Pay with your preferences

Pay with your preferences

We are going to need to work out some new economic system for our content.

Quite simply, there are a lot of people now who don’t pay for content, and won’t going forward.

Oh, they may buy some things, but the regular, daily books/movies/TV/apps/music? Not really.

There are plenty of places to get free ones of all of those, if you aren’t particularly picky (and even if you are).

So, there is going to be a real challenge both for when you buy one thing at a time (like we typically do with e-books) and for “all you can eat” plans, like Netflix.

What can we do?

Pay with something else besides money.

There is something that we have which is clearly valuable to companies: the information about what we prefer.

Advertising something is easy. It used to be hard to reach people…picture a new restaurant in a small town in the 1920s.

Now, it’s simple. You can put something out there that is in reach of hundreds of millions of people with very little cost.

The problem is that you still have to be able to reach the specific people who are buying what you want to sell (very few things are of universal interest).

Let’s say you make, oh, a Doctor Who cat play structure. You need to reach people who like cats and Doctor Who. You can show the product to a million people without reaching anybody who will buy it.

For a seller, being able to identify who is a likely purchaser is worth a lot. Those people not only are more likely to actually buy it, they may be happy to get your ad and will want to see more from you.

One way to determine what you are likely to buy is to look at what you have bought in the past.

Amazon can do that no problem. As I’ve written about before, Amazon already does this. You can opt-out of “interest based ads”, but if you don’t, Amazon can already use your buying history (and other things) to let sellers know what to  advertise  to you. The advertiser doesn’t need to get to know who you are personally…Amazon could charge them to make their ad visible to people who have bought X from Amazon before, without revealing who you are as an individual (Amazon is famously protective of its customers’ privacy).

I’m going to call that “direct evidence” of the likelihood of you buying something…you’ve bought something similar before, or browsed to pages about that type of item.

Another big indicator of what you might buy, though, are your interests…what we can call the “indirect indicators”.

A seller wouldn’t need to figure out the logic. You don’t have to know why people who watch a particular show buy a particular item…just that they do.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called

Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior

got quite a bit of play. It showed that it was possible to predict a person’s political party and sexual orientation based on their Facebook likes.

It wasn’t 100% accurate, but it was pretty good at it…certainly, valuable enough for advertising purposes.

I would guess that what we read/watch/listen to has similar predictive qualities, even if they might not as good (I don’t know if they would be or not).

Haven’t you ever made a judgement about somebody based on the media they consume?

So, imagine this as a scenario:

Amazon (or Apple or Google) has you a customer. You agree to let them share what you read (although perhaps not you as an individual…see above).

That company then sells that information to advertisers, and shows you ads you want to see.

That’s already largely happening.

Now, I’m going to take this one step farther.

Amazon pays a content producer to make something (let’s say a book, although the bigger money would likely be in visual media). Why? They test the book to see what groups of people like reading it, and how that predicts their purchases.

Amazon sells that information to advertisers…for more than what it gave to the content producer.

The consumer doesn’t pay money for the book…they pay with their preferences.

I think there’s a possible system there.

Not everybody would have to along with it (many people wouldn’t). There are people who would still opt to pay $9.99 for an e-book, and $100 a month for cable, rather than have their information shared.

My guess is that a lot of the things that we get for free now might dry up in that system…unless you paid with your preferences.

One of the questions would be whether selling the preference information would make enough to pay for the production of , for example, a blockbuster movie. My intuition is that it would: look at how much people pay for Superbowl ads.

Putting out a movie also can mean a lot of sales in ancillary goods, and I would still think people will pay for things like t-shirts in the future.

That might mean that Amazon wouldn’t have to finance the entire production cost.

I can also see people being worried that the works being created would be skewed towards predictability rather than art, but much of what you see is already molded by forces other than pure art. For example, Iron Man 3 will, as I understand, basically have two versions…one of which is more attractive for China (a huge and growing movie market).

I’m just kicking this idea around…what do you think about it? Do you think the current systems will endure? Are there other good viable models? How would you sell this idea to people if it was going to be widely-adopted? Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

How important is it to remember what you read?

How important is it to remember what you read?

We may need a new measure of reading success.

During my morning Flipboard read, I ran across this

Salon.com article

It originally appeared in Scientific American, and talks about studies showing that we don’t retain material as well when we read it as an e-book compared to reading it as a p-book…paperbook.

I certainly believe that’s possible.

One of the arguments that is made is that we remember the content better in paper because reading it is more irregular.

In my “day job”, I’m a trainer. Getting people to remember things is a big part of my job, and I can honestly say I’m pretty good at it.

One of the key things about remembering is that we remember what is different.

We build up patterns of expected things, and then remember what varies from those patterns.

Let’s try this:

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 8 5 5 5 5 5555

What number is different from the others?

Now, if I were to test you later, you would be more likely to remember that there was an eight that was different from everything else than to remember that the other numbers were fives.

If you are reading a p-book, there are things that are different…a wrinkle on a page here, the thickness of the unread portion, the position in which you were holding the book and what was behind it, and so on.

With an e-book, the experience of all of the words is much more the same…so, it is logical to me that you are less able to remember the words.

That sameness also limits the context clues.

We tend to remember things in context. There was a great study where they had a group of people standing in water, and a group of people on dry land. They had them both remember a set of numbers.

The people who had been in the water had better recollection when they were in water than when they weren’t.

The people who had been on dry land had better recollection on dry land.

I had a student (these are adult medical people) who suddenly couldn’t remember how to do something. I was in that person’s office. I asked if anything had changed in the office…yep, a picture, visible on the wall above the computer, had been moved. That change of context was enough to lose the memory.

I’ve mentioned this in the blog before, but here’s a trick. If you hear a website or a phone number you want to remember while you are driving, slap your leg and say it out loud.

When you want to remember it later, sit down again (simulating the car ride), and slap your leg. It will help you recall it.

So, I can accept that we retain less well what we read in digital form than in physical form.

What I was thinking, though, was this: is that inherently worse?

What if we engage more with digital (that can be measured too)? What if we read more with digital (I believe that’s likely to be true for most people)? What if what we read in digital format still helps us make better decisions, even if we can’t consciously recall it?

People are often impressed because I remember all sorts of odd things…I’d do well on Jeopardy. I remember lots of old trivia.

That’s just me, though. There’s no more reason to be proud of that than to be proud of having blue eyes or being two meters tall.

Yes, I do think people can be taught to remember things better, and I used to think I was hot intellectual stuff because of my memory, but I’ve thought about it. I didn’t really earn that memory, it’s just there.

I have a relative, for example, with the classic eidetic memory. This relative remembers everything that they ever read.

We’d gotten to a point where we were going to sell childhood comics. I picked up an obscure one and said, “I remember this guy!” My relative said, “On page seven, in panel three, he says this,” and quoted it verbatim.

That’s a comic book that person had read once, decades earlier.

Does that make my relative smarter than me? If it does, it makes my Kindle way smarter than me.

Now, my memory isn’t the same as it once was. When I watched a Star Trek episode years ago, I could tell you the name of every character in it whose name was mentioned (no matter how small a part), and repeat a lot of the dialog.

Now, I don’t remember the names of the characters in TV shows I watch. I’ve been watching The Walking Dead: I’d be hard-pressed to give the first names of five of the characters.

I just wanted to think about this. If we don’t retain as much when we read e-books, is that a good measure of how valuable they are?

I recently tweeted this:

“eMentia = the inability to remember simple things, like phone numbers and birthdays, because a gadget is remembering them for you”

Maybe we don’t remember e-books as well because we know we can search them more easily than we can p-books. It isn’t necessary to remember the details, because we can get them again easily, so why waste the synaptic storage space?

I don’t know that that is it, though…

I guess my basic question here is this:

Is retention the best measure of the value of a book?

Let me ask you…are you impressed with someone with a good memeory? Do you think that person is smarter than people without as good a memory? Is it possible to get value out of a book without retaining the details? If we read more, but retain less, is that a worthy trade-off?

Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Re-imagining copyright

Re-imagining  copyright

Maria A. Pallante, the Register of Copyrights, recently spoke before Congress about the future of copyright:

The Register’s Call for Updates to U.S. Copyright Law

The transcription linked above is fairly short. I’ve read it, and I had a couple of people direct me to it as well (thanks for that…even if I’ve already found something, I appreciate getting a heads up).

There are certainly interesting things in this Federal document. I’m going to reproduce a couple of paragraphs here:

“A central equation for Congress to consider is what does and does not belong under a copyright owner’s control in the digital age. I do not believe that the control of copyright owners should be absolute, but it needs to be meaningful. People around the world increasingly are accessing content on mobile devices and fewer and fewer of them will need or desire the physical copies that were so central to the 19th and 20th century copyright laws.

Moreover, while philosophical discussions have a place in policy debates, amending the law eventually comes down to the negotiation of complex and sometimes arcane provisions of the statute, requiring leadership from Congress and assistance from expert agencies like mine. The list of issues is long: clarifying the scope of exclusive rights, revising exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives, addressing orphan works, accommodating persons who have print disabilities, providing guidance to educational institutions, exempting incidental copies in appropriate instances, updating enforcement provisions, providing guidance on statutory damages, reviewing the efficacy of the DMCA, assisting with small copyright claims, reforming the music marketplace, updating the framework for cable and satellite transmissions, encouraging new licensing regimes, and improving the systems of copyright registration and recordation.”

However, while the Register says that “…Congress does not need to start from scratch…”, I wanted to do just that.

I’m going to free us from the requirement to think about what could pass, and what is technically possible, and ask us just to re-imagine copyright. I’m going to act as if there had never been copyright, and look at the idea afresh.

After all, the original concepts of copyright largely had to do with protecting people who made maps. There was a lot of risk in mapping a coast, and if you couldn’t benefit from it (since other people just reproduced your map and sold it), there would be a lot less incentive for people to invest in the enterprise. Certainly, people would still have explored, but it wouldn’t be likely to produce the kinds of relatively accurate maps that other people could use.

So, let’s start at the very beginning.

Someone creates something intangible, a book, a song, which can be consumed by others.

Why should the government be involved in what happens next?

What are the societal benefits in creating law which controls what happens to that work?

Well, there are a couple of things.

The first thing we could say is that there is just a moral right that the person who created the work should have control over how it is used. In that argument, we are protecting people from unreasonable exploitation by others.

We do pass a lot of laws for that reason. For example, if someone is a “Peeping Tom”, that’s illegal. There doesn’t have to be any monetary use of that…the observer doesn’t have to sell, or even record, images of you for it to be a crime. We just say that you have the right to that privacy, and someone who violates that right can be charged with a crime. We could think of copyright the same way: you created that work, and you should get to control who consumes it.

The other big argument is an advantage to the economy.

That says that there is a plus to the society in people creating something, and that they won’t tend to do it without the ability to make money from it (this is akin to the map argument).

Would somebody spend $100 million to make a movie if there wasn’t a way to make that money back?

Would someone spend two years researching a non-fiction book, if they couldn’t be compensated?

This one suggests that copyright makes it more likely for valuable ideas to get into societal use, even if that use is controlled by the creator of the work. If you can’t make money with that documentary, would you share it with other people the way movie makers do now?

While emotionally, the moral argument is powerful to me, I think I would tend to set up a government system based on making money. The taxes from that clearly benefit the society, and an economic motive is going to encourage production and risk.

Here’s my first new copyright postulate:

If you create something, you have the right to make money from it.

Now, current copyright recognizes something called “Fair Use”.

U.S. Copyright Office – Fair Use

When you look at the elements of Fair Use, it currently suggests that there are times when your right to control your material is  overridden  by a societal good…such as criticism of your work, or teaching (within limits).

I’m going to expand this in my thinking.

Here’s my second new copyright postulate:

If what someone does does not impact your ability to make money on your work, you do not have control over it.

This is sweepingly broad, and would be a big change. It would create a lot of arguments when there was transmission involved from one person to another, but it would remove a lot of controversies over personal use.

The burden would be on the rightsholder to prove that making money was impacted.

For example, let’s say you have a p-book (paperbook). You want to scan it and turn it into an e-book for your own personal use. While many people assume that’s legal, and it may be, that isn’t clear.

Under my re-imagined copyright, the rightsholder has to prove that you would otherwise have bought an e-book if you couldn’t do that. There isn’t a presumed control over every copy produced, just a control over making money from your work.

This is, incidentally, how a lot of readers seem to think it should work (that doesn’t make it right, of course). If they bought the book once in paper, they think they are entitled to a free copy in e-book form. The same could be said for going from a hardback to a paperback…if you wouldn’t have bought the paperback, should it be okay for you to photocopy the book and reproduce it in a more convenient form?

I need to be very clear that I am not advocating these changes, I’m just thinking about them.

Under this new concept, it isn’t reproduction that matters: it’s consumption.

Could it be worked out that the rightsholder collects a fee every time you read a book? In other words, you buy the book, pay for reading it the first time, don’t pay anything more if it sits around in your archives (on your bookshelves in the paper world), then pay for it again if you read it again years later?

As you can see, I’m not worried about the technological implementation in this “thoughtabout”. I’m looking for the guiding principles.

What about somebody licensing/buying a book from you, and then distributing it for free over the internet?

Hm…if the purchaser could be charged for everybody who read that free copy, that could work.

Somebody reads it, the rightsholder gets paid.

Ideally, of course, the rightsholder gets paid before somebody reads it.

That might be the best way to go, in this hypothetical world. The rightsholder is paid per use.

Of course, that would mean that there would be some sort of record of who was using what, and people would resist that…but I’m not concerned with what’s practicable right now.

Another major issue is whether creative works eventually belong to society at large. I’ve asked this question before:

Should copyright be permanent?

Under my first postulate, if copyright is purely to protect an economic value, then you give up copyright if you are not using it to make money.

That sends shivers down my spine in a bad way…I want artists to be able to control their art, emotionally. However, is that what the government should be doing?

We do this already with patents…if you don’t use your patent, you can lose it.

We could say that if your book isn’t available to the public (“in print”, in the old parlance), or if you aren’t making a good faith effort to make it available, you lose control over it.

What about educational use? If the educational use doesn’t cut into the market, then it would be allowed in this new conception. If it did, if the students don’t buy the work because they can read for it free whenever they want to as part of a class, that would fail the test.

Oh, those might be some complicated court cases in the beginning!

Actually, I think these two postulates create an interesting balance. You control your creative works as long as you are using them to make money, and any other use of them is okay.

What do you think? I’m not terribly happy with this myself, and can poke holes in it. I just really want to rethink things. We shouldn’t have copyright which is based on individual ownership of physical containers, because that’s just not the entire future.

Do you think copyright should take into account art for art’s sake? Should educational use get any special and separate rules? Parody is legal in the USA, not legal in Canada…what should it’s status be? What do you think of what Register Pallante has actually suggested? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Buying a book twice

Buying a book twice

Have you ever bought a book twice?

On purpose.

Not because you didn’t mean to do it, like all the people who bought Bladerunner back in the day, not realizing that they already owned it as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

I’m talking about a situation where you already had purchased the book in the past, most likely had already read it, might even still have it…and yet, you bought a second copy for yourself.

I’ve done that many times. I was thinking about why I had done that, and how e-books might change that.

For me, part of the question is how it affects the publishing industry.

First, I can see how re-buying has been tremendously helped by e-books. The very first e-book I bought I already owned…in fact, I had several copies. I bought it because I wanted the search capabilities, but also because it was going to be a clear comparison for me between e-books and p-books (paperbooks).

I also bought it, honestly, to pay homage to the author…even though the author hadn’t been alive for some time, and the book is in the public domain in the USA, meaning even the author’s estate got nothing from my purchase.

That’s one reason I buy things…to support something, even if that’s just psychologically in my mind, as in the case above. It’s funny, but I feel like I owe  some fictional characters something. That’s one reason we saw

Oz the Great and Powerful

this last weekend. I’m a big Oz fan: I’ve actually been to an Oz convention (traveled to another state for it), owned one of the Russian parallel Oz series in Russian, gone to Egghead’s Restaurant, an Oz themed restaurant in Ft. Bragg, California. As my Significant Other put it, “I don’t see how we can not go.”

I wasn’t disappointed in the movie, because I had my expectations in the right place.

However, I did feel I owed it to Oz to go to it, because I’ve gotten so much from Oz.

There’s a book where I own several copies in a variety of formats: The (Wonderful) Wizard of Oz.

I’m even writing something about Oz myself right now…I’ll tell you more about it when I get closer to publishing it (it’s not a new Oz story, but about Oz).

So, I might buy something I already own to “vote for it” in the marketplace.

Then, there’s the “completionist” aspect of being a collector. I might want different versions of the same book, just because they are different. For example, I might buy a paperback of The Wizard of Oz because it had a different cover (back in the day).

As a collector, there is also the “reading copy” motivation. You buy one to keep in perfect condition, and another that you can carry around with you and feel comfortable having out and about in the big scary world of soda spills, rain, and cats.

Somewhat related to that was buying several copies of the same book, so I could have ones to give away to people. I consider that somewhat different from just buying one for somebody as a specific gift. For example, I used to buy cheap used copies of Man of Bronze in used bookstores whenever I saw them, so I could comfortably give it to somebody who I thought would want to read it. I might have six or seven at a time, and if people gave them back, great…if not, I didn’t have to worry about it. I learned my lesson about that, when somebody borrowed that Russian Oz book and, well, I never got it back.

In very rare cases, I might be replacing a lost or damaged copy. I say “rare” because I almost never lose or damage books (knock virtual wood). I have bought books to replace ones that the family had when I was a kid…I hadn’t paid for the first copy, but it is a case of me buying a book I’ve already read.

That’s a situation where e-books might depress the market a bit. Hypothetically, you should never have to re-buy an e-book  you’ve bought before due to loss or damage, since it shouldn’t have either (although I know some people worry about a format shift or, say, Amazon going out of business and not having access to your archives/Cloud).

Another thing: I’m sure a lot of us have bought books for ourselves, and then later bought the same book to give to a family member (like a kid) in the same  household. There are two copies purchased by the same “buying pool” in a case like that, even though the second copy may eventually leave.

That last one may change if our descendants have access to our e-book accounts, which I think is a likely scenario. I expect my eventual great-grandkids will have a better chance of accessing my e-books than of accessing my p-books. We have bookshelves in our homes, in large part, thanks to the founder of modern public relations, Edward Bernays (whose book, Propaganda, is available in a Kindle edition). In the 1930s, several major publishers hired Bernays to help the book business. One way that the “architect of spin” did it was to encourage actual architects to design new homes with built-in bookshelves. That, in turn, encouraged people to buy books to put on them, in addition to showing the value.

I’m not convinced that fifty years from now, new dwelling places will commonly have built-in bookshelves, or freestanding ones, for that matter, as a typical thing.

My great-grandkids will probably see p-books as a burden, or something to sell…but they might read my e-books.

So, having e-books makes is less likely that I’ll buy in some way additional copies for my descendants. However, they have also made it more likely that I’ll re-buy books to format shift them (e-books have a lot of advantages over p-books…and vice versa, of course).

How about you?

Have you re-bought books? If so, why?

I’m curious about your thoughts on this. Do e-books increase or decrease re-buying, and if so, is it enough to have an industry impact? Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

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DecalGirl sale ends today

Well, something didn’t go right with their e-mailing system. I got an e-mail yesterday (March 18th) telling that St. Patrick’s day was almost here! Yes, it’s a mere 364 days away. It included a coupon code you can use to save 25% on items (skins, cases) from DecalGirl, good through today only (Tuesday, March 19, 2013). The skins are fun…I got my Significant Other one with a favorite image on it.  Sorry for the late notice on this, but I assume I was supposed to get it days earlier. The coupon code is

patrick25

I think it’s okay to share the code with you, because it says I can send it to a friend.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Gglasshole! The pushback against Google GLASS has begun

Gglasshole! The pushback against Google GLASS has begun

You know how people talk about the 24-hour news cycle? Well, now it has accelerated so much that people are making mock videos…of things that haven’t even happened yet. It appears that we now travel “faster than life”, which has caused us to go back in time…perhaps transiting a “Snark Hole” to get there.

In this case, the target is Google GLASS.

That’s an upcoming (for general commercial release…possibly late this year) gadget (I’m guessing they won’t like that I am using that word) from Google.

It’s a pair of glasses with a heads-up display…you can see things provided by software in your vision. You can also use it to record video.

It’s important to note that it’s a two-way street. You can see things that aren’t there, but your Google GLASS can see things that are…and react to them.

Before I get too much into what that might mean (specifically for e-books, since that’s the focus of this blog), let’s settle on terminology.

People are tending to call them “Google Glasses” which makes sense. I used “Gglass” (“GEE-glass’) in the headline here. That would tie it into, say, Gmail. However, if they were really successful and became ubiquitous, it’s quite possible that people will just call them “glasses”, in the same way most people say, “I can’t find my phone” rather than “I can’t find my cellphone”. I think the context will make it clear enough. “Ask your glasses” should work*.

For some folks, they really will be the same thing…Gglasses might be the prescription lenses they need for corrected vision.

What concerns do people have?

I’m seeing two main threads.

One is people being even more distracted than they are now. For example, you are talking to someone, and they are simultaneously watching YouTube videos. That might be okay in some cases, but might not be a good idea when the person was driving, or walking down a crowded sidewalk.

I think that’s going to depend various much on the person, and on how smart the glasses are.

For example, the Gglass could be aware of someone or something rapidly approaching, and return you to a clear view…perhaps with some sort of alert. It’s possible that it could actually reduce pedestrian/vehicle accidents. I remember years ago when a friend of mine had a facial injury. Asking what had happened, the friend had been riding a bike…reading a book…and slammed into the back of a parked truck. An intelligent  collision  avoidance system would have helped in that case. I don’t read books while I’m driving or when I was riding a bike, but I’ve certainly done it while walking somewhere.

I think a certain percentage of the population could read a book while watching a TV show or carrying on a conversation (see this earlier post). Will some people walk off a cliff or into traffic? Sure, it’s possible…just like they can do now when navigating a bag of french fries.

The other concern I’m seeing is not from the data the Gglasses give you, but the data they gather.

They can identify people, prices, and so on, and that’s one thing. Could you use them, for example, to identify where a stranger lives? I can see ways that could work. First identifying them through facial recognition and scanning Facebook and other sources, then using public records to locate, perhaps, a property tax record.

The other thing is that they can record video…and it may be pretty unobtrusive.

In fact, I can picture a system that records all the time, probably taking the data to the Cloud. Then, the active decision you make is whether to keep something or not, rather than to start recording.

Maybe you only have a day to decide to preserve something before it gets “recorded over” (although I know it wouldn’t exactly work that way). You could verbally mark it afterwards, give it a time to preserve (“from noon to one”), or, depending on how smart it is, tell it to “Save parent-teacher conference”.

It could become like Russian dash cams

Wired article with video

where we gets tons of video on YouTube (or Vine). Got robbed? The video is in the Cloud. Want to prove what happened at work, or when that inspector came to your house? Already recorded.

That obviously raises some interesting issues…which David Brin has addressed in

The Transparent Society

In terms of just reading, I see some applications.

First, I’d like it if it could block everything except what I am reading…of course, being able to change back again quickly. That might be a challenge, but an opaque page might be nice sometimes.

Second, how about simultaneous translation? You are reading a book written in  Spanish, but reading it in English. That seems (imperfectly) possible.

Third, you could certainly look at something that has a “tag”, and maybe see video or information about a character about which you are reading. If it was tied into Amazon, for example, you could see the Shelfari Book Extras. This could even work with paperbooks (through text recognition, rather than tagging), conceivably, giving them some of the advantages of e-books. Seamless dictionary lookup in a paperbook? Hm…there might be hope for them yet.

Fourth, what about a Zeebox type app (Zeebooks?) for books, magazines, comics, and more? You could have social interactions with other people, see what they find interesting, and so on? Who wore it best? Instant polls!

Will this be a culture changer, like Tivo or the Walkman? It’s hard to say at this point, but a lot of people are already offering their opinions.

Official Site, including the “How It Feels” video
TechCrunch comedy video “How Guys Will Use Google Glass”
Engadget: This is the Modem World: The dark side of Google Glass

What do you think? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post and/or participating in the poll below:

* I did call them “datacles” (data spectacles) in this earlier post, although I wasn’t limiting them to Google’s product.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Is original writing always better?

Is original writing always better?

Tonight is the Oscars*, and one interesting thing for me is that they split the screenwriting awards into two categories: original and adapted.

Why the difference?

Is it inherently easier to write an adapted screenplay…or perhaps inherently harder? Is one form of writing more “valuable” than the other?

That question pulls together a few threads I’ve been pondering recently.

One was when of my readers and commenters, JJ Hitt, expressed a concern about author John Scalzi having “reworked” earlier books.

Another is that there is a legal action, as reported in this

The Economist article

to establish the legality of authors writing new Sherlock Holmes works without the approval of the Conan Doyle estate.

Then there is the prejudice that some people have about tie-in novels, the art of which is eloquently addressed in this book

Tied In: The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-In Writing

edited by Lee Goldberg.

All of that brings me to a question: do you think authors should write original things, and if they do, does that make them better than authors who aren’t as original?

I think the knee-jerk reaction from a lot of people will be, “Of course!”

After all, isn’t The Lord of the Rings better than a knock-off?

Most likely…but The Lord of the Rings drew on a lot of other sources (you can get some of them for free at http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/index.htm). Would LOTR have been better if it wasn’t inspired by the Kalevala and Wagner?

Shakespeare, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark…they all had resonances to other works, and wouldn’t have been the same without that sense.

Now, note that I’m not talking about either plagiarism or copyright infringement here. I’m talking about using other works, often with permission, as a basis for a new work.

We should probably get the definitions of plagiarism and infringement out of the way, so we know what were discussing. I find those two terms commonly confused, although they are quite different.

Copyright infringement is a legal thing. Someone has registered a copyright which gives them certain authorities, and you are infringing on those authorities. In the USA, you can not commit a copyright infringement of Shakespeare’s plays, since they are not under copyright protection any more (they are in what is called “the public domain”…they are owned by the public).

If you were to publish a new book starring  Katniss Everdeen of
Review: The Hunger Games without the permission of the rightsholder, you would be infringing on the copyright. Copyright law includes protection for derivative works, which would include movie and TV adaptations…and new novels. That’s how I understand it, although I’m not a lawyer.

That brings up the idea of fan fiction (fanfic)…people who publish it without permission do so at the risk of legal action of the rightsholder. Lots of it is made available (see, for example, http://www.fanfiction.net/ but with certain notable exceptions, there is a risk in doing so.

J.K. Rowling has famously allowed fanfic about Harry Potter

BBC article

within certain guidelines (nothing sexually explicit, for example).

There is a Fair Use doctrine under US copyright law that protects certain uses of copyrighted material without permission (including parodies), but I think people think it allows much more than it does. Just because you aren’t charging for something doesn’t make it exempt from copyright protection, for one thing.

So, copyright infringement falls under legal definitions.

Plagiarism, on the other hand, means that you are claiming that someone else’s work is your own.

That is not, de facto, illegal.

Let’s say that someone sends a Shakespeare sonnet to someone, claiming to have written it as an original love poem. That is plagiarism, but not copyright infringement.

If someone copyrights and illegally distributes copies of, say,

Gone Girl

without permission, but with Gillian Flynn’s name still showing as the author, that is infringement, but not plagiarism.

Something can, of course, be both. When someone else’s work contained my material (beyond Fair Use) without my permission and without crediting me (see Infringement, plagiarism, and Amazon to the rescue), that was both infringement and plagiarism.

With those two out of the way, to you think that writing something original is more creatively valuable than adapting something else?

For example, there will be a

New James Bond novel

written by William Boyd, authorized by the Fleming estate, published in October of this year.

Do you automatically “downgrade” it, because it is based on someone else’s work? Do you think it is easier to do?

I’ve written parodies, and I love to try to write in other people’s styles.

One reason I like that is because it challenges me.

It adds a level of difficulty, as opposed to just writing my own material from scratch.

When I’ve captured the feel of it, and readers think I have, that makes me feel good.

It’s a bit like the rules in a boardgame…they are what make it interesting.

When we were kids, my family often made up new and more complicated rules. We liked that better. It’s like…if you watched the show Chopped. Chefs open baskets with these really bizarre ingredients, and have to make something good out of them n a very short amount of time. Would it be as fun or as hard if they could use any ingredients they wanted in any way?

I think writing a tie-in novel is both easier in some ways and harder in others.

If you were to write an authorized Star Trek novel, you don’t have to create main characters…if you use Spock, Kirk, and McCoy, it’s already established how they think and  interact  with each other.

That’s easier.

However, if you get that wrong, or some other tiny bit of Star Trek lore wrong, or write something that fans see as “out of character”, you are in big trouble.

That’s harder.

Do I like the idea of true originality? Yes. If you can really do something someone has never done before (good luck with that, by the way), that’s wonderful.

However, I also admire someone who can do something new with an existing work. I think the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie is much better than the original book (and I’m a big Oz book fan). Some of my favorite Oz books were written by Ruth Plumly Thompson who (with permission) carried on after L. Frank Baum.

I think

Forbidden Planet

is a great movie, and is enhanced by being inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

What do you think? Is originality always better and harder? Is a bad original more of an achievement than a good derivative work? Does only originality show true artistry? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

* If you want to see my predictions for the Oscars, and the aggregate predictions of those participating in my annual Bufo’s Oscar Prediction Madness (BOPMadness) competition, see The Measured Circle’s BOPMadness category

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Do fictional heroes read?

Do fictional heroes read?

I believe that reading makes a person more likely to perform heroic deeds.

Certainly, that’s a tricky point for me. There have been many discussions (and some studies recently) examining the idea of whether or not fiction can encourage people to behave in “anti-social” ways (such as becoming violent). My instinct is to reject that idea, but I’m too scientifically minded to do that without the data.

I do think that someone who is already violent can model behavior on something fictional.

Where I have the problem is with the idea that fiction can change the motivations of a person (as opposed to the ways in which they carry out the actions which they are already motivated to do).

I would be very, very cautious about banning specific books because of a belief that they can lead to bad behaviors.

I believe that reading broadly exposes readers to different points of view. Reading is the closest thing we have to experience something through someone else’s eyes…or rather, through their brains. In a way similar to how we may dream about very anti-social things, it allows us to explore those feelings without carrying them out…and may, in so doing, give us a solid rejection of them.

I do speculate that reading a single book to the exclusion of all others might guide one towards an agreement with things in that book. We hear about people who have behaved in non-societally-standard ways that read a single book over and over again. I don’t think, though, that the single book molded them into that behavior, but rather that there was already an inclination towards obsessive tunnel vision.

However…

I also believe that I have been positively impacted by being influenced by “good” characters, which I will refer to as “heroes” as a way of shorthand.

I think that I am a much better person because I admire the selflessness of Doc Savage…the drive to improve oneself for the purpose of helping others, rather than for personal gain.

Again, that’s just anecdotal. I’d love to see studies that show that people who watched, perhaps, The Lone Ranger versus oh, the Halloween movie series, behave in more “positive” ways.

My guess, though, is that someone who consumed both would behave in the “best” ways out of the three. That person would have “experienced” both a non-lethal, helping viewpoint and a revenge driven murderous viewpoint, and I would presume would (if initially a typical person, as opposed to someone with a pathology) elected for the former…and would have a personal basis for doing so.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said:

“Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”

My thought is that perhaps they should read all three.

Given these two things (people can model their behaviors on heroes and reading is good) got me thinking. Do famous heroes read?

Doc Savage is a brain surgeon, among other things, so we know Doc read textbooks…but does Doc Savage read for fun?

Does James Bond?

Certainly, some heroes show familiarity with books. Captain Picard read on Star Trek: The Next Generation (Shakespeare, for one). Don Quixote, of course, was a big reader…although that wasn’t necessarily perceived as a positive thing by other folks (been there!).

I also understand that showing somebody reading is, well, not that exciting an activity. We don’t typically see heroes brushing their teeth, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do it (hm…question. Does Superman need to brush those super-teeth? Presumably not).

When I tried to do a little research on this, I ran across this interesting Tumblr:

Fictional Characters Reading Books

It’s mostly screenshots of characters reading books…and they do a nice job of identifying the character and the book.

Skimming through it, I’m not sure I’m seeing a lot of pictures of people the average person would call heroes…yes, there is Doctor Who (reading a fictional piece of fiction), and a list of the book’s Roald Dahl’s Matilda read.

I think Superman spent time reading up on Kryptonian history in the Fortress of Solitude, but I’m not sure. Holmes, Spock, and Sherlock all seem to know about books…but do you really picture them sitting and reading for hours?

Perhaps that’s another issue in fictional depictions of reading. It is sometimes suggested that heroes act while others think (a very peculiar notion to me). In the Tom Jones sung theme song to Thunderball, we’re told that James Bond “…acts while other men just talk”.  John Carter says:

“My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes.”
John Carter (Captain Jack Carter)
A Princess of Mars
written by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Do we think of thinking (which to me equates in many ways with reading) as inherently non-heroic?

I certainly don’t.

Einstein supposedly said something like

“If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.”

I’ve heard some variants on that, but that seems like a reasonable approach to me, especially when the last part is said as “implementing the solution”, which is another way I’ve seen it.

Let me call on you, readers. Can you comment on this post and add some fictional heroes who read? I know that real heroes do.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

 

Personal Reading Consultants

Personal Reading Consultants

It happened again.

I thought I had come up with something new, and it turns out it already exists…although, in this case, in quite a different form (that’s not unusual).

I was thinking the other day about just how many books (and other reading material) are available to people.

Right now, just in the USA Kindle store, there are 1,882,850 results under e-books.

How do you choose?

Well, although I consider myself an eclectic reader, not all of these books are going to appeal equally to me.

Step one, I could eliminate any book that blocks text-to-speech access…I just don’t buy those. That’s not going to be all that many, though…I’d be surprised if it’s 20,000 altogether.

That would still leave me with more than 1,850,000.

Step two, we could take out books I already own (although I might re-read some sometimes, it’s not common for me). Figuring both paperbooks and e-books, again, that’s probably not more than 20,000. I may have read more than that over my life, but that’s not the same as owning them.

Still not much of a reduction.

There are topics which might not appeal to me, like certain hobbies interesting. I can’t say I wouldn’t find a book on…1930s hockey players or some kind of actuarial formulae interesting, but they wouldn’t be high on my list.

Oh, we could reasonably eliminate books in languages I don’t read! That would help.

As a vegetarian, I’m also not going to be interested in books on preparing meat dishes…although I do see that on TV a lot as we watch cooking competition shows.

Once we got all of those out of the way, there are still going to be much more than a million books to consider.

Let’s say I spend on average ten seconds evaluating the appeal of a book. Hmm…10,000,000 seconds comes out to something like 115 days (non-stop, no sleep), I think. Of course, during that period, more books are being published (we can figure something like a 1,000 a day to the USA Kindle store).

So far, this is all just very broad strokes…it’s eliminating books I wouldn’t want to read, but it isn’t finding books I would find exceptionally good.

That got me thinking about the publishers’ representatives that would come to the brick-and-mortar bookstore I managed.

Somebody would come in, cull out the books that weren’t selling well, and suggest more for us to buy.

It would, of course, be up to me to finally say yay or nay, but the recommendations were quite valuable.

What if there were people who did that for individuals?

You would pay someone to make book recommendations to you on a regular basis.

I think there might be a real opportunity there.

It’s not just about saving a hundred dollars a month on books (after all, you can “return” any Kindle store book within seven days of purchase for a refund, so money isn’t really a risk).

It’s about saving time.

Time is a super valuable commodity.

I remember having a conversation with somebody years ago about how truck commercials had changed.

They had been largely about the utility of the truck, or the sexiness. You’d see the wheels spinning as it towed a dinosaur out of a ditch or something, or the back of the truck would be full of “beautiful people” in swimsuits going to the beach.

Then, it started to be that you would just see the truck parked on top of mountain.

It didn’t even have to move during the commercial.

The owner would, presumably, just be kicked back, doing nothing (maybe reading, but they wouldn’t show you that…”brains” and pickup trucks? Not a classic combination for advertisers).

The suggestion was that owning the truck would give you leisure time away from it all.

I always finish a book I start reading (even though some are a slog). I have people say to me, “Who has time to read bad books?”

Picture this.

You pay a consultant, say, $50 a month. That person Skypes or calls you once a month, and talks with you for maybe five minutes.

They recommend books to you.

You personally.

Based on what they know about you…maybe through surveys first (like a dating site for books), then through getting to know you.

You love almost every book they recommend to you.

Would that be worth it?

If you had a lot of money and your time was really valuable, it certainly might be. Maybe it would be business books for a CEO…or just novels for a busy person.

I do think this could work.

There could also be cut-rate versions, where you met in a group (a Google hangout, perhaps).

That person could also (with permission of clients) announce (and make available for purchase) books that they have recommended. Would people want to read the same books that, say, Beyoncé was reading, or Nate Silver, or Joss Whedon? Yes, I think they might.

I don’t think this would likely be a business that would make you rich, but I think people could make a living at it.

If they were good, or course.

If they weren’t good, the relationship would end in a hot second…or at least, they wouldn’t pay again next month.

That’s one of the things that would make this much better than reviews in magazines. It’s not just that the recommendation is specifically for you…it’s that, if you don’t like the recommendation, it has a direct impact on the person making the recommendation. The money flow depends on being right.

Let’s take a quick look at the economics.

I’m going to say you can do four client contacts an hour, and you do that six and a half hours a day (I’m giving you a lunch and breaks), and you do that four days a week (you need one day just for research).

Twenty-six clients a day, let’s go with 17 days in a month, so that’s 442 clients (with once a month calls).

442*50=$22,100 a month.

Hey, that’s a pretty nice living!

Of course, finding 442 people who would pay you $50 a month would be a huge challenge.

Still, if you find…100 people who pay you $10 a month, that’s $12,000 a year. That could make a decent side salary.

That doesn’t count having a website and making peripheral sales that way.

Do I think I’d be good at this?

Yes, I’d probably be pretty good. Having been a bookstore manager would help…and that’s one group of people that I could see making this work.

I mentioned that when I looked up the term I was going to use (“Personal Reading Consultant”), I found something that was already in use.

It’s used by libraries for librarians that recommend books:

Library Developments article

It’s in place in several libraries. You give them a list of books (or perhaps movies and TV shows, as the article explains) and a librarian recommends books for you.

That’s not really a proof of concept for my idea, since you don’t pay for the service (directly) or buy the books.

Of course, with mine, the books recommended could be free sometimes, although I think the Personal Reading Consultant could work some things where they got referral fees. My Significant Other pointed out that it might also get you press releases and such from publishers, if you were a known, successful…hm, I need a new term.

“Personal Reading Advisor”? Already being used (although it isn’t actually personal, the way I mean it.

“Royal Book Taster”? That one’s not being used, but doesn’t really fit.

I’ll think about that more, but I hope this idea helps some of you out there. If it starts you on a new path, I’d love to hear about it. If you have reasons why this wouldn’t work, feel free to say so. I do think it would be successful for a small minority of people who tried it…like being a tailor, or…a personal chef or something. A lot more people would think they could do it than actually could, and there would certainly be luck involved. Do you think social media can fill this need for most people…at no expense? Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Jocks vs. Brains: can you be both a sports fan and a serious reader?

Jocks vs. Brains: can you be both a sports fan and a serious reader?

Today is Superbowl Sunday. People who don’t watch football the rest of the year will gather with friends to cheer on one team or the other…and watch the commercials and the half-time show. It’s a social time, and perhaps a social test. On Monday, if you don’t know what happened in the game, well, you may get some odd looks.

That got me thinking about what is seen as a classic dichotomy in high school: Jocks (athletes) versus Brains (intellectuals).

In a computer like binary system of one or the other, you weren’t going to define someone as both a Jock and a Brain (at least when I was in school, and I’d be surprised if it’s changed much). When your body is changing and  pumping mind-altering chemicals into your brain, dichotomies are simple. You are a this or a that…not both.

That’s not to say that everybody grows out of that, and it is different in different cultures. We see some people with the same either/or conceptions about people’s politics, lifestyles, and so on. No question, that’s easier. As Dr. Seuss did it so well, are you an East-going Zax or a West-going Zax? As soon as I see you take a step to the East, I don’t have to spend any more brainpower on that, which is efficient.

It’s far more complicated if you go both East and West sometimes.

I tend to see more mixes of elements in things…I have a harder time defining something as good or evil, for example, but often find that something has both effects (although not in a balanced manner).

I was definitely more on the Brain side, although I might have been considered more an eccentric than an academic. I could have always gotten good grades in every classroom subject, I think, but I didn’t always want to do that. I remember a classic situation for me in a math class. I quickly answered the questions correctly and turned in the exam. The teacher asked me to “show my work”, and I said that I hadn’t done any. I just knew what the answer was to that long division question…I didn’t go through some proscribed method of getting there.  The teacher wasn’t happy with that…

I had, at that time, what was undoubtedly a prejudice about “Jocks”. I tended to think of them as both unintelligent and exclusionary. If you couldn’t play a sport well, they laughed at you. Here’s another time I got in trouble. We were playing badminton, of all things, and I missed what might have been an easy shot for someone else. The coach said, “It happens to the best of us.” I replied, “…and it happens to the worst of us, too…but more often.” That comment was certainly considered to be smart alecky and inappropriate…despite being completely statistically accurate.

However, were the Brains really more accepting? If someone had trouble understanding something we thought was obvious, weren’t we just as likely to make fun of that?

Oh, sure, there were people on both sides who got a pass…those with a defined condition that made it clear that they had a reason not to be as successful at something, but if that wasn’t the case, ridicule of incompetence (of whatever type) was not uncommon in high school.

I’ve grown, and I think matured, over time. I was always pretty accepting of those with different ideas, but I’ve also become accepting of those without as many ideas.

Now, back to sports fans and serious readers.

That’s a bit different from Jocks and Brains.

A sports fan is a fantatic; by definition, they are more enthusiastic about that sport than the average person.

A “serious reader” (although we read a lot for fun) is more into reading than the average person.

Can you be both?

Can someone enthusiastically follow a sports team, not missing a game, having everyone who knows them socially know who their team is, and, at the same time, be a serious reader?

I’d say, “Sure,” but there may be challenges.

Both following sports and reading take a lot of time. I recently wrote about people* who might do both things at once…read and watch a game on TV. I’m not sure a fanatic would do it that way, though, even with the capability. I think they’d be riveted on every second of the same, analyzing every expression and coach’s choice.

Remember, we are talking about fanatics, not someone who is average in how they follow the sport.

By the way, speaking of coach’s decisions, I do think football is arguably the most intellectual of the big sports (although baseball is a strong contender). I know it may be perceived by those who don’t know it well as just mountainously large people crashing into each other, but when I finally became interested in it as an adult, I was struck by how much of it is mentally-oriented. I mean, how often do you have an event where you stop every few seconds, have a meeting (huddle) and make a decision? It’s clearly those decisions which determine who wins, even though size helps. When people talk about the game on Monday morning, they aren’t “Monday morning linebackers”. They are “Monday morning quarterbacks”, and they are debating the decisions. They don’t say, “We would have won if we’d been bigger.” They say, “If they hadn’t gone for it on fourth down in the third quarter…” That’s about choice, not physicality.

So, perhaps the Brains have been selling the Jocks short. You need both to succeed in football. Do you need athleticism to be a serious reader? Um…maybe when we used to carry ten books home from the library.

In summing this up, let me say as a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, “Go Niners!” That’s despite being a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, and even having satirized the poem (that’s right, poem) after which the opponents are named. Hadn’t occurred to you? Those football loving fans in Baltimore venerate one of the least-jockiest American figures, an American fantasy-writing poet. There’s hope for them after all…

* Just wanted to mention that I’m pleased that, of the number of people expressing a preference for quiet or data-rich environments when reading, the latter one has come out to be about 15%…as I had suggested was the case in the post. I don’t mind being wrong much, but I do like being right

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Do you need a quiet place to read?

Do you need a quiet place to read?

Hats off to Laura Miller at Salon for this post:

Bring back shushing librarians

That’s not because I particularly endorse the admonition in the headline. It’s for catching something which hadn’t stood out to me in the recent

Pew survey on libraries in the digital age

Miller observes, that, in what people value about public libraries

“”Quiet study spaces for adults and children” comes in fourth, and here is where the results go rogue. The percentage of people who consider quiet spaces to be a very important element in any public library is 76, only one percentage point less than the value given to computer and Internet access. A relatively silent place to read is almost exactly as valuable to these people as the Internet!”

That one fascinates me, because it’s the opposite of how I read.

I prefer to be in a noisy environment. I want to read with the TV on in the background, or in a crowded and noisy restaurant.

Now, I know that’s not how most people feel, and the Pew survey demonstrates that to some extent. I say to “some extent” because the question isn’t just about reading, but about study, which could be different.

It’s more important for me to have a data rich environment when I am studying than when I am reading for pleasure (although studying is a pleasure for me…but I digress).

I remember when our kid (now an adult) was first starting to do serious studying for school. My Significant Other said (and I’m paraphrasing): “Should we allow music during the studying?” I said, “How can the kid study without music?”

That concept actually baffled me. I couldn’t imagine studying for school while in the low-tech equivalent of an isolation booth.

I want something else happening…so I don’t get bored with the studying. The studying doesn’t take up my full attention, typically. I’m understanding and remembering it all with only part of my mind. If there isn’t already something going on in the environment, I’ll look for something…and that’s a distraction.

I was explaining this to a class once (of highly educated adults), and somebody said to me, “Is that like attention deficit?” I replied, “No, it’s more like attention surplus.” I have “more attention” available than the work can occupy. It’s not that I can’t keep paying attention to the work…it’s that I want to pay attention to that and to something else.

I want to put up a sign that says, “People are trying to work…please make some noise.”

Now, I’ve heard from people over and over again about how humans can’t really multitask. While I won’t debate the mechanics of what is happening (are successful multitaskers really just very good at switching back and forth rapidly and repeatedly), I’ve found that about fifteen percent of people are good at having two things happening at once.

With that group, if you stop them from being on the internet while you are teaching, they aren’t going to learn it.

The problem arises because a lot more than fifteen percent of people think they are in that group, when they really aren’t.

Not too long ago, they asked us not to use our computers while we were in a recurring team meeting…that lasts basically a whole day. It was nice that they asked if anybody had a problem with that, and I explained that I did. There would be little point in my being in the meeting if I couldn’t be doing something else at the same time, since I wouldn’t absorb any of it. I was the only person to say that, by the way. Oh, and I am perhaps the most participatory person in the meeting in those situations (one of the top three, I’d say), while I’m checking my e-mail.

The solution in that case was for me to take the minutes (and fortunately, I’m good at that). That gives me something else to do, and that certainly helps.

I am not saying that this is superior. I think it’s connected in some ways to my having quite a lengthy process to get to sleep, and to waking up slowly. I am very envious of my Significant Other’s ability to just announce a twenty minute nap, and then be up, active, and refreshed twenty-two minutes later! It takes me that long just to get to sleep (although I now have the process down so it isn’t difficult, it’s still a complicated procedure).

It’s just different.

So, I was curious about you.

I realize some of you would pick all three of these answers: try to do the one that’s true the most often:

I’m also puzzled when people seem to think that having multiple things happening around you at once is a modern development. I’ve never understood that. If you were painstakingly making a stone knife in the Paleolithic Age and weren’t constantly aware of rustles in the tall grass, and movement behind the rocks, you’d never get a chance to use your fancy high-tech artificial fang.

I think we’re likely to have evolved to work on one task while paying attention to what is happening around us.

This “Cone of Silence” idea for studying? That just seems very artificial.

That people rate it nearly as highly as having internet access while in a library is surprising to me. Oh, it’s cool when I’m in a library and it’s all quiet…I think in part because that makes it a different environment than what I normally encounter. I suppose a laser light show might have a similar sense of “altered reality” for me.

For those of you who like the quiet (and again, my guess is that’s the vast majority of people), have you ever gone to the library just to have that around you? Do you ever go in, find a quiet spot, lean back, lace your fingers behind your neck, close your eyes, and just soak it all in? I’m sure people must.

Maybe we should have “quiet booths” on the street, where you could just go in there and shut everything else out. Of course, those would inevitably be used for activities some would consider unsavory.

Say, I do remember that in The Jungle, a sort of giant Habitrail for kids, they did have a quiet room for parents! You’d be there for a birthday party, and two hundred kids were yelling and screaming and getting stuck on a platform because they were afraid to go down a tunnel, and you could just go somewhere else and let the employees deal with it. I do think people read in there…when we were going, we didn’t carry the internet with us.

What do you think? How important is quiet to you when you read? Is it natural to prefer focus and exclusion when studying? Is it a reason why you go to the library? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

Oh, and I do recommend the post I linked at the start of this article…just read it quietly.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.