The Mind of Alex

This entire post is an annoyed rant, and as such is not edited or spell checked. 

I wrote an article last night that had a wonderful fucking headline: Kindle Outselling iBooks 60 To 1. Needless to say, controversy ensued. The post hit Techmeme, and was picked up by TechCrunch, AllThingsD, SAI, among others. I didn't expect it to perform at that level, I was just excited by the premise and the data that I had found. 

I'm a fucking idiot for new media, and to hear the numbers that I used in the article was fucking great. Hard data in the publishing world is hard to come by. In short, to save you the time, J. A. Konrath (more on him later), has put a good number of his books that were in print up on the Kindle store and is making a fucking killing. He pointed out that on iBooks he moves 100 books a month, compared to 6,000 on Kindle. 6,000 on Kindle for books that are often largely in print is pretty damn impressive. He has more than 2 dozen books up online across the various platforms, meaning that he has a large, distributed library of titles to extrapolate from.

Fast foward to this guy, who in an apparent state of boredom or unemployment decided to take me to task on the article, because, and maybe you already knew it, I am a flaming idiot tool. We'll see. I'm going to dissect his post one bit at a time. You decide who is right. Let's go:

Alex Wilhelm, writing for The Next Web:

If you follow the ebook market you were likely stunned this June when Steve Jobs claimed to have captured 22% of the electronic book market overnight with the release of iBooks and iPad. Many of us who watch this market with careful eyes were leery of the numbers that Jobs was tossing around, they sounded too good to be true.

1. If you “follow the ebook market” you’re a fucking dork. Yeah. I said it, and I’m not sorry I said it.
2. Assuming you’re a fucking dork, were you really “stunned” by Jobs’s claim? Did your mouth literally hang wide open, as you stared blankly at the words that you could not bring yourself to believe? Was it like a punch to the gut?
3. Steve Jobs did not make that claim, and if you think he did, you’re not following the ebook market very closely. Dork status: Revoked.

Alright, off the bat, he is a little ad hominem, but so am I, so I'll let it slide. Yes, I am a massive fucking dork for media. We can move on now. Yes, I was actually stunned when the 22% number came up. I talked to colleagues, friends, and publishers about it. We were all shocked at the number. My mouth was probably not agape per se, but it may have been slightly loose. Perhaps.

Now, you will note that the guy, I don't remember his name nor do I care enough to go look it up, says that Jobs "did not make that claim [the 22% number]." He is almost half right, Steve actually did something far more insidious, and far more Apple. I am going to assume that guy (we'll just call him that ) does not know (or care) how Apple PR works. But first, let's get to what guy says next:

How do I know Steve Jobs didn’t make the claim? An investigation? A Google search? Did I call Steve Jobs up, because I can do that, and ask him?

No, no, no. I only call Steve as a last resort. I didn’t even have to do any of the work myself. Before I copied and pasted the little snippet from TNW’s article, the word “claim” was a “hyperlink” to this Gravitational Pull article:

What Steve Jobs actually said about iBooks market share

As you might have guessed, the word “actually” (which I helpfully emphasized) is a hint that there’s something more to the story. The “something more” was this:

I’ve got a few stats today for you. In the first 65 days, users have downloaded over 5 million books and that is about two and  half books per iPad which is terrific. The other interesting thing is the five of the six biggest publishers in the US who have their books on the iBookstore tell us that the share of ebooks now that are going through the iBookstore now is about 22 percent. So iBooks market share now of ebooks from five of these six major publishers is up to 22 percent in just about 8 weeks. And, as we ship more iPads, that number is just going to keep going up and up and up and we’re really thrilled with it.

So, what Steve Jobs “claimed” was merely what he was told by the five biggest publishers who publish on the iBooks platform. The 22% figure is not a reflection of the “total ebook market” and it wasn’t pulled out of Jobs’s ass—it’s a reflection of the sales of those specific publishers.

Yes, I’m aware that a slide from Jobs’s presentation caused some initial confusion, because it read “22% share of total ebook sales” but the entire point of the Gravitational Pull article was to provide context for that slide via the actual words that came out of Jobs’s mouth. Apple doesn’t provide a live feed of its events, so getting a transcript took some time. Time which was used by many in the blog-o-press to flip the fuck out.

The naivete here is so thick it looks like the buttered bread of a fat fuck. The slide in question is this:

This is what Jobs actually did. First he launched iBooks and sold a good number of books out of the gate to curious new iPad owners. Then, to spin the numbers as hard as he could, he half lied. The slide is damn specific: we own 22% of eBooks sales. But while that slide was up, Steve went droning on about what he actually meant, only 22% of books from certain publishers, etc, etc. 

Classic Apple. Make a huge claim that will be headline fodder, and then hide in the small print that really covers their asses legally. So what did Jobs say? He said two things: 1) We own 22% of the eBook market, and 2) We don't. Aww, that's a bitch, right? Not really if you know how Apple runs its press. I am right: Jobs did claim to own 22% of the eBook market, the photographic evidence is right there. Guy is also partially right, Jobs did say something else about controlling 22% of the eBook sales from 5 of the top 6 publishing houses. 

Anyway, back to guy:

Why is it, then, that TNW is trotting out an author who self publishes (one guy whose name is not A. Nick Dotal, alas)  to somehow prove false a claim Apple never actually made, even while linking to an article which proves he never made the claim?

Because they can, and no one will call them on it. Because the internet sucks.

You are an apparent idiot, guy, just so you know. Konrath has sold hundreds of thousands of paperback books via a large publishing house. You missed the *whole* fucking point. Konrath has taken the eBook side of his writing career into his own hands, so he has all the fucking numbers for THIRTY EIGHT books in Kindle, iBooks etc and is willing to share. You find better data than that, it's hard to come by. And people do call us on shit, every fucking day. If anyone gave a shit about what you thought or wrote, you would understand how it works. No one does, so you don't. I am not blaming you, just laughing at you.

Was my data perfect? No. I admit that. The headline probably should have been toned down some, but at the time I ran with it. I'm not worried about that at all. The last bit of guy's post:

On the other hand, the article is written by the kind of guy who would end on something like this:

So much for iPad killing Kindle. I called it.

Way to go, Nostradamus. Where can everyone else get a crystal ball that peers into the obvious?

At any rate: The iPad hasn’t even finished mashing the buttons on the fatality it’s laying down on netbooks and as everyone who follows the technology mortal combat circuit knows, killing things is an art, not a race.

“Get over here!”

Again, this guy is an idiot. It has been obvious that the Kindle is doing fine? Oh look, I did a quick Google search and found just a few different articles here in a row that claim that iPad will kill Kindle. Let's see, the NYT, PCMag, GigaOm, and a whole fucking host of others. I am one of the few people in tech who has thought since day one that the Kindle was going to win. That is why the claim of Jobs that "22% share of total ebooks sales" belonging to Apple was so interesting, which is why I was shocked, which is why when I got my hands on Konrath's numbers I was excited.

Get over here? Here I am you fucking idiot. 

 

 

This whole "Journalism v. Blogging" debate has gone on long enough, so I am going to settle it. Let's get some big things out of the way first: most blogs are fucking terrible, and most journalists are out of touch with technology and love themselves too much.

Now that everyone is mad, or at least unsettled, let's get to work. I really don't give a fuck what you were told in journalism school (did they crush your soul there, you all sound really uptight) what journalism is, but here is what the Wikipedia says about what a journalist should be:

A journalist collects and disseminates information about current events, people, trends, and issues. His or her work is acknowledged as journalism.

That, in a nutshell, is right. A journalist collects shit, pieces it together, and then gives it to people. Do note the lack of any personal view in that definition. Raw information in, packaged information out, period.

Now, that is all well and dandy, and we bloggers could do that. In fact, given the blogging writing culture, we could do it faster than journalists, and do our own copy editing and promotion to boot, but we don't. You see, we prefer blogging to journalism any day of the week. Let's get down a definition for blogging so you know what I am talking about:

Blogging = journalism + opinion. 

So says me. Well, probably other people as well, but it's what I think and I haven't read them. Do journalists often end up blogging and not journalisting (in blogging you can make up your own words)? Of course. Newspapers generally call that the editorial section, set apart from the "hard news" bits, but there is no complete divide.

In no small way there is no pure journalism, no one can write the perfectly objective article. Therefore, all journalists are always trying to blog as little as possible and report as much as possible. Fair enough, and good on them. We need that.

What we don't need is for journalists to claim that they are the only useful cunts to be found. Yes, people do want the hard facts. And yes, they do want to know what they mean. That is where blogging comes in, we provide perspective along with the facts. 

Two. Different. Things.

For what it's worth, I don't want to be a journalist and in fact would have a hard time doing it. No place for my views? No ability to say what I think this means? No space to forecast based on the best information that I can find? Fuck that, all the way.

Yes, I am a blogger. Yes, writing is my profession. And no, I don't want to be a fucking journalist. I have a brain that I like to use. If I just wanted to parrot the facts, I could turn it off and think about naked women all day. 

This is the break down: a journalist reports the facts with as little personal input as possible, a blogger brings the facts and provides their views on them. Which do you want to be?

---

My friends have been talking about this for a while. I am quite late to the discussion. Read what Jolie and Martin have to say (Martin's website is down for some reason, so that is his Twitter account).

Introduction:

The phrase has been repeated until it has lost all meaning except to the honest intellectual: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ Thus spoke Socrates before the city that would decide shortly, and as all know too well, terminally, on the question of his life. His sentence was death, but his words have gained more life after his bodily expiration than he could have perhaps ever hoped. Socrates the teacher is far more immortal than nearly any human has ever been. He is certainly ahead of the world’s dead dictators who etched their mark into stone and ground in futile rage against the fragility of life and slow release of aging. It seems plain that some intellectual power transcends time. Thus Socrates lives on while the dictators are lost to all except the most erudite historian.

Hitchens himself said something to a similar effect. When confronted with the lack of perhaps a strong historicity of Socrates in a spirited debate, and thus with the possibility of Socrates’ non-existence, Christopher said strongly (and I condense) “I do not care if he never lived, it is in his ideas that he was strong. The man is the conveyance.” Indeed.

 During the week of this essay’s writing Christopher Hitchens’ diagnosis with cancer had just been made public. His illness is of a serious sort that has a tendency to ignore the efforts of modern medicine. I want to make it plain, this is no eulogy, right now Hitchens is very much alive. Although his pen is calmed during this therapy there is little doubt as to the fact that when given a particle of health the polemic genius will return. Until then, at this difficult time, I would like to take a short moment and extol a man worthy of more praise than he has received thus far in his life. That is the goal of this essay.

It is a cheapened reward to be given full recognition for the good life after its natural conclusion of death. This is especially true as there is no personal afterlife to be enjoyed; only ideas and works live past the grave of their authors. While Christopher is alive we need to take a moment to explain why he has done well, and how we appreciate his life’s work; we are in his debt, let us work to absolve that debit.

The dedication of this essay is of course chiefly to Christopher Hitchens, but that is too narrow a mark. There is a community around the world who debate and disseminate Mr. Hitchens’ work as it comes out, contributing to an intense ad lively dialogue between his detractors and proponents that never ceases. While the starting spark is the genesis (and genius) of the discussion, the fire of the ensuing argument is something to be praised, even if sometimes the conversation can become trite. Perhaps to some it seems to exist only for ‘the sake of argument.’ Taking all of that as a given, it is fair to say that this tract is for more than just Hitchens, it is also for his readers, and his opponents. It is for everyone then, as to lack opinion on Hitchens is to be unplugged.

There has been, in this past week, a new strain of discussion and pontification that has cropped up in the community I mentioned before. Coming from the usual centers of religious dithering, a call that Christopher’s cancer is in fact a gift from god to convince him of his combined immortality and immorality, and thus to steer him to Calvary, has begun to ring. No real intellectual would ever wish those peoples who think such to be quieted by force, but on a personal level a complaint can be lodged: I have a cross word to the crass Christians who have taken the sad news of Hitchens’s cancer to proselytize their usual crop of banal lies. My unhappiness with you shall only be set aside long enough to honor a good man living, lest he become good man remembered before I can tell him what he deserves to hear while breathing.

No introduction can fully dodge an egregious pop-culture reference; I will lend the task to Jay –Z:

“They say ‘they never really miss you ‘till you dead or you gone,’ so on that note I'm leaving after this song.”

----

Our collected best wishes to Christopher and his immediate family in this difficult time. There is a great silent global host who wait on baited breath that the miracle of our medical complex will find a cure to this cancer, granting us just one more thought from a man whose life is more than an act of self-questioning, it is a tutorial on how to lead the life of examination, argument, debate, curiosity, love, passion, and unending courage. May those proclivities that I have thus listed which have served Christopher so well in health carry him through sickness as well.

To Christopher.

 

A Biography Abbreviated

I have a small tugging in my mind that many who read this tract will do so out of curiosity about Hitchens, and will therefore be bereft of a good grasp of his life. I cannot bridge that gap, the chasm is too wide. I can however provide a short flash of highlights that can toss enough light into the air to illuminate a rough shadow of a large figure.

Christopher Hitchens is an author, journalist, essayist, literary critic, polemicist, and both public speaker and intellectual. Usually it seems that when a person’s job listing runs past three slots they are fluffing their resume for one reason or the next. In this case what I have listed is only a fraction of Christopher’s accomplishment and capabilities.

Mr. Hitchens has written (through the recent Hitch-22) some 18 books, edited a collection, co-authored or co-edited another 7 works, was a partial contributor to 3 more, and has written numerous introductions to popular books of a different authorial vintage. If that is not enough to impress, Hitchens is also a famed orator whose lectures and participation in debates have gained him a reputation on television, at the university lectern, and on the large stage as a voice of reason that will not give one inch to any bit of illogic or, as he has said, ‘piffle.’ He is the bulldog of the logical and has often been the popper of the ‘bubble reputation’ in the regular world. A longtime critic of the literary, and a biographer of the excellent, Christopher has promoted the best, protected the regular, attacked the overrated, and torn down the weak and limited idea as just that: lesser and not capable.

Before entering cancer treatment he wrote actively for a number of periodicals, both large and small. His name has long carried enough weight to write for any publication of his choosing, and so his words penned for smaller, lesser known publications, against the opportunity to write for much more money if he wished it, illuminate his drive to support free inquiry and free expression.

He has always taken the unpopular view whenever he found it to be the correct one. Long an ally of the leftist view of the world, Hitchens, to the great chagrin of many of his friends and the left-establishment came out in strong support of the Iraq war. He vocally supported the subsequent liberation of those diverse peoples from the grip of a man known for a career as a strong man with a weakness for genocide and territorial war.

Christopher is a friend of the weak, an ally of the intellectual, a fervent critic of fraud, and an anti-theist. Perhaps you may know him only as the latter, and that is too often the shame. His life has been so much more than the last five years in which his ‘god bashing book’ brought him new fame. His prominence, it is impossible to say, has not suffered by his branding along with the other so called ‘new atheists,’ but to merely affix that sticker to Christopher’s forehead is to skip the story, read the executive summary, and then to miscomprehend the shortening; surely Hitchens is an anti-theist, but that is merely a theme in his life, not its aggregate.

Christopher Hitchens evokes anger, pain, love, war, calm, peace, strife, extravagance, and one thousand other emotions that are too myriad to contain on these pages. All that a person can do is to read his words, listen to his voice, critically examine his claims and attempt to ascertain when Christopher has a point perfected and when it could be improved. It does nothing for the legacy of a contrarian to treat their work as gospel; nothing Hitchens has ever written should be let go without a firm drubbing of verification, I imagine he would want nothing less. Come to your own conclusions on the merit of what Christopher has said so far, but on my recommendation do not miss what he has to say.

The last note in any biography written on Hitchens must contain this final entry: in this year 2010 Mr. Hitchens is 61, and is in a battle for his life. 

A Template for Youth

Christopher Hitchens, never Chris, is known for his love of both tobacco and alcohol, two things that youth are discouraged from enjoying on a good day, let alone in a moment of weakness. Many people view what others call his vices a sign of his true figure, claiming that they indicate a laxity of self-control that explains his often times acerbic pen. Nonsense.

Our hero made it plain that alcohol can a word improve (and if this essay is readable it is the beneficiary of just that boost), but that he does not need it to work. Boosterism of the excellent Mr. Walker is hardly something to be ashamed of; Christopher has few of the vices that we tend to lock people up for. No, Hitchens has at most we could call character flaws that never seemed to stem his literary output. In short, he must be absolved for his perceived weaknesses and judged by his real merits.

I say all of that as I want to state emphatically, and without qualification that Hitchens is a role model that I would trust with the education of any child I will ever bring into this world. The position of the skeptic is the only position of clarity, and I would not have my future progeny miss it for the world.

That idea might be lost on a person of faith, or perhaps even for the apatheist. To them, let me phrase it this way: to train a young man to take the position of questioning is perhaps the single best way to assist a young person and help them on the walk to real adulthood. A person of thirty years who cannot form an argument in speech, or parse the news for its backing themes is no adult, but is more an automaton useful for repetitive work that requires no thought.

No, the child told to read, and to think, and to question, and raised just long enough to be launched half ready into the winds of idea so that they can find their way, asking and researching, is the very story and epitome of a youth raised in the tradition of Hitchens. Will that youth grow to think as Christopher does? It would very much surprise me if they did, but in some cases it could happen. Some have found in Christopher an ally and others an enemy. What no one can say, in good faith, is that Christopher did nothing to advance intellectualism. That alone should make him a lion of all people of learning, regardless of where they stand on his particular points of thought. You cannot not respect a man who would, and did, stand up to anyone anywhere in his pursuit of the good and the right at every turn. In our age of compromise and lukewarm politics, he is a positive anomaly much deserving of deference.

But for our small adult, of perhaps no more than 16 years, wondering just what is true and what is not, can we actually offer them with a straight face the truth as we best know it? Or is it best to stand before a person on their path to independence, and instead of telling them what the results of our best inquisitive efforts are, tell them to ask the questions that will guide them on their own path of discovery? To be a skeptic is hardly to be a person of an ideology. To the contrary, it is the opposite; it is to be mercenary with no camp to report to and not a weapon to swing; only a pad of paper to write on, a library of all thought to read, and a lifetime of experience to have that will allow for personal refinement.

When confronted with the question ‘what is truth,’ Hitchens took the softball pitch and hit it so far out of the park that no one ever found a shred of the question. To paraphrase, “I could describe the search for it [truth]. But I would be skeptical of anyone who claims to have found it.” Yes, that is core the idea of the Enlightenment perhaps better than it has ever been previously put.

And so to Christopher Hitchens we can all raise a glass and thank the living man for his contributions and say that yes, despite a few physical activities that most of us cannot stamp out, this is a man of personal courage that we should attempt to emulate on our own, and a man whose principles we should teach: intellectual curiosity, voracious reading, a constant pursuit of knowledge, and deep self-examination to find in ourselves our weakest ideas that we just may hold dearest. We all have it at least partially wrong, and we will never find out what is true, that is, not without those listed principles.

Hitchens’ life is a role model for more than me and you, but for the next generation. And the next. And the next. He epitomizes the promise of America, its drive for the free debate, the next idea, and the tearing down of the old to make way for the improved.  We all wish that the same could be said of ourselves, it is a role that we should fill, even if we cannot.

A Legacy Unbound

It is something of a tribute of America to have found a son so fervent in his pursuit of freedom that he not only became her citizen, but also her lion. This is a late addition to what I would say is the growing legacy of Mr. Hitchens.

Yes, we have read his books, listened to his debates, examined his ideas, tossed food in annoyance when he was cut off by a Fox News host whose cranium was lost in their own nether regions, but that is merely the start. Christopher is struggling for his physical life, but not for his intellectual existence.

To put it plainly: the ideas of Christopher are going to live long, and anew, and perhaps greater than ever before, after his death. I wish that he could live on and comment further, but we will eventually have no such luck. Just as you and I are in the words of Richard Dawkins the ‘lucky ones’ who have received the gift of life, so is Christopher fortunate in his eventual demise. He has the chance to release the precious gift of existence, placing him ahead of billions who will never have the opportunity to do so. On the last day of his life he may rest easy, having taken the breath of the conscious far past what most manage to conjure up in their most logically deviant dreams; he did well with the time that he had.

The voice, through whatever medium, of our hero will live on. We shall see to it. We will see it through. It will need no large help to continue its non-small start, but that does not mean that a speeding car cannot do with a few extra horsepower. Christopher Hitchens’ ideas and methods will live on, no matter the price, no matter the cost, no matter the time, no matter the climate.

When a younger Christopher was asked how long he would go on doing what he was, he promptly replied that he would do so ‘until I [he] drop[ped].” Indeed, and he continues to do so.

 

A Personal Thanks

Christopher,

From myself, and on the behalf of millions of other people, I wish to thank you. You have not done as Socrates was so accused, making the weaker argument the stronger, but instead have taken the correct opinion so suffering from unpopularity and made it the tenable stance of the intellectual. Anyone of letters owes you, if for nothing more than your mental demands and strength to look a bully in the eye and say ‘nonsense.’.

We all respect you, especially when we disagree, and you are dearer to us than perhaps you had imagined. Your family is lucky to have you.

From the multitudes that I am a part of who call you hero, good luck. Your cheerleaders may not be the best looking, or always brandish pigtails, but we are behind you. All the way. Until you are forced from the living and into death, and even then all the more, we love you. Stay strong.