eBook lending - good idea?

Did you know you can borrow eBooks from online libraries? Actually, that might be a lie; it depends on where you live. It's estimated that 25% of councils in the UK are offering the service - check your local council's website to find out. You might be suprised; I read a fair amount of local news and had no idea my council offered the service until yesterday.

The excitement wore off pretty quickly when I realised that a book had to be available for me to borrow it, and there were currently only 614 books available. And I didn't want to read any of them. There was one book listed under poetry. I was prepared to widen my horizons a little - that's what the library is for - but children's poetry was stretching it a bit. I put myself on the waiting list for a couple of novels, before realising that I wouldn't be able to read them; they're all in ePub. (I've covered the format clusterfeck before, but to review: Amazon Kindle = azw or mobi, Sony Reader/Nook = ePub).

If you detect a tone of frustration in today's post, it's because process of borrowing and loaning eBooks contains more obstacles than Total Wipeout. I feel like a screechy estate agent from Milton Keynes who's just been whacked by a comedy oversize boxing glove and fallen in a puddle of mud. Let's take a look at those obstacles, one by one. (Note that when I refer to peer to peer lending, I mean the service provided by Amazon and other retailers, which allows you to lend an eBook for 14 days. Again, this service is comparable with owning a physical book; you can't read the book whilst lending it. You can either arrange to lend privately, or through sites like these.)

1. Digital "Copies"
Are you baffled by the concept of waiting for an eBook to become available before you can borrow it? When your local library purchases an eBook, they are legally required to treat it in the same way as a single, physical book; so only one person can borrow it at a time. Where peer to peer lending is allowed by retailers and publishers, it works in the same way. I'm gradually coming round to this idea; publishers are frightened of digital lending, and if this compromise is necessary for us to have an eLending service, it's better than nothing.

2. Geography
To register with a council eBook library, you need to be a resident/employee/student in an area where the council offers the service. Again, this is fair enough; the money the eBook rights are brought with is intended to be spent on people who live within a given area.
You can only loan a book through Amazon's peer to peer lending service if you live in the US. I can only assume the discussions involved in making the service legal are so intensely tedious they're only got round to having them in one country. Still, you can do the same things with a physical book no matter where on earth you are, so when lending rights are based on what you can do with a physical book, it seems pretty daft to allow lending in one country but not another.
BookLending allows residents of any country to borrow books, unless there are 'publishing restrictions related to geographic location'.

3. Poor selection
The selection of poetry available electronically is poor, and the selection of poetry available to borrow and lend is even poorer. When you publish on Amazon, you can decide whether or not to mark your book as lendable, and it would seem a lot of publishers have decided against. Every book I searched for on Booklending was marked, 'Buy on Amazon - this book is not lendable.'

4. Formats
As mentioned above, libraries in both the US and the UK lend books as ePub only, although Amazon will be soon be launching a library service in the US.

4. Random Whims
Amazon recently shut down a lending site because it didn't feel it was doing enough to promote sales of books, and refused to give any further information to journalists.

To summarise: Publishers and eBook retailers are preventing eBook libraries from becoming as useful as they could be.

Do publishers and retailers have anything to gain from eBook lending? I think they do, especially considering the terms that the books are lent on. Very few people feel finished with a book in 14 days, and the system is set up to encourage you to buy the book if you like it. Contemporary poetry can be very daunting; you need some sort of familiarity with authors and styles to feel ready to buy expensive books. Libraries create readers.

What Can The Internet Tell Us About... D.A.Powell

This is the first of a series of articles, in which I will be attempting a primer on a favourite poet, featuring poems that are free to access on the internet.

I wanted to write about D.A.Powell, because, "Oh my God, here's somebody who actually lives in the world in his poems." That's Powell on O'Hara, but it's also how I'd describe Powell. You imagine he hasn't detached himself at all from the scenes he describes; still in the midst of a situation as he brings his notepad out, rather than recalling it over coffee years later. And if that isn't how he writes, he understands the importance of the illusion. If there's one thing I've taken from his work, it's to seek out and destroy any hint of detachment in my poems.

Powell has written four books; Tea (1998), Lunch (2000), Cocktails (2004) and Chronic (2009). It's sadly impossible to read any of Tea without spending a lot of money on Amazon, (eBook edition? repress? please?), but you can read a poem from Lunch, which is reckoned to be not too dissimilar stylistically.

[darling can you kill me: with your mickeymouse pillows] (Scroll halfway down the review to read the poem).

There's also the series that won him the Boston Review Poetry Contest in 2001, shortly after Lunch came out.

You'll notice the judge of the contest draws attention to Powell's long lines. Around the time he began to write Tea, Powell became frustrated with the uniform shape of poetry, which he reckoned was a limitation of the size of the page. He felt he needed a longer line, and Tea was eventually published in an unusual 'landscape' format.

If you've studied poetry, I expect you'll have been given another explanation for the usual length of a line: it's difficult to say more than about ten syllables without having to pause for breath, and a reader will struggle to take in any more information without pausing to consider meaning. One line, one unit of meaning, one unit of speech. A line longer than about five beats tends to be split into two or more units.

But then, what's wrong with that? Having given your reader a morsel to digest, must you give them their breathing space? Must they always want it? Longer lines are demanding of the reader; but sometimes your subject impels you to demand more of your reader. Powell related his line lengths to the people he wrote about, many of whom were dying of AIDS, 'I felt that, by pulling the line longer, stretching it into a longer breath, I was giving a little bit more life to some people who had very short lives.'

As someone who tries to write poetry, I was drawn to have a closer look at Powell's lines and figure out what was keeping my attention.

'could you put me out: when I'm a mite a splinter a grain'

'mightn't you disconnect the plug: give the cord a proper yank'

'and I'm a thread a reed a wrack a ruin: of clap and flux and grippe'

(all from [darling can you kill me: with your mickeymouse pillows])

These are less prose sentences, more rhythmic series of associated phrases. Lots and lots of iambs, although the rhythm is also broken occasionally to keep the voice conversational. Lots of lists; so nothing that's not in the amateur poet's toolbox already. But it's the delicacy with which Powell moulds these elements into a feasible voice that makes him exceptional. There are pauses, lulls, rushes, all of which indicate a distinctive and realistic monologue.

Halfway through working on Lunch, Powell was himself diagnosed with HIV. Hence, Cocktails refers to combination therapies; sickening cocktails of pills as well as sweet alcoholic concoctions.

[listen mother, he punched the air: I am not your son dying]

How does Powell manage to strike exactly the right tone when talking about a mother watching her son dying of AIDS? It isn't hysterical, or unnaturally calm. There's a lot of imagery, yet you never feel the poem is too literary to really get a grip on its subject matter. I think it's the rich mix of the medical, the natural, and the everyday that does it: a BIOHAZARD bin, a husk a nest, a stick of chewing gum.

There is a consensus that Powell's first three books are a sort trilogy, and Chronic represents a fresh departure.

Chronic

The long lines are still there, but it's definitely more of a case of wanting to stick around than being forced to, 'vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air'. Reviews have been mixed. Whilst I don't agree with all of the linked review, I can certainly get behind the reviewers criticism of certain unfeasibly popular devices in modern poetry. Is there anything more annoying than a poet pausing to clarify the meaning of a word?

Powell continues to refine his art with as much enthusiasm as ever; this is a collaboration with a younger poet. I think its great; it's like a new acquaintance telling you all their best jokes and then buying you drinks even though they hardly know you; it's that generous. I love it.

All the quotes I have used are lifted from this interview. Read it!

A bargain for you

One of my favourite things to do late at night is enter ambiguous search terms into the kindle store, and see what comes up. 'Poetry magazine', 'poetry journal', 'poetry anthology', 'poetry translation'; I take a look at the covers and blurbs and see what's cheap and takes my fancy. And then I share it with you.

What would you expect to find on the Kindle store for under £3? Probably not a journal with a 72 year history. The Kenyon Review contains the best quality poetry you're likely to find at such an affordable price; now feel a bit guilty about how you're being subsidised by American taxpayers.

I brought the Spring 2011 edition first, and have today moved onto the Winter 2011 edition, (which I'm a little confused by. Winter? Tomorrow is Good Friday...) Poetic highlights of the Spring edition include...

* Roger Desy - a better apple: Tactile enough to make you want to permit yourself the nostalgia.

* Katherine Larson - Lake of Little Birds: Handles narrative as only a poem can; stripped back to essential fragments that somehow make perfect sense. A wonderful example of how to make disparate elements of a poem sit well together, this covers both a leper colony and a dinner in Alghero, Italy.

* Deema Shehabi and Marilyn Hacker - From Diasporenga, (A collaboration in alternating renga): You can sense the fun that must have been had taking it in turns to continue this series of stunning fragments. The best jumps are subtle shocks, for instance, 'on the great white bed/ where she used to comb/ his eyebrows with her fingers'. I found it impossible not to try and seek out a narrative, clinging onto morsels of sense and trying to shape them. This in itself was engaging, but I was also fascinated by the unfamiliar language, places and food.

I'll keep looking for more cheap, quality eBooks to share.

How To Price eBooks

eBook piracy was on the front page of the Metro yesterday: turns out it is no longer a theoretical threat for B2B journalists to mull over, but an actual thing that anyone can access by typing the words 'Stieg Larsson epub torrent' into google.

Did you read the article in the Metro yesterday? And if so, were you stunned to discover that the electronic edition of Jeffrey Archer's new novel will cost an utterly disgusting £9.40? You weren't the only one; the question of what an eBook should cost has dominated discussion of the piracy problem. Currently, most are priced either identically to the print version, or at a very slight discount. A slight discount from the RRP, that is; retail stores will often sell for less than that. Who hasn't picked up holiday reads, or bulk brought presents from the Waterstones '3 for 2' table? Currently, you may end up paying more to switch to eBooks.

Customers instinctively feel that the price of an eBook should be less than that of a print edition. After all, an eBook costs nothing to manufacture - the army of self-publishers creating perfectly readable eBooks on their evenings off prove that. When no trees have to be felled and made into paper, no letters have to be printed, no storage space has to be taken up, no lorries have to drive the book to the shops, and no shop assistants have to be paid the minimum wage to sell it to you, the cost must be substantially lower, surely?

Apparently not, according to people who have access to the relevant figures. It is impossible to calculate a universal cost of producing a print book, since the price varies depending on the particular book and the size of the print run. A very crude estimate would be 10% for printing, and another 10% to distribute.

So can we agree that the price of an electronic book should always be around 20% cheaper than the price of a print edition? No, because businesses don't select prices based on an estimate of costs, and then add on a reasonable mark up - although some of them might like you to think that they do. Businesses select prices for many strange reasons, such as raising prices to make you believe that the product is of a high quality. But mainly they just go with whatever they think they can get away with. So how much is that?

If you're selling beans at a market, and the guy two stall down is selling his beans cheaper, you have to either undercut him or claim your beans are better. To turn this into a metaphor for eBooks, the other guy is giving his beans away on a torrents site, so your beans had better have some serious health benefits.

What benefits does a legitimately purchased eBook have compared to its pirated equivalent? The only thing I can think of, aside from a (perhaps justified) sense of moral superiority, is the promise that the file you are downloading will not turn out to be a trojan virus that destroys your computer. People will pay something for that, and then a little bit more because they feel they ought to support the author. Somewhere between 99p and £3 sounds about right, by my reckoning.

Although the style of writing they tend to cover is not my thing at all, (I'm a literary snob), I enjoy reading The Writer's Guide to E-Publishing, and especially their articles about the success enjoyed by self published writers who are willing to sell their work at the kind of prices larger publishers would not consider. Their findings tend to back up my estimate above: readers will take a chance on a book that costs 99p, and are willing to spend a couple of pounds more once they're familiar with an author. Larger publishing houses will argue that their product is of a higher quality, and some of the time they're right. £5 then?

Reading the comments on the breakdown of publishing costs I linked above, the statement that shocked me most was, 'The promise of digital is to recover already dwindling profit'. Is this why publishers are reluctant to pass on the savings made by selling eBooks - they need them to bring their profit margins back to a sustainable level?

To go back to the question in the title; there is clearly no right answer, but if you price eBooks based on the cost of selecting, editing, marketing and retailing them, the current prices are about right, (although it could be argued that the current system is bloated and unnecessarily expensive). If you base prices on what customers deem to be worth spending, they ought to be a lot less, (as is shown by the number of people choosing the naughty torrent - and that can only get worse as the popularity of eReaders increases).

If you are self-publishing an eBook, your overheads ought to be negligible, so you are free to set a price so low it hardly feels like spending. Lucky you.

hitRECord and writing communities

I've never really engaged with online writing communities, despite in theory wanting to.

In theory, I believe other people's suggestions improve my writing. Sometimes that improvement is the result of me having to think a little harder about why I disagree. But still, that means I have learnt more about what I value in a poem. Trying to implement other people's ideas gives me a challenge, and stops me feeling like I don't know where to go next.

However, the disadvantages of using most writing forums do seem to outweigh the positives sometimes.

* I'm lucky enough to be able to use a private forum on the Open University site, but most public forums are not password protected, meaning your rough drafts can be googled. Allegedly, some magazines will accept poems that have been previously posted on forums. If this is true, it's at odds with most of the contributors guidelines I've read, and I wouldn't want to chance it with a poem I cared about. If you plan on self publishing, you will be wanting to use those same forums to promote your work... to people who've already read it in an unfinished form?

* The process of giving and receiving feedback can sometimes be so overwhelming that it distracts you from your writing. The level of criticism that contributors will receive gracefully varies wildly, and can result in unforeseen flouncing. And whilst you may think you have steeled yourself to the worst the internet has to offer, an isolated remark that comes out of nowhere can leave your head spinning for days.

* You can hardly expect other contributors to consider your work if you've not put back into the community. This means spending a lot of time reading the work of novice poets; time which you could have spent reading quality poets whose work is more likely to positively influence you.

For these reasons, I've recently spent a lot of time looking around for communities that are in some way different, and make me feel like putting my grievances aside. This is what I found...

hitRECord is not just a community for writers; there are film makers, artists, photographers and musicians on there as well. The video explains the concept pretty well. Once you upload a piece of work, you are giving everyone in the community permission to mess around with it. So someone else might record a reading of your poem, or put it to music. It might become an illustration, and the illustration might become a film. Alternately, you might use someone else's work as inspiration for a piece of writing.

I've often daydreamed about writing ambient music to go with my poems, or drawing illustrations to accompany them. Sadly, I find that to get my writing to the level I want it to be at, I need to concentrate on a single discipline, and not waste my time messing around with oil paints and synthesizers. So the thought that other people could take my work and turn it into something I'd never even dreamt of was very exciting to me.

I've only uploaded one poem so far: a pantoum about the inside of a piano. I choose it above my other work because I thought it had a stronger sense of rhythm than my other poems, and would survive being moved out of context. So far, I've had a small amount of love, but no one has chosen to remix it. I guess I can't expect success so early on - I'll have to spend some time remixing other people's work to build up my name. Not that I mind - the site is a source of inspiration, and a rare example of the internet improving my workrate.

Kindle Publishing For Blogs

Given the subject of this blog, I think it's appropriate that you can now have new posts delivered direct to your Kindle library. Poetry After Ink is now available from the Amazon Kindle Store. The monthly price is set at £1.99. I should make it clear that I didn't choose the price; I wanted to make the blog available in a format that I believe has a lot of advantages, and I'd prefer it to be free. Amazon claim to, 'define the price based on what we deem is a fair value for customers.' In my case, I think they've been extremely generous to my witterings.

How easy is it to use Kindle Publishing For Blogs? Obscenely easy. So easy it almost feels like cheating. You have to complete two short online forms, and then wait two to three days for your blog to appear. You won't have to look at any code, and you shouldn't have to make any changes to the source material. Amazon magically distributes your new posts without you having to let it know that you've updated.

I took advantage of the 14 Day Free Trial so I could check over my blog, and make sure the words weren't scattered randomly over the screen like a concrete poem about an explosion. It looks more professional than I could have imagined; but then my blog is just text, with the occasional hyperlink thrown in for fun. Simple is what the Kindle does well; if you try to make it do too much, it starts gently weeping.

I still think this new format has a lot of potential, and could allow writers to present their work in new ways.

Imagine if, rather than releasing a long sequence of poems as an eBook, you posted one to you Kindle Blog each day. I'm not suggesting that just to be novel; I think it would reflect the way that most people consume poems in print. Ever tried to read a book of poetry by a single author in one sitting, like you would a novel? I've tried, but it's almost impossible to give each poem the attention it needs. To be honest, after reading more than about five poems by a single author in one sitting I find myself scanning them. My thought process reads, 'Something something hot day, metaphor for a bird, religious reference I don't understand, on to the next one.' That sounds awful, but if I'm able to flick between books, I find I'm much more able to appreciate the poems I read.

If more poets took on my idea, it would be like having a stack of books to dip into on your bedside table, except portable.

Do It Yourself ePublishing Step 2: Plain Text

A few posts back, I mentioned I was going to write about how to make your book look beautiful on a Kindle. I'm afraid I'm going to have to renege on that promise - I've decided it isn't possible.

Let's say you publish a PDF, as I was initially going to. You've chosen your fonts, positioned the text exactly as you want it, and put some images in. The pages fit the size of your Kindle's screen exactly. You've checked over it, and you feel happy for the rest of the world to see it.

The first person to download your book is Dave. Dave has an iPad, so the pages of your book don't fit his screen, and PDF does not allow for the text to re-flow. Dave decides he'd rather the book were an .epub file, so he uses Calibre to convert it.

Unfortunately, this leaves your carefully formatted sequence of poems completely unreadable.

My point is that as soon as your book is available on the internet, you have to relinquish control. Even rotating the screen on a device changes the way your book appears.

Self-publish eBook store Smashwords have a program that takes your document and converts it into every format imaginable. They call it a meat grinder, which I think is a nice metaphor for the effect the internet will have on your carefully presented words. Now, to really torture that metaphor; if you had a meat grinder and wanted to make some good mince, you'd be careful to only put quality meat and no bones in at the start. This is what your eBook ought to consist of - lots of meaty language and as little formatting as possible.

Whatever your feeling about losing all the 'packaging' a text usually comes wrapped up in, it's probably best to embrace purity. At least it places the focus back where it should be: on your writing.

If you'd like to learn more about stripping back a word document for ePublishing, I strongly recommend you read the Smashwords Style Guide, even if you don't plan on publishing with them. Having a clean word document is a good first step in preparing your work, however you eventually plan to sell it.

Kindle Blogs Highlights

Given the slowness and clumsiness of the Kindle's experimental internet browser, it's good that the Amazon Kindle Store has a wide variety of blogs and newsfeeds you can have delivered straight to your Kindle library. Even better that 64 of them supposedly cover poetry. It's a great idea: the blog appears as one document, with new updates automatically appearing at the front, in a simple format that looks OK on your Kindle.

I'm assuming that many of the people who run these blogs cannot have tried to read them on a Kindle. A couple that I tried consisted of several pages of code, and then nothing. Another few consisted of links to the web pages where the content was originally posted, which was useless. I tend to believe that a good poem is a good poem, however you come about it, but I've got to say that the Kindle web browser is not the way to experience new poetry. I bookmarked The Write Room and Ragazine for reading on my PC, but cancelled my subscriptions. A few more were sound in terms of presentation, but lacking in quality content.

Enough complaining for now. These are the ones worth subscribing to...

Word Riot
In General: This one's more fiction than poetry to be honest, but the poems that do make it in are fantastic.
Best Recent Poem: A Prompt by Joy Herman
How often/How much? Monthly, 99p per month.

Flotsam
In General: Short, sweet reviews and articles that usually include a poem to illustrate the point. If you write poetry yourself, Flotsam help you with starting points and ways to edit. The style of writing is more personal and less academic than most literary journalism, which I enjoyed.
Best Recent Poem: Steps by Frank O'Hara (I have no idea if this is a breach of copyright)
How often/How much? Updates every few days, 99p per month

I am hoping to make this blog available in a Kindle friendly format very soon. When I've managed it, I'll let you know how it works.