Oh Amazon.

Remember back in the old first heady days of Amazon when people like me, surrounded by farmland and little children, could discover and order a book, almost any book, and have it hand-delivered to their own personal boondocks? While savings didn’t really exist in price, the service totally made up for it in terms of hassle and availability.

When I wrote my first book and published it just last year, Amazon was also there as a storefront and potential for marketing. Just a bit ago, I even uploaded my book to Kindle for no charge.

However, there are low rumblings and sweet Amazon words coming through my email every week encouraging me to use their POD service when my shelf stock runs out. I’ve been a loyal Lulu user for a couple of years now—printing everything from our local small press offerings to class materials to books. The printed books are always perfectly bound, the pages straight, the text crisp, the covers brilliant.

But, they’re also pretty expensive, particularly as it’s difficult to have orders from Baker & Taylor or Amazon shipped directly from the store.

So here comes Amazon and an enticing CreateSpace offer last week. No set-up charge (unlike BookSurge’s $299 a pop), and single copies running about $5.70 each. Lulu costs me about nine bucks, and that’s not including shipping. So, we’re talking about half the price—big savings. Huge savings.

Let’s try it.

I did. I uploaded the same PDF files I use at Lulu. The very same ones; I didn’t change a thing. It was easy, although CreateSpace didn’t allow me to look at proof online. I had to order one. Which I did. It arrived very quickly—within a week of the upload.

Big disappointment. The title on the cover looks like it’s been chewed at the edges, ditto the spine text. The barcode on the back is blurry and the blurb almost illegible. Although the interior text is legible, it’s far from crisp, and a comparison with the Lulu copy makes it look bloated. Just all around poor printing quality plain and simple.

While I’m sure I could get away with interior text in bookstores, I’m also sure that no one but my mom is going to want to display or endorse a book with such a carelessly produced cover.

Of course, I corresponded with Amazon about the problem, but they weren’t interested.

    Please Note: This e-mail message was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

    Hello Heather,

    Thank you for your reply.

    We are sorry to hear that you are unhappy with our services. We wish you luck in your future endeavors.

    Please feel free to contact us with any other inquiries.


So what I want to know is what happens to authors like me when our shelf stock runs out? Will we be faced with a choice of sinking or swimming in Amazon’s river? And who’s name will be Mud?

I didn’t cook as a kid living at home, and I didn’t cook when I went to college. I think I may have started to think about cooking when I tried to make an omelette from romantic description in Alejo Carpentier’s City of Light. Awful. Oh, and the nostalgic tuna noodle casserole (forgive me, I was pregnant). Revolting.

Coming of age in Mexico and handicapped by my feeble reading skills, the books in my house were all there because I’d heaved them down from Michigan. Initially, I had one cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. The old blue hardback edition with the very fiftyish line drawings, probably snitched from my mom’s kitchen. I recall that the page with the spaghetti recipe was stained with tomato sauce—not my tomato sauce. (I don’t remember my mom ever making spaghetti, so maybe the book wasn’t hers after all.)

Anyway, I read it cover to cover. Can you believe it? It’s quite chatty and there are little tips and asides on nearly every page. I also learned about canning, pickling, natural pectins, and yeasts at high altitudes. It wasn’t McGee, but it was thorough for its time. I did learn to make a great Devil’s Food cake by reading and experimenting.

I don’t remember actually buying Molly Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, but the objectness of it, the color of its cover, the illustrations and handwritten text, are forever integral to falling in love with cooking. I’m sure I cooked every single dish she recorded, and some of them became standard fare—Tuesdays for samozas and Thursdays for lentil burgers. The book had multiple uses also as the best recipes became translation exercises, and I even created a flipbook for my daughter on the right-hand pages.

And there were the salads. Who knew? Back in my growing-up house, we had two kinds of everyday salad: cottage cheese and canned peaches on iceberg and iceberg with Wishbone Italian. (On special occasions, we had frozen marshmallow salad.) Molly Katzen’s simple Garlic & Herb Vinaigrette was a revelation. And remember White Rabbit? Or Alfa-Romaino?

If your Moosewood Cookbook looks anything like mine (how can I toss it with the flipbook, the notes), you’ll appreciate Ten Speed reissuing in a compact form Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Salads (978-1-58008-878-7). You never know: give it as a gift and twenty years from now that person might say, This is the book that started it all.

Seeing Beyond Sight (Chronicle Books, 978-0-8118-5349-1) was a “leap in the dark” kind of project for photographer and teacher Tony Diefell. “Photography wasn’t the most obvious subject to teach at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina.”

“Obvious” is a great word choice. It comes from Latin, ob- (in the way of) via (way). In the way of the way, or the path. Something that blocks something else. A quick flip though the book, and what you see is obvious: torsos without heads, beds with stuff, floors, walls. What is this? Why is it more than obvious? Diefell explains in the introduction:

“When I first saw the photographs of the sidewalk, I thought they were a mistake. Perhaps LEUWYNDA had intended to capture a classmate of one of the large oak trees scattered across the campus. I was wrong. As soon as LEUWYNDA got her camera, she knew what she wanted to do: photograph the cracks in the sidewalk.

“The pictures were proof of damage, and she sent them, along with a letter, to Superintendent Sheila Breitweiser. ‘Since you are sighted,’ LEUWYNDA wrote, ‘you may not notice these cracks. They are a big problem since my white cane gets stuck.’ LEUWYNDA asked that the cracks be fixed—and they were.”

That’s only the beginning of the revelations, for Diefell, the students, the reader. This is an amazing book, and would make a fantastic social teaching tool for use in middle and high schools. See the website at www.seeingbeyondsight.com.


Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick (Rizzoli, 978-0-8478-3134-0) sets off with the history of the art, beginning in the mid-1600s when painters left the still life behind and moved aboard ships bound for the new worlds. Originally published in 2005, this is what publisher Rizzoli calls a “mini edition,” although a foreword by Dr. Robert Prys-Jones, Collection Manager at the British Natural History Museum, is an exclusive. The reproductions in both books are primarily from the Museum’s enormous collection of more than a million books and half a million images on paper.

There’s a decent amount of text in the book, documenting the enormous range in age and personalities that sat for hours to capture in paint or ink or pencil the form of birds. Given the small dimensions of this edition however (5.5 x 6.25), I advise you to enjoy the plates and forget about the words unless you’re equipped with young eyes.

But the illustrations are beautiful, the paper is good, and the binding tough. Once the introductory chapters end, the illustrations are ordered by artist—it’s an amazing breakthrough when Audubon figures out how to realistically show birds swimming, squabbling, or flying. Birds makes a charming gift book for all ages—and looks lovely displayed on a table.

There hasn’t been a single phone call in the last month when my daughter hasn’t felt the necessity to point out just how sick she is of school. Her statistics class gets the most razzing – she can’t believe she actually paid $600 for something that even the professor finds irrelevant. Or, how would you explain a prof who allows students to chat on their cell phones during lectures. (Lectures?) When I mentioned that her brother had opted to continue in college throughout the spring, she was quick to spout off the wisdom of a recent NPR report that included music in the list of careers that benefited not at all from a college degree.

As I’m writing this, our blogger at Shelf Space just posted an article about the disconnect between what is taught in college and what is needed in a library. Eva Mays writes, “Library Science is not something that can be taught in a lecture hall; it can only be learned in a library!”



Have I got a book for you. Put out by New World Library, The Career Chronicle: An Insider’s Guide to What Jobs are Really Like (978-1-57731-573-5) is fast and fascinating reading about the realities of some of the more idealized careers. In fact, “idealized” is a key word as real people talk about college expectations and hard-world facts. “Naïve” is another one, “paperwork,” “stress,” and yes, “unprepared.” Heaven forbid we scare the idealism out of our young people, but a little foreknowledge might help them avoid cynicism in the future.

And not all the careers are so dismally represented in their university training. Pharmacists felt well-prepared, and vets, and soil scientists (whew, I had to get all the way to the end of the book to find a third entry). Architects felt competent on the design side of their work, but stiffed on the business aspects. Lawyers unanimously felt that they’d been taught to “think like an attorney,” but were woefully unprepared for the practice of judges, clients, and deadlines.

Each career (there are twenty-three) has an overview by author Michael Gregory. Employment and salary levels from the appropriate associations are included as sidebars. Short answers to interview questions follow, like “How many hours do you work each week…?” and “What do you spend most of your day doing?” Title, numbers of years working in the field, and location identify the subjects.

Come to think of it, college professor isn’t included in the line-up, but maybe they’re the ones who need this book most.

Gregory was a lawyer and is now a freelance writer. His children have followed careers in soil, information tech, TV broadcasting, and elementary teaching.



Another college-bound book of note is Careers in Renewable Energy by Gregory McNamee (PixyJack Press, 978-0-9773724-3-0); descriptions of job opportunities in everything from energy to construction, transportation, and teaching.



And to get you revved up for that job of your dreams, try Improvisation for the Spirit: Live a More Creative, Spontaneous, and Courageous Life Using the Tools of Improv Comedy by Latie Goodman (Sourcebooks, 978-1-4022-1191-1). Stepping off from the argument that nothing is more stressful than stand-up comedy; that nothing requires fleeter brain footwork or more collaborative skills than group improv, Goodman, a contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine offers stand-up and write-down exercises to enlarge your spirit and transform your life.

All right, not babies so much as the very young, but old enough to want to hear the words and look at the pictures. I’ve been collecting for a while, and have got a sweet pile of five. All but one are board books.


Starting out with My Teeth by Richard and Michele Steckel (Tricycle Press). You will not believe how completely adorable this is – and what a great idea. Page one is “no teeth.” Page two, “one tooth.” Etc. The children are from all across the world: South Africa, Peru, Turkey. The second to last page says, “Bite!” and the last page says “Brush!” Grandmas will go crazy for this book, and the babies will like it too.


Another counting book is Island Counting 1 2 3 from Frané Lessac and Candlewick Press. I don’t know about you, but My Little Island got plenty of play in our house. Here, Ms. Lessac returns to the West Indies, portraying the colorful market life, animals, housing, people, and fun of the islands. “Three painted houses sitting high on a hill,” goes the text, but children will want to find and count the other things on the page as well: the chickens (3), the lilies (3), cats (3), palm trees (3), etc.

My Up & Down & All Around Book by Marjorie W. Pitzer (Woodbine House) teaches common prepositions using action. On the left green page, the boy is “behind” the tree, on the right green page, he’s “in front of.” “Before” and “after’s” a laugh as it involves food. “Between” and “Next to” gets friendly with dogs. All the models in the photos are children with Down syndrome.

Elyse April is a licensed early childhood educator. She’s brought her expertise to We Like to Read: A Picture Book for Pre-Readers and Parents (Hohm Press, illustrated by Angie Thompson). Basically, it’s a primer for how to incorporate reading into daily life, as well as a first book for young children. The engaging rhymes and pictures compliment each other while accomplishing their dual purpose. “We like to read to the babies at play. Touching and tasting is part of their ways,” says the text, while a dad and an older daughter laugh at the baby who’s chewing on a board book. Highly recommended and would make a wonderful gift for young families.



Finally, a book about not going to bed. I mean really – who needs another “let’s be good and go to bed” book. Just Five More Minutes by Marcy Brown and Dennis Haley, illustrated by Joe Kulka (Treasure Bay) is part of the We Both Read series. The left-hand page is for the caregiver to read, the right-hand page for the child. The story concerns Mark, who needsd “Just five more minutes” before getting into bed. Yes, he needs time to brush his teeth and get into his pajamas, but then he also needs to say goodnight to all his pets, make a snowman, do some knitting, deliver a letter… No child can help but become the tiniest bit pooped with all this pre-nightie-night activity. And of course, the end is just as good.

I wonder how long books like The Rough Guide to Europe on a Budget will last in this digital world. (Rough Guides, 978-1-84353-994-0) Even though it’s a compact 5 x 7 3/4, it feels a bit dinosaur-ish at nearly two pounds.

Not that the information is excessive, or even burdensome. I love the short histories of the nations and the cities. The sidebars about things like “Taking a Bath in Budapest” or “Hiking in the Tatras.” There are language basics, maps galore, emergency numbers, and activities inside and out.

Maybe my reserve is for the olden days of travelers who needed, who really used an all-purpose guide to Europe. It may have started out a brick, but by the end of the trip, it looked more like the sole of a shoe, frayed and worn softly open.

I’m also thinking that I’d rather have this kind of information on digital device. For people who travel a lot or extensively, why not a yearly subscription to Rough Guides that allow access (and input) to guides around the world. The guides could be downloaded at any WiFi spot and stored on the device until the next download. Wouldn’t you love to have photos and info about what the Ko Tarutao looks like today, not a year ago when the guide went to press?


Phil and Carol White still have the traveling chops in Live Your Road Trip Dream: Travel for a Year for the Cost of Staying Home (RLI Press, 978-0-9752928-3-9). A concise book, designed with a sense of fresh air and no strings, the couple start with a how-to of financing, then cover planning, staying in touch, emergencies, and returning home. The last half of their book details week by week their own experiment.

 
If you’re planning a trip to Egypt or Greece this summer, check out University of California’s Dictionaries of Civilization (978-0-520-25648-4, 978-0-520-25647-7). While not exactly travel guides, you’ll want to have them with you for the plane, the airport, busses, hotels, boat. Sensationally illustrated, they cover the people, state, religion, daily life, “The World of the Dead,” and monuments. Maps, museums, chronologies, a bibliography, and an index are also included.

Funny how a domestic occupation, a crucial one at that for most of the history of civilization, can so quickly and completely become irrelevant. Cleaning, cooking, and some kind of child-care arrangement will be difficult for technology to entirely flush, but sewing ability has gone the way of sitting room poetry recitals and musical presentations. Technology has made entertainment ubiquitous and clothing too cheap to mend.

One of my grandmothers sewed all of her clothes. Fancy stuff, too. Evening gowns and lined suits, all hemmed by hand in a leafy stitch. She tried to get me interested as a kid, but after having to tear out my basted hem three – four times, I realized and choked on the meaning of the word “discipline.” Or was it “desire?”

Nevertheless, I did learn to sew from necessity. No, wait, there was a home economics class back in the seventh grade. I learned to use a sewing machine and made a lilac terry cloth jumpsuit. (No one told me that terry cloth wasn’t exactly suited for anything but bathrobes and towels. You can guess what the item looked like after a few minutes of sitting.) Home economics still exists in the middle schools around these parts, for both of my sons have taken it, but they only teach cooking. Buttons and seams apparently never come loose.

Come to think of it, it is unusual for my boys to ask me to mend something of theirs. Must be that the item wears out before it breaks. Or does it break therefore it’s worn out? I don’t know, and maybe I’m not paying very close attention, but a book did come in a little bit ago that seemed like a good idea for kids, and even grownups who’ve resisted the passion of mending.


The title Hand Mending Made Easy: Save Time and Money Repairing Your Own Clothes (by Nan L. Ides; Palmer/Pletsch Publication; 978-0-935278-74-3) implies that some of you are sending your broken items out to a tailor (instead of throwing them away). It’s quite explicit that no tools are necessary beyond scissors, needles, thread — in other words, stuff you can pick up in a grocery store. It’s a great reference, well-illustrated and covering everything from ripped crotch seams to snags and patches. Send one of these off to your children away from home. I plan to hand a copy to my teenaged sons the next time they ask for a mend. Beats me doing it while explaining and them nodding, trying to look interested, uhuh Mom, uhuh.

Some other sewing books I liked are


Closely Knit: Handmade Gifts For the Ones You Love by Hannah Fettig (North Light Books, 978-1-60061-018-9). A terrific selection of projects for the experienced knitter who likes to watch tv. What I mean is that they’re not too difficult, but they’re not scarves either. Pillows, sweaters, baby clothes, caps – good stuff for gifts or just for fun. Nicely illustrated and well organized instructions.


You know those ugly dolls the New York Times says are great for boys? Aranzi Aronzo, manga king, has a book called Cute Dolls (Vertical, 978-1-932234-78-7) that shows you how to make your own. Okay, they’re “cute” rather than “ugly,” but if it’s ugly you want, then turn the mouth upside down. Anyway, there’s plenty of weird as well as cute and the instructions remind me of the old Ed Emberly drawing books. Make a tadpole, a kidnapper, a penguin, a monkey. Yes, you’ll want them all. Instructions include full-size patterns for tracing.

I was intrigued the other day by the announcement that Grove/Atlantic was releasing Mike Lawson’s new book digitally, through DailyLit.com, two months ahead of its bookstore appearance.

First of all, I went to check out DailyLit. Here’s what they say about themselves:

We got the idea for DailyLit after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in special supplements a few summers ago. We wound up reading books that we had always meant to simply by virtue of making them part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistently than read the paper is read email. Bingo!

DailyLit sends books in installments via e-mail or RSS feed. We currently offer over 750 classic and contemporary books available entirely for free or on a Pay-Per-Read basis (with sample installments available for free). You can read your installments wherever you receive e-mail/RSS feeds, including on your Blackberry and iPhone.

DailyLit allows you to schedule the time of arrival of your installments (you can also click on a link to download more immediately), and each installment takes under five minutes to read.

Under five minutes to read.

I’ll come back to this in a minute, but first I want to say that although I’ve read less than ten minutes of Mike Lawson, it’s pretty clear that he’s an airport read. I’ve got absolutely nothing against airport reads—in fact, the $9.95 price tag, the absence of the extra weight in my carry-on, and the sparing of a tree combine to make a convincing package, I think. Except for this one thing:

Under five minutes to read.

Until they give away Wi-Fi in airports and aboard planes, I can’t keep clicking on the re-load button every couple of minutes. (This could be solved with an option to download 10, 20, 100, etc. pages.)

Then I got to wondering if a Mike Lawson-type book could be had anywhere else. I went to Barnes & Noble first, keyed in “ebooks,” and got this message:

Our eBooks Store is Closed.
B&N.com no longer sells or provides support for eBooks. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I’m not terribly inconvenienced (there are always options on the net), so I wondered if it was really B&N that was inconvenienced about how to price and distribute ebooks.

Next stop, Amazon. Okay, they have lots and lots of selection, but only if I own a Kindle, which I don’t. I have an iPod Touch. And I have actually read books on it, not to mention the papers every day but Sunday.

My favorite site for the Touch is TextOnPhone.com. Yes, it’s also exclusive – only for the iPhone and Touch. It’s also free, and I can make a reading list to dip in and out of. Short stories work the best for this. TextOnPhone allows me to download in 4-page segments, and up to 50 pages at a time. I can, however, download several 50-page segments at once if I’m planning to be off the Wi-Fi for a while. I can also choose the font and size for best reading.

My last research operation was to price a book at several different sites. Here are the least expensive options for The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

DailyLit – Free
Barnes & Noble - Unavailable
Amazon - $2.97
TextOnPhone – Free
ebooks.com (MicroSoft, Mobi and Adobe readers only) - $5.95
Project Gutenberg – Free

Hmmm. What do you think?