reader.ly

In basketball, as in perhaps all sports, even the most casual fan will yell at the referees for questionable calls. And if he’s watching the game at home, will replay the incident repeatedly to illustrate the miscarriage of justice. Now in addition to hitting the 20-second rewind button on the DVR remote, he can pull up the NBA Video Rule Book and state with total confidence to the ref who can’t hear him, “You call that a blocking foul? This is a blocking foul.”

Of course, the intended result of the NBA’s video rule book is not to provide more fodder to its critics who charge favoritism among the officiators. It’s to educate the fans and media and to foster transparency in the wake of the Dongahy scandal. As Stu Jackson told the NY Times, “It’s very difficult, unless you’ve played the game at a very high level, or better yet, officiated the game at a very high level, to understand the complexity of our rules simply by reading them.”

Each type of foul or violation is illustrated with several different examples from games in the last couple of seasons. As the video plays, sans sound, you can read the commentary in the sidebar that explains exactly why the call was made. The video rule book is informative yet entertaining, a way to revisit some of the important game-changing fouls of the past two seasons, while drumming the message of the NBA into your head: The game is complicated and fast-moving so step off! Personally, I appreciate that they made the site free and easy to use, and stuck to its core mission of education. (Vook people and anyone else planning on melding books with multimedia please take note.) Although there is a chance that now when I ask “wha happened?” in the middle of a game, my husband — without looking up or hitting pause — will simply direct me to the video rule book.

I read a recap of the Ebook Pricing panel from last week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, and one of the speakers, Tammy Nam of Scribd, made a comment about the “interesting opportunity to provide metrics back to producers”

Lots of people looked at Chris Anderson’s free book—250,000 hits—but avg duration was under ten minutes; a few commented that they’d go and buy a physical copy to read through.

The book she’s referring to is FREE, by Chris Anderson. I haven’t read it, and it’s no longer available for free, so I can’t say whether the average duration of 10 minutes was because people quickly decided they didn’t like the book or because they ran out to buy a paper copy by the end of the first chapter. The letter from Anderson on the Scribd site says it became a NY Times bestseller, but then you’d think that Nam’s comments about the experiment would be a little more glowing.

Anyway, what really interested me was how this comment underscored the incredible volume and detail of information that ebook devices collect and deliver to publishers. There are a dozen sample books downloaded to my Kindle that I’ve never even finished. Aside from the privacy concerns raised by the ability of Amazon or Sony knowing which books you’ve downloaded, how quickly you read them, and on how many devices, the potential for marketing to influence publishing has never been greater.

Imagine a writer who’s just released a novel. Most of the people who download it don’t get past the third chapter, or even more specifically, page 29. If the data were available to the publisher, the editor would be able to examine what turned readers off, and provide the feedback to the writer so she could avoid that type of mistake in the future. FanFiction.net, for example, already connects aspiring writers with direct access to readers who comment and help shape their work.

Would a focus-group mentality someday come to bear on the writing of more established authors as well? I hate to think of Commerce interfering with Art, but then again, if I had read the bit where Robert Langdon confesses, in his tweedy professorial way, that he didn’t even know how to send a tweet in the first chapter rather than at the end of The Lost Symbol, I probably would have thrown the book across the room in disgust and walked away. But since this little gem of a scene appeared at the end, when I had already committed hours to skulking around subterranean D.C., and I was reading on a $299 Kindle, I simply cursed Dan Brown silently and punched the Next button.

By marketing eReaders to people who already love to read, device manufacturers are failing to expand the market of potential buyers, thereby cannibalizing the sales of printed books. Or so says Jason Pinter over at Huffington Post in his article “Why the Digital Revolution is Missing the Big Picture” (via TeleRead). He makes some valid points with respect to marketing:

Look at the ads for the iPod: they’re fun, they’re cool, they feature all sorts of (pastel-colored) people who are far funkier than anyone you or I know grooving to the licensed beat. Then consider the ads for the Kindle: the music is straight out of your local elevator. Hesitant readers aren’t going to rush out to spend $299 for the reading equivalent of John Tesh. iPods sell the experience. E-readers are selling the gadget. And that’s bass-ackwards.

Pinter is right, the Kindle ad is incredibly boring, but I’d argue that the ads are simply not that effective. Case in point, he hasn’t bought an eReader, and neither have most of my friends who are big readers. Why do I have a Kindle? Because my gadget-loving husband wanted one, and he convinced me that he would start to read more books. In the decade that we’ve been together, he’s read perhaps four books a year – typically a sports book, a parenting book, a business book, and whichever Harry Potter novel came out that year. I was skeptical that his affinity for reading would last beyond the honeymoon phase of having a new toy, but he proved me wrong. We got the Kindle in May, and he’s read about a book a week since then. On my own, I probably would have been happy to stick to paperbacks for the next few years, but now I do almost all of my reading on the Kindle and am downloading at least a book a week.

It would seem that our household bears out the demographic analysis done by Forrester Research that I’ve previously quoted: “While early adopters of eReaders were a perfect storm of demographics for Amazon (they could afford the device, they have a need for the device in business travel and urban commuting, they like technology, and they buy lots of books online), future prospects for the devices look completely different.”

In other words, my husband is in the first wave of early adopters and Pinter and I are in the next wave — people who like to read and are not as swayed by technology’s lure. Except of course, that I’m married to someone in the former so I got pulled in ahead of my time.

I took the Kindle to my book club meeting on Wednesday for the first time, where it was inspected with some interest. The other book club members, like myself, are women in their thirties. Some of the women are in the paid workforce, and a few of us have taken a couple of years off to raise the kids full-time. All of us love to read.

In other words, this group was the kind of demographic segment that Forrester Research predicts will drive the next wave of eReader sales:

They’re more likely to be female, less tech optimistic, and they read a lot (on average, 5 books per month) but they buy and borrow books from multiple sources, as opposed to buying lots of books online.

Despite the market research, I’d be surprised if anyone in my book club bought an eReader in the next year. During the discussion I demonstrated the search within text feature and we read reviews of future book selections in the Kindle Store. They seemed pleasantly surprised by how thin the Kindle was, and the search and wireless features were deemed cool, but no one had any problem handing it back to me. Based on this extremely small sample size (an experience, not an experiment) I’d say the predicted explosion in eReaders will be a long time coming, at least with the existing devices on the market.

With apologies to Dr. Seuss, the name Vook is so absurd that it sounds like something out of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Vook is actually the name of a company established last year “with the vision to unite the disparate worlds of books and videos into one complete, blended story.” Hence, vooks, online books that you can buy (currently from Simon & Schuster) with video segments incorporated into the text. There are four titles available today: The 90 Second Fitness Solution and Return to Beauty: Old-World Recipes for Great Radiant Skin, both non-fiction, and Promises by Jude Deveraux and Embassy, a thriller by Richard Doetsch.

I can see how video segments might complement self-improvement books, cookbooks, travel guides, how-to manuals and some text books. Video examples of positive discipline methods for toddlers or how to properly caramelize creme brulee, for example, could have saved me countless hours of frustration. Fiction, however, feels different. There are many film adaptations of novels that are brilliant — Atonement, The Hours, The Lord of the Rings trilogy — yet even the best ones have to sacrifice some amount of detail and complexity in order to create a coherent, approximately 2 hour movie.

So to give fiction vooks a fair shot, I bought Embassy this afternoon and read it (vead it?) online. On the plus side, you don’t have to download any software since the vook uses flash. The layout appears like an open book. You can read the text with the video player fixed on the left page while the text advances on the right, or have the text appear on both left and right pages. Clicking on forward and backward icons is the only means of navigating through the book, and oddly, there are no page numbers or progress bars or percentage complete indicators. Compressed video screens are interspersed like thin banners throughout the text; once you click it, the video expands to full screen. When the video ends, you can replay or return to the text.

The Vook people apparently feel that readers need to be encouraged to “get more out of your vook” as they like to reiterate throughout. Each video banner features a cutout of a screenshot, a large play button, and either a title or a call to action such as “See what happened next” or “Why he wants it.” Rather than enhancing the story, the videos interrupt the story, which on its own already strained credulity.

Most of the videos in Embassy are there to set the mood, in this case “tense.” The directors therefore chose “ominous” music, lots of close-ups of NYC police cars, hand-held cameras, and actors who specialize in a single look: scared, angry, or mysterious. In other words, they resemble the stereotypical film school project — poor lighting, shaky cameras, and little dialogue. Considering the results when the actors have to deliver lines, it might have been better to stick to the atmospheric vignettes. The segment where the mysterious guy delivers a raspy monologue explaining his motives (and central driver of the plot), occasionally biting the bandanna into which he seems to be coughing his last breath, is unfortunately more Windy City Heat than The Godfather.

I’m not sure how much blame you can lay on the author for this fiasco. Yes, he agreed to it and appears in an embarrassing video at the end of the vook (but hey! You can Connect with the author and other readers via links to your favorite social networking sites!). My problem lies more with the concept of the vook itself, at least for fiction. The creators of the vook are aiming to expand the market of people who read and buy books by making them easily downloadable, i.e., accessible to the wired generation. They’re also assuming — and reinforcing — a diminished capacity to concentrate enough to read a novel. Call me a Luddite, but I refuse to believe that young people can’t sit still for an hour to read a book (paper or digital) without having video snippets scattered like candy throughout the text to coax them along to the next page. Reading requires you to use your imagination to picture the characters and scenes, and a great story will pull you in so deeply that you forget where you are.

A vook doesn’t let you forget that you’re on your computer. Even aside from the clicking on the video banners (which given my avoidance of online banner ads feels unnatural), once you begin to visualize a scene in your head, the video reminds you that the director’s vision, however overwrought, is the one to watch. I guess I should be thankful that Vook drew the line at video; if Jude Deveraux, the author of romance vook Promises had her way, vooks would include music and perfume “to engage all the senses.”

I’ve enjoyed reading to my kids since they were born — cuddling together in a comfy chair, helping them discover worlds beyond their own, and watching them learn to recognize words. Very rewarding, and still one of my favorite activities. But I don’t know many parents who can honestly say that they enjoyed reading Goodnight Moon or Good Morning, Baby! (or one of its many variations) for the umpteenth time in one sitting. And yet we do it, and why? Because while experts may not agree on the best method to sleep train, they all state — and common sense affirms — that the most important thing you can do to foster a love of reading, and eventually, a sophisticated vocabulary, higher test scores and early admission to Yale, is to read to them regularly and from an early age.

Two other mandates: keep plenty of books in the house and set a good example by reading books yourself. So we should be on track — we read to the kids every day, have lots of books, and make regular trips to the library. They don’t see us read for our own entertainment all that much because when you have preschoolers, most adult reading happens after they’re in bed. But if I’m engrossed in a new book, I’ll keep it handy in case I can read a page while stirring pasta or watching a mind-numbing Nickelodeon show.

Apart from the collection of children’s books, however, the growth in our household’s book inventory has flattened out. Where I used to buy a book at the airport before every flight and shop for my book club selections at Barnes and Noble, I now download them to the Kindle, and once I’m out of my current contract with AT&T, I’ll load them onto an iPhone so that I can read anywhere. Highly convenient, yet does seeing a parent read on an eReader device, laptop or smart phone have the same beneficial, i.e. inspirational, effects on children? When I have a paper book in my hands, one of the kids will usually pick it up, examine the picture on the cover, and ask me what it’s about, and maybe try to read a few words. They know I’m reading. When you see a person with an eReader, you don’t have any idea what they’re reading (at least until this hits the market). And if you’re a kid, you probably can’t determine whether Mom is catching up on email, reading a novel, or watching a video.

The National Endowment for the Arts released a report two years ago that said young people were not reading as much as they used to, and that test scores for reading, math and science were all declining, leading some to consider the grim prospect of a shrinking literate population in the coming decades. Inevitably, the question for others was whether the Internet was to blame. As with most hotly contested issues, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, kids spend a lot of time online these days, and some of that time is spent reading articles and researching topics for school and personal interest; and yes, you could define some of what they do as “reading” only if you put air quotes around the term. As eReaders and tablet PCs become more advanced and more prevalent, with wireless access and faster browsers, the line between reading and “reading” will be blurred even further. But the solution seems pretty clear, at least to me: help your kids discover the joy of reading, and when they’re ready, provide them with the tools to help them research and interact with the material in a way that we never really could with The Encyclopedia Britannica a generation ago.

That said, I’m glad that our kids are too young for an eReader. Although they love a chance to type on my laptop, they’ve never shown much interest in the Kindle, which is fine by me and a reason in itself to avoid color eReaders for the immediate future. But the fact is, I’m looking forward to buying children’s books for years to come. I can’t wait to introduce them to writers like E.B. White, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Roald Dahl, and J.K. Rowlings, and as much as I appreciate the convenience of an eReader, I feel something would be missing from the experience if they read these classics as eBooks. There’s a sense of anticipation when you hold a thick book in your hands for the first time, and when you finish it, you feel a little bit more grown-up. I still have my copy of A Little Princess which I’ll give to my daughter in a few years. Somehow sharing a file, assuming that it’s even possible, doesn’t feel the same as presenting her with a worn but well-preserved and much-loved book.

I read a sample of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol on the Kindle today, and nearly laughed aloud midway through Chapter One at the description of Brown’s Langdon’s fashion sense: “He was wearing his usual charcoal turtleneck, Harris Tweed jacket, khakis, and collegiate cordovan loafers… his standard attire for the classroom, lecture circuit, author photos, and social events.”

Three days prior, I had read the article in Entertainment Weekly “The Da Vinci Sequel Has Landed” which described the backlash Brown faced after the success of The Da Vinci Code.

His taste for turtlenecks, for instance, was much maligned during the promotion of The Da Vinci Code. They have since been replaced by simple dress shirts, though Brown has held tight to his tweed jackets and penny loafers.

Wondering whether Brown intentionally created Langdon in his own likeness, I spent a few minutes looking up biographical information online. Yes, it appears to be the case. Brown is a lucky man; I imagine most writers would kill to create a fictional alter ego played in film by someone of Tom Hanks’ stature and popularity. Anyway, Boston Magazine posted this portrait of Brown written as a parody of one of his novels. It’s a hilarious article that follows the journalist as he tries to track down the mystery of Dan Brown the man. I don’t want to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT!) but his wife, Blythe Brown, has a prominent role, and Langdon may not be modeled so much after Brown as Brown is after Langdon.

I read Pride and Prejudice about once every 18 months, each time discovering some new detail that I had missed previously. It was a good choice, then, for my first assessment of the Kindle 2, a test that would determine whether I could get into the flow state that Jeff Bezos refers to. When I was a child, I could easily ignore perfect summer weather (and in Minnesota, those days are even more cherished) while curled up in a chair with a stack of books from the library. Told by my mom to get some fresh air, I’d just drag my books outside, ignoring calls to play from my sister, and read until it was time to do chores or come in for dinner. That is flow.

Now that I have children who wake up at 7am regardless of how late I stay up reading, and who furthermore require food every few hours in addition to clean clothes and mental stimulation, I can’t indulge my reading habits as often as I’d like. So when I do read, it has to be worth it, because there is little chance that once engrossed in a book, that I’ll be able to put it down like a sensible person at 10pm and wait until 8pm the next evening to resume.

Pride and Prejudice is one of those works that merits a couple of too-late nights; every meeting between Elizabeth and Darcy that ends unsatisfactorily, with confusion and missed cues on both sides, merely makes you hope for another chance to bring them together again on the next page. Read on the Kindle, the absurdities of the characters that populate Pride and Prejudice are just as hilarious, and the advancements and setbacks that the Bennet girls encounter on their path to marriage just as entertaining. I found, however, that while I could lose myself easily in the novel, once I attempted to use features that enabled the kind of reader-text interaction that Bezos touts as the advantage of the Kindle, I felt thwarted in my effort to engage, like the consummate outsider at a ball.

The main feature I was interested in testing was note-taking, as the ability to bookmark doesn’t offer you anything that napkins and receipts can’t. I haven’t had to take notes since college, but now that I’m writing about books again, I like the idea of being struck by an insight or question so compelling that the only thing to do is to immediately capture the thought before it evaporates in the face of daily life. Remembering without a Blackberry alert and a few sticky notes that Picture Day is on Friday is hard enough; remembering to follow up on questions of social disruption caused by the encampments of soldiers among England’s landed gentry during the Napoleonic wars altogether impossible.

Since I hadn’t bothered with any buttons other than Next Page when reading the first few books on the Kindle, I eagerly typed my first note. And was flummoxed. The keyboard is so small and the buttons so close together that I couldn’t help but mistype constantly. Moreover, the keys are difficult to press, a feature which I’m sure prevents accidental searching for words like “fesd” or “juik” but which also means that the effort required to edit a note is not worth it. And yet, one doesn’t wish to read a great work of literature and leave notes strewn with typos. For example, my note on the passage in Chapter 10 where Elizabeth and Darcy are debating the “hypothetical” character of a man (Bingley) who is easily swayed by the opinion of his friend reads: foreshadowim the incident wen darcy gtes bimgley to leave neth. Much easier to keep a laptop open and type notes on a separate screen as you read, than to try to write anything worth saving on the Kindle. Granted, not having to carry a laptop with you is certainly valuable. But then please remove the necessity by making the keyboard more usable.

I tend to read quickly, and so I’m used to paging back a chapter to see if I missed a cue or to review a character’s original appearance. Reading Pride and Prejudice on the Kindle, I couldn’t do that as the load time would have made going back page by page unbearable. The text search function is infinitely more efficient, but you lose the quick plot review and occasional fresh insights that you get when skimming through a book manually.

This won’t be the case for most Kindle users, but I am prone to tendonitis in both hands. Although the Kindle is relatively light, it requires a pincer grip to hold it properly while reading in bed, for instance, which means that by the time I’ve lost myself in “the flow” my hands and wrists are feeling twitchy. It’s possible to use pillows to prop up the Kindle, but it also slides around due to the smooth casing, and at any rate you still need to keep your thumb on the Next Page button. A paper book doesn’t cause the same issues because you don’t need to turn the pages as frequently, and when you do, it doesn’t require as much pressure to do so.

Despite the Kindle’s drawbacks, in the end I’m a convert. I love getting as many of the classics as I want downloaded for free, getting new releases (relatively) cheaply, and having multiple books accessible on a single, thin device. Not having to go to the bookstore or library makes the whole experience feel magical, like you’re wishing for The Lost Symbol, and two minutes later, poof! it appears like a phoenix rising from a pile of electronic ink, ready to take flight.