BOOK PUBLISHERS TURN TO THE IPHONE

The iPhone has been on nearly everyone’s minds since it debuted in 2007. Now, one of the biggest attractions of the Apple brand smartphone, the App Store, has more than 50,000 applications available for download. Many eBooks and eBook readers are available, but FTW checked in with some book publishers that have more creatively adapted their products for use on the iPhone and other devices.

Dictionaries went digital a long time ago. Most people are familiar with the concept of using Google, Wikipedia, or Dictionary.com to find the definition of a word. So it wasn’t much of a stretch for Merriam-Webster, WorldBook, Oxford, and Webster to bring their product to the smartphone. Dictionary apps from these publishers range in price from $7.99 to $24.99. Each includes search functionality, definitions, and links between entries.

Although the Amazon Kindle has gotten a great deal of publicity and compliments on its clear paper-like screen, illustrated books and comics have been left out because e-ink currently only displays grayscale text and images. This is probably the reason that comics publishers are embracing the iPhone, which can display vivid colors even better than newsprint.

UClick, a content distribution company owned by Andrews McMeel Universal, the parent company of Andrews McMeel Publishing and the Universal Press Syndicate, has developed iPhone apps that display comic books one panel at a time, the way they were first created. Each app costs $.99 and titles including Bone, Ghostbusters, We the Robots, and Basic Instructions are available.

Travel has long served as a good excuse for bookish people to purchase the latest gadgets. Those of us who travel with books have thought that e-readers would lighten our loads. Now, the iPhone and other smartphones are providing solutions for readers.

Rick Steves’ publisher, Avalon Travel teamed up with Seattle-based developer Übermind to create apps based on the travel guru’s advice. Rick Steves’ Historic Paris Walking Tour is one of four apps available now. Two more will be released before the end of June. A map highlights points on the walking tour. Tapping on each attraction brings up videos, photos, and a description of each location. Audio tours narrated by Steves himself can be played from a pull-down audio player.

“Since they include dozens of selections from his videos and podcasts, his voice and visage is all over the apps--what we and the developers have done is integrate these existing components in a new way,” Avalon Travel Publisher Bill Newlin told FTW.

The Rick Steves' Orsay Museum Tour app is available for free until July 6th on the iTunes App Store. After this date, it will cost $4.99, the same price as the others. A demo of the app is available online.

Lonely Planet has also developed apps based on its guidebooks for the iPhone, Blackberry, and other smartphones. City Guides are available for twenty world cities, including London, New York, San Francisco, and Barcelona. Phrasebooks are available for thirty-one language combinations.

Todd Sotkiewicz, president of Lonely Planet Americas, says the most compelling thing about the phrasebook is the audio functionality. Although he says it can be really fun to try to pronounce words spelled out in print books, it is more useful to be able to be understood in a foreign country.

“The phrases are arranged into twelve different categories, including tools, transport, communications, and sightseeing. The application can say the phrases out loud. If you’re looking for breakfast, you can hear the application say, “Where is breakfast found?”

Lonely Planet’s City Guides contain content from its books, but are also search and list capability and are GPS-enabled. This means that users can see their position on a may and find attractions nearby. These results can then be filtered.

“You can say, I’m really hungry, I only want to see restaurants that are nearby,” Sotkeiwicz said. “Then you can click on a restaurant, and see the phone number, call up, and make a reservation.”

Sotkeiwicz said he and his staff have “a million” ideas for new apps and digital innovations, but neither he nor Bill Newlin, publisher of Avalon Travel, believe that digital apps will replace guidebooks.

“All media will continue to evolve, but my personal guess is that paper will continue to be a part (but not the only part) of the mix,” Newlin said.

All of these apps are available through Apple’s App Store.

by Whitney Hallberg, Managing Editor

BOOK REVIEW

Jacko, His Rise and Fall: The Social and Sexual History of Michael Jackson
by Darwin Porter
(Blood Moon Productions, 978-0-9748118-5-7)

Although Michael Jackson has stayed out the public eye for the past few months, his tale is well known to legions of celebrity gossip mongers: a talented young kid who got off track, destroyed his face through too much plastic surgery, and fled the country in the wake of accusations of pedophilia.

But there is much more to Jackson’s story, some of it bizarre and nearly unbelievable—such as his odd behavior around children—and some of it rather charming. And in Jacko, it’s all included.

Researched over several decades, Jacko attempts to unveil the intricacies of Jackson’s character, by detailing not just his personal history, but also his friendships, the context of the times in which his star rose, and the confusion and pain that led to his recent legal troubles over inviting young boys into his bed.

Author Darwin Porter is certainly no stranger to celebrity nuances; he’s penned four other unauthorized biographies of controversial figures Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart.

One of the writer’s great strengths is not in uncovering lurid details, but in telling small stories within a larger tale. For example, he interviews a former employee of the Sahara casino, who gives a personal account of the only meeting between Elvis and Jackson:

“At one point during their encounter, Elvis reached for Michael’s hand. ‘I owe a debt to all you black boys and your music. Without the music of “the brothers” I heard back in the Forties, there would be no Elvis Presley today.’”

When Elvis drops into a dark mood and adds that he’s kidding no one, because there’s no Elvis left, Michael says in a soft voice, “To me, you’ll always be the greatest.”

That kind of tenderness is laced throughout the biography, and often Jackson is a heartbreaking figure. He’s not perfect, and definitely not without sin, but his childlike qualities have an aura of tragedy that put his recent trouble in context.

If there’s a misstep in Jacko, it’s not the writing or the subject matter, but the length of the tome. Certainly, readers who crave every nuance of Jackson’s life will delight in the minutiae uncovered by Porter, who seems to find every detail worthy of inclusion in the story.

True, it is the details of our lives that make us who we are sometimes—Bill Clinton’s fondness for fried pork products, Adolf Hitler’s ability to draw only landscapes rather than people, and Angelina Jolie’s perpetual use of drugstore-bought Blistex for her famous lips—but with a staggering 600 pages, Porter has penned a volume more geared toward fans than the casual, curious reader.

But, in many ways, this is a minor quibble, since it’s difficult to penalize a writer for erring on the side of more complexity and research rather than less. Jacko is, above all, a detailed portrait of a man whose enormous talents couldn’t save him from abuse, ridicule, and scorn, but who also garnered worldwide acclaim at a level reached by only a very select few. In this compelling glimpse at Jackson’s life, Porter manages to provide the one thing that many journalists have failed to produce in their writings about the pop star: a real person behind the headlines. (2007)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Millard

Read more reviews at www.forewordmagazine.com.

AUTHOR PAGES: JILL NORGREN

The Author Pages feature nearly 100 interviews with authors whose work has been reviewed in ForeWord magazine. Jill Norgren, author of Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would be President (NYU Press, 978-0-8147-5851-9), writes:

I was totally puzzled when I discovered that there was no biography written for adults about Belva Lockwood despite her importance in American history [first woman attorney to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court (1880), first woman to run a full campaign for president in (1884)]. When she died in 1917, there were no libraries that collected the correspondence and diaries of influential women and her remaining relatives were not in a position to save many of her papers. When I first considered researching her life I wondered, for two or three days, whether she really had existed. Slowly, playing the sleuth, I uncovered documents, correspondence, newspaper articles and other "footprints" of her life and knew that there was a great story to be told.

Visit ForeWord’s Author Pages to read more about the authors reviewed in the pages of ForeWord.

This week at Publishing Insider, author Joanna Campbell Slan talks about turning her scrapbooking hobby into her day job.

At Editor's Notes, Editor-in-Chief Heather Shaw presents the speech given at BookExpo America, announcing the ForeWord's Independent Publisher of the Year.

At Shelf Space, Carlie Webber pens a column titled "They're evil! They're brilliant! They're reviewers!"

At Publishing Matters, Eugene Schwartz Eugene Schwartz responds to a recent article from the Nation on the evolution of book publishing.

Visit www.forewordmagazine.com for publishing news, book reviews, and the ForeWord Book Club.

BOOK CLUB: DRIFT AND SWERVE

“Henry could have shot all three of them from where he sat, wedged into the crotch of a maple, but he knew they wouldn't die. ‘You missed,’ they’d say, and then they’d kill him. If they weren’t liars, they would admit there was no hiding from the Gestapo--secret rooms, new identities, none of it worked--but they were liars.”

Samuel Ligon’s short story, “Germans” is ForeWord’s Book Club selection for the week. Ligon is the author of a novel, Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins) and he teaches writing at Eastern Washington University. Drift and Swerve (978-1-932870-29-9), his collection of short stories published by Autumn House, showcases his muscular prose, dark humor, and gritty intimacy with isolation.

Read the whole story this week only at the ForeWord's Book Club.

FOREWORD FOOTNOTES

Art. REDISCOVERING SLOBODKINA: A PIONEER OF AMERICAN ABSTRACTION by Sandra Kraskin, Karen Cantor, Leonard S. Marcus, Ann Marie Mulhearn Sayer (Hudson Hills Press, 8 x 11, color and b/w illustrations, hardcover, 180 pages, $60.00, 978-1-55595-312-6): four essayists present reflections and thoughts on the 100th birthday of Siberian born Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002) who became “one of the most brilliant abstract artists of mid-twentieth-century America”; art examples include Self-Portrait (1932) Buttercups (1932), and her famous picture book art such as “her classic best-seller” Caps for Sale (1940).

Biography & Autobiography. CLEVELAND AMORY: MEDIA CURMUDGEON & ANIMAL RIGHTS CRUSADER by Marilyn Greenwald (University of Massachusetts Press, 26 b/w photographs, 280 pages, hardcover, $27.95, 978-1-58465-681-4): professor of journalism at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University, and author of The Secret of the Hardy Boys “examines the interplay of commentary and activism” in the life (1917-1998) of an “astute observer of American society”; Amory was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, a critic for TV Guide, and one who sometimes wrote with “muffled malice.”

Biography & Autobiography. ROSE O’NEILL: THE GIRL WHO LOVED TO DRAW by Linda Brewster (Boxing Day Books, 10 x 12, color and b/w illustrations, 80 pages, softcover, $27.95, 978-0-9798332-3-6): award-winning painter and photographer presents the life (1874-944) of “America’s first woman comic artist” who created “more than 5,500 illustrations for magazines, newspapers, and books”; among the topics are “Sweet Monsters,” winning the best drawing by a Nebraska schoolchild with Temptation Leading Down into an Abyss, and the creation of the Kewpie character, which appeared in the Ladies Home Journal in 1909 and later led to the birth of the Kewpie doll.

Body, Mind & Spirit. MEET YOUR BODY: CORE BODYWORK AND ROLFING TOOLS TO RELEASE BODYMINDCORE TRAUMA by Noah Karrasch (Singing Dragon, b/w illustrations, 184 pages, softcover, $17.95, 978-1-84819-016-0): certified Rolfer and licensed message therapist demonstrates how to relieve old fears, traumas, and stresses by employing “structural integration” through the technique of Rolfing--“a hands-on manipulation of the body’s connective tissue designed to enhance posture and freedom of movement”; connective parts (“hinges”) include knees, arms, and wrists, e.g., stretching for relief of carpal tunnel pain.

Body, Mind & Spirit. THE PRIEST AND THE MEDIUM: THE AMAZING TRUE STORY OF PSYCHIC MEDIUM B. ANNE GEHMAN AND HER HUSBAND, FORMER JESUIT PRIEST WAYNE KNOLL, PH.D. by Suzanne Giesemann (Hay House, b/w photographs, 275 pages, softcover, $15.95, 978-1-4019-2309-9): motivational speaker and former Navy Commander presents the story of “two soul mates” with “divergent beliefs, yet united in their love for God and each other”; references include psychic surgery, the finding of an abducted child, and the prediction of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Business & Economics. THE ADMIRABLE COMPANY: WHY CORPORATE REPUTATION MATTERS SO MUCH AND WHAT IT TAKES TO BE RANKED AMONG THE BEST by Michael Brown and Paul Turner (Profile Books, tables, graphs, appendices, 320 pages, softcover, $25.95, 978-1-84668-086-1): director of the Nottingham Business School and professor of management practice at Ashcroft International Business School present an analysis of the qualities that make companies great; among the topics are capacity to innovate, people management, and examples of the most lauded companies such as General Electric.

History. BOND OF UNION: BUILDING THE ERIE CANAL AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE by Gerard Koeppel (Da Capo Press, maps, 36 b/w illustrations, 454 pages, hardcover, $27.95, 978-0-306-81827-1): former editor at CBS News, an associate editor of the The Encyclopedia of New York City, and former contributor to the New York Times chronicles the building (1807-1825) of a 363 mile-long waterway from Lake Erie to the Hudson River at Albany, New York, and its infrastructure; topics include legislative battles, navigation along the Mohawk River, and the discovery of hydraulic cement for making canal masonry.

History. A DIFFERENT SHADE OF BLUE: HOW WOMEN CHANGED THE FACE OF POLICE WORK by Adam Eisenberg (Behler Publications, 16 b/w photographs, 235 pages, softcover, $15.95, 978-1-933016-56-6): court commissioner in Seattle Municipal Court and former contributor to The Los Angeles Times chronicles the history of the Seattle police force starting in 1912 along with comments from fifty policewoman; among the subjects are affirmative action, physical training, and “survival strategies” such as Marilyn McLaughlin’s: “A lot of it is attitude...how you walk into the room.”

History. THE ENDURING JOURNEY OF THE USS CHESAPEAKE: NAVIGATING THE COMMON HISTORY OF THREE NATIONS by Chris Dickon (The History Press, 7 x 10, b/w illustrations, 157 pages, softcover, $21.99, 978-1-59629-298-7): maritime historian presents the saga of the United States Navy’s USS Chesapeake encompassing its maiden voyage in 1800 to its final destination as part of a grist mill in Wickham, England (1820-2008); references include the unexpected broadsides by HMS Leopard and the battle with HMS Shannon in 1813 where “Don’t give up the ship!” was first shouted.

Political Science. THE WILL TO BELIEVE: WOODROW WILSON, WORLD WAR I, AND AMERICA’S STRATEGY FOR PEACE AND SECURITY by Rose A. Kennedy (Kent State University Press, 10 b/w photographs, 4 maps, 312 pages, hardcover, $45.00, 978-0-87338-971-6): former teacher at Johns Hopkins University–Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, and associate professor of history at Illinois State University presents America’s approach to the war; among the subjects are national security (1914-17), national security debates (1917-1918), and the Versailles Treaty, which restricted Germany’s power and punished it for causing the war.

Psychology. THE ANATOMY OF EVIL by Michael H. Stone (Prometheus Books, b/w photographs, 384 pages, hardcover, $26.98, 978-1-59102-726-3): professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and author of Personality Disorders: Treatable and Untreatable explores sadistic torture and murder; among the criminals discussed are “Angel of Death” nurse Kristen Gilbert, serial poisoner (at least 31) “Jolly Jane” Toppan, and George Skiadopoulos, who dismembered his girlfriend and threw her parts in the Aegean Sea, telling the police she “went missing.”

Reference. CHRISTIANS IN THE MOVIES: A CENTURY OF SAINTS AND SINNERS by Peter E. Dans (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, b/w photographs, 409 pages, hardcover, $44.95, 978-0-7425-7030-6): associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and author of Doctors in the Movies “traces the arc of portrayal in film of Christians” from 1905 to the present (175 films); several topics are the Hays Motion Picture Production Code, the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the demise of the Catholic Legion of Decency (est. 1933) where attendance by Catholics “at condemned films was forbidden under pain of sin.”

Self Help. GETTING PAST YOUR BREAKUP: HOW TO TURN A DEVASTATING LOSS INTO THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO YOU by Susan J. Elliott (Da Capo Press, 238 pages, softcover, $14.95, 978-0-7382-1328-6): attorney, motivational speaker, and certified grief counselor presents ways to accept the loss and move on; topics include affirmations, “break-up sex,” and combating obsessive thoughts such as using the “rubber-band technique”--snapping hard a thick rubber band on the wrist as punishment for thoughts of the ex until memories disappear.

Self Help. THE STRESS MESS: HOW TO THRIVE IN TURBULENT TIMES by Kelsie Kenefick (Roots and Wings Publishing, 42 b/w illustrations, 188 pages, softcover, $19.95, 978-0-9777493-1-7): biofeedback therapist and licensed counselor presents a “clinically proven” program for taking control of stress by “learning how to respond to it rather than react”; among the subsections are “Making Your Stress Chart,” “Psycho-Emotional Aspects of Jaw Tension,” and “How Your Thoughts Contribute to Stress”: “all emotions come from either conscious or subconscious thoughts.”

Social Science. NOTES ON A LOST FLUTE: A FIELD GUIDE TO THE WABANAKI by Kerry Hardy (Down East, 9 x 10, color and b/w photographs and illustrations, 144 pages, softcover, $21.95, 978-0-89272-779-7): eco-historian and former contributor to Field & Stream as well as Outdoor Life presents the history of Maine’s Abenaki Indians; discussions include the Wabanaki region, culture built around nature, and construction of a mobile home (wigwam) where “a family would just untie the bark panels and pack them in a tightly rolled bundle.”

by Alex Moore, Book Review Editor

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