Throwback Thursday: eBooks Abound

THIS BLOG POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN 2011

Thursday, the Huffington Post published an article by Amy Edelman that called Indie eBooks the "Gateway Drug" to traditional publishing. Here's the opening, Edelman's article in blue, my comments in blood red:

Gone are the days when a writer had to spend hours hunched over a stack of query letters,

>>>Been there, done that<<<

...only to have their hopes dashed months later with the arrival of an unsigned form letter.

>>>I could wallpaper my office with this stuff<<<

Today, thanks entirely to the creation of the e-reader (yay Jeff Bezos!),

>>>Yay, Jeff Bezos<<<

there's no longer a need for authors to deal with middle men. For less than what it costs to buy a book, an author can jump directly to the end game: formatting their titles, uploading them to a sales site and finding actual readers.

>>>You still have to purchase an ISBN, but hey, thatz-ok.<<<

Edelman goes on to explain that for many writers the prize is still out there in the traditional publishing world, but for the time being getting readers satisfies an important need. Not only are eBook authors still looking for conventional publishers, the publishers themselves are combing the ranks of independent authors to find their next round of author heroes.

Edelman is founder of the website IndieReader.com which lists the top selling eBooks each week.

In other news: The Tulare County Library has gone digital and is doing away with late fees — on ebook downloads. If you have a Nook, more and more libraries are making these new digital works available just like regular books. The local libraries here will become accessible on Kindles by the end of the year.

I asked my publisher TJ Lind to write up some instructions on how to read eBooks via other platforms when you don't have the official Kindle or Nook reading devices. Here's a short piece he wrote up, aptly titled eBooks All Around.

eBooks All Around!
In a previous article, “eBook Supremacy,” I had mentioned that part of eBook success is due to the ability for customers to “buy once, read everywhere.” If one were to download a book on a Kindle or Nook they could read the first few chapters on their eReader before bed, then another few chapters on their phone during their commute, another few chapters on their iPad during lunch break, and read some more on their computer during down time at work! Moreover, some readers do not realize that they do not need to own a Kindle or Nook to read books from their respective stores. There is a Kindle app for every major platform; iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, and Mac. Chances are the device you are reading this article on is able to download.

The download process differs depending on which platform one is using. Users with Apple products need only to search for “Kindle” or “Nook” in the App store. Same goes for Android and Blackberry users. If one wants to download the Kindle or Nook apps on a computer, simply navigate to the Kindle Store on Amazon, and select “Kindle Reading Apps” in the left hand column.

Once the app is downloaded, it will present instructions to download eBooks. Now your books will be synced between your devices!

Edelman ends her HuffPost piece with this challenge: So next week, after you've finished the Times crossword puzzle, why not try a new game? See if you can discover (and pass on!) the next great indie book...before a traditional publisher beats you to it!

>>>Hint: The Red Scorpion.<<<

Slow Living Versus the Rush and Roar of Fast Track Life

"There's something about the pace of life that makes it difficult to really slow down and assess where we're going and how we're doing on this journey called life." ~ Ed Young

Modern people feel hurried and harried
Swamped, buried, crushed by demands on their time
Overwhelmed, adrift on the high seas
Lives thrown out of balance….

Everything takes time. Work fills the days a large portion of our waking hours five days a week or more if you have two jobs to make ends meet. Then there's time involved in making meals and eating them…. Shopping, fueling, running errands, driving kids to friends’ houses...

Dishes, cleaning, laundry, …. Coaching sports, church and community commitments, …
Often there are the needs of ailing parents … family responsibilities…. Don't forget your exercise regimen…

Everything conspires to eat our time. As John Lennon aptly satated, “Sometimes life gets in the way of living.”

This harried existence isn't entirely new. In one of my files I have a quote from an 1880's issue of The Atlantic complaining about the pace of life. Earlier in the last century Franz Kafka likewise expressed dismay at the rapid pace of modern life.

The result is people feel stressed and fatigued. They are not looking for more ways to fill their time; they are searching for ways to free up time.

It's against this backdrop that the Slow Living movement has begun to find legs. Walking and biking aren't just suggested as ways to leave a smaller carbon footprint. They're encouraged as a way to get us to slow down. Speed kills. It winds us up and stresses us out.

Fast Living is something akin to eating without chewing, swallowing life experiences whole rather than taking time to savor them.

When in junior high school I took a speed reading class and learned that the eye only sees when it stops. If you ever read about the study of eye movements while reading, you discover we can grab little batches of words and bounce to the next cluster, rather than going one at a time. We can speed up our reading by increasing the batch of text we process, but even here there are limits to what we can read and retain. When reading for information fast reading can serve a purpose, but when devouring a poem it's a whole other matter.

So it is that in recent years we've seen increasing numbers of articles on the topic of slow living, and books like Carl Honore's In Praise of Slowness.

I first became aware of the concept of Slow Living through a friend from Italy who said the slow movement was slowly getting big in Europe. Here's an excerpt from a website devoted to this trend.

Living a mindful life seems more difficult now than it was in the past. The fast life is all around us – fast food, fast cars, fast conversations, fast families, fast holidays. We may be living great lives but we aren’t ‘there’ for them. We don’t take the time to linger over food, over friends, over our family etc. We are not savouring our life and are starving of the real connection to our life.

The solution is self-explanatory. We slow down and connect with our life. But often it is easier said than done. Each fast aspect of our life is necessary for other fast aspects to happen, and we have been fooled into thinking we need, or even must, be fast and have what the ‘fast life’ gives us.

So why are we averse to slowing down? Have we simply forgotten how? I don't think that's the whole of it. I was reading a Facebook post by my son who was a chef at a Savannah restaurant at the time. He talked about the adrenaline rush of getting everything assembled behind the scenes in a tinely manner each night. Timing is everything, and the rush bumps up the thrill.

The same adrenaline rush occurs in newsrooms around the country. The six o'clock news goes live at six, and everything has to be ready for that moment. You can see this portrayed in George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck, as well as in the older Broadcast News. I myself can experience a little rush of adrenaline as I try to finish my blog post in the hour before dressing and commuting to the office each morning. (Goal is to post each morning by seven.)

In short, fast living has a payoff for many people. The Slow Movement reminds us that there is a price to pay for getting so tightly wound by trying to seize every day by the throat to get the most out of it.

Arianna Huffington begins her bestselling Thrive by describing her breakdown as a result of a mad pace that included reduced hours for sleeping in order to manage more. One day she just fell over. She appeared tremendously successful at the helm of the influential Huffington Post, but her life was out of control.

In an interview on the Amazon.com Thrive page, she states, "I had my personal wake-up call on April 6, 2007, when I found myself on the floor in a pool of blood. I had collapsed from exhaustion, breaking my cheekbone and cutting my eye. I was working eighteen-hour days to build The Huffington Post, while being a mom to my two teenage daughters. What this wake-up call taught me was that even though I was considered successful by our society's conventional measures of success, I was not living a successful life by any sane definition of success. Something had to radically change in my life."

Aristotle's advice on this matter, were he to speak today, might be to look for the Golden Mean. That is, find the balance between these seemingly opposing ways of life. Do we live more effectively by maxing out our days? Huffington says no. It nearly killed her.

Meantime... life goes on all around you. Live mindfully.

Advice for Would-Be Art Buyers

Sunday the New York Times published a lengthy, in-depth critique of the unregulated art market in a piece by Robin Pogrebin and Kevin Flynn titled As Art Values Rise, So Do Concerns About Market’s Oversight. The writers detail some of the shenanigans that art auction houses pull to make sure sellers get the prices they want.

The Big Apple art scene is an eight billion dollar business, so it's a bit more than a flea market. Nevertheless, the Huffington Post's response to the story was that for most Americans this kind of news is a big yawn. As chief financial writer Mark Gongloff puts it...

It's a story involving bubbly prices, lax regulation and shady market practices.  this sounds like a recipe for the next financial crisis, then you are right. It does sound like that. But it's probably not.... It turns out that your local Sotheby's is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where the wealthy are bilked out of their cash by shady art dealers. Sometimes auctioneers just stone-cold make up bids until prices get closer to where the seller wants them. Galleries refuse to share their prices. Wealthy people may end up paying millions more for a piece of art than necessary. Naturally, if you're like me, when you read a story like this, you feel... um... not much?

The Times' influence is such that other publications weighed in as well in response to the Pogrebin/Flynn story. Kathryn Tully, writing for Forbes, used the piece to re-affirm some of her own views about art as an investment in a piece titled How Much For This Art?

As I’ve argued before, the opaque nature of the art market and the lack of price transparency are two reasons why art cannot be treated like other investments and certainly why it is not interchangeable with other commodities, even those with which it is commonly lumped together, like gold or silver.

Well, for most folks, making decisions like whether to buy the five million dollar Picasso or twenty million dollar Picasso is somewhat irrelevant. I'm fairly certain that offering advice on that decision would be meaningless for most readers here, but a few tips on how to purchase art wouldn't be a bad thing. At this point I am going to share this one.

Someone recently told me a story about how her mother was in Seattle or Portland many years ago and she saw a painting at an art show that she really loved. She wanted to buy it, but hesitated and ultimately left it behind. To her dismay she never stopped thinking about that transaction that failed to occur. Thirty years have passed and her mom still regrets that she never bought that painting.

My advice for the average person is this: don't buy it for the value you believe might accrue over time. Buy it because you love it. When you see it you take pleasure in it. When you share it, you take pleasure in it. When you see it tomorrow, you enjoy it.

I've often repeated this sentiment at art events I've been to: "You can enjoy this piece for a few minutes here or you can take it home and enjoy it for the rest of your life."

Yesterday I sold a painting to a happy buyer. The transaction was fun for both of us. I love knowing that a piece I've created is being appreciated and will have a new home. It is way more fun than trying to find more storage space in the garage.