GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Amazon is announcing that a new kind of content will soon join books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs in the Kindle store. Called Kindle Singles, the 30-to-90 page e-chapbooks aim to split the difference between feature-length magazine articles and shorter books.

“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” said Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti. The costs of print production, marketing and distribution have historically driven the page-counts of book monographs up and the word-counts of magazine and newspaper articles down.

Amazon said that Kindle Singles will have its own section in the Kindle store and will be priced “much less than a typical book.” Amazon will also grant authors and publishers the same royalty split for singles as on the Kindle Digital Text platform: 70% on books costing between $2.99 and $9.99.

There are print precedents for 10,000-to-30,000-word works — novellas, chapbooks, long pamphlets, extended journal articles, among others — but they’ve usually been either tied to specific genres or downright exceptions to the form. They’ve never been a central part of the publishing model in either fiction or nonfiction.

Translation Jackets for On Bullshit; Image by Princeton University Press

Kindle Singles is also unusual in calling on publishers to produce stand-alone “born-digital” works that may not ever be traditionally printed. Some publishers may use the form to sell individual sample or advance chapters of longer print books. Individual writers may benefit the most from the program, as it makes it easier for them to self-publish works that precisely for reasons of length can’t find support from traditional publishers.

Two further possibilities, particularly if other e-book retailers follow suit with similar chapbook-length offerings: digital-only publishers (or offshoot imprints) could emerge to produce works specifically for this format, or the additional revenue and marketing stream of electronic publishing could lead print publishers to produce more short-form books in print.

I wouldn’t discount this last possibility. In 2005, philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit became a surprise hardcover bestseller. Frankfurt’s “book” was a reprint of a journal article that had already been collected and published in a longer anthology. It sold over half a million copies and spawned a sequel, despite being just 67 pages long and printed in an unusually small 4″ by 6″ format.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

One of the pleasures of writing in pencil is the friction of two solid materials in contact. One of the delights of writing in pen is that you can write continuously without having to stop to sharpen your stylus. Writing in metal, while expensive, provides some of the benefits of both while exhibiting its own unique beauty.

These two (that’s right, two) different metal pen manufacturers come to us by way of champ design blog Dornob. Both models work on the same principle: a tiny amount of metal alloy transfers from the pen to the page. Unlike pencil, it can’t be smudged with your hand, and unlike ink, it doesn’t need to dry. The amount of alloy for each stroke is so tiny that the pens are expected to last a lifetime without needing to be refilled or replaced. You can sharpen the tips for a finer point with a little sandpaper.

Each company takes a slightly different approach. The Inkless Metal Pen by Vat19 goes with a full stainless-steel barrel. Their marketing department, as you can see from the video above, also has a sharp, playful, dudely sense of humor. (The word “awesome” gets thrown around a lot, and there’s a Scrooge McDuck reference.)

Grand Illusions goes a little more highbrow with their Metal Pens. They have two short versions (including one that can be worn as a keychain) and a Beta Pen which comes with a full-length extension in either black or silver metal or cherry-stained wood.

Grand Illusions also appends a short history on writing in silverpoint: “In the Medieval period, artists and scribes often used a metal stylus in order to draw on a specially prepared paper surface. Generally known as Metalpoint, or Silverpoint when the stylus was made of silver, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Drer and Rembrandt all used this technique.” My friends, this is music to my early-modern-loving ears. (Luckily, you don’t have to rub your paper with pumice to get these 21st-century pens to make an impression.

The alloy in the Vat19 pen (at least) has trace amounts of lead, so it’s not so good for kids. Both are targeted for designers, lefties (who often have to deal with smearing or smudging ink/graphite as they trace their hand across the page), and geeks who like even their handwriting to be all shiny. (Note: the writing isn’t actually very shiny, more kind of a matte titanium, but you can pretend).

<< Previous
|
Next >>

<< Previous
|
Next >>

Images via Vat19 and Grand Illusions. Story via Dornob.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Photograph of Stphane Mallarm’s Un Coup de Ds, Public Domain

E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural, and comfortable as possible. The ideal is for the device and text to fade away and immerse you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal. It’s also a profound mistake.

This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy… [w]e dont have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.

Lehrer cites research by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene showing that reading works along two pathways in the brain. When we’re reading familiar words laid out in familiar sequences within familiar contexts, our brain just mainlines the data; we can read whole chunks at a time without consciously processing their component parts.

When we read something like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, on the other hand — long chunks of linguistically playful, conceptually dense, sparsely punctuated text — our brain can’t handle the information the same way. It goes back to the same pathways that we used when we first learned how to read, processing a word, phoneme, or even a letter at a time. Our brain snaps upright to attention; as Lehrer says, “[a]ll the extra work the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words wakes us up.”

I think Lehrer makes a few mistakes here. They’re subtle, but decisive. I also think, however, that he’s on to something. I’ll try to lay out both.

First, the mistakes. I think Lehrer overestimates how much the material form of the text — literally, the support — contributes to the activation of the different reading pathways in the brain. This actually deeply pains me to write down, because I firmly believe that the material forms in which we read profoundly affect how we read. As William Morris says, “you can’t have art without resistance in the material.”

But that’s not what Dehaene’s talking about. It’s when we don’t understand the words or syntax in a book that we switch to our unfamiliar-text-processing mode. Smudged ink, rough paper, the interjection of images, even bad light — or, alternatively, gilded pages, lush leather bindings, a gorgeous library — are not relevant here. We work through all of that. It’s the language that makes this part of the brain stop and think, generally not the page or screen.

Second, it’s always important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of reading, and there are no particular reasons to privilege one over the other. When we’re scanning the news or the weather (and sometimes, even reading a blog), we don’t want to be provoked by literary unfamiliarity. We want to use that informational superhighway that our brain evolved and that we have put to such good use processing text.

Reading is, as the philosophers say, a family-resemblance concept; we use the same words to describe different acts that don’t easily fall under a single definition. It’s all textual processing, but when we’re walking down a city street, watching the credits to a television show, analyzing a map, or have our head deeply buried in James Joyce, we’re doing very different things. And in most cases, we need all the cognitive leverage we can get.

Now, here’s where I think Lehrer is right: overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.

We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.

This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines — in the representation of language. It isn’t the low-glare screens, or the crummy imitative page-turn animations. They’ve knocked those out of the park.

In fact, we’ve already faced this problem once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, book production went into overdrive, while newspapers and advertising were inventing new ways to use words to jostle urban passers-by out of their stupor.

Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter that had been achieved in the nineteenth-century novel.

That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism — not only Joyce, but Mallarm, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism — the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.

That’s what e-books need today. Give us the language that uses the machines, and it doesn’t matter if they try to get out of the way.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews