It’s always the 2nd question of every producer/ director, after the first being : Do you want to read this script?
What do you think of the script?
Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me about the script. It’s not my job to comment on the quality of the writing or what I think of the topic. Because then I…
America’s First Bookless Library to Open in Texas
BiblioTech is being touted as America’s first bookless public library system, with the prototype site in San Antonio hoping to offer 150 e-readers, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops and 25 tablets to local readers.
EXCERPT
Gideon was given his first firearm, a Marlin .22, when he was five years old. He learned early that one thing, and one thing only, could ensure his father’s affection. That one thing was good shooting. When you went to the range with Father, you didn’t mess around, you didn’t talk, you didn’t smile, you didn’t shuffle your feet. You simply loaded and fired. With precision and accuracy.
From the moment he touched the Marlin .22, Gideon knew he had a gift. Trap, skeet, air pistol, bench rest, offhand, prone, practical handgun shooting - no matter. He had it - that magical trick of eye and brain and finger that allowed him to aim a gun and hit what he wanted to hit. Kill was the word that Father used.
For the first three years, his father taught him. After that, all his father had to do was man the spotting scope and let the boy work. “Good kill, son,” he’d whisper. “Good kill.”
Tillman, on the other hand, struggled to keep up on the range. Compared to any other kid, he was excellent and could drive tacks with a rifle or run clays set after set. But he did it through gritted teeth, flinching under his father’s perpetual scrutiny. Every near miss, every stray shot earned him an ear-ringing slap on the back of the head, a pinch on the inside of his upper arm, or - worst of all - a few cutting words. These ranged from “useless fool” to “you’re no son of mine, boy.” Always whispered softly. Even at his most violent, Father never raised his voice.
But the violence was always there. When the dark rage came on him, he struck out at anyone within reach. Anyone except Gideon. While their mother sometimes absorbed his wrath, Tillman was always their father’s main target. It had taken a long time for Gideon to see it, but Tillman hadn’t absorbed the belittling and the beating and the abuse by accident. As the older of the two, Tillman had routinely stood between their father and Gideon - deflecting his anger, absorbing his blows, protecting the younger boy. In fact, Tillman had been his protector throughout his childhood - whether it was from bullies at school or opposing linemen on the football field. Thanks to Tillman, nobody messed with Gideon Davis. People came to understand that if you put a late hit on Gideon Davis, when the next play rolled around, Tillman Davis was going to cut you off at the knees.
It was only as he grew older - and increasingly estranged from his brother - that he began to understand what that protection had cost Tillman, how much pain he had absorbed on Gideon’s behalf. The realization came only slowly and grudgingly. But eventually Gideon realized that only through Tillman’s self-sacrifice had Gideon been given the space to grow into the man he had become.
It was a debt that Gideon knew he had never adequately repaid.
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Howard Gordan is an Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning writer and producer who served as executive producer of the hit television show 24 for its full eight-season run. He was also a writer and executive producer for The X-Files.
If digital covers as we know them are so ‘dead,’ why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can’t hurt them. They’re dead. So let’s start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.
This is an essay for book lovers and designers curious about where the cover has been, where it’s going, and what the ethos of covers means for digital book design. It’s for those of us dissatisfied with thoughtlessly transferring print assets to digital and closing our eyes.
The cover as we know it really is — gasp — ‘dead.’ But it’s dead because the way we touch digital books is different than the way we touch physical books. And once you acknowledge that, useful corollaries emerge.
COMMENT: In pronouncing the cover dead — albeit tongue in cheek — you assume that interface design is unchanging. To base a premise, even in part, on Amazon’s ugly storefront is to miss the shifting beauty of technology entirely.
It’s also beneficial to observe that the digital/virtual experience in every feasible way has made a goal of mimicking our physical reality. In other words, iPads and Kindles will increasingly look, feel and behave like traditional books. It’s pretty safe to imagine that covers will do the same.
A comparison to the disappearance of record and CD covers might seem like a good counter, but music, unlike the written word, does not require two-dimensional space. If we assume that we will continue to read words, we can assume that there will always be room for book covers more or less as we’ve come to know them.
What No One’s Saying About Amazon
COMMENT: Quote: “Another amazing thing is you can publish a physical book within days with an Amazon feature called Create Space and make the book available on demand to an author’s clamoring public.”
You don’t know much about publishing do you? That’s called print on demand (POD) and it’s been around since the late 1990s from companies such as Lightning Source, with automatic distribution through wholesale channels and online stores. I’ve been doing it since 1999.
The problem is that Amazon is making it so easy and free, their distribution system is getting choked with garbage, much of it deliberately so, since it isn’t that hard to game their review system and pick up a few quick bucks.
In addition to their bullying and their attempts to monopolize the market, that’s another of Amazon’s problems. Because Jeff Bezos and the Amazon culture he’s created don’t really understand—much less love—books, Amazon could (not) care less about the harm they’re doing to the market. That’s one reason why publishers hate them.
Amazon’s Create Space made them a ‘publisher,’ but it didn’t give them the moral or professional ethos of a publisher. It could (not) care less how poor the 203,219 books published under its CreateSpace label are. I’m certain most have never been read once by someone acting in Amazon’s employ. They’re the Kinkos of publishing.
For Amazon everything is just an ASIN. If it’s good, if it’s trash, it doesn’t matter to them. It’s all about dominance, market share and ultimately profit. Oscar Wilde’s remark about those who know “the price of everything and the value of nothing” is a near perfect description of the company that once billed itself as “the world’s largest bookstore.”
Simon & Schuster Introduces Self-Publishing Service
Self-Publishing a Book: 25 Things You Need to Know
@craigmod: Thinking about the future of books and publishing and storytelling.
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