Another month down. This month’s roundup of six bookish things I enjoyed reading and three that I wrote is illustrated by this collection of images from Hermann Esser’s Draughtsman's Alphabets: A Series of Plain and Ornamental Alphabets.
Money Talk for #BookTok
As somebody who blogs about the collision of books and digital technology, I am terminally in the middle of a massive, endlessly-unfolding essay draft that lays out, in clear terms, what I think about the books side of TikTok. The problem is, I hate BookTok. I hate, hate, hate it, in a way that makes me categorically unfit to talk about it, because all I can really do is hate it. And while I’m happy to snipe at fascist weirdos on Kindle Direct Publishing or Amazon’s dodgy data-hoarding, I don’t have the heart to pick on normal people who just want to make stupid, frivolous #content about books.
All this is just to say that I’m grateful that others are risking brain damage by signing up for TikTok and doing the reporting for the rest of us. Like, for instance, Constance Grady’s recent article at Vox exploring the economics of BookToking.
There’s a lot of money in BookTok: according to the article, as the Covid-19 pandemic wave of book sales began to recede, the only good bet for growth in publishing this year has been books trending on TikTok. If you’re a bookstore, the surefire way to get some sales for new hardcovers is to set up a #BookTok shelf and watch the teenagers flock to it. Publishers and booksellers are raking in money this way. But are the recommenders of BookTok?
Here, things get complicated. TikTok is notoriously secretive with its data (Congress has opinions on that), but one thing that’s pretty clear is that nobody is making very much money on the TikTok Creator Fund except for those at the very top of the popularity pyramid. One TikToker with 20,000 followers admits that she gets pennies for her work. So anybody on TikTok who wants to make a living crying into their phones about novels has to do what YouTube creators have done for a decade: partnerships with distributors.
The TikTokers Grady talks to agonize over their sponsorship choices. Do they only accept payments for videos about books they wanted to read anyway? Is there anything in the publisher’s portfolio that might get them canceled in their community? Is there some kind of marginalized group that has a better right to make money talking about a particular book? Some of these are the kinds of silly questions you have to deal with when you mostly live online. But the problem Grady zeroes in on is the one that is hardest to solve: BookTok is all about authenticity. “Once you monetize your own authenticity,” she writes, “how do you keep it authentic?”
The short answer, I think, is that you don’t, and that “BookToker” isn’t a job (it’s not even a word). Much like music streaming, the whole thing only works because there’s no money for the creators, not despite it. As soon as you start asking for fair wages for your video-production labor, somebody else will happily take your place, doing that same work for free. Audiences will not follow you to Patreon or whatever, because BookTok will always be more about TikTok than it will be about books. As with all social media, the platform is the message.
Hey! I guess I did say my thing about BookTok.
The Archive Moles
There isn’t really a name for Lucy Scholes’s job, so she calls herself an archive mole: somebody who looks for old, out-of-print books that might benefit from a reprint. Writing over at Prospect Magazine, she explains her job:
Most of the time, my work feels more like that of a detective than an editor. Falling down endless online rabbit holes is an occupational hazard. I read old reviews in digitised newspaper archives, and trawl obituaries, looking for interesting titbits. Internet Archive—the non-profit digital library that houses millions of books—is an indispensable resource, not least because so many of the titles it holds can’t be easily found IRL. But none of this would work without access to various bricks-and-mortar collections, especially the London Library. You’ll find me in the stacks, rootling out books that—as revealed by the stampings inside—no one’s read since the 1980s, or earlier.
If you like the kinds of things I write, you’ll like Scholes’s article, and probably her work. I added a pile of books to my watch list after reading this.
The Internet Archive
Speaking of archives, the Internet Archive—the free online library that allows open access loans to millions of scanned books—is under legal attack. Publishers have never liked IA, which they see as a parasite hiding under the aegis of overly-broad library lending laws, and they finally had their chance to take on IA in court. Back in 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns were starting, IA joined the crowd of other libraries relaxing their lending rules to allow for borrowing more books—and more types of books, including recent releases. This was enough for the Association of American Publishers to take IA to court.
I’ve been reading about this in several places, but Ashley Belanger’s coverage at Ars Technica has been the clearest and most helpful.
At the heart of the matter is the kind of lending that the Internet Archive does— scanned images of physical books—and whether or not lending out these digital copies one at a time is not the same thing as lending an ebook file. The difference, legally, is crucial: libraries can lend out physical books however they please, but to lend out ebooks, they need to pay licenses to publishers and submit to harsh lending limits set by the publishers. Most librarians hate these ebook licenses, finding them expensive and complicated.
The Internet Archive has lost its case, and is currently appealing the decision. As somebody who uses IA pretty much every day, and whose blog would be appreciably worse without it, I wish them luck.
Nerding Out Over Book Covers
It’s not like it’s hard to find spaces on the books side of the internet for appreciating book covers. I follow Paperback Paradise religiously and put on Henning Ledere’s Covers as comfort viewing, after all. But The Book Cover Review is a little fancier: most of its reviews are written by artists and book designers who know their craft, their materials, and their history better than the rest of us civilians. I first found it through Alan Jacobs’s recommendation in his newsletter, took one look at the front page, and thought: these are my people. Then I read this review of a Korean book by a Korean book designer, and was instantly hooked.
Reviving the IBM Composer Selectric Fonts
The IBM Selectric Composer is famous in histories of typewriters as the “golfball” typewriter, using a little, golfball-sized typing element to impress letters on the page. More importantly, the Selectric was the first commercial typewriter to escape the tyranny of monospace fonts, using a sophisticated division of letters into seven possible widths. “The Selectric Composer,” graphic designer Jens Kutilek writes, “could not stand up to a comparison with actual metal type or photo typesetting. However, in its time, it was far ahead of the usual typewritten typography and was able to fill a gap where typing was not sufficient and photo typesetting too costly.” Over at Kutilek’s website, you can read a fascinating, highly technical account of how he’s gone about recreating the Composer’s idiosyncratic style digitally, writing up his results in that font. Much of it was over my head, but I enjoyed it all the same.
This Month in Crazy AI Shit
Frankly, the whole LLM revolution is happening so quickly that it’s become a full-time job just covering what weird new writing tasks AI can get away with, so here are a few in no particular order:
ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon
For the record, most of them are very bad books. The one by Reid Hoffman (Mr. LinkedIn) looks promising. But man, that didn’t take long.
Clarkesword SF magazine ends open submission policy over torrent of AI stories
For the record, all of them were very bad stories. Perhaps Clarkesworld could simply have GPT read all submissions for them, and automatically slush the worst 99% of them?
Can LLMs replace literary translators?
Not yet, as Tim Parks proves in a wonderfully cantankerous appraisal of ChatGPT’s ability to translate Italian into English. Translation is a perfect example of the Pareto Principle in LLMs: they can easily get you 80% of the way there, but that last 20% is where the real value lies.
GPT-4 hires subcontractors to get around Captcha
OK, GPT-4 didn’t actually do this. The conversation transcript of the AI pretending to be a blind human paying somebody to solve the Captcha was the program’s theoretical response to a hypothetical scenario. But as AI programs are increasingly plugged into the wider internet, expect to see something like this actually happening (assuming it hasn’t already happened, as many fear).
ChatGPT + Code Interpreter = Magic
But connecting LLMs to the internet has some real utilities, too. It turns out, with a few plugins, you can actually have ChatGPT input instructions to programs and make real things, like animated GIFs and QR codes. This one impresses and frightens me the most.
This Month In Musement
Looking at this month’s crop of essays, concentration is a clear theme, starting with its abuse and suffering in the modern era, then looking back to better times for the attention span in ancient and medieval times.
I wrote a review of Matthew Crawford’s excellent The World Beyond Your Head, and what the philosopher’s work on attention and focus might say about reading in the 21st century:
Then I wrote a pair of essays riffing on Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. The first focused on a few useful tricks from the Desert Fathers you can use to get ahead in business, life, and reading:
And one especially fertile link from Kreiner’s book was repotted separately, and allowed to grow into its own beautiful, weird mutant reflection on one of the most delightfully gonzo books of the Middle Ages. Read more about Hugh of Saint-Victor’s encyclopedia of Noah’s Ark at the link:
And that’s all for this month. Happy reading!