Tuesday, Jul 31, 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Jonah Lehrer throws it all away

Why does a “young genius” risk everything by making up quotes? A better question is why we coddle young male genius

By Roxane Gay

“…Jonah Lehrer is part of a system that allows magazines, year after to year to publish men, and white men in particular, significantly more than women or people of color. He is part of a system where the 2012 National Magazine Awards have no women nominees in several key categories. He is part of a system where white editors belabor the delusion that there simply are few women or writers of color who are good enough for their magazines because said editors are too narrow in what they want, what they read, what they think, or just too lazy to work beyond their Rolodex of writers who look and think just like them.”

San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library may not be the first place you’d think to look

for what’s new in cutting-edge technology for writers & publishers, but Bay Areans are quickly learning what a great resource it is. On Monday evening, June 25, five indie publishers, a literary agent (April Eberhardt, not pictured), & MIL’s head librarian brought news bulletins & new books, just in time for beach-blanket reading! And if a beach blanket doesn’t loom large in your summer plans, how about those long waits in traffic? News flash: all of these new books can be read on your e-reader, tablet, or smartphone!

Each book I publish catapults me past what I needed to know & do for the last one! This is partly because I’m not fluent in Geek, the language of most advanced how-to guides, & partly because of big gaps in the overlap between publishing technology & software technology.

Edward Gorey On Stage will debut this month, fingers crossed, for Kindle, Nook, the iP*ds, & smartphones. It features color photos, B&W drawings, text of multiple sizes (captions were a challenge!), & live links. I’m using Apple’s Pages software because that lets me include all of the above & export the finished ms. as an e-pub, which even Kindle now promises they can handle (they refused until a few months ago).

Fallen by the wayside: Pages’ capacity to embed video clips does NOT export (I’ve had to use links instead), nor do its handy internal bookmarks (would have been great for image citations)–a problem because the auto-TOC won’t recognize figure captions.

The reason I’m posting this is a duh! moment yesterday. I knew that for my images to do the Alice-in-Wonderland size changes required by the enormous variety of e-readers, they’d have to be LARGE. So, OK; max pixels.  The pictures looked fine on Mac or PC, but they shrank beyond teeny on my smartphone! Why? Duh! For image size to matter, the book itself had to be large! I’d created it in the same 5.5 x 8.5 page size I’ve used for most other books, which take both e-book & POD form. For EGOS, which is an e-book only, I knew I could get rid of margins, since it would have no fixed pages. The breakthrough was realizing I could use whatever page size worked best for the images. POD size was too small (postage stamps); 8.5 x 11 was too big (accidental cropping). With a calculator plus some trial & error, I picked 6.5 x 10 as the page size where most images fill my Android phone side-to-side, & also show up large & clear on both my computers.

Now if I could just find a way to get distributors to accept the book with a combined cover & title page, instead of requiring one of each, which in an e-book is a waste of space!

My biggest concern with the commercial model for social media . . . is that I don’t see how they are going to deliver complete user experiences in exchange for payments or advertising. I’ve written for a long time about the need for companies to create a complete “consumption chain” in order for their products or services to be successful. A consumption chain is the total set of activities a customer goes through in order to get their needs met, or their jobs done. When a link in the chain is broken or unfulfilling (or offers more than the customer actually wants), the business model breaks down.

Social media have some of the links in the chain covered perfectly. But they don’t make payment easy, delivery is unspecified, and there is no particular social benefit to buying from one party or another. On Amazon, in contrast, you expect to be sold something (it isn’t an interruption in a social conversation); they cover every link right through to final disposition; and it is easier to do business with them than to cobble together a solution from many different players.

Contrast the two experiences. Say you hear about a cool new something or other — say a handbag — from a friend on Facebook, or through a Facebook ad. If you want to buy the handbag, you have to visit the vendor’s site. Then find the model you want. Then dig out your credit card and enter a ton of information about shipping and payment. Then (probably) pay more for shipping, etc. The experience takes a lot of effort, and it’s fragmented. Shoppers are very likely to drop out somewhere along the way. Let’s take the same experience on Amazon. An image pops up saying, “People like you bought this handbag.” You click on the handbag. There it is. You click on one-click — there is your payment and delivery information. And if you are a “prime” member, there’s no delivery charge. It is easy and effortless, all the way through the entire purchase and delivery process. Facebook and other companies similar to it are a long way away from having something like that to offer advertisers. And of course, if the advertising on Facebook is truly engaging and interesting, why would an advertiser pay them to feature it?