The screeny future of newspapers: "All the news you can screen!"

The screeny future of newspapers: "All the news you can screen!"


by Dan E. Bloom

Are you reading this in your print newspaper -- or -- are you screening this online or on your home computer screen? How you answer
this question will determine what the future of newspapers will be.

CONTINUE: MORE:

> Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first
> volley in this now-national
> discussion. "Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we
> read on the
> printed page?" Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a
> savvy Globe copyeditor: "I screen, you screen, we all screen."
>
> The answer to Beam's question is, of course, yes. From most of the
> research that has come in so
> far from academics in
> North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone's
> in agreement with what it all means.
>
> For me -- as a veteran author, editor and now a daily blogger hunting
> and pecking my way around the blogosphere -- what the current research
> means is that we need a new word for reading on plastic, pixelated
> screens (PPS).
>
> I have quietly suggested "screening", as Mr. Beam quietly noted in his
> column. Yes, screening has multiple meanings, as everyone and his
> brother has pointed out to me in over 1000 emails this year since the
> brouhaha began. We screen movies, we screen job candidates, we screen
> patients for medical problems, we do a lot of "screening" in this
> world of ours. And now, you will be hearing a lof about a new kind of
> "screening" -- so-called reading on plastic, pixelated screens.
>
> I did some homework. I asked Dr. Anne Mangen at the
> University of Stavanger in Norway what she thought about the word
> "screening" for reading on a screen, she told me by email: "My first
> impression is that the term 'screening' is adequate in some
> respects, but not in others. It's adequate to the extent that it
> points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with
> the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of
> print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and
> the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen
> spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly)."
>
> Dr Mangen, in a published academic paper published in Britain last
> December, listed a few reasons that reading on paper
> and reading on a screen are two very different animals.
>
> * Reading on a screen is not as rewarding -- or effective -- as
> reading printed words on paper.
>
> * The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
> manipulation of the
> computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and
> appreciate what we're reading.
>
> * Online text moves up and down the
> screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of
> completeness.
>
> * The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction
> with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things
> tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or
> newspaper or magazine does not.
>
> * The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is
> both a story experience and a tactile one.
>
> The jury's still out on just how different reading on paper is
> from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere
> are getting interesting -- and heated. But more and more, top experts
> in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and
> readability gurus, are in agreement with me that we need a new word
> for reading on screens, and that the word should be "screening." For
> now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in
> the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I
> screen, we all screen.
>
> I asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine,
> what he felt about this
> new word for reading on screens, he told me by email in one short sentence: "I
> would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this)."
>
> Mim Harrison, a book editor in New York, told me: "I find the
> distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it
> certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we're doing
> with our eyeballs these days."
>
>
> "Screening, of course, is not a new term," a top expert in predicting
> the future told me in a recent email, but this might just be the
> time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever
> and useful term capturing the fact that the
> experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading
> on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different."
>
> And then he added this important note: "It is the right word for the
> moment in terms of drawing people's attention to the vast literary
> shift about to wash over us."
>
>
> Another Web philosopher told me: "Keep going in the direcetion you are
> going. Eventually, people will listen to you. Of course, 'screening'
> has multiple meanings already. But your new way of putting it ...is
> very interesting and it provokes thought. I assume that is your
> intention."
>
> When I asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times
> about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: "Hmmmmmmm."
>
> I asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he
> said: "Very interesting."
>
> But when I asked a top technology editor at the Times if he could blog
> about this issue, he replied: "You have a noble crusade, sir, but
> we'll will not be writing about this until 'screening' is actually in
> use. You cannot just go out and create a new meaning for an old word.
> Who are you, anyways?"
>
> I told the New York Times editor (Damon Darlin, if you want to know
> his name): "I am just Dan Bloom, tilting at windmills.
> Tufts 1971. A seasoned reader and writer. I've been reading the New
> York Times on paper for over 50 years!"
>
> Bill Hill, a former Microsoft typeface designer from Scotland who is
> now based in the Seattle area, told me that one reason that "reading"
> on screens is still a bit problematical is because "we are still
> paying the price of an engineering shortcut taken sixteen years ago."
>
> I asked Mr Hill to explain this to me, and he replied: '' Sixteen
> years ago, when the programmers at the NSCA were creating Mosaic, the
> first Web browser, they made an engineering decision based on
> expediency. They took an easy option --for which we're all still
> paying a huge price in terms of the readability of the Web."
>
> The engineers asked themselves:"How do we display content?"
>
> They said: "Pagination's hard. The easy way is to display it all in a
> bottomless window, so the reader can scroll through it. Then it
> doesn't matter how much content there is on a Web page."
>
> But according to Mr Hill and most other Web readability experts,
> scrolling is much less suited to the way humans read than paging
> through content.
>
> "The human visual system -- the eyes, the muscles which control them,
> the optic nerve and the brain -- operates like a high-speed,
> high-resolution scanning machine," Mr Hill told me. "When reading, it
> scans four targets per second, taking only 25ms to move from one
> target to the next, each target about 5-7 characters wide."
>
> "Type, and layout, has evolved over the 5500 years since writing
> systems first appeared," Mr Hill continued, "and especially since the
> widespread adoption of Gutenberg's moveable metal type -- to optimize
> for the way human vision works. Sure, you can learn to make do with
> scrolling to read, if there's nothing better. And there's no choice on
> the Web today.
> And that's what we need to fix to make reading -- and design --
> first-class citizens on the Web."
>
> Mr Hill, who believes in the power of printed books and in a rosy
> future for e-books as well, says fixing the Web's readability won't be
> easy, but that it can be done.
>
> "It'll mean re-educating the design community in a new paradigm," he
> said. "But it'll be worth it."
>
> So, Dear Reader, er, Dear Screener, if you have scrolled all the way
> down to the bottom of this seemingly bottonless guest column, let me
> ask you one more time (and your comments and feedback are very welcome
> in the comments section below): Were you reading this commentary, or
> were you screening it?
>
>
>
> -------------------------
>
> Dan Bloom is the author of over a dozen books
> in English, Japanese and Chinese. A freelancer writer and blogger
> based in Taiwan, he does not own a computer and has never even seen a
> Kindle or BlackBerry or an iPhone

screening : Urban dictionary definition

screening

To read text on a computer screen, cellphone screen, Kindle screen or PDA screen or BlackBerry screen; replaces the term "reading" which now only refers to reading print text on paper

Examples

"I hate reading print newspapers now. I do all my screening online."

screenagers

screenagers



A term that combines two words to describe "teenagers who are online" and who are "always looking at the screen."

Also defined as: "wired teens or the much sought after marketing demographic of 18-24 year olds who grew up in front of a TV/computer screen."

Chris Anderson says: "Who needs newspapers? I get all the news I need sent to me by my friends, and they filter everything for me beforehand."

See DER SPEIGEL "get" with Christ Anderson in Salon.com the other day....

screensaver -- screenshot - The Screening Generation - The Screen Gen

PHANTOM SCREENS - A compact, retractable insect screen that adds to any door or window and rolls out of sight when not in use.

room screens

screen doors

bug screens

folding screens

window screens
room screens

decorative screens
outdoor screens

fireplace screens

touchscreen

laptop screens

Screen time -- Screening - screeny - screen-staring teens - screenagers - screenyness -

I am old enough to know how to do mental arithmetic. Excluding the copious bibliography, this is a 236 page book that does not really get rolling until page 163. That's two-thirds of the way through. The first several chapters are a laborious accounting of all of the new generation's shortcomings. The chapter titles are "Knowledge Deficits", "The New Bibliophobes," "Screen Time," and "Online Learning And Not Learning." He marshals exhaustive documentation to demonstrate that today's kids do not read much and consequently do not have a very impressive vocabularies, knowledge of history, or familiarity with math and science.

Screening - screeny - screen-staring teens - screenagers - screenyness -

New uses of the word SCREEN:

Screening (Danny Blooming) - screeny (Cory Doctorowing) - screen-staring teens (Roger Cohening, NY TIMES)

- screenagers - screenyness - screen-reading

- computer screen -

porch screen

movie screen

sceening potential job candidates

screening patients for early cancer detection

"You screen, I screen, we all screen"

Center for the Future of the Screen: PRESS RELEASE: Screening is the New Reading!

PRESS RELEASE
FROM: Center for the Future of the Screen
DIRECTOR: Danny Bloom
WEBSITE: http://zippy1300.blogspot.com
OFFICE: TAIPEI, TAIWAN


Do we need a new word for the new-fangled kind of "reading" we do on screens?



TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- Are you reading this press release -- or -- are you
screening this? How you answer
this question will determine whether you get to the bottom of this
news release.


Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first
volley in this now-national
discussion. "Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we
read on the
printed page?" Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a
savvy Globe copyeditor: "I screen, you screen, we all screen."

The answer to Beam's question is, of course, yes. From most of the
research that has come in so
far from academics in
North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone's
in agreement with what it all means.


Yes, screening has multiple meanings. We screen movies, we screen job
candidates, we screen
patients for medical problems, we do a lot of "screening" in this
world of ours. And now, you will be hearing a lot about a new kind of
"screening" -- so-called reading on plastic, pixelated screens.

Dr. Anne Mangen at the
University of Stavanger in Norway tells us what she thinks about the word
"screening" for reading on a screen: "My first
impression is that the term 'screening' is adequate in some
respects, but not in others. It's adequate to the extent that it
points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with
the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of
print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and
the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen
spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly)."

Dr Mangen, in a published academic paper published in Britain last
December, listed a few reasons that reading on paper
and reading on a screen are two very different animals.

* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding -- or effective -- as
reading printed words on paper.

* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
manipulation of the
computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and
appreciate what we're reading.

* Online text moves up and down the
screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of
completeness.

* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction
with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things
tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or
newspaper or magazine does not.

* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is
both a story experience and a tactile one.

The jury's still out on just how different reading on paper is
from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere
are getting interesting -- and heated. But more and more, top experts
in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and
readability gurus, are in agreement that we need a new word
for reading on screens, and that the word should be "screening." For
now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in
the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I
screen, we all screen.

We asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine,
what he felt about this
new word for reading on screens, he told us by email in one short sentence: "I
would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this)."

Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida with Levenger Press, said: "I find the
distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it
certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we're doing
with our eyeballs these days."


"Screening, of course, is not a new term," a top expert in predicting
the future told us in a recent email, but this might just be the
time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever
and useful term capturing the fact that the
experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading
on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different."

And then he added this important note: "It is the right word for the
moment in terms of drawing people's attention to the vast literary
shift about to wash over us."


When we asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times
about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: "Hmmmmmmm."

We asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he
said: "Very interesting."
DIRECTOR: Danny Bloom
WEBSITE: http://zippy1300.blogspot.com
OFFICE: TAIPEI, TAIWAN


Do we need a new word for the new-fangled kind of "reading" we do on screens?



TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- Are you reading this press release -- or -- are you
screening this? How you answer
this question will determine whether you get to the bottom of this
news release.


Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first
volley in this now-national
discussion. "Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we
read on the
printed page?" Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a
savvy Globe copyeditor: "I screen, you screen, we all screen."

The answer to Beam's question is, of course, yes. From most of the
research that has come in so
far from academics in
North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone's
in agreement with what it all means.


Yes, screening has multiple meanings. We screen movies, we screen job
candidates, we screen
patients for medical problems, we do a lot of "screening" in this
world of ours. And now, you will be hearing a lot about a new kind of
"screening" -- so-called reading on plastic, pixelated screens.

Dr. Anne Mangen at the
University of Stavanger in Norway tells us what she thinks about the word
"screening" for reading on a screen: "My first
impression is that the term 'screening' is adequate in some
respects, but not in others. It's adequate to the extent that it
points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with
the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of
print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and
the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen
spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly)."

Dr Mangen, in a published academic paper published in Britain last
December, listed a few reasons that reading on paper
and reading on a screen are two very different animals.

* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding -- or effective -- as
reading printed words on paper.

* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
manipulation of the
computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and
appreciate what we're reading.

* Online text moves up and down the
screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of
completeness.

* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction
with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things
tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or
newspaper or magazine does not.

* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is
both a story experience and a tactile one.

The jury's still out on just how different reading on paper is
from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere
are getting interesting -- and heated. But more and more, top experts
in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and
readability gurus, are in agreement that we need a new word
for reading on screens, and that the word should be "screening." For
now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in
the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I
screen, we all screen.

We asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine,
what he felt about this
new word for reading on screens, he told us by email in one short sentence: "I
would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this)."

Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida with Levenger Press, said: "I find the
distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it
certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we're doing
with our eyeballs these days."


"Screening, of course, is not a new term," a top expert in predicting
the future told us in a recent email, but this might just be the
time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever
and useful term capturing the fact that the
experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading
on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different."

And then he added this important note: "It is the right word for the
moment in terms of drawing people's attention to the vast literary
shift about to wash over us."


When we asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times
about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: "Hmmmmmmm."

We asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he
said: "Very interesting."

Michael Arrington says: "Good journalism takes one person and a keyboard." Who is he kidding?

Michael Arrington (@arrington) - July 30th, 2009 at 12:29 pm PDT
good journalism takes one person and a keyboard.

Michael Arrington says: "Good journalism takes one person and a keyboard." Who is he kidding?

Sharon Begley at NEWSWEEK, who never answers my emails to her, says SCREENING is a good word for all this....

The Dumbest Generation? Don't Be Dumb.
By Sharon Begley and Jeneen Interlandi
NEW WEEK June 2, 4008 Issue

George Santayana, too, despaired of a generation's ignorance, warning that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' That was 1905.
Really, don't we all know by now that finding examples of teens' and twentysomethings' ignorance is like shooting fish in a barrel? If you want to exercise your eye-rolling or hand-wringing muscles, take your pick. Two thirds of high-school seniors in 2006 couldn't explain an old photo of a sign over a theater door reading COLORED ENTRANCE. In 2001, 52 percent identified Germany, Japan or Italy, not the Soviet Union, as America's World War II ally. One quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds in a 2004 survey drew a blank on Dick Cheney, and 28 percent didn't know William Rehnquist. The world's most heavily defended border? Mexico's with the United States, according to 30 percent of the same age group. We doubt that the 30 percent were boastful or delusional Minutemen.

Like professors shocked to encounter students who respond with a blank-eyed "huh?" to casual mentions of fireside chats or Antietam or even Pearl Harbor, and like parents appalled that their AP-amassing darling doesn't know Chaucer from Chopin, Mark Bauerlein sees in such ignorance an intellectual, economic and civic disaster in the making. In his provocative new book "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)," the Emory University professor of English offers the usual indicators, grand and slight. From evidence such as a decline in adult literacy (40 percent of high-school grads had it in 1992; only 31 percent did in 2003) and a rise in geographic cluelessness (47 percent of the grads in 1950 could name the largest lake in North America, compared with 38 percent in 2002), for instance, Bauerlein concludes that "no cohort in human history has opened such a fissure between its material conditions and its intellectual attainments."

Bookshelf: Screening is making us dumber and dumber, says David Robinson in review of Mark Bauerlein's book THE DUMBEST GENERATION

Bookshelf

Can U Read Kant?

By DAVID ROBINSON

May 13, 3008

It would seem that technology and culture both make the present a good time to be young. The digital tools that are reshaping our economy make more sense to young "digital natives" than to members of older generation, an imbalance of abilities that tips the economic and political scales in favor of young people. Meanwhile, aging boomer parents, rather than pass down a fixed, canonical culture to their kids, encourage a modern-day version of their own rebellion, inviting younger voices to disrupt stodgy cultural continuities.

To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the present is a good time to be young only if you don't mind a tendency toward empty-headedness. In "The Dumbest Generation," he argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.

So: is screening good or bad?

How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, and SCREENING, dumb and dumber, this author writes.

How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes.

By Lee Drutman, Special to The LA Times

July 5, 2008


In the four minutes it probably takes to READ this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends READING each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are SCREENING this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!
[MORE]

Is Stupid Making Us Google? Is Screening Making Us Stupid? Maybe. - James Bowman

Is Stupid Making Us Google?

by James Bowman


Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I渇 spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That旧 rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I観 always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.?Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass旧 skin in Balzac旧 novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that 庁sers are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of 襷eading?are emerging as users 褜ower browse?horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.?BR>

Kevin Moore in NZ suggests: "monitoring" for reading on screens -- another good idea!

Says Kevin Moore in New Zealand re

[Do we need a new word for the new-fangled kind of "reading" we do on screens?]

Kevin tells me in email today:

''Monitoring is a possible word for reading the content generated by a computer system, since it implies keeping an eye on what is going on (and computer screens are often referred to as monitors)''

-KM

She scrolled, she screened, she said: "Great column!"

Dear Danny,

I scrolled all the way through and screened the whole thing. Great column!

Best,
Mim
Mim Harrison
Editor, Levenger Press


L E V E N G E R
Delray Beach, FL 33445
Levengerpress.com

Screening? For reading online?

Screening? For reading online?

Says a top UK fururist in London to me today:

"I think a new word [for reading on screens] is a good idea, although there could be confusion with
[its] current use - screening a movie versus screening a book?

Interesting.... "

Future of Libraries ....by Richard Watson, futurist, UK

Richard Watson, futurist says:

Future of Libraries (Draft Scenario 1)
Scenario 1 Draft

This is a world of distant thunder, where people have become alarmed about the health of the planet, especially the destructive effects of global growth and rampant consumerism. Following a series of highly destructive weather events, financial catastrophes and pandemics, people turn against the globalists, the techno-futurists and the multi-nationalists to look for simpler and more sustainable solutions closer to home. This is a world of strong family ties where people trust each other. It is also a world where people are drawn to things that don’t change, where free public spaces that are open to old and young alike are valued and protected.

Hence the idea of local living gains momentum, which, ironically, becomes a global movement. The leaders of the campaign then merge their ideas with those of a number of other likeminded movements, including the Slow Cities movement and the Fair Trade Alliance, and the Commonsense Revolution is born.

This is a sustainable world of switching things off, living on less and doing without certain things. It is intensely local, fiercely authentic, more emotional, less rational, more reflective and multi-sensorial. Climate change and resource shortages mean that energy efficiency is a key priority and local governments fund small grassroots campaigns to persuade people to generate their own power and recycle their own water. Grants also encourage people to grown their own food and large areas of publicly owned land are given over to city-farms and village growing co-operatives.

Alternative energy is key feature of this world, although most of the solutions remain fairly low-tech. Power generation shifts to local networks to avoid losses due to transmission and most homes, offices and public buildings generate at least some of the power they require through a mixture of solar and wind power.

Use of fossil fuels is significant for many decades (especially in transportation and manufacturing) but the mixture of high prices and green taxation means that the days of oil, coal and gas are numbered.However, at a domestic level change takes hold far sooner. The use of electrical goods declines and there is a slow but significant drift back towards analogue and human-powered technologies due to reliability and cost considerations. Hence, $2,000 tumble dryers are thrown out and recycled in favour of $20 washing lines. Cars are replaced with scooters and bicycles, people make and mend their own clothes and children start walking to school again.

Use of the internet, social networks and virtual worlds also decline, partly due to cost. This doesn’t mean that all technology is rejected, simply that people think carefully about what they need and try to achieve some level of balance by weighing up the personal against the collective disadvantages. Technology is balanced against overall human needs.

The only exception to the widespread rejection of electronics is the mobile phone. The use of mobiles increases for a number of years but eventually starts to fall off following a number of research studies linking mobile phone use to EMF radiation and cancer. Local governments then start to ban the use of mobiles in government building such as schools, hospitals and libraries.

To begin with this provokes a number of protests, especially from young users, who organise flash-mob protests, but eventually people accept the ruling and divert their calls to landline telephones instead. This co-incidentally proves to be an extremely good idea because landlines turn out to be far more resilient against power blackouts and phone viruses.

Work, too, is localised. There are still people that travel vast distances to work by public transport and there are those that travel the world in search of meaningful employment or escape. But by and large people shift their employment needs and leisure diversions to things that are more local. Work-life balance remains a key part of this equation, with many people giving up a proportion of their income in return for less travel or less stress. This means there is a gradual drift away from the big cities towards smaller towns and villages although some people, especially singles, are still attracted to major urban areas, which are now more ordered and calmer than they were in 2009.

In terms of information, things start to change here too. The production of new information declines substantially due to the slow shift away of the internet and digital devices. There is also a noticeable shift by consumers of information towards quality sources. In most instances trusted sources are fairly local, although a handful of well-established global infotainment brands and academic information publishers
do extremely well.

The movement towards safe sources also benefits physical books. e-Books are widely rejected due to concerns about sustainability but also because there is a feeling that digital devices like these benefit nobody over the longer-term. For example, a series of scientific studies demonstrates that the repeated use of mobile devices during the early part of the 21st century led to a decline in empathy due to a focus on the self and also a reduction in overall intelligence due to a lack of contextual understanding. People also believe that e-books accelerate the outsourcing of the human mind and user underestimate the literal and figurative sense of weight that is part of the analogue reading experience.

Physical books (including old and second-hand books) therefore make a rather unexpected re-appearance and physical libraries do well too because they are perceived as important pillars of the local community where people can physically interact and converse. Thus, libraries are transformed into local information centres, dispensing vital community information and also providing a physical refuge where disadvantaged groups can seek protection as well as knowledge.

Government funding for libraries remains low in this world, partly because economic growth is now restrained but also because environmental security and the health of the ageing population remain higher priorities. A new Libraries Act also signals a shift towards the introduction of more user-pays services and an end to what some library users consider ‘restrictive’ practices. Staffing is therefore tight but libraries cope with surging user demand by recruiting multi-skilled personnel and also by enticing retired knowledge workers to work part-time.

It is not all good news though. Libraries struggle to maintain old buildings, which are regularly attacked by the wild weather and there is also pressure from local government to make the buildings as green as possible and to add as many government services as physically possible.

Draft Timeline – Scenario #1

2010
Library visits up 4.25% over previous year and 17.49% over past 5 years
New strain of H5N1 influenza emerges and kills 250,000 in China alone
The Murray River records lowest ever flow of 88 gigalitres in January 2010
Collapse of Macquarie Bank sparks dancing protests again globalisation
Study finds that attention spans have declined to 2-minutes for teens.
Local newspapers resist widespread shift to e-news
Report claims that the average avatar uses more energy than the average German
Online banking accounts tumble in favour of local branches
The local living movement starts in Parkes and spreads throughout NSW
Library visits up 12% on 2009

2011
Launch of Local Living magazine. First print run is 100,000 copies
American Express (aka American Excess) loses major class action in US
Biofuel production blamed for death of 150,000 children in India
Australia records driest year on record
Local Living circulation now at 200,000 copies per month
Widespread flooding in USA
Commonwealth Bank opens series of branches inside libraries
Climate change and work-life balance key issues in Australian federal election
Slow Cities movement signs up councils across Europe – traffic banned at weekends
Sony successfully sued in France for peddling addictive video games

2012
Felix Denis buys Local Living magazine. US edition sells 950,000 in first month
CSIRO unveils nano ‘wallpaper’ for use on roofs and sides of houses
Water restrictions re-introduced and made permanent in most Australian cities
New-build swimming pools banned whilst existing pools attract pool tax
Google zeitgeist announces that ‘sustainability’ was 8th most popular search in 2011
Washing machine sales tumble by 50% year on year
Amazon withdraws Kindle 3 from sale in Australia
Global boycott of plastic packaging extends to plastics used in technology devices
Robotic pets the biggest flop of Christmas 2012
Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm is re-released on vinyl and sells 900,000 copies

2013
People start to fill in swimming pools to grow vegetables
Launch of the ‘Analogue Coalition’ to protect physical books and letter writing
Study by the Australia Institute claims that 45% of households have downshifted
Article in newspaper claims that second-hand bookshops opening at rate of ten a week
Survival store opens next door to the Apple store in George Street, Sydney
IAG refuse to insure any real estate situated within 5km of the coast
Boom in sale of domestic security products
Dick Smith launches Battler’s Bank
European Union collapses in face of rising nationalist sentiment
Oil now at $160 a barrel and rising
Boycott of plastic toys knocks 30% of Hasbro’s share price in US

2014
McDonald’s announce that their menu is now 100% local and organic
Car sales down 20% with the exception of city runabouts
Apple stores burnt down. Slogans on pavements outside include people not machines
Major shift towards home-based leisure announced by Mintel Research
85% of adults in Australia claim they would like to be a civil servant
Number of robots in domestic service worldwide drops from 4 million to 657,000
30% of children now either walk or cycle to schools (up from 9% in 2007)
Chinese economy turns inwards after GDP growth slips to 4%
Wikipedia starts to publish physical encyclopaedias

2015
Local governments announce library grants for citizen-preservation of local history
Sales of Dutch bicycles increase four fold in six-months
Government announces that the weight of the average child has fallen by 5%
Reports says that walking speeds in major cities have fallen by 5% in 5 years
95% of ocean fish now below sustainable levels
76% of young adults now a member of at least one single issue action group
Volume of traffic on UK roads drops by 30%
PEW report claims that 76% of Americans have nil or negative net worth
Insurance on property now represents 25% of global GDP

2016
Study shows link between mobile phone use and childhood leukaemia
Local governments ban use of mobile phones in schools and hospitals
Ban extended to all government building including libraries
Teens gather outside schools to protest against phone bans
Police able to fine parents that place TVs or computers in children’s rooms
Penn State University says average person has 50 hours of free time per week
33% of Chinese patent applications are to do with bicycles or e-scooters

2017
Second study finds definitive link between mobile phones and brain cancer
Mobile phone sales fall by 800% in six months
Local governments announce grants to ‘green’ old library buildings
6 out of 10 of the fastest growing companies in the US are environment related
Newspaper says that office productivity has increased 25% since death of Twitter
25% of Silicon Valley start-ups now clean tech related
Chinese economy collapses following major banking scandal
Google abandons book digitalisation project citing copyright issues

2018
BBC media buys the Australian physical newspaper assets of News Corporation
US v Google anti-trust case results in break-up and sale of library assets
Book sales now exceed lottery ticket sales worldwide
Average life expectancy in Asia now 65 and falling
Invention of paper announced as ‘world’s greatest’
Deceleration named as the #1 trend of 2018 by What’s Next report
Study finds that investment in technology has no noticeable impact on intelligence

2019
Oil hits $200 a barrel
Fresh water now largely priced by time of use x litres
Survivalism for Dummies is the runaway publishing hit of 2019
List of best professions includes; green architects, teachers, booksellers and librarians
40% of bank loans now used to improve the energy efficiency of real estate
Local government places restrictions on the use of technology in classrooms
Russia turns off gas pipeline to Europe citing resource security issues

2020
NPR report says that library use has quadrupled over the past 20 years
YouGov report says that stress costs the UK economy £66 billion per year
Readers Digest named as most trusted media brand alongside BBC and ABC
Series of scandals relating to accuracy of information used by Fox News

2021
Libraries introduce free health screening for over 55s
Rising sea levels cause mass population movements globally
77% of people say that they expect everything to be lots worse next year
‘Library on a bike’ a major hit across Asia
Local government allocates funds for development of mobile library network
Libraries experience surging demand for survivalist books and especially talks

2022
Reports says that more people know their neighbours names that 25 years ago
Sales of fountain pens up 80% in Japan
ABC childcare in second collapse as parents shift towards home-based work
Best selling book of 2022 is Books and Other Things that are Supposed to be Dead
Libraries sell board games

2023
Report says that average number of real friends has risen from 4 to 9 in 10 years
Libraries attract funding for series of events on Slow Living
Sales of garden equipment up 400% since 2019
Evening chess nights a surprise hit in local libraries

2024
Oxford University study claims that obesity epidemic is officially over
Global demand for flood engineers outstrips supply by 500:1
High winds kill 2010 overnight in Melbourne
Woolworth’s announces launch of farmer’s markets in all its car parks from Feb 2025

2025
Libraries offer free language services for recently arrived migrants
Extended Financial Families become the dominant household type in Australia
Laptop computers banned in public libraries
Report by Library Council of NSW says that paper is most durable media format

2026
Imported bottled water now banned although some supplies manage to drip through
Libraries become pivotal in tackling social exclusion
Libraries create events to build community identity and develop citizenship
Best selling book of 2026 is Books and other Things that are Supposed to be Dead

2027
Reports claims that Australia has lost 5% of its coastline due to erosion.
Increase in demand for wind-up products, especially radios and torches

2028
Book by James Lovelock Jnr claims that 98% of human race will be extinct by 2100
78% of people say they wish James Lovelock jnr would become extinct by 2029
New local tax on non-renewable energy consumption

2029
White candle sales catch fire and grow 800% in a single year
Local search trend intensifies
Collection strategies switch from vocational learning to local history and environment

2030
Librarians named as ‘living national treasures’ by Local Living magazine
Report says that global happiness index is at highest level since 1945
Philanthropists divert funds to public libraries

Michael Arrington on ''What If: The New New York Times''

What If: The New New York Times


by Michael Arrington on July 30, 3009

Like everyone else I’ve watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is the New York Times, of course, and their many missteps in recent memory have been well chronicled. In early 2008 Marc Andreessen started a New York Times Deathwatch, and the company’s financial performance has degraded since then.

I keep wondering what would happen if the top 10% of the writers at the NYTimes just…walked out. I know it’s crazy, but let’s just explore this a bit for the heck of it.

Today the company is worth just a little over $1 billion. As recently as five years ago it was worth nearly 5x that much. You have to go back to the early 1980s to see a lower stock price.

I certainly don’t think the NYTimes is going to be shutting down any time soon. The company still pulls in nearly $3 billion a year in revenue, down just 10% or so from 2005. But massive overhead, and more than 9,300 employees, make profitability an increasingly difficult goal for The Gray Lady. Her age is showing.

Journalism Isn’t Dead. Just The Old Business Part Of It.

A couple of weeks ago I met the Politico guys just before they taped their Charlie Rose segment. I watched them live from the green room at the show, and read Michael Wolff’s excellent Vanity Fair article on the young company. Their news room is 100 strong and they have more people in the White House Bureau than any other brand. They have roughly the same traffic as we do - 7 million monthly visitors - but they’ve been around just half the time. How did they do it? The site was founded by well known political journalists who bailed to start their own company. They took their personal brands and credentials with them, and the readers followed. Today they are profitable - largely because they launched a three-day-a-week print version of the site. Amazing. Print isn’t dead (yet). Just the overhead is.

And earlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to - they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by the newspapers and magazines. And they now have a news room 1,500 journalists and editors strong. Amazingly, failing old media is throwing away their most valuable assets. And AOL is eagerly picking those assets up for a song. Before anyone knows it, AOL may be the most powerful news outlet in the world.

Journalists still matter. A lot. Especially the good ones.

What if…

So that got me thinking about the NYTimes. $3 billion in revenue. 16 million monthly unique visitors and 124 million page views (Comscore worldwide, May 2009). 9,000+ employees. 1,200 news staff, and just 400 or so writers, critics, correspondents and columnists. I’m still waiting to hear how many editors the paper has on top of those 400, but it’s probably a total full time news staff of no more than 450 people.

I don’t really read the NYTImes beyond the technology section. But I’m guessing that the top performers in the news room, say the best 5%-10% of the writers and editors, produce 50% or more of the real value of the newspaper. The hungriest reporters. The best writers. The most competitive and aggressive editors.

What if that group, the most valuable assets that the NYTimes controls, simply walked out of the building and started their own company? What would that look like?

The New New York Times

The New New York Times, or NNYT, would have a writing staff of say 50 people. These are among the best journalists in the world, and lets say they wanted to pay themselves $200,000/year, a top salary for a reporter of that stature. That’s just $10 million a year in payroll expenses. Call it $12 million with benefits. Plus, they all have stock options in the new comapny

If TechCrunch is any indication, the amount of support staff (developers, office staff, sales people, admin) needed to run the company is at most 20%, or another ten people, particularly if they outsource a lot of that. Put everyone in the cheapest office possible, and you’re looking at additional payroll, benefits and office expenses of another $3-4 million per year.

Now lets just add another 50% on top of that for other expenses and a safety net, and round it up to $25 million per year in total expenses.

That’s $25 million/year to have a well paid staff of the best journalists on the planet. How long before they outstrip those 16 million monthly visitors and 124 million page views? 5 years? Less?

How many private equity funds would kill to put $100 million behind the NNYT to make sure the company had plenty of money until it reached profitability?

My guess is plenty. And Marc Andreeseen, who has already backed two blogs, may be the first in line to invest. And I know a couple of hedge funds that would be right there, too. I know this because they’ve pitched me on a vision not much different than this one.

Of course, none of this is going to happen. Those 50 top journalists aren’t going to be able to self select and organize themselves even if they had the inclination to do something like this. But the interesting thing is that I think something like this would work, really work, if anyone tried it. And the guys at Politico and AOL seem to be doing just that. Lean journalism, for the win.

David Anderson in Canada nails it!

Very funny article. You seem to suggest that the only real use for electronic reading devices, including the Kindle (if it were any good) and the iPod Touch, is to satisfy sudden urges to read (such as the late-night urge), or to continue reading (as after a book has been completed on the beach). I wonder if, during your research and your time with the Kindle, you ever had the sense that the demand of the book for patient, focused attention is simply antagonistic to the electronic medium, which is aiming to imitate the feel and readability of a book while adding an upgrade of immediate gratification? Will this “upgrade” ever truly be an upgrade, in the patient world of books, or will it simply distract the reader and downgrade the reading experience?


David Anderson
Ottawa, Ontario

The New YorkTimes: are you reading it or screening it these days?

''

The miracle, though, is the printed Times that rattles and makes your head go up and down to take it all in. The hugeness of it. I’ll be very sad if that goes. The Times has never looked better as a printed object. ''

Nicholas Baker

The miracle, though, is the printed Times that rattles and makes your head go up and down to take it all in

THE NEW YORKER: From e-mail:

When considering the DX model and its supposed aim to “rekindle” the newspaper industry, you mentioned its e-version of the Times and how badly it sucked. Have you had a chance to use the new Times Reader version 2.0? It is brilliant. I like it so much that, a few years after cancelling my home-delivered version of the physical paper, I am again subscribing to the Times daily, via the Times Reader. It is that good, IMO. With my MacBook Pro and the Times Reader, it’s just about as good as holding the ol’ gray lady, minus the ink stains. And that’s a good thing.
Dan Waun
Lansing, Michigan

NICHOLSON BAKER: The DX version of the Times is not good, in my opinion, but the Times Reader that gives you the PDF image is very good. The miracle, though, is the printed Times that rattles and makes your head go up and down to take it all in. The hugeness of it. I’ll be very sad if that goes. The Times has never looked better as a printed object.

Screening versus reading: the debate goes on

A top professor at PRINCETON told me this today: AND SEE HIS LAST SENTENCE!

"I think the answer depends on what kind of material you are talking about "reading". The Kindle is targeted at traditional "text", the kind of stuff that is designed for paper, including words and pictures and charts. Computer screens are designed more for dynamic content. That's why web pages look good on computer screens, and not so good on Kindles. I do think there is a difference between reading web pages, which more and more include video and interactive elements, and reading static text/images. Maybe "viewing" is a better description of what happens when we look at web pages, but that term is passive, and web pages can be interactive. Maybe we need to invent a new term."

Do you think the advent of the Kindle and other similar digitual reading devices will eventually impact the way authors write?

QUESTION FROM KIRK W.: Do you think the advent of the Kindle and other similar digitual reading devices will eventually impact the way authors conceive of literary narrative? Is it possible that they will begin to write differently because it’s a different medium than the physical book?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I can’t imagine that the format of publication won’t affect the way things flow to some degree. We already know that writing for blogs has a different rhythm that is the result of screenloads and the attention span in a clickable world. But it all comes back to somebody telling you a story or laying out a complicated nesting set of arguments.

Efforts at Princeton to pilot the use of the Kindle: are you screening this or reading it?

NOTE TO MR BAKER:

As the person leading the effort at Princeton to pilot the use of the Kindle, I was dismayed by your comments regarding Princeton in the Kindle article. Princeton consumed 50 million sheets of paper last year. That is a staggering number, both from a financial and environmental perspective. We have no interest in helping Amazon make money from coursepacks (or anything else). We do have an interest in finding ways to keep students from repeatedly printing digitized materials. Paradoxically, the advent of digitized text has led to an increase in printing on our campus (and many others). People don’t like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power), so we are looking for ways to deliver text in a greener and cheaper fashion, without adversely affecting the student’s ability to undertake their studies. If you would like to know something about what we are doing, and why, please consult our Web site.

Regards,
Serge Goldstein
Director of Academic Services
Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey

NICHOLSON BAKER replies: I don’t mean to dismay you, and I’m sure your motives are pure. I wonder, though, if you’ll find that students will stop printing out PDF files if they have the DX. I found it an extremely frustrating way to read PDFs because it’s so unflip-aroundable. So I wonder if the upshot of the pilot program will be that students will have another piece of exotic electronics made of rare materials that are shipped hither and yon, and yet they will still be printing. But you’ll know, and I’m curious.

... the endlessness-bottomlessness of a screen ...

Robert Fuller,author of RANKISM, tells me today, re the oped column on screening online versus reading on paper:

"I was screen-reading your long oped column, which feels like reading but with a touch of resentment regarding the screen glare, the endlessness-bottomlessness of a screen (you can't tell what you're signing up for when you begin screening, but with print you can usually tell). Plus, now, screening ties you to a big computer, and though they are getting smaller, still, you don't move from chair to chair so easily with a screen as you can with a book or magazine. So, your body begins to ache.

You've got something going here, Dan. Good luck."

Screening versus reading: the debate goes on

QUESTION FROM SB: By your standards, anything that you type into this chat window is lesser—utterly useless by way of the medium. This suggests very strongly that we shouldn’t trust anything you say to the readers here. After all, it’s appearing through a screen. But isn’t it needlessly tendentious of you to judge a funny sentence lesser because it appears on a screen? A funny sentence is a funny sentence. The presentation of that sentence shouldn’t get in the way of its funny qualities.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Oh gosh, I’m not saying anything that appears on a screen is less interesting or useless—as I say in the piece, the reviews on Amazon (for instance) are fascinating. About the funny sentence by Benchley—what I said was (and I think this is actually an important point) that it’s funny in the paperback but not on the Kindle, because humor is sensitive to things like grayness and typographical infelicity—and then I say, at the end, that the same passage by Benchley is funny again on the iPod. So I’m not dismissing things because they exist on screens!

Nicholson Baker on the Kindle

Nicholson Baker on the Kindle


[This week in the magazine, Nicholson Baker writes about the Kindle e-book reader. Today, Baker answered questions in a live chat; you can read the transcript below.]



THE NEW YORKER: Hello, and welcome to Ask the Author Live. Nicholson Baker is here with us to discuss his piece about the Kindle in this week’s issue. We’ll do our best to address as many questions as possible. Enjoy!

QUESTION FROM KIM: Please comment on Amazon’s “disappearing” of Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm.” My fear is that this is not as clear-cut and simple as a “Fahrenheit 451” incident (in which books are simply destroyed), but an even more sinister possibility: books can be altered in a trice.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, Amazon should have handled the recall better, but I don’t see anything sinister in it. It was just a mistake. It is a symptom of tetheredness, though—of the fact that things like Kindles are always checking back with the mother ship.

I mean, do we want book collections that must always be authorizing and validating themselves and synching up with some database? In some cases we do, in some cases not. Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That’s one of their nicest qualities—their brute persistence.

QUESTION FROM MARK POWER: Not so much a question as a comment; I’d be interested in hearing Mr. Baker’s comment on my comment. In general I agree with his observations about the Kindle, which I have owned for about a year. The one aspect I think Baker overlooks in his assessment was the pioneer spirit which keeps some Kindle owners like me going despite its obvious limitations. My grandfather once told me about the perils of owning an automobile in its earliest days. Unpaved roads were rife with potholes, cars required hand cranking to start, you could expect a flat every five miles or so, and the machines were quite dangerous as they could be coaxed into going over 30 miles an hour. But, said Grandfather, we put up with it because we could see the car was the future. One day the roads would be smooth as silk and the manufacturers would gladly guarantee a car to be repair-free for 100,000 miles. He neglected to add that the car would also choke the life out of our cities, but even grandfathers can’t be expected to know everything. So it’s sense of the future that allows us to tolerate the Kindle’s limitations. That same spirit kept early computer users going despite the tiny screen, green letters and MS-Dos -we could sense Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were beavering away in some dark garage and things would soon be better. Or perhaps much, much worse but as we found out with the car there’s no turning back.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Holy caramba. That’s a comment. I certainly did detect a huge enthusiasm and pioneer spirit on the part of Kindle owners. I liked that enthusiasm. The odd thing, though, is that we already have gone down this path. We have LCD screens that do a better job than the Kindle does now.

QUESTION FROM ANDREW M.: Mr. Baker, do you think e-book readers in general are problematic, or just the Kindle?

NICHOLSON BAKER: First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn’t problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.

I’m suspicious of full-replacement programs—that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along. It’s better if you let things evolve, and see what is in fact an improvement and what isn’t.

I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen—like the iPod Touch’s—although the pixel density could and should be much higher.

QUESTION FROM CARO: Would you be happier using an e-book reader with higher resolution and a larger library, or are you inherently opposed to the idea of electronic media mixing with literature?

NICHOLSON BAKER: No inherent opposition, but it’s nice to know what you’re gaining and losing with any one device or method.

QUESTION FROM PETER: As an aficionado of e-books, often reading books on my PDA in either MIcrosoft’s *.lit format or Palm’s *.pdb (I reread “Infinite Jest” this year—don’t ask), I am dismayed at Kindle’s proprietary approach to format. Will Amazon be amending this policy decision at any time? The hack involved at present is a bit overwhelming…

NICHOLSON BAKER: That’s quite an achievement, “Infinite Jest” on a PDA. I like it. I don’t have any inside scoop about Amazon’s proprietary software—it just seemed to me to be too bad that they had to go with something closed when there were good open formats out there already.

QUESTION FROM GIL KLAPPER: I have just now read your article on the Kindle 2. I understand that you have made a number of severe criticisms, the upshot of which is that I will not consider reading books on this inadequate device. Should I interpret your concluding sentence to mean that you will not read any further books on Kindle?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, gee, I don’t want to rule out any sort of reading. There’s a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don’t otherwise have. But I don’t find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.

QUESTION FROM CARO: Could you expand upon your dislike of the default font displayed on in the Kindle?

NICHOLSON BAKER: It’s just that the default font, Caecilia, is not a good reading font. The basic decision to use it was a mistake, I think. But some people really like that everything is made equal—George Eliot, The New Yorker, the Times, the latest bestseller, are all in this same font. I just wish it looked better.

QUESTION FROM JAVARI: Your article is a combination of muddled thoughts about the viability of incomparable technologies. You seem to want to impress the reader more with your favorite reading in a show-off way instead of making clear that Kindle offers neither color nor images, and that the profit margins and cuts that Amazon take will finally destroy book publishing. The 34% drop in Time Warner revenues declared today is the tip of the iceberg. Apple play fair.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Apple play fair? I don’t understand. I’m a PC guy from way back. I don’t see that talking about Mary Higgins Clark is showing off really, but I’ll admit to the normal muddlement.

QUESTION FROM EKKEHARD: iPod : MP3 is like Kindle : PDF—there are resemblances in that the devices (at least initially) push a closed format. The excitement of the moment is on the devices. Isn’t the more fundamental change on the technology side? I.e., we overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term effects. The Kindle does not really excite me—converting and being able to carry all my books with me at all times does.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes I see what you’re saying, I think. Uhm. I like the portability of e-book readers. What frustrates me about the Kindle is how slow and clunky it is as a way of paging around. The difference between the way the iPod plays a song and the way the Kindle plays a book is that the iPod offered incredible sound quality, whereas the Kindle offers dark gray on light gray and slow page turning.

QUESTION FROM JUSTIN RACZ: Will publishers be affected? Will people self-publish directly to e-book form?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes, people are already self-publishing, and that’s a good thing. And as with CDs the prices for hardcover books will come down some and the publishing industry will have some miserable moments. But the fundamental thing is that all these novelties layer over each other—radio, TV, newspapers, cable TV, books, e-books, magazines, blogs, etc., etc. Each finds its way.

THE NEW YORKER: We have two comments/questions about a potential Apple reader. We’ll put them through together so Nick can address.

QUESTION FROM ARIEL: I thought it was interesting that you felt that the iPod Touch was the better device since Apple is infamous for tying up the way in which you can use their technology. It seems that, since they had no interest in creating an e-reader, they didn’t regulate the apps other people were making, accidentally creating a quality e-reader. But Apple in general has been very poor at allowing users to share their digital files, in tethering things with DRM, and pretty much all of the things that bothered you about the Kindle. Do you think Apple is going to realize what they’ve got and go into the e-reader business? Will they over regulate at that point? Do you feel that the iPod Touch is something that can be used for more than fifteen minutes of reading? What are your concerns about digital piracy and rights management?

QUESTION FROM MIRIAM: It had to be coincidence that your essay appeared in The New Yorker just as rumors started swirling about Apple’s impending launch of its own “tablet” device, which looks to double as an e-reader of sorts. Since you’re more in favor of LCD screens than E-ink, would the hypothetical tablet be your ideal e-reading solution, at least for now?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I see your point about Apple and digital rights. I put in a passage about the Apple tablet, but when I was writing the piece it was still just a rumor. I’m curious about it, of course, but I’m embarrassed to say that I’m happy with the tininess of the iPod as a reader. It’s just about the width of a New Yorker column of type. With the Kindle, or with Apple’s upcoming tablet, if you fall asleep the thing will flop onto your face. My ideal e-book reader would be a little bigger than the iPod Touch with a pixel density of 400 ppi—I guess.

QUESTION FROM ARI: Mr. Baker, “People of the Kindle” just doesn’t have the same cache as “People of the Book.”

NICHOLSON BAKER: Not quite the same resonance, no.

THE NEW YORKER: We’ve got a few about the end of printed word:

QUESTION FROM RODRIGO: Is this the end of the paper book? Is the end of the smell of ink? I’m so sad about that.

QUESTION FROM CONSTANCE G.: Is the Kindle ultimately a serious threat to the printed book? Or, is it just another way to read a book?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I think it’s just another way to read, and that in itself a good thing. I like the smell of the cardboard box that the Kindle came in…

Amazon is pushing it too hard, and the press got all excited and thought it was a millennial development.

QUESTION FROM JOY VANNUYS: As a fan of erotic literature—especially your books “Vox” and “The Fermata”—I have to say that the Kindle makes it less embarrassing to read dirty books on the subway. Though I suppose there are lower-tech solutions to that issue.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Thank you, and yes, that’s a good point—privacy. The hortus conclusus of an electronic device.

QUESTION FROM JEANNE G.: What do you think about Sven Birkerts’s opinion (in an essay in The Atlantic, 3/2/09) that the Kindle “abets the decimation of context”?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I missed the article, but certainly there’s a different feeling when you only have the one page in front of you and you don’t have the thumb knowledge of how much you have to go. Sometimes, though, that homing in feeling of just a single hovering page of words can be good—turns everything into a little poem. But Sven Birkerts is a good observer of these things.

QUESTION FROM MIRIAM: In the interest of transparency, did you own a Kindle and/or the iPod Touch before writing the New Yorker essay, or did your purchases come about because you were about to write the piece?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I bought the Kindle in order to write the essay. That’s why I started by saying “I ordered a Kindle 2.” I wanted to like it more than I did, and when I was feeling down about the fact that I’d have to say critical things, I found out that you could read Kindle books on the iPod, so my son and I went to Target and bought one of those.

THE NEW YORKER: New York magazine speculated today about expenses incurred while writing this piece.

NICHOLSON BAKER: By the way, I guess I should make clear that Amazon didn’t give or lend me anything and The New Yorker didn’t buy anything for me.

QUESTION FROM SB: By your standards, anything that you type into this chat window is lesser—utterly useless by way of the medium. This suggests very strongly that we shouldn’t trust anything you say to the readers here. After all, it’s appearing through a screen. But isn’t it needlessly tendentious of you to judge a funny sentence lesser because it appears on a screen? A funny sentence is a funny sentence. The presentation of that sentence shouldn’t get in the way of its funny qualities.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Oh gosh, I’m not saying anything that appears on a screen is less interesting or useless—as I say in the piece, the reviews on Amazon (for instance) are fascinating. About the funny sentence by Benchley—what I said was (and I think this is actually an important point) that it’s funny in the paperback but not on the Kindle, because humor is sensitive to things like grayness and typographical infelicity—and then I say, at the end, that the same passage by Benchley is funny again on the iPod. So I’m not dismissing things because they exist on screens!

QUESTION FROM ROBERT TRAVIESO: I was re-reading “Room Temperature” last night (which I do often, dipping in and out) and reading your Kindle article this morning. So here’s my question: Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been reading “The Moonstone” for the last twenty or so years?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes it takes me twenty years to read a nineteenth-century novel. I’m slow!

QUESTION FROM ANTHONY: Do you see e-readers, including the Kindle or even iPod, playing any role in libraries? Or perhaps can you foresee libraries having a role in providing content to such devices? Librarians have played a huge role in my reading life and I’m not ready to cede that role over to Amazon or bn.com at the moment.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, there’s talk of kiosks that will print out books on demand and other innovations. I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same—keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.

QUESTION FROM MILLIE MENG: There is huge potential with the Kindle for people who have dyslexia. Apparently, 20% of the population has some sort of reading issue—of course there is a stigma with that, so people do not want it known about them. The Kindle, which is for everybody, is the perfect tool for dyslexics—no stigma attached with using it. We just got Kindle 2 for our son—listening while visually reading is an excellent way for dyslexics to move toward visual-reading fluency. My question is, can you tweak the “read to me” so that it highlights each word as it is read, to make it easier to follow along?

THE NEW YORKER: Here’s another comment on the same topic, via e-mail:

I am sufficiently dyslexic that I don’t read for fun. The Kindle has provided me with access to books through text to speech so that I can hear the book when I have reached the limits of my ability to read. And when I struggle to read I can change the type size to meet my needs, and the typeface is excellent for someone with my reading problems. It also lets me take all the time I need to review books before purchasing, something I couldn’t do in a book store. I appreciate that I may have lost something by not reading the original paper version; however, for me that simply was not an option. I hope you will speak to this issue.
Jeffrey Fried
Foster City, Calif.

NICHOLSON BAKER: I can see that the read-to-me function would be very helpful. It’s one of Amazon’s experimental features and it has oddities at the moment. The man sounds like that robot song in “Flight of the Conchords.”

The ability to resize type on e-readers is a wonderful thing. But the Kindle’s low contrast ratio is not good for some people with macular degeneration—I’ve talked to people and read comments by people with vision problems who bought the Kindle to help with that and found that it didn’t. But if it works, great.

THE NEW YORKER: Let’s take a break from live comments to post something that came in via e-mail:

As the person leading the effort at Princeton to pilot the use of the Kindle, I was dismayed by your comments regarding Princeton in the Kindle article. Princeton consumed 50 million sheets of paper last year. That is a staggering number, both from a financial and environmental perspective. We have no interest in helping Amazon make money from coursepacks (or anything else). We do have an interest in finding ways to keep students from repeatedly printing digitized materials. Paradoxically, the advent of digitized text has led to an increase in printing on our campus (and many others). People don’t like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power), so we are looking for ways to deliver text in a greener and cheaper fashion, without adversely affecting the student’s ability to undertake their studies. If you would like to know something about what we are doing, and why, please consult our Web site.
Regards,
Serge Goldstein
Director of Academic Services
Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey

NICHOLSON BAKER: I don’t mean to dismay you, and I’m sure your motives are pure. I wonder, though, if you’ll find that students will stop printing out PDF files if they have the DX. I found it an extremely frustrating way to read PDFs because it’s so unflip-aroundable. So I wonder if the upshot of the pilot program will be that students will have another piece of exotic electronics made of rare materials that are shipped hither and yon, and yet they will still be printing. But you’ll know, and I’m curious.

THE NEW YORKER: Let’s talk a bit about writers and e-books.

QUESTION FROM DAVID QUIGG, SEATTLE: Do you have any insight into Amazon’s deal with authors? I balked at self-publishing my novel on Kindle when I encountered the legalese, and found myself wishing I had a literary agent to go over the terms of what I’d be agreeing to.

NICHOLSON BAKER: I don’t know about the legal niceties at all, but, heck, it’s one way to get a book out there fast and set your own price for it. And it’s nonexclusive. Tempting…

THE NEW YORKER: Via e-mail:

Of the total sales so far in North America for your most recent book, “Human Smoke,” what percentage is from e-book edition sales?
Cristina Concepcion
New York City

NICHOLSON BAKER: No idea. I wish I did know.

QUESTION FROM DEBORAH COOK: Do authors have a say in whether their books will be available on the Kindle, or do the publishers make that decision?

NICHOLSON BAKER: The contracts I sign have language in them about electronic editions. Some appear as Kindle books and some don’t. I’m not opposed. My book “Double Fold” appeared as an Adobe e-book and as a Microsoft e-book. Now those e-books don’t really exist. The book is still on the shelf, though.

QUESTION FROM DISASTEROID: How are rights/royalties for writers going to be changed when books go digital?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I think we’ll develop new conventions and figure it all out when the time comes. There’s an appetite for strings of words that cling together, and that’s a constant. Things may sell in smaller units, the way songs do. That seems to be happening in the self-published Kindle world.

QUESTION FROM KIRK W.: Do you think the advent of the Kindle and other similar digitual reading devices will eventually impact the way authors conceive of literary narrative? Is it possible that they will begin to write differently because it’s a different medium than the physical book?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I can’t imagine that the format of publication won’t affect the way things flow to some degree. We already know that writing for blogs has a different rhythm that is the result of screenloads and the attention span in a clickable world. But it all comes back to somebody telling you a story or laying out a complicated nesting set of arguments.

THE NEW YORKER: From e-mail:

When considering the DX model and its supposed aim to “rekindle” the newspaper industry, you mentioned its e-version of the Times and how badly it sucked. Have you had a chance to use the new Times Reader version 2.0? It is brilliant. I like it so much that, a few years after cancelling my home-delivered version of the physical paper, I am again subscribing to the Times daily, via the Times Reader. It is that good, IMO. With my MacBook Pro and the Times Reader, it’s just about as good as holding the ol’ gray lady, minus the ink stains. And that’s a good thing.
Dan Waun
Lansing, Michigan

NICHOLSON BAKER: The DX version of the Times is not good, in my opinion, but the Times Reader that gives you the PDF image is very good. The miracle, though, is the printed Times that rattles and makes your head go up and down to take it all in. The hugeness of it. I’ll be very sad if that goes. The Times has never looked better as a printed object.

THE NEW YORKER: Another one from e-mail:

Very funny article. You seem to suggest that the only real use for electronic reading devices, including the Kindle (if it were any good) and the iPod Touch, is to satisfy sudden urges to read (such as the late-night urge), or to continue reading (as after a book has been completed on the beach). I wonder if, during your research and your time with the Kindle, you ever had the sense that the demand of the book for patient, focused attention is simply antagonistic to the electronic medium, which is aiming to imitate the feel and readability of a book while adding an upgrade of immediate gratification? Will this “upgrade” ever truly be an upgrade, in the patient world of books, or will it simply distract the reader and downgrade the reading experience?
David Anderson
Ottawa, Ontario

NICHOLSON BAKER: (These are all good questions, by the way—and I’m sorry about my spelling. My fingers get flapping and I never know where I’ll end up.) I don’t think there’s any deep, deep fundamental antagonism, but it doesn’t work perfectly yet.

THE NEW YORKER: That’s all for today, thanks so much for participating. Visit newyorker.com for the time and topic of the next Ask the Author Live chat.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Thank you everyone for these thought-provokers—I enjoyed being here.

Nicholson Baker on the Kindle, pro and con: ARE YOU READING THIS OR SCREENING IT?

This week in the magazine, Nicholson Baker writes about the Kindle e-book reader. Today, Baker answered questions in a live chat; you can read the transcript below.



THE NEW YORKER: Hello, and welcome to Ask the Author Live. Nicholson Baker is here with us to discuss his piece about the Kindle in this week’s issue. We’ll do our best to address as many questions as possible. Enjoy!

QUESTION FROM KIM: Please comment on Amazon’s “disappearing” of Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm.” My fear is that this is not as clear-cut and simple as a “Fahrenheit 451” incident (in which books are simply destroyed), but an even more sinister possibility: books can be altered in a trice.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, Amazon should have handled the recall better, but I don’t see anything sinister in it. It was just a mistake. It is a symptom of tetheredness, though—of the fact that things like Kindles are always checking back with the mother ship.

I mean, do we want book collections that must always be authorizing and validating themselves and synching up with some database? In some cases we do, in some cases not. Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That’s one of their nicest qualities—their brute persistence.

QUESTION FROM MARK POWER: Not so much a question as a comment; I’d be interested in hearing Mr. Baker’s comment on my comment. In general I agree with his observations about the Kindle, which I have owned for about a year. The one aspect I think Baker overlooks in his assessment was the pioneer spirit which keeps some Kindle owners like me going despite its obvious limitations. My grandfather once told me about the perils of owning an automobile in its earliest days. Unpaved roads were rife with potholes, cars required hand cranking to start, you could expect a flat every five miles or so, and the machines were quite dangerous as they could be coaxed into going over 30 miles an hour. But, said Grandfather, we put up with it because we could see the car was the future. One day the roads would be smooth as silk and the manufacturers would gladly guarantee a car to be repair-free for 100,000 miles. He neglected to add that the car would also choke the life out of our cities, but even grandfathers can’t be expected to know everything. So it’s sense of the future that allows us to tolerate the Kindle’s limitations. That same spirit kept early computer users going despite the tiny screen, green letters and MS-Dos -we could sense Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were beavering away in some dark garage and things would soon be better. Or perhaps much, much worse but as we found out with the car there’s no turning back.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Holy caramba. That’s a comment. I certainly did detect a huge enthusiasm and pioneer spirit on the part of Kindle owners. I liked that enthusiasm. The odd thing, though, is that we already have gone down this path. We have LCD screens that do a better job than the Kindle does now.

QUESTION FROM ANDREW M.: Mr. Baker, do you think e-book readers in general are problematic, or just the Kindle?

NICHOLSON BAKER: First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn’t problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.

I’m suspicious of full-replacement programs—that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along. It’s better if you let things evolve, and see what is in fact an improvement and what isn’t.

I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen—like the iPod Touch’s—although the pixel density could and should be much higher.

QUESTION FROM CARO: Would you be happier using an e-book reader with higher resolution and a larger library, or are you inherently opposed to the idea of electronic media mixing with literature?

NICHOLSON BAKER: No inherent opposition, but it’s nice to know what you’re gaining and losing with any one device or method.

QUESTION FROM PETER: As an aficionado of e-books, often reading books on my PDA in either MIcrosoft’s *.lit format or Palm’s *.pdb (I reread “Infinite Jest” this year—don’t ask), I am dismayed at Kindle’s proprietary approach to format. Will Amazon be amending this policy decision at any time? The hack involved at present is a bit overwhelming…

NICHOLSON BAKER: That’s quite an achievement, “Infinite Jest” on a PDA. I like it. I don’t have any inside scoop about Amazon’s proprietary software—it just seemed to me to be too bad that they had to go with something closed when there were good open formats out there already.

QUESTION FROM GIL KLAPPER: I have just now read your article on the Kindle 2. I understand that you have made a number of severe criticisms, the upshot of which is that I will not consider reading books on this inadequate device. Should I interpret your concluding sentence to mean that you will not read any further books on Kindle?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, gee, I don’t want to rule out any sort of reading. There’s a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don’t otherwise have. But I don’t find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.

QUESTION FROM CARO: Could you expand upon your dislike of the default font displayed on in the Kindle?

NICHOLSON BAKER: It’s just that the default font, Caecilia, is not a good reading font. The basic decision to use it was a mistake, I think. But some people really like that everything is made equal—George Eliot, The New Yorker, the Times, the latest bestseller, are all in this same font. I just wish it looked better.

QUESTION FROM JAVARI: Your article is a combination of muddled thoughts about the viability of incomparable technologies. You seem to want to impress the reader more with your favorite reading in a show-off way instead of making clear that Kindle offers neither color nor images, and that the profit margins and cuts that Amazon take will finally destroy book publishing. The 34% drop in Time Warner revenues declared today is the tip of the iceberg. Apple play fair.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Apple play fair? I don’t understand. I’m a PC guy from way back. I don’t see that talking about Mary Higgins Clark is showing off really, but I’ll admit to the normal muddlement.

QUESTION FROM EKKEHARD: iPod : MP3 is like Kindle : PDF—there are resemblances in that the devices (at least initially) push a closed format. The excitement of the moment is on the devices. Isn’t the more fundamental change on the technology side? I.e., we overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term effects. The Kindle does not really excite me—converting and being able to carry all my books with me at all times does.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes I see what you’re saying, I think. Uhm. I like the portability of e-book readers. What frustrates me about the Kindle is how slow and clunky it is as a way of paging around. The difference between the way the iPod plays a song and the way the Kindle plays a book is that the iPod offered incredible sound quality, whereas the Kindle offers dark gray on light gray and slow page turning.

QUESTION FROM JUSTIN RACZ: Will publishers be affected? Will people self-publish directly to e-book form?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes, people are already self-publishing, and that’s a good thing. And as with CDs the prices for hardcover books will come down some and the publishing industry will have some miserable moments. But the fundamental thing is that all these novelties layer over each other—radio, TV, newspapers, cable TV, books, e-books, magazines, blogs, etc., etc. Each finds its way.

THE NEW YORKER: We have two comments/questions about a potential Apple reader. We’ll put them through together so Nick can address.

QUESTION FROM ARIEL: I thought it was interesting that you felt that the iPod Touch was the better device since Apple is infamous for tying up the way in which you can use their technology. It seems that, since they had no interest in creating an e-reader, they didn’t regulate the apps other people were making, accidentally creating a quality e-reader. But Apple in general has been very poor at allowing users to share their digital files, in tethering things with DRM, and pretty much all of the things that bothered you about the Kindle. Do you think Apple is going to realize what they’ve got and go into the e-reader business? Will they over regulate at that point? Do you feel that the iPod Touch is something that can be used for more than fifteen minutes of reading? What are your concerns about digital piracy and rights management?

QUESTION FROM MIRIAM: It had to be coincidence that your essay appeared in The New Yorker just as rumors started swirling about Apple’s impending launch of its own “tablet” device, which looks to double as an e-reader of sorts. Since you’re more in favor of LCD screens than E-ink, would the hypothetical tablet be your ideal e-reading solution, at least for now?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I see your point about Apple and digital rights. I put in a passage about the Apple tablet, but when I was writing the piece it was still just a rumor. I’m curious about it, of course, but I’m embarrassed to say that I’m happy with the tininess of the iPod as a reader. It’s just about the width of a New Yorker column of type. With the Kindle, or with Apple’s upcoming tablet, if you fall asleep the thing will flop onto your face. My ideal e-book reader would be a little bigger than the iPod Touch with a pixel density of 400 ppi—I guess.

QUESTION FROM ARI: Mr. Baker, “People of the Kindle” just doesn’t have the same cache as “People of the Book.”

NICHOLSON BAKER: Not quite the same resonance, no.

THE NEW YORKER: We’ve got a few about the end of printed word:

QUESTION FROM RODRIGO: Is this the end of the paper book? Is the end of the smell of ink? I’m so sad about that.

QUESTION FROM CONSTANCE G.: Is the Kindle ultimately a serious threat to the printed book? Or, is it just another way to read a book?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I think it’s just another way to read, and that in itself a good thing. I like the smell of the cardboard box that the Kindle came in…

Amazon is pushing it too hard, and the press got all excited and thought it was a millennial development.

QUESTION FROM JOY VANNUYS: As a fan of erotic literature—especially your books “Vox” and “The Fermata”—I have to say that the Kindle makes it less embarrassing to read dirty books on the subway. Though I suppose there are lower-tech solutions to that issue.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Thank you, and yes, that’s a good point—privacy. The hortus conclusus of an electronic device.

QUESTION FROM JEANNE G.: What do you think about Sven Birkerts’s opinion (in an essay in The Atlantic, 3/2/09) that the Kindle “abets the decimation of context”?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I missed the article, but certainly there’s a different feeling when you only have the one page in front of you and you don’t have the thumb knowledge of how much you have to go. Sometimes, though, that homing in feeling of just a single hovering page of words can be good—turns everything into a little poem. But Sven Birkerts is a good observer of these things.

QUESTION FROM MIRIAM: In the interest of transparency, did you own a Kindle and/or the iPod Touch before writing the New Yorker essay, or did your purchases come about because you were about to write the piece?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I bought the Kindle in order to write the essay. That’s why I started by saying “I ordered a Kindle 2.” I wanted to like it more than I did, and when I was feeling down about the fact that I’d have to say critical things, I found out that you could read Kindle books on the iPod, so my son and I went to Target and bought one of those.

THE NEW YORKER: New York magazine speculated today about expenses incurred while writing this piece.

NICHOLSON BAKER: By the way, I guess I should make clear that Amazon didn’t give or lend me anything and The New Yorker didn’t buy anything for me.

QUESTION FROM SB: By your standards, anything that you type into this chat window is lesser—utterly useless by way of the medium. This suggests very strongly that we shouldn’t trust anything you say to the readers here. After all, it’s appearing through a screen. But isn’t it needlessly tendentious of you to judge a funny sentence lesser because it appears on a screen? A funny sentence is a funny sentence. The presentation of that sentence shouldn’t get in the way of its funny qualities.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Oh gosh, I’m not saying anything that appears on a screen is less interesting or useless—as I say in the piece, the reviews on Amazon (for instance) are fascinating. About the funny sentence by Benchley—what I said was (and I think this is actually an important point) that it’s funny in the paperback but not on the Kindle, because humor is sensitive to things like grayness and typographical infelicity—and then I say, at the end, that the same passage by Benchley is funny again on the iPod. So I’m not dismissing things because they exist on screens!

QUESTION FROM ROBERT TRAVIESO: I was re-reading “Room Temperature” last night (which I do often, dipping in and out) and reading your Kindle article this morning. So here’s my question: Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been reading “The Moonstone” for the last twenty or so years?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes it takes me twenty years to read a nineteenth-century novel. I’m slow!

QUESTION FROM ANTHONY: Do you see e-readers, including the Kindle or even iPod, playing any role in libraries? Or perhaps can you foresee libraries having a role in providing content to such devices? Librarians have played a huge role in my reading life and I’m not ready to cede that role over to Amazon or bn.com at the moment.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, there’s talk of kiosks that will print out books on demand and other innovations. I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same—keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.

QUESTION FROM MILLIE MENG: There is huge potential with the Kindle for people who have dyslexia. Apparently, 20% of the population has some sort of reading issue—of course there is a stigma with that, so people do not want it known about them. The Kindle, which is for everybody, is the perfect tool for dyslexics—no stigma attached with using it. We just got Kindle 2 for our son—listening while visually reading is an excellent way for dyslexics to move toward visual-reading fluency. My question is, can you tweak the “read to me” so that it highlights each word as it is read, to make it easier to follow along?

THE NEW YORKER: Here’s another comment on the same topic, via e-mail:

I am sufficiently dyslexic that I don’t read for fun. The Kindle has provided me with access to books through text to speech so that I can hear the book when I have reached the limits of my ability to read. And when I struggle to read I can change the type size to meet my needs, and the typeface is excellent for someone with my reading problems. It also lets me take all the time I need to review books before purchasing, something I couldn’t do in a book store. I appreciate that I may have lost something by not reading the original paper version; however, for me that simply was not an option. I hope you will speak to this issue.
Jeffrey Fried
Foster City, Calif.

NICHOLSON BAKER: I can see that the read-to-me function would be very helpful. It’s one of Amazon’s experimental features and it has oddities at the moment. The man sounds like that robot song in “Flight of the Conchords.”

The ability to resize type on e-readers is a wonderful thing. But the Kindle’s low contrast ratio is not good for some people with macular degeneration—I’ve talked to people and read comments by people with vision problems who bought the Kindle to help with that and found that it didn’t. But if it works, great.

THE NEW YORKER: Let’s take a break from live comments to post something that came in via e-mail:

As the person leading the effort at Princeton to pilot the use of the Kindle, I was dismayed by your comments regarding Princeton in the Kindle article. Princeton consumed 50 million sheets of paper last year. That is a staggering number, both from a financial and environmental perspective. We have no interest in helping Amazon make money from coursepacks (or anything else). We do have an interest in finding ways to keep students from repeatedly printing digitized materials. Paradoxically, the advent of digitized text has led to an increase in printing on our campus (and many others). People don’t like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power), so we are looking for ways to deliver text in a greener and cheaper fashion, without adversely affecting the student’s ability to undertake their studies. If you would like to know something about what we are doing, and why, please consult our Web site.
Regards,
Serge Goldstein
Director of Academic Services
Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey

NICHOLSON BAKER: I don’t mean to dismay you, and I’m sure your motives are pure. I wonder, though, if you’ll find that students will stop printing out PDF files if they have the DX. I found it an extremely frustrating way to read PDFs because it’s so unflip-aroundable. So I wonder if the upshot of the pilot program will be that students will have another piece of exotic electronics made of rare materials that are shipped hither and yon, and yet they will still be printing. But you’ll know, and I’m curious.

THE NEW YORKER: Let’s talk a bit about writers and e-books.

QUESTION FROM DAVID QUIGG, SEATTLE: Do you have any insight into Amazon’s deal with authors? I balked at self-publishing my novel on Kindle when I encountered the legalese, and found myself wishing I had a literary agent to go over the terms of what I’d be agreeing to.

NICHOLSON BAKER: I don’t know about the legal niceties at all, but, heck, it’s one way to get a book out there fast and set your own price for it. And it’s nonexclusive. Tempting…

THE NEW YORKER: Via e-mail:

Of the total sales so far in North America for your most recent book, “Human Smoke,” what percentage is from e-book edition sales?
Cristina Concepcion
New York City

NICHOLSON BAKER: No idea. I wish I did know.

QUESTION FROM DEBORAH COOK: Do authors have a say in whether their books will be available on the Kindle, or do the publishers make that decision?

NICHOLSON BAKER: The contracts I sign have language in them about electronic editions. Some appear as Kindle books and some don’t. I’m not opposed. My book “Double Fold” appeared as an Adobe e-book and as a Microsoft e-book. Now those e-books don’t really exist. The book is still on the shelf, though.

QUESTION FROM DISASTEROID: How are rights/royalties for writers going to be changed when books go digital?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I think we’ll develop new conventions and figure it all out when the time comes. There’s an appetite for strings of words that cling together, and that’s a constant. Things may sell in smaller units, the way songs do. That seems to be happening in the self-published Kindle world.

QUESTION FROM KIRK W.: Do you think the advent of the Kindle and other similar digitual reading devices will eventually impact the way authors conceive of literary narrative? Is it possible that they will begin to write differently because it’s a different medium than the physical book?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I can’t imagine that the format of publication won’t affect the way things flow to some degree. We already know that writing for blogs has a different rhythm that is the result of screenloads and the attention span in a clickable world. But it all comes back to somebody telling you a story or laying out a complicated nesting set of arguments.

THE NEW YORKER: From e-mail:

When considering the DX model and its supposed aim to “rekindle” the newspaper industry, you mentioned its e-version of the Times and how badly it sucked. Have you had a chance to use the new Times Reader version 2.0? It is brilliant. I like it so much that, a few years after cancelling my home-delivered version of the physical paper, I am again subscribing to the Times daily, via the Times Reader. It is that good, IMO. With my MacBook Pro and the Times Reader, it’s just about as good as holding the ol’ gray lady, minus the ink stains. And that’s a good thing.
Dan Waun
Lansing, Michigan

NICHOLSON BAKER: The DX version of the Times is not good, in my opinion, but the Times Reader that gives you the PDF image is very good. The miracle, though, is the printed Times that rattles and makes your head go up and down to take it all in. The hugeness of it. I’ll be very sad if that goes. The Times has never looked better as a printed object.

THE NEW YORKER: Another one from e-mail:

Very funny article. You seem to suggest that the only real use for electronic reading devices, including the Kindle (if it were any good) and the iPod Touch, is to satisfy sudden urges to read (such as the late-night urge), or to continue reading (as after a book has been completed on the beach). I wonder if, during your research and your time with the Kindle, you ever had the sense that the demand of the book for patient, focused attention is simply antagonistic to the electronic medium, which is aiming to imitate the feel and readability of a book while adding an upgrade of immediate gratification? Will this “upgrade” ever truly be an upgrade, in the patient world of books, or will it simply distract the reader and downgrade the reading experience?
David Anderson
Ottawa, Ontario

NICHOLSON BAKER: (These are all good questions, by the way—and I’m sorry about my spelling. My fingers get flapping and I never know where I’ll end up.) I don’t think there’s any deep, deep fundamental antagonism, but it doesn’t work perfectly yet.

THE NEW YORKER: That’s all for today, thanks so much for participating. Visit newyorker.com for the time and topic of the next Ask the Author Live chat.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Thank you everyone for these thought-provokers—I enjoyed being here.