. When the world changed and I was shocked back into feeling reality, I barely held on. I almost lost my grip, but I kept feigning fearlessness, and now that fearlessness… it’s almost real.

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Books Technology Videos

Tech Tuesday: The iPad

March 30, 2010 – 11:00 am

The iPad releases into the wild this Friday. I don’t have one… yet. I’ll most likely cave and get one in the not-so-distant future, even though I have a difficult time justifying the expense. However, Kindles and Nooks continue to intrigue me because of their size and portability, even though there’s nothing like the texture, smell, and look of a physical book. I’ve (surprisingly) staved off buying an ebook reader since they’ve become commercially available, and I’m glad I waited, because the iPad, for a comparable price given its extensive capabilities, does things like this:

So the selling point for me is the iBookstore, and magazines like Wired that are going to make full use of the iPad’s capabilities.

And, just so you know, my birthday’s in a few months.
A milestone one at that.
Just saying.

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Books Life Quotes

Finding Your Authentic Swing

March 29, 2010 – 9:00 am

I first became aware of author Steven Pressfield because of his kick-you-in-the-face book on writing, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. It’s concise, stellar, and brutal. If you crave creative fulfillment, you need this book.

I was consequently delightfully surprised to learn that he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life. And while I think I saw the movie, I can’t remember if I finished it. I picked up Legend about a month ago from a local used bookstore. I read it this past weekend. I’ve read a few other books on the “mystic” qualities of golf and life, but they all pale in comparison to what Pressfield did in Bagger. And while I plan to watch the movie again, I’m pretty sure the screen adaptation doesn’t live up to where the book took me. To wit, this passage, especially pointed for the smitten, frustrated golfer:

“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once – one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle – and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They are gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.”