Lending Libraries, Downloads and Bookshelves

Am I the only reader who now has more recently-read e-books in their Calibre catalog (or Kindle + iBooks) than they have recently-read paper-books?

I buy novels in paperback, since I think fiction writers and publishers need supporting and I prefer to read fiction on paper. Also because my local bookshop is Foyles. I download academic books, since academic publishing is a swindle on the public and the academics are not making a living from their textbooks on differential geometry. Best-selling pop-culture authors are also quite rich enough without needing me to trigger another 50p in royalties. I accept these are beliefs that fit my needs. Like I’m the only person who does that.

In the past there were things called Public Libraries, and there was one on your high street. It might not have the book you wanted on your shelves, but it could order that book from a library that did. The weekly visit to the library to get a couple of books to read was as fixed an occasion as the weekly shop or cleaning the bicycle chain. (You never cleaned your bicycle chain? What kind of person are you?) A lot of the books I read were from the public library, or from the Senate House Library which I could use as a graduate of the University of London.

It’s been a long time since I went into my local lending library, and it wasn’t very good back then. The academic books I want are postgraduate mathematics and philosophy textbooks and I have a feeling no-one would be able to get a copy of Jean-Pierre Serre’s Local Fields from a regular suburban lending library.

So the website I get my academic books from is like the local Lending Library, except of course authors don’t get royalties from it. But then they didn’t get a lot from Lending Libraries as I remember. Maybe a bit more than musicians do from Spotify, and certainly more than a £0.00 Kindle, but a writer who was more borrowed than bought back in the day needed to be frugal with the gas central heating.

And I have donated to Philip Tagg, author of Everyday Tonality. I’m going to write about that at some stage. If you want hardcore music theory, that’s your book. Because, you know, you’ve already read Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony. Right?

If you don’t have Calibre, you should definitely look into it.

About once a year I clear out books I realise I am never going to read again. Many of those are pop-culture best-sellers. Some are novels, and a few are academic books. So my limited bookshelf space doesn’t have a history of what I have read, but of what I have read that I think is worth keeping. The last clear-out was of books that made me think why did I buy that exactly?. I felt much better when I cleared those sources of regret off the shelves and away from my eyes. And if I’m prepared to do that to books, you can only imagine what I’m prepared to do with people. But I digress.

The bookshelf was the thing that spoke about you to yourself (I am he who has read all this), and to others (Jesus Christ, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony?). But now part of me is hidden on my iPad or Calibre library. I don’t use Kindle as much, but when I do,I’m always surprised at how much I’ve read on it. Because it’s not there to remind me.

Three Reasons for Reading, and One for Quitting Half-Way Through

In February I spent two weeks grinding my way through a collection of essays in contemporary epistemology. I could have read at least three novels or pop non-fiction books in that time. And enjoyed the experience. It felt like a wasted month, especially compared to January. Why did I do it? Well, I’m a philosopher, and every now and then I should read some recent stuff. The only thing I got out of the experience was a resolution that I was only going to read the big names from now on.

Why do we read? For useful knowledge, as when I read a software product manual; for interest, as when I read about Renaissance warfare or the life and paintings of Gustav Caillebote; for guidance and ideas, as when I read books on problem-solving or game; to understand more about the world I live in, which is what the pop non-fiction does; or for entertainment, as a Jasper Fforde; or for that mixture of entertainment and information that happens when reading classic fiction, as Moll Flanders.

And there’s another reason: to challenge myself. That’s why I read lecture notes on Algebraic Geometry, or attempt the Phenomenology of Spirit (again), or now or books on modern art back in the Never-Minds. (I read Henry James when I was far too young on the same basis: it would be good for me. And while I found The Portrait of a Lady a huge drag, The Ambassadors and Roderick Hudson stay with me as excellent reading experiences.)

Finally, because I’m interested in art and literature, I read some books because they are legends in and of themselves. Why on earth else would anyone read Ulysses? I’m reading Maldoror, started and finished Proust, and banged my head against The Man Without Qualities, for this reason. I have read and forgotten many nineteenth-century novels on that basis. Call that duty reading.

Books are a way of getting knowledge that you would never get in life. A way for their writers to share experience, thoughts and knowledge, their fantasies and stories, with their readers. I choose books based on what it seems to offer, and most of the time, I’m a pretty good judge of a book from a few samples. Sometimes I get it wrong. When I realise I’ve got it wrong, I don’t throw the book away. I grind it out. Maybe I should be more willing to throw it out. After all, I spend as much on a meal, and that gets thrown away after twenty-four hours. And the point is that I could be reading something that entertains or informs me, and I’m not. I’m wasting time.

So what do I do in March? What I really want is something that’s absorbing enough to stop me looking out of the window during the commute. Start reading, and, OMG it’s time to get off the train! That’s always worth having.

Keep Feeling Fascination

I buy fashion magazines and I have done ever since forever. Not obessively, but more frequently than the average Aston Villa supporter. I'm not interested in women's fashion. If I was, I would read Vogue, and I don't, exactly because it really is all about the frocks. When I say fashion magazines, I mean i-D, Ten, Pop, Dazed, Dansk, Zoo and the like. Not all of them every month, but at least one of them.

I like looking at the girls. Editorial fashion models are not, however, the kind of girls boys are supposed to like looking at. From time to time I've wondered about that, but not so I'm worried about it. It took reading Ashley Mears' excellent book Pricing Beauty to let me understand what was going on. Editorial models are not chosen to be generically good looking: they are chosen because they have The Look. It's about individuality, personality, a touch of fierce, and being on the edges of mainstream ideas of attractive and good-looking. Editorial models are about being walking modern art. (I don't find Generic Catwalk Girl any more attractive than you do.)

'Fit' and 'hot' are for catalogues, calenders, retailer websites, mass-market companies, Yoga and health magazines. If you want to be hit in the eyeball by the difference, go into one of the Soho fashion newsagents: look at the girls on the front of the edgy magazines and then at the yoga and health magazine covers. The Yoga Fit women look pleasant, and trim, and bland - like someone else's wife. The editorial models look as if they are going to be Trouble and Wilful and occasional Amazing Sex. That's The (Editorial) Look.

In real life there's a thing called The Look as well: for me, it's about sex and fascination. I don't mean a bubbly Mark One Fit Girl - though they are perfectly good company. I mean whatever it is that makes me look twice, and then again, and then maybe cross the line to creepy old man (or perhaps "Oh my god, that's the first time a man's looked at me like that for six months"). There's no formula for that Look, and you and I would very possibly disagree on a given example.

I enjoy the sight of a Yummy Mummy, a Mark One Fit Girl, or an NSNF (Nice Smile, Nice Figure), but they don't make my pulse skip a beat and remind me that my life is missing something. They don't make me think of hotel rooms, damp sheets and doing it just one more time just because. It's the girls and women with That Certain Something who make me feel the emptiness of my evenings. It's the women with a look, who reward being gazed at, who fascinate me, it's those women who make feel the empty evening that waits for me every day. As well as being an addict and alcoholic, I'm an aesthete, and for me a woman is both a person and an art object.

Days can go by, even weeks, and in the limited commuter-groove life I lead I never see one woman with The Look(s), except in magazines or on the Internet. And in real life, I know she's a person, with hang-ups, baggage, attitudes, bad experiences and that make it impossible for someone to maintain a stable, long-term, ring-signalled relationship. The same for me, of course, and it makes both of us wonder if whatever good times there might be will be worth the effort and the bad times that surely will be.

(Both pictures in Spring 2012 Tank Magazine.)

Downloading Books Is Killing Literature - Or Not

Apparently you can download books now. Illegally, that is. I have to think Amazon knew that would happen, as did all the publishers who agreed to make Kindle and Apple editions of their books. Large companies who foresee a consequence of their decision and still makes that decision desire the consequence. Large companies who don't foresee consequences are just dumb or careless. This isn't true about non-millionaire people and your uncle's bakery, because they can't afford lawyers and programmers and all the other people who could have foreseen or prevented the consequence. The money guys can and it's their job.

Medieval copyists complained that once Gutenberg had set up the type for a book on one of his presses, that was it. No more work for them. I bet they put up quite a fight as well. Which worked out well for them. Every time publishing technology changes, the chances of people getting stuff for free increases.

The music industry has been bitching since forever. If it really cared about free access to music, it would stop 8Tracks, Last FM, You Tube and all the others. It doesn't. They're promotion channels. One day I may buy a Ke$ha CD, because I've been watching her videos on You Tube. Otherwise I wouldn't go near it. I suspect the music industry is doing the same as the tobacco industry, which used to sell masses of cheap cigarettes to fat guys with addresses in Malta and then say it was shocked, shocked! to see those cigarettes on sale in the poorer parts of Italy, all of Romania and all over Africa. If they didn't say that, governments might think they were conspiring to avoid paying taxes. I'm not sure about the music industry's motives, but one day we'll hear something and say.... ahhh, so that's why.

The real question is this: what are you objecting to being downloaded? The data or the story (music, movie, whatever)? Downloading data isn't stealing anything, it's making a copy. The copyright owner may have put restrictions on making it available for copying, but then their case is against the person who made the copy available. That's who the contracts are between. Copying data is not the same as stealing a physical book. Wait until the next sentence before you object.

Stealing a book is stealing a bunch of paper and ink. You deprive someone of the paper and ink, and the reason copying isn't stealing is that you don't deprive the owner of the original of anything. If all you do is copy the file to your hard drive, there's no theft. Wait until the next sentence before you object.

Once I open the file and start reading / listening / watching or using the program - that's when the theft occurs. Because nobody buys a bunch of paper and ink, they buy a story. They don't buy a plastic coaster, they buy music. They don't buy an EXE file, they buy software. It's the use that creates the theft from the author and the publisher. Stealing the book is theft from the retailer. Reading it is theft from the publisher and author.

The catch is this: when you borrow a book from a friend, or when your children read a book on your shelves, that's exactly what they are doing: stealing the story from the author. You aren't stealing the physical book, but you are stealing the story from the publisher and author.

Since no judge in the world, nor any government, is going to pass a law or allow a civil ruling that says a child can't read their parents' books or that friends can't lend each other DVD's, what everyone pretends they get upset about is the medium. Which was kinda acceptable for books and vinyl, but is hard to argue for basically costless data. After all, the whole point of going digital is that it reduces the marginal costs of the medium to almost zero. See how the exact law gets a little tricky to frame? It's very technology-dependent.

However, by now we should have a fair appreciation that putting a Kindle file in your Dropbox public folder for friends and family is the same as lending them the book but putting it on a Google-searchable filestore for anyone anywhere to download is not. If we can define or explain the difference between a real (old-skool) friend and a new-age Facebook non-qualifying friend, that would tie it down a little more.

All we would need is for the media giants to be sensible and accept the difference.