Still Crowing over an Ebook "Slowdown"

It’s interesting to see the varied interpretations of the “latest” Nielsen Books & Consumers survey – unavailable to the unwashed masses for less than $1,200, by the sounds of it.

The Huffington Post leads with the breathless fact that print books are still outselling ebooks by a 3 to 1 margin, at least in the first half of 2014.

Publishers Weekly, meanwhile, taking a look at the same study, leads with ebooks gaining in the young adult market while leveling off – but still growing – in other categories.

Having the study’s numbers at hand would be helpful, but as mentioned earlier Nielsen doesn’t release their information wholesale – only retail. That’s their business. But with that business they’ll have to cope with varied interpretations.

Here’s what they’re saying:

Ebooks accounted for 23% of unit sales in the first six months of 2014, led by adult fiction and young adult categories, both of which saw a 30% share of unit sales in that same period.

In the United Kingdom, at least, the value of the ebook market is increasing more sharply than volume. That means the average ebook reader is willing to spend more on additional ebook titles.

While print books still dominate unit sales, and while ebook sales are leveling off, overall book sales are declining.

That second item is both good and bad for fiction writers looking to get into the ebook market. Per Publisher’s Weekly:

With consumers now paying more for e-books, the actual purchasing decision is no longer just about price. Instead, it’s increasingly about the author or the subject—particularly important for nonfiction e-books, the category that has seen the most significant growth. But the survey shows that a slightly lower proportion of e-books were bought on impulse in the first half of 2014 compared to 2013, a phenomenon that may be linked to higher prices.

In other words, people are willing to spend more on ebooks. But since prices are going up, impulse shopping is declining. Writers, therefore, ought to be encouraged to do what their big brothers and sisters in the print world are encouraged to do (duh): Cultivate a following. Or at least continue to do things to get readers’ attention.

That third item? Scares the heck out of me.

The Death of Saturday Morning

I’ve seen a few reports this weekend from folks lamenting the death of Saturday morning cartoons.

I tried to whip up some nostalgia and/or angst about the tradition’s passing, but the best I could come up with was this:

(And to be honest, I’ve said this pretty much about TV since 1997 and about Saturday morning cartoons long before that.)

Yes, I spent a lot of time as a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons. But because we’ve never had broadcast or cable TV in our house since we got married (firstly due to economics, secondly due to the lack of compelling programming) the tradition of sitting in front of the tube for hours on Saturday morning never got to our kids.

That’s not to say we don’t watch TV. We do. Just not on TV’s schedule any more – which is part of the reason given for Saturday morning cartoons’ demise. And somewhere in that pile of DVDs and VHS tapes I’ve got some Saturday morning cartoons we recorded live from the air.

But we watch way less TV now than we did as kids, and that’s a good thing. Probably we waste more time on computers than we did back then, but I still think the time spent in front of a screen has lessened. More irritating is to listen to people call Saturday morning cartoons “sacred” or to hear people saying things like this:

It’s sad, though, that an entire generation of kids is missing out on lazy Saturdays filled with excellent cartoons. Replacing them with cheaper, educational content was bound to happen, but a little magic has been lost in the process.

What magic?

Well, okay, this magic. And this magic. This magic came on in the afternoons after school -- but is now derided as racist. As if we didn't recognize that back then. But I recall many, many lazy Saturday mornings doing other things, including playing outside.  Building entire villages out of bricks for our teddy bears. Building entire cities out of clay. And, yes, setting well-supervised fires.

Not that I want my kids setting fires. That seems dangerous, unless well-supervised. And I also don’t want them spending their Saturday mornings in front of the tube, either.

‘It’s From A Movie. I’ll Tell You About It. It’s Horrible.’

Standing at the window with unseeing eyes, I had not noticed the coming of darkness. A thin ceiling of high cloud glowed a dim silver in the light of the vanished sun, and obscured the stars.

If she disappears after the experiment, that will mean that I wanted her to disappear – that I killed her. No, I will not see Sartorius. They can’t force me to cooperate. But I can’t tell them the truth, I’ll have to dissemble and lie, and keep on doing it . . . Because there may be thoughts, intentions and cruel hopes in my mind of which I know nothing, because I am a murderer unawares. Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed. Was I to abandon Rheya there out of false shame, or because I lacked the courage?

And there’s the core of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, harking back to the hard science fiction that used to be in vogue, when, as Scott Meyer of Basic Instructions fame, men fought their own self-destructive tendencies and sometimes apes.

Though I’m not sure Lem would have approved of even those movies, as he decried the permeation of soft science fiction into the genre. As if he had any more control over that than his hero, Kris Kelvin, has over his own self-destructive tendencies or any apes that might have shown up.

I will say this kind of science fiction is more appealing to me, because it’s a trait of humanity to explore outwards without looking within. And it’s interesting to see an alien world so alien it’s nigh on incomprehensible and not really bent on killing humans, or at least laying traps where humans are killed despite their best efforts. The horrible Gentry Lee/Arthur C. Clarke collaboration on Rama II comes to mind.

Not that I’m not a fan of soft science fiction, but I do like a sci-fi story that sets me to ponderin’, and Lem’s Solaris certainly fits in that category.

The core of the story is almost Luddite in the sense that Lem implies we ought to take care of our own hidden demons before we go out into the universe to encounter demons there. But given man’s innate curiosity (and removing all budget constraints) it’s probably easier to go exploring outward than to go inward. Especially if you’re James Tiberius Kirk.

I think what I like about science fiction in general (and the original Star Trek series in particular) is that those demons do go into space with us. And despite the science, sometimes those demons do win, as they would at home as well. So to say Lem implies those demons ought to be fixed before we explore is to malign Lem and science fiction in general. The genre is an extension of man’s desire to conquer those demons, perhaps through encounter of otherworldly risks and dangers meant to help unit man rather than once again show the divides between us. That, of course, brings us toward the concept of technoutopia, a writing genre that, as with all utopias, also deals with mankind trying to overcome its self-destructive tendencies, whether there are apes present or not.

Some sci-fi borders on the spiritual as well – Lem’s doesn’t particularly, except in my interpretation. How better to understand the unknown, it is implied, than to understand the unknown within ourselves? That speaks deeply to my spiritual side and sets me to wondering: What will eternity be like once I’ve conquered the demons I bring there?

This review is, of course, a gross misinterpretation of what Lem tries to convey – that contact between humans and an alien species may never occur, given the immense changes in the differences in physiologies and psychologies of any two intelligent species. He writes (in the guise of Gastrom, a Solaris intellectual heretic):

Gastrom’s conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be, any question of ‘contact’ between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorius silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression [said in the voice of Kelvin, the novel’s protagonist].

Connecting the Dots

Despite the dig against Microsoft (and the overarching arrogance) Steve Jobs makes a good point about connecting the dots -- connecting what we have learened or could learn with the experiences we're having now or will have shortly.

Helping my students connect the dots is my goal for the semester as I teach two English 101 courses again at BYU-Idaho.

What I hope to do is help my students see what they learned after writing the first essay translate into comprehension -- or at least an attempt at comprehension -- in the subsequent essay. As they master or come close to mastering one concept, I'll introduce another, so there's always something to be working on. My goal at the end is to see them connect the dots from what they've learned by writing better papers.

The first dot to connect:

Details

We all love details, right? When, for example, the First Presidency announces new temples, we want to know right away where they’ll be built. We get on Google Maps and find the cities and then wish they’d provide addresses so we could see the neighborhoods these temples will be built in. We want to know when ground will be broken. We want to know what the new temples will look like.

Obviously, they can’t interrupt conference to provide such details – but they come out as soon as they’re available.

In the essays we write, we have the opportunity to present the details our readers want right away. If, for example, we talk about how our fathers weren’t able to finish their formal education but we admire how they learned throughout their entire lives, we need to provide the detail – such as that Dad went on to become a bricklayer, built a successful business along with the house we grew up in, read incessantly on the topics of World War II and astronomy, and always pushed us to read to the point when he came home from trips he always brought us books to read rather than toys to play with. (These are all details about my Dad, by the way.)

Adding details takes us a step further from the general: “Dad didn’t have a formal education but learned a lot in his life” to the specific. And it’s the specific we remember. It never mattered to me that Dad’s education got stopped at the 7^th grade by World War II. It did matter a lot that I could brag he built the house we lived in.

Details sell the points we try to make.

(Beware: Strong Australian accent in this video.)

This is a pretty simple example of the dots I hope to connect this week, but I hope it gets the point across. The point, which is: You will make stronger connections to your readers if you provide specific examples. That stronger connection will help your readers understand your thesis better. We like to see the application of what we learn and observe – being specific helps your readers see the application you convey.

Phil Plait, Stahp!

Quick! How many moons does the Earth have?

You might be forgiven for saying “One”, but it turns out the question isn’t all that easy to answer . . . because it’s it [sic] depends on what you mean by “moon”.

No, Phil, no.

That’s how Plait starts out his most recent article at Slate.com.

Just no. Forget the click-baity headline (“How Many Moons Does Earth Have? One More Now, Kinda.” ) And forget the explanation of resonant orbits and quasi-satellites. Earth has one moon, and one moon only, Vasili, the likes of Cruithne and OL339, a 150-meter diameter rock discovered in July in a resonant orbit that mimic’s Earth in nearly every way be damned.

OL339, the newest baby, is no moon.

A moon, or natural satellite, is defined as an object that orbits another object – its primary. Both Cruithne and OL339 have a primary – and it ain’t the Earth. It’s the Sun. So Cruithne and OL339, despite their resonant orbits, are as much moons of Earth as Mars is.

You may not a special irritation in my voice while I discuss this matter. It clearly bugs me. Because you can’t dither over what the definition of a moon is. A moon orbits a planet – and asteroids (or near-Earth asteroids, as Cruithne and OL339 are more properly called) orbit the Sun.

This kind of word parsing irritates me. It’s a parlor trick smug folk play on gullible fools who don’t know enough about astronomy to call horseshit on the shenanigans. Listen, for example, to Stephen Fry on the same question:

If I’d have been on that show, Fry would have gotten a punch up the bracket and further abuse. Because I agree with Rich Hall’s assessment: “Oh, you’re just making this up.” Cruithne does NOT orbit the Earth once every 770 years. No. It orbits the Sun about once every year.

I highly object to parsing astronomical facts to make something appear as it is not – something Plait should be fully aware of, once being president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. It ought to be clear what we mean by moon as it is clear what Uri Geller means by bending spoons.

New Scientist, to whom Plait offers a tip o’th’ hat, m’lady, for the news, gives us the news in a better, more straightforward, less clickbaity fashion:

Add one to the entourage. A newly discovered asteroid called 2014 OL339 is the latest quasi-satellite of Earth – a space rock that orbits the sun but is close enough to Earth to look like a companion.

The asteroid has been hanging out near Earth for about 775 years and it will move on about 165 years from now, say Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid in Spain, who have just described it.

Quasi-satellites orbit in resonance with Earth, allowing the planet's gravity to shift the rock's position much like an adult pushing a child on a swing, says Martin Connors, an astronomer at Athabasca University in Canada. The asteroid orbits the sun every 365 days, as Earth does, but Earth's gravity guides it into an eccentric wobble, which causes the rock to appear to circle backward around the planet.