It’s not easy to get away from discussions today on the future of the industry. Every day I see another article on independent (or major, like Borders) book stores closing and how digital is the death of print. I also find myself listening to people debate print vs. digital with some people vowing that they will never go to the digital “dark side” and abandon the sensory experience they have with print, and others who embrace their eReaders and say they’ll never turn back.  But I also find many people, like myself, who just don’t want to choose sides.

Printed books will become like records

In the session, someone made the comment that they believe that the printed book will never actually die. Instead, it will become more of a collectors’ item, the way records have. And I can see that happening. People will always want to add a beautiful print book to their collection, especially if it comes with extra information or features such as maps and photos. I find that I’m doing this now already. I may read the digital version of a book or borrow a copy from the library, but if I love it, I’ll pick up the print version to add to my collection – especially if it’s a beautifully designed book.

As the discussion continued, someone asked how we can look to the music or film industry for inspiration. The film industry has seen a decline in ticket sales but people still go out to see movies in the cinema. And even more so, people are still buying DVDs and Blu-rays, even though they can buy digital editions through iTunes. Why? Because people like collecting movies, they like the extra features they can get like commentary and blooper reels, they love box sets and even more exciting are features like Easter eggs – anything that makes having that physical copy even more special.

Print and digital bundles

For me, the most interesting idea is of following the movie industry’s example and packaging a digital copy of a book with its print copy.  I have at least two movies on Blu-ray that came with a DVD and the digital version as well. Now, I haven’t used either of the other formats, but knowing I have that option is great! So if I’m about to go on a long trip, I can just load the movie onto my laptop and I’m good to go.

That’s how I feel books should be. Sometimes, I want to buy the print copy and I want to invest in that lovely large hardcover. But the thought of dragging that to and from work every day on the subway to read it? My shoulders just hurt at the thought.

At this point, I’m forced to choose one of the following options:

• Buy the beautiful hardcover and lug it around (or only read it at home… but if you’re seriously into a story, that’s impossible), or
• Compromise and buy the paperback. It’s smaller to carry around, but sometimes not as pretty. And well, it still adds weight to my full purse, or
• Just buy (or borrow) the ebook and read it on my eReader. It’s a great option for  carrying around but if I love the book, I still feel like I want to buy the print copy to add to my collection because I enjoy print that much.

But in my ideal world, I wouldn’t have to choose. I could go out and buy that beautiful hardcover and for that price or just slightly higher, I’d get a digital copy bundled in. Then I can keep my hardcover at home and read on my eReader when I’m on the go. That would be the perfect compromise!

I’m not happy that I had to choose

My feelings on this just grew stronger two weeks ago when I finished A Game of Thrones, the first book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I had purchased the $10 paperback and carried it around. But I’m on a mission to reduce the strain on my shoulders, so the thought of going through another four (eventually six!) books in the series like this wasn’t something I was looking forward to.  So after considering my options, I ended up buying the digital book set, with the plan to add the hardcover collection to my wishlist if I love the books that much.

It’s working so far, obviously, but I was disappointed that I had to choose.

Now, I don’t know the business and economic side of this and won’t claim to. But I imagine there are major changes that need to occur on the trade publishers’ side to make it even possible. I do have hope though, because educational publishers have been doing this for a while. I distinctly remember getting CD-ROMs and then DVDs in the back of my textbooks during high school and then university. They started with just additional content (like tests and videos) but now you can get digital copies too.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how the next few years go as the industry adjusts to these changes and tries to find that balance.

Update: A quick Google search showed me that some publishers are already considering multi-format bundles: Six e-book trends to watch in 2011 and Of Two Minds About Book Still not sure if it’s making business sense for the publishers yet, but it’s a start!

Photo credit: Penn Waggener

Of course, this idea is not new, but I’ve found that my favourite blog posts and newsletters are round-up ones. So hopefully these will become useful to someone else out there.

Here’s what I found interesting over the past week and a bit:

Books & Publishing:

• Booktrack: Soundtracks for Books – Cool idea: enhance the reading experience with a soundtrack that includes music and sound effects to make you feel like you’re really there.
• Reading Revolution: 14 Marvelous Modern Libraries
• Book Quotes to Live By & Pass On
• The Trinity Library, Dublin, Ireland – At some point, I have to visit Dublin to see this library in person. It looks amazing.
• “The Hunger Games” Viral Campaign Heats Up
• From the Guardian: The death of books has been greatly exaggerated
• Is the Personal Library Doomed?

PR, Communications & Marketing:

• 10 Blogs You Should Be Reading If You Manage A Company’s Content Strategy
• 16 Social Media Tools for Meeting Client Demands
• The 7 Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing
• Three Keys to Marketing Fiction in the Current Environment – Three great tips for marketing more than just fiction.
• How To Pitch Anything To Anyone
• Twitter Just Got the Respect it Deserves
• Google Quietly Rolls Out The Chrome Extension To Bring +1 To The Entire Web

Random:

• Google’s doodle tribute to Freddie with a blog post from Brian May
• How do you use your Moleskine? – I don’t know why I’ve never thought about using a reporter notebook horizontally. Totally inspired now and I want yet another Moleskine.
• What Do You Want to Say You’ve Done?
• Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age – A very, very interesting article on collaboration in general. My favourite quote: “If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer.”
• Sequencing the Startup DNA on LinkedIn

Travel photos: (from my Tumblr)

• September 5: Umbrella stands in Japan
• September 4: Canons outside the Jewel House at the Tower of London
• September 3: Jellyfish at the Vancouver Aquarium
• September 2: Toronto skyline
• September 1: Imagine. Strawberry Fields, Central Park, NYC
• September 31: Little blue door in Cambridge
• August 30: A random side street in Oxford. Beautiful
• August 29: George Washington and Co. in Chicago

Via Rosemina

Via demotivation. Original photo is from eksmo.ru

The story begins with Kavita, in rural India, giving birth on her own to a baby girl. The baby, who unfortunately is born into a society that prefers males, is promptly taken away from her and is never seen again.  At the same time, on the other side of the world in San Francisco, Somer is at the hospital experiencing yet another emotionally gripping miscarriage.

Two women going through such emotional moments right at the beginning of a book? I knew at that moment, whether I liked the story or not, I was going to be hooked.

A short time later, Kavita gives birth to another baby girl but this time in an effort to save her newborn daughter’s life, she gives her away. It’s a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even after she has a son and moves into the big city.

In America, Somer and her husband Krishnan, after realizing they cannot have their own baby, decide to adopt one from a Mumbai orphanage.  It’s a difficult decision to make for Somer, adopting an Indian baby who is more like her husband than her, but the minute she sees the little girl, she falls in love.

The baby of course is the one Kavita gave away.

We follow the stories of the two mothers’ lives as time goes on and soon start to follow the daughter Asha’s story (or Usha as Kavita named her) as she goes to India to do an internship at the Times, to get to know her father’s Indian family, to find her real parents, and ultimately find herself.

Gowda tells the story with excellent detail and style and with some very interesting characters from very different walks of life. The story is ultimately an emotional journey and it’s those emotions that kept me hooked, from the American mother who feels left out to the poor Indian mother whose heart hurts at the struggles her family is going through to Asha’s maturity and realization about the mothers in her life.

As a woman, I was taken by the relationships that unfold between the different women from different cultures and generations.

But what interested me more was how the move from one village/country and culture to another for a “better life” affected the characters and the struggles and the difficulties they faced. I was intrigued by the hardship that came from leaving people behind, with trying to adapt to the new cultures and people without losing themselves, and trying to have other people understand who they really are. And ultimately, the hardship that came when they realized that they don’t entirely fit in either place anymore.

It really reminded me of two other stories I have enjoyed and that I recommend you see or read:

• Dhobi Ghat. The independent movie I saw at TIFF last year, you can read my review here, that featured characters from different walks of life (poor, rich, American, Indian) and looked at the way their cultures both meshed and clashed together.  Of course this reminded me of The Secret Daughter as Shai, one of the main characters, is an Indian-born American who is in town to document and tell the story of the poor working in the city, as well as to learn more about herself. Pretty similar to Asha.
• The Namesake. The book (better than the movie) follows a young man as he learns to understand what his parents went through to move to the US to give their family a better life. We follow along as he learns what it’s like to leave everything you know behind, to try to adapt to a culture that doesn’t understand your own, and watch your children grow up in a world so different from what you know.

This was a very long review, but I’d love to hear what you thought of The Secret Daughter or even Dhobi Ghat or The Namesake. Let me know in the comments below.

Rating: 4/5.

All six movies that I saw were great and each one was different, which made my festival experience varied and kept it interesting.  I started writing my reviews but never finished, and as this post has been collecting dust in my drafts for months now, I decided to at least post the reviews I did end up writing.

Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)

Different from your standard Bollywood fare, Dhobi Ghat offers a glimpse into the lives of four very different people living in Mumbai, India. It’s a moving film, one that kept me riveted and offered up some great Indian filmmaking.

Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan stars as emotionally distant artist Arun who meets Shai, an American Indian-born photographer at one of his art showings. After spending the night together, Shai has a hard time letting go of Arun, who conversely has no problem shutting her out.

Shai, taking a sabbatical from her job in the States, is in Mumbai to document with photographs the often hidden side of the city: the work done by the city’s poor.  One of her subjects is Munna, who turns out to be the laundry boy for both Arun and Shai. Munna quickly falls for Shai while she photographs him, and becomes embarrassed and shy about the various jobs he has to take on to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, while Arun is doing his best to ignore Shai, he discovers a set of video tapes recorded by a woman who used to live in his apartment. Arun quickly becomes captivated by the mysterious woman and her story (composed of video letters she was creating for her brother).  This woman is new to the city, brought there by her new husband. We watch as she captures images of the city to share with her brother and as she becomes more isolated in the big city.

The movie revolves around these four characters and we get to see contrasting sides of the city as the movie plays out. Kiran Rao, the writer/director and Khan’s wife, did a good job of showing us the city through the lens of each character. And it just moved me. She was articulate during the Q&A session and I appreciated her thoughts on the movie and its main themes. As well, the newcomers Prateik Babbar and Monica Dogra were excellent and played their contrasting roles really well.

4/5 stars.

Bunraku

I was really excited about seeing this movie and it didn’t disappoint. Part of the Midnight Madness selection, Bunraku takes place in a world where guns are outlawed and swords have returned as the weapon of choice.

In this world, a secretive crime boss named Nicola the Woodcutter rules the city with the help of nine assassins (each with their own fighting style) and the Red Gang. The assassins move up and down in authority by fighting each other. Nicola’s right-hand man is Killer #2, a suave, cold-hearted murderer who kills without remorse.  Together, they run the city using fear and violence to enforce their rules.

We soon meet an unnamed man, a stranger to the city and our cowboy-streetwise hero, who wants to kill Nicola. At a bar, he meets another stranger and our second hero, a samurai named Yoshi. Yoshi wants to avenge the death of his father by taking back a pendant Nicola stole from his clan. Together the two wildly different men set out on a journey to find Nicola.  It’s an entertaining movie with laughs, great fight scenes (with fighting styles that vary throughout the film) and cinematography that is a treat to your eyes. It’s a mash-up of the best of old-style Westerns, futuristic sci-fi and Samurai movies  In fact, the styling seemed to me like a mash-up of Sin City and Kill Bill.

Guy Moshe did an excellent job with this movie and it’s a delight to watch. The principal cast, including Josh Hartnett, Woody Harrelson, GACKT (a Japanese superstar apparently), Kevin McKidd, Ron Perlman and Demi Moore, all play their characters well.  I would definitely recommend watching this movie – it’s visually stunning, funny and just generally kick-ass.

4/5 stars.

The others:

The four other films I saw were all fantastic: Never Let Me Go (4/5 stars), Black Swan (5/5 stars), The Town (3.5/5 stars) and Peep World (3.5/5 stars).

Perhaps when I get a chance to watch each of these again, I’ll finally write those reviews.

Have you seen any of these movies? What did you think of them?

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve had my Kobo for a few months now and I love it.

I promised a list of pros and cons for the Kobo, and so without further ado, here’s my list (in no particular order):

Pros:

• It’s lightweight and small enough to fit in my purse (“So light! Like a croissant!”)
• It’s fast and simple to add books to my Kobo library
• It reads ePubs, which is what the Toronto Public Library offers (though I’m sure you can find a program to convert ebook formats for any reader)
• It comes with 100 classics pre-loaded, which is great when you’re looking for something to read on the go.
• Unlike reading on my iPhone or computer, the screen does not strain my eyes. The e-ink makes it feel like I’m just reading a piece of paper behind glass. It’s fantastic.
• You can change fonts and font sizes, and if you’re reading a PDF, you can switch to landscape view. This actually came in handy a few times.
• There is no delay when turning pages (unlike the previous Kobo edition)
• Battery life! I haven’t actually made note of how long it lasts, but it feels like about a month goes by before I have to re-charge.

Cons:

• There’s only one button to push to navigate through menus and turn pages. I was really worried about getting an RSI as I read pretty quickly and turn pages frequently. But this actually hasn’t been a problem so far and I’ve gotten used to it.
• It takes some time to power on and the store takes some time to load and navigate.
• It has also frozen a few times and I’ve had to re-start. As well, in recent weeks my settings have randomly changed back to the factory settings a few times. I should probably look into updating my software though.
• It doesn’t have some of the other nice-to-have features that the Kindle has: free (!) wifi, multiple navigation buttons, a full keyboard to make notes on pages, etc.

A few friends have asked for my input on e-readers and my final comment is always this:

The Kobo meets my needs right now. It’s lightweight and can read free books. It would be nice to surf the Internet and all those other fun things the Kindle does, but all I wanted was something to read books on. This does it. For everything else I have my iPhone.

Do any of you have a Kindle? I’m curious to know what you think of it. Please share in the comments.

Image Source: jivedanson.

Most people know that I have a weakness for stationary and I love collecting printed books. I love holding them, turning the pages, and even love the smell of them.  I’m also a really big reader – I read often and I read everywhere.  I read daily during my commute to and from work, but have a hard time when the book is heavy. I already take a lot to work and carrying a heavy book in my purse wasn’t doing my shoulders any favours.

That’s when I started thinking about getting a light-weight e-reader that I could use while commuting and on-the-go. It would ideally fit in my purse and could carry as many books on it as I want.

I knew I needed an ereader that was both affordable and could read library books. I’ve been trying to spend less money on books this year and my personal rule is to borrow from the library first. Then, if I love a book enough, I can put it on the list to purchase.  I wanted to stick to this rule with my ereader (even more so as I’d rather buy printed books than digital ones) and soon found out that the library offers ebooks in epub format.

The solution ended up being the Kobo. As much as I really like the Kindle and the features it offers, it doesn’t handle epubs and that was most important to me. I would have loved an iPad but it’s above my price range and is too big for what I needed.

So I waited until the new wirelesss version of the Kobo was out and happily picked one up. Now I can read library books on my Kobo and if I love a book enough, I can still put it on the list of printed books to purchase.

I’ve had it for a few weeks now and it’s been great! There wasn’t much of an adjustment period and I’m still zooming through books like I was before. I’ll share my thoughts on reading on a Kobo in my next post.

Do you have an ereader? Why or why not?

I was debating over my travel options a few months ago, but I finally made a decision when I realized how to knock another item off my to-do-in-life list. More on that later.

Picture taken during my last trip - on the eve of New Year's Eve 2008

I love my classes. The studio space is nice and the instructor is great. I only wish that we had more time to practice and learn – maybe two classes a week would have been better.

So far we’ve learned all about fabrics, how to thread a sewing machine, how to do basic stitches and seams, how to read patterns, and more.  As well, I’m starting to get used to the fabric store and how to navigate it (it can be overwhelming), and I finally know what a serger is and what it’s for. 

I’ve already picked out the skirt pattern and fabric that I’ll be using for my final project. It’s amazing to think we’ll be attempting to make a skirt in just a few weeks when we’ve only just made our first item.

That’s right. This week we completed our first project: a drawstring bag!

It was pretty easy and by the end of it I was impressed and excited.  I know, I know, it’s simple but each little step matters!

Next up? A zippered pouch!