Disqus - Latest Comments for richardnash

Re: The Morning News Tournament of Books - Presented by Field Notes

richardnash — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 16:10:24 -0000

We did actually—those publications *all* passed on reviewing, sadly :-( We did get some coverage on other places, ranging from the New York Times T: Styles Magazine to Lenny Letter to Lithub, but inexplicably, all the major pre-pubs—PW, LJ, Booklist and Kirkus, passed...We do so much appreciate your support though!

Re: Lessons on the Sacrifice of Craft, From the ULTIMATE Collection

richardnash — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 13:07:34 -0000

I'm reminded of one of the finest tweets I've ever seen—all it said was: "The most important item in a collection is the next one."

Re: SXSW PanelPicker

richardnash — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:37:49 -0000

By way of orienting folks towards some concrete examples of what we mean, we'll post some examples of what we mean... At Small Demons we're trying to systematically offer what in many respects has been around for years but in a very ad-hoc way, the ability to dive deeper into the details of a story. Here is a fan who helps us listen to all the music in Simon Reynold's RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN http://scenesfromripitupand... Here's a glossary of Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: http://www.alizahausman.net... And here's is something unlinkable on of our users once told us: "When we were in high school, my best friend and I stuck tester strips of the perfumes the different female characters [in Janet Fitch's White Oleander] wear into the relevant pages in our books..."

Re: http://bowlsofcolors.tumblr.com/post/26225093493

richardnash — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 23:47:12 -0000

Read most anything Lydia Millet has written in the past decade—that's all the beauty you'll need. (And then remember she copyedited Hustler and other Larry Flynt publications.)

Re: Inside by Alix Ohlin

richardnash — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:49:54 -0000

Alix is wonderful (we went to college together)—nice to see fab folks like Jason from a different part of my life discovering her! Has Jonny Evison seen a copy yet?

Re: TEST TEXT

richardnash — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:21:25 -0000

My perspective first. I believe that people come to the site for the content and that content and context are the motivator for the vast majority of users for a PUBLIC BOOKS site. As Craigslist shows, if you get what you are looking for it doesn't have to be pretty. This is not to suggest that good design is in anyway a commodity or an extra, but that developing content and context is the more important thing for this site to achieve.

As such, therefore, the engagement approaches offered by Other Means and Rumors aren't just a nice addition—they are central. Common Name really doesn't propose any significant approach to context-generation.

Considering the two different approaches proposed by Other Means and Rumors, I lean towards Other Means, for the reasons offered by Kio below. Philosophically it accomplishes what a site likes this absolutely has to accomplish, which is to be a public space, a locus of serious discussion around culture and ideas, with writing being the primary mode of expression, with the use of image and audio to offer primary source counterpoint and/or illustration. And Other Means seems to get that.

However, it is certainly true that both Rumors and Common Name do a lot of the detail work extremely well. Readability, icon design, simplicity, etc. But I think Other Means has the deep vision which would be better served by a simpler set of visual cues and more emphasis on readability in execution.

Re: Six Late Afternoon Items

richardnash — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:54:44 -0000

Two perfectly legitimate criticisms to make, Cvan and Paul, but Vanessa's book was not in fact workshopped through Red Lemonade. So they're not connected, casually.

The question of what is going on the Red Lemonade site. To really evaluate the truth of your claim, you'd need to spend a good couple hundred hours reviewing the manuscripts and commentary on the site to see what is in fact happening.

As regards Vanessa's voice, having witnessed much debate around the book, these criticisms—that Vanessa dumbed her voice down—are new to me. I'd be interested to hear you guys debate this with Roxane. Knowing Vanessa as I do, I don't think she's easily neutered. Sometimes writers don't write the book you want them to write.

Re: Announcing Our Advisory Board

richardnash — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:41:57 -0000

Honored to be a part of the team. Been enjoying the paper from this distant Brooklyn.

Re: Centurion Venture Partners - Blog - Considering Your Stakeholders

richardnash — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:26:37 -0000

Or, as I like to say: the writer and the reader are the same fucking person.

Re: SXSW 2012 - Intro

richardnash — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:35:08 -0000

In 1968 in Paris, the rallying cry was Sous les paves, la plage. Under the pavement, beach. Absent revolution of the top-down variety, the only way we'll bring about beach is through the kinds of collective action Molly is describing here. This incremental work might lack the explosive glamor of the Molotov, but by anchoring change in the expression of people's desires on the most local level through the scalable tools Molly will describe, the change will stick. Very much look forward to this!

Re: When will iBooks really arrive?

richardnash — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 09:22:57 -0000

I suspect the larger reason is that Apple has very little interest in books at all. It's quite clear they've devoted very few resources to it, compared to what they put into other areas. It's really only folks in the book business who spend much time thinking about what Apple is doing in the books area. The most attention they ever paid to books was for about 6 weeks when launching the iPad 1, and it seems as if the reason was that they needed a story to tell then about why the Ipad wasn't just an oversized iPod Touch—we forget how skeptical folks were back then of the tablet. The form factor of books and magazines was convenient in that regard. But now that the iPad has exceeded even Apple's expectation, they don't really need to bother. So they're vague about books because they've bigger fish to fry...

Re: Do Digital Review Copies Need DRM Protection? - GalleyCat

richardnash — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:08:23 -0000

Well, that rather proves my point, eh? A. You can OCR scan a print ARC. B. You can crack DRM. And in neither case is there a shred of empirical evidence that sales are hurt. So why bother with DRM? It's like a body cavity search when you leave a clothing store—it might eliminate shoplifting, but it'll hurt sales. To be honest, I was rather surprised my actions constituted news though it is clear from the response that Jason was right, this is news! I look forward to being old hat.

Re: Maggie Nelson Roundup

richardnash — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:16:59 -0000

Can I also add, writing as the (former) publisher of Something Bright, Then Holes (though sadly not of Bluets) that folks might consider her book-length poem, Jane: A Murder, which I also published. FYI, she is also working on another scholarly book on aesthetics and violence for Norton which is, I think, publishing in 2012?

Re: The Case for De-hanced E-Books / ENCYCLOPEDIA HANASIANA

richardnash — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:15:19 -0000

Thanks, Jim, and it's MOST useful you should add, because it's a critically useful point. Yes, Instapaper is an excellent example. And that Marco dude does gets some plaudits out there in the world. But he's making readers happy, not businesses, so you're not hearing the noise. I'd love to find ways to collaborate with Instapaper. Screw Zuckerberg. I suspect he's of the now, not really of the future anyway...

Re: Age of Abundance

richardnash — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:06:59 -0000

Yeah, question one is knowable only via trying, which is always scary. By the second you mean that great cover article from the Economist late last year? When we give women a shot at a decent life, the fertility rate drops dramatically?

Re: Age of Abundance

richardnash — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:44:05 -0000

The first thing that comes to mind is really that humans have had a poor history of governing abundant resources—Clay Shirky's observation that "abundance breaks more things than it fixes" because we're accustomed to scarcity and know how to apportion scare resources. Of course, as you know, Clay and other believe we can rise to the occasion and what you've got above is a blueprint for that. I suppose what would be useful would be to see how the age of abundance for most things interacts with the age of scarcity in natural resources? The scarcity vs information duality was originally coined more for information than for things, as I understand it, and the greater abundance of things has as much to do, I think with the degree to which things are now individual and customized as it might have to do with the sheer volume. More things, yes, but vastly more SKUs, and vastly more things without SKUs.

Re: Once There Was Great Writing Here

richardnash — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:16:31 -0000

There is very little, shall we in fact acknowledge, NO evidence whatsoever that online availability hurts the market for the print work. And I'm not talking excerpts, I'm talking the entire work. The only analysis in books with any rigor (ie not sponsored by companies selling anti-piracy software) is by Brian O'Leary at Magellan Media, working with a lot of data from O'Reilly Media (computer book publishers), and a little from Random House and from Thomas Nelson (Christian publishers). Preliminary albeit inconclusive data: free in its entirety online publication increases market for the legit versions (sample size too small to make data conclusive, however.)

Regarding Lincoln's early comment: "If a book isn't offering any new content to the reader, does it start to become a kind of charity to buy a book?" I would argue that people do not necessarily buy books for content only. It has to do with many cultural variables like participation, convenience, identity-building, identity-expressing. You can download most any pop song in the world for free, yet people spend billions on iTunes and tens of millions on vinyl...

Re: Another Take on the Web is Dead: Limits to Decentralization

richardnash — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:03:15 -0000

"they are not technology problems but incentive problems." This is dead-on. And fascinating. I've found myself using the term "culture" to describe those things that technology doesn't address. But I think "incentives" is a more neutral and more encompassing term. I'm reminded of the growth of behavioral economics in the past decade to help address the limits of rationality in solving economic problems...

Re: SXSW 2011 Publishing Panel Voting, Part One - mediabistro.com: eBookNewser

richardnash — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:40:26 -0000

For what it is worth, here's mine! Not really about pimping Cursor, I hope. More about trying to identify commonalities: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com...

But also do check out: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com... Social Media Is Science Fiction. Genius!

Re: Richard Nash weighs in on publishing’s identity, Part 2 of 2

richardnash — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:12:10 -0000

To elaborate further. At the Untethered conference last week, Peter Osnos apparently said “it’s clear that technology is our friend” and then Brian Murrary announced “Our business model is not under threat…" Good bloody God. Your business model is completely under threat and technology is not yours or anyone's friend. It's technology. It doesn't have friends, or enemies. It is was you make of it. And you're trying to use it to preserve your business model, even though it involves going demonstrably against the grain of what the technology is best at doing. You're using it to manage the supply chain in a sector which has become a two-sided marketplace, and you're using it to create added features when the marketplace again and again demonstrates that participation always matters more than features.

Re: A new member of the USV team

richardnash — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:16:19 -0000

Congrats! As a person who has always hired and published more women than men, I've learned what USV obviously saw—you get more talent when you avoid the entrenched ways...Looking forward to reading more.

Re: James Murdoch: Surprised By Schmidt, Search Sites Should Give Us Answers | paidContent:UK

richardnash — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:25:25 -0000

Funny, I knew James a tiny bit in college. He was a shaggy hipster dude, little blue sunglasses. He was master carpenter for a play I produced and directed in college in 1993. It's a pity he's drunk the Koolaid. Especially because he's completely misunderstood the legal context for the promulgation of the Statute of Queen Anne. Wish I could send him a copy of Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright by Mark Rose pubbed by the University Press of his and my alma mater just as we were there and working together.

Re: Richard Nash Explains Cursor, Leaves Readers Curious - mediabistro.com: eBookNewser

richardnash — Wed, 12 May 2010 11:07:26 -0000

Two quick clarifications:

1. Three years form date of publication, not date of contract. For reasons y'all could easily enumerate.
2. This doesn't preclude us from entering into longer-term sublicenses. In fact, already there are a great many books which are reverting to authors because the domestic edition is out of print, but there are still extant editions of, say, audio, or French. So we deal with this all the time. All it takes is having a halfway competent lawyer draft the contract. Which, needless to say, we will :-)

Re: The Proverbial Sex Reassignment Surgery: what this transition is really about

richardnash — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:42:24 -0000

Sorry for the delayed response, hectic week last week! Thanks, Bud, for the mention there! I agree with Jason that the critical philosophical principle is to recognize that the true connection is the writer-reader one. The one thing I got right back in my Soft Skull days was to say to everyone in the office, We're in the writer-reader connection business.

I think it *is* safe to assume that that business does in fact exist—ie that the connection does not happen magically. It is not safe to assume that the present connectors will always serve that function, the present connectors have to re-justify, from scratch, their right to take part of the readers' money and attention they've earmarked for the writer.

That said, the problem with BEA is not that we spend money on it, the problem is that we don't let the readers in—it could be turned into a consumer show in a second, if the corporate publishers would permit Reed to do so (Reed's done very well with consumer/pop culture shows...). Shows like BEA were critical for companies like Soft Skull to build and extend their brand amongst those bookstore clerks, freelancers, librarians etc who, yes, are part of the increasingly vestigial supply chain, but are also a key set of influences within the increasingly dynamic book culture. That clerk is the guy whose friends ask him for book recs, who blogs, who ends up on local public radio talking about gift books, Fathers day books, blah blah. So, to the extent that we're spending money at BEA to influence the supply chain, yeah, it's a waste, but to the extent that we're doing it to reach him, it's money well bloody spent.

Also, Rebekah, oddly enough, indie presses have been doing what you describe since the 90's. Before my own time at Soft Skull, back in 1997, the Village Voice did an article about Akashic, Soft Skull, and the late Incommunicado Books, referring to them as the "Punks of Publishing," comparing them to indie record labels, and presses of the time like 2.13.61 and Manic D also followed that model. I'm not sure an indie could survive right now if they weren't already following that...

Re: HELP, ALICIA ALONSO IS FLYING THIS PLANE!

richardnash — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:20:19 -0000

Hi Tonya, Alex Ewing was just on the Leonard Lopate Show about "Bravura": http://www.wnyc.org/shows/l...