The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 05 Jul 2011 02:14 AM PDT DAVID Lender has wanted to be a writer since college. Now, after a 25-year career in finance, he's become a top-selling author of novels going for 99 US cents each on Amazon Inc's Kindle and Barnes & Noble Inc's Nook. Lender, who majored in English at the University of Connecticut, outlined his stories on planes and in cars during his work in mergers and acquisitions at Bank of America Corp and other Wall Street jobs. The result is three self-published tales of suspense set in the financial world that became bestsellers in the thriller category of Amazon's electronic bookstore. Lender is an example of how new authors are capitalising on the popularity of electronic books to break into the business without a publisher's backing. Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old author of vampire books such as My Blood Approves, sold about a million e-books on her own before signing a US$2mil (RM6.12mil) deal this year with St Martin's Press, part of Macmillan Group. E-book sales hit US$441.3mil (RM1.35bil) last year from US$61.3mil (RM187mil) two years earlier, according to the Association of American Publishers. The popularity of e-books gives self-published authors like Lender access to wide readership and saves on publishing costs. Lender, 58, released his first thriller, Trojan Horse, on the Kindle and the Nook in January for US$9.99 (RM30.50). When sales were dismal, he researched the price points of other independent publishers and settled on 99 cents. The e-book took off. For independent publishers like Lender, the growing number of e-readers in the hands of consumers is a promising first step. Lender believes paper books won't disappear, and he also put out his novels in print, including his latest, Bull Street, in paperback through Brindle Publishing. His e-books still comprise more than 95% of his sales. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| Posted: 04 Jul 2011 04:15 PM PDT Could there be a deeper and richer reading experience than just reading a book? T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land app NOTORIOUSLY difficult to understand but once encountered never forgotten, T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land is one of the benchmarks of 20th century literature and possibly the greatest poem of its time. Its difficulty on a first encounter lies at least partly in the fractured nature of the verse, the multiple voices that switch from one to another without any authorial signalling, and its systematic ignoring of the normal rules of narrative. Students' reactions on first reading the poem tend to be blank incomprehension. But then, ah then, those rhythms and that phrasing sink into the brain and the heart and never come out again. I can think of few poems that have the grip on the reader that The Waste Land exerts and if you still end up unclear about the precise details of what Eliot was getting at – well, you have a pretty good grasp of the drift of the thing. Poet/editor Ezra Pound's contribution to what we now know as The Waste Land was profound and is well documented. Many years ago, British publishers Faber & Faber released a facsimile transcript showing his comments and crossings out and he is frequently referred to, rightly or wrongly, as the architect of the poem. Those amendments and alterations are included in the app and can be seen alongside the final version of the poem. There are hours of interest here in examining just what Pound left in and took out. So far, so good then. But the poem and the transcript have been published already and most of what I have described is accessible in conventional print media. The big question here is why an app? What does an app offer a poem that the book form does not? Why did Touch Press and Faber go to the enormous time (two years in the making) and trouble of marketing a poem through a medium we normally associate with games and short, neatly packaged pieces of information? If the medium is the message, what is the medium telling us? Well, in short, the medium is telling us that this is an incredibly rich way of presenting a poem. Of course you get the text, both of the poem and of Pound's alterations. But that is just the beginning. Put the text on your screen, tap the loudspeaker symbol at the bottom and you can hear it read by Eliot himself (two readings, one recorded in 1933 and the other in 1947), by actors like Sir Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortensen and Fiona Shaw. You can also toggle between them, which provokes far more interest and fascination than I can easily describe. Put Eliot's austerity and formality beside Shaw's much more fluid and colloquial performance and the words take on new weight and meaning in the most beguiling way. Should you need a little help with any individual lines or phrases, move your iPad from vertical to horizontal screen and helpful and extensive notes will appear on the left hand side. A separate section called Perspectives offers short films of Shaw, Seamus Heaney, Paul Keegan, Jim McCue, Craig Raine, Jeanette Winterson and ex-punk rocker Frank Turner talking about the poem's history, meaning and qualities. Winterson takes on the issue of Eliot being difficult, while Turner links Eliot to Bob Dylan. Once again, this is a well-chosen and enlightening collection of short films that cannot help but illuminate the poem to a wide range of readers. A star contribution, however, is the performance of the text by Shaw. In an old and run down house in Dublin, Shaw performs the poem seated by a fire in a beautifully appropriate once-grand room with no carpets and peeling paint. The Irish lilt to her voice took me back instantly to Samuel Beckett in a sharp reminder once again that this poem was for many THE voice of the 20th century angst and fracture that followed World War I. Eliot's rhythms are simply impossible to avoid in any serious look at literature since The Waste Land. The decision to publish The Waste Land as an app, a piece of publishing madness or inspiration if ever there was one, is triumphantly vindicated and it is difficult to believe that this is not the start of a new trend. Poetry lends itself particularly well to a wealth of supporting material and as Faber has writers of the calibre of Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and W. H. Auden on its list, one can only hope that further treats are in store. Faber's partners in this enterprise are Touch Press who have clear ideas about what they are trying to achieve, as they stated in their press release: "Our goal is to create a new kind of book that makes use of emerging consumer platforms such as the iPad, as well as the latest computation capabilities and high performance visual media. We believe that we now have the capability to redefine the book, reinvent publishing, and forever transform the act of reading." In the case of The Waste Land app, they have succeeded in creating a reading experience that is both deeper and richer than the original book form. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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