Results tagged “Sony” from Slipped disc

I am struggling to come to terms with my reaction on discovering on Google that people are reading my last book on the electronic device known as Kindle.

I was thrilled beyond all expectation. The heart always has a little leap when someone is reading your novel on a bus, or even browsing it in an airport bookstore. That signifies a kind of acceptance, irrevocable once the purchase has been made.

But to find readers engaged in one of your works on a handheld computer when they could just as easily choose from a million others is an affirmation of a different sort and I am having trouble explaining to myself why it filled me with such joy.

I have always been among the first to use new cultural gadgets, be they compact disc - I had a demo model back in 1982 - or word processor, or DVD, or time-shift television. So it's great to be there on a Kindle or a Sony Reader, but not that much better than getting the super-coolest of i-Pods for your next big birthday. I have seen the things at work in my publisher's office and was not all that impressed.

What thrills me, I suspect, are the twin elements of transference and cylicality. An idea comes from the mind, gets worked out on screen and paper and is finally imprinted between hard covers in a satisfying permanence.

Or so you kid yourself. That permanence may be for a year or few, after which the book ends up in a dump bin or pulped in a publisher's recycling plant, the few hundred or thousand surviving copies trickling out of libraries and secondhand stores until they are worn out and only the British Library, Library of Congress and a few similar institutions maintain the author's precious illusion of eternity, unto the tenth generation.

In digital form, the work lasts forever. It can be deleted, of course, but that's unlikely to happen when it costs nothing to maintain on a databse and will continue to sell so long as there are readers who might find it enlightening. The sense of permanence is there.

Even more appealing is the feeling that the idea that has come from the ether has returned to the atmosphere, complete but ethereal, holding its space in the universe of ideas. What comes round, comes round.

I think that is what has made me so happy. I don't own a Kindle and, were I to be given one in the pursuit of my professions, I don't know how much I would use it in preference to the multi-sensual delights of the printed book.

I am a print junkie. I like to smell the page and run my fingers down the crack of a spine. But the uplift of receiving one's latest book in hard covers wears thin on repetition, whereas the knowledge that I am out there on Kindle just fills me with delight as I go about the daily toil of putting 1,000 more words on the page and readying them for publication. I am falling in love with a machine I have never met.

A statement by Peter Gelb to the Economist has set alarm bells ringing.

At his former job, as head of Sony Classical, Gelb used to deliver hour-long harangues about how his genius would rescue the label and the recording industry as a whole. By the time he quit, Sony was a shambles and the industry near-dead. For the detail, see here.

Now read Gelb in The Economist: 'When I took over, the Met was on a declining slope toward extermination...' He does not finish the sentence, but the implication is that golden man has once more revived a dying goose.

This is pure fantasy. The Met, with an endowment running into hundreds of millions of dollars, was never at death's door, let alone an emotive threat of 'extermination'. It just needed a blast of fresh air after a decade of stagnation.

What Gelb has done - introducing new repertoire, new directors, opera at the movies and in the open air - has been highly effective and long overdue, but no more than the start of what needs to be a coherent strategy to make opera meaningful to a wider American public. Let's hope the strategy is in place, because without it Gelb's reforms will soon go stale and in a couple of years the Met will be right back in the state he found it.

I, for one, very much hope that there is depth and breadth to the Gelb plan because I like to see success in the arts more than I enjoy criticising failure. But this latest boast, echoing the hollow claims of his Sony years, has me worried. 

Hubris is a sign that a leader has peaked. What follows is nemesis. Peter Gelb needs to take care that he does not let himself believe a myth of his own making.

A year ago I asked 'has anybody seen Alberto Vilar?'  Several readers were kind enough to respond and I was relieved to learn that the former philanthropist is still going to the opera while awaiting his fraud trial in September.

How about Chris Craker, though? Has anyone seen Chris?

Up to a couple of months ago he was running the classical output of Sony-BMG and talking up the industry in the music magazines with a lovely line in chutzpah. Then  the inevitable happened. A short press statement said he was gone and the cheery fellow has not been responding to emails. I do hope he's OK. Tell me if you've seen him.

The ones I feel sorriest for at Sony are the fine young artists that Chris signed - the Skrida sisters from Latvia and the lovely Lisa Batiashvili. Who will record them now? 

Meantime, better news of two victims of the EMI crunch. Barry McCann, who used to run the classical label in the UK and was Our Nige's best mate, has joined the self-publishing co-op Avie, while Theo Lap, who ran classical marketing, has joined the Dutch label Brilliant Classics. Brilliant it occasionally is, with low-cost boxes of collected works - the complete Messiaen on 17CDs, for instance, for as little as 30 Euros.

 For some reason they do not appear to be available in the US.