Freyburg

Recently I was contacted by StudioNow to create an author video for Random House about “The Tiger,” a new book by Vancouver author John Vaillant. It’s an interesting story about a poacher, a Russian game warden/badass and a very smart, very deadly tiger, and the violent maelstrom all three find themselves in while pursuing their own goals. Check out the video below.

iPhone 4 hasn’t even arrived in Canada yet, but for some reason (likely because the OS isn’t all that country-specific) Apple is allowing Canadians to download iBooks, the Apple branded e-reader currently found on the iPad and on U.S. iPhones.

And as of right now, it’s a complete disaster.

At first iBooks couldn’t even reach the iBookstore. Starting the app resulted in futile warnings, but searching revealed you could find public domain works from Project Gutenberg for download. All well and good, because who DOESN’T want to read Wuthering Heights on their phone….except that your iBookshelf iEats all your iBooks. Keep downloading them, and they’ll simply disappear. SOme people have had luck syncing their books through iTunes, but I haven’t.

More to the point, I’m chompng at the bit to actually BUY some books, but Apple won’t let me. I suspect whenever the phone is introduced in Canada (presumably at the end of July) the store will be populated with bestsellers and other goodies, and it may not even be Apple’s fault. Canadian publishers, like most of the old print guard, aren’t exactly know for forward thinking and bold new strategies.

In other news, getting rid of custom wallpapers dramatically speeds up the performance of my jailbroken iPhone 3G. Weirdly, having a nice bit of background on my home screen seems much more challenging than multitasking several programs at once. Who’da thunk it?

The New Yorker has a great article about how the iPad my exact some serious change on the publishing industry, not exactly known for their future embracing tendencies.

I think that while e-books via the iPad will at first be regarded as a novelty, given time the tablet/pad form factor will become a competitive if not dominant medium for the book and variations thereof that couldn’t be accomplished without digitization. And just like music and television, publishers will fight the future as long as they can, only to be taken out of the loop completely. The internet eliminates the middleman, and I can see a time when authors sell directly to their readers in a million different niches, simultaneously destroying bookstores but making our culture much richer.

Despite the perennial cries of “people don’t want to read books on their phones,” that’s precisely what’s happening according to an article in the New York Times. Everyone has their smartphone with them at all times, making it easy to read on the go and tote a library of titles in your pocket. I’ve read at least 3 or 4 books on my iPhone, and plan to keep doing so until Apple comes out with something better, like their mythical tablet device.

E-books are a medium that, like picture phones, always seems to be right over the horizon but never actually comes to pass. In fact, an excellent article at Ars Technica recently detailed just how backward and resistant to change the publishing industry is, and the struggles pioneering e-book companies have had to go through to get both publishers and the public to accept paperless literature. But a number of factors (including, not surprisingly, the iPhone, but also the impending launch of a new Kindle reader from Amazon) are trending towards the e-book finally emerging as a viable reading platform.

At least, according to the latest obituary for the book business in the NY Metro. It seems a tsunami of problems, including the fact that the publishing world is beginning to resemble Hollywood with its reliance on a few overly expensive mega-hits instead of a solid midlist. Not good for a book lover such as myself.

…and pretty much spent. This was my first time at the San Diego Comic Con, and I have to say it was something of an experience. Over 100,000 people, most of them in costume, hit the San Diego Convention Center every year, and both Hollywood and the comics and games industries show off their latest wares at what has become possibly the most important entertainment event of the year.

I spent most of my time lugging a tripod (I have the bruises on my arms to prove it), coordinating our three crews, and conducting interviews. Amongst the people I got to interview were Dave Gibbons, the artist responsible for the Watchmen, Walking Dead writer Robert Kirkman, the people behind the Spectacular Spider Man cartoon, Dana Snyder (the guy who plays Master Shake on ATHF), the cast of Eureka, and Tori Amos. I also coordinated us interviewing the cast of BSG, which was pretty cool.

Myself and my buddy Rich (cameraman for our unit) only had 20 minutes in the whole con to hit the floor and buy anything for ourselves, but I managed to snag a bunch of graphic novels, a “Con exclusive” Domo-Kun for Mel, another “Con exclusive” (say it with a nerdy sniff in your voice) action figure pack of the 10th and 5th Doctors, and this sweet-ass shirt:

All in all, a fine four days.

“Nixonland,” a new book by Rick Perlstein, looks like an interesting tome about how Nixon was both a reflection of and answer to the state of America in the late Sixties. It also points out that Nixon did succeed in calming an incredibly tumultuous time in the US, when the country was tearing itself apart from within. Compare that to today, when we have an arguably worse president but a relatively stable social and political atmosphere.

When I was a kid, I used to ravenously consume my dad’s old Mad magazines. It’s fair to say that a lot of my love of both reading and recent history comes from Mad (my knowledge of the Nixon administration, for one), and I’m glad that my collection has now been passed on to another young guy with an appetite for satire and sarcasm. One of my favorite Mad writer/artists was Al Jaffe, and it turns out he’s still kicking at 87, and still drawing amazing fold-ins for the back page of the magazine.

Good luck with that, Amazon. The Kindle e-book reader the online titan is getting ready to trot out is a good try, but at $400, I don’t think I’ll be picking one up soon. Why spend that kind of money when you can just buy a book for far less? I also don’t think a dedicated reader is the answer. Apple’s iPhone is a step in the right direction…if you have a device that’s your phone, your media player, a web device, and also carries your entire library around, then I can see the e-book taking off. In fact, that’s the direction magazines and newspapers probably should head in. But the Kindle? No thanks.