Reading Too Much Into Serendipity

Serendipity is one of those "tech can't copy it" things often sited by people clinging to the-way-things-were.

And there is serendipity in libraries and book stores. There's a lot of fun to be had finding books. But that's only for people who have a wide enough reading palette to enjoy a variety of books. I think that most readers pick their books for comfort, so they're not really interested in discovery.

That's why bookstores are failing across the country, why Amazon's suggestion logarithms do more business than libraries. We just aren't interested in reading much.

And I wonder if the internet doesn't offer the deeply engaged reader as many opportunities for discovery as the book store. Sure, if you're ruling out every recommended read and every suggested title as unserendipitous, sure that doesn't leave much else. But looking at it another way, every book reviewer is a book seller.

I wonder if that isn't really better in the long run.

Are Paper.li Tweets Spam?

from here

As I get the hang of Twitter, social media and all of this, I'm still learning my way around the netiquette of (frankly) everything.

This is the thing that has always scared me off of Facebook and Twitter to date, that even as a member of "the Facebook Generation," none of this is intuitive to me. I dislike frictionless sharing, I don't care what you ate for breakfast, or that you miss your babies (by which, you mean your dogs). I hate abbreviations and text speak (FTW!), and don't want to see a picture of how you look to yourself in the bathroom mirror.

So as I've begun to use Twitter to connect with other people interested in the things I'm interested (I have separate feeds in Hootsuite for baseball, books, friends, and the NYTimes free that gives me my news fix), I'm increasingly interested in what is and isn't acceptable in these forums.

In that vein, I don't know what to make of the paper.li tweets that periodically show up with my name attached. If there was a person deciding that my writing is one of their "top stories," I'd be flattered. Knowing that there is not, that this is a machine collecting anything published under hash-tag "whatever," I find I'm annoyed by it.

How annoyed should I be? I don't really know.

I know there are ways to opt out. Is it worth the effort? Are these mentions trolling for traffic from me showing up in my follower's feeds? Or is it just reaching me?

I know from visiting a couple of these sites that have tweeted about my work that my article is not particularly easy to find, even when I am a "top story." On the other hand, all publicity is good publicity, right? And links from outside sites impact where your blog ends up in Google searches, so is this auto-tweet spam just a side effect I should tolerate?

Reading and Community, the Next e-Book Revolution

I don't have an e-reader yet, though my wife loves her Kindle. I spend a fair portion of my day staring at computer screens, and so when I come home at night it's often a relief to settle in with text that doesn't have an ambient glow. I also think it's worth waiting on the e-reader until some more of the bugs get worked out.

But then I read something like this Book Riot article on the future for e-books, and I think... maybe I'll get that iPad soon.

An isolated reader can’t possibly have all of the answers or see the full range of meaning in what they’re reading. As a member of a social reading community, I can learn from other members and share and be recognized for my own ideas and knowledge.

I think about my favorite books, and they're sprawling, complex labyrinths I would never try to review: Ulysses, Endgame, Bluebeard, Against the Day, Lolita, Good Morning Midnight. I love them because even having read them, I know there's more to them I'm missing. I could read them again and again and again (and in some cases, I have).

Imagine embedding the last half centuries' literary analysis and criticism in the text. I've re-read parts of Don Quixote along with Nabokov's lectures and found the experience enlightening. Could an e-book really let me do that?

Just as importantly, built in marginalia could help suck the terror out of some of the books I've shied away from. I'm looking at you, Remembrance of Things Past. An enhanced e-book could link readers the way that sites like LibraryThing and Goodreads already try to.

Alright, publishers, let's make it happen. Who do we talk to? How do we start?

Not Quite Against the E-book

I am not, strictly speaking, an e-book basher. Neither am I an e-book reader. But the recent debate (inspired by Jonathan Franzen, who like most book lovers views the equation as an either/or division; who also, inexplicably, thinks "capitalists hate" traditional books because of their permanence, ignoring centuries of workers who have made the publication and distribution of books their trade) distilled a few points for me.

I'm a fairly heavy, if inconsistent reader. I can go days without picking up a book, then slam through 200 pages in an evening. I like books. I like the look and the smell of them, the color they bring to a room, the way friends notice the books lying around and the conversations this invites.

I also consume an unbelievable amount of digital text: work emails, NYTimes online, baseball blogs like Pinstripe Alley and Fangraphs and HardballTimes, the blogs of friends, g-chat, and all the corners of Wikipedia my curiosity drag me to. I don't want more electronic characters in my face, or in my life.

Carol has been reading e-books for a while now, and I think she reads e-books when she might not read the book. She likes the handling of the thing-itself less than I do, I think. She also has a harder time switching between books, grabbing a different book or the wrong one on the way out the door and then reading what you have, and the e-reader simplifies the "where'd I leave my book?" game.

I feel differently when I read. There is a climax in reaching the back cover of a book that I do not feel I would get from an e-book. The newspaper articles I read online only invite me further into the maze, drag me on to the next article. I don't know that an e-book would make me feel this way, but (so far) I have hesitated to risk my experience of a work on the new medium.

I'm sure I'll have an e-reader someday. When the books and readers are cheaper, when the copyright war is over, when they develop a satisfying way for me to annotate the text. The day will come, but it's not today.