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Category: General (Page 3 of 3)

Rise of the Manga Entrepreneur?

February 16, 2011 /

Now that Borders has filed for bankruptcy and the local Borders is closing, maybe its time to dust off those plans to open a manga cafe in the neighborhood! My wife suggested this, perhaps only half seriously, in response to yesterday’s post.

We started talking about the idea a few years ago. The idea was to open a little shop specializing in East Asian popular culture. This would include graphic novels, such as manga, along with Chinese martial arts novels. Video games, including hard to find imports, would also be part of the mix. And to keep things fresh and interesting, we’d also have a cosplay component. Staff would cosplay according to some weekly theme and we might even offer discounts or other incentives to customers who visited the store in costume.

Books are not a high margin business, so the shop would make most of its money selling beverages and pre-packaged baked goods. Sitting around reading manga would be encouraged as long as you bought something to drink or eat. A paid membership program would offer additional perks. Monthly open mike karaoke nights would round out the shop’s offerings.

In planning this, I felt that a key element to success would be keeping abreast of the latest trends and nimbly adjusting to take advantage of them. Obviously this entails a lot of work, but I do a lot of this already, so it would really just be monetizing my favorite hobbies. Now that the Borders down the street is closing, maybe this shop will finally see the light of day!

Nook Color Review

February 4, 2011 /

Buying presents for my wife is a tricky task at best, but it looks like my birthday gift of a Nook Color has paid off handsomely. Being a demanding user, I asked her to write a review of her new eBook reader in which she had this to say,

I have always been an avid reader.  I devour everything that is printed, be it books, magazines, newspapers, academic journals… When I was a child I even read the dictionary, the telephone book, street signs, and food labels for fun.  So I was not sure at first if I would like an E-reader.  Holding a pad just doesn’t seem the same as turning pages.  But the Nook Color is so easy to use and has so many features that the print medium cannot offer that I am officially sold.

Click here to read the full review on Grace Notes in Chicago.

Old Bookselling Model Must End

February 2, 2011 /

As much as I love bookstores, I really had no idea just how wacked out the traditional bookselling business model is until  now. As a Borders bankruptcy looms ever larger, writer Zetta Brown thinks that maybe it’s time for an outdated business model to die as well. She writes,

Frankly, Borders is a reflection of the traditional bookstore system. It’s hardly surprising that they are failing because the economics behind supplying bookstores is totally bogus. Think about it. Bookstores demand huge discounts from publishers to buy books to stock their shelves plus they expect to be able to return unsold books for full credit. And if the bookstore is allowed to strip the book before returning it (while getting full credit) to the publisher…

As a book lover, I was aghast to learn that stripping is the practice of ripping off the book cover before returning the book to the publisher! When I was a kid, my mom worked at a small K-Mart store, and occasionally she would bring home a bunch of paperback books, all of which had the covers ripped off of them. Now I know the reason these books had been mutilated.

Obviously, such a system has no place in a world of eBooks. And depending on the details of the publishing contracts, authors and publishers should get a better overall deal. I’m going to miss having Borders around. My neighborhood Borders is closing soon, essentially leaving me little choice but to order print books and eBooks online. But after some growing pains, I think a more efficient business model should benefit all involved and perhaps lead to a literary rebirth. It has never been easier write, publish, and buy books than it is now. Once the old model is dead and buried, things can only get better.

Special thanks to WriterDonna whose tweet lead me to Zetta Brown’s article.

NOOKbook Review: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

January 28, 2011 /

The first eBook my wife bought for her Nook Color was Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. The book has inspired a lot of lively debate concerning various parenting philosophies and methods. Here is an excerpt from her book review.

This book, by Yale University Law Professor Amy Chua, is meant to be a memoir, rather than a parenting guide, and it is certainly not meant to be a scholarly research piece.  At times funny because the descriptions were so over-the-top that it sounded unreal, and at times sobering because those of us who were born of Chinese parents have actually witnessed behaviors displayed by Chua in our own parents or in our friends’ parents and know the yelling and nagging and berating statements were in fact quite real, the book is nevertheless meant to be read as a memoir, and not as an instruction manual.  But the book is not meant to be pure entertainment either, Chua’s acerbic sense of humor notwithstanding.  So, what is the reader supposed to take away from the book?

Click here for the full book review on Grace Notes in Chicago.

A Reflection Of Books

January 22, 2011 /

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of seeing artist Makoto Fujimura speak on the work he was commissioned to do in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. His talk and the one preceding it by art historian Professor John Walford of Wheaton College had a profound impact on how I now see art. Seeing isn’t even the right word, something more like experiencing would be better.

Throughout the presentations, speakers would describe the materials that went into a work and often apologize for the disservice a projected image did to the work itself. It seems obvious now, but there’s no substitute for seeing the work in person and experiencing its totality as it was meant to be experienced. Art is more than its reflected photons.

Before the speakers started, I was talking to a new friend about books and eBook readers. It’s Hyde Park and we were at the University of Chicago Divinity School, so talking about books is completely natural! Anyway, we were going over the pros and cons of eBooks, in particular limitations on lending. And at the end, the fact that you cannot show off your collection to friends like you can with a real bookshelf. I had the impression that even increasingly inexpensive eReaders like the Kobo, were not going to win her over. In the end, to her a digital eBook was just a poor reflection of the real thing.

At some point it has to be realized that more mature readers like my friend Jan are not going to be sold on eBooks as long as they are pitched as some kind of replacement for the physical books she knows and loves. Just as immersive video games have to resist the temptation to imitate movies, so must eBooks resist the urge to ape physical books. eBooks are going to have to stand on their own as an entirely new medium for the expression of human thought and imagination. That imagination, coupled with technology, should soon give rise to something entirely new and beautiful.

I Still Love Bookstores!

January 12, 2011 /

My favorite Chicago Borders bookstore is closing this month. After a one year extension, the end of the line is finally here and I’m very sad to see it go. I’ve always spent a lot of money on books, real paper, printed books! I love books, and the physical form of a book is still something that gives me a pleasure that can’t be duplicated in the digital form. I love eBooks too, but it’s a different and still evolving experience. My love of physical books is refined and mature.

There’s a Borders near my house which, while a wonderful space, simply does not have the selection of manga that my downtown Borders did. Manga, Japanese graphic novels, are very slowly making their way into legitimate eBook stores. Illegal, scanned translations abound on the internet, but I prefer to avoid these. So for now, I still buy these in bookstores and therein lies my problem. The closing of my favorite Borders leaves me no other choice but to buy manga online from Amazon.com. The remaining book stores in my area don’t have the titles I want anymore!

Peter Osnos at the Atlantic has written a wonderful analysis of What Went Wrong at Borders. Like many failing businesses, what was once a successful company has not thrived under the management of people who did not understand or have a passion for the underlying enterprise. Competitor Barnes & Noble seems to have handled the transition to online book selling and the rise of eBooks somewhat better than Borders.

I would like to see Borders and Barnes & Noble both survive and evolve. I still love bookstores and hope to spend many more hours in them in the future, browsing and buying books whether physical or digital in their form. It’s hard to see what form bookstores will evolve into. I suppose the era of the mega-bookstore is over. Maybe a smaller, boutique style store that blends digital offerings with physical copies of best sellers by the most popular authors, is the way of the future. Imagine a coffee shop with a couple of racks of books where one can buy eBooks on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad at a discount if you do it over the local hot spot. Barnes & Noble already does something like this in their stores, but I think the stores themselves are still too big.

Only the future will tell how this all plays out. My neighborhood still has a number of independent bookstores. Maybe it’s time I introduce them to my kids!

Huck Finn and Revisionist Editing

January 7, 2011 /
Family Guy Huck Finn Spoof

Jim explains how that's OUR WORD!!!

It doesn’t take a time machine to know what Mark Twain would likely think of a publisher’s proposal to release a version of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” edited out. I’m sure he’d have a lot of colorful expressions with which to express his displeasure.

Arguments about the hurtfulness of the n-word aside, this smacks of what is perhaps the worst kind of censorship. That which attempts to build the future by erasing the past. Forgetting history is a sure way to ensure that it is repeated. While Huckleberry Finn is a work of fiction, it paints and preserves a picture of a time in American history that should not be forgotten and still holds valuable lessons for us going forward.

As an artist, my feeling is that once a work is completed, that’s it. The time for revision and refinement is over. Obviously, not everyone holds this opinion. But I think that the “enhanced” versions of Star Wars and E.T. and their less than pleased critical reception by fans of the originals, should give pause to anyone seeking to revise classic works, even the creator of said works! Han shot first, and no amount of CG editing is going to change that for me!

I grew up watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in the afternoon. These and other cartoons of that era had some horrible stereotypes of black people and other minorities and women. Years later, many of these same cartoons had been butchered to either remove or redub the black maid and other, now offensive, images. I thought it was a  pretty silly thing to do. Even as a kid, I knew those images did not represent my people. But I thought it was cool to be able to look back in time and get a glimpse of how things were in the past, even through a goofy cat and mouse cartoon.

We still need to know and remember a time when being called a nigger was not hip, cool, or a sign of friendship.

Rebirth!

January 4, 2011 /

Welcome to the new WordPress powered Learncrest site! Here I will be writing about all manner of things related to books, with a particular focus on books I’m working on for Learncrest. So stay tuned for future updates!

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