Category: books

Books and Kindle Singles

Recently I started re-reading Vikram Chandra (the novelist and Berkeley academic)’s book “Mirrored Mind”, which has been published in the US as “Geek Sublime”. I hadn’t read it earlier – I had only read the Kindle sample and then discarded it, and I recently decided to pick it up from where I had left off.
In fact, that was hard to do, so I decided to start from the beginning once again, and so went through the introduction and preface and acknowledgements and all such before diving into the book again. This time I liked it better (not that I hadn’t liked it the first time round), and so decided to buy the full book. But somewhere midway through the full book, I lost enthu, and didn’t feel like reading further. My Kindle lay unused for a few days, for the “loaded” book on that was this one, and there was absolutely no enthu to continue reading that. Finally I gave up and moved on to another book.So one point that Vikram Chandra makes in the introduction to the book is that he initially planned to make it a Kindle single, but then decided, upon the urging of his wife and others, to make it into a complete book on coding and poetry. While the intent of writing a full book is no doubt well-placed, the result doesn’t really match up.

For when you try and turn a Kindle single into a full book, you try to add words and pages, and for that reason you write things that aren’t organically attached to the rest of the book. You want to add content, and depth, but instead you end up simply adding empty words – those that you could have done without, and chapters which are disconnected from the rest of the book.

And so it is the case with Vikram Chandra’s Mirrored Mind. There is a whole chapter, for example, on the sociology of the Indian software industry, which is clearly “out of syllabus” for the otherwise excellent novelist, programmer and creative writer Vikram Chandra. He goes into long expositions on the role of women in the Indian software industry, the history of the industry, etc. which are inherently interesting stories, but not when told by Chandra, who is clearly not in his zone while writing that chapter.

And then there is the chapter on Sanskrit poetry, which is anything but crisp, and so verbose that it is extremely hard to get through. There is nothing about code in the chapter, and it is very hard to cut through the verbosity and discern any references to the structure of poetry, and that lays waste to the chapter. It was while reading this chapter that I simply couldn’t proceed, and abandoned the book.

This is by no means a comparison but I’ve gone down this path, too. I’ve written so many blog posts on the taxi industry, and especially on the pricing aspects, that I thought it might make sense to put them all together and convert them into a Kindle Single. But then, as I started going through my posts and began to piece them together during my holiday in Barcelona earlier this year, I got greedy, and I thought I could convert this into a full “proper” book, and that I could become a published author.

And so I started writing, mostly in cafes where I went to for breakfast (croissant and “cortado”) and for coffees. I set myself ambitious targets, of the nature of writing at least two thousand words in each session. This might help me get out a skeleton of the book by the time my vacation ended, I reasoned.

Midway through my vacation, I decided to review my work before proceeding, and found my own writing unreadable. This is not always the case – for example, I quite enjoy going back and reading my own old blog posts. I’m quite narcissistic, in other words, when it comes to my own writing. And I found my own work-in-progress book unreadable! I immediately put a pause on it, and proceeded to fritter away the rest of my vacation in an offhand way.

I got back to Bangalore and sent the “manuscript”, if it can be called such to editor extraordinaire Sarah Farooqui, I don’t know what trouble she went through reading it, but her reaction was rather crisp – that the “book” was anything but crisp and I should cut down on the multitude of words, sentences and paragraphs that added no value. The project remains stillborn.

So based on these two data points, one from a great novelist (none of whose novels I’ve read), and one from my not-so-humble self, I posit that a Kindle single once conceived should be left that way, and authors should not be overcome by delusions of grandeur that might lead them to believe they are in the process of writing a great work. The only thing that can come out of this is a horribly overblown book whose information content is no greater than that of the Kindle single originally conceived.

Long ago on this blog I had written about “blog posts turned into books”, after reading Richard MacKenzie’s book on pricing (Why popcorn costs so much at the movies). The same holds true for Kindle singles turned into books, too. And when I started writing I intended to be a 500-word blog post, not the 900-word monster it has turned into. I wouldn’t blame you if you if you didn’t get this far.

The Box: A review

So over the weekend I started and finished reading “The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger” by Mark Levinson. It’s a fascinating book, and one that I had been intending to read for a very long time. Somehow it always kept slipping my mind whenever I wondered what book to buy next, and I’d pushed buying it for a long time now.

Finally, a few days back, when “unknown twitter celebrity” Krish Ashok asked his followers to send him reading recommendations, and when he published the list, and I saw this book on the list, and I saw that the book was available on Kindle for Rs. 175, I just bought it. This is the first book in a very long time that I’ve bought “straight” off the Kindle Store, not bothering with a sample.

It’s a fascinating book, as it takes us through the 50-odd years of history of the shipping box. And on the way, it gives us insights into the development of the world economy through the 50s and 60s, and factors that led to the logistic revolution ushered in by the box.

We think of post world war America as this capitalist haven, where markets were free, and you could get jailed for communist leanings. We tend to think about this time as one of innovation and freedom of business, leading to high economic growth.

This wasn’t the case, though. While the US was nominally capitalist and markets were supposedly free, this was a time of heavy regulations, and the presence of cartels. International shipping rates, for example, till the mid-1970s, were set by “conferences” (basically cartels), after which the cartels broke down. It was not possible for a carrier to quote an integrated source-to-destination rate, and rates had to be quoted by leg. Someone who wanted to start a new train route had to prove to the regulators that it would not harm existing players!

And then there were the unions. Levinson devotes an entire chapter to how the unions were managed. Basically containerisation meant greater mechanisation and a reduction in demand for labour. And this was obviously not acceptable to the dockworker unions, and led to protracted battles which needed to be resolved before containerisation could take off. The most interesting story came from the UK, where unions in most established ports (primarily London and Liverpool) blocked containerisation, and went on strike in the specially developed container port at Tilbury. Felixstowe, which had hitherto been too obscure a port to attract unions’ attention, now unencumbered by unions, jumped on to the container business and is now by far the UK’s biggest port.

Levinson also pays much attention to how the container shaped economies in general. Prior to containerisation, the cost of changing mode of transport was very high, since individual items needed to be unloaded from one means of transport and loaded to another. Industries were usually located based on access to port, and ports came up to service nearby industries. Containerisation changed all that. Now that it was easy to transport using a series of different means of transport, the location advantage of being close to port was lost. And this had massive effects on the economy of regions.

Massive effects on economies also happened due to the scale factor that containerisation brought in. Small ports didn’t make any sense any more, since the transaction cost of berthing was too high. And so small ports started dying, with business being soncolidated into a few larger ports. The game changed into a winner take all mechanism.

In the 1950s and 60s, before the coming of the container, shipping was a low-capex high-opex (operational expenditure) business. Most ships were old and cheap, but costs in terms of labour and other things was high. With the coming of the containership, the cost structure inverted, with the capital expenditure now being extremely high, but opex being quite low. This led to “revenue management”, and a drop in prices, and ultimately the breaking of the cartels.

The book is full of insights, and chapters are organised by subject rather than in chronological order. It gets a little repetitive at times, but is mostly crisp (I read it in a weekend), and the insights mentioned above are only a sample. And it tells us not only the story of the box (which it does) but also the story of the world economy, and regulation, and competition, and unionisation and economies of scale. Highly recommended.

 

Neal Stephenson is Amibah the Formless One

Close to ten years ago, some of us had imagined ourselves to be Gods, and thus created a Pantheon. I was War, for whatever reason. Madness was Madness. Kodhi was Disease. Spunky was Death, because, you know, Death looks like Spunky.

And then there was a whole host of “minor Gods”, most of who I don’t remember right now, but most of who were also modelled after real people that we (Madness, Disease and I – the creators of the Pantheon) were very well acquainted with. If I’m not wrong, there was a point in time when we tried fitting every significant person around us into the Pantheon. Anyway.

So as far as Pantheons are concerned a flat organisation is not desirable. There can be minor quibbles among the Gods, which can only be resolved by a higher power. Then, there can be conflicts in judgments of Gods, for which a hierarchy is necessary to determine whose Will will prevail.

One way of doing this is to establish a hierarchical structure, where there is some kind of well-formed ordering among the Gods of the Pantheon. The downside of this, of course, is that there can be quibbles among the Gods regarding their positions in the Pantheon itself, and if they can’t agree on the hierarchy itself, there is very little they can achieve by being Gods.

So a standard solution for this is to have a mostly flat organisational structure, but have a head at the head of it – a King of Gods, or perhaps a God of Gods. So in Indian mythology you have Indra. The Greeks have Zeus, whom the Romans call Jupiter and whom the Norse call Thor (it is interesting, though, that when it comes to days of the week, it is Brhaspati and not Indra who is mapped to Jupiter and Thor. But that is another matter). Given that most of the Pantheonic religions have a King of Gods, it seems like a rather sustainable organisational structure!

And so we decided to have a King of Gods for our Pantheon also. Now, within our peer group we wanted to avoid unsavoury competition, and didn’t want to impose a hierarchy. So we had to get someone from outside the peer group to head the Pantheon (like the Kodhis have Manoj Kumar at the head of their Pantheon). So we created a King of Gods, and called him/her (it wasn’t clear then) Amibah the Formless One. Amibah wasn’t mapped to anyone we knew.

So as I’d mentioned in these pages last month, I recently finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. Earlier in October, two days before I was due a day-long flight, I started reading the prequel to that, The Baroque Cycle (this book is so long that at the end of the flight, most of which I spent reading, I was at 6% in the book). I’m now through about a quarter of the book, and it has been absolutely awesome. I’ve learnt much more about late Medieval European history by reading this book than by reading all the other history books I’ve read in the last several years.

That, however, is besides the point. As I have been going through the two books of Stephenson, I’m amazed at how much of Madness’s talking and writing and style is derived from Stephenson. In almost every page, there is something that I read that reminds me of Madness. The similarity in styles is unmistakable. Considering that Madness had finished reading the two books before he wrote all the stuff in which the same style was seen, the causation can only run one way – everything Madness says and does is heavily influenced by Stephenson’s writings.

Madness channels Stephenson in everything that he writes, says and does. If you were to remove the elements of Stephenson from Madness, he gets reduced to virtually nothing. By thus channeling Stephenson, Madness can be considered an ambassador of Stephenson. Nay, he should be considered to be a Prophet of Stephenson.

So if Madness is a Prophet of Stephenson, that implies that Stephenson is a God. But Madness is no ordinary prophet – he is also a member of the Pantheon. That a member of the Pantheon is Stephenson’s prophet can mean only one thing – that Stephenson is a higher member of the Pantheon. Which means he is none other than the King of Gods.

Which means that Neal Stephenson is actually Amibah the Formless ONe.

Good boys don’t get laid

Last night I bought Christian Rudder’s Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) and started reading it. I’m now about 10% into the book, well past the Kindle sample (I bought the book in entirety after I’d finished the sample). I’m past the first couple of chapters and am now reading a chapter on the contributions of Twitter to linguistics.

Rudder is a co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at the matchmaking website OkCupid, and he draws upon some aggregate data that his website has collected to point out some rather interesting stuff about how people think, view themselves, and the kind of partners they are looking for. One very interesting piece of analysis (which includes a couple of brilliant graphs) shows the preference for the partner’s age among men and women of different ages. So far the book has been absolutely spectacular.

The part of the book that I’ve found most fascinating so far is the one on averages and variances. Rudder looks at the average ratings of a large number of women registered on OkCupid (as rated by men) and tries to correlate their ratings with their success on the site (measured in terms of the number of messages they have received from men on the site wanting to date them). Given the scale of the data that Rudder has access to (rather large), the results are rather stupendous.

What Rudder finds is that for a given level of average rating for a woman, the higher the variance in her rating, the more the number of messages she receives. There are some quirky statistics he quotes (a lot of which has been extracted in this post on Brain Pickings – it was after a friend sent me this post that I got interested and bought the book) which show that women who are consistently rated a 3 (on a scale of 1-5) by men are much less likely to get a message than someone who gets a mix of 1s and 5s.

From this Rudder concludes that negative ratings actually boost a woman’s chances of getting a date – the fact that a number of men have rated someone unattractive means that there is something about her that a lot of men don’t like. This implies that the “competition” for getting her is possibly low, and you might be able to get a “bargain” or an “arbitrage” if you are able to get her.

While this is a plausible and rather palatable thesis, I have an alternate explanation for the same data – I posit that low ratings don’t matter. Some people might have rated you lowly but they don’t matter since they aren’t interested in you. What matters simply is the number of high ratings that you get – people are always on the lookout for spectacular people to date, and by getting a number of 5s, you are showing that you are found rather attractive by a number of people. The ratings of 1 that you have received are an anomaly – messages of rejection from people who don’t want to date you, and all they do is to pull down your average. A better way of comparing women would be to throw away the bottom 20% of all ratings that a woman gets and then calculate the average – and a lot of 3s that Rudder has analysed in his book are likely to come out as something more than that.

Irrespective of the reason for the correlation of variance with attractiveness, though, what is undisputed is that people look for spectacular people to date. If you are a consistent three, irrespective of whether you go by Rudder’s thesis or mine, a large number of men are likely to rate you as being “unspectacular”. When given a choice between dating someone who is a “common minimum program” on most dimensions and someone who has a “spike” (as recruiting management consultants like to put it), you are likely to be more interested in the one that has the spike. What you consider to be a spike might be considered to be a trough by others, which probably leads to an average average rating (but high variance), but it is the spike that attracts you to her.

The problem with the arranged marriage market in India is that it is set up such that people show off their “average” side. As I had argued several years earlier (back when I was in the market), the Indian arranged marriage market is dominated by people who are themselves “common minimum programmes” and who are looking for “common minimum programmes” to marry. Thus, if you want to enter that market yourself, you try to mould yourself as yet another common minimum program and try to hide your spike rather than to enhance it (it is also a result of counterparties sharing notes in the arranged marriage market, something that doesn’t happen in the dating market. If you have a spike that one girl considers to be a trough, her folks are likely to tell people known to them about your trough (which is actually a spike), and that might pull down your average rating).

Most Indian parents bring up  their kids to become good materials in the arranged marriage market, and since it is the unspectacular CMP that succeeds in that market, parents aspire to get their grown up kids to fit such moulds. Any possibly deviant behaviour is quickly dissed, non-standard careers are strongly discouraged, you are encouraged to dress unspectacularly and so on. Taking this together with Rudder’s thesis, what this means is that if you prime yourself for the arranged marriage market, you are losing out on the dating market!

What it takes to be a success in the arranged marriage market (solidity, unspectacularity, CMPness) are directly at odds to what it takes to succeed in the dating market (a spike, quirkiness, character) and so once you have decided to enter one market you automatically become a failure in the other. This thesis also explains why people who break up in their mid/late twenties and who consequently enter the arranged marriage market (possibly since it offers the quickest chance of a rebound) struggle significantly in that market – they have been primed for the dating market which makes them unhot in the arranged marriage market.

One “spike” that I consider to be a part of my character is this blog. Back in the Benjarong conference, I was given sage advice that I do not disclose this blog to prospective brides from the arranged marriage market, thanks to posts like this one and this one. Finally I ended up marrying someone who I met as a consequence of this blog (this post to be precise – she later told me) – who messaged me on Orkut saying she likes my blog, because of which we got talking and so forth. It was the spike – possibly considered abhorrent by many – that was responsible for my finding my wife!

So decide which market you actually want to be in before you prime yourself. “I’ll also casually look at the other market” is never likely to work.

The big deal about the half-girlfriend

When all of twitter outraged about Chetan Bhagat’s latest masterpiece “half girlfriend” I didn’t know what the big deal was. Given that concepts such as ladder theory, friendzone, GBF (Gay Best Friend), FGB (Foremost Girl Buddy), Goalkeeper Theory and Petromax are all so well documented and accepted, it doesn’t take much of a leap to get to the concept of “half-girlfriend”, as described in the flipkart summary of the book. 

It seemed to me that the people that were outraging were all pseud-types who had hardly been single in their youth and how looked down upon IITs and IITians (for lacking social skills; and guilty as charged on that count). That they were people who subscribed to a certain view of how friendships and romances and relationships should function, and who were incapable of appreciating any alternate mechanisms. I could think of them as the people who got madly outraged when I put out my now classic blog post on petromaxing in business schools nine Deepavalis ago.

But now that the book has already come out (I have no plans to read it since I don’t read fiction. Moreover, considering myself an authority on alternate mechanisms of romantic relationships, and am married to someone who considers herself an authority on conventional mechanisms of romantic relationships, I don’t think I can bear being lectured upon on such topics), and people that I know, or people that know people that I know have started reading it, I realise why the outrage is all about. Consider this sample which I got on one WhatsApp group this morning:

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The first reaction is that the quality of writing is horrible, but then that’s how Chetan Bhagat writes, and that’s how the audience he writes for wants him to write. And then the whole crassness of the implementation of the concept in the book hits me – while the concept of half-girlfriend might be a bloody good one, with wide-ranging implications and mechanism designs, it seems like (based on the above limited sample) the concept as instantiated by Bhagat doesn’t hold a candle to its potential!

I’ve now crossed the floor. I’m now in the camp of the people who believe that Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend is cringeworthy – and I find it cringeworthy not because of the concept (which I think is rather worthy), but because of the way that Bhagat seems to have butchered it and made it appear crass and “LS”. By writing this book, Bhagat has nipped in the bud what might have been a phenomenal alternative relationship concept. And that is unforgivable.

I don’t normally quote sitcoms, and I don’t normally watch sitcoms, but given we are on the topic of alternative relationships mechanisms, I can’t help but put a short video featuring perhaps the greatest purveyor of alternative relationship mechanisms of all time – Jeffery Murdoch from Coupling. I couldn’t find an extract from the episode, so here is the full first episode of the first season of Coupling in all its glory! May you be able to get rid of your unflushables!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvFs5S6A6LM

Reading fiction

In the semester of January-May 2004, I took a course on Indian Fiction in English. This was in order to satisfy the quota for “humanities” credits at IIT Madras. The course was mostly good, and taught well, and we got a glimpse of how Indian writing in English developed, and the motifs that have been unique to such writing. There are a number of short stories we read as part of the course that I still remember vividly. But then there was the book.

For a one semester course, having lots of short stories makes sense, but no course is complete without analysing a novel, and so we were asked to read Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises, a truly depressing and mindfucking piece of literature. I don’t know if it was a consequence of that, or that I didn’t read much anyway, that the number of books of fiction I’ve read since then can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Soon after graduating from IIT (after some wrangling – I had attendance issues in the said Indian Fiction in English course, thanks to all the IIM interviews and some casual bunking), I paid Rs. 95 for Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone and devoured it. Fresh out of IIT (and having spent a summer at IIT Delhi, I could relate to the settings in the book), I must say I loved it. A few days later I borrowed To Kill A Mockingbird from God. Loved that, too. Then I borrowed (from God, again) Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Never got past the initial pages. I don’t think I even returned the book to God.

Then I bought Catch 22 and didn’t read it (the book was soon in tatters and I gave it away). Through IIM, I was too busy reading the Business Standard and blogging and indulging in unsavoury activities to have any time for reading. And after graduation I turned to non-fiction (I started with Duncan Watts’s Six Degrees, then James Suroweicki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, Freakonomics, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, James Gleick’s Chaos, etc.) – mostly books on science and history and economics. I was hooked and for the last eight years this is what I’ve mostly read. The only book of fiction I remember reading in this intervening time period was Amit Varma’s My Friend Sancho. I had gone for the book’s launch in Delhi (more of an excuse to meet Amit and other friends who were going to turn up there), bought it out of sheer social pressure at the occasion and read it. I must say I quite liked it (though I like Amit’s recent writings on risk and ancient writings on freedom much better).

So scroll back (or forward – depending on which frame of reference you are in ) to about a month back, after I had left twitter and facebook when I decided I must use the now available time to read some fiction. I started off with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (free Kindle edition), struggled though to about 50% and promptly gave up. I needed some fiction that would inspire me.

Some ten years back Madness had recommended that I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I promptly ignored him. Eight years back he made the same recommendation. I ignored him again. In 2008 I decided to read the book, but couldn’t find a copy (pre-Kindle days, remember). Sometime in 2009 or 2010 I found a copy in Blossom, and bought it, and it was sitting in the back of my bookshelf till two weeks back. I didn’t start reading from that, though.

When I had my accident in Rajasthan back in 2012, I had injured the ligament in my left thumb, and the greater injury of my fourth right metacarpal had meant that I had ignored this ligament injury until it was too late. So I have a weak left thumb. And that means it is hard for me to hold open a paperback with my left hand – it has to be placed somewhere. This means most of my reading in the last two years has been on the Kindle.

And so I got a sample on my Kindle. The first scene involving movement of currency in Shanghai had me hooked. Soon I was through the sample. Before I hit that “buy” button on my Kindle, though, I checked the bookshelf to see if the physical copy still existed. It did, though it was yellow (perhaps it was already yellow by the time I bought it). So I picked up the physical copy. And over the last ten or twelve days I’ve read it. All 918 pages of it.

It’s been a fabulous book (if a work of fiction has to hold my attention for this long it ought to be fabulous – my ADHD makes me a very good judge of books and movies). Insane fundaes on cryptography, privacy, the second world war, American legal system and just about everything else. It’s been so insanely full of fundaes that I actually sat through 918 pages of it! Can’t recommend the book enough!

I wonder if I would have read it had I still been on Twitter and Facebook. I probably would have – despite being on these media I did read a sufficient quantity of non fiction in the last 2-3 years. But I had the kind of mental space I didn’t for a long time (possibly in part with living alone). And so I read. It’s been fabulous.

The next two books I plan to read are Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (I’d begun reading it two years back and liked it before I had a problem with that Kindle and had to exchange it) and Dr. Sid Lowe’s Fear and Loathing in La Liga (considering I’m traveling to Catalunya next month). I still don’t know which one I’ll pick up next (figuratively – both books are on my kindle).

Blossom, not babykutty

I wouldn’t be wrong in saying that most of the books I own have been bought at Blossom, the new and secondhand bookstore on Church Street, Bangalore. I have bought significantly from Premier Bookshop also, but there was an inflexion point in my reading after Premier closed, so most of my book-buying has happened after that. I have bought some books from larger stores such as Landmark or Crossword, but they are too few to be counted. In fact, I would hate to classify Landmark or Crossword as “bookstores” any more, given the amount of real estate they allocate for that trade.

So I was at Blossom last month, browsing its shelves. The Karnataka Quiz Association still gives out its prizes in the form of Blossom coupons, and since I still have a few unspent coupons, I was at the store looking if there was a book I liked. And possibly for the first time ever in that store, I was underwhelmed.

Essentially my book buying and reading habits have changed significantly in the last two years (my last “raid” on Blossoms was in September 2011). Sometime in 2012 i got myself a Kindle. While I initially used it to read PDFs and free e-books and instapaper, I soon warmed up to buying books directly from the Kindle store. The gamechanger as far as I was concerned was the free samples. You can download free samples of any e-book on your Kindle, and once you’ve read the sample (typically about 7% of the book) you can purchase the book with a single click (from your Kindle itself). Some of the books which I’ve wanted to explore have had me so hooked that I’ve ended up buying. And now (partly as a result of a weak ligament in my left thumb) I find it hard to read physical books!

The primary reason I felt underwhelmed at Blossom was that my process for book-discovery has also changed, along with my process for book buying. One of the advantages buying regularly from Amazon is that their recommendation engines start working for you. So nowadays, if I want to browse books, i go to the Amazon website and start looking through my recommendations. And so far, I’ve bought a few of my recommended books and have ended up liking them.

Being a regular visitor to the Amazon recommendations page means that I’m clued in to the long tail of books, which would happen earlier only when i visited special bookshops such as Blossom. Also, the breadth of Amazon’s collection means that I’m more likely to find a title I like on the Kindle Store than in a bookshop like Blossom. And add to this my preference for ebooks over physical books and you know why Blossom doesn’t pleasure me any more.

So every time I would look through the shelves on the third floor of the store (the non-fiction section housing secondhand books) and find something interesting, I would find myself reaching for my phone and checking if the book were available on the kindle store. I would contemplate buying the book only if it weren’t available on the Kindle store or if it  were extraordinarily priced.

I had gone to Blossom with about a thousand rupees of coupons (collected over various quizzes) but was able to spend only half of them. Solstice at Panipat (about the third battle in 1761) wasn’t available on the Kindle Store. It was a similar story with KA Nilakanta Sastri’s The History of South India. Jane Jacobs’ Cities and The Wealth Of Nations was available on the Kindle Store but the Blossom price was too tempting.

I realize that despite my binge on the Kindle Store, I have more unread physical books than e-books. I wish some day Amazon were to come up with a program where I could exchange physical copies of my books for ebooks. That way I’m sure I would read more.

Bloggers writing books

There have been times in the past when I would have read a book and then concluded that “it’s a blog post expanded into a book”. One book that I clearly remember that followed this model was Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”. An idea that can be easily explained in 3000 words instead taking 30000, so that it can then qualify to be a “book”, the economics of whose publications are much different from that of a “long form article”. I remember thinking this even more about this book called “Why Popcorn Costs So Much At The Movies“. It was all about price discrimination, a concept that could have been explained well in a blog length article (500-1000 words). Even a long-form article would have been too much for it.

The topic of this post, however, is not about books that should have been blogposts. It is about bloggers writing books. For dinner on Saturday I met two friends who also happen to be renowned twitter trolls. Somewhere between the soups and the pizzas the conversation moved to books being written by bloggers (and there are many of those). And the three of us came to the unanimous decision that bloggers are lousy at writing books (I haven’t read any of the books they were talking about, but could attest to it since I’ve been trying to write a couple of books for a couple of years now and getting nowhere).

The fundamental point is that the art of holding someone’s attention over 1000 words (the normal length of a blog post) is very different from holding someone’s attention over 50000 words (the length of a typical book). So if you’ve been a blogger for a few years now, through sheer practice you would be great at using 1000 words to put across your ideas. However, when you want to write something longer, you either get discontinuous (with lots of mini-chapters of 1000 words each) or you end up saying the same thing over and over again.

So yes, as you might have figured out from my Project Thirty/Thirty One filings, I’m writing a book. And no, it’s not about Studs and Fighters (thanks to your valuable feedback I’ve given up on that concept). I’ve been  trying to write lots of small chapters. Somehow, I’m not able to go beyond 1000 words per chapter (2000 is the intention). There is a bigger problem. I begin to take myself too seriously when I think I’m writing a book. I stop writing in the informal conversational style I normally use on my blog. And it becomes excruciating, both to write and to read (I’ve tried reading some of my own “serious” pieces and given up).

Maybe all this tells me something. That having been writing this blog (and its predecessor on LiveJournal) for 9 years now, and having got many an accolade for it, I should simply stick to writing blog posts. Maybe it’s time to accept that when it comes to writing books mEre sE nahIn hOga

Library Membership

While on a long lonely walk today (ironically, immediately after watching Liverpool play) I saw this library not too far from my house. It was called Just Books, I think, but I’m not sure of the name. With my British Council Library membership due for renewal in a couple of months, and doubts about whether I want to renew it (the library is too far, and I’ve stopped getting excited by the collection there), I’m considering membership to this library.

I took a look at the books today, and there were two major turnoffs. One was a section labeled “non-fiction” (whatever that is supposed to mean!). I don’t remember the other one right now – but I do remember having one other turn off while I was there. Apart from that, though, the collection seems good, which makes me think I should take membership there.

I found a lot of books there that I’ve read, or want to read, but wouldn’t borrow because I already own them. Now, I don’t know how to interpret this. The positive way of looking at it is that given that I like a lot of books that are there, they’re more likely to get other books of “my kind”, too. The negative way of looking at it is that I already own all the interesting books there that I want to read, so the membership wouldn’t add much value to me. The clincher, I guess, is about the frequency with which they update their collection. If they are going to buy new books on a regular basis, then I guess this will work out for me.

The other thing I liked about the library is that it has multiple copies of a lot of books. I think that is always a good thing, for you wouldn’t want to wait forever for someone to read that book that you want to read. They follow the netflix pricing model, where you pay a fixed fee (Rs 150) per month and there are no late fees. So by taking longer with a book, you are essentially denying yourself bang for the buck that you’re going to be paying them regularly (In the past I’ve “bailed out” of a library membership that followed this model. I didn’t go for a while, and then realized that the amount due was so high that I didn’t mind losing the deposit I’d placed there and I never bothered returning the books I’d “borrowed” from there).

And do any of you use Justbooks already? Do you like it? What are the odds that you go to the library and find nothing that you want to read?

Library sourcing

It’s been close to two years since I took up membership at the British Council Library in Bangalore and of late I’ve been thinking that I won’t extend my membership after it expires this December. The library hasn’t been very active in updating its book stocks, and seeing the same books in the same places again and again (my interests mean I’m limited to a handful of shelves in the library) gets monotonous, and there have been times when I’ve borrowed books just for the heck of it.

Yesterday, I was meeitng Kodhi after which I wanted to go to the library (since books were due for return), and he offered me to come along with me. And for the first time in a very long time, I had too many books from which I had to decide which ones to take home. There had been books which I’d been seeing at their regular places time and again, and had never felt the need to read until Kodhi told me about them and convinced me to borrow them. Overall, it was a very pleasant visit to the library.

Going forward, I think I’ll extend this strategy. Every time I go to the library, I’ll take along a different person – hopefully someone who understands well my interests and reading habits, and see if I make better use of the library. Since there are two months left before my membership expires, I hope to have got more data on this (how “successful” visits to the library are when I go with a friend) and can make a better decision about giving up the membership (it costs around Rs. 2000 per year).