The Penguin Blog

Special Guest Post - Nick Hornby on ebooks

Last Friday some Penguins presented other Penguins with our plans for the (re)launch of ebooks which will be happening later this year. We, like other publishers, are frantically digitizing our books because, as we are all aware, The eBooks are Coming!!! This is, of course, a tremendously exciting time - we might be at the brink of a revolution in the way that we distribute books and the way that people access books. But the key word is 'might' - the really exciting thing is that no-one really knows how things will turn out. Ebooks might change our world ... but they might not. We'll know a little bit more a year from now.

Within the publishing community there's no shortage of opinions about the future of books and the future of reading, but it is refreshing to see the views of a reader and writer on this topic. So below, reposted from Nick Hornby's own blog, are his thoughts on books, ebooks and readers. Feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

 

In branches of Borders, they are trying to flog us their e-book reader, the ‘Iliad’, for £399. Meanwhile in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton seems quite taken with Amazon’s version, the Kindle. In my branch of Borders on Monday, the Iliad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right is their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won’t buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task. (A member of staff at Borders told me that he attempted to persuade a young and famous comedian to buy an Iliad last week. He seemed interested, until he was told the price, at which point he swore loudly and walked away. So at the moment, they are priced too high for millionaire showbusiness entertainers.)

There is currently much consternation in the book industry about the future of the conventional book, but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons:

1)    Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no. They are too small for interesting cover art and legible lyrics, the cases break easily, and despite all promises to the contrary, they are extremely easy to break and scratch. Books have remained consistently lovable for several hundred years now. For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.
2)    E-book readers have a couple of disadvantages, when compared to mp3 players.  The first is that, when we bought our iPods, we already owned the music to put on it; none of us own e-books, however. The second is that so far, Apple is uninterested in designing an e-book reader, which means that they don’t look very cool.
3)    We don’t buy many books – seven per person per year, a couple of which, we must assume, are presents for other people. Three paperbacks bought in a three-for-two offer – expenditure, fourteen pounds approx – will do most of us for months. The advantages of the Iliad and the Kindle – that you can take vast numbers of books away with you – are of no interest to the average book-buyer.
4)    Book-lovers are always late adaptors, and generally suspicious of new technology.
5)    The new capabilities of the iPod will make it harder to sell books anyway. How much reading has been done historically, simply because there is no television available on a bus or a train or a sun-lounger? But that’s no longer true. You could watch a whole series of the Sopranos by the pool on your iPod touchscreen, if you want.  Reading is going to take a hit from this.

But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people don’t like reading books much anyway: a 2004 survey of two thousand adults found that thirty-four per cent didn’t read books at all.  The music industry’s problems are many and profound, but you never see advertisements asking us to listen to more music; there are no pressure groups or government quangos attempting to ensure that we make room in our day for a little Leona Lewis. The problem is getting people to pay for music, not getting people to consume it.  Can you see every teenager in Britain harassing their parents for a Kindle? Me neither.

I’m not naïve –  I’m sure that in the future we’ll be able to take a pill that saves us the trouble of having to read anything ever, and books will die overnight. But while people are so resistant to the act of reading itself, the four hundred pound reader is not going to be the must-have accessory of the near future.

Copyright © Nick Hornby, July 2008

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A word about words

Words. So easy to take for granted.

If you live wherever people gather, words are mostly everywhere you look. But how often do we ponder just exactly what they're doing - not saying, but actually doing?

Three weeks ago I had ample opportunity for word pondering. Against my - not-so, as it turns out - better judgment I was sent to the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank, which is located just outside Hebden Bridge - 'lesbian capital of the North' I was informed by at least two people - to spend five days with Dark Angels.

No. Dark Angels are nothing to do with James Cameron's TV series about a bike courier in post-event Seattle. That'd be silly. In fact Dark Angels run a series of courses on creative writing in business. That's pretty much all I knew when I headed up to Yorkshire on a wet Monday evening. Two trains and a very small bus later I trudged down a steep road to Lumb Bank, an eighteenth-century converted mill-owner's house once owned by Ted Hughes. Over the course of the next few hours I was joined by our two tutors, John Simmons and Jamie Jauncey; Steve, who runs Lumb Bank; my five fellow participants Lyn, Julie, Molly, Sue and Marilyn; and Ted Hughes (the cat, female, a bit butch - surely a resident of nearby Hebden Bridge?).

For five days six complete strangers would have to cook, eat, light fires and generally live together while exploring and coming to terms with a number of - sometimes painful - things about themselves as writers. This wasn't writing as therapy. It was therapy as writing.

Each morning, we'd gather in the converted barn and, with the chanting out the way - you might well laugh, but it aerates the blood and clears out last night's cobwebs, never mind the bloody chakras - we'd get down to some serious writing exercises designed to get to the meat of ourselves as writers.

In no particular order - though I suspect the order we followed was crucial to the madness in John and Jamie's method - we were asked to come up with the title and opening page of our autobiography; we had to write our version of the first paragraph of a published novel; we listened to music and wrote what we heard; we committed automatic writing and haiku to paper; we personalized Simon Armitage's Not the Furniture Game which is about Ted Hughes (not the cat, the other one); we formed an imaginary business, writing its founding story and its launch campaign. There were many other activities of a writing nature that I shan't write about here for the sake of brevity.

In-between, while we scratched our heads over our daily homework activities, there were walks, a lunch with Simon Armitage - yes, him again, much wine, piano and guitar playing and singing (not by yours truly) and plenty of time - for me at least - to realise just how complacent I'd become as a copywriter after ten years.

Give me a book and I'll slap a blurb on it in half an hour if need be. I pride myself on getting the job done quickly, pertinently and without fuss. I work on approximately two hundred titles a year so there's no time for mucking about. Yet when I started at Penguin I'd be tinkering with each blurb for days trying to come up with the right formulation of words: a decent structure, pace, tension, a good stab at reflecting the author's style. In short, putting together the most compelling proposition for our ideal reader standing in a bookshop.

Sure, I was green and was learning on the job. And with experience came all the tricks, the instant recognition of this or that requirement and, of course, a certain wisdom that speeds the process up. But wisdom too easily comes at the expense of wonder and fun. The words lose their excitement, playing with them becomes less of a joy. So you tend to experiment less and take fewer risks (if only because you know now that certain retailers and authors are - with very good reason - risk averse). In knowing the rules of the game you become bound by them. And that is never a good place to be.

My week with Dark Angels was about breaking down barriers inside myself. It was about how exciting words can be - not just what they say, but their sounds and patterns and effects, the rhythms and the sheer ruddy joy of playing around with them.

Words do so many things that we easily take for granted, and if ever we take words for granted we're no longer seeing them properly. Worse, we're no longer listening to them. So thank you, John and Jamie and Dark Angels, for bringing me back to the words.

And if you can't spend a week with Dark Angels yourself? Then get hold of a decent volume of poetry. There you'll surely be inspired by other writers, giddy with their own delight in words.

Isn't that the most wonderful place to be?

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Mayday! It's the end of literature!

Generally speaking, I'm a pretty big fan of Jean Hannah Edelstein. I often read her posts and feel a pang of recognition, albeit by replacing her hi-falutin' titles with the ones I actually read. But this time, the headline writers of the Guardian have gone too far. "Can the novella save literature?" may be both an interesting question and a tongue-in-cheek way of addressing the fact that London's public transport is crammed with crummy freepapers, but it smacks of the terror that seems to riddle the whole world of books like woodworm. Or bookworm.

JHE argues: "the vast majority of new writers - even the very good ones - trying to crack in to publishing with their first novel are inevitably told that times are hard for fiction right now ... the chance of publishers successfully launching a novel by an unknown writer on the reading public are indeed slim in an information culture where we struggle to get through 10 pages without losing focus to the buzz of media white noise. Several hundred pages can feel like too much of a commitment when there is so much information to consume ... And who could deny that the actual experience of reading a long book can feel a little arduous if it doesn't really make your heart sing?"

I think partaking in anything you find rubbish is a pretty poor way of judging that oeuvre. Going to see my sister's childhood orchestra would never have made a classical music fan of anyone, and seeing one Young Vic performance of Hamlet is not the way to judge that theatre is "over". Yes, we are pretty busy these days, and yes, there is a lot going on in terms of the information being fed to us - but how much more do we appreciate sinking into a good book? A thick, good book. Whether it's a Rowling, Clarke, Mitchell or James, a book that requires dedication and commitment is exactly what many people are desperate for at a time where restaurant meals last 45 minutes and you can cross the planet in a day or so.

JHE also suggests that novellas battle dumbing-down charges, because "without exacting quite the level of austerity presented by the task of writing a good short story, novellas challenge writers to use words like wartime rations: with care and thought and the extra level of creative gusto required to ensure that they stretch to make a miniature read that is just as satisfying as something more substantial." Why not encourage full-length novelists to work that way? Neither Lolita nor The Talented Mr Ripley are particularly brief, but neither has a word wasted - unlike some of the sprawling rambles novelists (as opposed to novella-ists) can be inclined towards. And if a reader didn't have to wade through 150 pages of foggy childhood recollection, who knows - 800-page tomes might fly by.

I think the bell for literature has been tolling for a few hundred years now, with no noticeable shift away from books over walking, talking, dancing, playing the piano/Wii, or any of the myriad other options. And since Penguin Towers keeps on ticking over, I think I'll hold off on tearing down my bookshelves for novella racks/computer brain sockets/iron gates to keep away the barbarian hordes. Although since one of them fell down recently, I may have to reinforce the 'tome' section.

Sam the Copywriter

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Expressivity

So, to the Reader/Writer Mash-up, held conveniently on the 10th floor of Penguin towers and attended by a motley collection of educators, librarians, metaverse evangelists, poets, game designers and the odd publisher.

The point of the evening, Miranda McKearney from meeting organisers The Reading Agency, told us was to look at the changing nature of reading and writing in a digital age; "The advent of new media is changing the way we all read, and this is especially true of young people."

Then Rose, hilariously described in the programme as 'Young Person' confirmed this by saying that her and her friends all love reading, but all chose different ways to get content. For her it is olde-worlde print and paper books, but many of her friends access manga online, and presumably soon will be doing the same on their mobile phones.

I guess that what I took away from the evening (apart from Rose's brilliantly and spontaneously invented word that I've used as the title of this post) was that as publishers we often preach to the converted, those who already love books and love reading, people like you! We try very hard to sell more books to the same group of readers, rather than trying to deal with the fact that a generation is growing up who want to create content as well as consume it.

My other thought, it is time to retire the word mash-up to refer to the practice of cutting, pasting and remixing words, film, music and any other type of content imaginable. In this digital world of cut and paste, drag and drop, ctrl-c and ctrl-v, mashing up is simply stuff we make and stuff we do.

To sort of illustrate the themes of the evening here's a video which brilliantly encapsulates everything that was discussed and raises several other issues. Expressivity indeed.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

 

update - thanks to those who pointed out by horrible misquotation of Rose's new word - my shorthand isn't what it used to be.

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