Author: CJ Verburg

by Carol Verburg

Did your Thanksgiving dinner give you sticker shock?  Be of good cheer!  While turkey, yams, and pumpkin pie–as well as the plates, the table, and the floor beneath–might have gone up this year, the price of books has plummeted.  You can e-read from now until New Year’s for less than it cost you to drive over the river and through the woods.

But wait!  There’s more!

Boom-Books is celebrating Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the weekend in between by giving out “Edward Gorey’s Stealth Career in Theatre” for free on Amazon!

That’s right: from midnight on Thanksgiving Day until midnight on Monday, Dec. 2, just click on the link above for a free copy of this literary aperitif.  If you’ve ever been curious about Edward Gorey as an artist, writer, and human being, but not sure you’re $15 worth of curious, now’s your chance.  This mini-ebook is also an ideal way to find out if my multimedia paper book Edward Gorey On Stage (which is available as an e-book, too) is the perfect holiday gift for your friend who has everything.  Read reviews here!

As a bonus, Edward Gorey On Stage is discounted on Amazon this weekend, from $14.99 to just $10.27 in paperback ($4.99 ebook).

If romance is more your style, Boom-Books has a special deal for you on Sunday and Cyber Monday, Dec. 1-2.  Charisse Howard’s brand-new “Regency Rakes & Rebels” novella Lady Barbara & the Buccaneer is FREE from midnight Saturday until midnight Monday.

The Regency wasn’t all nuanced flirtation between young English ladies and gentlemen.  In those days the British Empire reached around the world like a giant squid, from South Asia to the Gulf of Mexico.  Lady Barbara Poole, who fled to the Louisiana Territory after her English father’s death, can’t resist one last fling at a Carnival held by the Gulf pirate Jean Laffite and his band.  The last thing she expects is to be swept off her feet by the notorious Black Buccaneer.  Who is he, and what does he want with her?  Not until she returns to London does Barbara discover the truth behind their unforgettable night of passion.

Happy Thanksgiving from Boom-Books!

In the 21st-century publishing Gold Rush, as in Gold Rushes past, most of the riches don’t go to the miners, but to the entrepreneurs who sell to the miners. That’s why enough online book-services companies have popped up in the past decade to fill a phone book. (Remember phone books?)

Once upon a time, book fans wondered:  Can Apple can beat out Amazon? Is Kobo the Canadian Amazon? Will B&N leap into the gap left by Borders before Amazon fills it? Now it’s a hot race for second place. (Remember Lulu?) In our guerrilla sector of the book biz, the FAQ are:  Which of these competitors are most useful to us and our customers? What are their distinctive features? How are readers, writers, and publishers utilizing them?

Thus began a nonscientific investigation, whose findings are reported here with the hope that you’ll add your own data.  This week we look at three big competitors in book creation and distribution.  Later we’ll explore book social media, e.g., Twitter and Goodreads.

While Amazon defined itself as the universal online marketplace, Apple chose the Secret Clubhouse approach. Want to be in with the In Crowd? Join the iTeam! Apple’s edge is in design, innovation, and quality of products. Where are they focusing their publishing energy? On iBooks Author, the first platform that let anybody with an iPad build a professional-looking full-color illustrated book. Which can be bought and/or enjoyed by anyone else with an iPad. No outsiders allowed.

We at Boom-Books wish Apple would develop Pages. This excellent program lets anybody with a Mac easily format a book, and then export it in the semi-universal EPUB format to any e-publishing platform (except Amazon’s Kindle). Coupled with the expert help available at Apple Stores, Pages could be the go-to program for indie and self-publishers. But letting iUsers publish elsewhere would open a gate Apple prefers to keep shut. Yet their own e-publishing arm is not user-friendly. It’s much easier to finagle a book into iTunes (an odd channel for book sales) via an aggregator such as Smashwords than via Apple.

Barnes & Noble hamstrung itself right out of the starting gate by giving each part of its book operation a different (and less than catchy) name. To read a B&N e-book, you need a Nook. To publish a book with B&N, until recently you had to use the inelegantly titled PubIt! The newer Nook mini-tablets actually are fine e-readers, which can be picked up cheap these days since B&N is dropping them. Alas for the company’s future, one of these devices’ best features is their Android operating system and full access to Google, including Google Books and Google Play (also an odd channel for book sales–but more on that another time).

Kobo started as the Canadian Amazon, building its own e-readers and selling books. Now, although Japanese-owned, it’s finding a niche as the ally of independent American bookstores in their defensive battle against the giant. An indie bookstore hosts a Kobo kiosk; if a reader opens a Kobo account on the bookshop’s website, the shop gets a percentage of sales to that reader.  Kobo’s newest round of tablets, large and small, claim to be optimized for reading. It’s their stand with the good guys, though, that may be their strongest selling point. Amazon seems to think so: it’s just launched a competing program called Source. So far, indie bookstores are not falling over themselves to sign up. News reports on Source tend to include the phrase “Faustian bargain.”

by Carol Verburg

Every year on this date, a sudden murmur outside catches my ear.  It quickly rises to a gabble, rather like the parrots who squawk hysterically when they fly overhead.  It’s the kids in their Halloween costumes!

They walk up the Greenwich Street hill from Stockton to Coit Tower.  When they reach the bottom again, they’ll make a ceremonious circle around Washington Square Park.  Like the Columbus Day Parade, this event has endeared itself to me for its hokey straightforwardness — “We are wonderful and we want to show you!” — plus its diversity.  A Latino Spiderman, a Caucasian Wonder Woman, a Chinese tiger: chattering to each other, sometimes holding hands, the kids show off their rainbow of ethnicities at the same time they’re showing off their costumes.

Over the ten-plus years I worked and hung out with the artist Edward Gorey, he never particularly relished Halloween.  Kids, yes: they charmed him almost as much as cats and dogs did.  To adults he could be courtly and courteous or sardonic or chilly, but to kids he was just plain sweet.  He was also partial to bats and skeletons, more so to mysteries, less so to pumpkins; but not in the same up-close way.

He thought it was bizarre that adults kept linking him to Halloween.  He disliked anyone calling his work macabre.  There was nothing prurient in his curiosity about death.

In San Francisco, death, like almost everything, is practically an art form.  Edward only visited this city once that I know of.  He and his friend Connie, who attended Mills College, met on the top floor of the Fairmont (as I recall) one weekend when he was on leave from his Army job in Utah and danced the night away.  (For more on that Army job, which I strongly suspect fostered many of his later interests, including The X-Files, see my book Edward Gorey on Stage…a Multimedia Memoir.)  He had already put down his roots by then in the sandy, stony soil of Cape Cod.  California interested him, as everything interested him, but he had no inclination to travel here (or anywhere).

Still, every year when the kids go by, I think of Edward.  He would have stood on the balcony, as I do, and watched this homespun parade in absorbed fascination.

Then he would have chucked the cat under her chin — “Wuzzum wuzzum!” — and gone back to his drawing board.

Here in San Francisco, “reality” can be more fluid than elsewhere.  Last night Litquake, our week+ October literary festival, popped up at the Mechanics’ Institute Library for a vibrant and vigorous panel discussion entitled “Get Real: Perception and the Nature of Reality.”
Looking under every stone from particle physics to game theory were Robert Burton, MD, author of A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind; UC Berkeley psychologist and NPR blogger Tania Lombrozo; conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, author of Forged; and game designer Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken.  Their adept moderator, novelist and physicist Ransom Stephens, posed questions which encouraged a wide-ranging investigation.  Some highlights:

• Stephens launched the quest with a physicist’s working definition — “Reality is a space where things move” — and noted that, perceptually, reality appears entirely different at different scales (vide the 1977 Eames film Powers of Ten).
• Robert Burton used the double-arrow paradox to illustrate that perception is not only deceptive, but cultural: whether you see both arrows as the same length or as different depends partly on where you grew up, as do many other observations and beliefs.  He depicted the whole concept of reality as convenient more than factual.  He also observed that “language comes after feeling”: In our perpetual quest for purpose and value, we’re most likely to perceive our lives as having meaning when we feel that things (work, love, and other arenas of struggle) are going well.
• Jane McGonigal debunked the popular idea that gamers are escaping from reality: in the first place, winning points turns out to be less of a motivator than the thrill of pitting one’s smarts and skills against a challenge; and, second, grappling with virtual reality has been shown to sharpen those smarts and skills as well as to boost other measures of health and success.  Far from making people dysfunctional, games can be valuable in treating dysfunctions such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
• Tania Lombrozo, whose specialties include explanation/causation and moral reasoning, probed the mysterious human itch to explain reality.  What use is it?  Why are we so picky about what kinds of explanations satisfy us? — for instance, preferring one that includes a cause-and-effect story (preferably with us humans in the picture) to a simple observation.  She noted that explanations accomplish more than what’s on the surface: “Sometimes you can learn something new just by explaining to yourself.”
• Jonathon Keats described some of his and others’ conceptual-art explorations, positing the goal as in effect stepping outside of everyday cause-and-effect consensual reality into “purposeful purposelessness” (e.g., the silent ringtone).  In keeping with his latest book’s subtitle, “Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age,” he toured the fuzzy border between art (e.g., drawing a dollar and trading it for a cup of coffee) and forgery (“Would a moron in a hurry mistake this for the real thing?”).

What about reality beyond the handsome book-lined walls of the Mechanics’s Institute Library?

• Regarding the current 3-ring circus in Washington, Jane McGonigal disputed the common contention “This isn’t a —ing game!”  On the contrary: the problem is that different sets of participants are playing different games with incompatible rules and goals (e.g., winning re-election vs. alleviating poverty), which hugely complicates the challenge of achieving an outcome that’s acceptable to all the players.
• Tania Lombrozo added that studies have shown that new evidence doesn’t always help contenders move toward agreement or harmony; instead, somewhat paradoxically, it can stiffen their original positions.
• She also emphasized that there isn’t just one “reality.”  Robert Burton agreed that we are inclined and able, often seamlessly, to integrate multiple realities (e.g., a spiritual and a scientific explanation for an experience or phenomenon), rather than opt for a single consistent set of beliefs reflecting what Ransom Stephens called a Grand Unification Theory of reality.

Much more of interest was said during the panel discussion and Q&A which space prevents including here.  Congratulations to Litquake, MIL Events Director Laura Sheppard, the exceptionally fascinating panelists and moderator, their large and uncommonly astute audience, and MIL staff and volunteers for an outstanding evening!

On Friday night 9/27 the Mechanics’ Institute Library hosted its third annual Booktoberfest, celebrating San Francisco Bay Area book artists, craftspeople, and producers, including MIL’s own Indie Publishers’ Working Group.

What better way to toast local books than with local beers?  21st Amendment Brewery, Speakeasy Ales & Lagers provided some Dionysian lubrication for this Apollonian event, with the excellent assistance of Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery, UC Berkeley Extension, Wiley publishers, and Bay Area cornerstone The Book Designer, AKA Joel Friedlander.

Congratulations to our extraordinary table of independent publishers: Adele Fasick, Carol Costello, Mary O’Toole, Jon Foyt, Jackie Davis-Martin, and Carol Verburg, also representing the absent Renee Gibbons.  Also to separate participants Alicia Young, Charles Sullivan, Paula Hendricks, and David Colin Carr.

The books created by this diverse and distinguished group cover such a broad range–from Adele’s Guide to California Government to Alicia’s Savvy Girl’s Guide to Grace to Carol C’s novel Chasing Grace–that we may need our own website to do them justice.  Meanwhile, most or all are easily found at individual websites and via search engines.

Congratulations, everybody! and keep up the good work!