Buying books

Buying books has gotten to be pretty complicated.

I truly admire people who go to the library for most of their reading material. In the end, supporting libraries guarantees more sales of books. I got completely out of the habit living abroad for many years in non-English speaking countries. Also, my erratic reading habits – starting, stopping, reading two or three books concurrently – don’t lend themselves to library due dates.

So I buy most of the books I read. And as a book consumer, I’m very conscious that my choices are critical to sustaining the book publishing industry in its various facets.

I have many choices:

• Buy a hardback book at full retail price when it comes out. This is important to support authors and independent bookstores.

• Buy a discounted hardback at a megastore. Still helps authors and megastores are an important part of the landscape, too.

• Buy a remaindered hardback. Doesn’t do much for authors, but is good for publishers (which actually helps authors since it’s important for publishers to be able to sell overstock) and still helps the independent bookstore. Politics & Prose, for instance, works hard at keeping its remainder shelves stocked with good books.

• Buy the ebook version for Kindle or iPad. Cuts out the bookstore, but potentially adds to my convenience in reading, and still gives a royalty to the author.

• Buy the audiobooks version. Increasingly, this is released simultaneously with the hardback. This supports a whole new industry in narrators and gives me the convenience of “reading” a book while walking, driving, working out, etc.

• Wait for the trade paperback to come out. What I often do when I see a new book I think I might like or which got a good review is to look for earlier books by the same author that have already come out in paperback. This is not as good for author/publisher/bookstore as buying the hardback, but helps keep them all in business.

• Buy the heavily discounted hardbacks or trade paperbacks through Amazon. So easy, relatively cheap – especially when you’re a prime customer and save on shipping costs – and yet fatal for those independent bookstores and megastores where I can go in, browse, relax, have a cup of coffee.

• Wait for the mass paperback, though of course a lot of books don’t make it to this stage.

• Buy the remaindered trade paperback. Helps my budget; almost as cheap as a triple tall cappuccino.

• Take pot luck at the library sale, where a hardback can cost less than a cookie.

What are the factors in my decisions?

• I still love the printed book – the covers, the typeface, the creamy paper. Book publishers have realized that we baby boomers need bigger print and more leading, so the hardbacks and trade paperbacks are easier than ever to read. But these books can be heavy, cumbersome, or just inconvenient in many situations. I was an early adopter for Kindle but have since abandoned it. I just got an iPad and downloaded the Kindle app, so I may get back to reading ebooks.

• I’m not in a big hurry to read most books. This won’t stop me from buying the hardback, but it will make me think twice.

• I resist having my iPod/iPhone as a constant companion. I could “read” a lot more, for instance, if I listened to audiobooks while walking the dog, but then when would I daydream, or think about my stories, or hear the chattering squirrels, or exchange a greeting with neighbors?

In the end, I will buy books on various platforms. Sometimes there is no choice – many books may be available only in hard copy. Perhaps they are out of print and available only as used books on Amazon’s helpful site for booksellers.
Some books may lend themselves to a particular platform. A friend of mine says he reads poetry on his iPad while killing time in airports. This seems to me to be a stroke of genius. No one can carry around a bag full of tiny poetry volumes, but you’re never sure what poet you’ll be in the mood for. Yet a poem is the perfect length (generally speaking) for those broken bits of 10 or 15 minutes you experience in air travel.

Audible.com

Audible.com is where the genius of Amazon meets the genius of Apple. You sign up for Audible with your Amazon password and get two free books right off the bat with the first month free. Then you pay $14.95 a month, entitling you to purchase another book -- an audio book-of-the-month club! If that's not enough listening, you can purchase further books at a 30% discount.

I got my new iPhone last week and yesterday I became a member of Audible. I was moving in this direction anyway, but then my iPod died on me last fall. I had already decided to get an iPhone once it was available from Verizon, so I just waited.

I listened to a lot of audiobooks when I was commuting out to work at AOL -- all of the Harry Potter books, for instance. Jim Dale was a pleasure to listen to, as was Barbara Kingsolver reading her Appalachian Spring. Probably the highlight was Derek Jacobi reading Robert Fagles' new translation of The Iliad -- absolutely thrilling.

Audiobooks have become a whole new art form, with narrators vying for prizes and other recognition. Audiobooks have turned what otherwise might be empty hours into learning moments. Not that I think every empty minute should be given over to music or books on the iPhone. I'm not sure I'll listen to books while working out -- if I'm doing that properly, I think I need more focus. Will I be able to listen while riding a bike? We'll see. But some of my dog-walking and driving time can surely be devoted to book-listening.

I had a friend in grade school whose father was legally blind. He used to get these heavy cases of recorded books from a special lending library. These were vinyl discs -- it was a time even before Books on Tape. In those days, of course, readers simply read the text out loud. There was no attempt to dramatize, develop different voices, or even give it much inflection. The evolution of this semi-charitable business into today's audiobooks is quite a story.

I'm not sure it could get any easier than Audible. You purchase it and it goes into "My Library" for download. You download it into iTunes, then sync your iPhone and start listening. In addition to the earbuds, I have the cable to plug the iPhone into my car sound system, and for that matter, into our living room stereo.

My first download last fall was Robert Reich's Aftershocks, which I got two-thirds through before the iPod died. With my new membership, I've purchased Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life and Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists. Presuming all goes well, I will report on these books in due course.

Spies of the Balkans

Alan Furst is back creating another morally ambivalent, atmospheric thriller featuring a hard-bitten foreign protagonist. This time it is the Greek Costa Zannis, who is remarkably similar in his attitudes and cigarette smoking to the French, Hungarian and Dutch protagonists of Furst's earlier novels.

We listened to this on audiobooks during a road trip and it was entertaining enough, though Furst has clearly fallen into purely formula writing. Watch a few old movies (he even refers to one character as a real cinematic aviator), research a relatively obscure location (Salonika, Greece in this instance), insert above-mentioned hard-bitten protagonist, add a few lady friends, and wrap everything in a smoky nostalgia that makes it as blurry and comforting as the black-and-white movie you started with.

I happen to like a lot of this, particularly the obscure locations. Furst plays this one to the hilt, with Zannis shuttling off to Belgrade and Budapest, with a quick dash to Paris, and dispatching loved ones to Istanbul and Alexandria, while carrying on three love affairs in Salonika. Some of the romantic scenes were amazingly clumsy, bordering on the adolescent. And in an audiobook you don't have the freedom to skim over the embarrassing parts.

The reading by Daniel Gerroll was easy to listen to and follow. His comfortable pace was well-matched to Furst's unhurried narrative style and he was consistent in his characterization of Zannis and other main figures, so there was virtually no confusion in a book populated by people with names that are strange to our ears. No small feat.

Furst belabors the history a bit more in this book than he has in some earlier works, probably because this location and the action he describes (Greece girding for the Nazi assault) is so obscure to American readers. He is at his best describing the fin du monde atmosphere of a country coming under siege and the desperation that accompanies it. The story of an underground railroad smuggling Jews out of Germany to freedom, in Turkey of all places, was moving and rich in historical context.

Less successful was Furst's attempt to show a Gestapo officer at work, which seemed to owe too much to Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone to be called original.

We bought the audiobook at Books a Million in Tennessee because we inadvertently left behind the audiobooks we had bought for the trip in our hotel the first night. Out of the dozens of audiobooks on sale, it was the only one we felt both of us could enjoy and that proved to be the case.