Underemployed in the new economy: Billy, his brother Billy, and his other brother Billy
If you haven’t already heard, 2009 is the year of the e-book. Or so it’s been said. Anyway, it seems it’s the thing to talk about in the world of books these days. It seems the older the news outlet, the more arguments there are against the technology, which suggests to me that the people with the best means to make themselves heard are the most worried. But I don’t want to use this space to argue about whether or not we’ll all be reading ebooks by the end of the Obama’s first administration (many of us will be).
When wifey and I moved into our new digs in November we hired professional movers for the first time. We could afford it, my brother who’d moved just a few months prior recommended them, and we couldn’t see ourselves repeating, let alone expanding on, the epic migration that was our last move.
You see, we are book people. We have many of them, they are heavy (one of the moving guys said we’d better re-read all of them), we’re always adding to their numbers, and they travel with an entourage of furniture.
It was over a month before we’d put up all the shelving (from Ikea, of course) and unpacked all the books. Then came the question of order. I’d always held to a pretty durable Fiction/Non-Fiction split with subdivisions (narrative non-fiction, argument/philosophy, British fiction, American fiction, poetry, drama, etc.) but this time I just couldn’t be bothered.
Like I say, this wasn’t the first time we moved our books. But by god, I’d be happy if it were the last. And there’s a feeling in the air that it might be.
Since music became available as a completely digital product it’s become ever easier to imagine the end of CDs. Just this weekend I nudged the medium a bit closer to obsolescence when I finished ripping all of my CDs into iTunes. I rated every album, checked on all the artwork and metadata. Like everyone else on the streetcar these days, my entire collection of music now resides in my iPod.
So why are there colourful Ikea shelves full of 300+ CDs next to me?
I don’t really know anymore.
decorative plate in hanger
From the moment I ripped the first disc, the shelving I’ve had for years, which though inexpensive was not cheap, changed in function — twice.
My shelves used to be attractively laminated particle-board structures that kept my music on-hand and organized in the main living space, sort of like how our glass-fronted kitchen cabinets hold the dinnerware. But when I started ripping my CDs, each shelf became a factory bin holding units awaiting processing. Now that I’m done, they’re now the media equivalent of plate hangers: useful only for displaying artifacts of personal taste.
I don’t mean to get all Fredric Jameson just now, but it seems to me that Ikea’s minimalist aesthetic nears its logical, self-defeating conclusion with the spread of wholly digital media.
Which brings me to the collossal collection of books that presently surrounds me.
I’ve been enjoying hearing my music on shuffle, queueing up songs I enjoy from albums I haven’t felt the urge to listen to in years. But in this respect books aren’t like music at all: it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll re-read any particular book of mine, even if there were a mechanism to cause it to fall open in front of me. Conceding this, I couldn’t object to wifey organizing the books by colour. Never mind that I can still find everything; the point is that we’re done with meaningful order here. I’ve seen how it’s going to be and I’m resigned to regarding shelving as a means for keeping stuff off the floor. I even let her hang a painting on the shelving — entirely blocking access to several volumes — fulfilling a design dream she’d had since she saw it done in a movie (she, unlike me, is far more realistic about the need for free access to every single book at all times — and anyway, I can still find everything).
What if you needed a bird-obstructed book?!?!
Our books haven’t quite become vestigial organs of home decor, but our array of shelving has certainly arrived at a point where any more would feel as gratuitous as a sixth finger.
Ask me what my rooms look like and I’ll say “books”, but really, they look like shelves. Lots of shelves carrying books. The sheer excess of room after room of books has always appealed to me, but as the necessity of books’ physical manifestation fades I fear we’re going to start looking like collectors of rare vinyl recordings that have seen less daylight than the pronouncing index of the Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology.
There’s just no reason to keep CDs around as digital music gets easier to access. But a beautiful book is a nice thing to have at hand. Then again,what’s your relationship to books if the only ones you have around are the ones you like to look at? What’s the distance between that and Ikea’s dressing their showroom shelves with Swedish remainders? If e-books are cheaper and more convenient to collect, would it really be so bad to collect printed books only for their aesthetic appeal? What’s wrong with bibliophiles expressing their love as pure physical attraction? I think on some level my spouse has anticipated this sea-change with her bold, strictly aesthetic arrangement of our not terribly comely books, and for that I’m very grateful.
And I’m glad that for now when we throw a party our friends will still have the option of wandering through the apartment scrutinizing spines, though the day isn’t far off when we make new friends who’ll have to actually ask what we majored in instead of looking for a copy of Survival or Practical Ethics while we look for the corkscrew. In the meantime I guess I’ll be pricing tapestries.
When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.
We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves — to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we’ve undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections — consciously or unconsciously — to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.
What’s true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books — just like prominently reading Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway — is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.
What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?
This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element — the ability to have one’s music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?
Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It’s been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.
Bolt a high endvirtual surround source to the screen, and you’ve got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you’re already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.
Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.
It’s the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us — about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time — and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.
I enjoy Last.fm a great deal. That’s less, I think, for its admittedly rather limited utility to me at this point, and more for its set-it-up-and-forget-about-it aspect. There’s a silent promise that it is taking note of what I’m listening to, and that at some point in the future this information may be of some use to me. In the meantime it’s all going into the communal pot to help other people.
If you can make your peace with companies storing a great deal of information about you in this way (and if you can’t, I’m afraid that you may not enjoy the rest of your life very much), there is a definite social good that can come of it. By telling Last.fm what I listen to — what the pathways of my taste are — I am contributing to someone else’s enjoyment. Indeed, the more people like me share their listening tastes with Last.fm, the higher the chance that it will allow me to discover something genuinely new which thrills and excites.
There is at least one more immediate benefit to society, however, and it’s one that at first blush seems horrifying. It dispenses with the guilty pleasure — the ability to listen to a track, watch a movie, or enjoy a book without the knowledge of others.
The guilty pleasure allows you to maintain a distance between your carefully constructed public identity (perhaps the face you show to friends alone; perhaps the profile you showcase in front of some wider public) and the things you enjoy by ’slumming it’. I’m certain that much of the work of cultural discovery — finding unknown artists or writers, chancing upon sounds that refresh popular music — happens by accident or by exposure to works under the liberating cover of anonymity.
But it’s also an inhibitor of cultural development, building walls around blocks of content believed to be discreet and in some way — usually unrelated to their artistic merits — antagonistic to one another. One doesn’t listen to Tosca and Tosca side-by-side.
When I picked up Kylie’s Fever a few years ago and listened to it obsessively for a weekend, a friend emailed to make the observation, with a great deal of mockery, that it didn’t exactly fit with the avant-garde jazz and austere IDM that I had been listening to for the preceding few weeks. Had my critical faculties been replaced by those of a thirteen year-old?
Well, it’s no good being ashamed about these things any more. Shame requires the ability to hide, and Last.fm doesn’t let you do that at all. The exercise of snobbery as a substitute for critical faculty is going to become very much harder, because everybody’s cultural preferences — their true preferences — are that much more visible. We’re one step closer to the democratization of taste.
So here’s a challenge: if you’re a music critic, why not make your Last.fm profile public for all to see?
I recently listened to When Markets Collide by Mohamed El-Erian. Great book. I think. At least someone thought so. Anyway, delighted as I was to get it on audio, because there was little chance I’d tackle it in print, I wasn’t surprised to find that there was a PDF file on the last disc containing charts and tables referred to in the text. This I saved to my desktop and opened after pausing the narrator at “see figure 4.1 in the included PDF”.
Now I listened to it on standard compact discs, 8 in all, through wireless headphones. I was restricted to consuming the book strictly as audio through my stereo and required my computer to call up the visual elements. Often as not, this meant dashing from the laundry room or kitchen to my desk, where I’d left the PDF open, but I digress. But suppose I had downloaded the audiobook from the iTunes store and was listening on my iPod, which can easily display images and text. How nice it would be to have my iPod chime like one of those book & tape sets I used to enjoy as a pre-schooler: when we got to “see figure 5.2″ the image would come up on the screen, I’d glance at my iPod as the narration carries on, then go back to listening.
But wait a second. If can look at my iPod for book content while listening to an audiobook, what about listening to an eBook? Not possible, I’m afraid. Ebooks are eBooks and audiobooks are audiobooks and digital though they both might be, never the twain shall meet. Though the second generation of Amazon’s Kindle can apparently read to you, I doubt it’s a very pleasant experience over long durations. At this point, invoking Sklar with the flip of a switch remains just a dream.
When I buy a book, I’d like to think I bought the privilege of reading it in any way I choose. If I buy a book as an electronic file containing text and images, why should I have to buy it all over again if I’d like to use my ears instead of my eyes as my primary organs for consuming it? Ultimately, I don’t want a Kindle with audio capabilities or an eBook app for an iPhone as much as I want a new kind of necessarily electronic book format that takes full advantage of the device through which it’s consumed.
Publishers need to stop seeing eBooks as a substitute for printed pages and start thinking about them as a means for transmitting content — any content.
I want to be able to read with my eyes while seated on the subway, then switch to audio when I have to get off and walk down the street to meet a friend for lunch. If there’s an element I need to see, sound a chime to get my eyes on the screen, then fade out to conserve battery life and keep the narration rolling. Google’s already got the technology to sync the printed page to audio narration and plenty of podcasts feature images that change at different points during playback. So near, yet so far…
HarperStudio has made a gesture in the direction of selling books in multiple media by offering ebooks and audiobooks for a small fee on top of the cost of the printed book. It’s still very early days, but I believe that at the heart of this move is the acknowledgement that publishers aren’t manfucturers: their product isn’t paper and glue. But whether HarperStudio’s model a) works financially and b) pushes anyone to develop an integrated audio/text standard remainds to be seen. Or heard. Or whatever.
Cool, I thought. I’d heard that it can be tricky to migrate to a new PC with iTunes purchases intact, and I already had a new PC on order from Dell. Anything that would make migration easier was good news to me.
Then last weekend I realized that they’d just changed how I buy music. Actually, it was me that had changed.
A little background.
I bought my first iPod less than a year ago. Not my first iPhone. My first iPod. Really. She’s a beaut. 80GB, matte black, with a silky click-wheel. Had it about 6 months. My youngest brother, a teenager at the time, had nagged at me for years to get one (he thought he was offering enlightenment to his aging brother with the mountain of CDs) but I’d always protested that the only reason to change the hardware you use for listening to music is to get music you can’t otherwise listen to. I have a good stereo at home, a computer at work I can play CDs on, and a good CD player in the car. On public transit I like to read. Nothing had yet been released in digital-only format (even Radiohead’s digital experiment became available on the racks of the music stores eventually) and I still believe in one of my dark itchy places beyond the reach of reason that if you can tell the difference between a CD and a digital audio file ripped at 128 kbps that the CD will sound better.
What made me buy an iPod?
Believe it or not, podcasts. Video podcasts. I had been enjoying This American Life and BBC Documentaries on my desktop PC and borrowed iPod Shuffle (juicy-fruit first-gen) but was interested in the late Moblogic.tv and Bill Moyers on the recommendation of some friends. I started to see the advantage of having these and other podcasts on my person, especially while out walking the dog which for me takes up about an hour a day (2-3 hours on weekends). If I could carry my music collection around with me as well, so much the better.
I’d planned on buying music in 2 streams: digitally for things of interest to me, not my wife; and in CD format, for things of interest to both of us (or for music where remastering made all the difference and iTunes wasn’t clear about which version they were offering). I didn’t know exactly how iTunes locked down its music, but I knew that it did and that I didn’t much like the idea of employing some klunky work-around just so wifey and I could enjoy music together as we always had.
Maybe the workaround wasn’t sloppy. Maybe I’m just lazy.
But that’s the point. The idea of DRM’s restrictions were possibly more restrictive than the restrictions themselves. Buying music on CD was a habit for me, and because it was easy and required no DRM-dodging it’s what I kept on doing. The only new habit I’d picked up was ripping music to my PC (at 256 kbps), but for me buying music still meant going to the store and picking up a CD.
It was still cheaper than buying the same album twice on iTunes. But typing that now I know that wasn’t really something I’d have done. I’d certainly have gotten around to figuring out how to crack iTunes’ lock if it came to buying the same digital product twice. But it never did come to that because I had an old habit to fall back on. CDs were easy and reliable, and iTunes was cheap, dubious quality (not really), and inconvenient. And there was always the sense that music bought from iTunes was like a leased car: in the day-to-day it felt like yours, but out on the horizon was a day of reckoning where the limits of your ownership would come into sharp relief.
With iTunes’ move to DRM-free music, digital music became just a bunch of files in my computer the way books are just things on my shelf. I now have to ask myself why I’d pay more than iTunes’ price for an album the same way I ask myself whether I need to own the hardcover or paperback (this seldom comes up: it’s always paperback).
Sound quality vs. CD? Seems they thought of that, having upgraded the whole store to the iTunes Plus standard of 256 kbps. Liner notes? What’s in there that isn’t on allmusic?
Last weekend I spent a $50 iTunes giftcard that I’d been given for Christmas. I’d made a couple of purchases here and there on iTunes in the past few months, but never more than 1 album at a time. Going on a $50 spree was a revelatory experience. Not only was basically everything I thought I might like to buy available (quite the opposite of the shopping experience HMV provides, unless you need a new cellphone) but $50 on iTunes went a lot further than 2 or 3 CDs. And one of the albums is something wifey would enjoy running to.
I haven’t bought a CD since and I wonder if I ever will again.
Update: I started arranging our CDs by artist Sunday afternoon. (They’ve been shelved in a jumble since we moved.) This is miserable work. And we’re almost out of room (again). I really do think this is the end of an era.
This looks to be another quick way of using their very intelligent recommendations algorithm. But the name of the feature itself is another little nudge in the direction of leveraging “negative data” — what we hate as well as what we like. Why do companies and services not make more use of information on what we spurn, as well as that which we actively seek to consume?
I’ve no doubt that some of the better recommendation engines do indeed use this data, but the fact that it isn’t foregrounded means that users aren’t inclined to, for example, apply low ratings to things that they actively hate. Indeed — the entire conceptual language of our user interfaces is geared against this. When I’m rating items in Amazon or iTunes, I’m not inclined to give any stars at all to something that I hate. I want to banish it, not apply the most meagre of rewards.
What songs do I never listen to? Which songs do I skip away from within the first 30 seconds? When I’m browsing a newspaper website, which writers do I always fail to read — suggesting that I’m deliberately avoiding them? Which websites do I always refuse to click through to?
What books have I started but never finished? Wouldn’t it be nice if Amazon could tell me I have only 50 percent likelihood of finishing Finnegan’s Wake?
Companies do everything they can to push highly viewed or rated content to customers — but toxic content doesn’t get pushed out of the way with quite the same enthusiasm. As anyone who has been involved in merchandising will tell you, bad content isn’t just a “dead zone” around which good content can exist without impact. It risks infecting everything around it.
