Don’t just worry about ‘books,’ Jack—worry about libraries, indie stores, e-formats and DRM
Jack Shafer, the Slate “Press Box” columnist, is mourning the “fallen status” of the traditional paper book, which he thinks technology has devalued.
As a contributor to the troubled medium—Scandals is available as a trade paperback, not just as an e-book—I have an obvious stake in this. Shafer may be thinking especially of hardcovers, but at least we’re talking about something more tangible than electrons.
Scandals is about the newspaper world of several decades ago, and some of its gray-haired readers might prefer to read it the old-fashioned way. Then again, maybe not; as one librarian put it, Kindles could be the new large print. I just want to make certain those paperbacks are around, too.
At least, unlike many other worrywarts, Shafer distinguishes between books and reading. I simply wish he’d think of e-books as books, too. If anything the technology has made my reading more old-fashioned, through the public domain collections of Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks, the Internet Archive and elsewhere. How many neighborhood public libraries carry all the major novels of George Gissing, for example?
Rather than simply worrying about paper books, here’s what I’d recommend some good, healthy fretting over—following up on Shafer’s wise distinction between books and reading.
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Book promotion wisdom for the Twitter era? Victorian novelist George Gissing on social standing and literary success
“Men won’t succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature.” — Jasper Milvain, the social-climbing journalist in George Gissing’s New Grub Street, his classic about the London literary world more than a century ago.
Question: Substitute “Web,” “Facebook” or “Twitter” for “society,” and would be the above apply to the Internet era? Maybe. But I suspect that the traditional social component would still count as well, at least when it comes to mention in the mainstream media. As a success story, Gissing cites a “clever, prolific” writer named Ralph Warbury who “began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles.” Then Gissing goes on to the quote at the top of this post. Warbury seems to be imaginary, but I certainly can think of his real-life equivalents today here in the States, especially with such a fixation that many Washingtonians have on Ivy League degrees. If nothing else, remember the five Ws and the H—who, what, why, when, where and how—taught to American journalists. Guess which one comes first. I hardly doubt that the same is true in the Gissing’s country.
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‘6 great novels that were hated in their time’: Hope for overlooked novelists and brave readers
What do The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (one book shown), Moby-Dick, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, The Grapes of Wrath and Brave New World have in common?
Literary critics hated them.
So, at least, says Jacopo della Querci’s Cracked piece—must reading for brave readers and overlooked novelists alike. Here’s the lowdown on the reception befalling The Lord of the Rings Trilogy:
“The reasons for Tolkien’s negative feedback were numerous, not the least of them being that he was a career linguist, not a professional writer. The New York Times described Tolkien’s writing as ‘high-minded’ and ‘death to literature itself.’
“The New Republic described the book and its characters as ‘anemic, and lacking in fiber’ which was apparently a real burn back then in the pre-Cheerios days. Even heavyweights like Isaac Asimov weren’t sold by the book’s whole industry versus the environment message, retorting that modernity ‘or perhaps the modern world… wasn’t all bad.’
“Hell, not even Tolkien’s friends were all that big on it. Tolkien had to stop reading samples of the book to them on account of negative feedback/hurt feelings. One member of Tolkien’s circle, Hugo Dyson (H.V.D. Dyson in geek) once famously moaned from a sofa during one reading: ‘Oh, fuck! Not another elf!’
How about Brave New World? “Even fellow futurists like H.G. Wells were shocked by the book’s dystopian landscape. Despite being the same man who wrote War of the Worlds, Wells describe Brave New World’s bleak future as ‘a betrayal.’ As for the book’s more forgettable critics, i.e. everyone else, responses ranged from dismissal to childish name-calling.”
Now here’s a question. If even critics can’t get these things right, just what are the implications of the above in an era when Amazon and many other book-related Web sites rely so heavily on the opinions of civilians? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, since the readers are rating books for each other, not posterity. Or does it? Meanwhile I think it’s tragic that Kilgore Trout is only imaginary and Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I’d love their opinions on these matters.
Detail: “Jacopo della Querci” is apparently a pseudonym? Note the similar name of an Italian Renaissance sculptor.
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‘David Rothman’ namesakes: Egosurfers, here’s what the rest of us are up to
I’ve remarked before on weird coincidences related to my name.
Two letters, for example, distinguish me from David Roffman, at least if you don’t include middle names. He’s the veteran journalist associated with the Georgetowner newspaper, shown with a Kitty Kelley feature (temporary link).
Much of The Solomon Scandals happens in Georgetown, which, by the way, is home to a net.friend of mine named Beth Solomon, founder of The Georgetown Dish website and most definitely not the real estate magnate in Scandals. You can read the Dish’s own Kelley feature here.
But back Topic R or DR. For the benefit of any stray David Rothmans who egosurfed their way to this post, here are a few more stray facts about people sharing The Name or close to it:
–David the Almost Rothman and I are now friends on Facebook, which will make it all the easier to catch up with him when once again people confuse us and I need to redirect them.
–I enjoyed The Girl on the Train, an excellent French film about an attention-grabber who falsely claims to have been the victim of anti-Semitism. Authentic anti-Semitism happens against a fictionalized character in the movie (French title shown). His name? “David Rothman.” Hey, for the purpose of this list, we’ll consider him an honorary real person.
–Yes, other book-writers exist named David Rothman, even though the surname isn’t exactly “Smith.” David B., is the author of Mr. Death: The Life of a CIA Assassination Expert, by His Son. David J. writes poetry. Perhaps the most prominent David Rothman, at least in the United States, is the professor at Columbia University, an expert on medical ethics and a prolific author. He’s a second David J. Finally there’s the medical librarian David L. Rothman, a library blogger and author, whose life became perhaps a little less difficult when I sold off the TeleRead site devoted to e-books and libraries. That’s him to the right, doing a funny rant against a LibraryJournal blog.
In Florida a David Rothman works for Disney World, or at least was when our paths crossed virtually due to confusion on Hotmail. Flordia is also home to David B. Rothman the lawyer.
I don’t know of any crooks, child-molesters, etc., with The Name but will do an addendum if I find any. Minus the “David” in the title, there is a Rothman Scandal novel.
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The essential copy editor
See update at the end. – D.R.
I’m zealously pro-copy editor. While I don’t always agree with CEs, I’d hate for them not to be around to argue with. I can remember one book project where I replaced a dozen likes in favor of as ifs and as thoughs, my original choices. And yet I’m grateful for all the typo catches and other hard work from the same editor.
In the perfect cosmos, even the tiniest Web site would benefit from formal copy editing (including Solomonscandals.com). No writer would be without his or her own protector. Just look at the atrocities that inevitably slip through here. I’d rather be able to focus more on writing as opposed to proofing, which, alas, isn’t my forte.
Now let’s parse a sentence from another Web site: “It’s hard to know, and hard to measure—but without the effort, it’s my sense that we’re headed quickly into a world only one set of eyeballs determines publication.”
Where’s the “where,” and just who gave us this gem? A sleepy independent blogger, typing away in his PJs? Not exactly. The sin showed up in The Newsonomics of copyediting value, some commentary from Ken Doctor, the author of Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. It didn’t appear just anywhere. No, it was at the end of the blog post, where Doctor should have been rewarding his most conscientious and enthusiastic readers—the detail lovers most likely to agree with him. And the site was none other than the one for the prestigious Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard.
According to the Nieman time stamp, the Doctor item popped up at around 10 a.m. (Eastern Daylight, presumably) on the unlucky date of May 13. It’s now about 3:30 p.m. on May 19, and I still don’t see a fix even though an eagle-eyed reader named Sara caught the mistake at 1:08 a.m. on May 16 after some well-placed editors at various newspapers failed to comment on the irony.
Surprise of surprise, Sara says she is an unemployed copy editor. I hope someone hires this woman in a hurry. Perhaps I even know her. Sara, by any chance do you live in an Eastern state bordering Canada? Whatever the case, I propose that news organizations settle for slimmer profits and saner executive salaries to be able to use more copy editors like Sara, and I’d hope that Ken Doctor would agree. In his piece mentioning “copyediting value,” he called for the publication of “news principle boxes” to tout the effort that went into MSM sites, including “important practices—like editing.
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