When ebooks make discoverability harder

One of the current buzz words in the book business these days is “discoverability.”  The key to such, we are told, is better “meta-data.”  The age of the Dewy decimal system as sufficiently “granular” is long past.  Shouldn't ebooks -- with their wealth of "searchable" text -- be easier to discover, even without cataloging tags or high name recognition? Or marketing? 

Isn't that why authors may think they don't need publishers any more to be discovered?  Nevertheless, to self-publish is not only to forgo an “advance against royalties” and to pay out-of-pocket for editing and design, but to have to do your own marketing.   That may seem easy if you are an investment advisor with a book on finance that grew out of your blog and CNN spots.  It’s a lot of work if you are an independent historian (i.e. not an academic) or a newly minted Iowa Writers Workshop novelist.

Imagine how much harder that can be if you’re dead. Or if your books were published 30 years ago and still sell but only to graduate students? Or the first novel you wrote has gone out-of-print? 

The joy of re-discovery is one of the great pleasures of browsing – whether in bookstores, in libraries, or leafing through the footnotes and bibliography of a really good history book.  Ebooks – being cheaper than paperback reprinting – should be easier to “re-discover.”  They shouldn't be costly to "re-stock" when print books are lost, stolen, or simply squeezed off a shelf by newer books. That is, if the titles exist in ebook versions and if the publishers allow libraries to lend their ebook editions to patrons (which, as you may know, several large ones, like Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Little Brown, do not.

That ebooks are not easier to discover, especially a reprint of a backlist book, is due in part to the explosion of digital information makes it harder to distinguish one book from another.   An old book is indeed a needle in a haystack, and author, title, genre and even keywords do not make the stack much smaller.

Furthermore, DRM software doesn’t just “lock out pirates (and only un-tech savy ones at that), it makes it hard to browse and discover ebooks, because each ebook must be read on the particular e-reader  attached to the store you buy from, and each reader and publisher has different rules for “sampling.”

If ebooks are not easier to find than print, and if bookstores and libraries where you can browse physical books become fewer and fewer, how will our backlist staples of history, science, and independent fiction survive during the next 70-120 years that they will remain in copyright?

Best books are always being read again

I saw a Tweet the other day asking “What was the best book you read in school?”  

My flip response was “I could name one best teacher, maybe, but best book, no way.”  It isn’t just the snobbery of having become an overeducated English Major (forgive the redundancy) that makes it hard for me. 

What was “best” when I was 10 (Prince Tom) had been surpassed by many, many others only a few years later.  But that fact did not diminish in any way the bestness of that story about an adopted Cocker Spaniel.  

There are also books that I once disliked and yet came to reconsider and promote to “best.”   Lord Jim was one.   As I only understood decades later, what spooked me was the guilt Jim feels for not protecting the passengers from the Captain who abandons ship. The book was telling  me a story I was not ready, at age 12, to face.  I did not want to know that sometimes people who get drunk, even people you know, can be mean and stupid.  And you can’t stop them.

It is in this way that a book which I thought of as my worst reading experience, one made more depressing because I didn’t know why it made me so sad, became “best” book, when I re-read it as an adult.

I do not believe there could ever be one best book in my life.  

Best books are always plural, and always ones that I have read several times, will re-read again, and can’t imagine having lived without reading more than once.   

That’s why I am working with a start-up company, Gluejar, which wants to make sure anyone’s “best” book can be reread at any time.  We want to make sure no reader will see that book “out of print” and lose the opportunity to remember the joy felt the first time she called that book the “best book I’ve ever read. 

Watch for more about Gluejar and our fundraising webstie, Unglue.it.

Backlist discoveries: Make New Friends, but Keep the Old:

I have to admit a weakness for nostalgic childhood songs. As my mother and I say, “we sing off- key, but we remember all the words.”

One of my favorites is this round:

Make new friends, but keep the old.

One is silver but the other gold.

All my life I have taken pleasure in adding to my friends far more often than subtracting any, and in introducing new friends to old. And I think the same rule should apply to reading – and rereading – good books.

This applies especially non-fiction that may have been published in those decades between college and middle-age when you’ve been too busy raising a family and building a career to read as much for pleasure as you did when you were that history major turned law student.

For some suggestions, Time Magazine has just issued a list of 100 top “non-fiction” books (http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2088856,00.html).

These “influential books” include many gems you may not have read in school, (if you are too old or were not an English major), from Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (a memoir of growing up in Harlem before the drug epidemic, the only reason the author survived.) to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a less pretentious window on Americans in France in the early 20th Century than Hemmingway, especially if you liked Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

I like the new writers and books as much as anyone. Far be it for me to stop repeatedly checking Google, as well as browsing all the best book reviewers (NYT, Wash Post, NYRB, Atlantic, New Yorker) in the few places who still employ staff writers

If you are interested in reading more than just the things that make new news every 15 minutes on social media, I hope you’ll check out Unglue.it, where our Team is building a new way to get more ebooks reprinted, into more public libraries, and read by more people -- all over the world.

What’s your favorite book that isn’t yet available as an ebook? Go to www.Unglue.it and let us know, or email me at:  amanda@gluejar.com.

On Twitter You can also follow  #gluejar or @AMREADERTOO





P.S. (FYI, if you like me sang a lot of rounds at camp or in scouts, my other favorite song is “one bottle top, two bottle top…. But that’s another story.)