E-Books Perfect for Instant Repair of Screwups

If for no other reason, e-books are the perfect vehicle for immediately correcting errors in published books. And if the errors are serious enough to damage a person's reputation or otherwise incur potential legal liability, a prompt correction and withdrawal of the offending text demonstrate the sincere determination of the those who messed up to set the record straight without delay.

Such might be the recourse of Charles Pellegrino and his publisher Henry Holt in expunging material in his otherwise highly acclaimed account of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, The Last Train From Hiroshima.

According to William J. Broad in the New York Times, a section of the book cites recollections of someone who says he flew in an observation plane accompanying the bomber that released the a-bomb, the Enola Gay. But the man, Joseph Fuoco, "never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer," says Corliss’s family. "They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor," writes Broad.

The author of the book "now concedes that he was probably duped" and plans to "rewrite sections of the book for paperback and foreign editions."

If normal production timelines apply, that means that the paperback might not come out for a year after hardcover publication, or six or nine months if Holt accelerates release of the reprint. Foreign editions? Foreign publishers need to translate the book first, so don't expect a correct edition to appear overseas for many months as well.

If there was ever a case for e-books, this is it. Pellegrino and his publisher could remove the controversial passages for an e-print and write an apology that might remove not just the insult of the offending passages but also the injury of making the Corliss's family wait, brood - and, perhaps, call a lawyer. As of this writing, however, there is no e-book edition. It undoubtedly has been "windowed", the term used by publishers to describe the holding back of an e-book edition until the hardcover has had its run. Though controversial (see Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Prints), windowing is sound strategy for many books and might have been fine for Last Train too had it not been for this alleged error, which if true is embarrassing at the very least but potentially damaging as well.

Holt should consider crash-releasing Last Train in e-book.

Here's the Times article.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Phone Booth Library

We've projected a near-future in which kiosks located in supermarkets, coffee shops or public libraries will dispense print on demand books. Customers will be able to choose among hundreds of thousands of titles and watch their book being born while they have a cup of coffee or finish their shopping. Some clever Brits, however, have created a lower-tech kiosk - out of a phone booth, turning a village's double loss - its public phone service and its mobile library - into a wonderful amenity.

The council of a small parish called Westbury-sub-Mendip took one of those familiar red boxes off the phone company's hands for a token £1. Then the townspeople stocked the booth with books, CDs and DVDs. "Users simply stock it with a book they have read, swapping it for one they have not," BBC explains. "'It's really taken off,'" said one of the town's councillors. '"This facility has turned a piece of street furniture into a community service in constant use.'"

BT Group, Britain's leading landline telecommunications provider, subsequently received almost 800 applications for parishes to "adopt a kiosk", and about half of the applications have been fulfilled to date.

Obviously, in an age of cell phones, phone booths worldwide are just occupying real estate. And so are a lot of books, CDs and DVDs. Converting phone boxes to microlibraries solves both problems at a stroke. The only one it creates is long, long queues. C'mon, mate, make yer bloody selection!

Richard Curtis

Beast With Two Backs: Tina Figures Out How To Monetize E-Content: It's Called Paper

We knew print was good for something, and Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and now publisher of The Daily Beast, figured out what that is: it's called making money.

Her website has launched a joint venture with mainstream publisher/distributor Perseus Books Group to spin paperback books off the online versions. The idea is to maximize the benefits of both formats: e-books to move quickly on fast-breaking stories, p-books to get them into the hands of those who prefer to hold a paper volume in their hands.

Creating the content first as e-books will also accelerate release of the paperbacks, cutting out a number of editorial and production steps that slow down traditional book-making procedures. Mokoto Rich, writing in the New York Times, says that "On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition." The print edition would be ready to go as soon as feasible.

Tina Brown understands that speed is the name of the game: “There is a real window of interest when people want to know something, and that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.” Read details in Daily Beast Seeks to Publish Faster, and for some insights into the way that publishers customarily handle fast-breaking stories, check out How's About a Quickie?

RC

How Green Was My E-Book?

Book lovers and tree huggers don't necessarily mix. The carbon footprint created by the average printed book is sasquatchian in size compared to that made by an electronic book reader - about 23 to 1, according to a recent study. "E-readers could have a major impact on improving the sustainability and environmental impact on the publishing industry, one of the world’s most polluting sectors,” states Cleantech, issuer of the 2008 study reported in the New York Times. “In 2008, the U.S. book and newspaper industries combined resulted in the harvesting of 125 million trees, not to mention wastewater that was produced or its massive carbon footprint.”

And let's not forget the fossil fuel required to ship books from printer to warehouse to bookstore - and, for somewhere between a quarter and a third of them (the current return rate for the book industry), shipping returned stock back to warehouse and thence to pulpers or incinerators.

Does that mean e-readers are emerald green? Environmental groups beg to differ. "Consumer electronics, after all, are notorious for containing a variety of toxic materials among their circuitry," say the Times's Joe Hutso. Speaking out forthrightly about the problem is Greenpeace. In a recent website posting it raised the alarm that there has been "a dangerous explosion in electronic scrap (e-waste) containing toxic chemicals and heavy metals that cannot be disposed of or recycled safely." In countries where e-junk is dumped, "workers at scrap yards, some of whom are children, are exposed to a cocktail of toxic chemicals and poisons."

The rate at which these mountains of obsolete electronic products are growing will reach crisis proportions unless electronics corporations that profit from making and selling these devices face up to their responsibilities. It is possible to make clean, durable products that can be upgraded, recycled, or disposed of safely and don't end up as hazardous waste in someone's backyard.

Amazon, Sony and other manufacturers are tight-lipped about the components of their reading devices that might be contributing to this nasty stew. But Greenpeace's assessment reminds us that the damage done by discarded e-readers could offset the good they do during their useful life. For more on that subject, read The E-Waste Problem.

Which reminds us: science fiction author M. M. Buckner brings e-waste terrifyingly to life in a brilliant environmental thriller, Watermind. A young scientist discovers that castoff electronic chips and computers have not only begun to communicate with one another in pulses, but to combine with algae and other biota to form an intelligent entity. And it's growing very large very fast. Check it out.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Wait! Come In Off That Ledge! Dave Eggers' Hotline for Suicidal Publishers

The New Yorker's "Book Bench" feature reports a Tribeca Rooftop celebration to honor author and McSweeney's founder Dave Eggers, whose nonprofit 826 National is devoted to turning children on to writing and assisting them to develop writing skills.

Eggers gave an impassioned and inspiring speech that will send chills down the spine of any who despairs that the printed word is finished. But if you're still ready to climb out the window, he offers an email hotline to talk you back inside, where you can inhale the intoxicating aroma of ink on paper, listen to the crinkling of newsprint, and rejoice to the crack of a book's spine the first time it's opened. Here's an excerpt, including the special email address:

Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.

RC

Bloggers Breathe Life into Dead Trees

Print is print and digital is digital and never the twain shall meet, right? Not so fast. Some recent news items would seem to refute those blogger Cassandras predicting the doom of printed books. In fact, it's the bloggers themselves who've lined up book deals. Not e-book deals -- book-book deals, dead tree deals. And their crossover success stories point the way to a convergence of old and new paradigms and confirm something that many media observers have been thinking: the only thing wrong with printed books is the way they're distributed.

New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham tells us about a Los Angeles screenwriter named Duncan Birmingham, a comedy screenwriter in Los Angeles who "got one too many holiday cards featuring miserable-looking pets wearing fake reindeer antlers." Realizing that the photos were great material for a blog, he launched Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves and invited viewers to send in photos. "Within days," Wortham writes, "visitors were supplying him with snapshots of bulldogs in bunny costumes and cats wearing wigs. The blogosphere noticed — and so did the publishing world. Within a week, he was contacted by editors and literary agents. By the second month, he said, he had sold a book based on the photos to Three Rivers Press, an imprint at Crown Publishing Group, for 'enough money to buy a Lincoln Town Car' — with change left over."

If viewers can access blogs free of charge, why would they then plunk down $10.00 or more to buy the hard-copy version of the same material? Clearly, it's because they instinctively understand the difference between the evanescence of digital pleasures and the permanence of tangible ones. A few virally distributed pages of images are wonderfully diverting, but after a minute or two we click off and abandon them. The images vanish and we turn back to the solemnities of life and work.

Not so if those images are in books. We examine books, we handle and caress them, we invest our time and attention in them, we own them, we lend them but (with the expectation of getting them back), we put them on shelves where they define us, become projections of our identities. A visitor sees it and exclaims "Oh, I loved that!" An experience shared, and shared in a way that simply cannot register on a screen.

Whence this kinship between blogs and books? Well, the audience for blogs often numbers in the millions. Book publishers understand that a certain percentage of that audience wants to capture and possess the gratification longer than a few moments. That percentage is large enough to support print publication of thousands of copies. Wortham reports that I Can Has Cheezburger?, a collection of funny cat photos drawn from an immensely popular blog and published by Penguin imprint Gotham Books, "sold more than 100,000 copies and hovered on The New York Times best-seller list for 13 weeks."

Noam Cohen, also a Times journalist, mentions another print book, this one a collection of "xkcd", a popular online comic strip by NASA physicist Randall Munroe featuring humor about math, science and technology. Like I Can Has Cheezburger?, Munroe's collection is headed for print, too, but the approach is radically different, as you will infer from the name of the publisher: breadpig. “It doesn’t need to be in bookstores,” Munroe is quoted as saying.

"Are we seeing an all-too-rare example of the triumph of print books over digital content?" asks the Times's Cohen. "In fact," he answers, "the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers."

Both Cheezburger and xkcd exemplify a much-overlooked reason that people buy books: they make great souvenirs. I remember wondering, as I watched huge numbers of customers waiting patiently in line for Bill Clinton to autograph his 957 page memoir - how many of these people are going to read that book? I concluded that most of them were not going to. They were not buying a book to read. They were buying a souvenir of Bill Clinton ("He actually shook my hand and asked me how I spell my name!") And that's okay. There are enough books bought to be read (or intended to be read), so that we can forgive those who buy books merely to remind us of a happy experience.

Printed books will remain a staple of human culture. What must change is the is the stupid and scandalously wasteful way that they are are distributed. Print on demand points the way to solving that problem. We'll have a lot more to say about that in due time.

Richard Curtis

Penetrating the Mysteries of E-Book Pricing. Kind of.

The e-book industry was officially launched at a government-sponsored conference in 1998. Starry-eyed dreamers, technical pioneers, entrepreneurs, geeks and curious publishers convened with the evangelical fervor of a tent meeting. Bliss it was in that dawn to be in the e-book business, and the wave of zeal generated predictions of the end of printed books.

Alas, some hard realities set in soon afterward. Copyright issues, technical problems, muddled business models and a lack of standards hindered momentum for almost ten years. Though the industry grew at a steady double-digit rate in spite of these problems and has at last broken out, it took a decade to mature, and that's a decade longer than most of us anticipated.

One of the problems that compromised progress was e-book pricing. No one really knew how much to charge to download a book. And the fact is, we're still not sure. If you survey prices on various publisher and etail sites you will readily see that list prices are all over the place. A quick foray onto the website of Fictionwise, the world's foremost book etailer, shows Janet Evanovich's The Grand Finale e-book listing at $14.99 (discounted by Fictionwise to $12.74 for its Club members). Temptation and Surrender by Stephanie Laurens sells for $25.99 ($22.09 Club price). The Demon's Librarian, a paranormal romance by Lilith Saintcrow, sells for $5.95 and $5.06 respectively.

As in every other business enterprise there are two schools of pricing merchandise. One is to set a target profit and peg the price to meet that target. The other is to gain an advantage over competitors by undercutting them, reducing profit to the thinnest possible margin. That easily explains the range of list prices from roughly $3.00 to $10.00. It doesn't however account for e-books listing for $20.00 or more. We'll examine that in a moment.

In an attempt to bring discipline to e-book pricing and do for books what Apple did for music (at least, for whole albums) via the iPod, Amazon has strongly prescribed a $9.99 cap for books carried on the Kindle. But an analysis of list prices of Kindle titles, described in a blog headlined "Paid Is a Lot More Complicated than You Think--So Is the Truth"*, reveals the following:

"Using two different methods for checking Kindle price data in Amazon's system, we find that roughly 30 percent of the 240,000 or so Kindle titles sell for more than $9.99 (and well over 20 percent sell for more than $20).

Yes, approximately 33,000 titles sell for around the magic $9.99--but about 13,000 titles sell for between $10 and $20. Here's is one slice of approximate numbers for the four most popular price bands:

1. $20.01 and up: 55,750
2. $10.00 and $9.01: 33,000
3. $4.00 and $3.01: 25,500
4. $8.00 and $7.01: 20,750"

The writer goes on to point out that “There are more than 7,000 free books, and another 28,000 or so titles that sell for $2 or less.” He or she goes on to say,

"Now take a look just at their hourly bestseller list, as we have done both yesterday and today. As of one slice this morning, two of the top three Kindle books (and 18 of the top 100) are free.

But the No. 4 title sells for more than the magic $9.99--Breaking Dawn, by Stephenie Meyer, at $11.38. (The print version, at No. 2 on Amazon's overall list, sells at discount for $12.64.) The Sony eBookstore sells it for $11.99 and the iPhone app version sells for $19.99.

In all, 16 titles on the top 100 are selling for more than $9.99. Some of those are pre-orders of books by the likes of Jodi Picoult, selling now at $15.37 even though presumably those books would sell for less once they are available and hit the NYT list."

A $15.00 or $20.00+ price for an e-book seems counterintuitive, but don't worry, your intuition is quite sound. We know (and appreciate) that there are diehard fans so desperate to read a new book by their favorite author that they're ready to shell out as much for a download as they would pay for the hardcover in a bookstore or on amazon.com, maybe even more. But it's safe to say that most readers and fans feel that, confronted with a choice of paying $25.00 for either an e-book or a hard copy of the same book, they will elect the version that they can put on their bookshelf when they're finished with it.

What's behind that high list price for so many e-books has to do with a stubborn fact of book publishing life. The business model of traditional publishers like Random House, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, is built around printed books. The profit to be made on a successful “book-book’ is at this time far greater than that made on an e-book. Furthermore, publishers employ sales representatives who earn commissions on sales of printed books; they do not earn anything on e-book sales.

It stands to reason, then, that from the viewpoint of a publisher and its sales reps, a low e-book price will cannibalize the profit made on sale of the higher priced print edition, and deprive the sales reps of their commissions. To bring the e-book profit up to parity with that of the print book, publishers must bring the e-book list price up to parity with that of the print book as well. That explains why Temptation and Surrender, the Stephanie Laurens novel selling in e-book for 25.99, is being sold for the very same price in hardcover on amazon.com. When a hardcover edition goes out of print and a cheaper paperback is issued, the publisher will in all likelihood lower the e-book price to maintain that same parity. (And there are mystifying anomalies. The Grand Finale, the Evanovich novel mentioned above that sells for $14.99 in e-book format, can be purchased in mass market paperback for $7.99!)

If your intuition tells you that this brick and mortar mentality is a significant reason why it’s taken so long for the e-book business to prosper – well, again, you’re absolutely correct. Whether the problem can be remedied is hard to say. Traditional publishers are traditional for a good reason. Newer entries into the e-book publishing field are not hampered by the same considerations as the Simon & Schusters of the world, and price their wares without concern about cannibalizing themselves or keeping commissioned sales representatives happy. On the other hand, traditional publishers enjoy distribution advantages that are the envy of every e-book startup.

So – you pays yer money and you takes yer choice.

Our anonymous blogger also raises a cogent point about Kindle pricing: though the price of an e-book purchased on the device may be discounted, you have to build in the price of the Kindle itself in order to ascertain the true cost of the downloaded book:

Logically speaking, the overall save-money-by-buying-a-Kindle argument is also specious for most consumers; as others have pointed out, if you save an average of $7.50 a book--supposed Kindle price of a new hardcover versus discounted Amazon print price--you need to buy at least 50 books or so before recovering the purchase price of the device. Yet it's clearly one factor in the purchase decision by many Kindle owners.

Which brings us back to the “Gillette Razor” solution we’ve championed in these pages. The inventor of the modern razor shrewdly observed that the most effective strategy to boost his product was to give away the razor and sell the blades. Giving away the e-reader and selling the books might be just the rocket boost the e-book industry needs to send it into the stratosphere.

Richard Curtis

*(Apologies to the unnamed author of this survey, which was emailed to me by a friend without a link to the source. In a rare failure of Google search capabilities I was unable to ascertain the blog's author. If the author happens to read this, sir or madame, please identify yourself so that I can accord you well deserved recognition!)

13,000 Reasons to Save Printed Books

You have three days to visit the stunning collection of Hebrew books on display at Sotheby's on East 72nd Street and York Avenue in New York City. That you reside in San Francisco, Bogota, St. Petersburg or Beijing is no excuse for missing the Valmadonna Trust's library, nor can you beg off because you can't read Hebrew. The reason you must make this pilgrimage is to rededicate yourself to the most precious of all of civilization's artifacts, the printed book.

Thirteen thousand of them are displayed in a 2400 square-foot space, representing a bibliophile's passion to assemble - literally from every corner of the globe including Africa - the world's finest private library of Hebrew books. Some of the volumes were written three centuries before Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, and many were produced within a generation of that event. Taken altogether, they bespeak the culture, scholarship and religious devotion of the "People of the Book" that thrived in such disparate locations as Cochin, Mantua, Fez, Calcutta and Baghdad.

Though the Trust's collector, Jack V. Lunzer, could have maximized the library's value by auctioning off the individual volumes, he seeks a single buyer that will treat the collection as lovingly as he. “Every one of these books I have held in my hands,” he told the New York Times's Edward Rothstein. “They’re my friends.” When Rothstein asked Lunzer if he will miss them, he replied, "I’ll be happy if they are well kept and respected."

A prayer found in one of the volumes reminds us of all that is sacrosanct about books: “Blessed be He... Who has magnified His grace with a great invention, one that is useful for all inhabitants of the world, there is none beside it, and nothing can equal it among all wisdoms and inventions since God created man on the earth: The Printing Press.”

RC

Smitten with Screens

In Watching Books, an Authors Guild Bulletin article published last summer, I wrote

Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium.

As I'm not a social scientist, these observations were not supported by hard research or statistics. Thanks to Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University writing in the New York Times, they are now powerfully reinforced by metrics supplied by such solid data gathering organizations as Nielsen and ComScore.

Surprisingly, Stross focuses not so much on the Internet as on television. You'd think that TV, like print media, would be losing ground to YouTube and other Web distractions (nearly 100 million viewers watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos in December alone!). In fact, watching television in the third quarter of 2008 increased by five hours a month compared to the same period in 2007. "Tellingly," says Stross, "YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership - it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen."

In short, whether it's YouTube or BoobTube, "A tipping point has been passed in the competition between print and screen that has been under way since the beginning of broadcast TV and now continues with video and other media."

Stross's conclusion: "People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention."

In Watching Books, I wrote,

The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand. Books are vehicles for ideas; one can set a book down and ruminate and process. Computer monitors, television sets, and e-book screens discourage reflection. Thinkers simply live in a different time zone from watchers.

Stross echoes my own disheartening comments: "We used to speak of reading a book as an immersive experience, too, but 'immersive' now seems shorthand for 'video on a screen.'" What worries me most is that book editors, especially young ones coming into the business, will be affected - or infected - by that same disenchantment with words displayed on screen that is touching everybody else. If editors start putting down their Kindles or Sony eReaders and asking, "Is that all there is?," we will know that the End Days of Book Publishing have begun.

"Smitten with screens" is his phrase for it, and I can't think of a better one. Read Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens in full and - if you can spare a little time between your TV programs and your Internet videos - reflect.

Richard Curtis

Economy Tanks, Print Sales Sink, E-Books Soar

October 2008 e-book sales at $5,200,000 showed an increase of 73% over the same month in 2007, according to the Association of American Publishers and the International Digital Publishing Forum. Calendar Year to Date Revenue is up 57.7%.

The true numbers may be even better than the charts indicate. The IDPF reminds us that:

* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices"
* The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

While e-books were going through the roof, print books were going through the floor. The AAP confirmed that October's sales fell more than 20% and overall sales for the first 10 months of 2008 were down 3.4% compared to the same period last year. Anecdotal reports for November are inexpressibly depressing.

RC

Talk About Print on Demand - This One Is Definitely Not Your Quickie Paperback

You can try calling your bookmaker about placing a bet on La Dotta Mano, but after checking the entries at Pimlico he will tell you there's no such nag. That's because it's not the name of a horse. It's the name of a book.

Oops - wrong bookmaker. The makers of this particular book are skilled Old World craftsmen hand-sculpting a Carrara marble-bound edition of plates of Michaelangelo drawings and sculptures. A copy of the extremely limited edition goes on exhibit today at the New York Public Library, as reported by David Carr in the New York Times. "La Dotta Mano" means “The Wise Hand” and the work is arguably il piu bello libro nel mondo.

It may also be il piu pesante - the world's heaviest. We thought Phaidon's 800 page Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture was heavy at fifteen pounds. La Dotta Mano weighs in at about sixty-two. Around the size of a Siberian Husky, except you don't wear white gloves to shlep a Siberian Husky. You'd better wear them to protect your investment if you browse La Dotta Mano, however - the book sells for 100,000 Euros. Despite the price, some twenty bibliophiles have purchased it. They are undoubtedly reinforcing their bookshelves as we speak.

For more about the genesis of this remarkable book, click here. And check out this video of the cover being produced.

RC

A Portable Reading Device Weighing Fifteen Pounds

Elaine Louie In the New York Times reports on Phaidon's 800 page Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture. It's such a whopper it comes with its own carrying case.

Let me get this straight: you can't can't play a video game on it. You can't call your office with it. You can't upload documents on it. It has no Find and Replace function. You can't watch YouTube on it. You can't text your friends on it.

So, this book -- what, exactly, does it do?

RC