Accustomed to writing weighty tomes of military or political history, a personal family memoir might not be the kind of work you’d immediately associate with Sir Max Hastings, journalist and ex-newspaper editor extraordinaire – but prepare to be surprised. His quirkily named Did you Really Shoot the Television: A Family Fable has received favourable reviews across the board.]]>
Accustomed to writing weighty tomes of military or political history, a personal family memoir might not be the kind of work you’d immediately associate with Sir Max Hastings, journalist and ex-newspaper editor extraordinaire – but prepare to be surprised. His quirkily named Did you Really Shoot the Television: A Family Fable has received favourable reviews across the board.
Descibed by Andrew Marr in the FT as a ‘slim, delightful book’, Did you Really Shoot the Television is a stirring and bawdy portrait of several generations of the illustrious Hastings family.
‘Relatives of memoir-writers,’ asserts Jonathan Sale in the Independent, ‘are legally obliged to be exasperating and eccentric.’ Serendipitously, Hastings’ ancestors exude both criteria – a family of hopelessly improvident individualists. His Great Uncle Lewis for example, was sent down from Stonyhurst college for ‘alleged homosexuality.’ Undettered, he headed for Africa and became a professional hunter, mounting, amongst other things, a campaign to protect the tse-tse fly. His own father Mac once spent three months on a desert island for The People, managing to lose 32lb and show signs of scurvy in the process.
And nor does Hastings spare anybody, revealing in detail, for example, his parents’ disastrous relationship (‘not a single image exists of them posing together as a couple’), his strained relationship with his demanding mother and his hopeless attention-seeking as a child – manifested most spectacularly in the anecdote which lies behind the work’s title. In fact, it’s a testament to Hastings’ honesty that his childhood self emerges as a pompous, disagreeable type.
Alongside the family history, Hastings’ book colourfully relates the history of the newspaper industry – with which almost every member of the family has had dalliances with at some stage. All have at some other contributed copy to the nationals – from small vignettes, to his mother’s role as a pioneering women’s editor at Harper’s Bazaar, to his own copious output.
What also marks the book out in amongst the warm and vivid family portraits is Hastings’ meticulous attention to detail. We learn, for example that in 1890 the Hastings family income totalled £416 per annum, with the puritancial Edward Hastings allowing himself £200 for household costs, £70 for rent, £6, 2s,0d for lunches and £3.12s.0d on travel. By 1916, Basil, Hastings’ grandfather, was earning £1,100 a year. Despite this, the novel retains a quick picaresque pace, whisking us from spartan British boarding schools one minute to hunting trips in Africa the next.
A gripping read throughout, Did you Really Shoot the Television seems certain to concretise Hastings’ reputation as a versatile and talented author in any genre.
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]]>At the heart of Klein’s book was the notion that companies were now focussed on creating brands; products were an afterthought. Brands, Klein argued, used to be a way of giving everyday products a recognisable face; now they had usurped these products, becoming more important than the products themselves. Companies which are now permanent fixtures and fittings of our daily landscape came into being. Behind their pre-eminence, however, lurked something distinctly unsettling: an outsourced supply chain which allowed the companies to focus resources on creating their brands rather than on the products themselves. Klein dedicates a large chunk of the book to laying bare networks of exploitation on which some of the world’s most ubiquitous and successful products are based.
Klein backs this overarching thesis up with an astonishingly detailed set of research; what stands it aside from other polemics of the time is the painstaking detail of Klein’s case studies – the book took four years of careful field research to write.
That said, all of this is presented in an informal way and with such a paucity of language that the reader never feels bogged down in the figures which line the book. It begins, in fact, with Klein looking at her own building – owned by the town coat maker – who Klein then links to the book’s thesis as a whole. Klein approaches her subjects throughout with humanity and objectivity, combining facts with personal stories – whether looking at Nike’s growing influence in American high schools or sweatshop workers in the Philippines – preferring to use the force of facts rather than emotion to press her case.
Klein may now set her sights on different targets: her latest book, Shock Doctrine, won the inaugural Warwick Prize for writing in 2009 for its excoriating analysis of the implementation of the ideas of the Chicago school. However, No Logo is as insightful and relevant today as ever before and will undoubtedly be revisited by countless readers.
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]]>The basic device will cost $499 (just over £300) in the US and should be available across the world by July. But what will this new mystical device mean for publishing?
It’ll almost certainly offer us a central point of distribution for e-books – or iBooks as Jobs would have it – a one stop virtual bookshelf. With the absence of Random House, almost all major world trade publishers have struck a deal with Apple to sell their books in the new iTunes bookstore. Those that haven’t will surely be scrambling to do so as of today. This is how Apple would like us to see things: with them as the go-to store for e-books of every description, effectively a cicumlocution of all other e-readers.
But let’s not label it a Kindle-killer just yet. Some reviewers have lamented that the backlit screen doesn’t come close to emulating the e-ink of Amazon’s competitor product. That said, it does have a lot more to offer in terms of the general multimedia experience – a point in which the Kindle is sadly lacking. The new larger screen allows the iPad to present itself as perfect platform for video and games material a point on which Jobs was strangely silent in his speech.
Further, having another big beast alongside Amazon and Google cannot be a bad thing, a point Steve Jobs sought to underline when unveiling the product. 125 million people worldwide have one-click buying with Apple, and this sort of market – even if we reach only a small part of it – has to be a good thing for publishers. And with the competititve price point – relatively low for one of Apple’s new releases – Apple have sought to place themselves right at the centre of the e-reader market.
Only time will tell whether or not this represents the publishing industry’s ‘iPod moment’, but Jobs et al have given us the perfect platform from which to experiment in the future,and probably made software developers fantastically happy in the process.
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]]>Penguin kicked off the new year by offering loss-leading excerpts from the e-book version of Paul Hoffmann’s haunting novel The Left Hand of God – which plays out in a Mervyn Peake-esque imaginary world stuffed with absolutely terrifying characters. Perhaps because of the genre, this loss-leader concept seems to have served them well as a means of attracting new readers to the novel – with countless reviewers who claim to not normally buy Penguin books saying that they clicked through from the app. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out with other texts.
Alongside this new foray into suck-in iBooks, Penguin also seem to have recognised the huge marketing potential of the iPhone. Their umbrella app – last updated in late Novemeber – seeks to update readers regularly on Penguin release and upcoming titles, therein building their fan base. Potential click-through is always in mind though, with a stylised shopping trolley on each page.
With genre-specific searching and the weekly Penguin podacst, readers are able to move throughout Penguin’s content. The app itself – with a free price point reflecting its status as a marketing platform – is largely concentrated on Penguin US at the moment, though it does have numerous reviews of books published in the UK.
While it remains to be seen whether publishers will be able to develop the sort of brand loyalty seen in other industries, these are intriguing new ways of engaging with readers.
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]]>With Christmas Day seeing Amazon sell more e-books than their printed counterparts for the first time ever – perhaps in part due to it being the present most teens were unwrapping that very morning – 2010 looks set to be a year of digital experimentation and creativity: one which will see a clash of the technological titans, as well as a raft of brilliant and not-so-brilliant ideas in the publishing industry.
Wasting no time in setting out their stall, Google launched their new smartphone this Tuesday, the fancifully named ‘Nexus One.’ A direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone – rather than a subtle attempt to undermine the latter’s dominance with the Android operating system as they have attempted thus far – the Nexus will have a 5 megapixel screen to the iPhone’s 3. Despite outdoing the iPhone in terms of functionality, the Nexus owes much to Apple’s simple design: besides four small buttons along the bottom strip, the phone is black with a large screen.
Apple meanwhile, have been tinkering on their new tablet-like device – referred to in the interim as the iSlate – which was rumoured yesterday to be a ten-inch slate with e-reader capabilities and has been described by some as a ‘Kindle Killer.’ The Venturebeat blog reported that the iSlate will be marketed mostly as an e-reader with iPhone functionality, a sort of smartphone/e-reader hybrid. Either way, an announcement is slated for the end of January.
Whether this will smash Apple’s apparently inexorable rise to pre-eminence is debateable; what is indisputable however, is that these developments provide publishers with yet another potential platform on which to publish, with both helping to improve the e-reading experience and much for publishers to chew over.
]]>With the runaway success of Lonely Planet’s digitized guides firmly in their sights - the LP’s language guides, despite offering only 600 words and not a great deal of interactivity, have repeatedly reached the top 20 paid travel apps ranking – Time Out have begun launching their range of city travel guides as apps.
The first app – initially only covering New York – has married mapping from Google with Time Out’s own extensive content, offering a constantly-updated guide to the city. The app manages to be both highly simplistic and very effective: using the iPhone’s GPS in combination with the myriad reviews and listings Time Out have to offer on a city’s cultural landscape.
Interestingly, the Time Outers have offered up their app for free – attempting to draw out a strong dividing line between themselves and Lonely Planet. For more discerning customers – read those with a thicker wallet – the app offers a ‘Critics Choice’ filter, whilst those looking to get more for their dollar can make use of the ‘Free and Cheap’ criterion. Other added features are the ability to send recommendations to friends and the fact that the app works even when you’re not connected.
Whilst the graphics aren’t great and Time Out are hardly going to blow the world away with their functionality, they have crossed one big hurdle: combining mapping data with creative content and have thus outdone LP on this front – time will tell who’ll be more successful.
]]>Julian Barnes – acclaimed author of Flaubert’s Parrot – singles out Laura Cumming’s A Face to the World (HarperPress) for praise, noting that it, ‘is a rare item: an art book where the text is so enthralling that the picture, however necessary, almost seem like an interruption.
Meanwhile WW2 historian Ian Kershaw singled out Max Hastings’ Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, 1940-1945 for particular praise, noting, ‘I particularly enjoyed his beautifully painted warts-and-all potrait of Churchill.’
Sarah Waters – author of Tipping the Velvet – singles out James Lever’s spoof Hollywood memoir Me Cheeta as, ‘funny, caustic and genuinely moving,’ whilst fellow novelist and journalist Hari Kunzru praised Mantel’s Wolf Hall which, ‘effortlessly solves the considerable technical problems in writing a historical novel.’
All in all a varied list, highlighting the broad scope of fiction and non-fiction that Press Books brings to the market each year.
]]>So much so, in fact, that its developer – the Duck Duck Moose Partnership – has released another two apps to sit alongside their runaway seller, an Old Macdonald app and Itsy Bitsy Spider version – the developer’s latest offering.
Hot off the back of an Apple Staff recommendation, the app has attracted rave reviews from the likes of the New York Times and U.S.A Today. A musical book, based on the perennially popular song, Duck Duck Moose’s ‘Wheels on the Bus’ creation manages to be both incredible fun and a valid educational tool at the same time. Alongside a recording facility, the book app allows playback in five different languages, squeezing more educational value in just for good measure. ‘Itsy Bitsy’, the latest installment, asserts to offer more interactivity and more educational value, with a fly acting as a tutor teaching children about nature and the environment.
Ultimately, the success of these apps has thrown the playing field wide open for developers and publishers alike, confirming a market which many had long thought existed: parents looking to use the iPhone as a means of entertaining/pacifiying their children, in much the same way as a childrens’ book long has.
]]>The set comprises one free app and four paid offerings (‘The W Files’; ‘Parts and Labour’; ‘Big in Japan’; and ‘Where there’s Muck there’s Brass,’ respectively), all launched to celebrate the 20th birthday of the plasticine pair.
The free comic – transparently named ‘The W Files’, sees everyone’s favourite crackpot inventor and his canine friend come up against a group of alien interlopers. Public spirited as ever – the pair set off in search of the aliens, kitted out with Wallace’s various bizzare contraptions, only to be mistaken for aliens themselves and interviewed by the military staff of ‘Unitwit’.
The comic comes complete with all the accoutrements one might expect: thinly veiled parodic episodes, brilliantly understated lines and slapstick humour. The app’s creators have taken advantage of the new promotional pricing function of the App Store with ‘The W-Files’- making it available free for a limited time. The others – which offer variously a glimpse into Wallace’s mad world of inventions, a trip to Japan and a misguided attempt by Wallace to bring brass music back to the local community – are available at the lowest priced tier of £0.59.
Developed by Titan Publishing, the apps are amongst the first in a long line of comic book and graphic novel releases – a frenzy that looks set to throw up more exciting creative content. Watch this space.
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With The Bookseller talking about an ‘explosion in the number of apps’ available for the iPhone, and Apple’s device starting to be taken seriously as a challenger to Amazon’s Kindle, a small German start-up has set the running with the cross-publisher project ‘Zehnseiten.’
Brought to the world from the depths of Bavaria, Zehnseiten (ten pages), have combined the iPhone platform with that most traditional mainstay of publishing publicity – the public reading, presenting authors reading the first ten pages of their works, filmed in black and white and with only a glass of water for company.
The app’s brilliantly user-friendly layout and simple biographies mean that they largely succeed in their aim of giving both author and book centrality, ‘in a measured fashion.’ The aim, presumably, it to whet the reading public’s appetite for these new works – spurring them on to buy the whole physical product in response. The paradoxical result is that the audio-visual mastery of the iPhone brings the words on the page back to centre stage.
Impressively, the app’s developers have managed to secure the involvement of a cross-section of publishers, from big names such as Suhrkamp – Herman Hesse’s publisher and the publishing house that brought T.S.Eliot to German speakers, to the old East German publisher Aufbau which in its heyday published greats such as Christa Wolf – to smaller niche publishers, such as the Swiss imprint Sanssoucci. It’s range of authors is also extensive, covering the evocative migrant literature of Rafik Schami to the satirical non-fiction of Christoph Süβ.
Though the future looks bright for Zehnseiten, the app does have its draw backs – constructed entirely with flash, you can’t link to specific extracts; access too, can be painfully slow. And, conspicuously lacking an English-language section, it’s difficult to see the app’s plucky developers making waves outsides of German speaking Europe. But with their unusual combination of the multimedia functions of the iPhone app with the monochrome of the traditional public reading, Zehnseiten have kicked the app race off with something quite special.
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