Standing Here

Gösta Ågren

My translation of  the first part of Gösta Ågren's autobiographical trilogy, Jär, is now available as a Kindle e-book, Standing Here, published on Amazon's KDP. 

My short introductory essay on the trilogy, published in Books from Finland magazine in 1992, can be read here. 

Two Percent

At FutureBook, Jakob Harden discusses the state of Danish publishing in the light of the rise of the e-book, and notes that so far

With less than a 2 % market share, e-books are still to come in Denmark.

Words in Nature

I've put an electronic version of my early poetry collection Words in Nature (1971) for sale in Amazon's Kindle e-bookstore. For a change, these are nearly all original poems, not translations. The Kindle Store looks as though it may be a useful way to bring back titles that once sold reasonably well but are now out of print, and I may eventually broaden the experiment to include some Nordic titles for which I have the publishing rights.

Incidentally, you don't need to own a Kindle e-reader in order to read Kindle e-books - the free-of-charge Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for iPhone/iPod touch and Kindle for iPad all make it possible on the respective devices.

Kindle 2.5

I'm pleased with the Kindle 2.5 upgrade, which finally arrived on my DX Global this morning via Whispernet. Not only are "collections" (folders) now available, but the web browser also works for all sites, not just Amazon and Wikipedia. So although the browser is still quite slow it can be used for things like checking mail and news, anywhere that there's a 3G connection. The E-ink typeface is also clearer and sharper than before,in all the font sizes. All of this is a major improvement.

Electric verses

"Christmas 2009 was the time when e-book sales in America began to have financial significance," writes Clare Alexander in the Bookseller, and as someone who has recently begun to use a Kindle, I think I can see why. The convenience of being able to download books, newspapers and magazines instantly, without having to visit a bookstore, is certainly something new, and the lightness, clear display and portability of the device is also a factor that speaks in its favour. To be able to read not simply one book, but three or four simultaneously, without having to prop them up or otherwise support them (large volumes can be hard on the hands and wrists), is to me a definite step forward. Recently, when reading a biography of T.S. Eliot, I wanted to have several other Eliot-related books available, including the poet's own works, and on the Kindle I was able to do this neatly and without effort, switching between automatically bookmarked pages in different volumes. It's also possible to bring up Wikipedia while reading in order to check references. The whole experience is a bit like having a reference library in the palm of one's hand.

When the royalties question is settled and some kind of standardization takes place in the matter of e-book formats, I can see foresee that e-books could even come to replace the paper versions. Whether this development will be truly international or confined to the English-speaking world, it's hard to know at present. Certainly in Scandinavian publishing circles there still seems to be some resistance to the electronic incursion, but this may change as countries like Finland and Estonia, which have always been at the forefront of developments in information technology, begin to respond. It would obviously help if Amazon were to acquire a presence in the Nordic countries, and one wonders if that will happen any time soon.

ePub in Sweden

The Swedish print-on-demand company Publit has set itself the task of making all Swedish out-of-print books available as PoD (print on demand) titles. The ePub blog has a post about a visit to Stockholm by one of their members. Excerpt:

During my time in Sweden we discussed the many different areas of the eBook world, including DRM (of course), the processes involved in going from scanned document (TIFF/PDF/DOC) to an eBook Master format and onto ePub creation itself.

Now, the people at Publit are a group of very talented individuals with plenty of technical knowledge, yet there were aspects of ePub which has left them somewhat perplexed. There were two main points which I found interesting and have heard before around the web so I thought I would share them here.

The electronic antiquariat

An increasing number of out-of-copyright editions of Nordic classics are now being scanned from the collections of U.S. university libraries and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Recently I've been looking at the 1901 edition of Arvid Mörne's Nya sånger and the 1903 edition of Ny Tid, both from Harvard University Library. I also found it interesting to finally read Mikael Lybeck's plays about Finnish fortune-seekers and European industrial magnates in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, Dynastien Peterberg (The Peterberg Dynasty) and Den röde André (Red André). But if one looks further, both in the Archive and in Project Runeberg, there is now a very large amount of similar scanned material by Nordic authors available online, ranging from the works of Strindberg and Ibsen to much less well known names.

Serial readers

Over at Books from Finland, Teemu Manninen talks to science fiction author Michael Stackpole about publishing innovations:

Of course, Stackpole doesn’t take the problem of quality control into account. After all, the ‘job’ of most publishers is not just to deliver content but to find the best writing out there; good publishers are also reliable critics. But he does intuit, and I believe correctly, that digital publishing is already having an impact on the nature of what we read. He cites the example of the ‘commuter market’: people who read one or two chapters on their way to work or home. This kind of reading, Stackpole surmises, could point the way to a return to 19th-century publishing models, such as serial fiction (think of Dickens, whose fame and wealth was based on serialised novels which appeared in literary magazines).

E-books and translation

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post is publishing in four parts the presentation on e-books and literary translation he will deliver at next week's Icelandic Literary Festival in Reykjavik. The first part can be read here, and the subsequent installments are appearing on a day-to-day basis.

E-books in Scandinavia - 3

In its blog, Publit, the Swedish print-on-demand publisher we mentioned in an earlier post, refers to an interesting survey of e-book use among unversity students that was carried out recently by the UK's JISC (Join Information Systems Committee). Although the findings relate to e-books in the academic world, they may have some relevance to the field of electronic publishing in general. Print sales, the survey suggests,

indicated that making course text e-books freely available through the library is not a threat to print sales revenue. Many of the print versions of the e-books made available through the Observatory project actually increased their sales against what was expected. So just as the librarians say, students are using e-books in addition to the print they have bought or borrowed; they co-exist.

E-books in Scandinavia - 2

News from Sweden that print-on-demand publisher Publit is to develop a software-based e-book reader specifically for the Swedish book market. E-books have been slow to gain acceptance in Scandinavia, even though they have been discussed for ten years now, and Publit hopes to change this.

See also: E-books in Scandinavia

Each to their own devices

While there's much admiration for e-books among the upper echelons of the publishing fraternity, there's apparently less enthusiasm for the devices that are used to read them, Catherine Neilan observes in The Bookseller:

John Makinson, chairman and c.e.o. of Penguin, described the current models available as "very conservative devices", which had been "designed for old people".

E-books in Scandinavia

It looks as though it may still be some time before the commercially downloadable e-book finds a secure place in Scandinavian publishing. The absence of Amazon from the Nordic countries (there is still no Nordic equivalent of amazon.de or amazon.fr) has meant that the distribution of e-books has not yet really reached the Scandinavian reading public. The tremendous amount of uptake on the Kindle e-reading device in the United States during the past year or so remains mostly a U.S.-focused phenomenon, and although the Sony reader has made inroads in the U.K. publishing world, with Penguin releasing a growing number of titles in the Adobe .ePub format, readable on the Sony PRS-505, it doesn't yet appear that these recent developments in publishing technology are reaching a wider European public, especially in the North. At the end of last year, Swedish firms like Atlas and Bra Böcker announced plans to release e-book versions of many of their titles, but on visiting the websites of these companies it's hard to find specifics or details, or even the e-books themselves.

It's possible, one guesses, that the concept of e-book publishing clashes with certain ingrained Nordic attitudes - and certainly the authoritarian trend noticeable in the recent Pirate Bay trial has given some pointers to this hypothesis. Although the outcome of the trial is still uncertain, the whole proceeding gives a good idea of where the priorities of Swedish and Nordic media content providers lie. Even so, there is one area of electronic publishing where Nordic classical literature has quite a strong representation: the appropriately-named Project Runeberg has been archiving Nordic-language literature online since December 1992. Like its larger sister enterprise, Project Gutenberg, it is largely a volunteer effort, publishing freely available electronic versions of books which have a cultural and historical significance. Nowadays it also releases facsimile editions of classic works, as well as sheet music, and Latin works by Nordic authors.

At Project Runeberg one can find freely available electronic editions of works (including collected works) by most of Scandinavia's major 19th century authors, as well as writings by many minor and lesser-known ones. The archive contains books by more modern poets and authors, such as Edith Södergran, Karin Boye and even Kjell Westö. According to the project catalog, the database lists 31698 authors, out of which 7746 have presentations of varying lengths. Although the primary emphasis is on Swedish, there are texts in all of the major Nordic languages, including Finnish.

One doesn't have to read the books while sitting at a computer screen -- they can be downloaded both directly and from one's PC to portable devices, PDAs and even mobile phones, making it possible to read them while one's on the move -- travelling by train, for example. I've found this a good way to catch up on my reading of Nordic classics, and I look forward to the day when I will also be able to read commercially published books this way.

See also in this blog: Old Masters