This is the first post of a series on bloggers who inspire me. It is also day 2 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge, and today’s task is to write a “list post.” As far as possible, I have decided to adapt the tasks of the Challenge to the posts I had already scheduled on my editorial calendar. Since there are so many things about my friend Mario Kluser that I admire and find inspiring, I think it will be very helpful to take the approach of a list post.
I have already spoken extensively of Mario in this blog. I interviewed him with reference to his two novels (and there are podcasts to go with his interviews), and I have linked to his blog on various occasions. I have never talked in depth about our friendship or about our professional relationship, nor have I really spoken much about his blog.
His blog is called Mario LIVE! and the tag line is “The People Blog.” No tag line has ever been more apt. For those who may not be familiar with our history, as it is a good story, here’s a little background. Mario and I met on Twitter in November of 2007. I was new to Twitter and Mario was one of my first two friends. Both he and the other friend, an Italian, went on to become “real life” friends, and visited me in New York in 2008. Both will be friends for life. What induced me to ask Mario to be my friend was his tone. I could sense kindness, warmth, friendliness and a sense of humor in his tweets (amazing what 140 little characters will reveal about a person), and I was right. He is a kindred spirit, and as they are hard to find, it’s a good idea to befriend one when you spot one.


After a short while we began to correspond via email, and we soon discovered that we were in similar professional situations, both looking for work in our chosen fields and not finding it in the current economic climate, and both in the process of deciding to make our own fortunes so as not to have to live with the pain and suffering of depending on an employer. We would both rather depend on the world at large.

He was already experienced in internet marketing, with AdWords, AdSense, landing pages, squeeze pages, etc., but knew very little about blogging, having always been under the impression that it was for whiny teenagers who just wanted to put their “diaries” online, and things of that nature. I, on the other hand, had already had a very intense blogging experience and was in the process of launching what are my two current blogs, turtle^haus and Life+Web. I told him a little about what I thought blogging was and could be, and he was convinced. Thus, Mario LIVE! was born. Mario and I discovered that we have complementary skills in business and complementary work experiences, and decided to join forces on special projects. Now, in addition to our blogs, we are helping a few corporate clients increase their online visibility and bring more clients through the virtual doors of their companies.

So, without further ado, here are 6 of the many reasons why Mario of Mario LIVE! inspires me:

1. He is a DOER and not a TALKER. I told him I was launching a blog and he was still quite skeptical. Within two short weeks, his blog was up and running, with a dozen posts, active comments, and so on, while mine was still heavily in the “design” phase and only had two or three posts. He has now well surpassed 100 posts in 6 months, and has now started a lovely newsletter;
2. He is absolutely AUTHENTIC (an overused buzz word in the world of blogging) in a way that is difficult to find;
3. He is not afraid to EXPRESS HIS OPINION and has no concern for what others might think or whether they may disagree with him. Don’t misunderstand me, he is not defiant and “in-your-face.” Quite the contrary. He is willing to bare his soul and share his innermost thoughts and feelings with the world, and does not let fads, trends, political correctness or the media influence his voice;
4. He is GUILELESS, CANDID, and POSITIVE. This does not mean that he never has negative feelings or that he is immune from being a little depressed or overwhelmed at times, but he always bounces back, and has a SOLUTION-ORIENTED attitude. Rather than dwelling on what is going wrong, he very quickly focuses on HOW CAN WE FIX THE PROBLEM AND MOVE ON.
5. His sense of WONDER is still very much alive. This is perhaps his most unique characteristic and one I find very winning. In fact, I think it is what sets him apart from other bloggers and will ultimately make his success online. It is a CHILDLIKE (not to be confused with childish) quality that allows us, his readers, to see his eyes widen in the face of extraordinary events or personal actions, and our eyes widen with his.
6. He KNOWS WHO HE IS as a person and as a blogger.

As with most bloggers, Mario did not immediately know what his blog was going to be about, what his MISSION was. At first he had a ton of different categories. He still has several categories, but nowadays they are much more coherent and the parts meld nicely into a recognizable and very pleasing whole.

His blog is tagged as “the people blog” because Mario finds inspiration in the actions of others. And these others don’t have to be celebrities. Anyone is worthy of a blog post, even a conversation overheard at the bus stop can inspire a story. But what he has to say is always interesting. Human interest, I would say, is the main focus of his posts. His stories are always heartfelt and entertaining, and I am always sucked in right from the opening sentence.

An overview of the things that interest him:

• The human mind
• Hypnosis
• Depression and overcoming it
• Friendship
• Overcoming life’s obstacles
• Personal finances
• Curious, fun, amazing things he finds surfing the web
• Music
• Photography
• Videography
• Films – he writes regular film reviews
• Books – as a writer he also reads a lot, and writes book reviews
• Animals – he has a pet rabbit, some hamsters (or is it gerbils?) and a cat. His girlfriend has a dog. They are sometimes featured
• Twitter
• Social media
• Motivation
• Television shows (he wants to be a corpse on one of the CSI shows)
• Fulfilling his dreams – this is another reason I should have mentioned. He is not afraid of pursuing his dreams, and he puts them right out there in the universe. I have no doubt that he will achieve most if not all of them
• New York and Brooklyn (where I live, now a second home to him)
• People and their stories.

When I get discouraged or a little “blocked” with my blogging or our online ventures, he always knows what to say to encourage me and get me going again. We motivate and encourage each other, we are each other’s biggest fans. At the end of his visit with me in November, on the day he was leaving, he said, “From now on, if they ask me whether I have any siblings, I will say yes, two: a brother in Germany and a sister in New York.” That’s the kind of person he is.

I am proud to be his friend and adopted sister, and so very happy to have found him. Thanks, Mario!

Related posts:

1. Renewed Mission – Part 2 and day 1-31DBBB I define the second half of my mission for this...
2. Author Interview: Mario Kluser, part I In the first of three segments, Mario Kluser tells us...
3. Author Interview: Mario Kluser – part III In the final segment of our 3-part interview, Mario tells...

So my friend Cristina and I took a break for brunch and then got right back to chatting about the pros and cons of having an Amazon Kindle. The more we talked, the more intrigued I was by the implications of the Kindle for publishing, authors, and readers. So, without further ado, here is the rest of my fascinating interview with Cristina.

Ilaria: So, what are some of the other benefits of owning a Kindle that come to mind?


Cristina: Well, in addition to the benefit of being able to read fiction again, I have noticed something else in my behavior. I read a lot of non-fiction, both for personal interest and for professional reasons, but there are many books that, while I find them interesting and intriguing, I don’t necessarily want to own in my bookcase forever. And I don’t feel like spending $24.99 for them, either. Let’s take Outliers, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. I was curious about it and had enjoyed his previous books, but I didn’t necessarily want to spend the money. Besides, I just don’t have room to keep every book I buy on my shelves, my apartment is too small. So, for $9.99 I downloaded it to my Kindle and now I’m reading it on the train and at other odd moments here and there.

In my other house in North Carolina my partner and I have two walls full of books, I just can’t afford to keep buying them. What is ever going to happen to all these books. So I also give lots of books away using BookCrossing. Kindle helps me be more efficient in my consumption of books.

Then there is another great advantage that I just thought of. The Kindle allows you to download the first chapter of any book for free as a sample. Two goals are achieved simultaneously this way: 1) If you are curious about a book, you can find out right away if it’s for you or not, and 2) instant gratification. I am curious and also anxious (have I mentioned that I’m a little neurotic?). If I find something I like, I have to have it right away. Before I could order a book on Amazon, but then I’d have to wait for it to be delivered. Now I can download the whole thing to my Kindle in 60 seconds. I love this feature. When I find something that interests me, I have a great sense of urgency, and the Kindle allows me to satisfy this urge.

Ilaria: How about other newspapers besides the Times?

Cristina: We Italians are woefully behind, in this respect. I would love to be able to read Il Manifesto. I would gladly pay for the subscription, because it has always been one of the ways I “do my part.” But there are no Italian newspapers on the Kindle yet. There are several English, French and German papers, but no Italian ones. We need to catch up.

Ilaria: What about Italian books?

Cristina: No, nothing, that I know of. When my sister visits from Italy, she brings me a few books, or I can order them from Internet Book Shop, but the shipping costs are prohibitive. The funny thing is that I haven’t stopped buying books. I still buy one or two books a week, and I get some for free as a faculty member, but perhaps I am digressing here.

Ilaria: Not at all. This reinforces my point that the Kindle is not detrimental to the publishing industry. It doesn’t stop people from buying books. On the contrary. A book you might be interested in but not enough to pay hardcover money for becomes affordable on the Kindle, so you do buy it. And books are like cherries, you can never have just one — you buy one on the Kindle and you have more money to buy the one you really do want to have on your shelf, so you buy that one too. It makes for abundant reading.

Cristina: And then there is another thing. Since I don’t have a lot of time for fiction, I have a lot of novels that I have started but not finished. The Kindle is very lightweight [editor's note: 10.2 ounces], so I don’t have to choose which of the novels I’m in the middle of reading to take on the train. I just pick up the Kindle and then decide what to read once I’m in the subway.

Ilaria: This definitely resonates with me. I have been late to appointments before because I spend five minutes staring at the pile of books on my bedside table and agonizing over which one to bring. I often end up with two or three, and a heavy bag.

Cristina: Between books, folders and papers, my bag is huge and extremely heavy already. Before the Kindle I would most of the time give up on reading for pleasure while commuting because I just couldn’t bear to add one more weight to my bag. And there’s another thing. I commute during rush hour, naturally, so half the time at least I don’t have a seat. The Kindle allows me to read with one hand, so I can read standing up. Before I would resent my book because I would have to leave it in my bag, it would be weighing me down, and I wouldn’t even be able to read it. Those days are over. Also, it has this new technology, iInk, which makes it more like a book. The Kindle is not backlit like a computer screen, so it requires an external light source, just like a regular book. This means that it does not tire the eyes the way the screen does. It’s just like reading a book. And the Kindle 2 is going to be much better. I have already got one on reserve at Amazon.

Ilaria: So my friend who was afraid that the Kindle would kill book sales was wrong?

Cristina: Absolutely. In the old days, for instance, when the first big bookstore chains started opening up all over the place, we used to say that “another bookstore will kill the libraries.” That is not at all true. They feed each other.

Ilaria: The more we read, the more we read. The more channels we have through which to read, the more we read.

Cristina: And it can be seamless, from one place to another, one medium to another. You end up reading constantly.

Ilaria: Thank you so much, Cristina, for this lovely conversation. The Kindle 2 is going straight to the top of my wish list!

So, in summary, here are the advantages of owning a Kindle:

• Being able to move from one environment to another without having to stop reading;
• Being able to read things you normally would not have time for, like fiction and newspapers;
• Being able to download a sample chapter for free, which allows you to find many more books to read;
• The instant gratification of downloading an entire book in 60 seconds;
• Portability and reduced weight in your bag;
• Being able to carry many books with you at one time with no added weight, all inside the Kindle;
• Being able to buy books you ordinarily would not want to spend the money on, because they are less expensive [editor's note: there are some books to which this does not apply, but most bestsellers are $9.99];
• An esthetically pleasing reading experience with no eye strain due to backlit screen, since the Kindle relies on external light in the same way that books do;
• Being able to read standing up, even when there are no seats on the train, with one hand;

Since this conversation with Cristina I have been thinking quite a lot about the Kindle and how it can help the publishing industry and authors as well, and something new occurred to me. One of my goals with this blog is to help new authors become published, and another is to extend the “shelf life” of previously published books. In future posts I am going to explore both of these possibilities. I know that authors who self-publish can get their books published on Kindle, or at least that is what I have heard, so I am going to investigate this avenue. But I also want to find out whether books that are out of print might get a second life on Kindle, without having to be reissued on paper. Then, if interest grows, there can also be another print run. The possibilities are endless! Stay tuned, because we have not heard the last of the Kindle, by a long shot.

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Welcome to t^h’s first review! I have been interested in the Kindle ever since the first version came on the market, but the Kindle 2 has really gotten my attention because it’s so much more attractive esthetically, and seems to have been much improved as far as functionality goes, as well. But my fascination is not limited to the looks and functionality of this object. I am interested in the implications in terms of our relationship with reading and with books. Let me first mention a few of the things that are being said about the Kindle, give you my position on the matters, and then move on to an interview I had with my friend Cristina.

• I have a dear friend whose life partner is a well known and accomplished writer, editor and teacher. He was in the process of publishing his latest novel when the first Kindle was released. I remember my friend saying to me “We’re very worried about this Kindle thing and what it will mean for the book and its sales.”
• The text-to-speech function has been criticized for a number of reasons: Amazon does not pay audio rights to authors, because it is a computer voice and not the voice of a professional actor — no one has been paid to create an audio version of the work, and Amazon does not make extra money (but there is an added incentive for people to buy the books, knowing of this added bonus/value). On the side of the readers, of course, it is criticized for the same reason from the opposite perspective: the voice is a computer-generated strange voice with no inflections and it’s a bit creepy. On the plus side, it’s a boon to blind readers, who, however, cannot operate it by themselves.

Then there is the whole “book as object” question.

Where I Stand

• Anything that is used for reading HELPS reading. I don’t understand why anyone would be afraid of a gadget that is made for readers, to help people read in circumstances where reading a physical book might be inconvenient, or when carrying many books may be difficult. “We read too little these days,” “no one reads anymore,” etc. This is all we hear, and yet we complain that the Kindle might spell the end of reading as we know it (or knew it). Bulls**t! The more we read, the more we read. So if the Kindle means that one person who would not have read a book is now reading, long live the Kindle!
• I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of audio rights because any text can be read by a computer-generated voice these days, and no one pays rights to read to their kids at night (I still read to my teenagers from time to time). I would say that I don’t feel strongly about this and I would tend to side with Amazon. As for the fact that books are cheaper on the Kindle than in book form, I say that a percentage of something is a lot more than a percentage of nothing. If the Kindle means that more books are sold, albeit at a lower price, long live the Kindle!
• I must come clean about myself. My name is Ilaria and I am a book addict. Here’s the thing. I think most people who know me would agree with this description of me: aside from Zen monks, I am the least consumeristic person I know. I have no attachment to objects. I could walk away from every single thing I own. I could move to another country, another planet, with the clothes on my back and never look back. I would not miss a single thing. Not even my beloved house. The only things that I accumulate are books. They are the only thing I like to shop for. I will stand in Barnes & Noble for hours, that is my idea of fun, and browse and browse. I pick books up, I put them down, I run my palm over the cover, my fingers over the page. Sometimes I smell them. I do not lick them (that would not be nice). I own a lot of them. And yet, I could walk away from them too. In fact, I have walked away from them. When I moved to New York this last time, after 18 straight years in Florence, I brought with me my two children, four duffel bags of clothing (mostly theirs), and one of my two guitars. For 11 years my books remained in boxes in the basement of my house in Italy. Only last year, when my new home was renovated and my Italian house sold, did I finally ship the boxes over here. And most of them I have not opened yet. I have collected almost as many books again as I had, and I’m sure there are quite a few doubles (have to have Dickens, have to have Homer, the Russians, the French, etc.) But I am of the old world and of the new. As much as I love books, I also love the computer, the web, the age of information, and I am deeply fascinated by how new tools and media change the way we absorb information, art, literature, stories.

And now let us move on to my interview with my friend Cristina. Cristina was the ideal candidate for this interview. She has spent her life among books, cherishes them as objects, has collected and preserved them. At the same time she is also a modern information professional, highly computer-literate, a connoisseur and lover of gadgets. She has a Mac, a PC, an iPhone… you get the picture. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Cristina is originally from Italy, and was for many years a librarian. Over the years she developed special experience in the evaluation of private libraries and book collections. She herself has a collection of first editions, which she left in Italy. Then she came to the United States, and got a PhD in Information Science. So you see, she lives on both sides of the cultural divide, if we can call it that, between Book Land and Gadget Land. And now, for the interview itself. Ilaria: Over the time that I have known you, the past year or so, I noticed that you mentioned your Kindle on various occasions, at different times during the day, and this made me curious, as I knew you to be a great lover of books. You kindly agreed to this interview, and here we are. What do you think are the pros of owning a Kindle, and how did you come to acquire one? Cristina: My first encounter with the Kindle was almost by chance. My boss had purchased a few of them to conduct experiments where I teach, and they were languishing on the shelves. So after a while my colleagues and I decided to start using them, and I brought one home with me. What the Kindle has done for me is make reading a seamless experience from one medium to the next, from one moment of my day to the next. I’ll give you an example. I read the New York Times in the morning on my computer. I also subscribe to the hard copy on the weekend, because I still enjoy clipping. But when I am ready to leave the house, I take my Kindle with me and can continue reading the Times on the subway. The funny thing is that it’s not pleasant to read the paper on the Kindle. It’s compressed, there are no or few images, and it doesn’t look very good. But I can scan the article titles and when I find one I like I can read the whole thing. I end up reading entire articles that I almost certainly would not have the time to read if I weren’t on the subway. The other thing that the Kindle has done for me, and this is truly an added value, is that I use the Kindle to read fiction. I had stopped reading fiction in my life. I am in a phase in which I just don’t have the time to read fiction. This phase may end in about five years, but for now… And I missed it terribly. Cultural consumption was the biggest luxury in my life. As a librarian, having the good fortune of working in the cultural world, I was on top of things for many years. I had lost this, and the Kindle has allowed this luxury back into my life. Furthermore, I can have many novels at once on the Kindle. I don’t read sequentially. I read several things at the same time, so it’s very convenient. Ilaria: So, to summarize, so far the benefits of the Kindle are:

• Being able to move seamlessly from one environment to the next while continuing to read, from paper, to the computer, to the Kindle on the go;

• Being able to read things that you normally would not read (for lack of time) while commuting, such as newspapers and fiction.

I’m sure there are many other things you want to tell me about. Let’s take a break and continue the interview after coffee and croissants.

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I should perhaps have titled this post “Introducing our Good Reviews.” It’s not that I don’t believe in bad reviews. If there is something (a book, a movie) that offends me particularly (The Da Vinci Code, anyone? — did I say that out loud?) then I might write a bad or scathing review.
But the purpose of my reviews is to bring things I like and love to the attention of my readers and the world, to share my enjoyment of books, design, interiors, objects that aid in the enjoyment of life, and movies with as many people as possible. I feel it is our duty as members of the human community to remember and remind ourselves and others that art is important, beauty is important and living in a beautiful, comfortable environment is important.
Hence, the Reviews page.
That’s all I’m going to say in this brief introductory post, because I’m anxious to move on to the next post, the first real review. See you there, my friends!

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