John Menick Blog

After putting aside a couple hundred books for sale this week, I realized all books have a shelf life. Some books might be lifelong keepers, but many of the rest, including tell-alls about the Bush White House and histories of the Cold War, just end up taking up room after the first reading. The books may have been informative and worthwhile, but they don’t warrant the long-term shelf space. And when you are facing a few years of constant moving, as I am, keeping these books doesn’t make much sense at all.

I had been following the Kindle for a while, and was pretty skeptical of it at first. I didn’t like Amazon’s proprietary format, the high price, and the company’s apparent disinterest in the public library system. But looking at the books I had put aside, I started to understand that there is a kind of book that would do very well on a Kindle. So I decided to give it a try. I figured it would be perfect for two kinds of books: public domain books and timely books that may or may not be of interest in a couple of years.

The device is a wonder, and in many ways feels like the future of reading. The E Ink technology is as readable as printed ink, and the possibility of putting thousands of books in your suitcase is incredibly seductive. Many reviewers have complained about button positioning and the little joystick that navigates the device, but after using it for a week I found most of reviews to be nitpicking. In my mind, it’s no better or worse than the BlackBerry’s microscopic keyboard or the iPhone’s error-prone touchscreen technology. (Although, as a friend of mine said, touchscreen would make a lot of sense when you are flipping pages.)

There are line break issues with the public domain material, specifically Project Gutenberg texts, but they can be easily corrected by processing the document through Amazon’s formatting system. (Send an email to your Kindle email address with the document attached and receive it to your Kindle reformatted. You can pay a small fee for this and have it delivered to your Kindle directly, or choose the free option and have it emailed to your inbox.)

It’s been a week of reading on the device, and I can’t put it down. I’m halfway through one book (Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia) and have a few hundred public domain books waiting in the background. (I probably won’t get to the large majority of them, but no longer have to feel embarrassed about the yards of shelf space they would consume.)

The Kindle won’t replace every kind of book or reading experience. I can’t part with any of my art catalogs and artists books. I have a feeling screens can never replace paper for these kinds of books, and e-readers will probably drive up coffee table book prices even higher as more people turn to devices for black and white text.

The most unexpected change in my reading habits came with reading the New York Times. Amazon gives you the option of signing up for a free trial for the printed edition, and for the first time in years I am reading the paper front to back every day. The edition is delivered wirelessly to your Kindle every evening, and is deleted each day unless you decide otherwise. You can “clip” articles, notate and search them.

Like most people my age, I read most of my news online. The Web has made my reading broader — I’ve lost count of the number of news sources in my RSS reader — but it hasn’t become deeper. Someone once described the personal computer as a “distraction machine” — finish the first paragraph of a news article and in pops a new email, or an IM, or a friend calling on Skype. Getting to the end of a two-page article feels like a lucky break.

At the same time, printed papers are more rare, and about the only time I pick one up is when I’m traveling. Reading this way is a completely different level of engagement. In print, I’ll read most articles, and if I’m in the plane long enough, even the articles I have no interest in will at least get skimmed. Despite the fact that stories are ‘buried’ by editors, it’s much harder to do in print than online. The printed format encourages reading things that are on the twelfth page of business section, because there’s a greater chance of seeing every page. Everything feels more even, paradoxically more accessible.

On the Kindle, the experience is similar. You are provided with an index of all sections of the paper, but must forward through the paper one story at a time. Reviewers have complained about this, and it would be better to have a list of all articles available, but I ended up liking forwarding through letters and one-paragraph stories to get to the content I think I want. The process is less immediate, but it helps avoiding reinforcing your own reading biases.

The Kindle offers a lot, but it’s still lacking in two key areas. In specific:

* Will Amazon offer a plan for the public library system? If the e-book reader is going to be a serious part of any reader’s life, it needs to be integrated into the current lending libraries.

* Amazon’s contemporary American literature selection is almost non-existent. Searches for Faulkner, Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth, and Barthelme either returned no results or a few titles. It was easier to find more obscure authors than many of the most important American writers of the last fifty years. I’m sure it will improve, but if it doesn’t, the lack of selection will cripple the device.

Kindle support for libraries are a big concern for me. Building local libraries is a crazy idea: it’s incredibly redundant if you consider that you have to reproduce the same library everywhere ideally. Currently the New York Public Library has books available through DRMed Adobe PDFs and Mobipocket e-books, but the Kindle supports neither of these formats if the files have DRM. A sly program has been put in place by at least one library to loan out a Kindle pre-loaded with books, and although this is a clever trick, it’s not a real plan. A device-agnostic, federal rental system similar to iTunes’ rental service is what is needed. One database of all published books in the country might provide a reader with e-books that would remain readable for a limited time. Something like this would provide a big benefit to most of the country, specifically for people like me who grew up outside of an urban center and had to deal with horrible local libraries.

E-book readers will have to overcome a lot of technophobia and their own high cost, but if these devices stick around their prices will drop, just as the prices of personal computers and cell phones did and continue to do. Wider Kindle adoption doesn’t so much mean an end to the printed word, but lots of saved shelf space, fewer dead trees, and if there is a plan for libraries, a better national library system.

Last week, the New York Foundations for the Arts published an interview with me as part of their “Meet a NYFA Artist” series. (I was a video fellow last year.) Thought I might reproduce the interview here:

Please tell us what are you working on and what’s coming up for you.

There are usually several things going on at once, but the biggest thing I’m finishing up is a project I shot in Paris last fall called, Paris Syndrome. It’s a video about Japanese travelers in France. I read an article in The Guardian a few years ago about how Japanese travelers allegedly have a great amount of difficulty when travelling in France. There are all kinds of mental health problems, from depression, to paranoia, nervous breakdowns etc. A Japanese psychiatrist living in Paris called it “Paris Syndrome.” I found the article fascinating, but the whole thing seemed little hard to believe. So I was able to go to Paris this year and interview some French and Japanese psychiatrists about it. I’ve got all this footage and I’m currently trying make sense of it all.

What is your biggest influence or inspiration right now?

I get hung up on weird things, which makes answering questions like this really hard. I just wrote something about a book the RAND corporation published in 1955 called, A Million Random Digits with 100000 Normal Deviates. It’s just that: a 600-page book of random numbers. It’s as thick as the Brooklyn Yellow Pages. It’s like a work of conceptual art, only stranger. Something like that can keep me going for weeks.

Do you collect anything?

I collect books. Nothing special – not like rare books or anything. Paperbacks, science fiction, art book, computer books, whatever. I buy them compulsively. It’s a little bit of problem, actually. I also assemble things for my work. I’ve been collecting factoids for a project called Hearsay. One I just wrote down is, “New York is the most diverse city in the world.” Everyone in New York says that, but then someone in London told me, “London is the most diverse city in the world.” So both go in the collection. In the end they’re all presented in a video slideshow. No debate. I believe anything.

How do you start on a project?

It’s really hard to say. I find the best projects aren’t premeditated. If I just start working on something, I know it’s going to turn out well. If I’m forcing myself to start something, it’s a bad sign. Actually, finishing things is the hard part. I think Sam Shepard said something like, “Beginnings are easy. Endings are impossible.” Maybe he didn’t say that, but I like it anyway.

What is an indulgence for you?

Other than interviews? Late-night champagne and oysters in Paris with friends.

What is one technology that you’d like to see developed?

A cheap electric car.

Is there anything that you’d like to see addressed more adequately by artists’ service and funding organizations? If so, how might this issue be addressed?

Health care. It’s way beyond the scope of artists’ organization, though. It’s a national crisis. Health care shouldn’t be “affordable.” It should be free.

What role has the Fellowship played in your life?

It helped me live for a few months as I transitioned back to New York after spending the summer and fall shooting my project abroad. Without it I would have been lost.

What is your workspace like?

A large desk, small MacBook, too many hard drives, chairs. The books are all over the place: a study of the Tunguska incident, a biography of Charles Ponzi, a couple books on the history of tourism, a collection John Cage writings, a Robert Smithson catalog. Occasionally there’s a drawing on a table or wall or the floor. To my left there is a wall of clippings: a group of stills from Warner Brothers cartoons, an image of Antonioni talking to his actors while shooting Zabriskie Point, a bunch of cryptic scribblings that say things like “stage fright” and “inconsistency.” I put the scribblings up there when I get an idea, and then I instantly forget what I originally meant. It took me a while to realize the forgetting part was probably the point.

Scott Kirsner — columnist, blogger and author of Inventing the Movies — speaking to the folks at Google. I’ve been meaning to read Inventing the Movies for a couple of weeks now. It’s one of the few books I know of tracing the technological advancements in the movie industry. More accurately, it looks at Hollywood’s frequent inability to understand those advancements. Kirsner, in both the talk and the book, gleefully points out that most technological advancements were resisted by the industry: first sound, then color, VCRs, digital editing, and now digital projection and online video. It’s worth a look.

From Yahoo News. One is art, the other, not. Maybe.

A few months ago I received my invitation to use Joost, a new, legal peer-to-peer distribution software for Web video. Although hyped (by Joost execs) as both the future of television and streaming video, my initial experience was extremely disappointing, mostly due to the exclusive presence of corporate content. Thinking Joost might expand its content in the coming months, I decided to let some time pass before I tried it again. Last night I checked back, and sure enough nothing has changed. Crucially, most of the programming available to watch is already on the cable stations I refuse to pay for in the first place. I watched about 10 minutes all together and closed the future of Web TV for yet another three months.

The biggest problem with Joost is that the software is open source, but the content is not. Everything you watch is vetted, and the system only utilizes peer-to-peer technology to solve bandwidth issues. There is the much bragged about, and much yawned at, chat function, but as has been said before, I hope someone at Joost HQ brought up during the design meetings that you can already chat while watching TV. (I personally don’t do either separately very much, let alone together.) Otherwise, it’s like TV with a search function, except instead of the search returning surprising results, you get MTV and Comedy Central shows you already knew about and don’t watch.

So what is this software all about? How can small content producers have anything to do with such a locked-down distribution system, and would they even want to? This all could be some highly out-of-touch corporate fantasy, a kind of inverted Kazaa or YouTube, but even if we compare Joost to preexisting television, and ignore the Web, it still makes little sense. Why, if I can watch cable television at a higher resolution and record anything I like, would I bother with hiccup-plagued, unrecordable Joost? It’s almost as if Viacom, CBS, et al. sat down and decided that the best way to conquer the Web was to help develop a system worse than the one they already have.

I’m most likely not the demographic. Maybe Joost hopes its appeal skews young, to a generation of people who might actually chat while watching television. Then again, this this could also be about catching people at a time when they don’t get the chance to watch television they can control. In other words, this is a television station for people with laptops in cafes, airports, waiting rooms, etc. Viacom and others probably figure they can get a new audience for TV that has been locked out due to spacial and technological issues, not cultural ones. For someone who likes this content, I guess it could be seen as better than nothing, but as a full-on replacement or competitor to TV, I’ll stick with the low-res, broad-content YouTube.