Sandstone Press

Leave those cobwebs a while longer

Posted by RLD on 21st June 2009

A few years ago Sandstone Press entered electronic publishing by commissioning novellas in English from Ron Butlin and Suhayl Saadi, in Gaelic from Flora MacDonald and Michael Newton, and poetry from Anna Aguilar-Amat of Catalonia translated by our friend Anna Crowe.  We applied some of our thinking from the Sandstone Vista series for adult learners about the value of background colour, some other thinking about wide paragraph breaks as being particularly valuable to those who are reading from a screen, and had Edward Garden Graphic Design create some really quite beautiful PDFs.  We traded them through our web site using PayPal as a vehicle for payment and editorially, artistically and practically made something that really did work.

In those idea-driven days before Sony Readers and Amazon Kindles the notion was that people would read them from their computer screens, transferring them to other hardware as was most useful to them.  Travelling by train to Edinburgh and Glasgow as I did frequently at that time I visualised busy commuters taking time out from their spread sheets and work documents to enjoy the read without ever having to put their laptop away.

I look back on our imagination and audacity with considerable pride.  No one else was doing this kind of thing.  As so often, Sandstone led.  We sold quite a few copies but not enough to make the venture practical and eventually stopped.  Since then Flora and Michael’s two novellas have become our first two hard copy books for Gaelic learners, Anna’s work has also appeared in hard copy from another publisher and, since Sandstone is not yet ready to publish poetry with success, we wish both her and Anna Crowe every success.  Ron’s story has been published in one of his excellent books from Serpent’s Tail.  As far as I know Suhayl’s novella is still in abeyance.  It will appear though; it is well worth a greater readership.

In March 2005, in an article titled WATCH THOSE COBWEBS SHIVER, published on the Hi-Arts web site, Northings, I wrote:-
‘Right now I am reading my own words, as I write them, from the screen of an object that looks very like a television set.  This is design for you.  When the first motorised vehicles were manufactured they were called horseless carriages and that is exactly what they looked like.  The designers made them resemble the very objects they were going to replace; but that was just the starting point.  Very quickly they evolved into flat lorries, sports cars, saloons, delivery vans.  A more determined purpose demanded a more particular shape.  One size, very definitely, did not fit all.
It seems the thrust of present design in computer hardware is in putting more and more function into smaller and smaller units.  Can this last?  Pretty soon, I think, the computer will find itself in all kinds of shapes for all kinds of functions and the reading object is going to look and feel something like a book does now.  It’s likely though, to hold the contents of the Mitchell Library.  Likely also to scroll rather than turn pages.  Of course delivery will be by download.  Fear nought, this will be better than the books we know or it won’t take off.  The contents will also be much, much cheaper and hard copy, which will never go away, will eventually belong entirely to the world of art and craft.’

I would like to think that Sony, Random House and the other international monsters were listening, but no doubt they were already at work.  About ten days ago my Sony Reader arrived and, yes, it looks and feels much like a book.  Not so much the paper or hard back books we are accustomed to now, it is more like the leatherback objects of yore.  Right away I fell in love with it.

It came with two discs and a multi-folded A3 sheet of instructions; English on one side, French on the other.  On both sides instructions are numbered One to Eight.  On both sides there is a two panel gap where Five should be, the first ominous sign.

Of the two discs, one accesses the two necessary programmes: eBook Library and Adobe Digital Editions.  eBook Library was easy.  When Digital editions came down, up popped a panel that said ‘Cannot find Digital Editions folder’.  What the folder is, or its purpose, was not stated.  Not feeling ready for this challenge, indeed made dizzy by it, I put the other disc in, 100 Free Books.  These books are what are termed ‘classics’.  You don’t need my opinion of this usage, you will know what the perpetrators mean as well as I do.  The classics are as published by Pennsylvania State University, the bare texts.

Since we are about to publish RLS IN LOVE I chose TREASURE ISLAND as my first Sony Reader read, a book which all who wish to learn how to write should fall on.  TREASURE ISLAND is how it’s done.

What you do to actually get to the book is drag the title from the disc (after the contents pop up on the screen) to eBook Library and there it appears.  So far so good.  Connecting the reader by its USB means you can again drag the title, this time from the title list, into where the word ‘reader’ has appeared, in the function list on the left hand side.  Now you are cooking on gas.  Turning to the reader itself, after disconnecting of course, I confronted that first truly sensual experience of the reading process, sniffing the leather.  Ah-aa-hh Bisto!

The reader sits easily in the hands, easy as a book,  a silvery plastic rectangle 123mm wide x172 high containing a 92 x 123mm not-quite-white screen.  Wise Sony, their designers must read Northings.  Bottom left has a button for turning pages forward or back, a little magnifying glass button to enlarge the font a possible twice before returning to default, and another button that turns the top left corner over to make a bookmark.  You can bookmark any number of pages in any number of books and return to them quickly.  No operations are instant.  Turning a page takes a second or two.  Another two buttons on the right side also turn pages forward or back.

I reread TREASURE ISLAND with enormous pleasure and after that felt I should confront Digital Editions and its mysterious missing folder, and buy a book.  Sony recommend Waterstones as purchasing place and give direct access to their web site.

Now comes an area of profound failure, but on the commercial side, not the technical, and with the fault not necessarily residing with Waterstones.  Like most people who will read this article I read mostly off the mainstream.  Yes, I dare to make this assumption about you, my friend in books.  As chance would have it I am, at the moment, reading about as close to the charts as I am likely to go.  Beside me as I tap away are copies of DUE CONSIDERATIONS, the final collection of non-fiction from John Updike, Toni Morrison’s A MERCY, a devastating book that demands a second reading of each chapter as you go, SNAKES AND EARRINGS by Hitomi Kanehara, which I suspect was written for younger people than me but that provides its own insights, and HAMISH’S GROATS END WALK, to revisit a great author.  None of these titles are available as ebooks.  What chance then, Edward Said, James Kelman, even John Steinbeck?  You’ve got it, none.

Never one to avoid dropping a name, at the Edinburgh launch of Ron McMillan’s BETWEEN WEATHERS Aly Bain recommended to me the work of Henning Markell, crime fiction.  Okay, I paid for THE DOGS OF RIGA to note with cynicism that it was some good way more expensive than any of the paperback editions.  Searching the lists of, mostly, pap I found this was consistently true.  Ebooks are generally more expensive than their hard copy equivalents.  A tiny, hard-done-by frown played at the corners of my mouth.  Music is cheaper to download than it is to buy in CD form, as it should be with virtually zero logistics.  Books should be no different.

Now Digital Editions came into play - or rather didn’t.  The book refused to download while DE ‘could not find the Digital Editions folder’.  As ever, my first port of call was to Steve, our youthful, crop haired, IT guru who knows everything or can find it on the web.  He scoured the net and found quite a bit of discussion on what proves to be a common failing.  DE, it is said, does not work with some levels of Adobe Reader.  The Adobe site itself says it does not work with Vista.  My computer uses Vista because Steve keeps us bang up to date.  I tried to contact Adobe but as well try to contact the planet Mars, indeed NASA can contact Mars these days so let’s say Pluto.

The Waterstones technical staff were extremely helpful but, frankly, failed.  They, like me, were before long lying down with wet towels across their foreheads.  With Sandstone activities at higher than usual stress levels I didn’t need this, but the problem had that scab-picking quality that distracts from more urgent matters.  It was Steve who eventually saved the day and came up with SHOCKING THEORY #1.  It seemed likely that the DE/Vista interface was the problem.  My laptop, used these days only for book writing and, for that reason long disconnected from the internet, had an earlier form of Explorer. It might be the answer.  So it was, but only after the slow realisation, and many more panels saying, ‘cannot find Digital Editions folder’, that the laptop was using Firefox and Firefox was another Digital Editions no-no.

With Steve’s guidance I changed to whatever-it-was-before and everything fell into place.  THE DOGS OF RIGA downloaded swiftly onto Digital Editions and, after more struggle, transferred to the eBook Library and from there to the reader.

Now came the next disappointment.  Unlike with music downloads, where you get a thumbnail of the album cover that is not only useful for recognition but also an entertainment in itself, the book download came with something in greytone that will be the same for every book, I guess, but with the information ‘Random House’ book title and author.  The contents page itself gives the underlined chapters just as underlined Chapter 1, etc, in a dull list, without page numbers.  Everything is a straight transfer from the hard copy.  It is an ugly un-thought-through boring looking rendition of what I trust (on the word of the said Mr Bain) to be an engrossing read.

Re-reading TREASURE ISLAND taught me that the Sony Reader gives a pleasant reading experience.  It is lighter in the hand that a conventional book and, absurd as the contention might seem, that made a difference.  When the book(s) are downloaded they are easy to navigate.  Perhaps the screen could be larger, closer to the size of a hard back book, but that would make the whole arrangement bigger still.  Say then, that the whole arrangement might be the size of a hard back book, what in Britain is known as ‘royal’ (see FICKLE MAN and CAIRNGORM JOHN), with the screen as large as is practical within that framework.

All Sony Readers look the same, so some means of personalising would be a good thing.  No two people have precisely the same lines of reading development, one of the things that make the whole reading game interesting.  The books should look like their minds.

Steve’s SHOCKING THEORY #1 is that manufacturers know that Vista will soon be replaced and have not, as a consequence, made the necessary investment in tailoring their product to suit.  This leaves the problem with the purchaser.  Time and the next generation of Explorer will resolve this, but only for those who can afford the change.  It looks mighty like Vista users are being abandoned.

SHOCKING THEORY #2 comes from me and it lies with the poor looking product, lack of choice, and price policy of the giant publishers.  The eBook design Sandstone was publishing in 2005 provided a better product.  We went out of our way to make the PDFs beautiful and easy to read.  As far as I can see no such effort has been made to make the commercial ebook more of a discrete product, similar to the hard copy but adapted to this new environment.

It is a poor relation in everything but price.  I (and you) can purchase music by download and all we miss is the booklet that comes in the CD case.  For me, incidentally, that is quite a loss.  Just the same, the music download comes as a discrete product.

The book download is inexplicably expensive and a poor looking object (I will just use the word ‘object’) in comparison with the music download and, more significantly, with a hard copy book.  It does not have to be, not now, not ever.  The purchaser is being short changed and, it seems to me, put off – or so it seems.

Having now used the Sony Reader with much pleasure the only way I would change my predictions of 2005 is to say that I am no longer sure the hard copy book can survive long term, not really, absolutely sure.  Electronic methods have so much to offer, and are potentially so cheap, and the surface is barely scratched.  The giants have much to lose, even from their own ebooks.

For Sandstone’s next foray into the future, watch this space.  It will be one of several major announcements we will make in the not too distant future.  Meantime I will return to Toni, John, Hitomi and Hamish, to live in their minds for a while and enjoy the tactile, sensuous environment I have loved all my life.  One way or another, books will never die.

Robert Davidson’s Northings essay was titles WATCH THOSE COBWEBS SHIVER and can be read here: http://www.hi-arts.co.uk/mar05_feature-e-publishing.htm