My latest Locus column, “Put Not Your Faith in Ebook Readers,” just went live. In it, I discuss the fact what while there’s plenty of programmers who’ll hack you a little ebook business that runs on a phone, handheld game device or PDA; there’s a genuine shortage of high-quality manufacturers who’ll build you a great, cheap, hardware-based ebook reader, and that that’s likely to continue for some time.
He quotes his column at some length, which basically explains the economics of the problem. As I noted in my piece on the Kindle last November:
I think it is still a hard sell. $400 is a chunk for something which only kinda-sorta replaces a real book. And if you drop it in the mud, it isn’t just $7.95 to buy a new copy. But it does seem to be an intelligent application of the relevant tech, and sounds intriguing. There will be those who snap it up, just ’cause - but Amazon has a long way to go before it is mainstream.
That’s my guess.
As I mentioned in this post back in March, something like the Kindle has been a staple of SF going way back. Way back. But for all our progress in tech to date, I think it’ll be a while before actual paper & ink books are obsolete. It’s a simple matter of economics and risk, as I indicate in that note to my friend above.
I haven’t heard much about the success that Amazon has had with the Kindle to date, but I would guess that if it was revolutionizing publishing it would be more in the news. And I’d bet this is why.
A good friend and I have a running joke about getting our six chickens and a goat, and retiring from the world to farm while things fall slowly into ruin.
But the thing is, it’s not a joke. Not really.
I’m not saying that everyone should fall into a paranoid spiral, become some kind of survivalist nut. I’m not ready to do that. But when you read something like this, it does make you wonder. An excerpt (please note, I added the embedded links in the following):
For decades, his [James Lovelock's] advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.
* * *
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”
I opened the email to find an article about the most recent “comments and projections” by James Hansen. Hansen, you may know, is perhaps the most famous NASA climate change scientist. He’s the man who testified before Congress twenty years ago that the planet was warming and that people were the source of that warming. He’s the man who was pressured by senior officials at NASA, at the behest of the current administration, to tone down his reports about the impacts of climate change. Thankfully he seems to have resisted that pressure.
I read the article and then I read a related article by Bill McKibben. Hansen says, and McKibben underscores, that there is a critical maximum number of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to heed to prevent climatic catastrophe. That number, he says, is between 300 and 350.
* * *
Can you guess how many ppm of CO2 are in the atmosphere now? Slightly below 350? Slightly above?
We’re at 383 parts per million and counting, well past the number Hansen suggests is critical. We are past it by a lot. We were at 325 parts per million in 1970! Um, I don’t think we can just suck all that carbon back out, ask billions of people not to have been born, tear down all of those new suburban developments, return to non-fossil-based agriculture, and innocently pretend it’s thirty years ago.
So, what to do?
Well, that’s the problem. Lovelock says that you might as well enjoy life while you can, as much as you can, before the shit hits the fan. The second passage, from a very long blog entry evidently by Sally Erickson, explores some options but focuses on the need to convince people that the shit has essentially already hit the fan, in order to radically change behavior sufficient to have a hope to save the world.
I am not sanguine about the prospects of making radical change, nor what that would really mean for our civil liberties. I think, unfortunately, that the mass of humanity just cannot deal with a problem until it becomes an actual, in-your-face emergency, but that once in it, we usually do a fairly decent job of slogging our way out.
This is one of the reasons that I decided to choose a pandemic flu as the cataclysm behind the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams. As I have discussedpreviously, I made that decision for reasons of plotting, but also because I actually believe that we’ll likely experience some kind of mass die-off of humanity sometime in the next century, whether due to war, asteroid impact, plague, global warming or some other disaster. We’ve just been too lucky, too long.
But in a way, it is an odd sort of optimism, as reflected in the book, and as shared by James Lovelock (from the same Guardian article):
“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”
And not to end it there, here’s a little something for counterpoint, I suppose:
A good friend uses this quote from Robert Heinlein (from Time Enough for Love) as part of her .sig:
“There is no such thing as luck.
There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.”
Which is a nice reformulation of my favorite Louis Pasteur quote:
“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Which is why I grieve for the future of my country when I read things like this:
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment (from the NY Public Library following the 9/11 attacks), she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
SusanJacoby has a number of other books to her credit, including Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. She has a history of supporting rationalism, and this is her latest effort to get people to pay attention to the toxic mix of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. From her website:
This impassioned, tough-minded work of contemporary history paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society—on the political right and the left. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
Edenists, anyone? Grieve. Grieve for the future.
Jim Downey
(Cross-posted to UTI. Thanks to ML for the initial NYT story.)
Multiple friends sent me notes about the auction of J.K. Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard, which sold at auction yesterday for almost $4 million, proceeds of which are going to charity. This was undoubtedly because the book touches on a number of my interests and profession - if you haven’t seen the thing yet, it is worth looking at. Rowling created seven copies of the book, writing and illustrating the text herself.
Unfortunately, but not terribly surprisingly, I have yet to find any mention of who did the binding work, or created the silver bosses and clasp used. The artisans who executed this work did a fine job, based on what I’ve been able to tell from the images available, and it would be nice to see at least some acknowledgment of them.
There is already some discussion of the “value” of the book, as an artifact, due to the price it sold for. And that is understandable, since $4 million is a chunk of change, and most authors, artists and artisans will never see their work command such a price. I have been involved in many projects of this nature, creating custom bindings of personal texts, or very limited editions, or a commemorative binding. And never has my work commanded more than a few hundred dollars. I’d be willing to bet the same was the case with the remuneration paid to the artisans who did the binding for these seven copies of Beedle. And certainly J.K. Rowling doesn’t command millions for her calligraphy or illustration work, as nice as it is.
So, why the price? Reports indicate that it was expected that the book would auction for something on the order of $100,000. What caused the book to sell for 40 times that amount?
Well, it is likely that it was a unique combination of events. Most of all, J.K. Rowling’s reputation meant that the sale would attract attention. No doubt Amazon.com (and Jeff Bezos) felt that the purchase would be well worth it, just in terms of the free publicity and good will that it would generate for the company. And the money was going to charity, so that doesn’t hurt. Chances are, if someone who owns one of the other six copies of this book were to put it up for sale privately, it would not attract that kind of money - not at this time, anyway. In another generation or two, it is likely that whenever one of these books is sold it’ll fetch quite a high price.
Because that is how these things work. Initially, there is surprise - but over the long term the thing which will be remembered is that the first book sold for millions. With only seven original copies, each one will be seen as precious - purely because one already sold at auction for millions. Whether she meant to do so or not, J. K. Rowling has just made the other owners of these books (or at least their heirs) wealthy. I hope they each get a decent insurance policy and a fireproof safe.
I think it is still a hard sell. $400 is a chunk for something which only kinda-sorta replaces a real book. And if you drop it in the mud, it isn’t just $7.95 to buy a new copy. But it does seem to be an intelligent application of the relevant tech, and sounds intriguing. There will be those who snap it up, just ’cause - but Amazon has a long way to go before it is mainstream.
That’s my guess.
As I mentioned in this post back in March, something like the Kindle has been a staple of SF going way back. Way back. But for all our progress in tech to date, I think it’ll be a while before actual paper & ink books are obsolete. It’s a simple matter of economics and risk, as I indicate in that note to my friend above. Joel Johnson at BoingBoing Gadgets says much the same thing in his review - here’s an excerpt:
Although I can hold a $400 eBook reader in my hand, it only feels truly valuable because I have a $7 book inside that I want to read. If Amazon can find a way to lower the barrier of entry on either side of the platform—a cheaper Kindle, or free content—it may then be worth wider consideration.
Bezos might be right, and me wrong. Certainly, I don’t have the track record he does, and haven’t earned the kind of money he has with his hard work and predictions. Then again, he has the wealth to afford being wrong for a long time before he is right, as may happen with this kind of project .
