You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier (Knopf, 1/10).

Let’s just get this out of the way: I really like this book. This book changed the way I think about the Internet and intellectual property, and I think could change a lot of minds, but only if a critical mass of people start reading it and talking about it. So this is my Queen’s Gambit. (I apologize in advance for not citing page numbers with quotes, but as I was reading a review copy, I have no idea what the actual page numbers will be.) This review is long, so if you are in a rush and have some faith in my book recommendations, just go out and buy it in January and meet me back here when you’re done.

Okay! There are too many ideas in this book that I underlined and starred and ?ed and yes!ed to count. I’m just going to touch on a few, and especially the ones that made me think of books and publishing.

Probably the most interesting idea in this book, especially for the book world, is how the Internet’s push towards the hive mind (also known as the noosphere, a word so creepy that I almost become a Luddite every time I read it) has already damaged and threatens to essentially destroy art as we now experience it. As Lanier puts it:

“The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush.”

A thing, I’m sure we can all agree, that is not great for writing, which pretty much lives and dies by things like the strength and believability of an author’s individual voice.

A he writes, “Authorship—the very idea from the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new ideology.” Which is pretty well borne out by a quick glance at Wikipedia (an entity to which I am not opposed, by the way). The argument on behalf of the hive mind is that many many people working together will come up with a better answer, and faster, than individuals working alone. Lanier pretty conclusively demonstrates that this is not always the case, even for things to which humanity already knows the answer. And what about novels, of which there is no clear question, let alone a clear answer?

Most interestingly, Lanier talks about how hive mind thinking has interacted with advertising to create an entirely new hierarchy of creativity on the web. He writes:

“The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

In other words, we’ve decided, or been persuaded to decide, that original content is not worth paying for, very often with the justification that the corporations that mainly provide that content are dinosaurs who can’t keep up with technology or don’t distribute the money fairly anyway (both of which are valid points, sometimes). Ironically, though, we’ve also elevated the only artistic output of non-media corporations, advertising, to a sainted level. We expect ads on websites, blogs, nyt.com and Pandora to pay for our content instead. Eyeballs on content: worth less and less with every $9.99 e-book. Eyeballs on banner ads: expected to prop up an entire Internet’s worth of information commerce.

This is something I wonder about constantly. Writing has never been a reliable way of making a living, as anybody who reads biographies will tell you. But there has always been the (somewhat) rational expectation that if you wrote something good enough that other people would enjoy reading it, or be enriched by it, somebody would eventually pay you for it. Very few people have ever gotten rich as writers, but many people have eked out a living. The (d)evolution towards hive mind thinking and writing makes that more impossible with each passing day. And, as he puts it: “This trajectory begs the question of how a person who is volunteering for the hive all day long will earn rent money.”

(As an aside, this is not just important to booksellers because we sell the fruits of creativity, although that’s not to be ignored. But also because what we do is something that has been increasingly crowdsourced, via Amazon’s odd algorithms and reviews, and a million other ways besides, including my willingness to share book recommendations for free on Twitter with people who have neither the willingness nor the ability to reward my professional expertise with a purchase. On my cynical days, I wonder where it all will end. Will we all be expected to work at jobs to which we’re indifferent so we can come home and do the things we love for free online? If creativity is at the heart of most careers that people love, how many of those careers will disappear as we make the group decision that creative talent is no longer something to be financially rewarded? Is this potential insanity something that can be avoided? Lanier seems to think that yes, it is. I hope he is right.)

There’s another quote in here that I think can be fairly well applied to independent bookstores, but would be interesting even if it couldn’t be. “No one’s ever been able to offer good advice for the dying newspapers,” Lanier writes, “but it is still considered appropriate to blame them for their fate.”  You could substitute publishers in there for newspapers, or independent bookstores, and the sentence reads fine.

This is not to say that newspapers and publishers and independent bookstores have all been taking advice well, certainly. Obviously, it’s not necessary for me to recount the many things that failed bookstores might have done to stay in business. But sometimes (again, on cynical days only) I wonder if even everything we’re doing at WORD, and these are all at the top of all thinking people’s bookstore advice lists, will be enough: having an online store, curating our book selection to suit our neighborhood, hosting grand events, special ordering out the wazoo, and free shipping over $50, and great customer service, and all the rest. Can any of those things matter if creativity is no longer valued because the general belief is that the product of the group is superior to the product of the individual? I suspect they will not matter a whit if that is the case. And that is the case that Lanier worries we are heading for.

I’ll mention just one more thing that piqued my interest: the ways in which our creative culture has stalled since the prevalence of the Internet. I can’t put it better than Lanier when he writes:

“Certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age…It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.”

And it’s true that mash-ups and re-mixes have become one of the pre-eminent forms of art of late. Lanier points out that while most of the decades of the twentieth century have their own distinct musical styles, due to rapid leaps and changes in the possibilities of music over the course of the century, there’s very little that distinguishes that last ten years or so of music from the ten years previous. There’s a lot of throwbacks, a lot of retro music—and not all of it necessarily bad, and some of it quite good—but also not the overhauling quirks of imagination that propelled music forward several decades ago. I don’t know that I agree with all the conclusions that Lanier draws from this observation, but I think it’s a very good point.

Again, it’s also echoed in the book world. For all the expansion of book technology, there’s been precious little expansion of writing formats. I’ve always wondered why the main focus of e-readers has been a fancier version of reading a .pdf one page at a time on a screen small enough to fit in my purse. Even things like the Vook seem to me like the offspring of a book and the jump scenes in a video game, to be honest. Emily Pullen at Skylight has written movingly about her desire to see the boundaries of this new medium pushed a little. Writing and storytelling themselves seem also to be at a relative standstill; “it’s all been done already” echoes off every bookstore wall and writing garret.

There are also a few things in this book that I disagree with; namely, Lanier’s characterization of (and subsequent dismissal of) social media rankles, for me. Perhaps this is because I’ve had a uniquely good experience with social media, but I doubt I’m the only one. His main argument against its ubiquity? Its calculated personalities: we spend an absurd amount of time crafting our online personas, and there are few true friendships to be found in social media. He writes:

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.”

It would take more than one person’s anecdotes to disprove his belief, I guess, but let me be the first to say that I have formed several true and important (and unexpectedly weird) friendships due to social media. This is partially because I experience it through the existing book community, and probably also because that community is full of fantastic people who I am predisposed to like. Nevertheless, here is a short list of people I never would have met, let alone shared booze and good times with, if not for social media spurring the whole thing: Jenn! Suzanna! Melissa! Michele! And for Pete’s sake, Josh and also Liberty, neither of whom I’ve even met in person yet, but who I would invite to my wedding if I had one tomorrow. My friendships with these people are almost exactly like many of my real world friendships, except that we type with each other more than talk.

For those six reasons and many others, I feel that Lanier is wrong to write off social media as he does, although I understand why he does: like many of the things he talks about in the book, it’s a tool that is not always well-wielded. Which is not to say that everybody should use social media the way that I do, just that a lot of the anxieties and potential problems he sees in it are non-existent for me and I suspect a lot of other people. (Aside from the “favorite music” prompt on Facebook. I hate that section.)

This is an especially odd problem because Lanier so clearly draws a line between the capabilities of tools/means of communication and what people actually do with them elsewhere in the book, especially with his emphasis on the importance of the individual voice and authorship.  Different types of communication are best served by different forms of media, but a person can retain hir individuality and sense of self in all of them if desired. Social media is still developing in that regard, but I think Lanier is too focused on the primary implementations of it.

In any event, I would recommend this book to anybody reading this review. If I were Oprah, I would pick this for my book club.

If you love technology and are excited about its future, you need to read this book, because there are a lot of things you and I haven’t thought about yet. You won’t agree with all of it, but at the end I think you will agree with me on this point: we are not hearing enough voices talking about human interaction with technology. We hear a lot of “it’s fantastico!” and a lot of “it’s an abomination!” and not much in-between. For that alone, this book is very important.

So too, if you do not like technology, or are nervous about it, I think you should also read this book. Lanier is one of the first technophiles I’ve ever read who acknowledges and treats as valid many of the anti-tech arguments I hear on a regular basis. Primarily, I thought often of a point that Jonathon of Talking Leaves…Books made in a discussion about e-books at NAIBA this year. Though I didn’t agree with everything he said, I did agree when he cautioned everyone in the audience to keep an eye on who is the greatest champion of e-books, and what they have to gain from the success of e-books. (Obviously, this applies more to Amazon than Booksquare.) This same idea—who gains from the current and coming technological changes, and what do they gain?—is a crucial underpinning of this book, and I will never regard digital advances in the same way because of it.

I’m sorry this review was so long and rambling. Scarily, it was originally twice this length! There’s just so much to talk about wrt this short little book. (On that note, though: a $23.95 hardcover for 200 pages about, you know, changing the way we look at the digital world? Wowza, would I ever have played that one differently). Anyway, one of the things I’m most excited to see in the coming months is the responses of many other people to this book and the ideas therein. I encourage all of you to get your hands on it, read it, digest it, and comment on it as well.

You’re on notice, authors. You are totally harshing my winter-is-here-curl-up-and-read-a-lot mellow and it has got to stop. How? I’m so glad you asked!

1. Please, for the love of Pete, STOP only mentioning the race of a character if that race is not white. I know you are trying to embrace diversity and create a more realistic world, but the fact of the matter is this. If I meet five characters (say, your main character, her mom, her sister, her best friend, and her other best friend) and you describe them but DON’T mention their race, and that is followed in the next few chapters by a black teacher, or a cute boy who’s Hispanic, that doesn’t prove to me that you embrace diversity. It proves to me that you assume all characters are white unless otherwise announced; that white is, in other words, the default race in your fictional world and by extension, the world in general.

More importantly, it annoys me so greatly that it yanks me right out of your book and then I spend five minutes reading the back cover again and wondering how much more time I really want to devote to your book, and frankly I am sick of wasting my time that way. From now on whenever it happens I’m just going to stop reading, period.

I’ve been thinking about writing this for awhile, especially ever since I read The Lost Symbol a few months ago (Dan Brown is so proud of his decision to include noble characters of color that it practically drips off the page into your lap), but it’s really come to a head recently, since this has happened in the last five books I have picked up. So, authors, quit it. Either create for me a completely colorblind world, or, create for me a world in which race is a noticeable detail because it’s a very basic physical descriptor of a human being, but in which ALL races are a noticeable detail. Otherwise it’s just uncomfortable and weird.

I feel like this problem could be really easily solved in almost every book I’ve ever read if authors would ask themselves these questions when they finish a manuscript:

1. have I mentioned race in my book at any point? If so, then
2. have I mentioned the race of my protagonist?

Make sure that if your answer to a. is yes, that your answer to b. is also yes.

2. This one is for YA authors in particular, and I am begging you, all of you, please, please, before I have to give up on YA as a genre because really I am on the verge of breaking a window with all the books I am flinging around my apartment sometimes:

QUIT IT WITH THE MAGICAL PIXIE AWESOME HAS SO MUCH SELF-ESTEEM TALL SPORTS-PLAYING FASHIONPLATE BEST FRIENDS. JUST QUIT IT ALREADY. PLEASE!

(And while you’re at it, STOP MAKING ALL BEST FRIENDS REDHEADS. Let me tell you something: if there was a secret cabal of awesomesauce adolescent redheads, I would have gotten wind of it at some point in the last decade. There is not. So stop using red hair to stand in for actual character development.)

To go a bit further: look, I know WHY you create these mythical best friends, these girls who wave their hands in the air like they just don’t care, who pair Converse with tutus, who play viola in the morning and varsity soccer at night. It’s because they make your protagonists seem normal and relatable. Of course we all think other people are cooler than us (especially when we’re 14) and of course this is a good way to impress upon your reader that your main character is “JUST LIKE YOU!”

But if you read as much YA fiction as I do, you must have started to wonder something: why don’t these jaw-dropping doyennes of girlhood ever get their own freakin’ books? They seem a lot more interesting than the seventy plain-Jane-hiding-I’m-just-me girls I’ve read about so far this year.

Let me answer my own question, actually. First, I know that a few of them DO have their own books, but man oh man is the balance ever out of whack. But the real reason is that most of these best friend characters are completely over-the-top and two-dimensional, and therefore could not support their own books without veering heavily into the realm of the melodramatic and unrealistic. And supporting character or not, that sort of flat character creation is going to bring a book down every time, which is what keeps happening in books I am picking up.

All I’m saying is, I’m starting to get to a lot of third chapters and wondering if maybe the author chose to write about the wrong character in the story.  And I’m starting to get to a lot of seventh chapters and wondering if it is actually possible that there are this many people involved in the writing and editing of books who are painfully clueless about race. I wish that would stop happening. Authors, please make it so. I don’t like it when reading makes me this cranky.

Thank you!

This is not an indie bookseller dancing on a chain bookstore grave. This is me pouring one out for the folks who taught me to love bookselling.

Borders Group announced last week that, by the end of January 2010, they expect to have closed 200 Waldenbooks bookstores (most of which at this point have been branded as Borders Express, actually). One of them is located at 268 Montgomery Mall, and it’s where a young Bookavore got her start.

As soon as I got my working papers, the Montgomery Mall Waldens was my first stop. My mom had worked there before her writing career took off, so it was easy to get hired. And, like most new hires in a bookstore, I was pretty sure I knew the drill: look at the books, read behind the counter, occasionally shelve when there was a cart of books around, have witty conversations about new fiction with cute guys, take home a stack of books at the end of the night purchased with massive employee discount.

(Here I pause so any bookseller reading can giggle a bit.)

Instead, here is what the drill was: Work hard. Enjoy yourself. Read on your own time.

A short list of bookselling skills I learned there would begin with the first lesson I learned on my first day (“if the book is in stock, then by God, you walk over to the section and you take the book off the shelf and you put it in the customer’s hands”) and would also include:

1. Every customer should be treated with respect, regardless of what they’re buying.

2. If you’re going to have to say the same spiel to every customer, practice until it’s 100% natural, and that way you won’t sound like a robot. (One of the managers would actually give us regular breaks in her office (by which I mean the mall hallway) to practice talking about the reader discount program, the special order process, etc.)

3. It’s okay not to like every book you read, and it’s double okay to tell customers when you don’t like a book, just don’t be an asshat about it.

4. You have to read to be a good bookseller, and you have to be familiar with what your co-workers read as well.

5. Chocolate truffles are a valuable bribery tool.

6. There are many, many creative ways in which to stack 400 copies of the same new hardcover.

7. Always double-check with someone before you say a book is out of stock. People often have their information wrong and it takes two people to figure out what the deal is. Also, the computer will be wrong half the time no matter what you do, so it’s worth it to look again.

8. Though computers make things more efficient in some ways, sometimes you just have to go with your gut when you’re ordering.

9. It doesn’t always matter how much foot traffic you have or how famous an author is: sometimes book signings just go terribly wrong.

10. People like their bookstores to have personality.

Does the last one sound like I shouldn’t have learned it under the corporate bookstore wingspan? I probably shouldn’t have. But I had a rogue manager. She ordered books from Koen when they weren’t available at the Waldens warehouse. She ordered books directly from Arcadia, stacked them on a table at the entrance because there was no section in the store in which to shelve them, and got an award from the Home Office for increasing “Local” sales by ridiculous amounts. She ignored mandated endcaps in order to keep a permanent endcap of her staff picks, which sold out the door in stacks. And she squished fiction to the side so that our receiver could have his own section. I think it was called “Weird Reads”—it was my introduction to The Sandman and Palahniuk and House of Leaves before those all became cool.

In their press release, in addition to using the reprehensible word “right-sizing,” Borders Group assures us that most of the 1500 people losing their jobs are part-timers. But that’s not true of most of the folks who taught me a lot of what I know about my job and, even more kindly, put up with me as a teenager. Not only are they full-time booksellers, but they’ve been working there for years and years, and they’re important to the community they serve despite the fact that they work for people whose ideas about bookselling I disagree with, and I am just as sad about their loss as I am when I read about an independent bookstore shutting its doors.

So this one’s for you, Sharon, Karen, Lisa, Laurie, Eric, and all the rest. I haven’t seen you in a few years, but I think of you every day at work, and I wish you all the best as another era in bookselling comes to an end.

Yesterday on Twitter I mentioned a delicious soup and was asked for the recipe, so here it is. Sort of. I made it up as I went along and didn’t measure anything, so it’s my best guess. Luckily, it is really difficult to mess up soup.

You’ll need:

—one butternut squash that’s 8-9 inches long and not too fat on the bulb end

—one can of black beans (I used Goya)

—vegetable broth (I use the stuff in a carton from Trader Joe’s, and highly recommend keeping vegetable broth around all the time if you don’t already. It is GREAT for making rice/couscous/quinoa)

—honey

—cayenne powder

And then you:

Cut the squash down the middle, scrape out all the seeds and whatnot, and put it on aluminum foil on a baking pan. Put it in the oven at 380 (Bittman calls for 375, I don’t think there’s a huge difference). I didn’t add any butter or oil, though you can. I am honestly not sure how long I baked it for because I was reading (The Mysterious Benedict Society!) and just kept peeking at it. Probably 45 minutes or so? In any event, you’ll know it’s ready when the skin is puffy on the outsides and the flesh looks sort of dry. Poke it with a fork. If the fork goes right through, you’re probably set. Take it out and let it cool. This is a good chance to read some more.

After it’s cool enough to hold, peel the skin off. It should come off very easily. Slice the squash up into chunks, whatever size you like, and put in a saucepan. Add the beans. Cover with broth plus another half-inch or so of broth (though you could do more). Turn the heat on medium and let it warm up a bit (aka: read some more) and then put in honey. I think I made three or four spirals worth, but add to taste. Then just 2 or 3 shakes of cayenne, but you could do more. Mix it up, put the lid on, let it simmer for awhile, and voila! Delicious soup.

You could probably double this and make it in a bigger pot. Also, I think next time I might soften an onion in some oil in the pot before I add in the squash. Or maybe some potatoes. So many options!

It’s been a long time since I wrote a book review here, mostly because I’ve moved the bulk of my book commentary to Twitter. But I just finished a book I need more than 140, 280, or even 560 characters to talk about.

Over the last three days I’ve been devouring When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to Present, by Gail Collins (Little, Brown; just released). And I think it might have changed my life.

Let’s get something clear at the outset: I am, in almost every way, the grateful heir of the hard work of generations of American women who imagined a better life for their daughters and granddaughters. I was raised with flat-footed real-proportioned fake Barbies, and a subscription to New Moon magazine, and a healthy appreciation for women’s history, both in general and in my personal genealogy. In my senior year of college, asked to produce a utopia, dystopia or manifesto for a political science class, I wrote “A Womb of One’s Own: The Muliebrity Manifesto,” complete with grrrl power soundtrack. (Yes, really!)

And so I approached When Everything Changed with excitement, because I have the utmost respect for Gail Collins, but did not expect to be surprised by it. I certainly did not expect it to make me cry.

But I was, and it did.

What Collins has done is taken things that we all know—women used to need their husband’s permission to buy a car, and the Pill was revolutionary, and fifty years ago for a woman to go in front of a judge wearing slacks was completely impermissible, and the story of the Equal Rights Amendment, and so on—and created out of them a narrative above and beyond the typical history-book regurgitation. By weaving the experiences of average women into her chronology of the social and political upheavals, Collins molds the changes of the last five decades into an entirely new creation. God, I found myself thinking over and over, my great-grandmothers and grandmothers really put up with this nonsense? And didn’t snap once? Suddenly, the story of women’s liberation, which had always intellectually resonated with me as a woman, began to feel like a part of me down to my very bones.

I found myself welling up at the oddest places in the book. Sometimes I would be moved by the story of a woman Collins interviewed. When reading the section about Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, I remembered my mom telling me when I was younger about how she had been riveted to the TV set for the match, and how proud she’d been when Billie Jean won. Shuttling between soccer, basketball, and softball practices, I had just thought she was a weirdo. Now I realize an entire generation of women (and men!) had been perched in front of the TV that day as well. When reading about the increase of women attending college and looking at the years in which it became allowed for women to attend various graduate programs, I suddenly realized that there was more behind my Nana and Yia-Yia’s incessant harping about my grades than maternal concern. They were also trying to make sure I could take advantage of the opportunities they’d been denied. Both of them would have made very good lawyers. And each time I felt like I would cry—from sadness, from guilt, from the sheer amount of wasted opportunity on display—underneath it all like a heartbeat I could hear my brain: you are so lucky, you are so lucky, you are so, so, so lucky.

I knew many of these things before I started the book, but Collins has taken them and infused them with a passion and an importance that cannot be ignored. The book is perfectly paced, so it’s easy to get a sense of both the slowness and the speed at which many issues of the last few decades have unfolded. And because her aim is to tell a story, rather than to try to make a larger point, the point makes itself: things aren’t perfect, but my God, how they’ve gotten better.

Collins addresses my generation’s blessed amnesia about the gains of women since the 1960s at the end of the book, and the ways in which it’s both proof that the women’s movement has made true gains, and also problematic for the concerns of women that are still unaddressed. It’s my hope that this book can be a partial corrective for that. It can act as a reminder for women my age of what, if not for the tireless and in many cases unrewarded work of thousands of American women before us, could have been.

For me, it certainly has. Reading the book has put my life and its possibilities into sharp relief. I have woken up the last two mornings feeling luckier than I ever have, determined to do something good with my life simply because I can. I hope to feel that way tomorrow morning and again the day after that—and if the feeling ever fades, I will return to this incredible volume to be re-inspired.

Just quick post regarding this item in today’s Shelf Awareness:

“The French National Book Centre awarded more than 400 independent bookstores the new three-year quality label. Bookseller.com reported that booksellers ‘had to respond to a number of criteria to qualify for the LIR, or librairies indépendantes de référence. These included deriving at least half their turnover from the sale of books, proof of independence, diversity of stock, the quality of staff and services, and a strong programme of events.

‘In exchange, they are entitled to exoneration from the payroll tax, or taxe professionnelle (TP), that is levied by local authorities, starting from next year. The label, which was officially launched last April, was one of the proposals in the ‘Plan Livre’ that was adopted by the cabinet in November 2007 to bolster the book business.’”

Ever since someone told me that in Switzerland, booksellers are required to be certified, I’ve been thinking that US booksellers should hop on the bandwagon. (NB: I have no idea if that’s actually true about the certification, but it got the wheels turning anyway.)

Bookselling, in our culture and for the average person, is a retail job. A slightly more interesting retail job, and maybe even a cool one? Certainly. But it’s also a job you take while finishing your MFA. There is very little professional credibility in working full-time for a bookstore outside of the book industry.

Now, you and I and the lamppost know that this is ridiculous. Most people in bookselling are woefully over-educated, and in addition, have a strange skillset that makes them good at their job. We tend to know too much about a few select types of books (collections of 18th century love letters, Russian literature of the mid-1970s, books about the cultivation of oranges, etc). We also tend to know enough to get by while talking about almost any book, and enough to bullshit when talking about the rest. Some of this we learned while completing useless bachelor’s degrees, but the rest we obtained honestly, through hours and days and weeks of time logged behind the counter and on the floor, the way you learn any trade.

So I think we should have a certificate or something, I don’t know what. A school. A quality label. Whatever! Something that would make materially clear what we already know to be true. Would it be very hard to quantify what makes a good bookstore and a good bookseller? Probably. Would it lead to squabbling? Almost certainly. But it’d be worth it, I think.

This is all scrabble-dash, though. What do you think? Would people be reassured to see a pretty certificate in a frame when they walked in the shop? Could it lead to a greater awareness of the greatest asset of the indie bookseller—knowledge—which currently does not seem to resonate with the wider public? Discuss.

That’s right, this is extra credit, because I know that in a room of booksellers, at least half are the kid for whom the phrase “extra credit” sends a shiver up the spine.

As you’ll see in my latest Shelf Awareness column, I interviewed Fraser Kelton of Glue in order to write my article. Unfortunately, some of his thoughtful responses to my questions didn’t make the column; I ended up taking it in a different direction than I had anticipated. But I think they offer some interesting perspectives for indie booksellers to consider. This is a good guy to listen to—he’s smart about technology, he loves books, has been nothing but committed to helping indie stores out, and even has a favorite bookstore (Bryan Prince Books). If you live in NYC, I recommend checking out the Publishing Meets Tech Meetups that he organizes.

Bookavore: In what ways do you think independent booksellers could use technology to improve their business?

Fraser: I’m anything but an expert here, but I’ll toss out two ideas:

1) Use technology to create and nurture community. I bet that a major source of business is the offline community that an independent bookseller nurtures and grows. Technology enables independent booksellers to do this on a larger level online. The web is wonderfully efficient and effective for creating and maintaining relationships. These relationships could be with individuals who already frequent the bookstore (strengthening current connections) or they could be with someone hundreds of miles away (creating new connections). The past 5 years has seen an explosion in online social tools that enable one to tap into and join the conversation and it would be great to see independent booksellers embrace these tools.

2) Focus on providing the best experience possible for an individual. A single website will never be the sole resource for individuals interested in books. Even if the majority of people buy from a single online retailer we read reviews on other sites, check out what our friends are reading on various book social networks, etc. Our book experience online spans multiple sites and it’s naive to think that an independent bookseller will ever be THE site for books. With this in mind, I’d love to see independent booksellers embrace this idea and focus on providing the best experience for the individual. Link to other sites. Even competitors. Even Amazon. The better the experience provided, the more likely I am to return to the site. If I knew that an independent bookseller provided links to the best resources online for books I’d most likely continue to visit the site and with time I bet I’d start to transact through them as well.

B: What are the two or three things that you think all bookstores, indie or not, should be including on their websites?

F: 1) Answer the “What Book Should I Read Next?” question.

Offline, indie booksellers provide value by providing recommendations and curating content. By asking a few questions about previous books enjoyed they can provide a patron with personalized suggestions. An independent bookseller can use their relatively small online presence, when compared to Amazon, as a strategic advantage – they can provide these personalized suggestions online. Have a user fill out a quick form and then provide them with a short list of personalized suggestions within a stated period of time (say, 1 hour). This is a great way to build a permission marketing list and to engage directly with a broad base of potential customers. You should be so lucky that the service becomes so popular that you can barely keep up with requests.

2) Enable the community to curate and edit the book pages.

I want a single place that makes it easy to access the best resources online for a specific book. I want to read reviews from book bloggers, browse critic reviews, access summaries, browse inside the book, etc. There’s currently no aggregated page to easily access all of this information. An independent bookseller should publish book pages that are editable by their community. Imagine a blogger being able to add a direct link to their review, or an avid reader linking to a particularly insightful review from the local newspaper’s site. These actions would create a vibrant site and further strengthen the community. The indie bookseller would then become a go-to resource for all things book related. Google has become the dominant company on the web by directing people off of their site and landing them on information that’s most useful. I’d love to see an indie bookseller take this same approach to the book vertical.

What do you think?

As begun on Facebook after a fun conversation with my co-worker: what if independent bookselling were more like (or anything like) professional football?

Being Eagles-centric, I thought that if I were the McNabb of bookselling, I would forget the alphabet from 2-5pm everyday and thus be incapable of shelving or doing my job properly.

My co-worker, our events coordinator, would get a bonus every time she signed a bestselling author for an event.

No matter what new releases came in on Tuesday, there’d be twenty blog posts up by Wednesday morning on fan blogs talking about how we were idiots to only go with four of the new Pynchon,and wondering if that new book from Featherproof was really going to prove itself or if we had just been snookered.

Kelly then chimed in: “And we’d still get paid the big bucks for all sick days due to paper cuts and box cutting injuries.”

John Mutter of Shelf Awareness: “How about an annual draft of the top bookseller prospects eligible for full-time jobs? C-Span could televise it. The stores down the most the previous year would have the top picks and could trade them. The major choices would have press conferences with their store managers and owners wearing store T-shirts or caps. Oh,and booksellers would have agents!”

Laurie Halse Anderson: “I will look forward to the inquiries and scandals when the news leaks out that you were recruited by the deep-pockets world of bookselling when you were an innocent teen with an astounding ability to read fast and naive parents who didn’t realize what that meant for your future career. And then the coaches came calling… in the dark….”

My boss: “So I guess I’m like the Jerry Maguire of bookselling. SHOW ME THE BOOK SALES!!!!!!”

Terra Elan McVoy, author of PURE and manager of Little Shop of Stories: “You’d want a quarterback who had more than one handsell in her–not always going to the same Audrey Niffeneger handoff: one who could stay in the pocket and not panic but still dole out some Andrea Barrett, a little Zadie Smith, maybe fake with some Chuck Klosterman, but who could also fire off one or two big, beautiful hail marys like selling that copy of Drood you’ve been hoping to get rid of before it comes out in PB next month.”

This is a game that had to be extended to the greater world, naturally. Post your best ideas about how to make indie bookselling more like the NFL while I try to get Roger Goodell on the phone.

There are so few of us bookavores, we who eat books, that I feel a clan obligation to post any and all sightings of them.

Via the lovely Emily Pullen, please go watch this video of Blake Butler eating the first page of his book. I think he intends to eat the whole thing, so please also go recommend to him ways to make that a little easier.

I have brought my blog back from the dead! Did you miss me?

I’m just going to jump back into it with a random list of thoughts about a Sony Reader 505 that I won in a contest about a month ago (thanks, Unbridled Books, Firebrand Technologies, and Emily St. John Mandel!). In no particular order:

It is super irritating that the Reader doesn’t work with my MacBook unless I download software someone had to write in order to basically trick it into working with a Mac. (Calibre is, though, a good program.) No wonder nobody in Brooklyn has one.

E-reading is not a strain on the eyes. I had no problem reading for hours on the Reader. I also did not really feel as though I was comprehending the books any differently, though I guess an MRI scan would be a better judge of that.

If you are a fast reader, which I am, you will probably also be annoyed by the weird blinky thing it does between pages. Do other e-readers do that? What the hell is that?

DRM sucks and, though I have on more than one occasion set out EXPRESSLY to spend money on an e-book, I have yet to do it. This is mostly because of DRM and the fact that, because I have a Mac and the Reader won’t make nice with it, I can’t do whatever magic wand waving nonsense I need to do in order to put DRM-encrypted files on the Reader. I probably would have bought a few e-books by now if not for that. The other thing holding me back has been the umpteen formats in which one can buy an e-book. It’s confusing and stupid and I find it impossible to believe that whoever it is who needs to make the decision to release all e-books in the same format hasn’t done it yet. In the case of both DRM and formats, it’s got to be either the publishers or the tech people who are making these mistakes, which I find funny because they’re the same people who send out press releases about how e-books are the future. Not if you make them complicated and annoying, they’re not.

And for that matter, if I had spent money on e-books, I damn sure would have claimed them as a business expense, because frankly right now e-books are so ugly that I’d feel silly spending money on them if I couldn’t even get a break on my taxes. I like what Emily said in this post—I think the industry does, to some extent, need to start thinking about e-reading as a medium, not just a format. Nobody knows better than me how much it costs to put a book together, but frankly, an e-book just does not seem worth the same amount of money as a physical one.

I am glad I didn’t buy the Reader, it’s absurdly over-priced for what it does. If I made twice as much money as I do now, I’d still feel that way.

Partially this is because it’s really poorly-designed. I try not to be too negative on this site, but I think Sony can take it. As a Mac user I know I’m predisposed to expect my hardware to be elegant, but this thing is just blegh. I have no idea why it has to have so many buttons. Sony, for a minimal consulting fee I’d be glad to show you how you could have easily gained an inch of reading space on this thing. My only consolation is that the Kindle is just as ugly, and also white, so over time it will be ugly AND covered in fingerprints.

I love using it to read ARCs. I love getting them in my inbox and plopping them on the Reader and not adding to the stacks all over my bedroom.

I downloaded some free public domain books from the Gutenberg Project, and finally read Mark Twain for the first time in my life. I am sure you will all be shocked to hear that the man was very funny and a great writer! It’s all about timeliness here at bookavore.com.

The thing the Reader is best for, in my life, is my commute. It takes me 20-25 minutes to walk to work. I like to read for much of that walk so the time isn’t wasted. And, though everybody mocked Jeff Bezos for pointing out that an advantage of the Kindle is reading one-handed, the fact is that reading one-handed is pretty useful for a number of non-perverted reasons. One of them is walking. I love walking and reading on this thing at the same time.

If the Reader worked like a Kindle and downloaded my blog reader and newspaper and magazine subscriptions, it would probably be one of the first things I picked up every day. But it doesn’t, so I can go days without using it.

So those are some random thoughts on the Sony Reader. As I mentioned in a forthcoming Shelf Awareness column (link TK), I wouldn’t recommend spending your money on an e-reader—yet. I’m holding out for something that has way more uses. But in terms of plain old reading experience, it is pretty useful, and I think booksellers need to become more familiar with the technology. Mostly because it is probably going to become part of our jobs, but also, I think many booksellers might actually enjoy the damn things a little bit.

There’s so much information out there on e-reading, I don’t know if there are any questions people have about it. Are there? Do you have any questions or thoughts? I have a question, and it’s probably the most important one there is when I think about my relationship to the Reader.

Do I look more or less fetching with an e-reader in my mouth as compared to a physical book?

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