Bookaholic

After about a year and a half of putting my books (used) online, and recently teaming up with Mz. Monzter, it’s time to try a few new twists. One is Art of Books, which is only one of several inventory management programs, to get books on perhaps a dozen book sites at once without doing it manually. I chose Art of Books, even though there’s a small monthly charge, because it offers “custom venues,” that is, sites that they don’t usually offer but which I’m already using for about 700 titles.

The idea is to streamline this part of the process, which is primarily my area of work. Mz. does much better at research and personal negotiating, and I handle the spreadsheet info, usually do the Saturday morning garage sales and estate sales (that’s the fun part), and catalog the books and mags (recently picked up a bunch of Playboys — who knew they’d be worth more than newsstand price 20 years later?).

And FBA from Amazon looks like it will be a time-saver and a money-saver as well; we’ll see. Adam Bertram’s recent blog on Amazon cited $8,700 gross for one month, with Amazon fees about $3,600 — but he’s delighted to have so much business. How did he say it, someone’s already done the heavy lifting in figuring out how to sell and ship books, so why try to duplicate that on one’s own website. I haven’t heard back from Amazon yet; it’s not quite as straightforward as I had hoped, but there are a lot of books taking up a lot of room in my small house.

Next steps, when we figure we can afford it: data service (i.e., Internet) on a mobile phone. Perhaps an accounting system (cheaper than MYOB, more reliable than Quickbooks for Mac, more functional than open source Gnucash). Figuring out a better sourcing strategy. Publishing (which is my old career) new content — lots of ideas, not enough time to develop properties.

As August winds down, it’s been a slow month. Back to school might help move some of these older textbooks — or not. And there’s the specter of ebooks as well. I now have the software to do them, but haven’t made the changeover. Tick, tick, tick.

Let me hear from book people — what is your experience, what works, what used to work but not so well any longer?

For you Americans (me too), it was a delight to see the fireworks — and in the back of my mind remember that US soldiers are seeing the real thing. It also brings to mind when the Star Spangled Banner was written, during an attack of the War of 1812 if I remember my eighth grade right. When will wars end?

I accept the words of Fareed Zakaria that our war in Afghanistan is disproportionate. At the very beginning, I believed the attack on the World Trade Center did not call for a war, it called for a police action. Osama bin Laden already won when he provoked military action. An army (well, OK, I’m venting here, not much to do with books today) simply calls up resistance. The more we pour into it, the more turmoil we create, the more reliance on us, when in Afghanistan, the issues are not about us at all.
What do we stand for, and how do we work to bring that about? It’s the paradox of liberty — we need freedoms to make a better society, and we need to recognize the limits and the dangers inherent in that belief.

A change of pace for the blog, I made a video yesterday, highlighting four books. Here’s the YouTube url:

I’ve been publishing humanities texts (many public domain) for college for years now, and it took a jog of the mind from Jason Epstein (chief at Random House) to make me recognize that I’m the editor of a star lineup of authors, and since they’re all dead, I can edit more or less as I see fit. Sappho, Edgar Allan Poe, Whitman, John Milton (whoa — edit Milton? yes, I’ve done it).

One might call what I do semi-scholarly; I don’t have to satisfy academic journals, but I do have to address the needs and concerns of the wider public. “Public” is the key word, that’s what a “publish”-er caters to. Which carries a responsibility to serve the past and the future well.

In one of my prefaces, I recall the image of the author looking over my shoulder as I tinker with the words or the translation. If she/he were alive today, how should the text read? This concern has led to modernization of some texts, praise for Jowett’s remarkable style that somehow escaped Victorianisms or, as we might say today, being cutsie with the language by prettying it up with quaint words.

I have to believe that people actually said “anon,” and “forsooth” in Shakespeare’s day, but in my life I have never heard them spoken outside a Shakespeare play. That was one reason I created the Deadword Dictionary.

The audience, too, is smaller than one might suspect; at least, this is my assumption: that the classics are read primarily in late high school and early college, if at all. That narrows it down significantly, which works for me. I aim to find models, if I can find them, of the “breakthrough” type, usually in one’s twenties or thirties, as Milton with Areopagitica (though he’s more famous for his much later works) or Walt Whitman.

But now that Google and the Gutenberg Project have made so much public domain material available, does that mean my niche is gone? I don’t think so. The trick, in my mind, has been to create the simplest approach to difficult or important ideas. And I’m taking my cue from beer, coffee, and food products, the proliferation of their brands and slight variations over the past few decades, but with an assist from coding, to allow a reader choices of customizing a text as they prefer it –say, with or without the original language, modernized or not, genderized or not, format, ability to add notes, or read notes or links, audio, graphics, so that each customer ends up with the product they helped create.

This should end up with a book with dimensions, different angles with which one might approach it. That would be more like a “tarbaby” (as in the Uncle Remus stories of Br’er Rabbit).

One of my hobby horses has been the third person singular pronoun, which I will reserve for another post.

I was digging through boxes of tapes that desperately need weeded out, sold, trashed, or… when I rediscovered my old radio tapes. I used to do a radio show on the local campus radio station — yes, at that time they invited community members to propose programs, and I did with a partner. The partner soon left, but I continued with a show called Sound Art, Sound Text, which combined whatever I chose to play from the record library (yes, LPs, remember those?) with some talk, some reading and eventually more.

On the basis of what little I knew about radio, I was also hired on as the graveyard shift person on an all-classical local station, in which my major duty was to change giant 2-3 hour reels and keep the canned music flowing, and occasionally read a story or two off the AP wire. In other words, I had a lot of time on my hands. The result of this is that I conceived of, and executed, a plan to create a radio serial (just like in the old days), in this case based on the Beecher family. I had run across two volumes of their round-robin letters, so the material for “dialogue” was set up. I wrote the narrator pieces to set the background, and created the scripts.

Then, since I spent time at the campus station, I would drag in anybody who was walking by in the hallway to read a role for me, which was recorded on reel tape. Actually I chose five friends to voice the major continuing characters: Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the father Lyman Beecher. In all, there were 57 parts, some of them tiny, and it stretched to 28 half-hour episodes. There was a lot of cutting and splicing of reel tape before I could convert it to cassette tapes (remember those?). This was in the Eighties, way before computers or the Internet were widespread.

OK, OK, I’m coming to it. I transferred all 28 episodes to mp3 files, uploaded them, each with the script (and you may notice some places of going off-script) scrolling down. I haven’t figured out how to regulate or coordinate the audio with the text (hint, hint).

And while I was doing that, I found four other radio scripts, but only one other did I find the audio (Margaret Fuller). These two are posted at www.bandannabooks.com/19th. I also included other pieces that bear on the 19th Century, which I have published or helped to create. The Izak Starfisher experimental radio group was three of us doing some interesting things, most of which never aired.

It surprised me that so much of my effort was focused on the Nineteenth Century, but it still fascinates me, and I hope that others might continue to be curious enough to see where we came from and how we got here. Anyhow, enjoy.

This is just a fun thing.
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