Kindle Competition & the Future of the Device

It is always nice when the industry rumor mill starts validating what I have been saying for months, namely, that rumors of a ready-to-release Apple netbook actually refer to a supersized iPod touch.

Described as having a larger touch-screen than the Kindle's 6-inch display, while being physically smaller than the Amazon device, Apple's baby has been dubbed a ‘mediapad.’ The larger screen would be a more pleasant way to view movies or the Internet than an iPod or iPhone and the device could have decent speakers, too. By using a touch screen, Apple could save space necessary for Kindle's keyboard, resulting in a smaller device. While not pocket-sized, the Apple mediapad would be easy to carry and offer an entertainment experience a smaller device could not match. Reading a book might be such an experience, right?

The Kindle for iPhone app is on a screen is just too tiny. 
I do not own a Kindle and have little interest in paying over $350 for what, to me, would be a single-purpose device. An Apple mediapad would doubtless do everything an iPod touch does, only larger. And it could do everything a Kindle does, too, only in color.

I cannot imagine that Amazon really wants to be a consumer electronics hardware company. Its investment in Kindle was necessary to kick-start the e-book industry. Many companies had tried e-books previously, without much luck. Amazon has shown that an e-book reader can find customers, provided the content is available. Amazon has the content part nailed and will, presumably, be happy to see Apple create a much larger installed based of e-book-capable hardware than Kindle ever will.

A popular prediction is that if Apple really does the mediapad, Kindle will go away. But, probably not until Apple can reach a $350 price for its rumored new product. That make take a while, as estimates are that the super iPod touch will cost $500 or more when/if it is released.

In which case, the Apple mediapad and Kindle will coexist for a time, but eventually there will be no need for the Kindle and Amazon will be happy to be out of the hardware business.

Jeff Bezos today announced that among books that are available for the Kindle, 35% of the copies Amazon sells are Kindle editions. This is a surprising number (at the Kindle 2 unveiling in February it was 10%) and is further proof of the huge land grab that Amazon is now enacting. Only slightly mitigating those sales figures is news that the DX will support the commonplace PDF format, leaving the door open for a future in which most ebooks sold can be read on any reader, no matter what company manufactures it.

Think of what that means. Amazon has tens of millions of customers. It sold 500,000 Kindles last year, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup estimates. So even if it has twice that many in distribution, that is a lot of e-book buying by a small number of people. The Kindle must have an enormous penetration of what is a very distinctive, and for Amazon, quite lucrative, segment: very heavy buyers of books.

Amazon has also been making waves on the device agnostic side of things with last month's purchase of Stanza, the popular free ebook application for the iPhone. Amazon had already unveiled the Kindle app for the iPhone, and this move further solidifies its presence there (and presumably in the app-centric ecosystems of future smartphones).

The Kindle itself, of course, is the main focus. The longer that Amazon can keep its hands on the ebook market (a market that will eventually embrace open formats, one has to assume), the longer Amazon can rake in its monopoly profits. The iPhone moves, as well as the decision to support PDFs on the DX, meanwhile, are a smart hedge and a tacit acknowledgment that ebooks will one day be predominantly sold in formats that aren't tied to any one device.

Chris Anderson made the idea famous that you can make something and sell it to the masses, that can be a great business. But sometimes selling something to a much smaller group can also be quite lucrative, if you pick the right product for the right customers.

A large percentage of the books are bought by a small number of readers. We hear a lot about the long tail — how most items in a product catalog have a small volume of sales. But the same curve can be applied to customers of most businesses. The “head” — a relatively small number of people — represent a disproportionately large share of profits.
Amazon already served many of those people with its mail-order store, and it built a product that a large number of them have adopted. Most of the rest of its customers — the long tail who read a book every now and then — shrug and ask why they need another gadget when they already have a phone and computer.

By contrast, mass adoption was critical for the iPod, which earns money for Apple mainly through hardware sales. Apple has said it runs the iTunes store at only a small profit. And most people get most of their music from CDs, file sharing or other sources that don’t bring dollars to Apple.

The Kindle is about selling books, not eReaders. There is very little book piracy at the moment, and Amazon no doubt sells the vast majority of the books read on the Kindle. Why wouldn’t it? Its wireless store is amazingly convenient, and its prices can’t be beat: $10 or less for a best seller.

On a conference call with investors in January, Mr. Bezos even said that the Kindle hadn’t cannibalized the company’s paper book business: ‘We see that when people buy a Kindle, they actually continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle. And then incrementally, they buy about 1.6 to 1.7 electronic books, Kindle books, for every physical book that they buy.’

Apple’s proposed device would no doubt be a mass-market product with many uses and a very different proposition than the Kindle. It would be interesting to see how the market reacts to a color, back-lit, touch-screen device with much shorter battery life than the black-and-white Kindle.

In some ways such a device may undercut the new markets Amazon is staking out for the new Kindle DX: students and news fans, both of whom may value color and speed more than book readers. Moreover, a Web-oriented interface would offer, at least for now, free content from newspapers and magazines. In fact, one might assume that the only reason the DX was announced only a few months after Kindle 2.0 is to get the media discussing the applications of the device, especially the textbook application that will be discussed here later this week, before Apple could steal their thunder.

But Amazon has already hedged its bets here. It has a Kindle application for the iPhone that most likely will also run on the new Apple device, potentially competing with an Apple e-book store.

An interesting technology that is going to affect the e-book reader industry in the next year or so is the screen from the One Laptop Per Child. Mary Lou Jepsen came from One Laptop Per Child. She invented the screen, which is actually called Pixel Qi — Pixel Q-I. It’s based off the E-Ink technology and LCD, and it’s mashed together, and it creates a color version of E-Ink that you can actually switch between this LCD with full movement to E-Ink in low-light situations and low power and things like that. So she’s going to be shipping those devices, the screens in November or so which means that we’ll probably start seeing them in the market place in the next year or year and a half, which should be really interesting if we assume that they won’t be edged out of the market.

The Future of eBooks & Their Marketing

Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called ‘web logs,’ cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.

With books becoming part of this universe, ‘booklogs’ will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, ‘In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.’) You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.

You might think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Web publishers have long recognized that ‘front doors’ matter much less in the Google age, as visitors come directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind.

There are also those authors who are exploiting the nature of the electronic writing space available with devices like a PDA. Arguably the most popular and best known genre of electronic literature is hypertext fiction, distinguished by its many links between blocks of text known as lexias. Prior to the Internet, distribution of literary hypertext still shared many characteristics with print novels. As with a paperback copy of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight, readers of Patchwork Girl were restricted to engaging with that story in ways limited by the constraints inherent to a CD ROM: just as we can’t add or substract pages from a printed book, a CD ROM-based hypertext like Patchwork Girl is restricted to the contents that are on the physical disc. Unless a new edition is created, no new information can be added to the work. Unlike Web-based hypertext, for better or worse it cannot be updated or revised without a whole new physical product being produced, making it really just another computer program, one that lacks the interconnectedness found on the Web.

Michael Joyce has created the terms 'exploratory' and 'constructive' hypertext in order to denote the differences between pre-Web and Web-based hypertexts, and he considers exploratory hypertexts like Patchwork Girl and Victory Garden to be more in line with the 'output' readers would associate with contemporary book culture. In exploratory hypertexts, the relationship between the text and reader is not terribly different from a reader’s relationship to a novel like Ulysses or Tristram Shandy.

The economics of digital books will likely change the conventions of reading and writing as well. Digital distribution makes it a simple matter to offer prospective buyers a 'free sample' to entice them to purchase the whole thing. Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The ‘free sample’ component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections, just as Dickens mastered the cliffhanger device almost two centuries before.

It's not hard to imagine, for instance, how introductions will be transformed in this new world. Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won't be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.
Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.

As the publishing industry is now in a position where devices are starting to become good enough for people to buy eBooks in significant numbers, publishers are becoming increasingly anxious to adapt to the changing scene amongst their consumers. Their concerns over which format to use and which device will be the ‘killer device’ are growing. Should the gamble on the Kindle and get into bed with Amazon, or hold out and see what happens with the rumored new Apple eReader device or even something else. Unlike the music industry, publishers have never needed to think about which device to publish their books for. The device was the paper and print. If you publish regular novels which just has text and no illustrations, there is one format for you. If you publish cookbooks, for example, then you need a format that can handle the more complex text and images.

Computer games developers and publishers have always needed a device to be purchased on which their games can be played. In the early days, it was a computer. Then specialized devices came along and the manufacturers of the devices started to battle it out for domination and Sony was the early winner with the Playstation. Microsoft brought out the Xbox and Nintendo discovered a new market with the Wii.

But the games publishers and developers learnt fairly early on that the platform did not affect their development and publishing of games. The games developers (the equivalent of authors) created ever more immersive and graphically stunning games to make the most of the power of the games consoles, which could be played on either an Xbox or a Playstation. They just developed ‘compiler’ programs and ‘architectures’ through which their games adapted to the platform for which they had been purchased. Games publishers want to be able to distribute their games onto as many platforms as they can.

The good thing about books unlike a newspaper is that they are likely to be read again. Not read as many times, perhaps, as often as a track is played on a MP3 player, but an eBook has a longer life than a newspaper article, nevertheless. A game is likely to be played several times before it swapped or exchanged. Of course, most games come on a disc. But, increasingly, games are being played online and soon they will be downloaded to consoles when broadband speeds increase. So, in that sense, publishers will be ahead of games developers.

A game can be rented from Blockbuster for a few nights, or purchased from the store or online. eBooks will need to be adaptable enough to allow different forms of ownership and payment such as borrowing from a library, renting from an online store, as well a perpetual license when bought outright.

Book publishers should think like this too. They just need to carry on finding good authors, and marketing the books well and let the device manufacturers fight it out amongst themselves on which device will be the most popular. In the meantime, they need to grow their digital capability to be able to deliver eBooks in several different formats and study how companies like EA Games work to get some idea.

The Kindle: A Current Snapshot

The general consensus among those in the publishing industry is that writing and reading are doing just fine. It’s the intermediaries that are failing. Sara Nelson, formed editor in chief at Publisher’s Weekly, discussed the ineffective supply chain management among publishers at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April. That supply chain needs to deal with 300,000 books published annually, which led Nelson to two points. ‘This is a gatekeeper issue,’ she said. ‘We simply publish too many books. We need more midlist novels and less of the celebrity books that challenge the bottomline of publishing conglomerates. The supply chain is broken. In the 20th century you got books to distributors and they got books into stores, and reps from publishers into stores telling buyers what to order... that doesn’t work anymore. The more you publish, the more overwhelming it is, and you need somebody to help you through the morass of choices.’

One audience member commented that because of the economic structure and relatively low price of e-books, ‘writers are then screwed.’ Richard Nash, former head of Soft Skull Press, responded, ‘No, that is not true. Printing accounts for 12% of production cost, thus there is actually more of the pie for the writer to get.’

Let’s take a minute to investigate this claim. Assuming that what Nash said is accurate, one would expect that the difference between the print version of a book and the Kindle copy would be 12%, leaving out that he price may be artificially low in order to encourage buyers. This week, Colson Whitehead has brought out a new novel called Sag Harbor that is priced at $24.95. The Kindle version on Amazon is only $9.99, a difference of about 60%. Yet Amazon offers the book at $14.97, a difference between the Kindle version of only 20% from the actual price. So on the surface, Nash’s assertion would appear to be true, even though an author's actual share is probably about a nickel or so.

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison's controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from book-bloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google's results for anyone searching ‘invention of light bulb.’ Each day, Google will deposit a hundred potential book buyers on that page, eager for information about Edison's breakthrough. Those hundred readers might pale compared with the tens of thousands of prospective buyers an author gets from an NPR appearance, but that Google ranking doesn't fade away overnight. It becomes a kind of permanent annuity for the author.

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.
This fragmentation sounds unnerving -- yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from Middlemarch, Gravity's Rainbow and Beloved will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today. Nor will many sustained nonfiction arguments like Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat or biographies like David Michaelis’s Schultz and Peanuts.

Yet that modular pricing system will have one interesting, and laudable, side effect: The online marketplace will have established an easy, one-click mechanism for purchasing small quantities of text.

Tellingly, the Kindle already includes blog and newspaper subscriptions that can be purchased in a matter of seconds.

Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that's precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We've seen how that turned out. If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business -- a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

Tomorrow’s post will deal how this new economic structure may affect the way books are produced and marketed.

Amazon's Kindle: A Scholarly Mash-Up

This is the first in a series of posts concerning the Amazon Kindle, presented as a mash-up of various news sources compiled from the web. While links will be presented to demonstrate where content has been culled from, and thus cited, quotation marks will seldom be used.

A friend is in the process of moving to a new apartment, which means we just finished boxing up and shipping his entire book collection. This was a lot of boxes. I'm the kind of person who likes to travel light, so it's at moments like this that I really see the value in the so-called e-book revolution that's apparently heading our way. If the e-book revolution means I can enjoy these same objet's d'art in a virtual form about 600 pounds lighter, I'm for that.

Amazon.com’s Kindle is a software and hardware platform for reading electronic books. Three hardware devices, known as ‘Kindle,’ ‘Kindle 2,’ and newly announced ‘Kindle DX,’ support this platform, as does an Apple’s iPhone application called ‘Kindle for iPhone.’ The first device was released in the United States in November of 2007. While Amazon has declined to release sales figures, estimates are that the company sold 500,000 of the devices last year.

Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: the bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it.

An impulsive purchase of a novel or nonfiction book has another element to it, though -- one that may not be as welcomed by authors. Specifically: if I was in the middle of another book, in a matter of seconds, I can leave it for one of its competitors. The jump could be triggered by something in the book I was originally reading: a direct quote or reference to another work, or some more indirect suggestion in the text.

In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.

Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to an online magazine like Slate -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument. This is perhaps one reason that it doesn’t seem too many people are reading the long form journalism on sites run by The New Republic or Harper's, for example.

The Kindle in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting, and its Web browser is buried in a subfolder for "experimental" projects. But Amazon has already released a version of the Kindle software for reading its e-books on an iPhone, which is much more conducive to all manner of distraction. No doubt future iterations of the Kindle and other e-book readers will make it just as easy to jump online to check your 401(k) performance as it is now to buy a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

As a result, many fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

Further posts will focus on the evolution of books when the primary form of reading is via an electronic reader, the dissemination of magazines and newspapers, the future of the device and possible competitors, as well as a new trend to try and sell college textbooks on Kindles this fall. Please let me know what you think.

This project was originally conceived as a long form essay that would mash-up over a dozen sources with minimal editing into one sustained argument. Halfway through the effort, I realized the irony of discussing a device that could be complicated by the short attention span of today’s users in a very long essay that would be disseminated over the web. I then chose to cut a thousand words and translate the overall argument into several smaller and easier to state pieces that could be comfortably submitted on my blog, a forum where readers are already familiar with my style of writing and where I am confident in my ability to communicate.

Three Brief Reviews

Since reading a few of the very short stories by J. Robert Lennon in Michael Chabon's Best American Short Stories, I've been yearning for the full collection, Pieces for the Left Hand, to be published here in America. It finally arrived last month, and the other 92 stories (called 'anecdotes' on the front cover) don't disappoint. Lennon's stories are a bit unsettling for the very reason that they are so entertaining. An escalation in a high school rivalry leads to kidnapping. A woman who used to allow some mice to be killed in traps in order to save others is haunted when as a obstetrician she must advise mothers of multiples to cull a few to let the others live. You see how it is.

While the collection is enjoyable, the short nature of the anecdotes can make sustained reading problematic. Best enjoyed the way they were presented in BASS, my advice would be to only read a handful at a time. Rapid succession of the stories causes them to lose resonance, and sometimes the best thing to read before going to sleep is something just unsettling enough to make you pray for calm dreams.

I've never kept up with the X-Men on any sort of regular basis, but browsing a few of the recent collections has piqued my interest. Endangered Species takes place after the Scarlet Witch has reduced the number of mutants in the world from tens of millions to a couple of hundred based solely upon her words. Beast is consumed with the desire to preserve his race, going so far as to solicit help from some of the X-Men's staunchest foes. While the story is fairly moving and one cannot help but empathize with Hank McCoy, the inclusion of so many characters out of any broader context was very confusing. This is especially true of Dark Beast, a sort of mirror universe Beast who has dark brown fur and no conscience when it comes to experimentation. As one might expect, the mutant/Jew angle is played up and after so many times down this road it just isn't as powerful as it once was. All this said, I am taking effort to go back and read the tales that preceded this one in order to help make sense of the current Marvel universe. Perhaps this will change my opinion of the collection, but for now I give it a moderate thumbs up.

There is only one reason that I watched Charlie Wilson's War earlier this week: Aaron Sorkin. He writes some of the best dialogue being filmed today, but you wouldn't know it from watching this film. Tom Hanks plays Rep. Charlie Wilson from Texas who pretty much single-handedly arms the freedom fighters in Afghanistan in their battle against their Soviet oppressors. An interesting story, one that seems pretty much accurate to the true events, but just lacks the sort of verve one wants in a movie experience. Julia Roberts plays a completely unbelievable rich Houston woman, while Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in another fantastic performance as CIA agent Gust Avrakotos. If for anything, you should watch this film for his performance.

Maybe it isn't fair that I am against it Sorkin's script just because it didn't dance like The American President or The West Wing even though it's about politics. But what really didn't work for me was the sort of moral stuck to the end. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall fell, Americans wouldn't spend even a few million dollars to help the Afghans rebuild their infrastructure: read here schools and hospitals. As a result, Sorkin draws the obvious line between those decisions almost twenty years ago and the state of Afghanistan today. Anyone who has read anything about the Mideast country in the past seven years already knows this, and playing out this little piece of history, despite its entertainment value, didn't serve to drive home the point any more directly for this viewer. Instead, I felt like my intelligence was insulted.

Superman: For Tomorrow

I am a big fan of Brian Azzarello. His name will make me pick up a comic that I otherwise have no interest in reading. Perfect example is For Tomorrow, a Superman collaboration with Jim Lee that came out a few years ago. As a kid I used to be a huge fan of Superman, but as I have gotten older there just seems to be a missing element to the character that bothers me. I understand that he got the great values from his Kansan parents, but there has to be something deeper as to why he acts the way he does, something that so many have tried and failed to convey before, and something that Azzarello and Lee attempt again here.

While Superman is off in space, millions of people across Earth suddenly disappear. He returns too late to stop the disappearances that devastate the world, but discovers quickly that the global tragedy struck all-too close for the Man of Steel. Lois Lane is gone and Superman is so despondent about his failings that he visits a priest for an ongoing confessional that runs the length of the story.

Superman is always most interesting when his superiority is put into question, and Azzarello poses the perfect question at the start: what happens when the Man of Steel fails? It’s not like losing a fight with the Parasite or something, but instead that he was powerless to prevent a global act of terror. As many of us felt after 9/11, the big guy is left questioning his abilities and purpose. This is played out in his confessional type conversations with the priest and is stirringly effective.

Yet the problem with For Tomorrow, as with so many other stories, is that the mystery is more interesting than the truth. Since the first volume is primarily told in a flashback, the second catches up to the present and we lose the troubling reflections by the Man of Steel. But the real issue is that it doesn’t feel like a Superman story. Instead it feels like a Brian Azzarello story that just so happens to have a Superman-like character in it. The brooding character is welcome, but in the end the appeal of the character is one of hope and wonder.

Azzarello wastes the character of the priest, turning him from a compelling person to a science fiction cliché. To me, this character provides the heart of this book, the touch of humanity, and to have it thrown away irrevocably mars the tale.

Jim Lee’s artwork is top notch. It really feels like he has a handle on Superman and Lois Lane in a way that he didn’t while drawing Hush. While some of the villains aren’t conceived too well visually, the layouts are stunning and his mastery of storytelling is easily apparent.

All in all, another disappointing stab at what makes Superman the sort of person he is. That said, I hope that DC continues to mine stories in this vein because when someone finally does nail it, it will be one of the best comics ever written.

Reading List: April 2009

I will be done with graduate school classes in twelve days, allowing me to use the summer to work on my thesis and complete it at the start of the fall. Words cannot describe what a joy this will be, though I suppose I should keep in mind the two seminar papers I must write between now and the 12th. Anyway, this will hopefully free my schedule enough that I can focus on some short pieces for this space, perhaps even some multipart posts concerning specific issues.

This month was a bit of a mixed bag so far as posting goes. I did increase content over March, but it was sporadic and I let more than a few ideas die a quick and unceremonious death. I also am realizing that while I am completing a lot of books, the majority are graphic novels, usually quick reads, and thus my numbers are a bit inflated. I'm hoping to get back to reading more long fiction this summer.

In the month of April I read 19 books and graphic novels, and this is what they were:

• Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
• Sin City: A Dame to Kill For & The Big Fat Kill by Frank Miller
• Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
• DMZ: The Hidden War & Blood in the Game by Brian Wood & Riccardo Burchielli
• Preacher: Alamo by Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon
• Fables: War and Pieces by Bill Willingham, et al.
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
• Planetary: Leaving the 20th Century by Warren Ellis & John Cassasday
• Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War, Volume I & Volume II by Geoff Johns, et al.
• The Boat by Nam Le
• Ex Machina: Ex Cathedra by Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris
• Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins
• The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham
  
• Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore & Brian Bolland
• JLA: Earth 2 by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
• Joker by Brian Azzarello & Lee Bermejo

This month is going to start a new tradition where I make a pick of the month and encourage everyone to read it. Ideally, this will be a book I have already reviewed so one can further investigate my opinions and decide if they want to give the book a shot, yet I make no promises. This month, however, I did indeed write a review of Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index, in which the author attempts to put into order the details surrounding her father's suicide sixteen years ago. An excellent rumination not only on suicide, but also on the nature of turning life into stories.

As always, I welcome questions or comments about the books listed or about anything under the sun.