The Guardian Books news

The speed race, at least. Books are faster and ‘more relaxing’ to read, but iPads and Kindles are ‘more satisfying’, finds new study

E-book readers might be heralded as the future of literature but a new report shows that it’s still quicker to read the old-fashioned print version of a book.

The study, by Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group, gave 24 people a short story by Ernest Hemingway to read – chosen because “his work is pleasant and engaging to read, and yet not so complicated that it would be above the heads of users”.

Each participant read their story using four different devices – a printed book, a PC, an iPad and a Kindle. While on average the stories took 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read, the Kindle experience was 10.7% slower than print, and the iPad was 6.2% slower.

The readers were also asked to rate their satisfaction of the four experiences on a one-to-seven scale: the iPad was top at 5.8, followed by the Kindle at 5.7 and the printed book at 5.6. The PC came in last, with “an abysmal 3.6″.

“They disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp, grey-on-grey letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter,” said Nielsen. He added that “less predictable” comments included participants saying that the book was “more relaxing” to use than the electronic devices. “And they felt uncomfortable with the PC because it reminded them of work.”

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is still deeply in the red despite being the ninth-highest grossing film of all time, according to industry blog

A hint of the true extent of Hollywood’s current financial travails has emerged after it was claimed that a film which racked up almost $1bn at the worldwide box office in 2007 still lost money for the studio that made it.

The industry blog Deadline yesterday published a leaked net profit statement for the blockbuster film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which stands at number nine in the all-time global box office chart, with a gross profit of $938.2m (£619m). If genuine, the statement suggests that Warner Bros is still yet to recoup $167m (£110m) of the film’s total budget.

The report suggests that Hollywood may be in a far more precarious position than previously thought – it is already well known that studios are struggling to find funding in the wake of the credit crunch and interest payments on loans and other calculations are not normally factored into a film’s official production budget. Order of the Phoenix is listed with costs of just $150m on the Box Office Mojo website.

The statement unearthed by Deadline suggests that Warner Bros incurred interest payments of $57m (£38m) on loans it took out to pay for the film to be made, more than a third of the official production budget. The extra costs may be due to distribution fees and adverts.

It also casts into doubt the efficacy of stars making deals that give them a share of net profits on top of their wages. On the evidence of Order of the Phoenix, few films can be delivering particularly large sums to those who sign up to such contracts.

Do you avoid difficult reads, or seek them out? Which tomes are worth the pain, and which are best left on the shelf?

On my last trip to the library I took an unexpected turn and, facing a series of alarmingly engorged spines, realised I’d strayed into the “Literary Novels” section. Primly distinct from “General Fiction”, these consisted of books from many distinguished pens with one thing in common: they were all difficult reads. Nary a one without a complex and duplicitous prose style, baffling haemorrhage of a plot or an approach to dialogue that was, as Obi Wan said, presumably in reference to Finnegans Wake, “as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced”.

What was the purpose of this strange act of bookish apartheid? Perhaps to keep the other shelves safe for easily frightened readers. Or, perhaps, a siren’s call and challenge? “You, bold reader, step forth and read the Chosen Tomes – pluck them from the shelf and you shall inherit the Kingdom of Books.”

Whatever the intention, I was struck by my lack of inclination to pounce on these indisputably great works of literature. I was happier with the modest bundle of slenderer fare already in my bookbag. How lazy I’d become! There was a time when I would have seen it as morally imperative to devote my reading time to the difficult and challenging. I remember an awfully unselfaware conversation in the terminally unselfaware years of teenagedom, during which I asked a similarly earnest friend why “people ever bother to write bad books?” He didn’t know. More in pity than in anger, we shook our heads and re-opened our novels, returning, slightly mystified, to the frustrated longing of Russian peasants. We read books that were clearly quite brilliant, if only we could understand them. They might, as we never admitted to each other, baffle us now, but hopefully we’d come out the other side stronger, better people for the experience. Maybe one day we’d even impress some girls.

Nowadays I wonder how I could have read so many books that were such heavy going and which I so clearly disliked. It only shows what a cowardly, deferential youth I was. Rather than find my own tastes, my own pleasures, I tortured myself by slavishly emulating someone else’s idea of a good time. Now I know that while I find Don Quixote hilarious, other readers may think of it as an overlong Monty Python sketch. To my wife, Jane Eyre is a tear-jerking source of perennial inspiration – to me, it’s a 19th-century Dawson’s Creek. But that’s all OK. We don’t have to upset our mental digestions, devouring books we find unpalatable just because other people love them. It’s no skin off anyone’s nose, least of all the dead authors’ – they don’t have skin any more. The only people who’ll be upset are a dwindling number of old-school Eng Lit academics who still think there’s a straight line of good reading from Boccaccio onwards. And we don’t even have to tell them, either.

But still people seem to feel obliged to toil up the mountain, not for pleasure but in the dry pursuit of worth. There’s a number of online guides explaining how one goes about reading difficult books. Largely humourless, they provide tips as to how mortal readers can prepare themselves for the challenge of entering the minds of the truly great. One guide offers a list of what you’ll need that includes time, patience, a dictionary and a highlighter. Another explains that a single read will not be enough: prepare yourself for many laps through the tome if your puny brain is to have a hope of understanding it. It’s enough to make you long for illiteracy.

But perhaps I’m just making up reasons to excuse my own laziness, using an anti-canonical argument to justify not bothering to read anything mind-widening. Am I ignoring the challenging books that I know would bore me, or just ignoring anything that challenges? Anything truly innovative requires an adjustment of taste from its audience. If I hadn’t been a wide-eyed, hideously pretentious teenager then I’d have never realised the music of Xenakis wasn’t just noise. I’d have never taken the time to adjust my head to Middle English and been able to enjoy Chaucer.

There’s a line somewhere between the peaceful harbour of enjoying your own individual taste, and wallowing, too conservatively satisfied, in an increasingly stagnant pool of the same old same old. But where is it to be drawn? I don’t know, but there must be some books that challenged you but which you found more than worthwhile. Or that you still spit in disgust at having wasted so much of your life on. Please, get me experimenting – recommend and warn away!

Author Harper Lee is famously shy of talking to the press. So imagine the excitement when one newspaper flagged its “interview” . . .

It’s nearly 50 years since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Famously, Lee has spent most of the time since living a quiet life, which journalists commonly describe as reclusive, chiefly because although Lee is known in her Alabaman home town, she won’t speak to the press, and has never published another novel.

So imagine the excitement when the Mail on Sunday devoted two pages to the story of a meeting between its writer Sharon Churcher and the legendarily silent novelist. “When [Harper Lee's] friends agreed to give our reporter an introduction, it was on one strict condition . . . Don’t mention the Mockingbird” ran the preamble. This is how the meeting went (read it slowly, to make it last):

“Nervously, I approach the novelist, carrying the best box of chocolates I could find in the small Alabama town of Monroeville, a Hershey’s selection costing a few dollars. I start to apologise that I hadn’t brought more but a beaming Nelle – as her friends and family call her – extends her hand.

“‘Thank you so much,’ she told me. ‘You are most kind. We’re just going to feed the ducks but call me the next time you are here. We have a lot of history here. You will enjoy it.’”

Budget for Public Lending Right scheme, which pays just over six pence per loan, is already being reduced by 3% this year

Minor romantic novelists might not be the first group to come to mind when you consider deprived victims of the current public spending cuts. But they and a host of the UK’s lesser known authors are up in arms at the prospect of a drop in their already limited incomes through cuts in the money paid out on library loans.

Authors receive just over six pence per loan, up to a cap of £6,600, through the Public Lending Right (PLR) scheme, something many describe as a “lifeline”. Along with all bodies funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the scheme’s budget is being reduced this year by 3%, to £7.45m, and authors are desperately concerned that further reductions will be forthcoming in the autumn, when the government’s next spending review is published.

Jim Parker, PLR registrar, said the organisation would be able “to absorb some but not all” of the 3% cut, and was concerned about the impact this could have on authors. “It will be very difficult to sustain last year’s rate per loan because of the cut in funding,” he said.

“An awful lot of writers are clinging on by their fingernails anyway,” said romance novelist Jenny Haddon, treasurer of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. Many romance writers “earn more from PLR than from outright sales, particularly because these days books other than bestsellers don’t stay on the shelves very long,” she said. It’s the same, added the bestselling crime novelist Peter James, for crime writers: “It does help struggling authors, authors who are not that commercial – for many it is a lifeline, it’s quite a large chunk of money.”

Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the Society of Authors, said that PLR was “particularly important to the genre of writers who sell to libraries but don’t sell in huge numbers in bookshops – saga writers, crime writers, romance novelists”.

“We are hugely concerned. It’s a tiny amount in the great scheme of things but it’s the only public support given to writers. Now is a particularly difficult time for writers and it’s only going to get worse. Publishers are focusing their concentration on fewer bestsellers, there’s a squeeze on mid-list authors, and the budget is not going to help,” said Le Fanu, who – together with a cadre of the society’s biggest names – will be writing to culture minister Ed Vaizey to make the case for the PLR.

“I absolutely back it to the hilt and would walk through the streets for it,” said bestselling women’s fiction author Elizabeth Buchan. “It’s absolutely right and proper that all authors are accorded this money.”

“It means a great deal. It’s never been lavishly funded and it desperately needs to stay,” agreed Penelope Lively, the only author to have won both the Carnegie medal and the Booker prize. “Authors need it. It’s a very important extra for a frequently underfunded activity, and more than that it’s a return on your work that should be made.”

Some children’s authors, too, depend heavily on PLR, said Le Fanu.

“Children’s writers are not highly paid,” agreed Ian Whybrow, one of the most borrowed authors from libraries with over 100 books to his name. “I make a living and I sell thousands of books, but I don’t make a great big living, simply because of the way books are sold [so] the PLR amount is significant to me.”

A 2007 survey by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society found that the average income for an author in the UK was £16,531, and that the top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of total income, while the bottom 50% earn less than 10% of total income.

“PLR is very important to people who are having hiccups in their career, and pretty important for newly published authors as well,” said Haddon. “The division between bestsellers and everyone else is huge. Publishers seem to me to be looking for the next big thing, and if you don’t produce huge sales in your first couple of books you’re gone. There’s never going to be a Dick Francis, who took seven books to get off the launch pad, because your publisher won’t stand by you that long. The point about PLR is that actually it will help to feed the author while they’re trying to find another voice, or genre, or pen name, because that’s what they have to do.”

The DCMS said it would not speculate about future spending decisions.

“This week we had a tough but fair budget. All areas have to bear their share of spending cuts,” said a spokesperson.