Pokemon Go: An Observation

While travelling across country this summer, we've been fascinated to watch how Pokemon Go manifests different community to community. In some, players were sitting around in a park, chatting with each other; in the next, exact same circumstances but here all the people were ignoring each other! How one ignores someone standing next to you playing the exact same game and not start a conversation about it confuses me.

In some communities, people arrived at a park or museum or whatever would look up from their phones and say, ‘hey, that looks interesting’ and go explore; while in another community with similarly engaging locale, nobody looked up from their phones to see where they were. The difference between player groups community to community was striking!

Similarly, we saw staff at one railway museum shooing kids away from their lawn; at the park in next community official welcomed everybody, gave tips on which path to go for best catches, just asked one player to put cigarette out in receptacle rather than flowerbed. (Seemed fair comment to me.) These all seemed sponteous acts, not a matter of policy.

There’s a sociological article about community cultures in there somewhere, but I’m sure somebody is already writing it.

Ian Adam's The Trudeau Papers Re-Evaluated.

We need today to re-evaluate Ian Adam's 1971 novel The Trudeau Papers.

The basic plot was that America had invaded Canada in response to the newly elected NDP government in Ottawa trying to raise the price on Canadian natural resources going to the US, and possibly cutting the US off entirely to meet Canadian demand. The book follows a small band of resistance fighters. Canada as Viet Nam.

The title, our narrator tells us, was a reference to one of Canada's last elected Prime Ministers before the invasion. When the novel came out in 1971, we all assumed the author meant Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the book was a 'contemporary political thriller'. But clearly, Ian Adams was in fact writing predictive speculative fiction. The title was actually a prescient reference to Justin Trudeau as one of the last elected Canadian PMs. The novel seemed pretty far-fetched in 1971; but with Trump running for President of the US, and American running out of water... Yeah, maybe time to dig out an old copy of the "Trudeau Papers", dust it off, and have another read....

Dr. Runte / Doctor Who

Thanks to Stephanie Johanson for this.

Happy 10th Anniversary

Just realized that January 15th was the 10th anniversary of this blog. So I probably should have done something specialish on the 15th....

But well...who blogs anymore? I get relatively few readers and fewer comments here, whereas if I post something random on Facebook, I'll often get 20 comments within the hour.

Not that Facebook is doing that well, either.... My students are abandoning it for timblr or even pinterest (people go to Pinterest less frequently but browse it longer). And Twitter, of course. I mostly try to avoid Facebook et al during the day, lest it suck the time out of my life, but I do check Facebook and Twitter on my phone whenever I have to kill time waiting, e.g., picking up the kids from school or standing in line at a good restaurant. I find typing on my phone a pain, so I mostly just read what others have to say, take note of current trending issues among my friends and colleagues, or take advantage of the clipping service Twitter can be. A lot of my Twitter feed is course-related, people tweeting about breakthroughs in science and technology I can refer to in my cyberculture course, for example. Turns what used to be dead time to productive use.

I notice I'm not alone. In line at Cora's the other day, all but two of the thirty or so people in line were on their smartphones. Made me wonder if people are more patient than they used to be--no, I mean, more tolerant of delays and waiting because they can do something productive, or productive-like, while they are forced to wait. I suppose it actually makes people less patient in the long run, less able to deal with periods of forced inactivity. I know I go slightly bored now when I forget my phone or have to hand it over to the 9year old to keep her entertained in line. Research from PEW a while back commented that 26% of Americans said they could not manage without their cell phones. I never used to get bored because I could always write the next scene of my novel or etc. Now I read Twitter.

Constantly amazed at how many people have no idea how to use Twitter. So many authors just tweet the same "buy my book" line every few hours. That's not information, that's spam. I delete such people immediately from my feed; when Twitter suggests new people to follow or someone follows me, I often take a look, but as soon as I see self-advertizing, I move on. The occasional tweet about a book launch is okay, because I might want to know what they are doing and if not, I can ignore the occasional commercial. But repeating the same tweet over and over is just stupid. So many authors I respect seem to do this. But the authors who get to stay in my twitter feed are the ones who tell me interesting stuff. Things they've notice in the paper or books they've found by other people or the research they are doing for their book that turned up some interesting fact, or something funny. Those are people worth reading. Don't care about whether you are having coffee or a bath, don't care how your cats are doing, don't want to hear about your neighbours unless you can make it funny.

The funniest guy on Twitter is Tim Siedell @badbanana. E.g., "If we do mint a $1 trillion coin we should intentionally make a mistake on it so it's worth even more to collectors." or "Going to a concert tonight. Doors open at 7pm, according to the ticket. That's a pretty impressive opening act." Brilliant stuff. I bought his book.

So I mostly blog now to keep track of stuff for myself, an on-line diary. I'd do more entries but the best source material is about the kids, but unfortunately they are now old enough to read the blog, so I mostly can't write about the really good stuff any more. Still, life in the old blog yet. Hopefully.

Comic book writer Mark Shainblum once observed that "I often feel like a character in someone else's story. I want my writer to be Alan Moore, but I frequently think it's Phillip Roth. Sigh."

And I thought, that would make a great party game, or one of those annoying-Facebook quizes: If your life turned out to be just a character in a novel, who would your author be?

I can't come up with an author for my own life though: I need an Russian author's attention to pointless minutia and a Canadian author's themes and obsessions, but tempered with an American mass market author's optimism. Who is as verbose as a Russian novelist, has a Canadian's characters and lack of action, but is still upbeat? Can't think of anyone to fit the bill.

For me, the realization has now slowly dawned on me that instead of the hero in the novel, I'm just one of the background characters (you know, not really fully developed, just sketched out in broad stereotypical strokes) in my daughter's or wife's or even student's stories. Here I thought my life was entirely about me, but now reached the age when realize I am just going to be "annoying professor" or "neighbour with loud dog" when the credits roll....

Though, you know, being Canadian, I'm mostly good with bystander role. Adventure is unpleasantness that happens to other people, and actually, not being the hero is all to the good. "Neighbour with loud dog" is a satisfyingly stable life, and "annoying professor" gets some of the better lines in the book. IMHO.

Shakespeare for Slackers

Recently, I was editing John Poulsen's Shakespeare for Reader's Theater and was looking around to see what other books might represent competition to our series, when author Mike Plested turned me on to the Shakespeare for Slackers series by Aaron Kite. I picked up the softcover Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet for $7.99; Macbeth is only $6.99. And they are absolutely brilliant. They work on so many different levels its hard to know where to begin.

(Well, I began by showing it to my 14-year-old daughter, who immediately fell out of her chair laughing. She's taken my copy and won't give it back. Instead she took it to school to show her equally nerdy friends. They too all immediately fell in love with it. I can't tell you how great it is to see a group of teens sitting around reading Shakespeare aloud to each other! If I were still teaching high school English, I would drop copies strategically around the school, then post signs forbidding students to use Shakespeare for Slackers to complete their assignments, to ensure that all the students read it cover to cover.)

The basic concept is simple: the original Shakespeare text down the left hand side of the page, while the right carries the 'translation'.

Much of the humor in the updated Romeo & Juliet stems from seeing Shakespeare's poetic language and flowery delivery translated into the brutally direct and limited vocabulary of modern teens. Benvolio's:

"Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun
Peer'd forth the golden window of the East,
A troubled mind drove me to walk abroad
Where, underneath the grove of sycamore
That westward reetheh from the city's side
So early walking did I see your son:
Toward him I made, but he was ware of me
And stole into the covert of the wood:
I, measuring his affections by my own,
That most are busied when they're most alone,
Pursued my humor not pursing his,
And gladly shunn'd who gladly fled from me.

becomes Ben's:

I saw him this morning, by the woods. He seemed pretty bummed.

Presenting one random excerpt doesn't do justice to the cumulative effect of reading lengthy passage after passage, closely followed by the ten word translation. It was fascinating watching my daughter's group of teens reading out the original Shakespeare in full Shakespearian theatrical projection, and then the usually briefer, always more direct Americanization in the clipped delivery of modern cinema; followed immediately by gales of laughter at the breathtaking inaccuracy of the translation. But the thing is…you can't get the joke unless you sort of work at understanding what Shakespeare actually said. The translation may focus more on the connotations than the actual wording, but in terms of conveying meaning, the result is actually a big improvement over editions that merely define/explain words and phrases from the original.

Consequently, much of the humor comes from actually understanding what's going on, especially in the first half of Romeo and Juliet. A lot of Shakespearian English is now obsolete or at least too obscure for modern audiences, and the original comedic bits often too hard to follow when read aloud without accompanying footnotes. Here the 'footnotes' morph into the entire speech rewritten in a way that recreates the original jokes, satire and ludicruoius situations. There are several excellent cinematic versions of Romeo and Juliet that capture the whole 'rival gang' theme in a contemporary setting, for example, but none of these seems to have been able to really convey that much of the first half of the play was written to be funny. Gregory and Sampson are clowns in the original Shakespeare, but are usually portrayed as just angry teen gang members in contemporary renditions. (Okay, admittedly it's a fine distinction, but the original dialog was supposed to be funny.)

And, if you're 14, the third element of humor is that the naughty bits are translated into recognizable, explicitly naughty, "you didn't really just say that, did you?" bits.

So one's initial reaction is to laugh a lot. I was frankly surprised that this wasn't a one-gag concept, that I kept laughing as I kept reading. But it's Shakespeare: reading the original dialog is continually uplifting--which makes the accompanying pie in the face funny, every time. We're continually reminded that Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare because he had good plots or ideas, but rather that it's all about the poetry of his language. Because the same story told in modern dialog is so lame or ludicrous or obvious that the contrast is funny, every speech.

On the other hand, I grasped the educational implications immediately. These volumes take Shakespeare out of the classroom and place him back in the gutter, where he belongs. As the back cover explains:

You want to know something cool? Back in the day, Shakespeare wasn't considered elite. Oh sure, his plays were performed for royalty, but they were actually written for tradesman, shopkeepers, average Joes, anybody who could pay a penny for a ticket. Mostly he wrote plays for the common man, using the language of the times.
Times have changed. . . .
In Shakespeare for Slackers . . . you get what a few of us think he probably would have written if he were still around today. (And if he sat around watching a lot of television.)

I know that a few of my English teacher colleagues (or parents) will be highly offended by this attempt to knock Shakespeare off the pedestal upon which they have placed him, but I think most will appreciate not just the humor, but the serious intent to make Shakespeare both accessible and relevant to modern teen audiences. Ironically, the completely over the top translations manages to convey the essence of the original without watering down the content or speaking down to the audience. Puzzling out the meaning of a passage based on footnotes is a painfully slow and discouraging activity compared to the riotous readings that result from this romp through Romeo and Juliet. Let's face it, every kid already knows the story of Romeo and Juliet by the time they hit high school, so if we don't do something to make them fall in love with the language, then there is simply no point to requiring them to read it. By vandalizing, brutalizing and outright demolishing Shakespeare to the language of our times (to paraphrase the back cover), the author has forced the reader to really pay attention to language and imagery and iambic pentameter and really appreciate the unique richness that was Shakespeare's. The volume reintroduces the playfulness of language, which is really what English courses are supposed to be about.

I well remember taking Shakespeare in high school. It was a painful process even for those of us who loved Shakespeare, because everyone in the class had to take turns reading out, and some of my peers could not yet read Dick and Jane fluently. Listening to them struggle with Shakespeare was as torturous for the listener as humiliating for them. What was the point of that? What was the lesson the majority learned: that Shakespeare wasn't for them.

I once had the opportunity of listening to a recording of an archival interview with the administrator responsible for introducing Shakespeare into the Canadian curriculum, and he explained why he regretted that decision. He explained that when he'd made it, only about 20%-25% of the population attended High School, so it was the equivalent of university today. Those students could easily cope with Shakespeare, so for them it had been a positive experience. But, he explained, by the time he had retired, high schools had become mass institutions (a good thing), and many of the students being exposed to Shakespeare were not sufficiently strong readers to properly decode, let alone enjoy, reading Shakespeare. The possibility of their enjoying seeing the plays was being undermined, he felt, by their prematurely being asked to read what should have been a dramatic presentation.

Here, then, is an approach that turns that potentially slow, dry, angst-ridden process of decoding Shakespearian text into a riotous deconstruction. The contrast between the two texts presented in this volume forces students to think about language; about deconstruction; about the differences between classical theatre and cinema; about what makes Shakespeare, Shakespeare. And isn't raising those issues, even implicitly, what including Shakespeare in the curriculum is really about?

I cannot conclude the review without at least mentioning the brilliant cover, seen above: half Shakespeare as he was, half as a modern punk rocker, complete with piercings. This book should be on the shelf of every drama teacher, every English teacher, and every Shakespeare fan. And the cover image should be available separately as a poster.

Highly Recommended.

Today's Spam

Okay, I mostly just delete spam without opening it, but this one from Mrs. Amal Nasri caught my eye:

Muslim Brotherhood Random Selection Approved

As-Salamu Alaykum

Muslim Brotherhood random selection approved your email along with 199 others to benefit from the revolution gift, this is organized in London Early this year, it's organized to encourage the Muslim world and appreciate their support, and to those who have lost their love ones in the revolution, your compensation amount is Two Million United States of American Dollars (USD $2,000,000.00),

CONTACT MR. ABDUL MUSA
Contact email: XXXX
Regards
Mrs.Amal Nasri.
Arab Revolution
WebRep

It was recently explained to me that spammers are not stupid, and that the complete lack of credibility in this sort of email is not sloppiness or lack of research. Fooling you is a waste of their time if, after the initial email hooks one, the intended victims suddenly says, "Hey, wait a minute! That doesn't make any sense!" when asked for one's bank account password. No, they send out deliberately ridiculous emails hoping to hook that one in a million really stupid person who will fall for anything, and so can be relied on to follow through.

The other key to a good con, I learned from some movie or other decades ago: the victim must think s/he is doing something illegal/immoral themselves so that they are then disinclined to report their victimization, once they eventually realized they have been fleeced.

So this one comes close to perfect on both counts. You'd have to be both spectacularly stupid and a traitor to your right-wing prejudices to fall for this one. "They randomly selected my email to give me $2 million dollars? Yes, that makes sense! They randomly blow people up, so naturally, they must be equally random in everything they do! They are insane, so this makes total sense!" Someone questions why they would have 200 X 2 million dollars to handout -- no problem: "Those damn arabs have billions! That's just chump change to them!" And, you know, handing out billions to random emails is way more cost effective for the revolution than say, I don't know, buying armaments. And they probably do use US dollars, because that's what they would use in London, right? "And anyway, they think I've suffered a loss for the revolution. So all I have to do is pretend to be Muslim revolutionary and I can collect big time!"

What bothers me is that spammers can find enough takers to make it worth their while to clutter up my email stream. That there are more than four guys who could fall for this is a condemnation of Social Studies teachers everywhere. That the people who fall for this are eligible to vote for Mitt Romney is the flaw in the democratic system.

Children: Our Future

Attended a charity event last night for a very worthwhile cause: a youth shelter. The shelter does great work helping troubled teens, and I fully support it. I was also pleased to hear someone from the University saying it was important for the university to support the shelter because the university should be there for all youth, not just the ones lucky enough to attend university.
However, I was troubled when the dinner featured some of the major sponsors explaining why they supported the shelter, and almost every one of them said something like "We need to help these young people, because these 'youth are our future'". And at some level, the constant repetition of that last phrase really annoyed me. Because here is the thing: Youth are not important because they are going to grow up some day; they're important, they have worth, now.

(John Atkinson, Wrong Hands)

It really troubles me to hear kids talked about as some sort of commodity in a futures market. "Let's invest in them now because it could pay off big in the future!" I don't actually care if any of them grow up to be "important" contributors to society. Or the equally annoying suggestion that a small amount invested in shelters now will reduce the higher costs of jails and rehab for them in the future. How about we just help them because they need help? Because it's the right thing to do? Because it takes a community to raise a child and its our responsibility to help?
Heard a line on "Damages" last night that may apply here: "Parents can only be as happy as their saddest child".

Nazis from the Moon

I talk a fair bit about the future of publishing, so I thought I mention one possible future for the movie industry. The producers of Iron Sky have raised 8.5 million from fans who want to see the movie made. They did this by producing a couple of trailers for the film, uploading it to Youtube where it has been viewed over a million times, and asking for micro investments from viewers who might like to see the trailer turned into an actual movie.



And it seems to be working.

Here's the description of the film from the Iron Sky website:

The Story of Iron Sky
Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity.

From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.

Now it’s 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom.

At some level you have to love the idea of flying saucers filled with Nazis attacking the Earth...one of those concepts that is so dumb it just might make a great B movie. But check out the trailers yourself and look around the site. A fascinating alternative to the Hollywood machine....

(see also the Wired Magazine article.) Thanks to Kevin Kozoriz for bring this to my attention.

Galt Museum

I have been consistently impressed with the exhibits mounted locally by the Galt Museum, but I was particularly struck by the recent Treasures and Curiosities Exhibit (Feb 20-May 2010). I feel strongly that this exhibit was not only engaging and innovative, but a role model for other regional museums to follow (which is why it's worth mentioning here, since most of my readers cannot travel to Lethbridge, or back in time, to see it).

The Treasures and Curiosities Exhibit had staff, board, volunteer and community members select their favorite artifacts from the Galt’s collection. This resulted in a very eclectic and slightly eccentric collection of artifacts, but presented two connecting threads: first, everything was from the Galt collection so by definition had a Southern Alberta connection; second, every item had a personal connection to, or resonance for, the community member who had selected it for the display. The write up on each item devoted as much space to the story of why the community member made the selection as on the item itself. This made for an inherently fascinating exhibit because even if the particular object held little interest for the viewer (i.e., me), the story of why someone else felt connected to the object was often as engaging, or more so, than the object itself.

The resulting display presented, therefore, several unique aspects:

First, just as Wikipedia includes entries on many topics the Britannica editors would never have deemed worthy of inclusion, the use of ordinary community members (as well as staff and board members) in choosing items for display created a wonderfully democratic process. Although the display was delimited by the fact that everything necessarily came from the Galt collection, and so all the artifacts were appropriate and of museum quality, the selection criteria still pretty broad! I find it highly unlikely that any expert curator would have put together this particular selection of items, and it is that very aspect of random juxtaposition that made the display so stimulating and such a creative success. Where else would you find a WWII model tank (made by a German POW interned near Lethbridge) next to a multilith, a grand piano, and six really creepy nurse dolls?

Similarly, given the broad sample of individuals included in the selection process, the criteria of personal resonance produced an extremely representative sample of time periods, topics, and Southern Alberta lifestyles. The greatest unifying theme was the sense of browsing through the Galt collections oneself and stumbling upon item after item with their own personal resonance for the viewer.

Second, I had a very strong emotional connection to several of the items. I would not normally have expected a multilith machine to be included in a museum display, and was strongly reminded of my mother, who ran that exact model of multilith for many years when the technology was still new. A far higher percentage of items in this exhibit had that effect on me than any other exhibit I can remember.

Third, I had a very strong impulse to donate to the Galt collection. Seeing, for example, the Gestetner 120 included in the display, I was reminded that I have a working condition Gestetner from two generations earlier in my basement – one of only a few dozen of that particular model left in the world. (Gestetner recalled and destroyed all the others when they realized the ‘perpetual guarantee’ they had been sold with was costing them too much money.) Indeed, there were any number of artifacts which gave me pause to think that I too had something similar, something better, or something missing from the display that could be offered to the Galt.

Beyond the association with particular artifacts, I think I and others become much better educated about the sorts of items museums actually collect when we see an exhibit such as this one. Most of us make the mistake of preserving the unusual – the commemorative coin, the souvenir, etc. – rather than the every day, common place items that are in fact the representative artifacts that museums require. Seeing this eclectic collection of everyday items, and feeling the strong emotional response such familiar objects trigger, educates potential donors about what they could be passing onto the Galt. This is especially timely given current demographics and that many of my generation are dealing with elder care and the disposition of estates. The range of items included in this exhibit – from a widower’s hooked rug of the ‘big bang’ (a nice example of both eccentricity and the concretization of abstract theory held in a particular age) to a ‘compact radio’ the size of trunk to first nation artifacts – was unusually helpful in demonstrating the scope of museum collections.

Further, as a celebration of the breadth and depth of the Galt Collection, one cannot help but feel a certain level of pride in and appreciation of -- and therefore the desire to contribute to -- that collection.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the display served to highlight the purpose of collections and museums such as the Galt. A local exhibit of local history that teaches us all that this stuff matters. That there is indeed a personal connection to local history for all of us at some level, even if we originally came from and have roots somewhere else. This is what museums are about.

The extremely simple (I mean conceptually – I’m sure it was an immense effort to organize) design of this exhibit is exemplary – there is no museum that could not adopt this particular democratic and populist approach to mounting a display from their own collections. That I have never seen or heard of anything similar elsewhere suggests to me that the collections team at the Galt has hit on an extremely useful, applicable, and transferable innovation which others would be well advised to adopt.

So, go forth to your local museum and suggest that they attempt a similar exhibit -- and be sure to volunteer as one of those to pour through their hidden collection rooms to make your own selection for the display.

What Type Are You?

Casey Wolf drew my attention to the website that asks the question, "What type are you?". It is an amusing bit of pop-psychology and well worth 10 minutes of your time. I was particularly pleased that this is a free-standing webpage, not one of those annoying Facebook apps that tells you what character in Avatar you are, or whatever, and then raids your Facebook info to sell to marketers, because you had to allow the app access to everything in order to play. This site, by contrast, seems to have a deeper and more noble purpose.

There's a bit of a punchline involved, so to get the full benefit, you might want to go do it before reading the rest of this post, which includes spoilers.

* * *

I have to say, I thought the sight a brilliant bit of understated comedy — and the commentary on typefaces very informative. The site is obviously intended to be sent to people who think the test is about a different meaning of "type", so the purpose of punchline appears to be to get people to think seriously (albeit in a satirical context) about fonts and their meanings. Whoever developed this page is trying to provoke the audience into asking the question: 'What do different typefaces express?' The typology developed is simplistic, but I nevertheless applaud the serious undercurrent here. Somebody was trying to get a general audience to think about the meaning of fonts when most people are barely conscious that there is a choice to be made.

So, in case you're wondering, I come up Bifur. I am very pleased.

But to expand on the comment I made in passing about book design in yesterday's post, one problem with self-publishing is that authors seldom think of issues such as font choice. Even excellent authors, who take the precaution of having their work edited for their work, and know to get a good cover artist, are still likely to miss details like designing professional looking text. Consequently potential buyers can sense these works are self-published or 'amateur' even though the reader often cannot put their finger on what it is that is giving off that impression.

I concede that I would never have given typeface selection a second thought if I had not happened to be friends with two fellow SF fans in college who grew up to be two of the top Canadian type designers and text experts — one, Thomas Phinney, was until recently a font manager at Adobe; the other, David Vereschagin, is now a professional book designer in Toronto — so I had it kind of beaten into me that this stuff matters. Thanks to them, I tried to pay attention to issues of font selection and layout in my zines, and when I grew up to be a prof, in my course materials. The latter in particular had a significant impact on students and colleagues, who have repeatedly told me that my course outlines, course manuals, powerpoints, and so on "just look more professional" than anybody else's, even though I have -- knowing my limitations -- stuck with the very simplest of designs. But apparently, basic is better than no design at all.

This effect has worn off somewhat in recent years as undergraduates these days are much more visually sophisticated than a generation ago. Having grown up as part of the digital generation, they have always been immersed in a world of fonts (in contrast to my growing up with typewriters -- what a revolution it was when I got an IBM Selectric which allowed one to switch fonts by switching 'golfballs'!) My colleagues constantly complain how less literate today's students are, but they seldom recognize how much more sophisticated they are visually. When Macs first appeared at school, every term paper would come in with a minimum of 27 different fonts on the title page, but today's students never make that particular faux pas. Similarly, most undergrads come in having at least a rudimentary understanding of how to handle text in power point or on a Smartboard. Less so, my aging colleagues.

But the problem remains that universities are very slow to adapt and update their curricula, so although my students get a pretty decent training in a variety of the skills they will require on the job, we still have nothing on design, layout, fonts, and so on -- but these have become vital to anyone (which means everyone!) interested in contributing to the on-going conversation that is the Internet, POD publishing, or etc. We used design daily, but so many of us are limited to the templates provided by others that it limits our ability to participate fully. Most high school grads have the reading and writing skills to present themselves in a reasonably good light, but almost no training in design. It's a bit as if a business executive made a fabulous presentation to the Board or a group of buyers, then ate the salmon entree with his hands at the luncheon. You know? Understanding fonts has become part of social capital -- if you have it, one simply exudes professionalism and is automatically taken more seriously; if you don't, it becomes something others have to get past....

Reading, writing, and publishing as conversation

My previous post got me thinking about the place of books in the 21st century and it suddenly struck me that the central paradox of our age is that reading is in decline at the precise moment that writing (publishing) is undergoing explosive growth.

It's true that people read less these days...I certainly see that in my undergraduate students compared to when I started teaching here 20 years ago...but the other, largely overlooked, half of that picture is that of those readers who remain, a great many more are also writers. Phrased negatively, it is easy to complain that the only people left reading are the writers; the idea that we are just writing to ourselves seems to be spreading among many of my colleagues. But I think that has it backwards. True, more people are watching TV and playing on the Internet or gaming or whatever than buying books, and even those who still read regularly may be reading less thanks to these other distractions. But more of my undergraduates are also serious about writing. Facebook set that back briefly as the writers' urge for audience found it's outlet in social media, but more and more of my students are dropping out of Facebook and its ilk and starting work on their novels or epic poetry.

Admittedly, that's a good news bad news story: more people fully engaged in literacy -- as both consumer and producer -- is good; more very badly written books being produced is probably less good. The emergence of practical POD self-publishing has made publishing much more democratic and diverse, which is very, very good; open access may also mean no refereeing and often no editing at all, which is often very, very bad.

But I remain optimistic that that will quickly sort itself out. As I've predicted here before, as the number of new, and especially self-published titles proliferates, the role of reviewers and small press editors correspondingly gains in importance in helping readers sort out the pearls from the dross. As readers come to know and trust particular reviewers, editors, and imprints, they will give preference to books (whether paper or digital) that come with their quality guarantee. Indeed, we are already seeing Amazon and YouTube and Goodreads and the like setting up channels/communities to which consumers can subscribe to more efficiently follow such recommendations.

It is all very reminiscent of the pre-megacorporate days of publishing when imprints reflected the tastes and literary values of their editors. When you bought a story edited by John W. Campbell, you knew exactly what you would be getting, even if you had never heard of the author before. Same with, say, the Ace Specials edited by Wollheim and Terry Carr. You didn't have to worry that the author was unknown to you or the cover blurb sounded dubious, it was an Ace Special and so a very safe bet. The editor or the imprint was the guarantor of the product.

This reliance on editors has been lost as the large-scale corporate publishers have allowed marketing departments to dictate editorial policy. As editors have been pushed aside in favour of fixed marketing categories, the neverendingseries, and author name recognition -- all in search of predictable sales in an inherently unpredictable market -- 'safe' titles have overwhelmingly replaced 'good' ones. Legacy publishers often find it difficult to publish cutting edge titles because they cannot afford to stand on the edge, and marketing departments don't know how to market something they can't fit into their pre-existing categories. The result is a retreat into republishing essentially the same book over and over with only slight variations. The trend towards narrowly focusing on a known product in hopes of reliable sales results in a sameness that the industry itself refers to as 'processed cheese'.

[Its as if GM and Chrysler were still producing the same cars today as sold in 1960, as if there had been no advances in automotives in 40 years! Oh wait. They did that and had to be bailed out by governments when consumers refused to buy their products. The publishing industry would do well to take note of this precedent; except, there's no bailout coming for publishers and booksellers....]

So here's a thought: perhaps one reason readership is declining is because the publishers themselves have become so fixated on 'the winning formula' that they have reduced their offerings to overly predictable formulaic crap: after you've read five Honor Harrington novels, you start to feel like you've pretty much read them all, so why bother buying the next one? Why continue reading at all if one's experience is that most books just aren't that good? If all that the legacy publishers are offering readers is the same 40-50 tired series, what other reaction could they expect from the reading public? Maybe the real problem isn't competition from movies, games, and the Internet; maybe the more fundamental issue is that the legacy publishers have become so risk-adverse that they are no longer providing the quality and range of books people want to read.

As small press niche publishers (like Five Rivers) emerge to fill the gaps left by the legacy publishers, I think the legacy publishers increasingly risk being cut out of the conversation.

First, as more and more real readers -- those interested in literature and fresh ideas and approaches, rather than just the latest movie novelization -- begin to turn to particular niche imprints, editors, and reviewers for their reading fix, the impersonal, marketing-driven publishers will begin to lose market share. Of course this won't happen over night and the trend won't be immediately obvious because the legacy publishers will continue to churn out processed cheese, and frankly, there will always be a market for processed cheese. I myself don't mind a slice of processed Cheddar on my burgers, but it's not, you know, to be confused with real Cheddar. Same with books. There will be a market for cheese slices and Dan Brown, but somewhere, someone will be reading Matt Hughes and eating a nice piece of brie.

Second, megacorporate publishing is a one-way street: the publishers produce books and we consume them. That was true for music and TV too, up until MP3 and YouTube, when consumers could suddenly also become producers. Just as the emergence of those new technologies turned consumers into sometimes producers, POD and digital make it possible for many more individuals to enter the print conversation. Yes, that raises the noise to signal ratio at first; but in the long run, I foresee authors and readers forming channels/communities where readers are reading the books by people who've read and are reacting to the books they themselves have written.

That may sound crazy, but there are plenty of historical precedents. I once undertook a study on the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, for example, which flourished in the 17-1800s and was exactly that sort of mutual reading and contributing community, covering the full range of literacy from scientific advances to poetry. The expectation was not only that the subscribers would be interested in everything they published, but that the readers would also themselves be regular contributors on a diverse range of subjects.

Or take Bali, for example. It's a culture where everyone is an artist -- everyone is supposed to create at least one work of art in their lifetime to contribute to the temple. Sure, some of the sculpture is better than others, and some people produce more art than others, but everyone appreciates art and craftsmanship and everyone participates. The division between producers and consumers that is so embedded in our capitalist culture that it is literally unthinkable for us not to speak in those terms, doesn't exist there to nearly the same extent.

I would therefore like to argue that the division between readers and writers that has emerged in our culture under conditions of monopoly capitalism is a false dichotomy, and one which cannot persist in the face of new technologies (i.e., the emergence of new, more inherently democratic means of production). Just as we have gotten used to not singing outside of the shower because singing is something that professionals do on the radio, we have become conditioned to thinking that writing is something that a few professionals do for publishers, not something average human beings should attempt.

But that's rubbish. Anyone reading this prepared to argue that Dan Brown is a particularly good writer? That there are not thousands of unpublished works as good or better? Mass appeal does not translate out to literary value in anyway we have ever been able to demonstrate. Big publishers, driven by the need for profit -- and the even more immediate need of servicing their stupidly high debt loads -- have to look for best sellers. They are not, cannot be, interested in whether the book is any good; just in whether it will sell. So a perfectly wonderful novel set in Alberta which might easily become a best seller in Alberta can be of no interest to the legacy publishers because the population of Alberta simply isn't big enough to produce the economies of scale the mega publishers require to make money on a book. Consequently, much excellent Canadian literature goes begging because, unless the megapublishers believe they can sell it to the Americans or the British, they just can't make a Canadian book profitable on that scale. Same goes for genre and niche fiction. But economies of scale should not fool us into thinking that 'bigger' is necessarily 'better'.

So, just as we can't allow ourselves to stop singing just because we can't get into the top ten of American Idol, I don't think we should stop thinking of ourselves as writers, or potential writers, just because we can't break into mass market publishing.

We need a whole new vocabulary here. Just as reading novels is not the same act as reading an instructional manual or a tax form, reading legacy-published novelizations of Avatar or Alice in Wonderland is not the same as reading a novel from Chi Press or the actual novel of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I think legacy publishers will continue churning out Honor Harrington novels and Dan Brown books, but we have to stop thinking of that as reading and instead add it -- along with the Internet, gaming, TV and movies -- to the list of distractions from true reading. Perhaps 'real reading', the true definition of literacy, is what happens when one reads books that are not mass produced processed-cheese but hand-craft works by local or niche artisans.

Initially, I expect to see a great flowering of Canadian literature as more Canadians have the opportunity to self-publish or publish through small POD presses then would ever have had a chance through the bloated legacy publishers. Okay, admittedly -- going to be a lot more weeds. But as we do weed out the crap, we're going to discover a hell of a lot of previously overlooked, ignored, or silenced voices that deserve to be heard.

And I don't expect the weeding-out process to take that long. After picking up a few unedited, badly-written, self-published disasters, readers will stop buying books that haven't been properly edited or vetted. Self-published authors will quickly learn to approach known writers and editors for introductions, the simplest form of vetting. As the pool of Robert Sawyers available to write introductions to Canadian SF novels is rather small, however, and as such authors won't write intros for weak books, the self-published author will have to turn to something else.

One possibility could be the emergence of an army of freelance editors who contract with authors to edit their books. As certain editors become associated with successful books, their name on the backcover becomes a quality guarantee, especially in contrast to books that provide no evidence of having been edited. As the editor's reputation grows, so does the demand for that editor's services and the corresponding ability of the editor to turn down inferior work and to enforce changes the author might otherwise be reluctant to make -- thus further enhancing the editor's ability to improve and guarantee the quality of product, which in turn enhances the editor's reputation. In theory, such editors could wield considerable influence, even within a freelance market.

(Of course, this vision of the freelance editor may be influenced by my intention to become one upon my retirement from academia, so I concede that I may be indulging in pure wishful thinking here.)

More likely, authors will choose to go through small press POD houses that can offer not only editing, but cover art, book design (the least appreciated and understood aspect of publishing, but nonetheless a crucial one) and marketing as well as act as a significant guarantor of quality.

In the longer term, however, I see the emergence of literary communities. As more readers turn writer and write their own books in response to what they are reading, tight knit communities could emerge based around a particular subgenre, regional literature, or otherwise mutually familiar literary cannon. This again has many historical precedents, such as the Amateur Press Associations of the turn of (last) century; or more recently, SF or comic fandoms. (See my essay on the history of fandom or discussion of amateur Press Associations) Both fandom and apas were briefly superceded by the emergence of the Internet, since chat rooms and web pages were cheaper, easier and faster technologies than print; but I think the emergence of POD could lead to a new, more professional and sophisticated print version of these earlier social phenomenon: Not fandom, but prodom; not zines but books. Indeed, the parallels here are intended only as illustrative of the sort of social relations I envisage evolving, and are by no means an exact parallel.

And that is about paper-books. Digital books add entirely new possibilities. It is only a matter of moments until someone figures out how to network ebooks with social media, so that reviews and reader commentary automatically accumulates with your copy of the book, creating whole new dimensions of book club/literary criticism and networking. We already see something of the sort in GoodReads and similar, but that is only scratching the surface of what we are likely to see in the next couple of years....

So what we may be witnessing is the re-emergence of a literate culture similar to that of the educated landed aristocracy, where literacy didn't just mean reading, but also carried the expectation of writing. Instead of readers being passive consumers, I foresee those still engaged with print as a medium using it productively to become themselves part of the conversation. With POD houses and Espresso machines in every Starbucks, there is now no reason why everyone should not have a shot at developing and contributing their talent to the pool of cultural objects available to everyone.

I think Clay Shirky's (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.) may be onto something. His central thesis is that Web 2.0 etc has created an environment that allows people to pool their 'cognitive surplus' -- leisure time. Although each of us has only a couple of hours to spare here or there, multiplied by the entire population, this cognitive surplus becomes a vast resource of personhours. Whereas previously our options for putting this time to productive use were limited (the occasional community project or carpentry hobby, but mostly frittered away in front of the TV), the Internet makes massive undertakings such as Wikipedia possible. For all its weaknesses, Wikipedia is a vast cultural resource which is growing and improving by the second. It is a perfect example of what I am talking about: instead of sitting back and waiting for experts to publish an encyclopedia -- with all the advantages of vetting and all the disadvantages of control and restrictions on what is to be considered worthwhile knowledge -- consumers have themselves become contributors and editors. They have become part of the conversation.

It does not take a great deal of extrapolation to suggest that the same sort of ongoing dialog, the same contentious arguing and vetting and occasional vandalism and correction that ultimately results in fairly reliable entries on Wikipedia can create a conversation that results in the publication of an equally vast and quality body of literature.

Future of Publishing

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future by Jason Epstein provides an interesting take on cultural implications of digital publishing in current issue of New York Review of Books.

Tigana and Story Time

Until recently, story time has been very different for Kasia than for Tigana at this age. Tigana loved having books read to her, as does Kasia, but Tigana also insisted on us telling her our own original bedtime stories.

When very young, we told Tigana the standard fairy tales, which would then have to be retold exactly the same way each night, until each story eventually reached saturation and we moved onto the next. Then Mary started a continuing series of stories featuring Peter (a Tom Thumb character) and “the little Girl” (who was of course Tigana). Tigana loved these stories beyond reason, as Mary retold the day’s highlights from the perspective of Peter. Tigana would always ask if she was ‘the little girl’, which Mary would neither confirm nor deny, but the events of ‘the little girl’s’ life strangely mirrored those of Tigana’s.

Then one time I covered off the Peter stories when Mary was away, not realizing that Mary considered them her special thing with Tigana. But the deed done, I was permitted to tell Peter stories when Mary was busy, so that we were soon alternating nights.

It was some time before we realized that we had quite different styles and had evolved the character of Peter in quite different directions. Mary’s Peter was mostly comical, getting himself into silly situations or misunderstandings, like the title character of the Amelia Bedelia books. My Peter stories were more plot driven and about Peter having adventures. Again, I wondered if this reflected a gender difference, or just personal style.

When Tigana was five, we moved to a new home in anticipation of Kasia’s arrival. Following a series of Peter adventures/misadventures over the move, I introduced the new character of Rhubarb, who lived in the Rhubarb plant in our new yard. As Peter and Rhubarb explored the new neighbourhood, they came into contact with a host of new characters who lived by the rules of magic I adopted holus-bolus from Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word series. Bedtime stories became a 1,500 episode serial, building one to the next, and often ending on a cliffhanger to be resolved the next evening.

Like any B movie serial, much of each episode included stock footage. In our case the nightly prologue was getting Tigana and her companions out her bedroom window (stealing from Dave Duncan’s The Magic Casement) to the Giant’s castle in Cloudland, from whence her nightly adventures began. (Originally, Tigana and Peter had snuck out into the garden, and then out into the neighbourhood, but after the first couple of weeks of sneaking past Mom in the kitchen, the sequence started to lose credibility, and the storyline started to chaff against the confines of the neighbourhood. So I had the giant invite Tigana back to his castle in the clouds, and introduced the magic window to get her there. Once I exhausted the potential of Cloudland, I introduced the new characters of Dr. Who and Romana. Tigana was delighted with these characters -- and the infusion of 25 years of plagiarized episodes, adapted only enough to make Tigana the star of each adventure.

There were two problems with a continuing series of bedtime stories lasted over 1500 different episodes, First, having stolen every story idea I've ever read over the past 45 years, I was worried there for awhile that I might have ruined fantasy for Tigana. I could just see her discovering Dr. Who or Dave Duncan's books, and instead of the pleasure they have given me over the years, quickly discard them on the basis "They're not very original -- I've heard it all a hundred times before!" Fortunately, in the event, Tigana instead has discovered the dozen of new great authors writing for kids her age, and still loves fantasy. (Though lately she is into the preteen reading of novels about dating, most of which make my brain hurt. But that's another post.)

Second, since I wasn’t writing any of this down, I would frequently lose track of some of the characters or occasionally start to repeat a particular storyline. Tigana would immediately interrupt and ask, "Is this like where they went into the castle and found the bomb?" or "Is this like the time the got caught in a time loop?" "Somewhat similar," I would stall, improvising madly, "but in this case the time loop was running in the opposite direction!" or "No, no! No bomb in this one!" and then beat my brain against the bed post trying to come up with some different angle on an overused story steal. Explaining what had happened to the characters I left hanging from a cliff a couple of episodes back and completely forgot about was similarly challenging.

Some days I rose to the challenge magnificently, and would go out from Tigana's bedroom to regal Mary with the evening's story, and bask in her agreement that ''that was a good one!" Other days, not so much. On more than one occasion, I was so tired by the time we got Tigana to bed, that I would actually fall asleep before her... This did not, to the amazement of all, actually keep me from finishing the story. The first time this happened, I came back awake to Tigana saying, "That was terrific Dad, but I didn't quite get the part about the train."

"Train? What train?"

And Tigana recited back to me a whole 10 minutes of story that I had no recollection of telling, and which frankly made no sense within the context of the story I had started out to tell. But dream like, it had all sort of blurred together, and apparently my mouth had kept recounting as I drifted off to sleep. I wasn't entirely sure I believed this was possible until it had happened several times, and had been witnessed by both Tigana and Mary.

I loved telling Tigana bed time stories, and was sad when she finally out grew that nightly ritual in favor of her reading to herself. My only regret was that I never thought to record any of those stories/episodes. In retrospect, there were enough 'good' nights, and enough original material (given Tigana and in the latter years, her sister) were added to the standard fantasy storylines for me to have gotten the rough draft of a novel or story collection out of it. And then I thought maybe I could record my stories to Kasia, and was shocked to discover her complete lack of interest in anything other than the stories she dictated to me....

But then, at five and a half, it's early days yet. Tigana is insistent I don't tell Kasia any of my Dr. Who episodes, since in Tigana's view those belong solely to her, but as I begin linking together the stories of Princess HummingBird and her Pink Pony -- and more significantly -- the newly introduced character of tinyweenie -- there is hope yet that the process will repeat. I hope so.

Kasia's Play and Stories

While sorting through my mom’s stuff, preparatory to putting her condo on the market, I came across a box of my old matchbox cars. This immediately brought back memories of hours of car chases round the border of the front room carpet. Even after 45 years, I still remembered what each car represented – the crooked racecar driver, the target treasure on the moving truck, the ploy of hiding the getaway car in the blue carrier behind the citron, the detective in the silver shadow Rolls-Royce who always figured out each case in the end, the decoy milk truck – the whole set of complicated plotlines that kept me happily engaged for years. I was surprised to find them, having thought I had passed all my toys on to another family’s youngsters decades before when I’d left home, but this particular set had somehow survived the general purge. So, naturally the shoebox of matchbox toys went into the ‘keepers’ pile.

Where it was shortly discovered by my own 5 year old. She opened the box with a ‘Wow, cars! Can I play with them?” I of course consented, especially since they were clearly already too banged up to be considered any sort of collector’s items. What harm could she do?

Momentarily distracted with other sorting duties, it has half an hour or so before I could return to explain what each vehicle represented, how they drove around the ‘roads’ on the carpet, which flowers in the carpet represented cloverleaf interchanges, all the complicated rules it taken me years to work out. And a good thing too as it turned out.


The carpet I grew up with -- "note highway" border strips with flower "interchanges".

When I got back to Kasia, she had all the cars out of the box and lined up next to each other. “These two are sisters,” she said pointing to the two blue cars, “and this is their Mom.” It was vital, she explained to me, that the cars stay in the right position within the line, that the line move forward in unison, because otherwise the family relationships might be disrupted. In a half hour she had worked out an entire family tree of cars, which had nothing to do with highway chases, conspiracies, or shootouts.

So, is this an age-related developmental stage, or is it a gender thing? For her, every doll and stuffy – and apparently toy car – is about “mommy/baby/older sister” relationships.

Kasia’s favorite pastime is ‘playing ponies’, which consists of extensive role plays with her massive collection of horse, unicorn, and Pegasus stuffies, supplemented with a few dog stuffies, the occasional fairy or mermaid, and visits from various Barbies and Kens intruding in the land of magic from the human world. Initially, when Kasia was three or four, plotlines consisted entirely of one or other horse falling from the bed or couch onto the floor and the frantic attempts by various horse family members to rescue these “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” victims. Invariably, once rescued, these careless individuals would again immediately plummet to the exact same spot. The cycle would be repeated for hours of selfplay. Invited to join Kasia playing ponies, we would have to stick strictly to the script: any attempt by one of our characters to, say, warn horse family members to stay way from the edge of the cliff, would elicit outraged tantrums.

Only slowly over the years has this basic plotline been allowed to evolve into the current version, which is that some bad guy (monster/witch/horse trader) intrudes into the valley of horses/land of magic to steal one or more horses and put them in cages from which they must be rescued. Lately, the bad guys are surprised to discover that the horses are magical and can talk/fly. Sometimes this discovery is what motivates the bad guys to try to capture the magic horses; sometimes it is this discovery that allows the horses to escape (e.g., the horses have invisible wings and turn out to be Pegasuses that can then fly away, after pummeling the would be kidnappers).

Mary and I have resisted, without much long-term success, Kasia’s insistence that there be bad guys. Tigana had had no such need to divide the world into good guys and villains, but Kasia insists on it. Most disturbing is her apparent belief that violence is justified against bad guys simply because they are the bad guys, as defined by the very narrow perspective of her tribe. The suggestion that the bad guys are bad because they are violent, and that being violent back makes you a bad guy seems to be a challenging concept to Kasia.

[I blame the early My Little Pony movies, which featured various stereotypical witches and mean spirited villains; in contrast to more recent My Little Pony offerings (such as Minty’s Christmas) which feature intelligent, engaging adventures sans bad guys. We started horse-crazy Kasia on the current My Little Ponies episodes, which were harmless enough, then hunted down the originals for our addicted daughter, not realizing what a corrupting influence they would turn out to be. I hated those early My Little Pony episodes almost as much as Kasia loved them. Fortunately, she now seems to be outgrowing the franchise...]

So, over the last year or so I have been working on introducing more moral ambiguity into Kasia’s play world. First, some of the dolls started objecting to being cast as the bad guys in various games. This was a hoot, because 4-5 year old Kasia saw nothing unusual in a doll arguing its assigned role, and would enter long debates with various ‘actors’ about their roles, their presumed motivation, and whether they were becoming typecast. The point of the exercise was to break down the ‘beauty=good’, ‘ugly=bad guy’ stereotype – and, frankly, to delay the moment when the next pony would fall off a cliff or get captured.

More recently, I have been working on showing the bad guy’s perspective. For example, I had a long series of bedtime stories / role-plays (story time has a tendency to become scripts for playtime, and playtime ‘rules’ tend to restrict the range of options for story time) in which the princess and her pink pony are the subject of persecution by the Wicked Witch of the West. (Borrowing wholesale for bedtime stories falls under ‘fair use’, right?) It slowly emerges, however, that the Wicked Witch has been the victim of a smear campaign, and that she is in fact the aggrieved party here. Although initially intrigued by the moral ambiguity presented, Kasia was clearly disturbed by the introduction of shades of grey, and has recently asked if we could go back to the original stories where it was just the good princess vs. the Wicked Witch....



Kasia's drawing of a pony

Expresso Book Machine

Went up to visit my mom this weekend, and stopped into the UofA bookstore to have a look at the Expresso book machine.

The UofA machine is a custom built model one (though you can't see 'em in this photo, it has four printers attached instead of the usual one) was installed Nov. 2007.

Apparently the machine attracted a lot of publicity when it was installed, but living 500 k away in Lethbridge, I hadn't heard of it at the time. Having recently seen the video on the version 2, I sought the machine out and was surprised to find that the UofA had already been using theirs for a couple of years.

I was extremely impressed by both the quality of the books being printed -- they were distinguishable from the regular pocket books or trade paperbacks on the nearby shelves only by the superior crispness of the Expresso's interior printing -- and by the passion of the woman in charge who clearly took pride in her work, and went out of her way to be helpful.

The original version was just kind of dumped in the back of the bookstore, and the operator had to figure it out -- no training provided -- and she also has to do the repairs herself. It's not like having a photocopier where you just phone the service guy. When something breaks that she can't fix herself, they have to fly an engineer up from the factory floor. But the flip side of that need for self-reliance was the complete sense of ownership and commitment to the process-- we talked at some length about how she'd experimented with different types of paper and ink and cover stock to arrive at the perfect combination. And she really does produce a superior product. She showed me a book from the UofA Press, and her copy of the same book, and I literally couldn't tell the difference. Given that many of the smaller presses are opting for cheaper paper and particularly cheap coverstock and bindings, the Expresso product is clearly superior.

The version 2 is smaller, easier to operate, and cheaper. She told me that the Expresso people had spent a lot of time debriefing her about the machine and incorporated a lot of her feedback into the Version 2. So it's the version 2 that's being rolled out as a commercial mass market product.

The sociological implications of this machine are staggering. When it first came out ten years ago, the product was not that great and a lot of people who looked at the first two gigantic clunky machines were not impressed. But the woman at the UofA told me that those were just concept demo models and never intended for commercial use. So there was a lot of talk about publishing on demand (POD) back then, but the legacy publishers sort of pooh poohed it.

But the version at the UofA is a different matter entirely. These books do not look like amateur photocopied knockoffs -- these look like what they are, legitimate books. The day I was there, she was printing off copies of Kim Campbell's autobiography. The legacy publisher that had originally brought the book out isn't interested in warehousing a few thousand copies or processing occasional orders -- the big publishers require big numbers to achieve economies of scale -- but by POD Campbell can keep the book in print and make it available if and when needed. Similarly, profs can self-publish texts for their own courses (publishers aren't interested unless the course or its equivalent is offered across multiple campuses), authors can self-publish, and so on. One budding local SF author had printed 50 copies on the Expresso and taken the book to a bookfair -- where Penguin bought the book and signed the author. Others use the Expresso to print off fifty copies (or just one!) of the family history, or their collection of blog posts, or whatever. The possibilities are endless.

This, I think, changes everything.

For the price of the machine (about $150,00) one could open a bookstore. The only space requirement would be a counter, enough room for the photocopier-sized machine, and a cash register. Personally, I would throw in an expresso coffee machine and half a dozen tables so people could have a latte while they wait, though since it only takes about 10 minutes to print and bind your book, there is a danger that your book would be ready before your coffee. It would be sooo easy to add this to any of the existing coffee shops (Starbucks/second cup/Esquires/etc) in town. No hundreds of feet of bookshelves, no rent, no stock, no stock-taking, no theft, no shopworn books, no sending unsold books back, no remaindering books that you couldn't sell, no being stuck with unsold books. Nothing but a terminal where customers browse through any of the 650,000 titles available online. Or bring in their own flash card with he book they want. So infinitely more selection than existing bookstores; but no waiting four days for delivery from the online stores and no shipping costs. Lower carbon footprint for shipping and wasted paper. Win-win-win.

Just like the ipod effectively eliminated the need for record stores or record companies and individuals can simply record their garage band and upload it to the net; now authors can simply upload their books to the net, and people can download to their Kindle or sony reader -- or PRINT IT OUT AS AN ACTUAL BOOK.

Or to approach the topic from the opposite direction: By sheer coincidence, the other person I talked to on campus this weekend was UofA engineering librarian Randy Reichardt. Randy took me round to look at some recent acquisitions the Uof A library had made related to SF fandom, fanzines from the 1930s and 1940s, SF fandom being a mutual interest of ours. These included copies of many legendary fanzines from that era that I had heard of but never seen. These amateur SF magazines were produced on hectographs (how many of you have ever seen a hectographs? I've only ever seen 1 and I am OLD) and Gesteners (ABDick in the States). The hectograph art had stood up very well over time (unlike ditto which often promptly faded to invisibility). There followed a discussion of our own fanzine years, and the sadness that that era was now over. Modern fans -- with a few rare exceptions -- don't produce fanzines anymore, but instead produce webpages and blogs. These formats are obviously much superior: color is as cheap as black and white; there are no mailing costs; no printing costs; and the audience / print run (potentially) infinitely larger. As wonderful a vehicle for fandom as the internet is, I still miss the old days of the printed zine.

Well...with the Expresso Book Machine, or other POD systems, those days are back again. Only this time, we're talking whole books! It has once again become ridiculously easy to put out your own product. Cost is 7 cents a page, so a hundred page book comes out as $7.00 (same cost for trade paper or pocket book, though you get more words per page in the trade). Add on shipping and handling, and what, $10? Which is what pocketbooks cost these days, and half the price of a trade paperback.

see CBC Sparks radio program on similar trend towards turning blogs posts into newspapers.

origami

This is pretty interesting: trailer for "Between the Folds".
See also this great 18 minute TED talk on Origami. First rate, worth your time!

Grocery Lists

I'm not sure what it says about the state of the world, but I'm often fascinated that there is no topic on which someone or other has not published. There are, for example, two books available on lost grocery lists:

Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found (Hardcover)

and the even more interesting A la Cart by performance artist Hilary Carlip.

These are second only to "The Barbed Wire Collector Magazine" (the only remaining magazine on the topic, we are told, which suggests there used to be competitors) as most surprising demographic.... Who are the subscribers here? And what, after over 30 years and nearly 200 issues, is there left to say about Barbed Wire?

Theo Tams and Tigana

Mary took Tigana to see Theo Tams and the other Canadian Idol finalists tonight as Tigana's Christmas present... and so naturally -- given the charmed life my daughter leads -- they were invited backstage for a meet and greet with all four performers.

Back row: Theo Tams, Amberlee Thiesen, Mitch MacDonald, Drew Wright; Front: Tigana

Almost looks like the four Idol finalists are Tigana's backup singers in this shot...

Shatner for Gov General

Check out this group on Facebook that wants to push William Shatner for the next Governor General (2009).

Not sure how serious Gingras is about this one, but it is an excellent example of Facebook (and similar social networking software) implications for grass roots political movements -- and how democracy really does mean "mob rule".