Books

Do gamers even read?

I came across the “world culture score index” of “readers around the world”. It was part of an infographic showing the results of a survey asking 1600 Russians what they read. While knowing what Russians read may be interesting I was far more intrigued by the World Culture Score Index and the amount of time people spend reading.

Hours reading per week per person

1. India — 10 hours, 42 minutes
2. Thailand — 9:24
3. China — 8:00
4. Philippines — 7:36
5. Egypt — 7:30
6. Czech Republic — 7:24
7. Russia — 7:06
8. Sweden — 6:54
8. France — 6:54
10. Hungary — 6:48
10. Saudi Arabia — 6:48
12. Hong Kong — 6:42
13. Poland — 6:30
14. Venezuela — 6:24
15. South Africa — 6:18
15. Australia — 6:18
17. Indonesia — 6:00
18. Argentina — 5:54
18. Turkey — 5:54
20. Spain — 5:48
20. Canada — 5:48
22. Germany — 5:42
22. USA — 5:42
24. Italy — 5:36
25. Mexico — 5:30
26. U.K. — 5:18
27. Brazil — 5:12
28. Taiwan — 5:00
29. Japan — 4:06
30. Korea — 3:06

The source of the data was a bit tricky but I found this, which included a note on methodology:

Eventually I found this:

About NOP World Culture Score(TM) …
The Culture Score Index Series is based on further analysis of the NOP World Roper Reports Worldwide(TM) survey, which includes in-depth personal interviews with more than 30,000 people age 13 and older in 30 countries between December 2004 and February 2005. The data are weighted to the sampled population in each country. For more information about the Culture Score Index series.

Wait! What? “in-depth personal interviews with more than 30,000 people”. Really? A short in-depth interview would be 20 minutes. That would mean it took 10 000 hours to interview 30 000 people. A whole year only has 8760 hours!

Then there is the problem of reading. What is reading? Are you reading now? When you glance at Facebook are you reading? Does this fit in to your number of hours reading? Ok, ok so I have many questions about the survey. It’s still a cute list. The problem is that all attempts to define reading are about excluding some form of reading. This exclusion is all about making a value judgement as to what should be – and shouldn’t be – read.

Are we to assume that the Indians in this list are spending over 10 hours on the classics? While the Koreans are so technologically oriented that all they do is dumbly stare at screens?

Posted on by Mathias Klang

When the last gatekeeper but one is gone

At the moment, those people are obsessed with how they read books—whether it’s on a Kindle or an iPad or on printed pages. This conversation, though important, takes place in the shallows and misses the deeper currents that, in the digital age, are pushing American culture under the control of ever fewer and more powerful corporations. Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?

George Packer Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? The New Yorker

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Are cheap books wrong?

In the era of the Kindle, a book costs the same price as a sandwich. Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, says that “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it’s a widget.”

That was the quote that headed the article in the New Yorker Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? This is a fantastic question. Books are cheaper than coffee and magazines are even cheaper still. (I just subscribed to Wired for a dollar an issue – with postage). In Sweden cheap books at the train station cost less than magazines but there seems to be a general trend. Without markets being regulated (like for example Norway) the price of books is sinking fast.

Is this a bad thing?

The New Yorker does a good job of comparing Amazon to Walmart and showing how their lack of social support and care for their employees hurts the employees, community and, in the long run, society. The low paying employers are relying on the government to ensure that their profits will be maintained by keeping their workers alive.

Wal-Mart’s poverty wages force employees to rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $420,000 per store. In state after state, Wal-Mart employees are the top recipients of Medicaid. As many as 80 percent of workers in Wal-Mart stores use food stamps.

Walmart: America’s real ‘Welfare Queen’

Giant Value by Jason Schlachet, CC BY NC ND

It’s not only Amazon. Other have to follow or die. Second hand bookshops, these piles of culture and delight are now struggling. Books cost less than their postage.

But what does this cheapness mean for books? With all the discussions about access to knowledge, the decline of reading and the rise of digital devices surely the cheap book is a necessity. But something happens when prices for consumer goods go down. Luxury is what we cannot afford, discounted is what we desire, affordable is the necessity, cheap is suspicious and less than that is without value.

Everyone wants a bargain, by lowering the costs of books we are getting a bargain. But then the price falls even further and we no longer appreciate the book. When I switched from physical CDs to digital music my collection was still valuable and attractive. When I couldn’t bring all my books with me across the Atlantic… nobody wanted them. The music stored in plastic cannot be played without a device, the books could be read by anyone.

Cheap books have made books worthless.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Analogue Portable eBook Collection

Where does the idea for an ebook come from? Some technology dreams are much older than we think. This cool late 16th century dos-à-dos book is really special as it contains six books. Erik Kwakkel writes:

These are very special objects consisting of usually two books, which were bound together at their, well, backs. When you were done with the one book, you would flip the object and read the other. The dos-à-dos book you see here is even more special. Not only is it a rather old one (it was bound in the late 16th century), but it contains not two but six books, all neatly hidden inside a single binding (see this motionless pic to admire it). They are all devotional texts printed in Germany during the 1550s and 1570s (including Martin Luther, Der kleine Catechismus) and each one is closed with its own tiny clasp. While it may have been difficult to keep track of a particular text’s location, a book you can open in six different ways is quite the display of craftsmanship.

This gif is from Io9

The book is in the Swedish Royal Library which has a very nice Flickr set demonstrating the book (and many others).

Six books in one. Not only six books one after another but six different books. Very cool. Sure, it’s still bigger and bulkier than my ebook reader but this is a bibliophile hipster’s dream.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Paper vs Digital Books infographic

Paper books are nothing more than the corpses of dead trees and other cool one-liners abound. But why do people chose to prefer one version over another?

Fatbrain asked around and created this infographic.

What are the top reasons for choosing a real life, lo-fi, analogue, hardcopy book over the digital option? In a recent poll we asked 1,000 Fatbrainers just that. Here’s what they told us.

books_infographic

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Inconvenience is not all bad

The cost of data storage and retrieval is hardly anything that an individual thinks about today. Some of us may need to delete things from our devices but actual storage of data is not an issue. A tweet from SciencePorn last year demonstrated the cost of 1gb of storage over time:

  • 1981 $300000
  • 1987 $50000
  • 1990 $10000
  • 1994 $1000
  • 1997 $100
  • 2000 $10
  • 2004 $1
  • 2012 $0.10

I would love to have a better source than a tweet but it serves its purpose in this post.

The data question today is one of where and how we keep our physical storage devices. And yes, this could be about hard drives that hum with lights that shine but my idea today is more about the way in which we store our physical books. When it comes to music and movies I have moved completely digital – the thought of buying, carrying and storing plastic in order to enjoy those medium is foreign to me.

But books are a problem. I have an e-reader and a tablet both of which have a seemingly endless array of books on them. Reading from these devices is not a problem. I do have issues with commenting texts, on remembering where in the text I read something and finding a book that I have digitally.

All the devices have the ability to make notes but none are better than a pencil. My books contain small texts and question marks. Exclamation marks can sometimes mean I agree, disagree or even just approve of the order in which the words came. Typing will not really do it for me. The way’s in which the marks where scratched also make a difference – when I really disagree I will underscore heavily or circle words. It’s so annoying trying to do that digitally. Also I noticed something even more important: I never looked at my digital notes. They were ephemeral: I wrote them; I felt pleased; and then I forgot them completely. Finding them and recreating the context in which they were written isn’t working for me.

Another problem, for me, is the loss of geography in the book. I first noticed that it didn’t matter how engrossed I was in a text, I would often forget what the book was called or who the author was – While I was reading! But more importantly I could almost never find the passages that I remembered reading. In a physical book I would know approximately where on the page and in the book the passage was. There is a loss of context in the digital version.

But most importantly was the loss of books. I would collect books to be read but they would all disappear in the neutral packaging of the device. Nothing happened to remind me of their existence, no guilty pangs to goad me into reading. My collection of books was increasing while my reading time was shrinking.

Dreams of devices and systems to collect the worlds knowledge are old. But we now have overcome most of the barriers to such systems and by solving the problem have lost the books. Ok, maybe its just me. But I cannot help but think of the wonderful device dreamed of by Captain Agostino Ramelli:

This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large number of books without moving from one spot. Moreover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set, as anyone of intelligence can clearly see from the drawing.

Captain Agostino Ramelli

The advantage of his device is that it does not hide the books needed to be read. You could naturally just scroll passed the book but it was still there demanding attention. The digital world gives us convenience, but too much convenience is not a good thing.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

The abundance of books is distraction

Another package arrives and my first thought is the joy of packages. It’s an conditioned response from decades of birthdays and Christmases. Despite knowing what’s inside there is an element of anticipation when I unwrap yet another book that I could not help ordering. Yupp, another book. The joy of holding the book is only marred by the sinking feeling that I should be writing faster, better and to be blunt about it, more. Just more.

There is a sadness in living in a time when there are enormous amounts of books. Most of the books I buy are second hand copies where the postage costs more than the content. Today the gorgeous On Paper: The Everything of it’s two-thousand-year history by a self-confessed bibliophiliac by the prolific Nicholas Basbanes. Thankfully, in this case, the book cost more than the postage.

Read Books by Wrote. CC BY.

But then I leaf through the book, marveling at all the letter, lines, paragraphs, chapters… The weight in my hand and the need to read it. Now. Read. Now. But, there is a pile of necessary books. All relevant to the project and this is just one of many. Place the book in the already precariously balanced pile and sigh while I think that the abundance of books is distraction.

The only thing that calms me is the thought that these words are neither original nor my own. Seneca wrote that the abundance of books is distraction (distringit librorum multitudo). Getting lost in so many books is unhelpful. Anne Bair quotes his explanation to what he means (in another great book: Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age)

You should always read the standard authors; and when you crave change, fall back upon those whom you read before.

And yet, here I am with another great looking book on my desk. It demands my attention and offers me the chance to procrastinate. Reading is not laziness but research, its not procrastination, it’s preparation. And yet the more I read the less text gets produced.

So I do neither: I blog my dilemma.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Fake Books and Valuable Copies

There is something fascinating about book thieves and none are less fascinating than the Marino Massimo De Caro who was the former director of the State Library of Girolamini but is most infamous for his book thefts and forgeries. Apparently this self-taught bibliophile without a college degree managed to become director of the Girolamini Library through political connections and lobbying.
Once there he began sacking the library, occasionally replacing books with forgeries and sometimes merely destroying the records of their existence in the library.
The full extent of the losses is not known — the Girolamini Library lacks a complete catalog — but prosecutors, with some bombast, have compared it to the destruction of Dresden during World War II. In 2012, the authorities recovered more than a thousand library volumes that were found in a self-storage unit in Verona traced to Mr. De Caro.
(Rare Books Vanish, With a Librarian in the Plot, New York Times)
Not content with simply stealing books Mr De Caro also branched out into book forgery. The most famous case is Galileo’s book containing the earliest drawings of the moon.

GalileoForgeries1

These gorgeous works were unfortunately fakes…

GalileoForgery2

…Like many forgers, De Caro acted out of a mixture of greed, envy, and a desire to prove himself to a field he felt did not recognize his talents (De Caro also forged a copy of Galileo’s 1606 Compasso to replace a stolen version). A college dropout, he “held an imperious grudge against people who had spent years studying in libraries,” writes Schmidle. Instead, De Caro had earned an honorary professorship by donating four Galileo editions (presumably genuine) and a chunk of meteorite to a private institution in Buenos Aires…

…De Caro and an accomplice artist aged several bottles of nineteenth-century ink to create the Galileo drawings, using the Florence Sheet as a guide for the seventeenth-century astronomer’s hand. After opening a bottle of red wine, he had his accomplice trace the outline of the moons with the foot of his wineglass. Then they baked the pages in his home oven to age them. It’s hard to believe De Caro’s fake survived scrutiny for over five years, until Wilding began to express his doubts in 2011…

(How a Book Thief Forged a Rare Edition of Galileo’s Scientific Work, and Almost Pulled it Off, Open Culture).

It’s a fascinating tale and it is particularly interesting after having a discussion on the value of books and their place in society and libraries. The value of a book as artifact is carried separately from the information within the book. The information in the book could be almost worthless and easily replicated but the actual replication of the physical format is what we desire.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Libraries without books

Anyone vaguely following the discussion on books and reading will come across posts like the rise of e-books, the demise of reading and the need for change in libraries. The latter is particularly poignant as libraries struggle to adapt to social media and become venues and experiences rather than… well, you know… libraries. The question is can we have a library without books?
Evelyn Juers knows where she stands, and writes in What is a library without books? that

Sydney’s Mitchell Library Reading Room should be kept as a place of books and readers and intellectual exchange, not transformed into a social hub

Is the problem that the use/usability/usefulness of libraries cannot (should not) be decided by popular majority opinion? Or is this just an opinionated paternalistic view of the world?

Collections by Wrote CC BY NC

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Breaking up with eBooks

Just love the text Librarian in Black writes about ending her relationship with eBooks I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too)

I want to break up with eBooks. Don’t get me wrong, eBooks is dead sexy and great arm candy at parties, as well as a magnet for attention and memorable experiences. But man…eBooks makes for a crap boyfriend. This relationship is as dysfunctional as it gets.

The flash of the ebook may be losing some of its glamor and I do miss many of the things that paper books had (ease of use and tactile sensation) but I am not sure if I am ready for a clean break just yet… I may just have to keep seeing them on the side?

Librarian in Black has written a wonderful text – read it!

Posted on by mklang