Twitter You’re Fired! Or Are You?

  

This was posted in an Author’s Group I belong to by a member who has not had the best of relationships with Twitter, I admit. But as we struggle to use our time wisely to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, to Edify believers, to promote a Christian Worldview, and to teach and to delight, we have to look at all the evidence when we consider promotion. So consider this testimonial by Steve Biddison, author of seven books on coaching and Christian fantasy.

Twitter, I called this meeting to let you know my intention to fire you. You’ve worked for me over a year now, but quite frankly, I feel as though I have been working for you. I’ve put in countless hours with you and have seen no return on my time investment. In fact you demand that you monopolize my time. But for what? Oh you’ve made great promises over the year. “start using hashtags” you tell me. So I did. But no one could see my tweets because they weren’t top tweets. So you insist I work harder to get more tweets. And again I listen and after a couple of thousand tweets, I arrive at top tweet status on almost all my hashtags, including ones like #amazon and #kindle, not to mention any number of smaller tags. But still you bring me no profit. “but wait,” you tell me. “labor Day we

ekend will be great. Tweet a bunch then.”. So I do. 350 tweets to be exact, tweeting around the clock since Friday morning. Not one sale through the whole labor day weekend So I ask why you insisted I waist all those hours scheduling tweets? But then came the real shocker for me. Late Monday afternoon I published a new book. A basketball playbook for goodness sake. I didn’t even let you know about because I was afraid you would insist on tweeting about it. So I did no advertising and lo and behold, I wake up this morning to find one had already sold WITHOUT you tweeting about it. So now I ask you, dear Twitter, what do you have to say for yourself? Give me some reasons why I should not fire you today.

http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Biddison/e/B006WM9GOG/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1346773376&sr=1-2-ent

Kindle Keyboard Compared to Kindle Fire

Michael’s further observations on the two devices:

In May 2011 our son bought me a Kindle. Though we own hundreds of paperbound print books, this one device has almost completely replaced our entire library. Print books are just too large and bulky. All but a handful are now in storage. We use our laptops for study because we can multitask, use a full size keyboard with keyboard commands to quickly look at multiple open books, surf the web and use the larger color screen.

But for simply reading a book, a laptop is too large and bulky. The Kindle is the size of a small print book and just as easy to read. As with any new device, the navigation menu and buttons take some getting used to. We have taken our Keyboard Kindle with us into restaurants, on walks, to read in bed, and just about anywhere else you can think of.

We bought our Kindle Fire about three weeks ago. The Fire is Mary’s Christmas present. The first problem we had with the Fire was finding a WiFi to which we could connect so that we could register it. We bought the Fire just South of Madison, Wisconsin, and were unable to find a WiFi until a McDonalds in Fargo, ND. We have rarely even tried to use the Fire for apps, video, surfing the web or music. All we use the Fire for is reading books. The touch keypad is slow and awkward, but unimportant. If you want a Galaxy or iPad, then spend three times as much money for a Galaxy or iPad.

Compared to an iPad, the touch features are awkward and slow. Compared to the keys on a keyboard Kindle, the touch features are a wonderful blessing. The size of the screen is almost perfect. The larger reading area compared to the keyboard Kindle is an improvement and the lighted screen is great. It makes reading in the dark easy. The reduced battery life is not so great. Once we had the registration issues straightened out, which took weeks, ordering books off the laptop’s aircard and transferring them to the Kindle is easy.

What I like most about the Kindle Fire is the lighted color screen, the cost, the ease of use and the number of books it stores. What I dislike is the “fat finger” problem, the working icons that are too small; the short battery life and difficulty finding a WiFi connection.

In addition:

We have actually learned more about how the Kindles work since getting the Fire, since the controls are easier to use in touch-mode. Our disappointingly small illustrations in or books jump to full-screen with a couple of touches on the Fire, and this feature is also available with buttons on the keyboard model.  The dictionary function we knew about, but there is actually a dictionary for Greek words in Michael’s Interlinear Septuagint and Koine Greek New Testament books.

Part Three: Your Book, Where It Should Go, How It Will Look

Our e-publishing journey now comes to the formats and how your book will look in each one. Smashwords has great information on this topic from a mechanics standpoint. As a previous post we made on the subject said,
http://elkjerkyforthesoul.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/the-hows-and-whys-of-e-books/
 , although almost all devices can read the pdf format, consider that people might get your books on anything from a full-screen laptop to a pretty small smart phone. A pdf will look wonderful on that laptop screen. It’ll seem a lot like a real book, except for not being able to turn the pages. But if you try to cram that pdf image into your iPhone, the latest model brags about having a 3.5″ diagonal display, and it seems unlikely that it will look just right. Even in a traditional Kindle, pdfs do not really work all that well.

It is possible to convert a pdf into a format that the smaller machines can display. Calibre is one progam that makes file conversions. It is even free. If you have an HTML version of your document, the conversion is even easier. The question is, will a reader go to the trouble of doing that? Some will, but most will want a document that they can just open up and begin reading. So it is a good idea to make your document available in multiple formats, so that all the trouble your prospective customer has to go to is to get the right one off the internet and into his device.

This is what makes Smashwords such a great e-book creation site. You upload a simple Microsoft Word document. Smashwords runs it through the Meatgrinder and produces HTML (good for computer reading), JavaScript, mobi (Kindle format) EPub, which as Smashwords says on its site, works on “Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, others.” The Meatgrinder also churns out RTF, PDF, LRF for older Sony readers, PDB (Palm Document files), and two versions of plain text.

Please bear in mind that although you as the author can download any format of your book for free, you cannot redistribute these files on other sites where you can upload and sell your works. Smashwords creates them, doesn’t charge you anything, puts you into premium distribution, and asks in return only that you don’t re-use the files the Meatgrinder creates. You might say, “But it’s my book.” That’s kind of like an architect making plans to build one house and someone stealing and using those plans to build a bunch more houses. And you didn’t even pay Smashwords like you paid the architect. Nope. Can’t do it. Sorry.

Smashwords also gives you coupon codes so you can give copies away for free. This is useful for reviewers and for contests or promotionals. Instead of just pricing your book at free, which you can do on Smashwords, just offer a coupon, so that you know who’s getting your book. Amazon makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to get your book priced “free,” and they don’t give any copies away otherwise. You have to buy your own book yourself if you want to be sure it was formatted correctly.

Smashwords premium distribution gets you into Barnes and Noble and the iBookstore, among others. Customers can buy the mobi format from them to read on a Kindle. Even so, Amazon clearly has the largest and most successful marketing apparatus, and your best chance to be noticed and purchased is on Amazon. Many authors have chosen to pull their books from general distribution and make them exclusive under Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Select plan. Indie authors in all the forums and discussion sites I belong to are extremely polarized about this. It is a personal decision, but the author must be sure to read and understand the agreement thoroughly. It’s not a boilerplate terms of use like we all unthinkingly agree to get on many sites to promote our books.

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?ie=UTF8&topicId=APILE934L348N#Select

Please read the entire agreement carefully, and especially pay attention to these two points.

1 Exclusivity. When you include a Digital Book in KDP Select, you give us the exclusive right to sell and distribute your Digital Book in digital format while your book is in KDP Select. During this period of exclusivity, you cannot sell or distribute, or give anyone else the right to sell or distribute, your Digital Book (or content that is reasonably likely to compete commercially with your Digital Book, diminish its value, or be confused with it), in digital format in any territory where you have rights.

 

5 Your Commitment. Your commitment to these terms and conditions is important, and the benefits we provide to you as part of this option are conditioned on your following through on your commitments. If you un-publish your Digital Book, we will remove it from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, but you must continue to comply with these commitments, including exclusivity, through the remainder of the Digital Book’s then-current 90-day period of participation in KDP Select. If you don’t comply with these KDP Select terms and conditions, we will not owe you Royalties for that Digital Book earned through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Program, and we may offset any of those Royalties that were previously paid against future Royalties, or require you to remit them to us. We may also withhold your Royalty payments on all your Digital Books for a period of up to 90 days while we investigate. This doesn’t limit other remedies we have, such as prohibiting your future participation in KDP Select or KDP generally.

Remember, all you’re getting is inclusion in the lending program for Amazon Prime Members. In return, it seems to me that you’re giving up a lot, and taking a big risk that Amazon can deny you royalties and revenue if you don’t do exactly what they say.

But there’s nothing wrong with having your books in the KDP program generally. In fact, the Kindle is a great reader, and your books will look fantastic on it. We have both the Kindle Keyboard model and the Kindle Fire. Both are great readers and both are easy to use and look wonderful. I prefer the Kindle Fire display because it allows the full screen illustrations we have created for our two illustrated books to show in full color and full size. And the ease of buying (or getting free) the bunches and bunches of books Amazon has for Kindle is hard to beat.

http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-3126_7-10010211.html

Here is a link to CNET’s Kindle Fire review and the screenshots they show. It really does look that good. Fun to read in bed, and, though the battery only lasts about 4 hours, compared to the keyboard model’s lifespan of a month or more, it’s the perfect in-bed reader.

Stuff Blogging Writers Need to Know: Part One

I have recently set up a blog with, at least partly, the purpose of promoting our books. I have also recently joined quite a few forums and groups including independently-publishing or self-publishing writers (I’m still a tad fuzzy on the precise distinction, but I know I’m one of them, possibly both), or in which writers and readers can interact with each other. I have learned a few things along the way which have come up as questions on many of these sites, and I would like to share some of them.

I think this will turn out to be multi-part and organized by subject, because I see three areas to talk about. One is setting up a blog and making it do what you want it to do. Two is doing things to promote your books, and to help other writers struggling to promote theirs. Three is a look at our Kindles, the traditional version and the new Fire, and how your book is going to work and look and be received on them.

So, first, the blog thing. I have used computers and technology for at least a quarter century now. I still remember typing away on my first masterpiece while our oldest son was under five (he’s now pushing 30, sorry, son), using a Coleco Adam. He walked over, said, “Play Game?” and pushed the button to activate the attached game module. My last hour’s worth of word-processed masterpiece was replaced by Subrock, I think. I learned a valuable lesson about frequent saves and backups that day.

So I am not unfamiliar with or new to technology. We have created videos, 3D animations, e-books, illustrations, a 300+ page website and all kinds of stuff, but this blog made me cry. When I first began to figure it out, I kept reading, “Just jump in and start writing!” But the vocabulary of blog elements is a whole new language, and I had to learn that before I could do what our blog needed to have done.

What’s a widget? How do I get book cover images to link to? What’s the difference between a page and a post? How do I get our logo and the desired header text into the banner? Back up. Why does WordPress call templates themes, anyway?

The last question I still don’t know the answer to. But I have learned a few things about blogs. We use the Pilcrow Theme on WordPress, one of the simplest I have looked at. I mentioned that we have a 300+ page website. It is gorgeous, if I do say so myself. Colorful, complex, and daunting. So when it came to the blog, my husband said “Keep it simple!” Still, Pilcrow has the ability to upload a custom header, so I could put up our Findley Family Video logo and a verse that states our blog’s main focus in a simple, clean graphic. WordPress give you the height and width the graphic has to be to fit and it is easy to set that size graphic up in the program I make all our artwork in, which I will talk about in a later post.

Our blog has a top panel, where the banner is, and where there are tabs with the names of the pages viewers can navigate to. Blog posts go in the center panel. It has a main or left sidebar, where I keep a list of the most important posts indexed. The right or secondary sidebar has images and links of our books to Smashwords and Amazon, our two main publishing sites. We also have archives, ways to follow the blog, and a spam filter in those sidebars.

Widgets allow you to add these features into the panels. Most of what appears on our blog is done by way of the links widget. The Blogroll widget is normally used to link to other blogs you recommend. On our blog it shows the basic posts we always want people to be able to easily find. Eventually it might include other blog links as well. A list of 10 most recent posts, the archives link, and the Akismet spam filter also appear on the left.

Akismet does a very good job of keeping out those who seek to attach themselves like leeches to a blog. On the right side, along with the book links, is a list of pages the blog contains that are visible to the public.

Our blog has three visible pages and also hidden ones. The Home page displays the posts. The second is a photo gallery of some of the images from our e-book Illustrated Antidisestablishmentarianism. The third page is a list of all the blog’s entries which automatically gets updated each time we post. Hidden pages contain graphics or links I need to make other things work but don’t need to show up as pages. A new post automatically fills the home page unless you use the sticky note feature on a post. That will keep that post “stuck” to the front page until you remove the “sticky” feature, and new posts will appear below it.

To create the linked book images, I uploaded small images of the book covers to a hidden page. Then I right-clicked on an image and hit “copy image url.” Then I pasted that link into the form to fill out for links. In that form you specify where the link will show up, what kind of link it will be, what it links to and any text you want to show up with it. You don’t have to have images show up, but you want them to. The rest of the links on the site are just text.

We wanted people to be able to comment, but the default setting on the comment filter (another widget) makes people enter an email and leave a name, so we had to disable that. Your post will appear immediately as long as Akismet doesn’t classify you as spam, but we also get an email when that happens. By the way, if you want to give people a link to a particular post, make sure you click the title of that post and copy and past that browser link, not the link on the home page. Otherwise you’ll get a link showing only the blog logo, not the post itself. The photo gallery page shows thumbnails which, when clicked on, bring up a left to right scrolling set of full-sized images. A gallery can also be set up as a slide show.

Many people have complimented us on how good our blog looks. There’s an old saying that one of the tricks to doing something well is to make it look simple and easy, especially if it’s not simple or easy. Making this blog was not simple or easy for me, but here it is.

E-Book versus Print Book Curriculum

Before America was even founded, Benjamin Franklin published the same 3 categories of print material we still have to today. First there is what I call “public domain.” This is stuff that has been around for awhile: The Bible, Plato’s Republic, Isaac Newton’s books on Physics and Mathematics, etc. Next is stuff we have to have, even if do not want it: Textbooks, dictionaries, repair manuals, warning labels, directions, instructions, etc. Though these might be expensive books, the last category is the real money category, stuff we want to read. While a few people might enjoy technical journals, most people read fiction or the news. Since Poor Richard’s Almanac, these were printed in vast quantities that made them highly profitable.

After centuries of enormous success, it is no secret that traditional book publishers are going out of business. While there are many reasons, such as poor marketing strategies, the major reason is competition from e-books. The year 2011 witnessed the sale of e-books surpassing the sale of print books at Amazon. There are many reasons for this, but three stand out. First is availability. A book we had not heard of was highly recommended to my wife and I and within a matter of minutes we had downloaded it onto our Kindle and begun to read it. This is possible to anyone anywhere in the world that has access to the Internet.

Second is security. We have lost or destroyed some very expensive books in our lifetimes. Kindle books are backed up by Amazon. Though it is not an automatic process, it is possible to recover books lost on a damaged Kindle, as we have just learned when our Kindle screen went to Kindle Heaven. Also, many authors find the security of a Kindle superior to the security of paper books. Every year thousands of printed books are stolen. While electronic theft is possible, every purchase is tracked and is traceable. At this time theft of printed books is more common that the theft of Kindle books.

Third is cost. Cost will eventually drive print books into a niche market. They will never disappear completely, but a generation raised on electronic books will fail to understand the mass appeal of print.

Cost is the reason we are developing an e-book curriculum. At this time, a high quality homeschool curriculum in print is at least $750, often over $1000 per student per year. For those who are unable or unwilling to afford these costs, an entire ebook curriculum is much less, about 10% not counting the counting the cost of the ebook reader.

The Hows (And Whys) of E-Books

Screenshot from Kindle of a page from The Illuminated Hope and the Black Lion

Do you really understand the spiritual warfare taking place in publishing? Christian publishers and bookstores are, to put it mildly, not very Christian anymore. There is a desperate need to make writers aware that secularism is a real and powerful enemy determined to prevent the dissemination of any works with a truly godly and scriptural basis.

Conventional publishing, Christian and non-Christian, seems to be completely lost as an avenue of getting the truth out. Christians have allowed so much of the world in, praised such small bits of semi-religious content, scrabbled for any crumbs of good that could be found in a work, that the leaven has leavened the whole lump and there seems nothing left that is pure, good, lovely, or of good report.

Independent publishing disseminates truth when truth is stifled. Writers don’t have to see their message suppressed by indifferent or hostile publishers and literary agents. They don’t have to watch the mangling or destruction of truth, if they are “accepted,” by an editor who “knows what will sell” but doesn’t care what must be preserved because it is right.

E-readers come in many formats. Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader Store, and Kobo are only a few. Smart phones can display e-books. Many e-readers are grayscale. Nook has a color version. Amazon’s Kindle Fire, coming soon, will also support color. People can, of course, read books on their computers.

An e-author should still make his work as “perfect” as he can. Grammar, spelling and punctuation matter to most readers. The work must be original. The author must own the rights. After that, there are two basic ways to translate the book into e-format.

First, an e-author can produce a .pdf document and distribute it online. It can be formatted much like a conventional print book, with specific margins, numbered pages, spacing and fonts like a “real” book. It can have illustrations, in full color if the author wishes, and emulate the size and shape of a print book. Open Office Writer, and the newer versions of Microsoft Word, can convert the document to a .pdf which will look just like the author lays it out. Many e-readers can read a .pdf document. There are limits to how well it can display if the author formats his document rigorously like a conventional book.

The second method produces an e-book formatted very differently from a print book. The author is creating a type of HTML document, similar to a webpage on the internet, that will change its size, shape, font size and type, and  almost everything else from e-reader to e-reader. There are no “pages” as such. The person reading the book can make more changes as he reads the book on his reader. He can in most readers make the font larger or smaller, rotate from portrait to landscape mode, and in some even change the color of the font and background.

If the author has formatted his work like a conventional book, or even with inconsistent styles, and converts it to this second form, it will likely have large blank areas, lines that end in strange places, varying fonts the author can’t even see in the original, and other problems that will make a reader think the book is defective. For most e-readers, it is better to use the second method of formatting, especially to allow the book to be read on as many format readers as possible.

Although there are many sites that accept e-books for free distribution or for sale, and many are free to upload, some charge, some reserve the right to reject what is submitted, and all take a percentage if the book is to be sold.  Some sites (such as Booklocker) ask that an entire work be submitted for review. The author is notified if the site declines to publish it. Marketability is one factor in this decision. Content criteria, like rejecting “hate speech,” discrimination, or objectionable content can also be a factor. All sites require an author to be able to list “tags” and search keys to make his work “visible” on the Internet so that people can find it in search engines. Most upload sites have easy places to enter these words reflecting content, identifying and describing the work.

This article will only deal with three sites as examples, all of which have no expressed criteria by which they “accept or reject” books as long as format guidelines are met and content is not rejected as objectionable. They are representative of many others and exemplify probably the easiest (Scribd.com), the “one in the middle,” Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, which is time-consuming but has the most methods of self-promotion, and the most demanding (Smashwords) in e-book upload sites. Detailed submission guidelines and step-by-step instructions can be found on the sites. Only some of the basic requirements will be included here. Any site that allows e-book uploads requires an “account,” free to set up, giving the site email contact information and usually very little personal information. If works are offered for sale, an author will be required to give information so that percentage payments can be made, SSN number for IRS accounting, and an address for checks to be sent to or a bank account for electronic transfers. Many require electronic transfer.

Scribd.com accepts a number of formats and creates pdf documents. Authors’ submissions do not have to be complete books. Many authors submit essays, books in progress, even single poems or photo collections. Many works on Scribd are offered free. Scribd has a rotating display of featured works. It has category listings for searching the site, and the site shows multi-page previews of books for sale. People can become “followers” of authors’ works and links can be made to a facebook or twitter account to announce what the author has “readcast” on Scribd, his own works or those of others.

Smashwords.com is a site that specializes in producing e-books for multiple formats. The site has a detailed style guide which can be downloaded from there or at Amazon.com for the Kindle reader at no cost. This style guide can be used to create the second type of e-book described above, even if the author is not using Smashwords as his publisher. An author can, if desired, upload a book to the Smashwords site and, if accepted, it will be converted for free to most of the formats listed above. (They do not format for Amazon Kindle). The submitted work must rigorously follow their style guide, however, because they use an automated system they call the “Meatgrinder” to convert to the multiple formats. They give very clear instructions in the style guide but it does require considerable simplifying to format correctly.

Books that do not format correctly may be rejected, and Smashwords has a “premium catalog” for perfectly-formatted books that includes distribution in more outlets than ordinary uploads, which are only featured on their site. The style guide is quite detailed. It explains that there are a limited number of fonts that reliably convert correctly into e-documents. It cautions authors to remove most complicated formatting and gives guidance on how to include graphics, though it recommends they be small and few. The philosophy of Smashwords is to focus on the words and message of the book and not to be concerned about the loss of certain conventional features. Smashwords only publishes complete works for sale and file size cannot exceed 5 megs.

Amazon.com allows writers to upload e-books through Kindle Direct Publishing, or kdp. The system is very easy and even cover art is optional but extremely simple to upload with the book or at any time afterward. It takes a day or two for a book to become live, and authors must charge at least $.99 for original works. There are no length limits and books can be illustrated, though the e-book will probably have space gaps above or below the illustrations depending on the page display size and the size of the graphic. Instructions for uploads are very easy to follow. The book cover, information and “look inside” features display like any other book on Amazon. Amazon has sold more e-books than print books for more than a year now. Authors can easily check sales, which are updated very frequently.

Authors can add as much information about themselves and their books as they like. Amazon has Author Central, where a writer can add blog and Twitter feeds, images, videos, and biographical information which can be changed and updated very easily. Amazon has Kindle stores in the UK, Germany and France, and even English language books can appear in Europe. Amazon Shelfari is a reader/writer community where the author can place his books on his “shelf” along with those he reads. He can write reviews and detailed character, plot and book info. The author can also have followers here and send messages back and forth to them. Amazon recently started a facebook page for Kindle Direct Publishing where they pose questions to writers and allow for book promotion and exchange of advice and encouragement.

Microsoft Word is the preferred format for Scribd, Smashwords and Amazon. The 2000 version can be purchased for $30 or less. Covers or illustrations can be created by hand and scanned, or by using simple photo editing or paint programs. Photo Impact from Corel includes impressive faux 3-D titling and object creation and great texturing and effects for under $50.

                                                       Screenshot from Kindle of a page from The Illustrated Antidisestablsihmentarianism

Book Review of The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

Men’s minds and thinking are getting shallower all the time, but it’s wrong to blame that on the Internet. Many things are just as powerful as the Internet in changing our lives and our thought patterns. Rock music, television, video games and addiction (alcoholism) still play a greater role in “shallowing” the mind than the Internet. The human brain works the same way it has since Adam. The Internet is a minor cultural change compared to the Civil War in the American South, Concentration Camps for Jews, the ten plagues in Egypt and the decimation of Native American culture by Europeans.

(Note that all quotes below are from Carr’s book unless otherwise stated.)

Sabrina’s “workaholic” Linus Larrabee shouts, “My life makes your life possible!” “And I resent that!” playboy younger brother David shouts back. “So do I!” Linus retorts. This popped into my head as I read the repeated descriptions of the deep readers and contemplative thinkers. Nathaniel Hawthorne lay back and experienced nature for hours. Trains and busy working people disturbed him. The “shallow thinkers” Carr brings up are productive people, people with jobs. They have always paid for the lives of these deep thinkers.

Deep thinkers may not be playboys. They still need to be supported to lie in the grass listening to the breeze. Artists and writers from ancient times had patrons or they starved to death. Today their support still comes from those who can handle the world’s distractions. I say this as an artist and writer forced into the distraction of working or helping my husband work to pay bills and buy books like The Shallows.

Carr’s concept of “deep reading” sounds like Eastern Mysticism, opening the mind to everything, rather than reading as the Scriptures teach, “to know wisdom and understanding,” “comparing Scripture with Scripture.” If you can’t lose yourself in a long book you don’t learn properly? Then why does he reduce the Nathaniel Hawthorne tale of his Sleepy Hollow reverie to “snippets?”

Carr quotes wicked men as praiseworthy examples. Emerson, Freud, Nietszche and Marx are just a few of his favorite secularists. Studies are automatically authoritative. In our book Antidisestablishmentarianism we include this: “Dennis Prager, anthropologist and historian, laments the unthinking reliance on pseudo-science in today’s society. ‘In much of the West, the well-educated have been taught to believe they can know nothing and they can draw no independent conclusions about truth, unless they cite a study and “experts” have affirmed it. “Studies show” is to the modern secular college graduate what “Scripture says” is to the religious fundamentalist.’” (Prager quote from “Breastfeeding as a Religion,” World Net Daily, wnd.com, posted November 11, 2003 1:00 am Eastern.)

Carr’s “facts” are lies or skewed into lies. Plato’s Phaedrus strongly supports oral tradition. Theuth and Thamus illustrate oral versus written traditions. “Unlike the orator Socrates, Plato was a writer, and while we can assume that he shared Socrates’ worry that reading might substitute for remembering, leading to a loss of inner depth, it’s also clear that he recognized the advantages that the written word had over the spoken one.” Carr twists it to say Plato is supporting writing over oral tradition.

Plato knew of the honored Spartan tradition that their laws had to be memorized. “Plutarch, in his discourse on the life of Lycurgus and his rule in ancient Greece, expresses the belief that oral tradition is a way of making the law more firmly fixed in the mind.

“None of his laws were put into writing by Lycurgus, indeed, one of the so-called ‘rhetras’ forbids it. For he thought that if the most important and binding principles which conduce to the prosperity and virtue of a city were implanted in the habits and training of its citizens, they would remain unchanged and secure, having a stronger bond than compulsion in the fixed purposes imparted to the young by education, which performs the office of a law-giver for every one of them.”

Carr says Plato’s Republic opposes the oral tradition. “In a famous and revealing passage at the end of the Republic, … Plato has Socrates go out of his way to attack ‘poetry,’ declaring that he would ban poets from his perfect state.” Book Ten of Plato’s Republic starts off by saying that he wanted to banish the type of poetry that did not support his state. His goal was to rewrite the religious and imitative literature. Plato wanted absolute regulation of content, not the banishment of the oral tradition, as stated in Book II. “Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction (which includes the Poets) …and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.”

The book relies on the shallowness of gleaning opinions from others without testing them by researching in the work itself. Carr didn’t seek out the real meaning of the discussions in the Republic and Phaedrus for himself. This would be almost comical if it weren’t for his repeated emphasis on deep thinking and reading.

Carr talks about the cool serenity of library stacks, but we went to a college where the stacks were closed and the frustrations of getting the right books were endless. Open stacks are still time consuming if the book in the card catalog isn’t on the shelf. Leisure reading and research reading are very different. Long novels like War and Peace and Bleak House and technically difficult works like Einstein and Infield’s The Evolution of Physics are worth the time to read cover to cover. But the library is confining and the Internet is liberating when there is time pressure.

Carr loses the struggle to define determinism because he is thoroughly deterministic in his approach to the studies, the experiments, and the use of what he condemns (superficial research and study) to prove his point. He mentions a couple of histories of societies making technology choices, but, “Although individuals and communities may make very different decisions about which tools they use, that doesn’t mean that as a species we’ve had much control over the path or pace of technological progress.”

How dare he say the brains of London cabbies won’t be as interesting if they start using GPS? That thinking isn’t much different from withholding medicine and clothing from jungle tribes. They’ll be “less interesting” for anthropologists to study. “Anthropologists are often faced with situations where members of the tribe they are studying die on a regular basis from easily curable diseases. But administering medicine may be the first step toward the loss of a culture. Many tribes actually express desire to become more technological. Anthropologists usually pressure them not to do so. One Brazilian indigenous tribal chief, after hearing such a recommendation, is quoted saying, ‘Do they think we like not having any clothes? It may be the way of our ancestors, but the bugs bother us…’ Should tribes like these be exposed to the modern world? There are no easy answers.” (Quoted from BBC online, updated April 10, 2002, in our book Antidisestablishmentarianism.)

E-books already outsell paper books on Amazon.com, and have for over a year. The Kindle is easy to read, keeps your place, allows written comments and highlighting. It’s a “real book.” Many small and medium conventional publishers are out of business. Only publishing giants and specialty “boutique” publishers can sustain the costs of producing paper books. The minimal costs of e-books will force this trend to continue.

Carr even quotes Psalm 115:3-8, a description of the deadness and powerlessness of idols, and warps it to fit his thesis about “technology’s numbing effect. It’s an ancient idea, one that was given perhaps its most eloquent and ominous expression by the Old Testament psalmist.” The creation of idols didn’t just “amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities — those for reason, perception, memory, and emotion.” This is blasphemy. How can he equate the deadly sin of idolatry with the mere loss of “natural capacities”? He does this because he’s a secularist. (The passage is included here) “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not. They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.” ( KJV)

Placing of scientific journals online does not narrow the scope of research and scholarship, which has always built on past scholarship. An article from 2005 need not cite one from 1945. That research was incorporated into, for example, a 1960 article. Further study, experimentation and research would occur by 1960, or more recently.

At one time many libraries had that 1945 issue, interlibrary loan privileges or microfilm. Libraries today rely on online research, which requires membership fees, payment by the article or both. Some of these charges are prohibitive to keep paying and paying for every article an author wishes he could study and reference. Newer articles are more readily available, often free or cheap, and easier to find.

We have been bombarded with distractions and choices and sensory overloads for centuries. It was happening before the Internet, before Gutenberg, before Plato. It’s up to us to filter.

Nicholas Carr pays tribute to the Scriptures by calling Psalm 115:3-8 a “most eloquent and ominous expression.” Hear then, more of the Scriptures and judge whether Carr has any conception of how eloquent the Word of God can be, and how little he understands about how it should shape our thinking. (The following quotes are from the King James Version)

Ecclesiastes 1:8-11: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

Ecclesiastes 12:11-14: “The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd.  And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.  Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”