Deceptively Simple

“It is experimental — no one’s moving their TV budget to mobile — but it is a part of every conversation we have with business advertisers,” Mr. [Stephen] Howard-Sarin said. “We have a lot of oars in the mobile water because we think there’s money there.”—Stephen Howard-Sarin, CBS Interactive VP of business and finance brands, quoted in the New York Times about iPhone apps and revenue streams

Water is like money and you pick it up with an oar? You’re floating in a sea of money and you use the oars to soak it up? An oar touches the money and pushes the boat through the water/money? Mobile:Water Oar::App? What?

I think it’s what’s in the boat that makes the money, down in the cargo hold, and that the oars propel you through the water. The water is a means of conveyance. But I’m from Indiana, so nautical metaphors are lost on me. Probably metaphors about cutting-edge technology, too, for the same reason. I do know that the Johnny Friendlys usually get their cut of the nautical action, too…

“I remember Jane Amsterdam, who was a wonderful magazine editor. She ran Manhattan, Inc…She said to me, ‘How do you take it? How do you stand the fact that there’s such a hiatus between when you commission a book and when you see it. What do you do? How do you get off on that?’ I said, ‘You have to learn to start getting off on just the fact that you’ve acquired the book.’ The deal has to become exciting. There’s a a long hiatus between the time you convince somebody or they convince you to do a book and when the damn thing actually comes out.”—David Rosenthal, publisher, Simon & Schuster, in Stop Smiling, 2005.

“The producer and director collect Navajo belts and speak every day to Los Angeles, New York, London. They are setting up other deals, other action. By the time this picture is released and reviewed they will be on location in other cities. A picture in release is gone. A picture in release tends to fade from the minds of the people who made it…[T]he picture itself is in many ways only the action’s by-product.”—Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979

That the Senate was even voting today on a bill that would allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon across state lines makes the mind reel, and that it was barely defeated is enough to make you think, “Yeah, sure, waterboarding, makes sense to me. Get me a towel and some water.” The right to carry a concealed weapon seems strange to me on two fronts: the first being that you want the gun concealed. If self-defense is the aim here, wouldn’t it be better to have the guns out in public, where everyone could see who had what firearm? Best defense is a good offense, and all that? The second is the simple cowardice of carrying a hidden gun. If you’re so tough, man up and put the thing on your hip, Doc, where we can see it.

But anyway. The more these sort of issues come around, the more I understand the immutable truth that Eddie Izzard has already addressed them, and unearthed logic such that no one can argue. Here’s Eddie on gun control. (NSFW)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsN0FCXw914

Powell’s Books is shuttering its South Loop location. The Chicago Symphony’s CSO-paraphernalia/music gift/CD store the Symphony Store is moving into Symphony Center. Tower Records already closed all of its stores, the Virgin Store is no more, and places where you can idle away hours rifling through CD racks and perusing shelves are getting scarcer by the day. The merchandise is 50 per cent off at both of them now, so get there while you still can. I made out like a bandit at Powell’s last week, picking up books by Jonathan Raban, Jonathan Lethem, John Haskell, Peter Matthiessen, and theater critic/raconteur/one of the greatest writers ever Kenneth Tynan (above) for $18.32.

And I’m still bothered by it. I’ve never bought anything recommended by an Amazon.com algorithm. The choice thing from its perspective is usually something from a major record label or publisher or author I already knew was out there. No algorithm has ever found something not at all related yet still exactly right the way going through the fiction section alphabetically at a book store – the only way to do it – has for me, consistently and accurately. There may be an untold number of riches online, but online shopping hasn’t yet gotten to the point where a browser (by which I mean a person, not the tool to get you on the Internet) can stumble on something they wanted but didn’t know it yet. For that, a bookstore and a record store are still unbeatable.

I say this as a devoted abebooks.com shopper. Believe me, if there’s something out there that’s pricey and somewhat rare or out-of-print and hard to find, I’m online before I’m anywhere. But it only works if I know what I want.

Fashionable yet down-to-earth model showing how pleasing Kindle-reading can be

I like the sense of chance of a store. I’ll miss it when it’s gone. I don’t want to read on a Kindle, regardless of how much easier it will make dusting and moving apartments. Moving doesn’t happen so often, and neither, for that matter, does dusting. I love having my music all in the palm of my hand, but I also like the sense of ownership I get from having it on a shelf somewhere, and not a hard drive where it could disappear. I don’t think I’d want to scan through a list of books stored on my Kindle, and try to remember back to when I bought them, and try to find the sentences I underlined because they seemed important at the time. When I look on the shelf, I can place the book in time, possibly because I can place the thing in physical space.

Ephemerality is the enemy. I like stuff that lasts.

I like being in the record store, hearing what the clerk has on, and saying that I’ll take it, too, at the cash register. Knowing that someone thought the people who would be in this store on this day should hear this, that’s an experience I like. I like the sense of community it fosters. So, if you’re looking for me, you can find this 31-going-on-78-year old in the bookstore, grumbling about kids and their Twindles or Kitters or whatever they’re using these days.

But seriously, I think this is the direction reading is headed. This well-reported Fast Company article states it all pretty plainly: Amazon is looking to crowd publishers out of publishing, and get everyone using Kindles. But a tangent of the article goes into what’s lost when reading on a screen, thanks to a quote from Oxford University Press’s Evan Schnittman, vice president of global business development:

“I love to read but I know I read immersively somewhat less now — and I’m in the publishing industry,” he says. “E-books are simply print books in digital form and my question is, Will that be enough? Is that really what we’re going to want to be doing?”

The loss of the “immersive reading experience,” as FC‘s Adam L. Penenberg calls it, is going to radically redefine how we learn, and how we read, and how we ultimately store information. Reading and thinking about what you’re reading files it away, and if you’re not engaged…I don’t know that that’s learning anymore.

As for me, I have a sky to go worry about whether it’s falling, and a small stack of literature to tide me over until it does.

“There was an interview going on with Itzhak Perlman, a noted violinist, punctuated with examples of him playing the violin. He was saying that he’d been playing since he was a baby and that the music was a vehicle for him, and I thought, This man is lucky. He didn’t have to ask, What am I going to do? or, How should I do it? And even if he did, he had his music, which was his key, opening the door, not just to the world we know, but to parts of that world which are unknown. Once Itzhak Perlman became one with the music, once he and the world became the same thing, he could then change the world. And the only thing is, once he became the world, there was nothing to change.”—John Haskell, American Purgatorio, 2005