Sampling books on the new iPhone

The 7.5 hours I spent on a Pasadena sidewalk on Friday were worth it— let's just start with that. I love my new iPhone. But after admiring its sleek styling and watching the GPS trace my Gold Line ride in real time, I wanted to get down to business. I heard you can read books on these things.

There are hundreds of new apps — they work on the first generation of iPhones, too — and I began my search assuming that I'd need to get an e-book reader and then go find some e-books.

But first I stumbled across the Harper Collins offering, which seemed like a good place to start. After pointing my iPhone's Web browser to the Harper Collins mobile page and selecting the iPhone option, I got a list of titles:

• "Beyond the Body Farm" by Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson
• "The Case for the Real Jesus" by Lee Strobel
• "Ike: An American Hero" by Michael Korda
• "A Killer's Kiss" by William Lashner
• "Life on the Refrigerator Door" by Alice Kuipers
• "Love is a Many Trousered Thing" by Louise Rennison
• "The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions" by Marcus J. Borg and N Wright
• "Now and Forever" by Ray Bradbury
• "Obama: From Promise to Power" by David Mendell
• "Soul Catcher" by Michael C. White
• "Sweet Revenge" by Diane Mott Davidson
• "When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box" by John Ortberg
• "Winning" by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch

I was hoping for a little more literary fiction — like Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," which can be previewed on the publisher's Browse Inside page — but I knew where I wanted to begin. The book, and the reading experience, after the jump.

Txt me Ishmael

Text messaging is not just for kids, David Crystal will tell you. He's written a piece for the Guardian that compares the constraints of texting — only 160 characters, in awkward cellphone configurations — to those of writing haikus or sonnets. Arbitrary limits of form can lead to some genuine creativity, he says (although he does have some critiques).

The creative truncation of language has a long history — IOU, for example, dates back to 1618. Ultimately, Crystal, whose book "txting: the gr8 db8" is coming to the United States in September, thinks that "txt msging" bodes well for the future:

"Some people dislike texting. Some are bemused by it. But it is merely the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings. There is no disaster pending. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English. The language as a whole will not decline. In texting what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution."

Japan had the jump on text message fiction — "Deep Love," stories that were self-published there in the mid-oughts, are often cited as an early popularization of long-form stories delivered in short text bursts. Since then, there have been many efforts to write prose in 160-character doses.

Today, writer Matt Richtel is among the authors using Twitter, which limits its post to 160 characters, just like text messages, and can be delivered to cellphones or viewed online. He's writing a thriller — cliffhanger after cliffhanger — in connection with his new book, "Hooked." The bookish TwitterLit provides just the first lines of books, such as "The year began with lunch." Interested parties who click through end up on the Amazon page for the book that follows — in this case, it's Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence." And DailyLit is using Twitter to send novels in tiny chunks to interested readers, then encouraging book group discussions.

I'm not sure how anyone has time for all this texty reading, but, like Crystal, I see promise in the evolution.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of a txt-heavy MIT graduation by dbdbrobot via Flickr.

Not just for books, of course

Your attention, please: Just in case you're wondering, Amazon's Kindle is now a place where you can find a friendly, electronic version of the Times. Our tech colleagues posted the news on the tech blog today, and you can read more about the paper's arrangements there. Hopefully this will become, as it has for books, yet another way to  kindle your interest in our pages (I know, I know, I should know better than use a pun like that).

Nick Owchar

Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Maybe it's better not to look

It is not uncommon to hear an author talk about Amazon rankings. Amazon is one of the few places to get a sense of how a book is doing in real time — the elaborate, drawn-out process of getting sales numbers from bookstores and back to authors is (to say the least) Byzantine.

Despite its specialization — Amazon counts only its own sales, after all — the immediacy of these rankings can be addictive. I've heard authors talk about tracking their status against other books or trying to gauge exactly how many places a single sale might raise their rank. It can get a bit obsessive.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it's such a common temptation that someone has built a Web application, Booklert, that obsessively checks Amazon rankings for you. The forward-thinking folks at if:book describe the tool this way:

I get a picture of Booklert as a time-saving tool for hypercompetitive and stat-obsessed writers, or possibly as a kind of masochistic entertainment for publishers morbidly addicted to seeing their industry flounder.

The truly obsessed author can even get Booklert updates via twitter. But sometimes, maybe, it's better to look away. if:book continues:

perhaps I'm being uncharitable... Booklert — or something similar — could be used to create personalized bestseller lists, adding a layer of market data to the work of trusted reviewers and curators.

I like the idea of personalized bestseller lists. But integrating them in a way that's useful would depend on who signs up for Booklert and how good the social networking tools are. Does someone who tracks books on personal finance, for example, really care about the interests of a cookbook lover?

Hmm... if they did, that could be interesting. The risks here are very low — Booklert is free.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Iwona Kellie via Flickr

The Web habits of highly effective literary people

Sitting in a Paris cafe can be highly effective. That is, as far as journalist-author Andrew Hussey and Granta are concerned.

Granta magazine asked a bunch of literary types, from publishers to bloggers, how they make the web work for them. Hussey has, perhaps, the most enviable lifestyle: He throws a laptop into his rucksack and bikes to local Paris cafes to tap in. Another journalist is more disciplined: He opens exactly six tabs in Firefox every morning (apparently, like some of us, he didn't leave a hectic array open the night before).

Litblogger Maud Newton has a pretty hectic lifestyle, abetted by her iPhone addiction. She writes:

The very ADD impulses that enable me to blog the way I do tend to hamstring larger projects, like the novel I’m writing, the review that’s coming due, the day-job work. No doubt this is true of most people who keep weblogs for fun rather than for profit — a dying pursuit, apparently. What still excites me about the Internet is that it facilitates endless foraging, and not only courtesy of my favorite blogs and newspapers. As more publications and critics go digital, I find myself sampling the offerings of literary magazines, squandering hours in the Harper’s archives (which stretch back to 1850!), formulating ever more intricate and passionate dissents....

More habits, both good and compulsive, here.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo of the Cafe de Floré in Paris by sergeymk via Flickr

Museum going, time-frittering edition

Coudal Partners, a design/advertising/interactive firm in Chicago, is in my RSS reader. And I admit, I avoid it. Because when I follow their links, I get sucked into category-defying Web excellence, to the extent that later I look up, dazed, completely unsure of what I was supposed to be doing but full of, say, booktitle-bandname combos like " The Things They Might Be Giants Carried," "Jane Eyre's Addiction" and "Abba Karenina."

But today I followed the time suck to end all time sucks, their Museum of Online Museums -- aka the MoOM. It is what it says it is and includes everything from the wondrously mundane -- The Grocery List Collection -- to the exquisite, like Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library and the British Library's online gallery of great books. You might look at some ancient illustrated texts close up or find yourself wondering why William Burroughs' classic was published in England as The Naked Lunch -- as if the title referred to a single nudist luncheon appointment.

The image above comes from a WPA pamphlet that's part of the Smithsonian's collection, where I ended up after clicking through on a link for WPA calendars. This is all interesting, possibly addictive Internet exploration. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Carolyn Kellogg

Gettin' Webby with books

Nominations for the 12th annual Webby Awards have just been announced. There are more than 100 categories: Most are plain ol' websites, but there are also nominees in interactive advertising, mobile and online film and video.

Yet ... not a lot of books. There are website categories for news, for banking, for art and netart, for family/parenting, for financial services, for games, for "weird" -- 70 categories in all. But not one for literary or book sites. A quick perusal found just two book-oriented nominees: Blurb (in services) and BookGlutton (in community).

Blurb is a print-on-demand site, where anyone can order up a book of his or her own making. Print-on-demand has been around for a while, but Blurb has distinguished itself with a prominent selection of art-book formats (it's more picture-y than text-y) and its easy integration with Flickr and several other blog services. So you can import your photos -- or your blog -- and make 'em into a book (that is, unless you want to hold out for that $350,000 book deal like the guy from Stuff White People Like).

Book Glutton is a Web-based online reader that allows you to make notations about a text and to have online conversations about it. In the center of a screen you'd see a page much like one from a printed book. On the right you can type notes -- and share them. On the left you can enter into a chat with anyone else who is reading the book -- in real time, if you've decided to join an online book group. You also can randomly bump into others reading the same book, if you like; and you can set your preferences so you connect only with readers who are on the same chapter (no spoilers!).

The biggest hitch right now is that BookGlutton seems to include only books already in the public domain. There's nothing wrong with Sherlock Holmes, but it would be so much fun to be able to go online to read and discuss the new Pulitzer Prize winners.

Carolyn Kellogg

Extra, a super L.A. geek note: