You may have heard that e-book readers are the it gadget of the year. Yet choosing the right e-book reader is more difficult than choosing a brand of shampoo or an ice cream flavor. Seems like every week there’s the hot new e-book reader being foisted upon the reading public. At last count, there are at least 12 brands of e-book readers either currently available or nearly close to release. So, how do you know which one is right for you? Comparing the two most popular e-book readers, we break it down for you here. Happy reading!

KINDLE 2	VERSUS	SONY READER
$359 @ Amazon.com	PRICE	$349 @ SonyStyle.com
8″ x 5.3″ x .36″	DIMENSIONS	6.7″ x 5.1″ x .4″
Basic white	COLOR	Basic black
6″ screen, thumbstick cursor. B&W, 16-level gray scale (more levels equals clearer picture)	SCREEN	6″ touch screen. B&W screen, 8-level gray scale (half the resolution of the Kindle 2)
Built-in wireless connects to Internet anywhere there is a signal. Books download in minutes (or less) once purchased from Amazon’s Kindle store. You can also subscribe to some magazines, newspapers, and blogs.	DOWNLOADS	No Internet connectivity. Books are purchased from Sony eBook Store (Window users only) and transferred in minutes (or less) by connecting the Reader to your computer.
Holds more than 1,500 books. Memory is not upgradable.	MEMORY	Holds about 350 books. Extra memory can be purchased.
Free iPhone app provides access to your library on an iPod or iPhone. Some books can be read aloud with text-to-speech function.	ADDITIONAL FEATURES	Unlike the Kindle 2, the Reader has built-in LED lights along the sides of the screen that provide illumination for convenient night reading.
Visit amazon.com/kindle	READY TO BUY?	Visit sonystyle.com

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Students of The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines, by Cosimo author Loren Coleman, were probably expecting, in the wake of several recent right-wing terrorist acts in the U.S., to see events precisely like the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC by white supremacist and Holocaust denier James W. von Brunn. In a posting at his blog Twilight Language — where Coleman explores the “coded words,” “name games,” and “number coincidences” that the media inadvertently broadcasts and that subsequently help transform individual events into trends — the author asks whether this is “a time of ‘lone nuts’ or not,” and discusses how the assassination of Kansas doctor George Richard Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder and the shootings of army recruits in Arkansas by American Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who bore a grudge against the U.S. military for the invasion of Iraq, may be connected via their “political-religious undertones.”

The chilling gist of Coleman’s post, however, is how the “twilight language” of von Brunn’s shooting spree may inspire further right-wing violence by those who share the shooter’s philosophies:

James Wenneker von Brunn reportedly was an 88-year-old resident of Maryland. He once lived in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

“Eighty-eight is used as code among Neo-Nazis to identify each other. H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, so 88 is taken to stand for HH which in turn means Heil Hitler,” says Wikipedia.

…

Von Brunn reportedly has claimed that the book The Diary of Anne Frank, about a teenage girl’s experiences under Nazi rule, was a hoax. The shooting occurred two days before what would have been Anne Frank’s 80th birthday….

It is also to be noted that the date of June 11, 2001 is the day on which Timothy James McVeigh was executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building.

The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Totally fascinating piece at BBC News recently:

People may be able to taste words

We are all capable of “hearing” shapes and sizes and perhaps even “tasting” sounds, according to researchers.

This blending of sensory experiences, or synaesthesia, they say, influences our perception and helps us make sense of a jumble of simultaneous sensations.

I’ve often thought about words as having shape, and obviously I’m not alone:

The concept of sharp- and soft-sounding words was introduced in 1929, when Estonian psychologist Wolfgang Kohler designed an experiment that asked people to choose which of two shapes was named “bouba” and which was “kiki”.

The vast majority of people choose kiki for the orange angular shape and bouba for the purple rounded shape.

Professor Spence thinks this strange language can influence our taste buds.

Working with world-renowned chef Heston Blumenthal, he is trying to directly combine an auditory experience into a dish.

“We’ve been giving people dishes and asking them questions about them, including is that food more of a ‘bouba’ or a ‘kiki’? Or is it a ‘maluma’ or ‘takete’?” he told BBC News.

He said that two of the best examples are brie, which is “very maluma”, whereas cranberries are “very takete”.

Mmm, maluma…

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Darwin Gillett, author of the Cosimo book Noble Enterprise: The Commonsense Guide to Uplifting People and Profits, is participating in the “Change This” Manifesto Competition. Gillett’s proposal, “The Old Business Model is Broken,” is for a new kind of business model that works for all:

The traditional “business model” is failing us – not only for employees who (if even still employed) have low morale and little fulfillment from their work, but also customers and even financial shareholders. The profit maximization approach to leading businesses long taught by business schools and practiced by CEOs and their management teams, despite generating impressive short-term gains, has too often led to the depletion of other important company resources and ultimately decline. The manifesto will describe an alternative “business model”– and the kind of leadership needed to make that model work for all contributors to business success. This “new” model will capitalize on major underlying trends in economics, human development and even science. At the heart of this model will be integrity and nobility. The Manifesto will also provide inspiring examples of where this alternative business model is already achieving considerable success.

Please visit the proposal page and click on “Yes, write this manifesto” to vote for Gillett’s vision of a new way of doing business.

Noble Enterprise is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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UPDATE June 4: We’ve just come across an astonishing essay by Benjamin Hoff — author of The Tao of Pooh — in which he decries “publishers who seemed dedicated to opposing at every step the new ideas and forms of writing I was trying to bring to the literary world.” His conclusion is as disheartening as it is extraordinary:

The variety is constantly diminishing as corporate committees of book-ignorant, conservative-minded decision makers reject ideas and rework manuscripts they consider too new and untried, not in harmony with a particular point of view or political ideology, or lacking the potential to quickly and sensationally bring them large amounts of risk-free money. Literary quality and intelligence are being lost as well in the relentless corporate dumbing down of literature and numbing down of readers. And authors.

How many wise, inspiring, entertaining, or even basically well-written books can possibly be produced by an industry that treats authors like dirt on the corporate floor? Literary creativity and professional integrity cannot survive in such a deadly atmosphere.

Please read the entire essay — “Farewell to Authorship: And Why We’re Losing Literature” — for one author’s story about how corporate publishing has failed us. And Hoff is a highly successful, bestselling author who has made his publishers lots of money. Imagine how much worse the situation must be for writers without his track record.

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Google is preparing to sell ebooks, cutting Amazon and its Kindle out of the loop.Celebrity nonreaders proudly publish “books”… at corporate publishers who are proud to sell them.

In 2008, for the first time ever, the number of print-on-demand titles published in the U.S. has exceeded the number of traditional books produced…

…which makes the self-publishing powerhouse AuthorSolutions — which encompasses such companies as AuthorHouse and iUniverse — the biggest publisher of books today.

A thoughtful, provocative piece in The Nation considers the state of the book and the publishing industry in light of the current cultural and economic situation. A few choice excerpts:

Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we’ve been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren’t necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.

A key element in the dissemination of books, independent of publishers and booksellers but essential to both, is the press. The simultaneous collapse of the business model for newspapers and magazines is a gruesome fact of life, and we book people keenly feel the pain of a sister print-on-paper industry, to put it mildly. All citizens should be alarmed by the loss of such a vital necessity to a democracy. But the hard numbers and socioeconomic exigencies of journalism’s huge crisis differ greatly from those of book publishing’s smaller one (though they are often conflated). Here I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.

As the megapublishers tightened their grip in the 1980s, I was dismayed to see a number of once good firms of markedly different publishing style or literary taste make foolish, overpriced mistakes; they seemed to be losing their bearings as they paid ever more money for ever more questionable properties, entrusting the sewing up of these sow’s ears to not very experienced practitioners. I asked Jeremiah Kaplan, founder of the Free Press, a once autonomous and brilliant publisher of serious social science, how things could go so wrong. Besides the obvious motive of greed, he thought it simple. “Businessmen never learn from their mistakes because they always find someone else to blame for them,” he said. “Businessmen only learn from their successes. Except publishers can’t do that.” He smiled. We both knew well that you couldn’t foreordain a bestseller, no matter how wisely you handled every detail. And the necessary skills were disappearing. “Since our successes can’t be replicated, publishers learn nothing! Nothing!” Roger Straus, too, a skillful practitioner if ever there was one, understood the chanciness: “Aw, a blind pig can find a truffle,” he’d say, deflecting praise for publishing a good book well. Yes, a lot of it was blind luck.

The stifling excess of lucrative junk is, naturally, galling for literary artists unknown or only slightly known to the mass market, whose talents are perhaps not suited to it; they want or need the filthy lucre too. Their ever more powerful agents have successfully decoupled the size of the royalty advances they receive from any estimate of the books’ eventual earnings, and routinely assure them that if Knopf or Norton or Morrow fails to earn back the upfront money, it’s because their masterpieces were badly published, not because the advances were implausibly high. This is cheering, of course; writers’ egos are always shaky, and they tend to forget the sage warning that you should disregard compliments extended by someone whose income derives from your own. Also, they won’t acknowledge that literary quality may decline as advances increase; only rarely is a writer liberated into confidence-inspiring freedom by following advice from greedy publishers about Pleasing the Crowd. Willa Cather wasn’t the only fine writer who refused advances for being, in her view, unethical, nor was D.H. Lawrence the only one who found them demeaning. The agents have much to answer for.

There’s much, much more, and it’s all worth a read. The gist of it, though, is that the woes of traditional publishing have been long in the making, and are yet another symptom of the same disease that ails our global economy on the whole: thoughtless arrogance, greed, shortsightedness, and a valuing of quantity over quality.

Dystopic futures aside — does anyone with a brain really doubt that the nightmare of Idiocracy something truly in the realm of fantasy only? — what can literary people, readers and authors and publishers alike, hope for? AuthorSolutions may be the largest publisher by quantity today, but it does not vet its books at all: it exists merely as a conduit for anyone who wants to write a book, regardless of quality or even coherence, to get that book out there. Flexibility and freedom is a good thing, but won’t be merely drown in even more junk than is already throttling us?

Are we going to have to redefine the book to encompass much more than “a finite number of pages bound into a relative portable package”? Or will the sense of what we know as a book today cease to exist, and soon?

We at Cosimo find ourselves right in the middle of these conundrums. We publish print-on-demand books and sell them online, and we love the freedom and the flexibility that gives us to introduce readers to books that have been overlooked by traditional publishers, because they don’t fit into the very narrow, corporate-minded paradigms those publishers have constricted themselves into over recent decades. But Cosimo isn’t an AuthorSolutions-style vanity press, either: we don’t publish everything that crosses our desks.

But if Cosimo isn’t actually alone in this new category of publisher, we’re in a very tiny minority in trying to cope with the new reality of publishing by finding a middle ground between the two wild extremes we’re seeing today.

What is the future of books and bookstores? Or readers and reading? If you’re an author, what do you expect from publishers and the publishing process these days? And where is nontraditional publishing and bookselling going to take us, as readers and as a culture?

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