Onward and Upward with E-Books

It's a momentous day here at Phoenicia Publishing: we just released our first e-books!

I've been reading books on my laptop and Android phone for quite a while now.

And here's the verdict: I've decided I like it, even though I'm not a 100% convert.

I like the ability to take my reading — lots of reading, in fact — with me wherever I go, on one nearly weightless device that fits in my pocket. And I like being able to buy, for less, books that I don't particularly want to keep as physical objects in a physical library. I like being able to search them, make bookmarks, look up words: all those interactive features.

If I can get a book I want to read at the local library, that's often the option I choose – it's free. But I live in a French-speaking province and can't always get what I want, which has been a problem ever since we moved here. And, like most people now, I like the instant gratification of being able to download a book and start reading right away. It's clear to me that the future of publishing lies, at the very least, with a mix of e-books and print books, and more likely with forms of electronic publishing that we can't even imagine yet, but which include a lot of multimedia content impossible with the printed page.

Most people don't have to think about all this, well, beyond their own pockets, but the problem is…I'm also running a publishing company. A small company, yes, but it's a furry little entity dedicated to being a fast and adaptable hare rather than a ponderous tortoise. At Phoenicia we publish mostly poetry — one of the most challenging formats for e-books, which are still pretty hobbled when it comes to complex typography. The other thing we will be publishing are art and photography books: also a type of book that needs careful, beautiful design.

I've spent the past couple of weeks thinking and exploring and learning, and today we released our first two e-books at Phoenicia: Dave Bonta's Odes to Tools and Ken Pobo's Ice and Gaywings, winner of this year's qarrtsiluni chapbook contest. Both are available in the Kindle/.MOBI format, and as EPUBs for the iPad or other EPUB readers, like the Nook or Sony, for a cost of only $2.99. Full-length e-books will be priced similarly to most commercial ones: around $10.00.

It was fun learning the new technology and I'm proud of the finished products. And it feels like a pretty big deal – a big step into the future.

(Dave Bonta has another book, a collection of his wryly funny and sometimes poignant "Words on the Street" cartoons that's just come out in multiple formats, through Bauble Tree Books in London. Check it out!)

I've been pretty low-key about Phoenicia here on the blog, but will be talking a bit more about it in the coming months – we've got several exciting projects in the works that I think will be interesting to Cassandra's readers, and, as always, the authors and I really appreciate your support! Nobody's getting rich – or even making any money to speak of – but I'm trying to develop a model that at least gets excellent, deserving work into print — and now, e-ink — which is a whole lot better than having it languish forever in a virtual folder in a virtual desk drawer!

Process

Spending increasing numbers of hours on the computer, over many years, one can forget (like the proverbial frog in the hotter-and-hotter water) just how far away from home one actually is. For the first thirty years of my life I made things with my hands. For the next thirty, I've made more and more of those things inside this box, including the work of my profession. Graphic design, when I began, was the province of ink and paper, knives and rulers, glue and wax and ruling pens. Even when my own work was done, there would be more ink-on-paper during the printing process: a process that designers needed to understand from start to finish.

We drove past the printing plant of the Montreal Gazette yesterday, with its oversize photographs of newspaper-carrying readers in the windows, and I asked J. how long he thought newspapers would keep on printing paper editions. Not that much longer, he replied, and I agree with him. We haven't gone to an offset printer for a press check in years. Like so many others, we're living and working more and more inside our computers, which have become laptops, and are shrinking further into palm-sized computers masquerading as phones. We walk around the streets holding this customized, self-contained world in our hands, often oblivious to everything else around us – and why not? Everyone and everything we care about, practically, is right there…

But I've noticed, in my recent forays into drawing and printmaking, how much my hands have missed the feel of real materials and the pleasure of movement that turns raw substances into something different: a dress, a knitted hat, a 2-dimensional depiction of reality. I've missed the smell of printing ink, whether relief ink for a linocut or the characteristic smell of a pressroom and newly-printed press sheets in the back of the car. Sometimes, I think, only cooking remains for a lot of people as a way to experience the transformation of ingredients into something we can use in a different way, and enjoy not only for its aesthetic and sensory qualities but for the fact that we can feel, in our hands and bodies, that we made this thing ourselves, by hand.

There's plenty to do in an art studio, even when the muse hasn't come to work yet. Today I opened up (that took some doing) some cans of old relief ink that I thought might be unusable, cut off the thick skin that had formed at the top, and discovered perfectly good ink hiding underneath, away from the air. I cut some new wax paper "skins" to put over the top of the ink, and cleaned up my tools and my hands, covered with smears of oily black and Venetian red. There's something profoundly satisfying for me about even a simple task like that.

Hands are astounding — have you ever really thought about them? I think we're meant to use them, to experience the most primitive of creative acts, like thrusting them into a vein of clay or mud in the earth and feeling, beneath our fingers, the lump of earth we pull out slowly form into a shape. My mother and I used to dig our own clay from a streambed, and then clear it of pebbles before making it into a figure, or a pot. How many people today have done something like that? This seems, to me, like a much greater change and loss than the printed book or newspaper, and I hardly know where to begin in writing about it, or what it must be doing to our brains and to us as a species. Can we appreciate creation if we don't know what it is to be a creator?

It's not that the computer isn't often a better way – in design, for instance, I'd never argue that digital page payout and typesetting aren't more accurate, easier, faster, leaving more time for creativity and imagination. The results are better, cheaper, more flexible in a lot of ways. I'd go nuts if I had to write this blog post wthout the benefit of a digital text editor! It just strikes me that we aren't using our hands and the brain-hand connection (that seems so intrinsic to the design of the human body) in the same ways anymore, and that this change has taken place, in an evolutionary timescale, overnight. 

In the deepest sense, I wouldn't know who I am – I would be an entirely different person – if I had never made things from scratch, using my hands; it is so fundamental to me. I'm not mourning, I'm just rather astonished. And I wonder if the pendulum will swing back again, with young people looking for crafts and artistic pursuits — as in the revivial of urban knitting — that show them something different about what it is to be human.

Confronting the Limits of Complexity

This week:

We joined the 21st century, and bought smartphones.

We changed our phone system to a different v.o.i.p. provider.

We replaced our modem, after days of intermittent internet service that drove us crazy.

I started a new feed on Twitter.

Everybody started flocking to Google+.

This was the week it all became Too Much.

I knew it was getting bad by Tuesday afternoon, when I started having visions of getting rid of as much of my stuff as I could, in order to create a nearly bare room in which I saw myself sitting in total silence.

My husband and I went to bed each night and lay there, each with our new phones, learning how they worked. "We've become just like everybody else," he remarked, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek. "Now we'll go to restaurants and not talk to each other, but just play with our phones."

"Maybe you," I said. "Not me!" But my vehemence was only the result of disgust at the seductiveness of the little gem-like computer-phone, and what all of this was doing to my brain.

On the internet, invitations to Google+ have been flying around, and everyone seems to be talking about what it is and how to use it and will it actually be a competitor to Facebook, or will we all just have yet another social networking site to manage?

I asked myself why this was bothering me so much, why did I feel fried, annoyed, even angry? Why did I feel, most of all, like unplugging completely?

Part of it was information overload: the difficulty of solving technical problems, learning a new system, dealing with frustration. That's OK. But once that is over, what do I want?

What I want is to be creative, I said. I want the tools to serve me, not the other way around. I'm getting absolutely nothing significant done, but I'm supposedly "busy" all the time. And it's all driven by a shared anxiety: if we don't keep up, we'll be left behind; if we don't flock over here with the Crowd, we'll lose our audience and no one will talk to us or listen to us anymore. We're not so sure they're listening now…maybe we'd better issue another Tweet or Post or Dent and make sure they're there.

Meanwhile, we're all being manipulated by huge corporations who stand to make enormous profits by understanding, influencing, and controlling our behavior, and then recording what we do and who we are, and selling that information to others and using it to get us to buy things ourselves.  Don't people see that? Increasingly, we are becoming pawns not only in the political arena we used to call democracy, but in a worldwide web of profit-making.

I, for one, don't want to participate in that game any more than I have to. And I am going to unplug, to a certain extent, while using the various media in as subversive and creative a way as possible.

I can see perfectly well why I've been writing micro-posts, but there's no need to maintain a new Twitter feed to do that.

The blog is my central focus, and will remain so; I'll continue cross-posting from the blog to Twitter and FB but I'm pulling back from anything new. I opened an account at Google+ because I like its lack of ads and lack of games and clutter, but my attitude is wait-and-see. Maybe it will replace FB as the place for conversation, but I can't maintain a significance presence at both. I know, for sure, that I've reached a point of complexity that is my own limit.

I've decided to cut down dramatically on my interaction on Facebook anyway. FB is useful for keeping in touch with certain people, for sharing news, and for marketing, but can be a tremendous time drain, and the busyness of the interface and constant bombardment of ads, along with all the voices demanding my interest and attention, are part of what's putting me over the edge.

Analog activities suddenly seem very appealing: seeing friends in real time, gardening, cooking, drawing. This week I cut out and sewed a dress, the first I've made in ages.

And I'm going away for a few days, out into the country, with my sketchbook and camera and some pieces of paper; A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" (3/4 finished) in paperback, and the complete novels of Virginia Woolf on my phone. You'll be hearing from me, but in brief.

Meanwhile, what do YOU think about all of this?

 

 

 

Bleak but Beautiful

Yesterday we got up very early and drove to Ottawa again, for another meeting. This time the landscape was dusted with snow that decided to stick, and in places a thin layer of fog, or possibly smoke from woodstoves, hovered about a foot above the ground but below the tops of the trees, giving an eerie quality to the early morning. The flat land used to feel very bleak to me, but I've come to love its starkness, especially in winter. Overhead, flocks of geese flew low, crossing from field to field, and we passed numerous signs reminding drivers, in French, English and black-on-yellow graphics, about the "night danger" posed by leaping, running deer and moose, though we didn't see a single deer during the two-and-a-half hour journey, and the bounding moose on the signs looked way more energetic than any moose I've ever seen for real. (I thought the problem with moose (and it's a big one that kills people and animals every year) is that their eyes don't shine, so at night drivers sometimes come upon one that's wandered onto the highway and is just standing there, like a small building.) We passed "Bear Brook", too, but the wildlife we saw on both legs of the journey were confined to the geese, a lone turkey, and a lot of hawks sitting in trees surveying the large china dinner-plate of a snow-covered field.

After our meeting we had lunch at the Ottawa IKEA – the smallest one I've ever been in – and then spent a happy time shopping at Lee Valley, a Canadian institution that J. has pronounced his "favorite store, ever." Like IKEA, Lee Valley was started and is still owned by a single entrepreneur. I'm just grateful we don't have our big house, garden, and garage anymore, because it would be too tempting to start filling them up with tools. This time we bought a few small Christmas presents; I bought some honing oil for my whetstone (to sharpen my block carving tools) and J. bought a slide-out tie rack that he's already installed in his closet. You can get on the mailing list and receive all their catalogs — but I'm warning you now.

Today, by contrast, was one of those Computer Days from Hell. For some reason, the layers palette InDesign on my computer completely stopped working, so I couldn't select any objects or type that were on locked or hidden layers or master pages, and that brought my work to a complete standstill, as well as disrupting J.'s day. We ended up having to uninstall the program and completely re-install it, plus all the updates, and we had two crashes in the meantime. Things got back to normal at about 3:30 pm. All I can say for sure right now is that it's going to be a late night, and we're smiling again, though about as wanly as the near-solstice morning light in that photo above.