Monthly Archives: February 2009

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

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Devil in the White City by Erik LarsonThe Devil in the White City by Erik Larson is an absorbing non-fiction narrative that juxtaposes the success of the World’s Columbian Exposition with the evil of serial killer Herman W. Mudgett. Larson packs the pages of The Devil in the White City with history and personality, making it both entertaining and educational.

I have a love hate relationship with history. In the wrong hands history can be unbelievably dull. Too many times a pious academic has reduced a truly interesting event into cut and dry facts that have as much life as a waterlogged tennis ball. But history is actually amazingly interesting in the right hands.

I had a professor in college who taught European Civilization. He made history come alive! He talked about the people who were part of the history, about their motivations, about the odd bits of lore that don’t make it into the textbooks. (It also helped that he had a dry sense of humor and was fond of throwing Monty Python quotes into his lectures.)

I don’t pick up non-fiction because too often it leaves me bored. Instead I find my history in fiction, blended into novels like English Passengers by Matthew Kneale or Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gould. These authors tell a story using history as a backdrop. Erik Larson, on the other hand, has a gift for telling history as it should, as a story.

The Devil in the White City chronicles the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition by following the architects who pulled off the amazing feat. Larson makes it easy for the reader to understand the enormity of the undertaking. He educates and instructs on architecture and exposes city rivalry and political intrigue that isn’t much different from the present.

Larson also delivers a palpable sense of what it was like to live in Chicago in the 1890s. It was an age where the slow, dank, filth of cities began to diminish as buildings rose to the sky. You sense a transformation – a great leap forward for America and humanity in general. One foot in the dark past and the other in the bright future.

Maybe it was the time or the task, but the number of famous figures who pop up in the narrative is amazing. You get a glimpse of people like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Clarence Darrow, Susan B. Anthony, Buffalo Bill and Frank Lloyd Wright among others.

Of course you also get a chilling look at Herman Mudgett or H.H. Holmes as he was better known. Larson paints a disturbing portrait of a personable killer who excels in gaining the confidence of his victims. It’s frightening how easily Holmes was able to con and cajole people, and how he was able to perform such treachery right under the noses of so many observers.

I was also left with the odd sense of similarity in the intense drive of lead architect Daniel Burnham and H.H. Holmes. Though the aims of each are diametrically opposed, the passion with which they both pursued their tasks are eerily the same. It is not the city of Chicago, or the World’s Columbian Exposition, but the zeal of each that truly binds the two narratives together.

I highly recommend The Devil in the White City if you have any interest in history or enjoy chilling murder mysteries. Erik Larson will convince you that history is far from dead.

Fringe features Land of Laughs

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Land of Laughs by Jonathan CarrollAs I’ve mentioned before I like TV and am not one of those Kill Your Television type of bibliophiles. The other night I’m catching up on TiVo and watch the latest episode of Fringe, which has gotten progressively better, so tune back in if the first two or three episodes left you cold.

This episode, “Ability”, led the characters to a rare book store where we witness a customer selling a copy of Jonathan Carroll’s Land of Laughs. The appearance of Land of Laughs was an illuminating look at the influence literary fiction is having on TV writers. There’s no question this wasn’t a coincidence as Carroll is well known for his amazingly surreal novels which dovetails nicely with the general theme of Fringe.

I’ve read a good deal of Carroll including Land of Laughs, Sleeping in Flame and The Wooden Sea among others. I read all of them before starting this blog so they aren’t currently reviewed. I am reminded that I should do a retro review to highlight the eerie, quirky genius that is Jonathan Carroll. Seriously, go out and read one of his many books. You will not be disappointed.

This is the second time I’ve noticed a J.J. Abrams show paying homage to and telegraphing plot and themes via literary works. The first time was on Lost, when I noticed Benjamin Linus reading a copy of VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Anyone who read VALIS immediately understood that there was an element of time travel involved on the island.

Literature is the fuel for our entertainment, regardless of the final medium and channel. So a big thank you to J.J. Abrams for putting these great writers in front of a mass audience.

On Demand Digital Books

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A new partnership between Kirtas Technologies and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries allows users to request and purchase a digitized version of nearly any out-of-copyright book from the Penn Library collection.

What makes this initiative unique is that the books can be offered for sale before they are ever digitized, so there is no up-front printing, production or storage cost.

Indeed, that is interesting. Here’s how they say it works.

The desired book will be pulled from Penn’s shelves, digitized, processed by Kirtas for optimal reading and printing, and a newly-printed copy will be shipped to the initiator. Or, the customer can purchase access to an online-only version of the book. Once the book has been digitized, it is returned undamaged to the library shelf.

Google took some flak when people realized that the scanning of new books often entailed chopping the book apart (disbinding is the politically correct term) to aid in the digitizing process. Lets be clear though, Google doesn’t do this with the books that come from library collections.

The landscape for digitization is relatively small. Kirtas seemed to have the inside track when they partnered with Microsoft in their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. However, both of the aforementioned projects were shuttered last year, leaving Kirtas in a David versus Goliath position with Google.

Mind you, there are other digitizing companies out there. Julian Ball, Manager of the BOPCRIS Digitisation Centre based within the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton, reviewed the four competing scanners at a public exhibition in Munich.

The wrinkle is that many digitizing experts seem to believe Google’s scanning technique, a proprietary process, is suboptimal. Some claim the scans are passable, while others believe rescanning might be necessary in some instances. This might not mean a lot to the everyman, but it’s a hot topic for historians and librarians.

Think of it this way, you’d have wanted the monks with the best penmanship to help preserve texts through the dark ages, right?

Here’s a look at the Kirtas 2400 Scanner.

Kirtas 2400 Book Scanner

For irony go watch the Kirtas Book Digitization Tour video.

I might give Kirtas Books a spin and you should too if you want an ‘analog’ book or a digital book that is in the public domain and available at the University of Pennsylvania Library.

Overall, I’m happy to see more momentum behind the digitization of books. I fully believe Google, or gBooks as I’ve come to call it, has the inside track on this business, and by a wide margin, over everyone else including Amazon via Kindle. More competition can only be good at this stage, leading to innovation and better products.

Google Books vs Amazon Kindle

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Google Books Versus Amazon Kindle

On Thursday Google announced new mobile editions of 1.5 million public domain books. iPhone and Android users now have access to five times the number of titles currently available on Kindle.

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen.

The timing of this announcement comes 4 days before the likely unveiling on the Kindle 2. Coincidence? I think not.

Of course, the titles currently available through Google Books are different from those on Kindle. We’re talking public domain versus the front list of bestsellers. But how long is that going to last?

Last month I wrote about the future of gBooks which is contingent on the blessing of the settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers.

Once this agreement has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future.

Add it up. Sometime this year Google will have well over 3 million titles available and optimized for the small screen. In addition, authors and publishers have a clear and decent revenue share (63%) with the search giant.

What makes anyone think Google will stop with public domain and out-of-print books?

Authors and publishers would welcome an alternative to the increasingly combative Amazon. Last year Amazon put the squeeze to large publishers and Print On Demand (POD) publishers. Is it any wonder that Amazon couldn’t convince textbook publishers to play ball with a textbook Kindle.

Google will have public domain and out-of-print books available to deliver to a built-in base of customers. That’s right, there’s no new device to purchase! Particularly not a single-use device with a $359 price tag.

That larger base of customers is going to look very attractive to publishers. How long until they agree to sell front list bestsellers through Google?

Gadget fans will clearly swoon over Kindle 2 but the real story is the growing competition between Google and Amazon in the digital book arena. The timing of Google’s mobile version is a shot over Amazon’s bow. The industry should take notice and the Internati should be looking beyond the hype.