First novelist Todd Shimoda's thoughtful review of Goodbye Madame Butterfly appears on The Asian Review of Books, then the Daily Yomiuri runs Christina Kuntz's interview of Sumie. Wish this sort of thing could happen every day ... or at least every week.

Here's an interesting piece from last week's NYT about an online publisher who was lured back to print because of the tactile quality of magazines. Nice to see that print is not fading without a fight.

The other point in this article worth mentioning is that the print magazine Mr. Minor is publishing derives its content from its readers. We've discussed this sort of approach (hitotoki travel guides, anyone?) at CMP many times, but Mr. Minor has the deep pockets to do it right now. Good for him.

Neojaponisme, one of the most consistently interesting and thoughtful online publications on Japan these days, just posted an excellent (and bilingual) interview with Sumie Kawakami. Here's an excerpt:

Is there not an unavoidable psychological issue that most Japanese men cease to see their wives as women after they give birth to children?

Many Japanese men say that if their wives have children they are no longer lovers: they are mothers. In Japan, there are only mothers or lovers. Nothing in-between. In a way, wives with children become special because they are given a special status beyond lovers. But the physical relationship often gets neglected.

If you go back to the employment issues we were talking about, after a family has children, the father may work around two hours away from home and he may not come back home until midnight. So he has a life outside of their house, but the wives also have their own lives. The woman’s life has a total radius of 3km with the kids’ school in the middle. Her life is established there, right? And she won’t probably go beyond that 3km unless she really needs to.

After many years of this lifestyle, the married couple have nothing in common. She is focused on daily activities — PTA, neighbors, school — while he is totally committed to his work. Even if they both think family is very important, they forget how to do things together. Maybe on the weekends they will go out together as family but that’s about it. It gets very difficult for them to actually talk together and understand each other.

1. The book covers blog bring us another wonderful roundup of beautiful book shelf designs.

2. The Book Design Review has a collection of their favorite covers for 2007.

3. Magazine.org brings us the best magazine covers of the year.

4. People still make zines? Apparently so.

And finally ...

5. Some thoughts on canonical web designs.

Congratulations to Jiro Ono (photographed here by Craig) on becoming the oldest 3-star chef, as designated by the Michelin Guide.

Craig photographed Mr. Ono as part of a sushi roundtable we organized back in 2006. Read the two-part interview for japaninfusion.com here and here.

PS to Craig: Based on the prices in the Mainichi story, that free sushi lunch Jiro made the day you photographed him probably would have cost around $300!

On the chilly eve of December 18th, you (and all your friends!) are invited into the warming embrace of The Pink Cow, a tavern of delicious brews and sloppy wraps, to celebrate -- Yes! Celebrate! -- the publication of the fourth Chin Music Press Literary Objet: Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage and the Modern Japanese Woman. Author (and Madame) Sumie Kawakami will be there! Friendly faces from Chin Music Press will be there! All those literate, well sighted and hungry for the written word will be there!

Come join us for a night of literary tom-foolery, perhaps a reading or two and endless fireside chats about housewives, affairs and finding love in this now wintry city of Tokyo.

When: Tuesday, December 18th. From 7:00 pm
Where: The Pink Cow, (behind Kodomo no Shiro in Omotesando / 10 minutes walk from Shibuya station)
Why: To celebrate publication of the book Goodbye Madame Butterfly by Sumie Kawakami
How much: Free!
What: Great food, drinks, music and literary hob-nobbing

It's out. It's ugly. And its reception has been somewhat luke-warm. Then again, when the first generation iPod came out, people laughed, spat and declared it an abject failure. Here's some ramblings from the bloggerheads:

Mr. Pilgrim:

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Mr. Greenfield:

Unless something comes along to radically reorient my thinking, I’m willing to bet Chris Heathcote has nailed it in eighteen words: “Kindle is what happens when a non-cool company attempts to do a closed service: a car crash.”

Mr. Godin:

The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he's really really lucky, he'll sell a million of these things in a year. And that means that at $10 a book, you need to have significant market share to make an impact. The Sony reader has been out for months and it has sold, perhaps, a few thousand units.

Mr. The Reader

Mr. Fireball

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Mr. Kawasaki

I have used it and if someone gave me a choice of receiving an iPhone or a Kindle, I’d pick the Kindle.

Updates:

Here's a couple sources with more specific details on the Kindle:
15 Things I Just Learned About the Amazon Kindle (Boing Boing)
Many Details About The Kindle (Engadget)

This is the week that Amazon releases Kindle, their new electronic book reader to the public. We should be somewhat excited — if for no other reason than to see what a progressive company can do with eInk technology. Sony has had a four-year head start on producing electronic readers and distributing electronic books and, not unlike most things at 21st century Sony, they've all but botched it. I'm in my 20s, surrounded by tech savvy and literary types, live in Japan, and don't know anyone (not one person) who owns a Sony Reader — they've failed.

Amazon, despite the publishing industry's love-hate relationship with them (we love them for ship-ship-shipping our books all over the place; we hate them for selling our books for penny-profits thus undermining anyone else [including direct sales from publishers like us] trying to make a profit selling books), you can't deny they've affected the industry more than anyone else — certainly in the online realm if not also in distribution.

So what's up with the Kindle? Here's the shortlist:

- 10.3 ounces
- 30 hours (max) battery life
- Retail: $399
- 167 dot-per-inch display
- Uses typeface Caecilia for body text
- Design inspired by both the year 1982 and the film War Games
- Wireless (not just WiFi but a ubiquitous, work-anywhere (only in America one presumes) network called Whispernet)
- Browses the web
- New releases and Hardcovers for $9.99
- Old books for much much less
- First chapters for free

A quick type-dork note on Caecilia, from the Veer type notes page:

This Linotype typeface was designed in 1990 by Peter Matthias Noordzij (PMN), and named for his wife, Caecilia. Because its shapes are humanist rather than geometric, PMN Caecilia is easier on the reader’s eye and so more useful as a text typeface than most slab serif designs.

Some quotes (and notes) from the Newsweek article on Kindle:

Regarding the wireless connectivity:

'Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices, notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just Wi-Fi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a device, it's a service."'

'"The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos.'

This will allow readers to theoretically buy any book on Amazon, anywhere, whenever they want. And it's important to emphasize that Mr. Bezos isn't talking about renting books — taking a cue from the successful iTunes sales model, they'll be selling to own. The lingering unknown is in what kind of format these books will be provided. Will there be DRM? Will you also be able to read these books on your computer? How many devices will you be able to share them with? We'll find out this week when Kindle comes out, but if the Amazon MP3 store is representative of the Amazon digital sales ethos, then we can assume a nonrestrictive, reasonable license associated with each eBook.

On updates:

Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem — in fact, instead of buying a book in one discrete transaction, you could subscribe to a book, with the expectation that an author will continually add to it. This would be more suitable for nonfiction than novels, but it's also possible that a novelist might decide to rewrite an ending, or change something in the middle of the story.

Anyone who has ever published a book knows receiving the first copies from the first print-run is a terrifying experience. You are both overjoyed and, quite frankly, channeling some form of schizophrenia — as you're frantically flipping through looking for printing, editorial and design errors, you're also frantically trying to block out your ability to see said errors. It's like the mother of a convicted murderer hugging her child trying not to let the murderer aspect interfere with her love ... Or maybe it's nothing like that.

And finally, two quotes — one from Mr. Levy (the author of the article) and the other from James Patterson:

Levy: 'That fort [of physical books and traditional publishing] will stand, of course, for a very long time. The awesome technology of original books—and our love for them—will keep them vital for many years to come.'

Patterson: "The baby boomers have a love affair with paper ... But the next-gen people, in their 20s and below, do everything on a screen."

I think Patterson's quote provides a tidy summation of what one in the industry can expect: the fort Levy describes has a lifespan only as long as, and probably much, much shorter than the remaining lifespan of baby-boomers.

In closing, my thoughts on Kindle are that I think the infrastructure of the Kindle system (having the books in a digital format, the collaboration with and support of large publishing houses and having a simple, ubiquitous sales system in place) is more exciting than the Kindle physical object. For a large company, Amazon has been surprisingly generous in opening up its databases and systems for the public to build on top of. If the Kindle system was open in such a way that allowed other devices (and I'm looking at you iPhone and iTouch) to patch into it, then I think we're onto something really interesting.

Other Reading:
- The Future of Reading Steven Levy for Newsweek
- Engadget
- Gizmodo

Update: Newsmap and Google News have worked out a solution and it looks like the project will be able to continue without interruption.

The Marcos Weskamp project Newsmap, one of the first and arguably one of the best pieces of 'news visualization' software has run into a bit of a snag: Google shut down access to their data. While Google explicitly states 'screen scrapping' is in violation of their Terms of Service, the fact of the matter is Google itself scrapes the web every day and the blocking of access to a free, non-profit resource like Newsmap is both hypocritical and sad.

Post a comment here to voice your support for the Newsmap project.

Sumie Kawakami joined us at Wordstock to sign copies of her new book, Goodbye Madame Butterfly.

This was the first time Chin Music had a stand-alone booth at a book fair. Now that we have four titles, it makes sense, and it makes it a lot easier to get into conversations about the vision of the company as well as the stories inside each book.

The weekend was a success, not just because we sold a lot of books, but because Sumie was able to talk to potential readers, and because we were able to finally display the four gorgeous covers by Craig on one table. We were inundated with "how beautiful" all weekend. It was exciting for us to see how those four covers lured people to our booth. Brother Dave, manning our booth at the New Orleans Bookfair, echoed our thoughts. A few of the comments we heard give a sense of the reaction to Craig's work:

"This is exactly what the Internet can't do."

"I don't normally judge a book by its cover, but in this case ..."

"You should charge people to pet these books."

"I'm not even interested in the topic of this book, but I want to buy it just to have on my shelf."

But Jay Gatsby we're not. Our books are both beautiful and worth reading. The conversations Sumie was having with women at the festival were intense and earnest. Not once, I slinked away to go bother Eli Horowitz at the McSweeney's booth, who was just behind the curtain from us, or go talk to the very good folks at Two Dollar Radio.

To all you Tokyo livin', book and art lovin' folk out there, I'd like to announce that CMP titles are now carried by On Sundays (WARNING: Most horrible website ever.), the fantastic and long-running select bookshop in the basement of Watrium Museum. The quirky shop is wonderful and the proprietor loves all things books and whimsical (he's hosting a small exhibition on antique microscope sets and their hand-made boxes right now!).

If you've never been to either the museum or the bookshop, it's a great Sunday afternoon trip. You can get there from Gaien-mae station -- walk up Gaien Higashi Doori away from Roppongi Hills. Watarium is about five minutes away on the left just after the pedestrian footbridge.

One of the nice things about the museum component (besides it being a lovely space) is that tickets are valid for the length of the entire exhibition. Considering most good exhibitions should require more than one visit -- especially long-running ones -- this sort of generous rationality is a welcome breath of fresh air.

The bookshop and stationery goods shop are both accessible without having to see an exhibition. There's also a small cafe hanging over the book browsing area so you can sip a coffee and spy on book perverts, molesters, paper whores and literary deviants alike.

Rumor also has it that the family running the museum lives in the pod on the top of the building.

Let me direct your attention to The Reader, a blog dedicated to reporting on and pondering the evolution of the book. I stumbled upon the site looking for concrete information on whether or not the iPod Touch could read PDFs, thus potentially making it a wonderful eBook reader. I turns out they can (sort of), and The Reader confirms my suspicions that a high-density pixel count will yield happiness for the eyes over long text sessions.

I have spent a couple of thirty minute sessions in Apple stores flicking my way around the web with the iPod Touch. To me, the music and video capabilities are a distant second to the way the high-pixel count screen renders text and web pages. This is where written word is heading, like it or not, and it's quite exciting to see it in action — and what beautiful action it is. Now if I could only afford one.

The Hitotoki London holding page is up and we're currently accepting submissions. The London site is set to launch mid-December so if you'd like your British infused hitotoki to be included in the launch, please submit by the end of November.

A submission form is available from the holding page and as always, you can sign up for the mailing list or subscribe to the feed to be notified of the launch.

Press: Hypen Press
Country: UK

Hyphen Press publishes books on design – in the largest sense of the word. Based in London, our books are mostly produced on the European continent, in the attempt to find good standards of industrial craft. We cherish writing that is lively, precise, free of jargon; pictures that are realistic, vivid. We try to make books that are good for the reader.

I own Hochuki and Kinross' Designing Books and can attest that these guys put out beautiful goods.

We'll be heading down to Portland, OR, this Friday to set up our Chin Music Press table for Wordstock, the biggest book festival in the Pacific Northwest. We'll also be bringing Sumie Kawakami, fresh from Japan, to sign copies of Goodbye Madame Butterfly and chat with readers about the book all weekend long.

Wordstock should be a lot of fun because, while all the big publishers will have their booths and many well-known writers will be there, the festival decided to keep the booths very affordable. That means you'll see the Chin Musics of the world rubbing shoulders with the large, intimidating New York houses (we'll be the ones not accepting credit cards ...). So come by, say hi and buy a book or two. We'll have some nice discounts for you.

OK, if you can't tell already, I'm pulling all of todays links from the Kottke site which was guest-blogged (quite spectacularly) last week by Joel Turnipseed.

The last link from this batch from me is going to be his interview with Jessica Hagy who I guess is known for her bloggo-meme-exploded index card site. I had never heard of her or seen her index card site but she apparently got an agent and book deal with Penguin because of it. This is the internet at it's best: someone using an out-of-the-box blogging tool (blogger) with standard templates -- in other words: a minimal amount of energy on the part of the content producer to engage with technology -- producing consistently solid content regularly, and coming out way, way on top. It's nice to see that high quality content and good ideas coupled with a little bit of luck are still able to rise above the muck out there.

Already five days late on this one: November 1st marks the start of National Novel Writing Month. I love that simply the declaration of a period of time as being "novel writin' time" is enough to push us would-be writers over the edge into actually completing something. There's a whole psych 101 class on deadlines, procrastination and goal setting wrapped up in this project.

Kottke interviews Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Time among others. He probably became most well known for giving his first book Down and Out away for free online while still allowing readers other avenues of purchase.

From the interview:

CD: So, let's pick the issues right. Let's first of all say that fraud or plagiarism is bad for a number of different reasons—not all of them having to do with the writer, some of them having to do with the reader. Readers deserve to know that the thing that they buy has been accurately labeled. I also wouldn't approve if someone sold Coke in a Pepsi can. Not because I particularly like either beverage, but I think fraud is wrong. So that's the first question. The second question is, "How would I feel if a corporation misappropriated the fruits of my labor and profited by it without my permission?" And that's a meatier question, but when you conflate the two you just confuse the issue.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"This is something that is being done secretly -- people don't know it is going on," said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, based in San Diego. "Consumers are without really knowing providing a very detailed picture of their lifestyles, spending habits and interests."

While there are ways to keep the cookies at bay, a "do not track" list sounds like a good solution for those of us who use the Net all the time but aren't that tech-savvy.