Category: Books

Books and the Traveller

11/10/2012

As an avid reader and traveller I’ve always been handicapped by having to lug around a decent supply of books. One of my great fears is not having enough to read. Some years ago I was caught up in a ‘strike’ on a road in India where our bus was held captive for a whole day. I didn’t mind this particularly except when I realized that all my books in my pack in the hold, and there was no way I was going to have access to it today, with all the demonstrators about. A day with nothing to do and nothing to read, it was very depressing and from then on I vowed I would always have at least 600 unread pages in reserve, just in case I was caught out like that again.

Of course books weigh a ton and always having at least two or three in the bag meant that I was always carrying a lot of weight. Places like Themal in Kathmandu where I am now were happy hunting grounds as I nearly always had books I’d read that I wanted to sell and I would spend hours trawling through the many bookshops, looking for new books, and deciding where I wanted to do my deals. The aim was always to be carrying only unread books to last me to the next place where there were bookshops.

Of course things have now changed as I now carry a Kindle which can store hundreds of books. I now don’t have to worry about running out of reading matter as I loaded my Kindle up with lots of new material before I left home. I still wander into the bookshops and look around but not with the avid interest I would have in the past. Of course using a Kindle brings its own problems, keeping it charged up which I do at every opportunity, and of course having ones’ eggs all in one basket so to speak, I would have real problems if it was damaged or stolen. It has now become one of most valuable processions. I could still read my books on my netbook, but it would not be as convenient as my Kindle. Luckily all my purchases are still stored at Amazon, so I could have another device FedExed out to me, or I could resort to buying the old fashioned paper versions.

At the end of the day my Kindle, even with its cover, only weighs the same as small paperback. I’ve just read a very long historical novel, which in its paper version is a 700 page brick of a book, only available in hardback. I’m very glad I could read that in its digital form.

I am still carrying some paper books. One is a history book which wasn’t available in a digital version; it relates to an area further on in my travels and I want to read it nearer the time. So I’m going to have to carry it until then but I rather resent it, and it will be sold or left behind as soon as it’s finished. Another book I have is a small guide to the birds of India. These kinds of books just don’t work on ereaders as they are now but who knows in the future?

When I planned this trip I thought I wouldn’t bother with a guide book, after all I’ve been to India and Nepal before so I could just wing it. On the day I was due to fly I bottled out and went down to Waterstones and bought the Footprint guide to India. It was like a comfort blanket, and I’m very glad I did as I would have been in real trouble without it, missing out on the most basic of information. I’m also carrying ‘Trekking in the Everest Region’ published by Trailblazer, another essential book as are all their trekking guides.

I have tried using digital guides, buying chapters of books as pdfs which can then be put on a Kindle. These are fine when you view them on a laptop, but on a Kindle the text is very small and it is very fiddly to move around the pages. They don’t really work. So to all my friends still in the travel book business who are today at the Frankfurt Book Fair, don’t worry there’s life in the guide book yet.

One thing I’ve been unable to do since arriving in the Indian sub continent is download any new books. The agreements that Amazon have to piggy back on wifi and 3G networks don’t seem to apply in India and Nepal. This again has implications for those travel book publishers who have gone for flashy digital material that can be viewed on smart phones and the like. What do you do if there’s no bandwidth to download all this information? In the end it’s back to the book.

Ereaders seem to have been designed for the traveller, limitless reading material for very little weight. I’m very glad I have one. However when it comes down to finding where you are on a street corner in a strange city, the guide book is still the gadget to have.

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The Future of Books

15/4/2011

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This week I went to the London Book Fair, so see old friends, network and see what is happening in the market. Despite a big digital publishing section it was clear that publishers are still committed to producing books made of paper and cardboard, and although fiction may be more convenient to read on an e reader, it will never replace the tactile feel of handling and reading an illustrated book, of which there were thousands on display.

I can see the attraction of ebooks, particularly as I travel so much; my pack has always been excessively heavy because of all the books I lug around. I always feel uneasy when I don’t have anything to read, I regard a reserve of 600 unread pages as the bare minimum. So to save all that weight I can see myself buying an ebook reader in the future.

Arthur C. Clark the science fiction writer, always foretold a long future for the book. They are cheap to product, look attractive, can be lent and resold, don’t need a power source to be used, and can suffer a lot of damage and still be read. Drop your e reader in the bath or even just let the battery run down and you’ll be reduced to staring out of the bus window. Besides, books do furnish a room, they are the perfect present. No one will ever cherish an ebook, or look at it fondly on the bookshelf. The fact that in Britain we have a buoyant second hand market for books shows that people are still prepared to track down and buy old favourites.

At a seminar at the Book Fair a publishing executive from the US announced that in America, heavy book buyers were now buying over 50% of their books in digital format. A heavy book buyer is regarded as someone who buys only twelve books a year, itself a pretty depressing statistic. I see part of the problem as the way books are sold, and the demise of book chains like Borders in the UK is partly because they have followed the American retail model. Books are now regarded as just a commodity, they are sold in the same way as baked beans, pile a few titles high, sell ‘em cheap, regardless of the quality, and make this the same in all your stores. Waterstones are now doing this making a visit to one of their stores a particularly dreary experience these days. This mode of selling is fine for the supermarkets, after all it’s their business model but what the bookshops have forgotten is that book lovers don’t like having books sold to them as if their baked beans and they particularly don’t like the ‘do you want fries with that?’ type selling at the till. There are still good bookshops around, with a wide selection of titles and knowledgeable staff and I know many heavy book buyers who shop in them.

Many in publishing regard the advance of the ebook as unstoppable. I believe that people are buying ebooks not because they are so wonderful or practical but because the experience of buying real books is so uninspiring. Both formats can co exist and both have their advantages, as I’ve pointed out, but the publishing industry needs to stand up for real books. They should be helping to make them a pleasure to buy and own, reading books should be about more than the raw data printed on the pages. The booksellers also need to wake up and start finding out what their customers what and delivering it, instead of using a business model that only makes sense to the pointy heads. Those people don’t buy books.

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Wilbur Smith at the RGS

14/4/2011

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On Tuesday 12th April I went to see Wilbur Smith who was ‘in conversation’ at the Royal Geographical Society in London. At these events a famous person is interviewed by a journalist, in this case Mary Rhodes from the BBC, and asked questions about their life and work.

We started off with a few anecdotes about his early life, as a child shooting pigeons while lying in bed, and a witty story about fishing using a stick of gelignite, which blew up the canoe Wilbur was sitting in. We also heard about how he became an accountant, mainly because his father admired his own accountant, so thought it would be a worthwhile career for his son. He ended up working in a tax office in Harare, and wrote his first book ‘ When the Lion feeds’ in work time on government stationary as he didn’t have a great deal to do.

Mary Rhodes asked him about his hunting and if he felt bad about killing a bull elephant. Wilbur pointed out that when he was a child there was such an abundance of animals it was almost as if they could never end. He also described how hunting could help communities in Africa. If an American hunter will pay $125,000 to shoot an old bull, and that half that money goes to the tribe in the area where the elephants live, then the people will look upon them as an asset, and they will be converted from poachers to conservationists. An old bull will have given all he can to the herd by passing on his genes; many of the younger animals will be his offspring. All he can look forward too is a death by slow starvation as his teeth wear down, so what is so wrong with a hunter shooting him, particularly as so many people will benefit from it?

Wilbur has a soft South African accent and he clearly loves Africa. He said he regarded Africa as a treasure house of stories, which was good because he thought people were fascinated by Africa seeing it as a romantic place full of adventure and danger. It also has such varied terrain and landscapes and well as wonderful flora and fauna. Interestedly he didn’t mention the people, about whom he has always written about with such insight and respect. Asked about how he sees the future for Africa, he said ‘Africa is eternal’ and that countries like South Africa will change but they will survive.

Talking about his writing, he said a writer should write for themselves and should write about what they know about, which is why he always wrote about Africa. A writer should be immersed in their environment in order to be able to write about it. For him, the characters were the most important part of the story, and I was lucky enough at the end to ask him which was his favourite character. Sean Courtney he said,, because he was the first, but he was also very fond of Taita, from the Egyptian series.

Wilber’s advice for writers is to start with a deadline, work business hours, have a daily routine and stop before you get tired, which for him is after about four hours. He said that writers become disillusioned as they go back and rewrite the first 100 pages countless times and give up, so he only reads the previous day’s work. He just goes with ‘the winds of the story’. Sometimes he leaves a book, goes away for awhile and then rereads the whole thing again afresh, carrying on from where he left off. What a writer needs he said is tenacity, keep on going with it, don’t ever give up.

A questioner asked Wilbur about his influences, and he said that all writers inspired him, although he had favourites like the Robert Graves ‘Claudius’ books, Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea’ and John Steinbeck, a writer he thought who had real compassion for human beings in straiten times.

At the end Mary Rhodes asked him about the radio programme ‘Desert Island Disks’ on which he appeared in 1982. She wanted to know if he would take the same book now as then. Then it had been the complete Oxford English Dictionary, the 26 volume set, now he thought, he would take Google. As for his luxury, then it had been a bed and he said he saw no reason to change that, as ‘all good things happen in bed’.

Afterwards, ever the pro, he sat and signed a large pile of his latest book ‘Those in peril’ for fans in the audience.

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Books and the Traveller

The Future of Books

Wilbur Smith at the RGS

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