Alan Jacobs

creepy lines (and those who draw them)

Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big publishing house? Because it would make my book twice as expensive for you, half as profitable for me, less purposefully written, and unavailable until about two years from now. In short, the traditional publishing system is nearly dead. And publishing a book under its rules can mean the death of ideas within it, as well. Until it utterly reworks its method, gets rid of a majority of its corporate dead weight, releases its publishing houses from the conglomerates that own them, and embraces direct selling models, the publishing industry will remain rather useless to readers and writers alike.

Yesterday, the NPD Group released the results of a survey of iPad owners. The most intriguing finding was that ‘20 percent of users’ time with the iPad was spent with it in bed.’ One has to wonder what other sorts of activities are being displaced by the nocturnal stroking of the iPad’s highly responsive screen.

Before I first acquired a Kindle, exactly one year ago, I didn’t usually buy books while under the influence of alcohol. I won’t say I never did it, because that would be a lie. But it wasn’t a habit. After a couple of glasses of wine, I tend to fixate on the present. I have no use for five to seven days’ delivery time. The Kindle is wonderful for drunk people because you can climb into bed, press one button, and The Anatomy of Melancholy instantaneously materialises before you, plucked by the so-called Whispernet out of the surrounding ether.

The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the night, none are left for waking life.

Counting free samples and e-books from the pre-1923 copyrightless domain, the total number of books I “purchase” per month has actually gone up by about 200%, while the number of books I purchase while sober has dwindled to about 5% of the total. You used to be able to say that someone’s library looked like it had been assembled by a drunk person. Now, for me, the metaphor has become a reality. How does a drunk person’s library differ from a sober person’s library? There are probably as many answers as there are drunk people, so I can only speak for myself.

One of the premises of this entire debate is that religious people want to use religious reasons in public debates. A few political scientists have examined the use of religious and secular reasons by the largely evangelical Protestant religious Right. If anyone would want to use religious reasons, it would be these activists. But what the scholars find is that, in fact, the religious Right offers secular reasons for their policy proposals. This is not because they are normatively sanctioned for using religious reasons, as critics of liberal theory suggest. Rather, religious reasons do not convince people to accept one’s position. In a country with diverse comprehensive perspectives, and especially when trying to pass a national, not a local, law, it just does not work to give ‘Leviticus 18:22’ as your reason.

Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a ‘neutral network,’ a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today. Websites across the developing world deliver high quality coding to complement the very best ideas from anywhere. This is a platform that has made democratic innovation possible… . The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here.

the world between two covers

the saddest thing I have read in some time

resisting print

In fact, one of the peculiar ironies of modern life is that the more successful we are, the more time stress we experience. An extensive survey of households in Australia, Germany, the U.S., and Korea by economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee found, “Complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from higher full-income families.” As well, they noted, “Time stress is a problem analogous to poverty: Both reflect scarcity of resources, time in the former, goods in the latter. The only difference is that in a growing economy the goods constraint will relax over time, while the time constraint cannot.” How did we get here?