Alison Behnke’s Kim Jong Il’s North Korea is a fine, evenhanded introduction to both the country and its dictators. The title of the book may give the impression that it is only about Kim Jong Il and modern-day North Korea, but Behnke covers a lot more than this. Acknowledging the difficulties of gathering accurate information about the country and the Kims, Behnke begins with a brief overview of the history of the Korean Peninsula, including its subjugation by Japan and the circumstances that led to the partitioning of Korea. She then moves on to Kim Il Sung—his origins, how he gained leadership, the Korean War, and life in North Korea under his dictatorship—before covering what is known about his son, Kim Jong Il, and the younger Kim’s dictatorship. Several first-person accounts by defectors are included in the text (they are also featured in a few sidebars), but the tone of the book is for the most part factual, describing the propaganda, purges, and other ways the Kims have maintained power without embellishment. Behnke concludes with a brief discussion of what might happen next as a result of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and the possibilities of reunification.
Many full-color pictures and graphics enhance the appeal of this book, which is a good choice for student research. It’s informative enough for most high schoolers, yet readable enough for middle schoolers. A timeline, bibliography, further reading section, source notes, and an index add to its usefulness.
Also, can I just say how great I think the covers in Lerner’s Dictatorships series are? (Well, not the Mugabe one, but definitely this and Mao Zedong’s China.) Some YA non-fiction covers just flat out suck (yes, Mason Crest, I’m looking at you), but these are so stylish! and eye-catching! All in all, this is a well-written, well-designed book.
Now, internet commerce is my life blood, so I pay attention to elements of
it on a daily basis - how many orders are coming in, from where, for what,
for how much - basically boring but vital stuff. What I try to take a
more careful look at, from time to time is what forces are driving
commerce on the internet forward, and what, if anything, can I do about
it. Looking around this time I was left with a Where’s My Jetpack
, where’s my damned bubble car feeling. While I’d had the
feeling, viscerally if not intellectually, that the internet was zipping
along and more in danger of leaving me behind than getting stuck in the
mud, this appears to be exactly what has happened to internet commerce,
especially that first great application, books.
Amazon in 1998 - look familiar?
Lets look back:
1995 I was connecting to my University’s server with a blazing 2400 baud
modem and zipping along fudging bibliographical entries for my grad school
papers on the text browser Lynx and Telnet. Often when connecting to
websites with creaky databases, I yearn for the days of telnet. Anyway,
one day we all moved to Netscape née Mosaic and,
lo and behold, there were pictures. Following along were Amazon and Ebay
and internet commerce - not just ordering products off of internet
bulletin boards - was born. At the time, and especially during the great Internet Stock
Market Bubble, it seemed like the internet would grow exponentially
unleashing brilliant technological advances every 8-10 seconds until the
universe collapsed in upon itself. If you’d listened to the media, you’d
have heard that this was actually happening, but if you look back at the
early days of Ebay and Amazon, it’s really hard to tell much of a
difference between then and now - the growing popularity of comparatively
backwards sites like craigslist and the
classifieds on Facebook are a testament to how far we haven’t come.
At least ABE was cuter in 1996.
The biggest difference (other than some more pictures and Amazon’s look
inside the book feature which we’ll revisit) is seller uptake. One of the
amazing things that the internet has unearthed is that sellers are
infinitely quicker to embrace new technologies than buyers. What this has
meant is that books you could sell on the old ABE or Ebay for $50 because,
pre-internet, they had been locally scarce, now can’t be sold for $6 and a
bag of chips. Capitalism encourages the breaching of new markets, but
consumers are much more stuck in their ways than the more desperate and
enterprising sellers - this leads to some, let’s say interesting, supply
and demand disparities. Obviously, it also means that ridiculously
obscure books that were on interest to no one locally can now be sold for
$250 in a flash to the four people 1000 miles away who are jonesing for
it, but this tends to happen below the surface, for now we’ll focus on the
surface.
Twelve years ago I used to cruise Onsale
the early internet auction site (which, who knew, still exists in some
form) and buy piles of great stuff that they were liquidating. I used to
have boxes of steak delivered from Omaha steaks for pennies on the dollar,
exotic meats - I bought an $8,000 couch for $400 and still have it in my
living room. Buying weird stuff on the internet was fantastic in the
early days - sellers had jumped into this new distribution system with
both feet and the comparatively few buyers out there were reaping the
benefits. It’s easy to think this has radically changed, but the same
dynamic is still largely at play, it’s just been turned on its head a bit.
Strange and rare items are now offered at a premium, and common items are
worthless, but in both cases the cause is largely the huge number of
sellers relative to buyers.
Innovation has been limited (have a look at any of the book sites via the
Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine which archives sections of the internet)- the internet is
still basically an electronic version of a print catalog, with little to
recommend it, particularly bookselling wise (clothing has actually come a
long way - but clothing is a much harder sell online, so they’ve had to
work harder and this has turned them into leaders), as an alternative. In
some ways it’s amazing that so many people are willing to shop for books
online, given how basically lame it is. What innovation there is has
largely been of either the bells and whistles variety, or part of a Seller
Cold War, driven by the aggregator sites, usually Ebay. Compare shopping
at Amazon to shopping at Nike.com or designing your own jeans at Lands End - it’s not very exciting. There are
a few items of interest though, that may point the way to the future of
bookselling.
1 - Look inside the book. This has finally moved bookselling into the
realm that music has occupied for some time - being able to sample the
product before buying. What will be interesting is whether this, and the
Kindle and related readers, starts to sink sales as perception as to what
a book is begins to change. Music, once freed from the confines of the CD
and record, rapidly evolved into a “shareable” rather than buyable,
medium.
2 - Amazon reviews. What was once a good start on user generated content,
now seems decidedly Web 1.0. With the advent of Wikipedia, tag clouds, and social
networking, static customer reviews are of limited helpfulness is
navigating the vast world of new and used books.
3 - Ebay has done a great job encouraging the use of pictures online - a
must for forward thinking booksellers. However, they’ve also encouraged
sellers in a mutual assured destruction arms race with bold listings,
gallery listings, featured, featured plus, featured super extra bold plus,
etc. Most of these features could be done without - and if sellers all
got together and decided not to use them, it would be the same as everyone
using them. Just like in the prisoner’s dilemma though, win wins are hard
to orchestrate.
4 -Between the Covers is an independent site that has done a great job of maximizing Web 1.0
features. A likable site, 3-D rotating books, and book related games lend
a stickiness and character to their book selling. It may not be the
future, but if it’s the past, it’s the best of it.
What some of this suggests is a path for the future of online selling.
Robust flash based shopping sites like Nike’s are both more fun to shop
on, and more intuitive to navigate. They are also, at least in theory, no
more difficult to run as a front end than current sites. If coupled with
additional content, the conceptual framework for which has already been
laid by Amazon, they could begin to utilize the strengths of the internet
and lead us beyond the electronic versions of paper catalogs that we
remain stuck with.
For example: Amazon reviews are great as far as they go - they allow
customers, and some paid reviewers, to enhance individual book listings
with deep content. Why not move into the current internet and allow users
to generate all sorts of content. It’s already been shown by sites like
Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, and others, that the cheapest and most
effective way to both generate content and create loyal users, is to allow
them great latitude in adding information to sites. Why not let them tag
items, comment on titles - even comment on pricing. On a site like ABE
where sellers hit the site much more than buyers (and have more invested
in it) you would rapidly generate useful content that, coupled with tag
clouds and the like, would allow navigation of the site in new and
potentially profitable ways. Crowd sourcing (as they call it) can be
extremely unpredictable, and the actual results can scarcely be guessed
at, but it’s shocking that no one has given it more of a shot.
ABE’s purchase of a stake in LibraryThing suggests that they
see this future, but nothing has been done to link the sites since their
May 2006 investment. They need to at least run a beta test linking the
sites and see what happens - the only way I see to inspire a new
generation of collectors is to embrace the social networking of the
internet and let people pursue their interests. As general searches on
both Google and in book selling databases become less reliable, and
browsing more pointless as stock grows, an alternate avenue for finding
what you’re looking for is vital.
Amazon’s look inside the book - and the long history of music samples
online - also suggest ways to enhance the selling of books. Why not link
to a books google books page, OCLC listing, or, even better, the Open Library (an improved, open content
version of Google Books in the early stages of development but showing
great promise). Sadly, this is easier on Amazon than ABE because of the
cataloging system Amazon licensed from the British Library, but it should
be possible. You could even have much of the user content on Open
Library, potentially helping both ABE and Open library.
I’ll have some ideas for hastening the future of online book selling in
Part II, but just imagine how all those late adopters and potential
customers out there would hop on the internet and buy stuff if it didn’t
continue to seem like an extremely complicated version of a print catalog
or a lame version of The Home Shopping Network. If infomercials and
television shopping channels continue to survive, it’s only because the
internet isn’t doing what it ought to be.
Posted by Tom Nealon of Pazzo Books
– Pazzo Books 4268 Washington St. Roslindale, MA 02131 pazzobooks.com 617-323-2919
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Comes the news this week that two publishers have launched distribution initiatives that feature competing visions of the future.
Harper Collins is releasing complete texts online from such web-savvy authors as Neil Gaiman and Paul Coelho.
Random House on the other hand is selling chunks of business books for small fees.
This almost 20 years after the creation of the world wide web. Is it just me or does this sound a bit slow, considering how the web has so far revolutionised music distribution and all sorts of human interaction?
Nicholas Clee, on the Guardian Book Blog, notes:
These announcements suggest we have not moved on from the year 2000 - at least a generation ago, in internet terms.
Clee saves us some research by outlining how authors from Stephen King to Seth Godin have been working the web for years way before the publishers perked up to its possibilities.
One author commenting on Clee’s blog post wrote:
The publishing houses are stuck in old modes of doing things, trying to make money (yes, they have to survive). Finally! they are allowing the public to read their books without trekking to the bookstore? But they are doing this after the books have been out and their window of opportunity is closed. And in whose interests?
When the Media Guardian invited
media movers and shakers to predict the future, book publishers were conspicuous in their absence.
For the publishing world, the online universe is a Brave New World. Aldous Huxley describes his novel as set in a “negative utopia” – which pretty much probably reflects how publishing regards the web.
Author and marketing guru Godin sees the Harper announcement as a typical traditional book publishing mentality attempting a new initiative: "They took all the [viral marketing] things that work — that make it spread — and they're turning them off." His idea is that marketing is "trying to start conversations, and if that conversation takes place the ideas spread." - 22nd Century Press Blog
I guess the key word in
this Brave New World is Brave. The initiatives announced today are at best tentative and at worst fearful.
Sure, the industry is constantly struggling to stay on the right side of the bottom line.
But publishers should do better.
Brave New World image copyright Tony Hamilton, DreamingAloud.com
Today was my concentrate-on-writing-
and-stay-off-the-internet-day. But I had to blog when I heard about author Patry Francis.
Patry Francis was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer just as her debut novel The Liar's Diary was going out in paperback. Which meant she would not be able to do the publicity work that makes or breaks most novels.
In response, author bloggers have rallied to do Francis' publicity for her, naming January 29 as Patry Francis Blog Day, with more than 300 bloggers mentioning and reviewing The Liar's Diary. The creativity and breadth of this effort is mind-blowing and inspiring. Read about it here — and look at the how well things are going on technorati!
Literary Agent Kristin Nelson comments on her blog:
Don’t ever let anyone convince you that publishing is “an every person for him or herself” industry because it’s not. There is a real community of writers and if you haven’t got connected, ask yourself why not?
Indeed. That's the power of the web for you and it's down to us authors to harness its potential.
The Patry Francis situation brings to mind YA author
Siobhan Dowd (photo, left by G. Morgan) who died last year and wasn't able to promote her magnificent
A Swift Pure Cry (buy it you guys!) as much as she would have liked because she was so ill. A Siobhan Dowd Trust has been set up to help disadvantaged children with their reading skills (
donations are welcome here). Siobhan's next book
Bog Child - which I hear is a cracker - will be published posthumously in February.
This piece came out in today's Publishing News and since PN only keeps their articles online for a week, I am kindly reprinting it here for future reference:
THE PENGUIN DIGITAL Marketing team has joined forces with MySpace to discuss ways of effectively promoting new authors on the social networking site. The first novelist to be marketed through this medium is Joe Dunthorne, the 26- year-old UEA Creative Writing graduate who caused a bidding war over his debut novel, Submarine, which will be published in hardback by Hamish Hamilton on 7 February.
Dunthorne and Penguin Digital Marketing Director Anna Rafferty met with the MySpace team earlier this month to explore raising his MySpace profile.
Plans include adding film content of Dunthorne reading 'off-cuts' - passages he wrote for the novel that didn't make it in - and video diaries,including footage of the Submarine launch party, along with personal recordings of his thoughts and feelings on becoming a published author. The revamped page, which will run under Dunthorne's name, will be live in time for publication.
Rafferty said Dunthorne had “exactly the right demographic for a project like this; he already had lots of material as well as his own profile, and we'll be building on that. This isn't just a microsite for Submarine or about Oliver [the novel's teenage protagonist], it's about Joe and the story behind the book. MySpace can help us get the message to the right people and amplify it to their audience.”
A spokesperson for MySpace, which has 10 million unique users in the UK alone and 110 million worldwide, said: “We have the potential to specifically promote artists and Joe is the first author we're trying it with. There are editorial areas of MySpace where we can highlight interesting content - we are a social networking site but we're also a content platform, always looking for things that will interest our users. We see ourselves as being a place where things start, so it's a great place for Joe to promote himself.”
Dunthorne has already been hailed a 'Rising Star of 2008' by the Observer despite the novel not yet being published.
It will be interesting to see how MySpace enhances its marketing of authors — many YA authors have already cottoned onto the fact that MySpace is a good place to get close to their readers.
Some in fact have become very good at using MySpace to this end. There's the self-published fantasy author Steven Oliverez who
used MySpace to drive sales of his book The Elder Staves to no. 25 on the Amazon bestseller list. Oliverez says:
Buzz creates more buzz. Since there's no marketing or publishing company behind teh book, it really helps to be online, able to connect with readers directly. Being on MySpace makes you seem more approachable, and that makes it a great tool for authors.
Searching MySpace for Joe Dunthorne's page, all I found was a 15 year old with the status tag: "I am very, very bored". Could it be my spelling? You can
view Steven's MySpace page here. Warning: if you have sensitive hearing, turn the volume down first.
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well – what people don't know is that Harper Collins only launched this free online reading site after the bestselling author Paulo Coelho revealed his pirate coelho blog to the world during the DLD conference in Munich last January.
I read the interveiw he gave for Newsweek and can't help to join the dots:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/108715
I doubt Harper Collins would have made such a move without this author's pressure.
Thumbs up for Pirate Coelho!
hey thanks for the comment and the newsweek link. i was shocked to hear that coelho's blog was comprehensively hacked the other day - there were mutterings about the empire striking back!
Readers - read this New York Times piece for more info about what Coelho's up to.