def.Tran·sum·er·ism [kuhn-soo-muh-riz-uhm] n.Transumers are consumers who would rather rent or pay for managed access to items/information rather than own them. (see TrendSpotting) BookSwim is proud to be a transumerist; a rental and product sharing advocate on the forefront of a revolution to transumerism.
Danielle “The Book Huntress” is, in every sense of the word, an exceptional reader, having rated more than 2300 books and reviewed more than 600 on the popular book social networking website GoodReads.com. I got a chance to sit with this maven of the reading arts and find a bit more about her.
What was the first book you remember reading?
Danielle - Argh!!! That would be really difficult to say. I know my mom used to read fairy tale books with us, particularly, Andrew Lang’s color Fairy Tale books, so I’m going to go with those. My mother said I have been reading since the age of four.
Explain the moment when you knew you were addicted to reading.
Danielle - I was very young, and I remember how happy I was to get my own library card in my name. I think that is probably the most lucid memory of my reading addiction.
What is your favorite childrens’ book? Danielle - The Gruesome Green Witch by Patricia Coffin. I remember checking it out of the library so many times. I would read it and get really scared, but I always came back for more.
What social networking tools do you use and how have they changed the way you read? Danielle - I mainly use the reading sites, such as Goodreads and Shelfari, and the Amazon.com forums, also Yahoo groups for various reading/book groups. Strictly romance-related, I love All About Romance. I also use Blogger.com to blog about my reading and to read other reader’s blogs. These online sites have increased by ability to talk to other readers. I don’t meet too many readers offline. Also I have bought and read so many books because of my online contacts.
Where is your favorite place to read? Do you have a favorite time to read? Danielle - I like to read in bed with the covers pulled up over me. I love to read before bed and I like to spend lazy Saturdays reading.
Will you only read a book if someone says it is great, or will you read a book if others say it is bad but has tons of hype? Danielle - I won’t read a book because it’s hyped. I have to be interested in reading it. I really dislike jumping on bandwagons. I am more likely to read a book that my trusted friends say is great, if I’m interested in the first place.
What is your favorite reading moment (any moment in your life where you were reading counts in this)? Danielle - When I read Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase and I realized it was my favorite book ever.
What do you hate most about reading? Danielle - That I don’t have enough time to do as much of it as I want to do.
If you could have a dinner/movie date with any author, who would it be and why? Danielle - CS Lewis. I think he was a brilliant man, and I love his love for the Lord and how he used his rational mind to spread the word about God. I think he was an interesting person, and I am sure that he would completely captivate me for that time I spent with him.
You can read all of Danielle’s reviews on GoodReads by clicking on her name above. Thank you Danielle for giving me a few minutes of your time.
Dear readers, I have an author interview tomorrow for an amazing rising author: Cherie Priest. In preparation for the interview, I picked up her latest book - Boneshaker (pictured left, link takes you to the BookSwim title page for that book). Despite my average reading speed, I managed to get through nearly 250 pages of the book in 2 days and am looking forward to the next 150 pages.
There are a ton of great reviews about this book, and most of the teasers really describe it well - so I won’t reiterate too much on that realm. A quote on the cover handles it well, “A steampunk-zombie-airship adventure of rollicking pace and sweeping proportions, full of wonderfully gnarly details. This book is made of irresistible.”
At first, I was expecting (and hoping, as I’m somewhat of a steam-punk guy) a sci-fi steam punk adventure of epic proportions. What surprised me was that it was so much more. In fact, there is a huge element of mystery in this book that I’ve seen left out of many book reviews and teasers. Bare in mind, I haven’t completed the book in full yet, but I am going to very shortly. Below I am going to list the reasons why I think this is a great read. If they seem to fit your fancy, make sure you add this to your pool.
The book has quite a few steampunk elements to it, although not enough to make an inventor drool. If you didn’t go to engineering school but think machines are cool - this is right up your alley. As well - if you DID go to engineering school, you won’t see anything mind-blowing but still worth it.
While I love the concept of a good zombie adventure (Book, Movie, or Video Game), I am not a fan of zombies being the main driving force. Boneshaker splashes in zombies as one piece of an intricate maze - as an accent if you will (as much as Zombies can accent anything). Great for those who love zombies as well as those who don’t.
The characters are very well thought out. Every character is given detail and history that brings them to life. This is a must for any good book in my mind, and this one executes.
It moves and it moves quickly. There is never a dull moment and rarely is there a mention of time - which is something that I found gripping. I’d be reading for three hours straight and a character would mention that night had began to fall. Another character would remark how surprising it was that time passed about the same moment as I would. Not to knock one of my favorite authors of all time (JRR Tolkien) but there is only so many pages of description about Bilbo Baggins’ cuff-links that I can read before I require a nap. Boneshaker has not bored me yet.
It is a great jump into a new genre for those who haven’t dove into science fiction/steampunk. I find that the science fiction books that I recommend to non science fiction readers tend to be received poorly. Boneshaker does a great job of not being too sci-fi as to allow the average mystery or novel reader to jump into the genre and get a taste of it before diving head-first into hardcore science fiction.
I promise to update this review after I have completed the book, but I put this out there now as I am interviewing the author Cherie Priest tomorrow and I wanted to generate some buzz as well as see if there were any questions that our audience wish to ask?
Hello everyone! As this is my first real post on BookSwim’s Literary Life, I think I will start with a bit about who I am. My name is Nick Ruffilo and I am the CIO/CTO of BookSwim (Basically I oversee all the technology and information that BookSwim has). On top of all that, I am currently running our twitter account (@bookswim), as well as will now be a regular poster on our Literary Life blog. I read quite a bit in high school and in college found myself reading quite a bit. After college, I kept up my reading and did quite a bit of writing as well. Most of my writing was in fantasy - but I did take a break from my normal genre to write a very special book. My wife is a huge reader and I decided that as a unique proposal, I would write her a book. As would seem obvious - she said yes. If you’re looking to get in touch with me, I’m active on GoodReads (http://www.goodreads.com/bookswimnick) or you can leave comments for me on any of my blog postings.
A bit of backstory to this post - my wife is an extremely avid reader. While I’ve never considered myself a voracious reader, I always read a bit more than all of my friends and pride myself on having read most of the “classics.” (Thank you highschool/college). To explain what I mean by avid reader, my wife has - on more than one occasion - checked out the maximum number of books from the library at one time (50), while having a personal library of nearly 800 books (200 of them still unread). She devours nearly 10 to 15 books a month while working a full-time job and partaking in non-reading activities.
The past few months have been busy for me with work as well as a few personal matters and sadly my reading habits became very poor. My wife pointed out to me that I wasn’t reading and in defense I state, “I bet I’ve read quite a few books that you haven’t.” Always up for the challenge, my wife waited patiently for me to list books so that she could proudly say that she’s read it. To both our great surprise, I had read quite a few books that she had not. When it came to some of the longer classics The Arabian Nights: Tales from One Thousand and One Nights and Canterbury Tales, it wasn’t a large shock that she had not read them, but when I came to some of the more quintessential children’s literature, I was shocked to hear she hadn’t read them. Most notably, she had not read The Little Prince, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, or Where the Wild Things Are.
Between my local library and my personal collection, I got a copy of those three amazing children’s novels and selected The Little Prince to read first. My choice was partially selfish as the only time I had read the book was for French class, and I would be lying if I said that I understood more than 50% of what I read. It all started about 2 weeks ago, but now, every night before going to sleep, I pick up where I have left off and I read a few pages of a classic to my wife. I enjoy reading but most of all I enjoy sharing.
An open challenge to all readers: If you have a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, son, daughter, niece, nephew, or even someone you babysit who has not read any of the following classics, take a few minutes a day to enlighten their lives by reading to them.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff
One of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, enthralled me with his book “The Martian Chronicles.” After reading that, then devouring Fahrenheit 451, then many of his short stories and poetry, I found myself using those as a basis for good literature. I would gloat some more, but I will let the video speak for itself. Ray Bradbury discusses the importance of books as well as a bit about how he got started as a writer.
While we’ve waited for the Kindle to spark a culture-wide switch to e-books, fans of the old paper and binding format have busied themselves with anxious questions: does this spell the end of paper books? Is this the device that will truly — gasp — revolutionize the way we read?
Now, it looks as if book publishers are answering: sure — but only with paperbacks.
Some book publishers now release new titles with the caveat that the e-book versions will be delayed, even indefinitely, so they don’t compromise more profitable hardcover sales. The Kindle edition of Harper Collins’ Sarah Palin biography Going Rogue will begin sales on December 26th, with only the hardcover edition available for holiday shopping, while Twelve Books has no plans to ever release a Kindle edition of the Ted Kennedy memoir True Compass (current list price $35).
This hasn’t endeared the publishers to Kindle readers, most of whom expected the expense of new releases to vanish along with paper and dust jackets. Some vocally boycott Kindle books selling above the $9.99 price point, using Amazon’s own tagging system to label books ‘9 99 boycott’ in their catalog. Their argument is that an e-book, little more than an elaborate text file with the ability to show a few black and white pictures, has no visible production costs. Take out the costs of printing, warehousing, and distributing, and the only cost left seems to be the electricity needed to run Microsoft Word.
The cost of an e-book has become such a point of contention because it makes distinct something we haven’t had to distinguish until now: the price of content, independent from its medium. When we purchase that new hardcover at an average list price of $25, it’s easy to think that most of our dollars pay for paper, binding and gluing, warehouse staff. We’re ready to accept these costs because of their tactile results: thick pages, colorful covers, a handsome typeface–in the end, a tangible object, straightforward and perfect at what it does. In its simplest form, though, what we’re really buying when we purchase a book is access to a written work, a means of viewing a verbal record. The physicality of paper books has tricked us into thinking we’re paying for the cost of the physical object, the pages themselves, when what’s really being sold is their words.
The reason this is important? It’s clear what a tangible object costs: the slimy salesman at the used car dealership will sell the Corvette with an engine straight out of The Fast and the Furious for more than the Camry salvaged from someone’s front lawn. Abstract products sell for whatever people will pay for them at that moment. This relative cost of access already takes place in the paper book marketplace, as demonstrated by the Harry Potter novels’ simultaneous rise in demand and price:
* Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1998):24.99
* Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003):29.99
* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007):34.99
According to publishers, the majority of a book’s ultimate sales price pays for intangible costs as well: preproduction (editing, graphic design, etc.), marketing, and author royalties and advances. Money Magazine found that these three made up about 77% of a hardcover’s production costs. By these numbers, a publisher doesn’t save much on an e-book over a paper book: about 23% of existing costs. So maintaining the same profit means a fair price for a $27.95 hardcover in an e-book format would amount to $21.50. Imagine how many ‘9 99 boycott’ tags a Kindle book would receive at that price!
Different pricing needs to match the different emotional, intangible appeals of the two book formats. So: what is the true draw of the Kindle?
The easiest answer is cost savings, but what reader spends $300 and up on a single-purpose machine — unlike, say, a $300 iPod that also sends text messages, takes pictures, and browses the web — expecting to save money? Cost savings don’t sell the Kindle. Its appeal, much like the appeal of its prime offering, is intangible: ability to look up and download titles at any location with cellphone service, portability, and the irresistible promise of having all the books you’ve ever wanted in one place, like a thorough and flawless memory bank — the Holy Grail of every avid reader. Not many readers can afford the buy-in cost of a device that, at its current price point, is suited best to a very specific kind of reader: the kind of avid reader who reads often enough for a $300 reading machine to make sense, who has reason to need the room saved by storing hundreds of titles on a device as thin as a pencil.
With fewer than half of Americans reading regularly (and those readers averaging a modest seven books a year), plus the $250 plus price of every e-reader device so far, book traditionalists have no need to fear the imminent extinction of the paper book. Even those who spring for the Kindle seem to purchase as many paper books as they had before buying the device. But the only way to make new releases profitable on e-readers such as the Kindle is for the reading audience to reevaluate the traditional metrics we’ve used to measure a book’s worth. Past the weight of its pages or the speed of its delivery, a book’s value will remain constant, and with a near-constant price, between paper and electronic formats: in its words.
Have you and the family curled up with any good books lately? These chilly fall months are just the right time for it, and to help get you and the kiddoes inspired, we’ve teamed up with BookSwim (a.k.a. “the Netflix for books”) to give one lucky Babble reader a free 3-month membership to the service.
An online book-rental service that functions in much the same way Netflix does for DVDs, BookSwim puts a revolving list of reads — including a large selection of pregnancy, parenting and children’s titles — at your fingertips. You can hold onto your books for as long as you need without accruing fines or worrying about due dates, and when you’re finished, you can either send back what you’ve read or purchase your selections to trigger the next set of books in your queue.
Membership plans start at $9.95 for one book per month, and return shipping is free on all plans. You can learn more at BookSwim, but first, be sure to click here to enter our giveaway for a free 3-month membership to the service.
If you’re like me, you love to read about pregnancy. With every pregnancy, I’ve spent hours pouring over pregnancy books, enjoying details about what my baby is doing or how to best care for myself in pregnancy or my baby once she or he was born. The problem is that books can get expensive! So here are some ideas on how to save money on those pregnancy and breastfeeding books:
* Used Books. These are typically very well preserved and cost very little compared to the new books. This can even be as low as a quarter for a book, depending on where you buy them. Used books can be found in used book stores, yard sales, library sales and even maternity and children’s consignment stores.
* Borrow. You can consider borrowing books both from the library or from friends. If you find a book that you love, then you can consider purchasing it for yourself. There are also some online book rental companies, like BookSwim.
* Trade Ins. If you have a ton of books on any topic, consider going to a bookstore that offers a trade in. You might trade in two books for one or get a monetary store credit but look at it as decluttering and saving money. How cool is that?
Those of you who are regu- lar readers might remem- ber the editorial for Vol-
ume 53, Number 2, April–June 2007 (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ ejournals/VALib/v53_n2/openers. html), in which I speculated, What if the library mailed books to your door? Recorded Books has been doing this for years. Netflix is doing it now. Libraries are exchanging books amongst themselves through interlibrary loan. The book- mobile makes the rounds of the city for special patrons. [...] [T]ime and money [...] would be covered if you’d take subscriptions to this service, like Netflix, or alternatively charge an appropriate fee per item to cover roundtrip ship- ping and handling. My guess is that patrons would jump at the chance. [...] It would fol- low a model many have grown enthusiastic about. [...] The library could invest in sturdy, reusable shipping containers in a variety of sizes, enclosing the return postage card with the item, as we do with audio materials mailed to the blind.
I don’t know whether any libraries out there have actually taken up the gauntlet, but at least one commercial entity has. BookSwim: Read Easy (http://www.bookswim. com) offers “unlimited book rent- als shipped free, easy returns & no late fees! [...] BookSwim is the first online book rental library service lending you paperbacks, hardcov- ers and now college textbooks
Netflix®-style directly to your house, without the need to purchase! [...] Even choose to purchase and keep the books you love!”
By the time BookSwim arrived on the scene, there had already been plenty of successful free online book swaps. A service such as this clearly falls within our mission. By failing to explore and take advantage of such opportunities and allowing commercial entities to exploit them instead, libraries may be their own worst enemies. Far more than any shift in cultural emphasis away from books or libraries, it seems to me that the worst threat to libraries is the reluctance of some to think creatively and act beyond their established paradigm, even to serve our patrons better, meeting them halfway in an age of changing expectations.
Seeing that BookSwim offers customers the chance to purchase books they love, I thought about a way that we could satisfy this desire without increasing our work- load overmuch. Recently, I noticed that my library had weeded some of my favorite books on tape, but I was unable to find them at the somewhat frenzied book sale. How many of you have seen a favorite, out-of-print book that no longer circulates much and thought, “I’ll have to keep an eye out for that if it ever shows up at the book sale”? And, feeling this way, how many of you have been successful at finding the item later, once it disappears from the catalog? Many of our online catalogs already provide patrons with the ability to keep lists of books they want to read and place and manage their own holds. What if we added a feature whereby patrons could add their names to a “want list” to purchase a particular title, instead of simply pointing them toward Amazon (and effectively giving their business away)? If a copy of that book gets removed from the catalog, it could go to the first patron on the book sale waiting list, perhaps reserved with a slip that notes the price. The item could be held at circulation like a request, thus allowing the notified patron to look at its condition and pay for it there.
If the patron chooses to pass on the item, the material could go to the next patron on the sale waiting list. This could be especially useful as libraries are repeatedly faced with the task of purging older for- mats and conserving shelf space. It would also provide an easy way to sell extra copies and rentals when they are no longer needed, as well as reference and nonfiction that’s outdated or not circulating much. It would be a boon to both the patrons and the library, allowing patrons a better chance to purchase exactly what they want, while giving the library an easy chance to sell some materials without worrying about the storage or labor needed to add that particular item to the book sale. It might also help discourage patron complaints as the library phases out particular formats, if the patrons who wish to use that format have a better chance to acquire favorite titles for themselves……..
Danielle “The Book Huntress” is, in every sense of the word, an exceptional reader, having rated more than 2300 books and reviewed more than 600 on the popular book social networking website GoodReads.com. I got a chance to sit with this maven of the reading arts and find a bit more about her.
