Good news and bad for the world of books.

Seth Godin, the marketing genius who has published half-a-dozen bestselling books, sees the price of books plunging to commodity levels. No one should plan to make a living making books, he warns. Why? Too many books: eight times as many this year as last!

I love movies and this strikes terror in me:

The only reason that movies still cost so much to make is the finite number of movie screens available to the studios (this choke point enforces the scarcity of the short head). Once the world is 100% Netflix, don’t expect to see many more $200 million movies.

But at IBM I learned a trick that might help.

I spoke to groups when I was at IBM, though in high school I would sooner throw myself under a bus than walk to the front of the room and talk about Ayn Rand or The Brothers Karamazov. I dealt with my terror in two ways.

First, I made sure to know more about the topic than anyone else in the room.

Second, I turned the hot spotlight on my listeners at the beginning and throughout.

“Let’s go around the room,” I would say. “Say your name, where you’re from, and what you hope to accomplish here today.”

Now I am not the only name they know, not the only person who must speak up and make sense, and not the only person who will succeed or fail here today. They feel peer pressure. They don’t want to look bad to one another.

I call on them early and often. They are less likely to roast me if I can roast them back. I have the advantage: I am standing over them with the microphone, deciding who speaks and when.

Thereafter I am kind, and so are they.

How could that trick help eBooks, or give eBooks a better future?

My trick did not always work. Later I trained coaches and led groups of a hundred or more. Anything can happen in business coaching and life coaching (they run together). If someone stood up for coaching about an eating disorder, could I expect to know more about the topic than anyone else in the room? Could I put the hot spotlight on each person, or could some people hide from me in a group that size?

Well, yes, the topic is always coaching, not eating disorders or lost love or whatever, and yes, after you put two or three people under your hot spotlight, the rest sit up straight and pay attention. They want to be ready if your spotlight falls on them.

What’s the equivalent for an eBook, where you never see your readers?

Look again at that flood of eBooks Godin mentioned. Don’t most of them consist entirely of text? How often does an eBook do anything a printed book can’t do? Often the eBook does less. It drops the illustrations.

Sure, I can see the price of such eBooks falling to almost nothing.

Text is not enough.

True, in the Internet era more people will see our words than hear them, and more people will see our words than see us. But words seen on the screen are not enough. There are too many: too many of us, and too many words.

Can the eBook do what I did when speaking to groups? Put the hot spotlight on the reader, and call the reader to attention with a jolt of alarm?

Remember the tiny list of questions at the end of textbook chapter? A lazy teacher would make those questions your homework.

Suppose in an eBook those we add illustrations to those questions? And animate the illustrations? And make the animations interactive, responding to the reader? And make those interactive animations a game? Now the eBook reader can win or lose at the end of each chapter; can win or lose against other readers of the same eBook; maybe against other readers by the dozens or the hundreds, other readers at the same moment, far across the Internet. Peer pressure calls the reader to attention. The hot spotlight falls on the reader. We know who that reader is, and we keep score. We start the eBook by asking the reader a few questions about himself.

This turns the textbook chapter inside out. The tiny questions at the end of the chapter swallow up the chapter. Each chapter is a game, and you get the text of the chapter in the course of the game, in the form of clues and instructions for winning the game.

Now eBooks sell the way games sell.

Now eBooks sell big.

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What do I have for you here? Only a game.

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You are working on two scales when you write; when you write with something to gain or lose in your life, I mean. If you are writing for the file cabinet, as happens so often in school, I have only one bit of advice: get done with that.

The two scales? On a small scale, you are making sentences and paragraphs. We’ll come to that. Work on the larger scale first: remaking minds; others and your own. If you want them to change their mind, show them how: change your mind first.

At that upper level, diagram this way:

 

How much does it help to research the official truth about something? Instead dig into the mind of the people you are talking to. No law says people have to make sense, and usually they don’t. They’re gone before you finish the sentence, “That makes no sense.” Assume they make sense to themselves, some kind of sense, and then find out what. You want to move them to your side, not destroy them. Start by moving their way, walk with them for a while, then bring them your way.

Instead of researching climate change, for example, research what the political right thinks about climate change.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could test out your paper before you send it away? You can. Interview someone from your opposition; not a clown you can easily disgrace, but the best of your opposition, who might disgrace you. Better now, before you send away that paper. Do it early, so you don’t throw away pages and pages when you find they don’t work.

 

After that, there’s no official right or better way to make sentences or paragraphs. They’re better and right when they move more people your way. They are music and song, those sentences and paragraphs; music to lure and coax the opposition to join you.

Write honey, not vinegar. What good are opponents once you destroy them, or drive them away, or push them out of sight? You want them to take up your song, to swell the chorus of your anthem.

Think of the beat in your favorite music, or the soundtrack of your favorite movie. Write like that. Hear what you write. Hear the beat and the mood. The words on a page are just notes on a score. We don’t love or hate them till we hear them. Write to be loved by your enemies, not correct on paper. When the music is good, you know, the words hardly matter.

Before your enemies love you, you must find something to love in them. Go listen to them, and the music they love, then bring them to hear yours. That’s writing: crossing the distance between minds to bring minds closer, so two voices add not subtract, and twist around one another, in a louder song with always more surprises.

Learn to write from music teachers.

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I know I have still not shown you how any of this matters, how it gets your thoughts to me any faster or better.

I have the notes, I will be back with them, the next day when I have a stretch of eight or ten fresh hours that are not urgently needed elsewhere.

Don’t give up…

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In a preliminary budget passed by the school board, as many as 28 of the 125 teachers at Truman High could lose their jobs. Double periods for struggling math and English students — credited for the district’s better test scores — would no longer be possible.

At the public meeting in late April, and another this month, parents spoke of the budget cuts as if they would lock the community into a kind of cycle. One said that the adults in Levittown struggle economically, so would cutting back on education not condemn the children to the same fate? “Probably,” said Mr. Bruck, the board’s budget chair.

Another parent asked: If the schools start failing again, who is going to want to move into all those foreclosed houses? No one offered an answer to that.

– NY Times, 22 May 2011

Last week I watched my son and his friends graduate from Wake Forest in the gleaming former tobacco town of Winston-Salem. One week later he is working full time at an unpaid internship, doing computer work for an auto parts company. Even that work is going away, I fear, slowly migrating to countries overseas. Not just the auto work but the computer work, another form of manufacturing.

Four decades earlier I graduated summa, with a double major in English and Math, but what a grind I was, in those years when Vietnam nearly killed off fraternities. In one picture my son stands shoulder to shoulder with a friend in full uniform, an ROTC grad and new officer, one of eight graduates who answered when called that day, and took an oath before taking a degree.

Already my son misses his many friends. I missed out on that. The week I left for Princeton and grad school I chanced upon my best friend from high school and his week-old daughter. I knew less to say than she did. The next time I saw him she had gone away to grad school herself.

Better to trade my summa for such friends, if I could go back.

I dawdled in Germany after Princeton, riding our favorable exchange rate with a former and defeated enemy. Now Germany takes more vacation than we do, gives more of its people health care, and outproduces us.

We  rose to greatness because we were God’s darlings, says one political faction, and slipped when we forgot that. No, I think our postwar America was the country high school whose valedictorian arrives at a top college with no notion of the international competition he faces there.

Where do we halt our ragged retreat? Turn and form a new line? Hold against further loss? Begin to retake lost ground?

Here.

Though China make our iPods, and India program them, I doubt either will improve upon our English, the language that gave us the iPod and its reason to be, the movies and the music. While we write the stories and songs of the future, the world will gladly scramble to supply the sets and props. If writing is murder, writing is war. This war this time we must win.

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