A Curious Statistical Anomaly

The start of a whole new day. Managed to get down to the Book Shop to open on time. We moved one of our bookshelves in order to help get traffic to our table when authors are doing signings. We’re right next to the autograph tables and when the lines get long they block off our table because we’re closer and we become inaccessible. Moving one bookcase seemed to ease the press so even if the lines were longer we still got customers. Of course this move was aided by the author close to us moving his chair closer to the other author’s chair so they could talk and none of the rest of the day’s authors moved it back to center on that table.

But still business so far is far less than it was last year but the conversation about books, reading, the rise of ebooks, and other topics has been entertaining, enlightening, and fun. If tomorrow doesn’t improve in sales we’re not even going to break even this year with the travel and hotel costs.

11:00 AM: Book Design and Typography in the Digital Era.
Panelists: Neil Clarke, Ken Liu, Erin Kissane, David G. Shaw (leader), and Alicia Verlager.
Description: Design and typography can heighten the experience of reading a written work; in the case of poetry, typesetting can be crucial to comprehension and interpretation. eReaders can change font sizes with the press of a button, making books far more accessible to people who have visual limitations or just their own ideas about how a book should look. What happens when these worthy goals are at odds? Will the future bring us more flexible book design, much as website design with CSS has become more flexible as browser customization becomes more common? Or will we see the book equivalent of Flash websites where the designer’s vision is strictly enforced.

Ken Liu gave a quick history of the book from scroll to codex. First there was the scroll but you didn’t have random access to it — you always had to roll and unroll the entire thing to find what you wanted. With a codex or book you could go right to the page. More of the development of the book driven by the desire to print the bible and get access quickly to the parts you wanted.

China also had the scroll and they went to whirlwind books. These books were still more scroll-like but the bottom layer was a long scroll page and the top was a slightly shorter one and so forth. When unrolled completely the shorter layers curled up looking like whirls. This was developed for a dictionary and it was a way to solve the random access problem.

Now we have the ebook which handles the random access aspect quite well to search for an item but the return to the section you were reading is not always easily or correctly handled.

They talked about design issues and the conversion problems of print to ebook. For newer books you still have the electronic file and that makes conversions a bit easier but for older books the scan, OCR, run through converter formula that many places are using create awful books, making those who run into these badly converted/formatted books think all the books are like that. There was general agreement that more quality control for editing the OCR’d book and cleaning up HTML needed to be added. It’s mostly the small publishers doing this and the larger publishers are watching and learning from them.

Verlanger, who is blind, and has a technology blog where she writes about accessibility issues with technology among other tech-topics, spoke about the problems of back code which make the books inaccessible simply because they can’t be read by the programs used to translate text into speech. Scanners on the lowest quality setting sometimes create files where the images are not even identified as images by the OCR programs and weird groupings of letters are are added into the text/speech confusing the listener. Also DRM came up, in that a lot of the programs DRM for PDF and other formats identify the text-to-speech programs as illegal pirating software and do not allow the access at all.

Many issues were discussed and if you were interested in book design and conversions to ebooks and their utility this was a panel with a wealth of information for the audience.

Then it was back to the Book Shop and our table for an hour.

1:00 PM: Urban (Fantasy) Renewal.
Participants: Toni L.P. Kelner, Craig Laurance Gidney, Leah Bobet (leader), Ellen Datlow, and John Clute.
Description: The term “urban fantasy” has encompassed the work of Charles Williams, a contemporary of Tolkien who sometimes situated his fantasy in London or suburban settings as opposed to a pastoral secondary world; the novels and short stories of Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, or Robin Hobb (as Megan Lindholm); the phantasmagoric cities of China Mié or Jeff VanderMeer; and most recently, the magical noir of Jim Butcher and Charlaine Harris. Is it possible to reclaim “urban fantasy” as a useful critical term? Rather than wring our hands at how it no longer means what it did, can we use it to examine what these very different writers have in common, and to what degree they reflect different eras’ anxieties around and interests in the urban?

John Clute read a definition that he’d put together for his Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It was a good one and quite long and I couldn’t write it all down. One part I remember and I’m pretty sure it’s from this section was that the city is so much a part of the story and the characters environment that it’s just “the city” — any big metropolitan city but usually London, NY, Paris…

There was also some talk about urban fantasy that wasn’t contemporary but most felt that modern readers expected urban fantasy to be contemporary rather than set in the distant past.

The panelists also tossed around the term rural fantasy, suburban fantasy, and paranormal romance and how it differed from urban fantasy. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance differ in how central to the story the search for a mate is. In urban fantasy, you may find your mate but it’s not the central core of the story while in paranormal romance it is the central to the story.

An interesting panel with some very interesting views on labels and these labels in particular.

Worked with Hyperion at the SFRevu table until closing at 6:00 PM. We then had an hour until my panel at 7.

7:00 PM: The One Right Form of a Story.
Panelists: John Langan, Meghan McCarron, Gayle Surrette (leader), Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, and Judith Berman.
Description: Quoth Mark Twain: “There are some books that refuse to be written…. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written– it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.” Anyone who has adapted a fairy tale for a poem or developed a short story into a novel might disagree, yet many authors have also spent years chasing stories that evade capture until they’re approached in just the right way. What makes some stories easy-going and others stubborn? Is the insistence on a story “telling itself” a red herring? And what does “form” really mean here?

This was one of the easiest panel I’ve ever moderated. From the first question the panelists just played off one another, building on or suggesting ideas until I opened it for questions. Each shared experiences where the story didn’t work and wouldn’t come together as they imagined it until they found the core or the character that the story was about. That form was when all the pieces fit because the creative and intellectual side worked together and the writer found the thread the story wove around. (This is my comprehension of the discussion and I was avidly listening but also concentrating on seeing that everyone got a chance to contribute.)

8:00 PM: I’ve Fallen (Behind) and I Can’t Get (Caught) Up
Panelists: Michael Dirda, Jennifer Pelland, Craig Laurance Gidney, Don D’Ammassa, and Rick Wilber.
Description: In a recent blog post for NPR, Linda Holmes wrote, “Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything…. There are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling or surrender.” How do you choose among the millions of books that you could be reading? Do you organize your “to read” books or are all your books “to read” books? How useful are books reviews, Amazon recommendations, Goodreads, LibraryThing, etc.? How do you budget your limited reading time? And how do you cope with the knowledge that you will never read everything you want to?

In other words — how do you pick what to read in your TO-BE-READ (TBR) pile when it’s larger than any one person, no matter how fast they read, can read in a lifetime?

D’Ammassa has an actual written schedule of when he reads (3 hours every morning and another 3 hours before bed). I can’t imagine being that organized but maybe it’s something to strive for.

Dirda said he hasn’t read for pleasure in years. Just about every book he reads, he writes about. That’s at least two books a week. He also said he’s a slow reader because he moves his lips when he reads. (I have a little person in my head who reads me the books — in other words I can’t read any faster than a person could read the book aloud. I was so happy to learn that Michael Dirda has a similar tic that slowed his reading down.)

All of the panelists stated that they read at different speeds for different types of books — dense text or non-fiction being slower than other books.

Time is always a problem. Dirda said he’d given up TV and movie watching. Other said they read on their long commutes to and from work and missed that reading time when they changed jobs to one closer with less travel time. Airplane trips are great reading times with few interruptions. Pelland said she got a lot of reading done in the Laundromat because there wasn’t anything else to do there while the machines ran.

The issue of ebooks was raised. They avoid the stacks of books but putting them on the drive of the machine and the device was easy to carry and handle rather than hauling around lots of books to read. Also, they avoided the appearance of hoarding.

In many ways this was a slight variation in the Bookaholics Annonomous panel that Readercon usually has during the convention. As someone who could insulate her house with the books she plans to read someday — I appreciated the issues raised and the ideas tossed out by the panelists and the audience.