Proust, Squid and Wolf

I just finished reading Proust and the Squid, the fascinating book by Maryanne Wolf about how we developed and acquired a ‘reading brain’. Although sometimes a little dense in its use of linguistic terminology, it is a very nice read and highly recommended if you are interested in the way we developed one of the most precious gifts available to mankind: the ability to read and write. If Wolf does one thing with this book, it is give you back the amazement pertaining to your own capability to read; to make out meaning out of tiny shapes and forms on paper and their linguistic, grammatical and semantic connections, literally in the blink of an eye. Wolf not only describes how we as a species adapted our brains over centuries to be able to read and write (which is not an innate capability), but also describes how children every day in a limited time-span are required (and able) to do the same thing. She also describes everything that can go wrong in this process, discussing various reading disorders and their origins in a different mind or brain ‘set-up’ or arrangement. After having read this you will truly realize what a wonder it is you now seem to be reading this text so naturally and smoothly as you actually are (I hope!).

She ends her book with a reflection on the future development of our writing capabilities and skills in a world that will increasingly be dominated by screens and where oral and visual communication and literacies will again be more stimulated. She is neither skeptic nor overly enthusiastic about these developments, bringing back into memory Socrates objections to written knowledge, but also the many positive things text culture has brought to humanity. At the same time the present shifts to new forms of literacy should be judged on their face-value. We will learn new things and develop many new (mental) capabilities, but should also try to preserve the mind-set associated with writing, becoming in a way as she calls it bi- or multitextual, thus still being able to analyse a text in multiple manners, capable of ‘probing what lies beneath any form of information.’ There are some good reviews of the book here and here. I would like to finish with a nice quote from the end of the book:

“In the transmission of knowledge the children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsuled versions of the news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next. The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking, reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble, multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms. Many of our children learn to code-switch between two or more oral languages, and we can teach them also to switch between different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis. Perhaps, like the memorable image captured in 600 BCE of a Sumerian scribe patiently transcribing cuneiform beside an Akkadian scribe, we will be able to preserve the capacities of two systems and appreciate why both of them are precious.”

Cave Bunny

As already hyped over the Net, Nick Cave (the multitalented Australian singer, screenwriter, actor, writer and what have you) is releasing his second book The Death of Bunny Munro. Surrounding the presentation of his new book, Cave, assisted by publisher Canongate, is launching a huge marketing campaign using all digital/new media marketing possibilities to promote Bunny. This viral operation, combined with the aura surrounding Cave, makes this a very interesting endeavor to take a closer look at.

 First of all, what is the book about?  From the publisher’s website:

“The Death of Bunny Munro recounts the last journey of a salesman in search of a soul. Following the suicide of his wife, Bunny, a door-to-door salesman and lothario, takes his son on a trip along the south coast of England. He is about to discover that his days are numbered. With a daring hellride of a plot The Death of Bunny Munro is also a modern morality tale of sorts, a stylish, furious, funny, truthful and tender account of one man’s descent and judgement. The novel is full of the linguistic verve that has made Cave one of the world’s most respected lyricists. It is his first novel since the publication of his critically acclaimed debut And the Ass Saw the Angel twenty years ago.”

I have not (yet) read Cave’s first novel (mentioned above) but love his song writing, and although, as novelist Will Self states in his amazing review on Cave as a writer, writing good song lyrics is not the same as writing a good book or poem, Self (with me agreeing – I hope) seems to make an exception when it comes to Cave. From his review, entitled Dark Matter (originally published in The Guardian): 

“Cave, as a poetic craftsman, provides all the enjambment, ellipsis and onomatopoeia that anyone could wish for. A word on eroticism and the dreadful dolour of knowing not only that all passion is spent – but also that you’re overdrawn. If Cave were to be typified as a lyricist of blood, guts and angst, it would be a grave mistake. He stands as one of the great writers on love of our era. Each Cave love song is at once perfumed with yearning, and already stinks of the putrefying loss to come. For Cave, consummation is always exactly that.”

This promises quite a lot and the fact that Cave’s writing skills extend to prose does not surprise me, although it does make one a little envious of such an unlimited talent. 

Published by Canongate, the UK publication of Bunny is planned for September 3^rd 2009. Accompanying the book release a beautifully designed website has been created, on which one can (of course) find more information about the book, reviews (reviews from the Australian release are already up here) and information about the events surrounding the release. As this is an international release, being published in 31 countries around the world, these events are an important part of the campaign. Cave is doing webchats, interviews, evenings and talk sessions all over the world. These events will not only gather there own revenue but will definitely also promote the sales of the book. Cave is also booked to come to Amsterdam, states his Dutch publisher J.M. Meulenhoff: On the 14^th of October Cave will ‘do’ the renowned venue Carré (an evening with Nick Cave) – press interviews afterwards. Knowing these Carré events, tickets will probably go for around 100 euros. Good plan Nick.

Still, nothing out of the ordinary here. What makes this such an interesting multimedia release however is the fact that Cave simultaneously releases an audiobook version, read by the man himself, with an accompanying soundtrack created by Cave and Warren Ellis (who worked before with Cave on The proposition and in his Grinderman project). The soundtrack uses a ‘3D audio spatial mix’, specially designed for listening on headphones and thus, as the website states ‘creating a fully immersive experience for the listener’. Next to that one can also find videos on the Bunny site (and on Youtube) showing Cave reading from the book (detail: notice bling-bling rings on fingers) – again accompanied by the aforementioned soundtrack: all creating the necessary buzz around the persona or brand of Cave. I watched some of it, and, in a part which recalls a kind of absurdist Ellis, I especially liked chapter 11 part 1.

You can buy or order different formats of the book: the signed, numbered and slipcased limited edition (up to 120 pounds and increasing with every sale – real fans buy everything). The standard hardback, the ebook in EPUB format, an audiobook box set (with DVD of Cave reading extracts from the book) and an audio download will also be available. This multimediality offers the reader all kinds of entrances into the narrative, providing choice and convenience. The Guardian zooms in on this aspect in a very good analysis of these  kinds of ‘enhanced book editions’ that will be available for the iPhone:

“The Enhanced Edition does some of the things we’re now accustomed to seeing as standard in electronic texts: you can faff with fonts, change colour, bookmark it, and so on; and there’s some smart social networking stuff attached. But it also includes enhancements that could have a noticeable effect on the experience of reading. Instead of paginating the book conventionally, it’s presented as a continuous vertical scroll (one geek-pleasing trick is that you can adjust the scrolling speed with the angle of tilt of the phone), and the App includes an audiobook that syncs with the written text.  Pop on the headphones, thumb the screen and Cave’s voice picks up where you left off.”

The Guardian seems very enthusiastic about the possibilities these kinds of experiments might bring to our reading experience: making it less monolithically text based and more immersed with our other senses, experiencing mixed media at the same time, as we are increasingly more used to nowadays anyway:

“This is interesting. It could be regarded as a gimmick, but if it catches on, it will subtly change the way we experience fiction. If you half-read, half-listen to a book, your experience of reading will partly be shaped by the voice of the audiobook; your memories of the text will be coloured by how you took it in, passage by passage. (…) So, some whiffs of roses and haddock. But the breadth of the package, it seems to me, is at the very least a weathervane. There’s no ignoring the fact that the e-book will, not too far from now, compete with the paperback; and the likelihood is that some readers won’t just use them to read. It’s a longstanding truism to say that every reader reads a different book. As more packages like this find their way to market, the book itself, as well as its readings, will become more plural, more blurred, and less monolithically booky. Smells good to me.”

Well, I am ready for the experience and will try to read the book simultaneously with the audiobook; as I am a fast reader I wonder if Nick can keep up with me, but maybe the rich baritone of his voice will keep my eyes gripped on the words a little longer.

 

Print will survive

Charming initiative by Dave Eggers (via De papieren man and Gawker): he send an email to everyone feeling at loss about the possible demise of print and all-round literacy. After an evening organized by the Authors Guild, Eggers promised to brighten up the pessimists. The New Yorker published a few lines from his speech: 

“To any of you who are feeling down, and saying, “Oh, no one’s reading anymore”: Walk into 826 on any afternoon. There are no screens there, it’s all paper, it’s all students working shoulder to shoulder invested in their work, writing down something, thinking their work might get published. They put it all on the page, and they think, “Well, if this person who works next to me cares so much about what I’m writing, and they’re going to publish it in their next anthology or newspaper or whatever, then I’m going to invest so much more in it.” And then meanwhile, they’re reading more than I did at their age. …

Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.” 

After his inbox flooded with messages, Eggers send out a bulk email response proclaiming a foreseeable future in which print and books will still play a large role. In order to make that happen, publishers (his own McSweeney’s on front) need to focus on finding a good niche to compete with the digital and this niche, according to Eggers, lies in creating a high quality product with an emphasis on design and experiences that are not duplicatable on the web. From the email:

“Pretty soon, on the McSweeney’s website— www.mcsweeneys.net— we’ll be showing some of our work on this upcoming issue, which will be in newspaper form. The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper
model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive. We’re convinced that the best way to ensure the future of journalism is to create a workable model where journalists are paid well for reporting here and abroad. And that starts with paying for the physical paper. And paying for the physical paper begins with creating a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print. We believe that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space— if you really truly give readers an experience that can’t be duplicated on the web— then they will spend $1 for a copy. And that $1 per copy, plus the revenue from some (but not all that many) ads, will keep the enterprise afloat.

It’s our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can coexist, and in fact should coexist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.”

I think his arguments also hold for academic books in the long run. Where printed monographs are also slowly but increasingly moving to the web, their printed version might still have some endurance. One of the models now proposed to sustain Open Access book publishing in the Humanities focuses mostly on an online, free Open Access edition and a paid for print edition, consisting of cheaply and in short (even single digits) print run produced POD books. The remit in this model lies predominantly in the sales from these POD books (for those people who still prefer to read from print) or added services on top of the online edition. It might however also be interesting to look into a market of deluxe editions of certain (probably only the best selling monographs and classics) books that people still want to ‘posses’ and pay for because they are beautifully designed or just nice to look at. Different readers, different markets; and just look at vinyl…

Open Access and eBooks

One of the most heard objectives against eBooks (let alone against Open Access eBooks) is that nobody is going to read a whole book from a screen. Especially in the Humanities, where long stretched arguments are laid out over hundreds of pages, scholars and students will prefer a solid hard copy over reading from the screen.

 

Reading attitudes are changing however. In Europe some interesting initiatives are taking place concerning eBooks and their usage. JISC, the UK based Joint Information Systems Committee, recently launched the JISC National eBooks Observatory Survey for which they placed e-textbooks into 120 UK universities. With over 20.000 responses to their survey, this makes it one of the largest eBook surveys ever undertaken. At a presentation about this project at the London Book Fair of this year, David Nicolas, a member of the eBooks Observatory research team, said that eBooks have reached the tipping point. The reading behavior of students is changing as they are much less reading the whole book online as they are viewing the book. This means that the whole book is no longer the unit of consumption in an online environment but rather chapters or even paragraphs.

 

As the preliminary research results of the eBook Observatory project show, people are reading books on their computers. For it shows that more than 53 per cent of eBook users only read from the screen, regardless of age group! Although, as Nicolas points out, much of the reading has a high ‘dipping in and out’ character, the question remains if this is such a big change from reading a print book. Are we still reading a whole (academic) book from cover to cover?

 

In order to find out if scholars and students in the Humanities will increasingly read monographs online, a lot more eBook content is needed in this field. This is one of the targets of the OAPEN project. OAPEN is a European project in Open Access publishing for Humanities monographs, led by a consortium of University-based academic publishers from all over Europe.  Next to creating a sustainable Open Access model for monograph publishing, the project wants to collect a critical mass of Open Access content. This content will be presented for everyone to use in an online Open Access library. The OAPEN project might not only create critical mass for the advance of Open Access (business models) in the Humanities, but also for research about changing user needs, as the JISC survey has done. And as these two innovative projects show or will show, people are reading books from a screen and probably will do so increasingly. And with this one of the main objectives against Open Access eBooks is being more and more contested.