Nothing to See Here

As you can tell, I've been very bad about keeping this blog up to date. It's been a busy few months, and I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing more, not to mention a hundred other things on various to-do lists.

It's not all that feasible to keep two blogs up and running, especially since my bookstore-opening advances aren't exactly advancing at the moment. This is not to say I'm giving up that goal; I am, however, mostly watching to see how other successful booksellers weather the changing industry, and sometimes that can be kind of like watching grass grow.

So, if you're following me on this little corner of the web, you probably already know about my other blog. It's where all the neat stuff will be for the foreseeable future, including the bookish things.

We're not turning the lights off here, merely dimming them for awhile before the grand reopening. In the meantime, feel free to switch your links and bookmarks around to point to L'esprit d'escalier, where I'll be kicking off the book bloggery over there in time for Banned Books Week.

Farewell, George Carlin

I don't remember when I first became aware of George Carlin. I like to think it was before Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, but I can't be sure. I know I'd heard A Place for My Stuff by then, but whether or not I realized that was the same person playing Rufus or not is unclear.

Somewhere between Bill &Ted and Dogma, I caught up on my Carlin education. We sold his books in the bookstore. If I heard a snippet of his routine while flipping channels, I'd pause and watch the whole thing. He was a comedian whose work I admired.

I was lucky enough to meet him.

One of the perks of my job is that every now and then I get to be in the same room with famous people. They write books, I sell books. It works out nicely. I'm not high enough on the totem pole to do much more than smile politely and shake a hand before moving on, but it's still one of those job benefits that isn't written down on any piece of paper. When I consider what I want to do after this, it's one of the things I know I'll be giving up, and it makes me a little sad.

In 2004, he wrote When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? and came to sales conference to talk to us. He read a few pages, having to ad-lib some of it since either the print was too small or one of the pages he'd printed out had gone missing. He stood at the podium while we sipped at our post-lunch coffees and talked for a while about his career and his life, and what the book was about. He took questions from us. He was open and honest, and of course, hilarious.

We had some time after the Q&A was finished to introduce ourselves, and I waited around, intending to just dart in, say thank you, and leave. The knot of people he was talking to shifted and I edged my way into the circle, just to listen. He noticed the newcomer - he noticed every time one of the faces surrounding him changed - and for each of us, he'd pause to say hello.

I don't remember what he said to me. It was most likely that kind of small talk you make when you're shaking the hand of someone you've never met and will never see again, but it wasn't a plain "Nice to meet you." I was utterly charmed by whatever it was he said (and I'm kicking myself that I don't recall the words), and I stood there awhile, entranced, listening to him patter on with the other reps.

I was, for a few moments, in the presence of someone I greatly admired. His was a brilliant voice, speaking truth through humor, making us think about politics, language and our treatment of one another. The world is a little dimmer today.

Review: Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life

In a conversation about favorite authors with some friends last night, Robert R. McCammon came up.

We discussed our love for his Blue World, and how we'd read Swan Song on the heels of The Stand, which made us love it all the more. We talked about how Usher's Passing was a wonderful, creepy follow-up to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," and about McCammon's general awesomeness.

But the book of his I love the very most, the one I have that is so tattered and dog-eared that it's held together by a rubber band, is Boy's Life.

Let's see if I can remember my handselling pitch: It's about a boy and his friends, growing up in a small town in 1960s Alabama. It's a coming-of-age story, and a murder mystery, and a story of how a family deals with a changing world. It's about a storyteller, and magic, bike rides and summertime, a carnival and a monster, the Beach Boys and ghosts, the loyalty of dogs, a single green feather, a boy with a perfect arm, and the history of a black arrowhead.

I cry every time I read it. Twice.

I could, if you asked me to right now, recite the poem at the beginning of the book. There are phrases from it that I'll never forget, and scenes that I can close my eyes and envision.

It's about friendship, and families, and how even the people you love the most have their flaws, and you love them anyway.

In McCammon's own words:

I say Boy's Life is not about lost innocence, because I believe we all maintain the pool of innocence and wonder inside us no matter how far we get away from our childhood. I believe this pool can be revisited, and we can immerse ourselves in its healing water if we dare to take the risk of knowing again the children we used to be. This is a risky thing, because once we look back---once we let that wonderful pool take us in again---we may not ever fully return to being the adults we are now.

Boy's Life, like The Stand, is one of the books I returned to every summer for several years. It's been a long while since I've revisited either of those worlds, my summers having been swallowed up by other things these past few years. But I'm feeling that ache again, for both of them. I think it's long past time for the rereads.

And, because my tattered old copy might not be able to withstand another reading, Pocket Books is reissuing Boy's Life in trade paperback in July. Excellent timing.

Sign Me Up

I had this post planned about Indie Bound, the new program that will be replacing Book Sense, which I think looks really neat and has the excitement and momentum to do amazing things.

However, I then saw this and all rational thought flew out of my head.

The Stand.

In comic book form.

And I have to wait until September before it happens.

/wails

The adaptation of The Dark Tower has so far been excellent - the writing, the art, the feel of that world. I will only imagine good things for the translation of my favorite book of all time into comic book form.

So, help me out here, O Those Who Read My Ramblings - what books would you love to see done as comic books? Which ones have already been done that you think are particularly good or particularly bad? Which titles would make you gnash your teeth and go "Nooooo! They'll fuck it up!" if a comic version was to be announced?

To Tide You Over

I'm spreading in Shannon's book meme. (Which was spread from somewhere else, and somewhere else before that, and so on, as all good memes are.)

The rules!

Copy the list of books, then bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Here goes (with occasional commentary)...

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (I could swear I bought it, but I can't find it. I am ashamed.)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (The first pop quiz I ever had came when we were reading this book my freshman year in high school. I actually hadn't read the chapter yet (le gasp), but somehow I managed to squeak out a passing grade.)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife (Loved, loved, loved it.)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner (I keep intending to read this.)
Mrs. Dalloway (Read it for school and loved it. It gets a bolding.)
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books (No, I don't know why I haven't read it yet, either.)
Memoirs of a Geisha (At an airport flying home, had given away whatever ARC I was reading to a bookseller I was visiting. The magazine stand had a bunch of meh paperbacks and this. I almost missed the call to board my flight, I was so entranced.)
Middlesex (No, but I have read The Virgin Suicides and loved it. Middlesex is on the list to buy.)
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel (I expected to hate it - I did my honors thesis on vampire literature (the English department collectively /facepalmed, I'm sure), so it takes a lot to impress me. Then I found out Kostova did ten years of research for this book. I loved it. I wouldn't shut up about it the whole summer.)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Y'know... I didn't hate it.)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
Anansi Boys
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels and Demons (I want those hours back, plzkthx)
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon (So, uh. My friend Eric has been recommending this forever, but when I was wandering the bookstore trying to remember which book he'd raved about, I got confused and thought he'd been talking about Neuromancer (hey, airport bookstore, 6:00 AM, no coffee. My brain wasn't on.) I loved Neuromancer. Now I need to go get Cryptonomicon.
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Spent the whole book nodding. I would have shouted "Amen!" every few lines, but I read most of it on the train. People tend to look at you funny when you do that.)
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

---

There are a lot of books on this list I'd still like to get around to. I'm kind of sad more of them aren't highlighted, but somehow the teachers and professors I had in high school and college deviated wildly from the lists of standard assigned reading. I can't complain, but the list feels light.

Of course, my genres-of-preference, sf/f and horror, don't have a lot of entries on the list unless the books are hugely successful. Hmph.

Brief Interruption of Service

It's been a while since I've rambled at you. I've fallen a bit behind on industry news, and I spent most of last weekend doing family things and planting herbs, so there wasn't a lot of time to catch up on my reading. I've also been bitten by a writing bug, so while that's a good thing for me, it's made this blog a lonely place.

Unless there's a way to plug the eReader directly into my brain, I am going to be reviewless this week.

Back Tuesday with more yattering about bookish things. Until then, I might spill words onto screen over at the other blog. Come visit!

Technology and Me, a Love-Hate Relationship

There was no review on Friday because the internet gods decided I didn't need to be connected to the outside world for the day. However, I have sweet, sweet connectivity now. Rejoice!

Also, I believe my Sony Reader might be fried, somehow. It had about half-battery on Thursday. I didn't touch it all weekend. Then, this morning, while I was waiting for the train to arrive, I pulled it out of my purse and tried turning it on.

Nothing.

Assuming that, somehow, the battery simply ran out, I plugged it into my computer when I arrived at work.

Nothing.

No icon letting me know that it's charging, no acknowledgment that something is plugged into the USB port on my computer. I haven't the faintest idea what might have killed it this dead, but it's not responding to anything.

Yet another argument for why paper books will always, always trump these devices. Right now, it seems to me, I have a $300 lump of metal and plastic and parts with no entertainment value whatsoever.

Tuesday Musing: Customer Service as a Value-Add

Yesterday, I heard an advertisement on NPR for a local realtor. The ad promised "exceptional customer service." I couldn't tell you the name of the company or what other things they might have offered, because I was so instantly caught up in that phrase.

It's something I see and hear in a lot of ads these days, this promise to be nice to customers, to be helpful and knowledgable and to, generally, not suck.

It floors me.

Exceptional customer service is something that should be understood. A business shouldn't have to promise that they'll do these things; they should just do them. Every person who walks through your door should be treated with respect. You go above and beyond for every. single. customer, whether they're buying $500 worth of merchandise or spending fifty cents on a newspaper.

Does that mean falling all over yourself and fawning on the customers? No, of course not. Then you're being disingenuous.

But a smile and a hello go a long way, as does knowing when to offer help and when to let the person browse in peace.

I can't wrap my head around why so many businesses these days toot their own horns about how great they are to their customers. Some of it, perhaps, is to suggest that the competition falls flat in that area. But it also sounds a bit like maybe that particular company wasn't doing so well on the service side before and has refocused. It serves to make me less confident about doing business with them, rather than more.

Should a commitment to great service be part of a company's mission statement? Certainly. However, it's an internal thing. Trumpeting the fact that you're good to your customers to the public sounds the same to me as the supermarket promising it will carry food.

Exceptional customer service should be a given. If you have to tell people you're going to provide it, you're doing it wrong. Shut up and do it. Let your actions speak for themselves.

Review: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

I hinted a bit about how today's pick was an author who didn't agree with the whole DRM thing. It's more than that. This book, like all of his books, was released under a Creative Commons license. Go look it up; it's a really interesting idea.

The author in question is Cory Doctorow, whom you might also know as the co-editor of Boing Boing.

I have so many things to say about his new YA book, Little Brother, that I'm not even sure where to begin. I suppose the best place is with a synopsis. So!

Marcus Yallow, a high school senior in San Fransciso, ditches school with three of his friends to play an Alternate Reality Game. While they're tracking down a clue, terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge. Marcus and his friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and find themselves taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security.

When they're released - after several days of cruel interrogation - Marcus realizes how many of the freedoms he'd taken for granted are now being taken away under the guise of "keeping America safe." He's a tech-savvy kid, and he's brave enough and angry enough to undermine the DHS and start a kind of electronic rebellion.

Rebellion, of course, comes with consequences.

The introduction alone makes for interesting reading. Doctorow talks about DRM and copyright in a very accessible way. The internet is changing how artists have to think about distribution, be that authors, musicians, photographers, anyone. As Doctorow says, quoting Tim O'Reilly: "For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." He makes the case that DRM is more a hurt than a help, hence why part of his deal with his publishers is that you can download Little Brother for free. (Ohyes. Go do it now.)

Every chapter is dedicated to a different bookstore, with a blurb about them or an anecdote of Doctorow's own experiences with the stores and their employees. Obviously, authors aren't going to leave the chains out - B&N, Borders, Amazon and a few others get their mentions, but the real gems are the shout-outs to Borderlands, Mysterious Galaxy, Tattered Cover, and the other indies.

And so, on to the story itself.

We meet Marcus just as he's getting ready to sneak out of school for the afternoon. The book is set in the near-future: the year isn't specified, but I'd guess it's around 2010 or so. The technology is a bit more advanced than present-day, but nothing is terribly far-fetched. They use school-issued laptops that log keystrokes and monitor the sites kids visit during classtime. Of course, Marcus has found his way around this, running a browser and an IM session that flies under the radar. You know right off the bat he's a damned smart kid.

His voice, to me, initially came off as cocky and a bit pretentious, but I had to remind myself that this is YA lit. It's not going to read the same way as other things I enjoy. (It's been suggested in the discussions at Making Light that the voice sounds almost like Doctorow's own. I am at best an infrequent visitor to his blogs, so I can't speak to that, myself.) However, once I let myself consider the audience a bit, and think of what I enjoyed reading 15 or so years ago, I was able to move past what bothered me. Younger-me would quite likely haved liked Marcus from page one.

There's a lot of talk about security and surveillance, and a third of the way in, I was chilled. Doctorow's not just making this stuf up. You can google plenty of the things mentioned throughout the book, and what makes it all the more terrifying is how plausible all of it is. What doesn't exist yet will soon, or already does, but just isn't available to the public yet. And here I am, all proud of myself for using Firefox as my browser with NoScript installed, and I've barely even scratched the surface when it comes to protecting my privacy online.

While Marcus can be a bit of a smartass, standing up and mouthing off a bit to the vice principal and later, the DHS agents, his bravado very quickly disappears when the fear kicks in. It's refreshing, when so many times in YA - in fan fiction and in published novels both - the main character snots all over the place and gets away with it. When Marcus tries, he learns that it doesn't work that way.

When he begins his rebellion, he also learns (several times) that his actions have consequences. Sure, it's fun tying up all of San Francisco by messing with RFIDs and screwing up tracking patterns. But when other kids get detained (not, mind you arrested - very few people are actually arrested and charged over the course of the book), Marcus realizes that his calls for civil disobedience may very well get other people tortured. At a concert-turned-protest, kids get gassed when they don't disperse. It scares the hell out of him - I did this. I started it. He doubts himself. He gets scared as much for his own safety as he is for others'. When it looks like the DHS will be actively going after the kids caught jamming, he sends out a plea for people to stop.

In times like those, when he's ready to give up and lay low, to try living a life as close to normal as he can, it's his friends' passion and commitment to winning back their freedom that keeps him going. It's never easy to do these things alone.

Of course, when your main character is seventeen, chances are there's going to be a bit of romance. There's a girl named Ange, and she and Marcus fall for each other. Ange is a good character, as much a leader as Marcus is. She's strong and not afraid to say what she wants. There's a lot of talk about the chances of Little Brother making its way onto banned books lists. I certainly think it will, though not because it encourages kids to look for holes and flaws in security systems. I have a feeling that all the technology and the idea of speaking out for your rights will be overlooked in place of "Oh my god, two kids have sex." It's honestly not graphic, and doesn't take up all that much of the story. It's told in a voice that's a bit awkward and a bit breathless and completely taken up by this new love, and then we fade to black (but not before we are informed that they'll be using a condom.)

Marcus gets a bit melodramatic every once in a while when he talks about Ange ("Ange, my Ange, my angel...") but most of the time, it's just a kid in a relationship, feeling all those Big New Love things.

I'm torn about my feelings on the end of the book. For the first half, Marcus feels like they can't possibly tell any adults what happened to them in the days after the bombings - no one's going to buy their story. It's believable enough, when you consider how afraid they were made to be. Even if they did talk to their parents, they were scared that it would only land them right back where they'd been.

By the end, though, he goes and tells his parents, and they are supportive, as is the journalist they go and talk to. There's a deus ex machina moment at the end, where he's been taken into custody once again, and just as it's getting really bad, in comes the cavalry. I'm not quite sure it works. On the one hand, it's a situation you very much don't want Marcus to be in. On the other, it feels a bit contrived.

There's a debate about the amount of exposition happening over at Making Light as well. I felt it was mostly seamless. Marcus occasionally went into detailed explanation about the things his readers might not know. How many kids actually know what LARPing is? What do you know about cryptography, internet protocols, and Alan Turing? He explains it and manages to make it all accessible. He doesn't veer into jargon without defining it. He doesn't talk down to the reader.

The place where the exposition bogs down, actually is where Marcus isn't the one As-You-Know-Bobbing. His teacher, Ms. Galvez, tells the class about the hippie movement, and that gets clunky, like he didn't quite have the right rhythm for the dialogue. The history itself was interesting, but the presentation could have been better.

I worry a bit that the swiftness with which the DHS steps in (and how quick they are to resort to stress positions and other forms of torture) is hard to accept, though I think this is more my own personal trouble with suspension of disbelief than it is Doctorow's writing. It's set so close to our own present that I'm looking at it more as 2008 than a few years from now. But when I think back to Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, those are also books set in future versions of our own society, and I was able to settle in to them quite easily - likely because they were vastly different realities, where Little Brother is very close to our own time and situation.

There are afterwords from Bruce Schneier and "Bunnie" Huang, encouraging kids to look for weaknesses, to be creative and clever and unafraid. Doctorow's own closing acknowledgements offer some great links and reading suggestions. He is, as he admits, standing on the shoulders of giants, and names his influences.

So, I can happily recommend Little Brother. Being one of those over-25s that Marcus and his friends decide can't be trusted, I still really enjoyed it. I'm guessing its true YA audience will love it. If you do download it and read it and find it worthy of passing on to a teen in your life (or if you think it would be a good book to get into schools), I'd suggest following the links to the donate-a-book program linked in the introduction.

It definitely should open up some excellent classroom dialogues on the meaning of free speech, security, and privacy.

Tuesday Musing: The Sony Reader

I mentioned a while back that my company handed out Sony e-Readers to some of the employees. The idea to relate my experiences with it got shoved on the backburner, but never quite went away.

Now that I've had a couple of months to play around and get a better feel for it, it's review time!

For the moment, let's put the comparison to flesh-and-blood paper-and-ink books aside, and look at the Reader as a device on its own.

Full disclosure: I'm a fan of gadgets. There are many people out there far more cutting-edge than I, but I have my iPod and my digital camera. My cell phone can flip around and be used as a keyboard for texting. The oooh-shiny factor for this is certainly high.

It's lightweight - just a bit bigger than a mass market paperback - and slim enough that I keep it in my purse. The interface is pretty self-explanatory, and the type is easy on the eyes. It's not like you're reading stark black-and-white words off of a computer screen. The font size can be increased or decreased to make reading easier.

You can bookmark pages in what you're reading, but at the moment there's no way to jot down your own notes about why you bookmarked whatever it was.

It can store a lot of books at once. So, if you're going on a trip and don't want to pack five different books into your carry-on (because you might finish this one, or not be in the mood for that one right now, or you only have a hundred pages left in your current one and your husband has been known to steal the backup book because he finished his first, leaving you with nothing but Skymall until he drifts off and you can steal it back from his sleeping grasp...), the Reader is a good way to carry a lot of books without lugging around your own weight in fiction.

There's an option to organize your books into collections - perhaps you want to keep the horror from touching the romances, or you have books you're reading for pleasure and books you're using for research. The program you use to transfer books from your computer to the eReader allows you to arrange them in whatever groupings make you happy.

The battery is supposed to last about 7,500 page turns before it needs recharging. I find mine to be draining much faster than that, closer to every 1,000. However it doesn't take that long to charge back up.

There are two different spots that control pageturning, one in the bottom left-hand corner and another along the right-hand edge of the reader. Most of the time, these are where your fingers or thumbs rest naturally when you're holding it. Unfortunately, I have a subway commute that occasionally forces me into strange, pretzel-like contortions so I can keep reading while everyone's shoving for space. It's times like those I wish there was one more pageturning button up near the top of the device.

For reading manuscripts my company is publishing, it's a nifty tool and it cuts way down on the amount of photocopying and distributing we've done in the past. I used to have shelves full of forthcoming books, some of which I might never get around to reading all the way through. Recycling them always brought a pang of guilt for the waste of paper. Now, I can go ahead and download those same manuscripts onto the eReader, and if I don't finish something, no trees were sacrificed for my fickleness.

But how does it compare to reading a real book?

It doesn't.

As portable as it can be, as "green" as the device is, it is not the same as holding a book in my hand. Reading is as much a tactile experience as it is a mental one. There's something to be said for the feel of pages at your fingertips and the weight of a book in your lap.

If I fill it up, I will eventually have to delete old titles to make room for new ones. If I want to go back to something I've removed, I either have to download it (and pay for it!) again, or at least hook the device up to my computer and transfer the file back over. With bound books, you can simply pluck something off your bookshelf to find a line you want to quote, or a single chapter you want to reread.

Sometimes, it breaks.

No, really. It gets touchy. Several times I've had it hooked up to my computer to charge the battery or to add/remove titles, and after shutting it down and properly removing the hardware, it doesn't want to start up again. It will sit at the loading screen, frozen, the books I want to read completely inaccessible unless I can find a paperclip, a pin, or the back of an earring to push the tiny reset button imbedded in the back of the Reader.

Maybe other people carry paper clips and pins around with them. I don't; I was a crappy Girl Scout. And while my ears are pierced, on a normal day I'm probably not wearing earrings. So, when I get to the train station and the eReader hangs, floundering as it tries and fails to boot itself up, I am essentially left bookless on my hour-long ride home. Paper-and-ink books don't fail you like that. Nor do you have to remember to bring a cord with you to recharge them should they run out of battery power in the middle of your trip.

And, the thing that will always, always make bound books trump any kind of e-reader for me:

You can't share the majority of the books you download to your Sony Reader, or your Kindle, or any other electronic reader with your friends. How many times have you loved a book so much, you press it into someone's hands and say, "You must read this?" There are at least three people reading this blog whom I've done it to, and who have done it to me in return.

The books coming out from most of the larger publishers come with DRM restrictions. You can't port your e-book over to your friend's reader. I suppose you can let your friend borrow your eReader (if you each have $300 to spend on one), but then what are you going to read in the meantime?

DRM is another rant in and of itself, which I'd like to address in the future. However, the author of the book I'll be reviewing this Friday nails it in the intro to his latest (DRM free!) book. I'll be cutting and pasting bits of that as part of the review - what he says before the story even starts is just as important as the story itself. (And the fact that I'm reading it DRM-free might tip some of you intarwebz-savvy people off as to which book it is, or at least which author, but for now, you'll have to remain in suspense.)

But, as it relates to the Sony Reader, unless publishers lift their DRM restrictions and allow customers to pass along the e-Books to friends, it threatens to strike a harsh blow to word-of-mouth recommendations. In these days of $25.00 hardcovers, how likely is it that someone will take a chance on a book that a friend recommended that they haven't even flipped through? Consider instead - if I lend you a book and you love it, you are likely to go buy a copy of that book yourself, to keep. Then, since you are now familiar with that author - since you trust that author - you will also pick up his/her next book on your own when it comes out.

All the flash and sparkle of the eReader dims when you realize that that goes away, all because of DRM.

So, my final verdict - the Sony Reader is a great tool as far as work goes, but for replacing regular books in your leisure time? No thank you. I'll keep the walls of my rooms lined with full bookshelves and suffer the sore shoulder from the books weighing down my carry-on bag, thank you very much.

Review: Gentlemen of the Road

It's Friday, and I promised a review of a book that didn't suck.

A caveat, before we begin: I've never done any kind of serious book reviewing before. This isn't going to read like something in the New York Review of Books or Publishers Weekly. My experience is in handselling, and that's how I'm going to attempt to approach these Friday reviews - like you're a customer who has wandered into my store and said, "What's good?"

Okay?

Okay.

It's fitting, then, that this first book, Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, came to me as a recommendation from Marty and another friend.

It's possible that I was predisposed to love it - I devoured The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. However, where that book was set in New York during the Golden Age of comics, Gentlemen of the Road brings us all the way back to 950AD.

Pardon my awkwardness with a synopsis - I don't want to give too much away. Amram and Zelikman are the gentlemen of the title, though they are joined by others on the way. They are travelers, brothers at heart, but not blood relations. They are fighting men and occasional swindlers - whatever earns them enough to continue on their adventures. They also - Amram especially, but Zelikman, too - have a habit of doing the right thing. Which is, of course, what sets the tale in motion. There's a boy, you see - not quite a man - and he was a prince, until his father was overthrown. Amram and Zelikman are tasked with bringing him to the safety of family to the south, but the boy, Filaq, slips away with the intention of returning home and seeking vengeance.

There's your first chapter or two.

I am a sucker for the lonely characters, the good-natured not-quite villains who know they are flawed and live with it - or despite it, or because of it. Zelikman (and his appreciation for a good hat) had me hooked from the start. He's prone to bouts of melancholy, and has a sword that is mostly a thin, pointed bit of metal named Lancet. And a loyal horse named Hillel. I can't help it. He's one of those characters I fall in love with, just a little bit. Maybe someday I'll share a few of the others; some of you probably can guess a few of them.

Chabon's narration is nothing short of breathtaking. He takes his time with a scene, occasionally digressing just long enough to enrich the original point. Points of view switch seamlessly, not breaking the overall voice.
The story itself is finely crafted, leading you along on their journey and, yes, once or twice breaking your heart, just a bit.** There are writers who can weave poetry into prose, and Chabon is one of them. The story is a twisting adventure, loyalties changing (though never, truly, Amram's or Zelikman's), battles fought, and every page is a kind of verse.

Gary Gianni's black and white illustrations are gorgeous, too. It should be no surprise that the ones I liked best were the ones featuring Zelikman.

I'm drifting dangerously into talking about things that are spoilers - there are rousing speeches and heroism (big and small), rescues and chases and redemptions, and the whole thing leaves you wanting more. I don't know if Chabon plans on returning to these characters in the future, but if he does, I will be there at the bookstore on the laydown date, and the cover will be opened before I'm even out of the store.


**Get used to this: I gravitate towards books that break my heart.

Tuesday Musing - Customer Service

Don't worry, I didn't forget. It is, still, technically Tuesday.

I promised a chat about the differences in customer service between indies and chains, didn't I?

I'm going to let you in on a little secret first. Ready?

There are good booksellers working in both chains and indies.

I'll wait while you pick yourself up off the floor.

The truth is, you can't always paint something like this with a broad brush. Once upon a time, ten years ago, I could (and often did) say that customer service in a Borders or a B&N sucked. Because, a lot of the time, it did.

But oh, the times, they are a-changin', and we have seen a shift in attitudes. Companies everywhere are realizing that sure, you can have a huge selection, and pride yourself on convenience, but if your employees are jerks to your customers, the customers will go elsewhere.

I don't care how big or small a company is, or what they sell. Thanks to the vastness of the internet, they're not the only game in town anymore. So, how do you hold on to your customer base?

You treat 'em nicely. You remember their names, the things they like to buy, if they have kids or cats or exotic fish. You help without pushing and smile when they walk in the door.

As much as I'd like to say in this regard, "The chains are cold and heartless and don't help their customers," I'd be lying. My husband occasionally goes to Borders before he picks me up from work (I know. I'll smite him later.) He's been trying to get his hands on George RR Martin's early Wild Cards books, which are currently out of print. The employee there suggested he try checking with Pandemonium. When next he visited (more smitings), the employee remembered him, and had another recommendation - Asimov's had collected the titles into hardcover editions at some point; maybe they'd still have some available. He helped him search for a copy of it. They didn't have it in stock, but it was a good lead.

It's the same thing I'd have done, in an indie.

Working in a bookstore of any flavor pretty much requires that you love to read and have some kind of passion for bookselling. There are probably other retail jobs where employees can just phone it in, but it takes a different kind of person to work in a bookstore. If you don't love it, you're not going to last very long.

There are places where indies can outshine the chains for customer service, though. (You didn't think I was going to call it a draw, did you?)

When you have three stories worth of books, it's awfully hard to keep track of your customers. I can wander around the stacks at a B&N and never see someone who's working there unless I go to the register or the customer service kiosk in the middle of the store. Indies are (on average) smaller. At Booksmith, I could look around the store and see who was where, and they could see me.

That smaller feel made it easier to approach customers, too. Sometimes, people simply didn't need help. They wanted to plunk themselves down in front of the history section and browse for a while. I usually said hello as they came into the store, then gave them a couple of minutes to poke around before I asked if there was something I could help them find. Sometimes they declined; sometimes they didn't.

But there was always someone within sight to ask.

I'd like to suggest that the smaller atmosphere makes it easier for indie booksellers to know who their regulars are, but as I'm typing it, I find I'm hesitating. Having only indie bookstore experience, I might well be wrong on this. I would be very curious to hear from someone who has worked in both an indie and a chain bookstore, to see if the larger customer base at a chain made it harder to develop relationships with customers.

One the one hand, I'd say yes - you're seeing more people on a daily basis and therefore can't devote as much time to each customer. But, on the other, most customers only truly need two minutes of your time or less ("Magazines? They're right up here at the front. Let me show you.") The ones who come in and talk about their favorite author with you for twenty minutes aren't lining up all throughout your shift, waiting for their turns to chat.

Hmm. I'd love to hear comments on this one.

My point here is, bookstores of all kinds can offer great customer service. Indies have always had it. The chains have recognized its importance and focused their efforts accordingly. If you receive subpar service anywhere, you have the right to talk to a manager - they want to know, so they can fix the problem. Doesn't matter if it's a tiny bookstore in the middle of nowhere or a B&N in the middle of Manhattan.

Good customer service should be the rule, not the exception.

Lateness (LOL, Murphy's Law)

I had a bit of a computer mess the last few days, so, yes, I missed my very first Friday review. It's coming, I promise. Today is for getting things done around the house, and tomorrow is up in the air.

But it will get done. It's a very, very good book that I'll be talking about - one that most assuredly does not suck.

Edith Wharton House in Danger of Foreclosure

via GalleyCat:

The Mount, the former Lenox, Massachusetts, home of early twentieth-century novelist Edith Wharton, is facing foreclosure unless Edith Wharton Restoration, the nonprofit organization that owns the estate and its gardens, can raise $3 million by Thursday.

The non-profit organization that runs the home, Edith Wharton Restoration, borrowed several million dollars to purchase Wharton's personal collection and have it returned to The Mount. They've spent $13 million in the last 20 years restoring the house and the grounds.

There's a bit of comfort in the article in Preservation Magazine:

If the bank forecloses on the property, the home may be sold to a private owner. However, since the National Trust for Historic Preservation holds easements on the house and adjacent acreage, The Mount, a Save America's Treasures project, is protected.

So, at least if it is foreclosed upon, it won't be turned into a strip mall. But it would be a terrible shame for the foreclosure to happen. Hopefully an arrangement can be made with the bank to extend the deadline - the organization raises the most money with summertime ticket sales.

If you happen to know any wealthy Wharton fans, point them at the articles.

Tuesday Musing the First

From Torteya/ElZ:

I just came accross this article from 2001 about the virtues of Chain bookstores and immediately started wondering what your take on it would be.

I realize its focus is on very different qualities and effects than what I believe yours are when talking about chains but was curious nonetheless.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/allen

It's from 2001 though, not sure if things have changed much since.


Imagine me rolling up my sleeves. Here we go.

First of all, there's this:

The image of the big bad chains gobbling up brave little independents was crystallized in the 1998 Nora Ephron film You've Got Mail, in which the cute encounter involves typically, and preposterously, antithetical types.

I actually enjoyed this movie... right up until the very end. "Hi, you drove me out of business. I love you!"

Just... no.

However, just because I feel like the movie fails on a realistic relationship level, I'd say Ephron nailed it for the plight of the independent booksellers vs. the chains.

I don't have a degree in business, it's a common enough practice that when one business is doing well in an area, another company that sells the same product or offers similar services will move in nearby. It's not limited to bookstores - gas stations, salons, coffee shops - everyone's doing it.

I worked for the only bookstore in the mall. We had a clause in our lease that kept any other bookstores from opening. It didn't stop the chains from scouting out places just outside the mall, although luckily for us, none ever found a spot they liked. The closest thing was a Waldenbooks down the street which had just about the same floor space as Booksmith did and had probably been there about as long.

Still, when a B&N and a Borders opened up four exits down the highway, we felt it. It hurt our business, and unfortunately Booksmith's owner didn't quite have the savvy to fight back. We should have had a better niche carved into the community long before the chains came swaggering along; we didn't. While the chains weren't the ultimate downfall of Booksmith (that's another long, painful story), they certainly put a scare into us, and made those of us who cared about indies start taking a closer look at things we needed to do - not just to survive, but to thrive.

Next point, on the fear that chains will only carry bestsellers and smaller books/presses will get left out:

André Schiffrin, the director of The New Press and formerly the managing director of Pantheon Books, recently based an entire book (The Business of Books) on his contention that the takeover of publishing and retail by big corporations and conglomerates, including the book superstores, has impoverished the culture, leaving "little room for books with new, controversial ideas or challenging literary voices."

(snip)

A look around any of the superstores will show that more risky and experimental fiction, more first novels, and more serious nonfiction are available to general readers all over the country than ever before.

It seems to me that Allen is suggesting this happy bit of risk-taking by the publishers is thanks to the chains. Yet, when you look at the debut novels that have become bestsellers, the buzz about them quite often started with indies. Cold Mountain was a hit in 1997, because independent booksellers fell in love with it. A year after this article was published, The Lovely Bones skyrocketed because of the indies. Not the chains.

So, by all means, applaud big publishing for taking a chance on new authors. But don't hand that credit to the chains. A book put out by an imprint of a large publisher is still a book by that large publisher. Allen cites Hyperion's Theia imprint (which I don't believe exists any longer, by the way) as one of these ground-breaking, risk-taking experiments. Theia titles were right beside the rest of the Hyperion titles in their seasonal catalogs; chain buyers would have seen them at the very same time they were deciding on numbers for Don't Sweat the Small Stuff.

And you know? Theia did have some really good books. But their placement in chains really isn't worth the pattings on the back Allen is handing out.

Meanwhile, show me a Barnes & Noble that's carrying a book by Meisha Merlin (although, they've just announced that they're closing - B&N might have already returned everything they possibly could.) So, all right. Show me a B&N or a Borders with a book from Small Beer Press and I'll be impressed. As a matter of fact, I searched, using their "check in-store availability function." Two stores out of 22 in the Boston area have John Crowley's Endless Things in stock. Small Beer is based in Easthampton, MA. So, tiny representation it the publisher's home state.

I will absolutely allow the argument that the book came out a year ago, and that hardcovers aren't often kept on shelves for more than six months at a stretch, but that rule applies just as equally to indies - later in the article, Allen chides indies for not having certain books in stock - titles that have been out for years and years. (Better examples of small press books' availability in the chains are welcome, by the way.)

I've realized while I've been writing that I have a lot more to say about this article, but I'd very much like to keep to my promise about posting on Tuesdays, so I'm going to break it up into pieces. I may go back and revisit some of Allen's other statements as well. There were a few that I've passed over (regarding the attitudes of people who prefer indies, and the brush she paints us with), and some that need better clarification.

Next time: the difference between customer service and bookseller knowledge in chains vs. indies.

Refocusing

It's been roughly forever since I've posted here.

Okay, less than a month, but still. The original idea behind this blog was to mark my progress towards opening a bookstore. If I'm being completely honest, there really hasn't been all that much. There are classes to be taken and business books to read, but so much hinges on clearing my own personal debt, that it feels like it'll be quite a while before there's real forward motion on opening a bookstore.

That, and right now it's a time of change for the bookselling industry. I'm not quite sure what it's even going to be like opening a store four years from now. MP3s and podcasts are changing the audio market. Products like the Sony Reader and the Kindle are having an impact on good ol' paper and ink books, but just what kind of impact is still uncertain.

I truly believe that the indies can survive this. They simply (ha!) have to figure out how to change with the times. Some of them are only now learning how beneficial it can be to have a store website, and a staff member or three who know what a blog is (and how to write a compelling one.)

It is still about the community. Success will always be based on that - how well do you know your customers? How involved with them are you?

Only, in this digital age (is that what are the kids calling it now?) a store's community is vastly larger than the town in which it's located. Bookstores in Seattle have readers in New York following their recommendations. A mystery store in the most rural town in the midwest can get books out not only to a big city in the U.S., but to just about any country in the world.

So, my saying, "I want to open a bookstore; I think I know how" is no longer true. There are changes coming. This is not entirely a bad thing, but unfortunately, some stores will refuse to move with it, and will fall by the wayside. Others will embrace it, improve upon it, and thrive. I'm going to be watching and waiting these next few years, and see how the successful ones do it.

In the meantime, this blog isn't going away. However, rather than me blathering on about the good ol' days and how we used to sell books uphill in the snow, barefoot both ways, I'll be talking about other things - books I'm reading (after all, I did name this place "Books That Don't Suck," didn't I?), what I'm seeing work for other indies, things like that.

I'd like to get a posting schedule going, most likely twice a week.

Let's go with... Tuesdays and Fridays for now. Tuesdays'll be for ramblings - industry news, whatever's drifting through my brain when I log in to write - and Fridays will be for book reviews.

SO. If you have questions you'd like me to attempt to field, go ahead and ask away. I have one buried in the comments from a couple months back that I never got around to answering (sorry, ElZ!). That'll be my first foray into this. For Fridays, if you have books to recommend, show me what you've got and I'll add it to the Pile O'Stuff. Discussion is always welcome.

Ridiculous

They passed it.

Now is a good time to support the ABFFE, as they make an effort to have the legislation overturned.

Overzealous

There is a bill getting ready to cross the governor of Indiana's desk. If he doesn't veto it, any bookseller carrying "sexually explicit materials" will have to register with the state. The ABFFE, a group of 15 independent booksellers, and Borders are encouraging the veto.

Aside from the fact that it's unconstitutional, it's also bloody ridiculous.

The bill seems to be aimed at adult bookstores, but the problem is, the wording is so vague that pretty much anything could be considered sexually explicit. There are bookstores that carry adult magazines. Most stores have The Joy of Sex and a copy of the Kama Sutra lurking somewhere where the kids can't get to them. At Booksmith, we kept them right up at the register - perhaps not the best spot for adults who wanted their privacy, but it ensured that seven-year-old Billy wasn't getting an eyeful.

Expand out a bit from the obvious - what else gets painted with that broad brush?

Erotica, of course. But what about other books that have sex scenes of any kind? Is the spinner rack of monthly Harlequin romances suddenly against the law if you don't register it? What about Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? What's Happening to My Body?

How about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition?

We had a magnet display at Booksmith. The designs ranged from inspirational quotes to reproductions of fine art. A woman spied Michaelangelo's David and accused us of selling pornographic material. This was a store that didn't carry adult magazines, and she freaked out over a magnet with one of the most recognizable sculptures in the world. What if that's the kind of person deciding where the line of sexually explicit vs acceptable is drawn?

I don't know very many people in Indiana, but if you happen to have friends there, ask them to call or write to the governor. Or, if they don't want to do that, encourage them to poke their heads into one of those bookstores and offer their support.

Truthiness in Publishing

I don't get it. Yet another false memoir is being pulled from the shelves. At this point, after A Million Little Pieces and the J.T. Leroy disasters, how are agents and editors not checking facts?

I can understand that an editor must develop a very close relationship with a writer whose manuscript he/she wants to publish. It has to feel like a kind of betrayal, or a breach of trust, making calls to verify the accuracy of certain claims.

But how can a person not be wary after the deceit we've seen in the publishing industry recently?

I followed a link to the original New York Times profile on Seltzer/Jones from a post at Bitch, Ph.D. On reading the article, one of the first things I thought was, "This is going to suck if it's not real." While none of my personal experience would give me any insight as to the authenticity of the story, something about it just seemed fishy. Maybe it's my own cynicism. I mean, hell, the book was being published by a major publishing house, and the New York Times was running a profile. Surely they have to know things I don't, right? Surely they've covered their collective asses and gone through the vetting process, haven't they? No one wants to be the next one going on Oprah saying, "Oops, my author didn't so much mean that it was a memoir as she meant, 'very, very, very loosely based on reality.' As in, 'It's at least set on planet Earth...'"

Sad to say, the fishy smell wasn't just the lingering odor from James Frey's tuna sandwich. Margaret B. Jones just isn't real. The uplifting story of a girl who pulled herself out of a bad situation and turned things around to help other people was all a fake. She claims some parts of the story were based on her friends' lives, but that still doesn't make it a memoir.

So, when does it stop? When do we begin demanding better fact-checking before a book ever hits the shelves? It is so disappointing to invest yourself emotionally in a book, and believe that a real person out there rose above a bad situation, only to see the author brought low again by his or her own newly-exposed lies.

If there's a story you want to tell, by all means, tell it, but don't couch it as truth. Call it the novel that it is, and uplift your readers that way. Sometimes fiction is just as inspiring as fact - sometimes even moreso. It must be nice, that feeling that the world is patting you on the back, admiring you for the hardships you've overcome. But is it really worth the ire you'll receive when you're found out to be a liar? That devalues every word you wrote. It calls into question every. single. thing. It makes what might have been something good into nothing more than disappointment.

Homework - Strengths

All right, homework time.

One of the slides at the class I attended asked us to make an honest appraisal of our skills. There were four categories: strengths, weaknesses, talents, and skills/experience. So, here I am, starting with my strengths. If there's anything you'd like to add, please do.

• I'm level-headed. It takes a lot to faze me. I can deal with glitches and setbacks with a minimum of fuss.
  
  
• I'm realistic. Sure, you could call this whole opening a bookstore thing a big dream, but I don't have any illusions about what goes into it. It's not all the magical, inspirational hip stuff you see in the books and movies and TV shows where someone "owns a bookshop." Those characters close down and go haring off to chase after plot points whenever they feel like it. They drink trendy coffee with their friends and are wildly successful. Real booksellers don't live in posh apartments and aren't making tons of money. They work - sometimes ten, twelve hours a day. Or more. I know I can kiss vacations goodbye for a while, and that there will be bad customers along with the good. I remember the things that drove me crazy at Booksmith, and I know they'll still be there, waiting, when I open a store of my own. I'm okay with that.
  
  
• I'm a good listener. Sometimes it's less about selling someone a book and more about helping them in other ways, or getting to the root of a complaint and figuring out how to fix it.
  
  
• I'm articulate. For dealing with publishers and community relations, sometimes it's all in the presentation.
  
  
• I'm able to change with the times. I know this sounds like an odd one, but there are booksellers out there who don't have fax machines, let alone e-mail addresses or websites. Some of those who have had to close up shop have fought valiantly to keep up with the changing world of publishing and book-buying trends, but there are others who have failed because they refuse to change. What worked twenty or thirty years ago isn't necessarily going to work now. I might rail against "w00t" being added to the dictionary, but I can adapt to changes in bookselling.
  

There are a couple of other things I'm thinking of, but I would put them more under talents or skills/experience. Next up is weaknesses, but I want to mull over that one for a while.

Playing Catch-up

There are a few things I intend to post about over the next few days (I know, I've been terribly neglectful). I have been mulling over the aforementioned homework assignment in my head; it's just a matter of typing it out in some coherent form. I am taking tomorrow off and plan to get writing done on several projects I've been dithering over. That will be one of them.

In an attempt to go green at work, the reps were given Sony Readers. I am of mixed feelings about this, and it will take a full blog post to explore and explain. The short version is, great for work, not-great for anything else. But, I'll go more in-depth in the next few days.

I have some book-reviewing to do, and plenty of reading.

A brief bit of good news, so this post isn't just a list of good intentions:

Last Friday, my boss called me into her office with bonus information. I was pretty sure I wasn't getting one, or if I was, it would come in the form of a cookie and a pat on the head, with a "maybe this year will be better." 2007 wasn't a great year for my territory, and while I know there are things I could have done better (which I aim to fix this year), there are several things that were simply out of my hands. Booksellers were being more cautious last year, trying to order in smaller quantities and cut back on returns. Customers weren't buying as much (even though bookstore and retail sales did rise slightly, from reports I've seen.) There were a lot of good books out there from the competition, and the writers' strike hurt at least one of the titles we were counting on.

So, add that all together, and I figured that any bonus I got would be one that came from pity.

It turns out, this wasn't so. Our bonus plan was restructured last year, and I didn't realize just how different it was from the years before. Now, believe me, I am by no means going to be raking in the dough when this check comes in. There are not going to be any fancy dinners at, say, the Ruth's Chris Steak House around the corner, nor will I be buying myself a small tropical island.

But, I will be able to pay off my car loan a few months early. The last payment would have been due this coming November (and I drive a pretty cheap car), so it's not a huge sum, but it's not something I've been able to scratch up until now, either.

I've always been looking at that last car payment as the thing that would let me start saving for other things - the biggest of those other things being the bookstore. Since day one, the plan has been to take the money that had previously gone towards my car every month and apply some of it to other bills and some of it to savings. Now I get to do that nine months early. It's a really, really good feeling. That, along with taking the classes, makes me more able to see this bookstore dream becoming a reality.

Also, the business cards I ordered have arrived. I need to take a picture of one and upload it. They came out very nice. I feel all professional and stuff.

Look, Ma, I'm Proactive

Last night I attended the class in starting a business that was canceled in December.

For those just tuning in, The Center for Women & Enterprise runs a class on steps to starting a business as part of their program for aspiring future entrepeneurs. It was a two-hour overview of things to keep in mind - how to figure out what kind of a business you want to run, financial things you're going to have to look at, a brief look at putting together a business plan, networking, things like that.

One thing I took from the class, which was kind of a nice realization, is that I'm probably further along in the process than I had given myself credit for. Not that I've come even close to being financially ready to do it, or that I have the best sense of what needs to be done, but that I do know what I want to do, and have a fairly realistic outlook on how to get there.

There were probably eight of us in the class, and only three of us seemed to have a solid idea of what kind of business we were interested in starting. The others had kind of nebulous goals - wanting to work for themselves, maybe an idea of what industry they wanted to go into. One woman seemed reluctant to actually state what it was she wanted to do. I couldn't tell if it was because there was a man in the room (all she would say was her idea had something to do with women), or whether she was afraid someone might steal her idea.

The instructor gave us a few things to consider "homework" - questions to ask ourselves before taking the leap. I know the first set of them is probably geared towards helping people figure out what they would like to do if they haven't yet decided, but it could also help me figure out things specific to running a bookstore. She suggested that after we answer them for ourselves, we ask other people to answer them about us, too. Friends might spot things that we weren't aware of, or discounted as not-terribly-relevant, but maybe those things might be worth looking at. That will go up in the next few days.

A couple of things I hadn't really considered, but are good suggestions:

--Having business cards made. It doesn't need anything more than my name and my contact info, but I'm going to get some made up. You never do know when you're going to meet someone that might be a good contact. (I realize one of my answers for the "What are your weaknesses" questions on the homework is my shyness. It's something I need to overcome, because as much as "networking" sounds so... jargony, it is a fact of life.)

--Reading the Wall Street Journal and business sections of local papers. I'm loathe to sign up for the physical paper. We used to have the Sunday Boston Globe delivered, and I never read it. Such a waste. But I'm afraid with the online versions of the newspapers, I'll be inclined to get distracted and click away. For now, I'm going to try bookmarking them and get into the habit of checking them out.

All in all, a good overview class. I'm not going to take the second class in the series, Visioning, because from the description it really is for people who are still figuring out what they want to do. So, the next step is the financial planning class that begins in March. Until then, though...homework.

If You're Not Part of the Solution...

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Steve Jobs offers this gloomy little tidbit:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Now, really. Yes, I read that report, too. And from a business perspective, I can see why he'd decline to develop Sony Reader or Kindle-like applications for the iPhone or iPod.

But "people don't read anymore"? Bullshit. Yes, they do. Bookstores did okay this past holiday season. Holiday post-mortems from all over the retail world showed that buyers were watching their wallets this year. It's not a big surprise, really. However, a slump in the economy shouldn't have people - especially smart people like Mr. Jobs - ringing the deathknell for reading in America.

Mr. Jobs earned a healthy dose of my respect last year when he published an open letter to the record companies, asking them to get rid of DRM encoding.

Some of the cool points he'd earned for that have been taken away by this recent statement. Am I saying he should get out there and dedicate himself to getting people to read more? No, that's not where his business' interests lead him. (Although, if he's so inclined, and got involved in sponsoring some literacy programs, he could earn some cool points back. They can be exchanged for beer or coffee if I ever meet him. Who doesn't like one or the other of those?)

Considering that I'm not a big fan of the Kindle or the Sony Reader - give me good, old-fashioned paper and ink books any day - it doesn't really matter to me that he's not pursuing the development of an Apple reader (let me guess, iRead?). Still, such a pessimistic statement sets my teeth on edge.