Publishing's Weekend War: 48 Hours That Changed an Industry

The facedown lasted from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon but when it was over the landscape of the book business was permanently altered. On Friday, in reaction to Macmillan's refusal to play the Kindle pricing game by Amazon's rules, the retailer punished Macmillan by extinguishing the publisher's Buy buttons on the Amazon website.

Obviously, Amazon hoped this tactic would bring Macmillan to its knees. Instead it triggered another wave of customer outrage as Kindle owners reacted just as they had in 2009 when Amazon reached into their Kindles and recaptured files without notice or explanation. Though the response of the author community was mixed, many authors were angered at becoming victims of a war they scarcely understood but they too blamed Amazon.

Amazon also underestimated the possibility that other major publishers might support Macmillan. This turned out to be a well founded concern. In the past few weeks all of the big houses except Random House conducted discussions, and in all likelihood negotiations, with Apple to forge a new retailing model that would return control of e-book pricing to the publishers, who had become alarmed that Amazon's insistence on a $9.99 price cap would force them to accept lower wholesale terms. Conditions were ripe for mutiny, and on Friday the test of wills began. By Sunday, as Amazon realized that this was a fight it could not win, it capitulated.

I stated that this might well be a turning point for the book industry - both e-book and print - and I stand by that statement.

I also made a prediction that publishers will no longer be able to hold the line on the current 20-25% royalty rate offered to authors. In fact I guaranteed that they won't be able to, and I stand by that guarantee as well. Authors, and more importantly their powerful literary agents, have viewed the new landscape and found it rich with the potential for profit. They perceive the current royalty level as arbitrary and without basis in the economies of e-book production and distribution. The current rates cannot and will not hold. Just as Amazon blinked in its stare-down with Macmillan, Macmillan and its Big Six companions will also blink in the inevitable confrontation with authors.

You heard it here first.

Richard Curtis

Amazon Blinks in Macmillan Facedown: "We Will Have to Capitulate"

Boy, that didn't take long!

Remember the pinkie bet I made ten minutes ago? I wagered that once publishers' hands were untied from the $9.99 price ceiling on e-books we would see an increase in the royalty percentage paid by publishers to authors on e-book revenue. Well, I'm halfway there to winning it. Amazon's Kindle team has just released a statement accepting Macmillan's position even though disagreeing with it. The statement in part says:

"We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."

The Kindle spokesblog added that "We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan." Perhaps not, but they will now be encouraged to do so by Macmillan's stand. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this may be a defining moment in the history of the e-book industry.

Read the Kindle Team's full statement here.

Richard Curtis

Guaranteed: E-book Royalties Will Rise When Publishers' Hands Untied

I don't know if people still make pinkie bets, but when I was a kid that's what we called friendly wagers with no money at stake - just the satisfaction of being right. And I'm making a pinkie bet right now: If publishers can untangle themselves from the current e-book pricing model that ties their hands with a $9.99 ceiling, author royalties will rise. Any takers? Warning - before you extend your pinkie, you must know that I never bet on anything I'm not absolutely certain about.

Currently the e-book royalty offered to authors by five of the Big Six is 25% of the publisher's net receipts, and Macmillan's is even lower. Indeed, it's the lowest in Big Publishing: 20%. And because it is, Macmillan has attracted less support from the author community for its facedown of Amazon than it would otherwise receive. Here for instance is a line from a Silicon Valley blogger that called Macmillan "evil": "they're trying to force all ebook vendors to adopt the new contract, while forcing authors to accept a below industry average (20% vs. 25%) on ebook royalties."

If, as a result of negative publicity, Amazon relents on its rigid pricing formula, e-book revenues will increase and it will be so much harder - indeed, it will be intensely embarrassing - for publishers to continue parceling out the mingy royalty they now proffer. How much higher will the royalty go? Publishers will kick and scream over every point they have to give up, but in time someone will blink and go to 50%, and the rest of the industry will follow.

You can get the house on that, but I'll accept a friendly pinkie.

Richard Curtis (who is happy to disclose that E-Reads pays 50% royalty to its authors, and has paid it from Day One, 2000).

What Do Amazon and Prada Have in Common?

Today a publisher brought to my attention an oddity on the Amazon.com website. It seems that you cannot purchase more than three copies of many bestsellers. On the evening of January 28, 2010 I viewed the top ten books on the Amazon.com bestseller list. In every case I was prohibited from putting more than three copies into my shopping cart. To make certain this was not a fluke, I sampled the first 50 titles on the list but did not find any exceptions to the three-to-a-customer rule.

You can see this for yourself by clicking on the following links for the top five titles, then going to the "Quantity" drop-down box over the "Add to Shopping Cart" button. (As listings change, future visitors to this posting may not find the same condition.)

The Kind Diet - list price $29.99, Amazon price $16.49
Food Rules - list price $11.00, Amazon price $5.00
Game Change - list price $27.99, Amazon price $14.50
The Help - list price $24.95, Amazon price $9.50
A People's History of the United States - list price $18.95, Amazon price $10.00

It was not until I clicked on #53 - What Would Google Do? (list price $17.91, Amazon price $9.18) - that the Quantity drop-down box indicated I could buy as many as 30 copies. I did not try to buy multiple copies by buying three and three and three etc. - I don't really need one copy of Food Rules let alone six or nine or thirty - but I'm sure a clever shopper could find a way around the rule. It occurred to me however that if I did order three copies ten times, the freight and handling charges would be substantially higher than if I purchased 30 in one shot.

But that's just incidental to the bigger question of why one must buy no more than three copies in one transaction.

I can understand this restrictive practice in the case of a high ticket item, where one $10,000 fur coat or $50,000 diamond ring per customer is enough. Pictured here is a Prada Ostrich Leather Tote listing on Saks Fifth Avenue's website for $5,850.00. On the bag's web page is this notice: DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND, A CUSTOMER MAY ORDER NO MORE THAN THREE UNITS OF THIS ITEM EVERY THIRTY DAYS.

But books are not luxury purchases. Why would Amazon prevent us from buying as many copies of a book as we want? After all, the more we buy the more money Amazon makes, yes?

In listing the books here I included their list price versus their Amazon.com price. I wonder if therein lies a clue to the restrictive policy. Assuming a 50% publisher discount, Amazon's profit margin on these books is slim to none. For instance, on A People's History of the United States (list price $18.95, Amazon price $10.00) Amazon nets about $.50 profit. Food Rules retailing for $11.00? The wholesale price would be $5.50. Amazon is selling it for $5.00, a $.50 loss. For The Help (list price $24.95, Amazon price $9.50), Amazon is losing $3.00 a copy.

Nothing unusual here: retailers in every business work on a slim margin, and loss leaders are a common competitive practice. However...

Suppose I opened a bookshop and stocked it with bestsellers purchased from Amazon. I could buy 100 copies of The Help for $9.50 each and sell them in my store for, say, $15.00. Even folding in the cost of freight from Amazon to my shop, I would make two or three dollars profit and still sell the books far beneath the publisher's list price.

I anticipate your question: why would people buy from my shop when they could get the same book cheaper from Amazon? The answer is, some will but some won't. That's why we have independent bookstores (barely, but we still do have them).

If this reasoning is correct, then the Amazon's three-to-a-customer rule makes sense: Amazon doesn't want resellers stocking their stores with Amazon books. Why not? Because Amazon doesn't make any money on those resales.

Authors will recognize an irony here. When their books are resold via Amazon, Amazon gets a piece of the resale of those used books but the authors get nothing. Could it be that Amazon is worried that it is not benefiting from resales that do not use Amazon as agent?

This theory could be all wet. But if it is, I invite smarter business heads than me to speculate on just what's behind the three-book cap on Amazon's bestseller shopping cart. Meanwhile, publishers and authors may be hurt by the curtailment of large book orders on the Amazon.com retail site.

Richard Curtis

Who Should Rescue Borders? How About a Publisher?

When Galley Cat invited me to make some predictions for the coming decade, I conjectured that sometime in the near future we would see the merger of a major retailer and a major publisher. Here was my reasoning: "A combined publisher/retailer solves many problems for both.The retailer owns the content and doesn't have to pay a premium for it. The publisher does not have to pay a premium to distribute its books. There would be huge efficiencies of manufacturing and distribution."

I've had about a month to think about what I said, and I want to revise it. The efficiencies of a retailer/publisher combine would not merely be huge. They would be decisive. If you don't believe it, ask Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

In 2003 Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling Publishing, described at the time as "one of the top 25 publishers in America and the industry's leading publisher of how-to books." Publishers were gravely concerned, and they had every reason to be. Barnes & Noble's own titles were like a supermarket's house brand, often undercutting the prices of outside purveyors.

And now Amazon is a publisher too. It started with its Encore program aimed at identifying overlooked books and authors. That was followed by the creation of a service called CreateSpace aimed at self-published authors. And now Amazon has begun publishing mainstream authors like Stephen King and recently acquired Stephen (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®) Covey for the Kindle.

The potential for mischief created by such combines was cogently articulated a few years ago by Morris Rosenthal and I urge you to read it. In essence, the savings generated by dissolving the barrier between seller and buyer enable the combine to lower prices below - sometimes far below - those charged by publishers that do not own their own retail branch. To state the case as simply as possible: Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, the two most powerful retailers in the book business, have become competitors of the very publishers they serve.

Though these retailers have no qualms about becoming publishers, publishers on the other hand are terrified of becoming retailers for fear of provoking the wrath of their key accounts - B&N and Amazon! When publishers do dip a timid toe in the water and try to sell their books direct to the consumer, they offer them at full list price, which cannot possibly compete with the deeply discounted prices charged by B&N and Amazon. Yet, if they wanted to, publishers could sell their books directly to the public at 40% discount or higher and thus level the playing field.

The solution? To survive, to remain competitive, publishers may have no choice: they must either become retailers or end up being acquired by them.

At this moment Borders, one of the best and most popular bookstore chains in the business, is in a life and death struggle to remain viable. If a publisher were smart it would rescue Borders and go into the retail business.

Retailers, I said a while ago (see Direct Sales: Publishing’s Last Stand), are intermediaries in a world that is rapidly disintermediating. As big as they are, retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon are vulnerable to market forces bent on eliminating middlemen, and that's precisely why they have begun publishing books. The digital revolution demands a direct relationship between content provider and consumer. Merging a publisher and a bookstore like Borders would bring both struggling enterprises a little closer to that direct relationship, to profitability and to competitiveness.

Do I hear any bids?

Richard Curtis

Google Editions Will Unchain Content from DRM

Sometime in the first half of this year Google will open the doors to its bookstore, called Google Editions. Ian Paul, in PC World, writes: "Unlike Google's biggest competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google's store will not be device-specific - allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on the far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010"

That spells good news for the makers of all those new e-reading gadgets that may be well engineered and loaded with fun features but are hard-up for content. Amazon has its Kindle, but because its system is closed (that's what DRM means) you can't easily get Kindle content on a non-Kindle device. Same goes for B&N and its Nook.

Now you'll be able to download Google's vast (half a million at launch) library on just about any device available. Since most publishers have not given their content exclusively to Amazon or B&N, you'll be able to find and buy it from Google editions and read it on your Que, Skiff, Cool-Er, Flepia, or any other device. Just try not to be embarrassed when someone asks you the name of that e-book reader you're holding in your hand.

The deal Google offers publishers is 63 % of gross sales. This compares favorable with the 50% offered by most e-retailers. But Google is also offering to partner with retailers. If you decide you'd like to open an e-book retail store but don't know how and where to acquire the content, Google will furnish it. Your company would get 55 percent of revenues less a commission for Google.

"Google's e-books would reportedly be indexed and searchable like many books are now through Google's Book Search," says Paul. "Unlike titles offered through e-readers, Google Editions books would not have to be accessed through a dedicated reader or special application.Instead, any device with a Web browser will be able to access a Google Editions book. After you purchase and access your online book for the first time, it will be cached in your browser making the book available when you're offline."

Details in Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format

Richard Curtis

Digital Book World Conference Hopes to Lure Agents into E-Revolution

Don't start the e-book revolution without us. That seems to be the message coming out of the literary agent community as reflected in their response to invitations to a major conference taking place in New York City's Sheraton Hotel and Towers at the end of January and presented by F+W Media (publisher of Writer's Digest and Writer's Market)

The revolution has overcome countless obstacles on the road to the tipping point, but one stubborn source of resistance has been the agents. Their intransigence has not been so much a matter of hostility as uncertainty. Caught flat-footed by developments that went from zero to warp-drive speed in the blink of an eye, agents have struggled to get a handle on their role in the new e-world order. Though they take pride in being ahead of their clients, in the case of e-books many of their authors are way ahead of them, doing things or at least thinking thoughts that do not involve services commissionable by their agents such as self-publication of unsold books. Other agents simply want to be able to answer author questions or help their clients find a place in a universe that seems to be hurtling out of control. One wag described it as "Agents on the verge of a nervous breakdown." (See Why Don't Agents Want to Play?)

Mike Shatzkin, chairing Digital Book World on January 26th-27th, is determined to draw agents into the e-book process by designing a number of programs specifically to interest them. "The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How It Will Affect the Business Model," chaired by Oprah's Book Club's Sara Nelson, is one such. Another, "Tomorrow’s Book Contract," chaired by yours truly, features several agents, a lawyer and a publishing company rights manager presenting wish lists of contract language and provisions reflecting changes in the publishing landscape.

Other panels and speeches will address non-e-book topics of concern to agents such as "Back-Loaded Book Deals: No (and Low) Advance Contracts, Profit-Sharing and Other Innovative Business Models".

With its glittering roster of publishing industry star speakers and panelists, we're told that the conference is almost sold out, but if you're a literary agent you can be sure Mike Shatzkin will do his best to squeeze you in.

For complete information, visit Digital Book World.

Richard Curtis

Will iSlate Battery Carry the Load?

We hate to rain on iSlate's apotheosis, but some of us are wondering about battery life.

A portable computer is only as good as its battery. A blogger with the handle of "Andrew", writing for TabletPCReview.com, said that "Whenever we review notebooks one of the questions that always needs to be answered is, what's the battery life like on this tablet? We all know manufacturers overstate the quoted battery life for a system, probably because they test for battery life under ideal conditions for getting a high number. For example, wireless off, processor underclocked, system idle, LCD brightness set to low, no DVD and so on. So when your notebook with a quoted 5 hour battery life actually gets three hours, you're left wondering what happened to those other two hours the manufacturer got?"

Andrew wrote that in 2007, but the fundamental issues have not changed since then.

A January 26-scheduled announcement by Apple, which few pundits believe could be about anything else than the imminent release of a tablet-sized computer/e-book reader, has created nearly messianic frenzy. A New York Times columnist said that some are calling the device a "Jesus tablet". But at least one authority, physicist Eric Hellmann, thinks we should look under the hood before declaring January 26th a religious holiday.

Hellman, whose popular blog Go To Hellman covers the e-book scene, has speculated on the device's power source. "The design problem is the battery," he recently wrote. "Assuming that the iSlate is a multimedia device implies that it's not an e-ink device. It's going to have a screen not so different from an iPhone screen, and that will consume power. That will in turn require a battery proportional to the iPhone battery, and batteries are what cause iPhones to be reasonably heavy for their size. The Kindle works as a book-replacement because it's light enough; I'm guessing the iSlate will be a more of a tv than a book."

Apple will undoubtedly imbed a state of the art battery in its tablet, but when you consider the load that a tabet will have to pull - movie and game videos, photo archives, videocam, multitouch screen, full color e-books, magazines, newspapers, music, plus countless juice-draining apps, to say nothing of the demands of the tablet's own operating and processing system, you have to wonder whether Apple's battery, or anybody else's at this moment in history, will be able to do the job without adding an unacceptable weight burden.

Knowledgeable insiders confirm these concerns. When a website named islate.org posted some allegedly leaked specs (you can read them here), one commenter wrote that "for as thin as the device is intended to be, there is no possible way it’ll run a HD, 2Gb RAM, and a Core 2 Duo processor. Factor in the large multitouch screen and you could expect a battery life of about 15-minutes with those specs, AND it’d be too hot to handle AND weigh a few pounds. No way."

There will undoubtedly be a stampede to snap up the iSlate, but the coolheaded will scrutinize the specs before committing to the hefty - rumored at $1000 - price of a device that, if you believe some iSlate evangelists, embeds nothing less than the spiritual hopes and dreams of humankind within its fragile case.

Richard Curtis

Howdy Brownsville, New York Calling, Have We Got a Great Bio of Spinoza for Y'all!

If you're a sales rep for a publishing company, you can be replaced by a telemarketer. At least that seems to be the message communicated by Simon & Schuster.

Michael Cader reports in Publishers Lunch that S&S has cut nine field representatives, leaving but seven to service the book buying needs of a nation. An adjunct to this action is the establishment of a telemarketing group that will presumably service the needs of far-flung independent bookstores around the country.

S&S justifies its decision on "the changing nature of the market place." That phrase should be nominated for the Understatement of the Year Award. The marketplace served by publisher field reps twenty or even ten years ago is all but unrecognizable, and what's left of it is melting away like an ice cube in a teapot.

Up until the mid-1990s rural bookshops and paperback outlets like drugstores were serviced by traveling sales reps or independent distributors. These people not only understood the reading tastes of the communities on their routes but knew many of the readers personally. They knew that this bookshop catered to lovers of western fiction and that one to historical romance.

The system worked wonderfully well, but it suffered a major hammer blow in 1996 when several influential paperback distribution agencies let go of most of the independent driver/rack jobbers that covered all those rural bookstores. The reason was that the growing power of computers enabled these agencies to stock stores by remote control instead of employing human beings driving vans and station wagons. It wasn't long before stores in Tuscaloosa or Paducah were being stocked from agencies in Chicago or Toronto who knew little if anything about what they liked to read. And actually it didn't matter, because Chicago and Toronto simply shipped those stores the top fifteen or twenty New York Times bestselling titles anyway. (I've detailed this crucial moment in publishing history in The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback, Part 1 and Part 2.)

So much for mass market paperbacks. But there were still hardcover books being sold in mall bookstores, right? Wrong. As the 1990s progressed, closing of mall stores reached epidemic proportions as the major chains, especially Barnes & Noble, realized that store traffic simply didn't justify keeping them open. At the same time the rise of Amazon shifted book buying patterns from the car to the armchair. Why drive into town when you could handle the transaction at home?

Given the withering of the rural bookstore market, why should we be surprised to hear S&S declare that "new field sales team will focus on the geographic regions where our sales are strongest--urban areas with a large base of key independent retail, wholesale, and educational accounts"?

The fact that it makes perfect economic sense doesn't palliate the pain that independent bookshop owners and their customers feel to have one more tie to the publishing community severed. One store owner said it all in a tweet: "SO pissed to see my rep go. My one link to you is now someone who has NO idea about my store."

In fairness to Simon & Schuster, this erosion of bookstore culture outside of the big cities is reflected in strategies pursued by every trade publisher. But that will not mitigate the sense among our country cousins that they're having a lot of undesirable and inappropriate books shoved down their throats by (to use Dave Barry's phrase) a bunch of "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

Richard Curtis

Incentives? Or Shmears? A Window Into Bookselling's Heart of Darkness

Adam Pennenberg, writing for Fast Company, has discovered that books don't find their way to the front of bookstores by themselves. Someone puts them there, and that's because money has crossed hands. "The practice is known as Co-op," Pennenberg writes in Bookstore Baksheesh: The Real Estate Deals That Sell Books,"and each book on each table costs publishers anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000, and even up to $50,000 depending on placement. The closer a table is to the front of the store, the more expensive the real estate."

Pennenberg's depiction of the seamy side of bookselling will come as a revelation to newcomers to the book industry, and some of you will feel the same poignant disillusionment as the discovery that it was mommy and daddy who slipped the dollar under your pillow to compensate you for that tooth that fell out.

For older timers, however, Pennenberg's article is just an update of an age-old practice that reveals the ugly underbelly of our glamorous book business. More than ten years ago I wrote about it in a piece called Incentives? Or Shmears? For those of you who understand a shmear to be helping of cream cheese spread on a bagel, it also has a second connotation in the Yiddish lexicon, namely, a bribe or payoff. "It is somewhat disconcerting," I said, "to learn that such elegant phrases as 'sales incentives,' 'slotting allowances,' 'co-op contributions,' and 'display fees' may be euphemisms for something more akin to what was done in the garment business than to the way ladies and gentlemen conduct business upstairs in Editorial.

"Bismarck said that it is unwise to look too closely into the way we make our laws or our sausages. You may be able think of some other things that don't bear up too well under intense scrutiny. High on my list is what publishers, particularly mass-market paperback publishers, have to do these days to get their merchandise displayed in and promoted by bookstores. It might be described as publishing's dirty little secret, except that it's not so little. In fact, it's become so pervasive that it touches everybody in publishing."

If you'd like to descend into the sewer system that runs beneath your local chain bookstore, click here.

Richard Curtis

NYC Pharmacy Chain Installs Kiosks. Today DVDs,Tomorrow Books?

Do books have to be sold at bookstores?

After the introduction last year of the Espresso print on demand press we wondered about that. As we wrote at the time (see I'll Have Four Sesames, Four Poppy-Seeds, and One Copy of War and Peace), "If you think outside the bookstore box, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that, as POD printing technology improves and miniaturizes, tabletop presses could be installed in a Wal-Mart, Macy's or 7-Eleven. You just go to any neighborhood kiosk and browse Amazon or Barnes & Noble or another book retail website, make your selection, enter your credit card and order the book. Finish shopping or get a cup of coffee, then come back and pick up your bound volume, still warm like a fresh bagel. Hey, you can put POD presses in bagel shops too! Just don't shmear lox spread on your newly minted paperback."

Installation of kiosks to support any product is still an expensive proposition when you think about all the technical challenges and support they require. Think for instance about what's involved just to place an ATM - a kiosk that dispenses cash - in a newspaper shop. So, not only must the operation be impeccably smooth over countless uses, it must sell a product in volume that justifies the use of the real estate it sits on. DVDs are one such product. We wonder if print books are another.

These reflections were triggered by the recent announcement of installation of DVD kiosks in 200 pharmacies in the Duane Reade chain, a drugstore outfit that has become as ubiquitous in New York City as yellow cabs. The kiosks will be sponsored by Blockbuster, the movie rental giant that is trying to reinvent itself after a media revolution that left it holding a bag full of videotapes. "Now Duane Reade pharmacy customers can get a movie with their next prescription pickup," writes Alex Palmer in brandweek.com. (We're not sure where the kiosk pictured here is installed.)

Rental of a DVD is $1.00 per day, so cheap that it plays up how profitable volume projections must be if two corporations splitting the revenue believe they can make out well on a buck per item per day. Some other high-traffic chains like grocery leviathan Publix have opted in.“'These are places that consumers are going by every day,'” the Brandweek article quoted an executive for NCR, the company operating the kiosks under the Blockbuster name. “'You’ve got a kid who’s home sick, you can run to the drug store and pick up their medicine and grab a movie, so as they’re sitting on the couch they can enjoy the rest of their day.'"

Okay, now read Blockbuster Kiosks Debut at Duane Reade and switch "book" for "movie" and you will grasp that, as Espresso technology is refined and the machines are miniaturized, a Duane Reade or Publix book nook on every corner is entirely within the realm of imagination.

Richard Curtis

Ticked Off about Delayed Release of E-Book Reprint? Enhancements Will Make It Worth Waiting For

In July of 2008, about nine months after the first season of Mad Men ended, Lionsgate, the hit television show's producer, released the DVD. It not only carried all 13 episodes but a number of special features as well. Among them were audio commentaries on each episode; a "featurette" exploring the world of Mad Men; a documentary called The Desire of the American Dream, described as "featuring the 1960's creative revolution in media"; "Pictures of Elegance" a photo gallery with commentaries from the costume, hair and production designers; another featurette called "Scoring Mad Men"; and a Mad Men Music Sampler.

Some leading publishing executives must have watched that or some other DVD and had an "Aha!" moment. Why couldn't you enhance e-book reprints the same way that film and television studios enhance the DVD rereleases of theatrical movies or television series?

That idea seems to be taking hold. Jack McKeown, a founder of book publisher and distributor Perseus Group, recently discussed this idea, citing remarks by HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray: "Publishers would do well to seize the high ground here by offering enhanced e-book editions, accompanied by robust internet-focused marketing campaigns to further distinguish their e-book launches."

And Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal reports that Macmillan will be releasing special e-book editions of key hardcover books, but with an interesting twist: they will actually be sold for a higher price than the hardcovers! "The special editions, which will include author interviews and other material, such as reading guides, will carry a list price slightly higher than the hardcover edition. (Hardcover books typically list for at least $25, while e-book versions of best sellers can go for as little as $9.99.) The new e-books will go on sale on the same day as the hardcover. After 90 days, the special edition will be replaced by a standard e-book."

It should come as no surprise that the idea for enhanced e-books was introduced, or at least articulated, last March by Mike Shatzkin, the closest thing our business has to a Nostradumus. In a two part posting he laid out everything a publisher needs to know and do to maximize its e-book resources.

One of the key benefits of the medium is economy. Enhanced e-books "present the opportunity to deliver additional content and features to consumers with no additional run-on production cost," Shatzkin explains. "Traditional printed books cost something additional for every extra page we put into them; e-books don’t.

"An enhanced ebook," he points out, "can be an infinite number of things, and probably will become dozens, if not hundreds, of different things over time...The tools include internal linking, external linking, embedded video and audio, additional text-and-illustration content, and even software utilities." You can read details in Part 1 and Part 2 of Shatzkin's oracular posts.

By glamorizing their e-book reprints with author interviews, special prefaces by guests or by the authors themselves, audios and videos, previews of the author's new book, etc., publishers will go far to pacify complaints by fans irritated about having to wait. (See Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Reprints.)

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal.

Richard Curtis Verses the Publishing Industry, 2009

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early '90s Publisher's Weekly ran literary agent Richard Curtis's end-of-the-year summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights and lowlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, "Merger, He Wrote," (1986), "Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine" (1989) and "Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off" (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with "The Year of the Platform," which boasted such lines as,

Are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

Last year's effusion, "The Coming of the POD People," had this memorable doggerel:

Agents now submit their schlock
By means of email as dot-doc.

In 2009's poem, "The Yr of the Tweet", Curtis writes,

It’s fine for paradigms to shift
As long as authors don’t get stiffed.

Click here to read it in its entirety, and discover how Curtis actually found a rhyme for "Shatzkin". Verses for prior years as well as his prose spoofs are collected in The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires.

The only problem is that if you really enjoy his latest poem, you'll have to wait a whole year before you get to read another.

John Douglas

Poem excerpts (c) Richard Curtis reprinted from Publishers Weekly, December 31 2007, December 22 2008 and December 21 2009 Reed Elsevier Magazines.

London, A Town Called "Sue", Rethinks Medieval Libel Laws

Last fall our piece about Britain's outrageous libel laws (Can't Sue for Libel in US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World) got a lot of attention, and perhaps some of the howls of horror it provoked were heard across the pond. "Embarrassed by London’s reputation as 'a town called sue' and by unusually stinging criticisms in American courts and legislatures," writes New York Times's sarah Lyall, "British lawmakers are seriously considering rewriting England’s 19th-century libel laws."

What the beef? "English libel law is the opposite of America’s in many ways," says Lyall. "In the United States, the plaintiff, or accuser, must prove that the statement in question was false; public officials must also prove that it was made maliciously, with 'reckless disregard' for the truth." Whereas in England, "the burden of proof rests on the defendant, whose statements are presumed false and who has to establish that they are true."

As a result, authors and publishers have been intimidated from writing anything that might get them hauled into a British court. In one case a handful of copies of an American book made their way into England but that was enough to get the author sued. The costs alone can be ruinous, and damages? Don't ask! “A protracted case could bankrupt an organization," said one victim. "Even if a plaintiff is completely in the wrong, they could break you.”

Feel your blood boiling? There's now hope: read Britain, Long a Libel Mecca, Reviews Laws by Sarah Lyall.

Richard Curtis

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

Separation of E-Book Rights: Publishers' Worst Nightmare

Publishers are fighting the last war, but they'd better turn their heads forward if they don't want to lose the next one.

The notice served by Random House to authors and agents, vowing to protect its backlist from predatory e-book developers, focused so much attention on previously published books that just about everybody took their eyes off an infinitely larger issue and an infinitely larger prize: the future.

When we look back at the fireworks triggered by Random House's action we will see it as a noisy squabble over a relatively small number of contracts with ambiguous definitions of the word "book". Very old books have entered the public domain beyond the reach of proprietary publishers. Very new ones, on the other hand, dating from around 1990, carry explicit language defining e-rights that no buccaneer would dream of challenging. That leaves a body of post-World War II titles predating the e-book revolution, and in a great many cases their contracts have just enough references to things like "information storage and retrieval rights" and "no competing editions" to intimidate most would be poachers. There may not be that many books worth fighting over, and certainly not that many worth suing over.

But there is one body of books that publishers will have to fight for if they are to avoid calamity: the ones that have not yet been published. Events of the last few weeks have introduced a concept so terrifying to book publishers that they have refused to think about it: the separation of e-books from the suite of rights that they have taken as God-given for centuries. Who can blame them for living in denial? Deprive publishers of e-rights and they become mere printers, game set match.

We don't have to look at ancient history to see how another right that publishers took for granted was pried out of their clutches, and that's audio. For decades "audio" was a sleepy little curiosity that no one felt worth fighting over. For many of us, it meant a boxed set of Caedmon records of Dylan Thomas reading his play Under Milkwood in 1953. But as recording media evolved from vinyl to tape to CD to streaming, the audio business became a billion dollar one, and authors and agents began demanding separation of those rights from the fundamental package just as they had done early in the 20th century with movie and television rights.

The turmoil of the last few weeks, capped by the dramatic announcement by business book author Stephen Covey of his intention to sell his e-book rights to Amazon, should make it crystal-clear that severance of those rights from a publisher's franchise is now a viable option for authors. At the moment it is an option for big-name stars only, but don't so many revolutions begin on the backs of the mighty? As we recently wrote, agents have been sitting on the sidelines waiting to hear the words "e-book" and "advance" used in the same sentence. Now they smell money. A recent all-expenses-paid junket by agents to Amazon's headquarters may have had some influence on these developments (See Why Don't Agents Want to Play? Amazon Flies a Bunch to Seattle to Find Out).

The implications of separation of e-rights are profound and for publishers they must be excrutiatingly threatening, for their biggest nightmare is that Amazon will become a publisher. Now that Amazon is a bidder for electronic rights, that day has arrived.

It must be said that publishers have brought some of this on themselves by pegging the e-book royalty rate at 25% of net proceeds or even less. There are enough independent e-book outfits offering 50% (including - full disclosure - E-Reads) that it was only a matter of time before authors and agents did the math and came to the conclusion that 50% was twice as large as 25%.

The nightmare is out of the box. Is there any way for publishers to get it back in and contain the threat? The answer is yes, if they are willing to bite the 50% royalty bullet. Earlier this week in connection with Random House's dictum, the Authors Guild urged that very condition. Random House, said the Guild, should "start offering a fair royalty for those rights." Their statement went on to say:

Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We're confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That's beginning to change.

While it's well and good for publishers to pore over their old contracts, they really need to examine the boilerplate in their current ones, and where it says "25%" they should consider amending it to 50%. Otherwise they may see their digital book rights calve off irretrievably like glaciers falling into the sea.

Richard Curtis

Random Serves Notice on Would-Be E-Interlopers

Like a wolf marking its territory against rivals, Random House served unequivocal notice today on what it perceives as potential e-poachers seeking a loophole in Random's definition of "book". The warning was embedded in a letter from Random CEO Markus Dohle mailed or emailed to literary agents describing the company's plans and initiatives in the digital world. Authors were also put on notice that they are "precluded from granting publishing rights to third parties that would compromise the rights for which Random House has bargained."

"The vast majority of our backlist contracts," writes Dohle, "grant us the exclusive right to publish books in electronic formats. At the same time, we are aware there have been some misunderstandings concerning ebook rights in older backlist titles. Our older older agreements often give the exclusive rights to publish 'in book form' or 'in any and all editions'. Many of those contracts also include enhanced language that references other forms of copying or displaying the text that might be developed in the future or other more relevant language that more specifically reflects the already expansive scope of rights. Such grants are usually not limited to any specific format, and indeed the "form" of a book has evolved over the years to include variations of hardcover, paperback and other written word formats, all of which have understood to be included in the grant of book publishing rights. Indeed, ebook retailers market, sell and merchandise ebooks as an alternate book format, alongside the hardcover, trade paperback and mass market versions of a given title. Whether physical or digital, the product is used and experienced in the same manner, serves the same function, and satisfies the same fundamental urge to discovery stories, ideas and information through the process of reading. Accordingly, Random House considers contracts that grant the exclusive right to publish 'in book form' or 'in any and all editions' to include the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats. Our agreements also contain broad non-competition provisions, so that the author is precluded from granting publishing rights to third parties that would compromise the rights for which Random House has bargained."

If Random's position sounded familiar to some, it's the same one that the company used in 2001 when it sued Rosetta, an e-book startup that offered digital editions of books by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., William Styron and Robert B. Parker, having secured them directly from the authors. Random had published the books before there was such a thing as the Internet, but nevertheless considered a book to be a book no matter what form it took. Random's request for an injunction was denied by the court, and Random then filed an appeal. It too was denied.

Random and Rosetta eventually settled, allowing Rosetta to continue publishing the books but leaving unresolved the issue of who controls e-rights to books where the language defining them is ambiguous.

By issuing its letter to agents today, Random House reasserted its position that, ambiguous or not, the publisher considers the language in its contracts to grant it ironclad control over e-rights. Anyone who believes otherwise is advised to take a good sniff before venturing over the perimeter of Random's territory.

Richard Curtis

Where Is E Going? Forrester Research Offers Ten Predictions

PaidContent.org has released ten predictions for the e-book industry prepared by Forrester Research analysts Sarah Rotman Epps and James McQuivey. They offer a rich banquet of food for thought, and though many are surprising, all of them confirm what we know in our bones and our stats - that the industry is definitely going in the right direction. Here's an abstract:

1. "E Ink will lose its claim to near-100% market share for e-reader displays. Next year will see the first devices that are marketed as “e-readers” but that don’t exclusively use E Ink displays."

2. "Dual-screen mobile phones and netbooks will eat into e-reader demand. Most consumers don’t read enough to justify buying a single-function reading device, and according to Forrester’s data, more consumers already read e-books on mobile phones and PCs than on e-readers."

3. "Apps will make non-reading devices more e-book-friendly. E-readers like the Kindle have catalyzed demand for digital reading: e-books have been around for more than a decade, but no one bought them before Amazon made it convenient to buy and consume them. But the market for e-books is not limited to e-readers."

4. "eReaders will get apps, too. As anyone with an iPhone knows, apps are where the magic happens: They make the device infinitely more useful."

5. "Amazon will launch a suite of new touchscreen e-readers. Awkward Kindle keyboard, begone!"

6. "B&N will steal market share from Amazon and Sony. This year was a setup year for B&N, and 2010 will see its efforts start to pay off."

7. "E-book content sales will top $500 million in the U.S. ...This means that AAP data, while directionally useful, far under-reports the true size of the e-book content market. Considering the growth rate of e-book trade sales (up 176% year-to-date), we think it’s reasonable to project overall e-book revenue will top $500 million in the U.S. in 2010."

8. "E-textbooks will become more accessible, but sales will be modest. If you’re holding your breath waiting for the electronic textbook market to take off, slowly start exhaling, because it won’t happen in 2010."

9. "Magazine and newspaper publishers will launch their own apps and devices. Magazine and newspaper publishers aren’t satisfied with the way their content looks and acts on the Kindle and Sony Readers—they want color, video, interactivity, the ability to sell ads and control the subscriber relationship."

10. "China, India, Brazil, and the EU will propel global growth, but the U.S. will still be the biggest market. Right now, the U.S. is the biggest market for e-readers and e-books, and that won’t change in 2010. But the rest of the world will start to catch up."

Bottom line? "Next year will be anything but boring." Amen to that, Forrester Research!

For the full and detailed summary of Forrester's predictions, click here.

Richard Curtis

Jealous Rivals Determined to Tank Google Settlement?

Google, the Authors Guild, and publishing industry leaders have filed a revised and sweetened settlement with the court. To those who are still opposed to it despite every reasonable effort to placate them, a request:

Spare us the hypocrisy.

You can dress up your objections to the Google settlement in legal niceties and pious pleas for fairness, but the truth is you're just jealous that Google took initiatives that you lacked the vision to take - until it looked like there was money to be made. So now you want to gut the settlement so you can get a piece of the action you didn't raise a finger or spend a dime to earn.

Where were you when a treasure house of literary works was abandoned? And isn't it odd that now that someone has come along with a viable plan to recover that treasure and wants to make a reasonable profit, you have suddenly become passionate bibliophiles and champions of fairness?

Google, the publishing industry, and the Authors Guild have walked an extra mile to satisfy your so-called "concerns". A revised and sweetened settlement has been presented to the court. Do the right thing: honor the men and women of good will who have forged it, the corporate leaders who deserve to profit from it and the generations of humanity that stand to benefit from it.

Read the sweetened terms of the settlement here. For additional observations read Google Settlement Under Attack for Making Treasure Out of Trash.

Richard Curtis

Getting Rid of E-Trash? Dump it on Asia's Poor

On a recent Chris Matthews Show the host asked his guests to "Tell me something I don't know." Rick Stengel, managing editor for Time Magazine, said, "By the end of the year you're going to see a plethora of e-readers - of post-Kindle devices - four color."

For those of you who have been keeping up with e-books Stengel didn't tell us anything we don't know. But here's something that nobody knows: when the next generation of e-readers arrives, what's going to happen to the Kindle or Sony E-Reader you replace?

If what's happening in Europe is any guideline, it will end up in a toxic e-waste landfill in Asia and Africa where the destitute, many of them children, will scavenge it for scrap. These scavengers incur horrifying and often fatal skin, lung, intestinal and reproductive organ ailments from the plastics, metals and gases that go into discarded cell phones, televisions, computers, keyboards, monitors,cables and similar e-scrap. Elizabeth Rosenthal, covering the story for the New York Times, tells us that "Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa.

"There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming."

Jessika Toothman, blogging on HowStuffWorks, describes how "A whole bouquet of heavy metals, semimetals and other chemical compounds lurk inside your seemingly innocent laptop or TV. E-waste dangers stem from ingredients such as lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, copper, beryllium, barium, chromium, nickel, zinc, silver and gold." In fact if you want to see what this "bouquet" of poisons is doing to your fellow man, woman and child, you can view this sickening video of a Chinese e-trash village.

One device not mentioned in Toothman's list of e-waste is e-book readers. The obvious reason is that we are still in the first generation of e-book devices (or second if you count progenitors like the Rocket Book) and there haven't been enough readers manufactured to make them a formidable source of trash like cell phones and TVs. But when the next generation of e-book readers floods us with Kindle and Sony rivals - better, cheaper, faster, more colorful, loaded with special features and options - will we simply add them to the tons of lethal junk earmarked for miserable dumps in China, Indonesia or Africa?

Because it is still young, the e-book industry has an unprecedented opportunity to exercise its social responsibility, as we recently pointed out. Here is a three-point program to make sure the e-books business remains green.

• First, manufacturers must be compelled to disclose the chemical components of the e-book devices they produce so that we can evaluate environmental hazards.
• Second, Amazon, Sony, Plastic logic, Philips and other developers must develop programs for either returning their devices for safe (and monitored) disassembly and recycling or for donation to students, armed services personnel and other charitable recipients.
  
• And third, The cost of recycling and safely disassembling e-books must be built into the price structure of e-books.

Right now the hidden cost of computers and other electronic devices is human suffering. It is unacceptable for the e-book industry to boast about environmental advantages while secretly sticking the helpless poor with the bill or contributing to the poisoning of the world's water and air. If safety measures and sensible recycling add $25 or $50 to the price of their devices, that is an acceptable tradeoff. Because it would be assessed equally on all manufacturers, none would have a competitive advantage over its rivals.

We expect the e-book industry to do the right thing.

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.

Are Subtitles Necessary?

Agents and publishers spend a lot of time creating subtitles. In fact, if you were to measure how many man- and woman-hours go into the process you would say they spend an inordinate amount of time in these deliberations. I say "deliberations" but as often as not they are debates, and some of them turn into donnybrooks with noses bent far out of shape and people not talking to each other. Publishing folks take subtitles seriously, and we advise you to do the same.

There is a lot at stake. A confusing or amorphous title desperately needs to be sharpened and focused with the help of a handful of explanatory words. But subtitles are not merely any words. They have to be perfect words.
Subtitles are not composed so much as they are distilled like acid so that every syllable etches an indelible impression in the mind of a customer gazing at a stack of books. A word out of place can well mean a sale lost.

Though subtitles are usually worked out in a dialogue between editor and author, the influence of the publisher's sales representatives is always in the room. The question What the hell does the title mean? coming from a sales rep is a command to go back and come up with a better one.

These remarks are prompted by a blog by Robert McCrum in London's Guardian.co.uk urging publishers to drop subtitles altogether. McCrum is incensed that the publisher of John Carey's biography of William Golding felt compelled to add this subtitle: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.

McCrum waxes positively bilious over the spineless editorial crew that came up with that one. "Picture the scene at Faber & Faber," he writes. "Carey's manuscript has been delivered, and the book is in production. Then, at some routine sales meeting, the worm of doubt starts to creep in. Up pops some bright young spark. Excuse me, says the BYS, I'm not sure that some of our younger readers will actually know who William Golding is. I mean, he's been, like, dead since 1993, and most of his books are out of print." The fact that Golding won a Nobel Prize for Literature and his masterpiece is required reading at countless colleges does not seem to have assured the publisher that readers will identify him without having to be hammered on their heads.

That's why McCrum wants to do away with subtitles entirely. "The truth is, if you have to justify your book with a subtitle, the game is up," he says. "Buyers pay scant attention to them; librarians and bibliographers often forget to catalogue them. They linger only as fig leaves of authorial shame. Who now remembers, or cares, that George Orwell's Animal Farm bears the subtitle A Fairy Tale, or that Herman Melville's Moby Dick was also known as The Whale?"

Author and English professor Ben Yagoda agrees with McCrum. In 2005 he published an article on the subject for the New York Times Book Review section. "Nobody really notices subtitles," he wrote. "They are a sort of lottery ticket in the economics of nonfiction book marketing. Publishers throw all kinds of elements in them - vogue words and phrases, features of the book the title didn't get around to mentioning, talismanic locutions like 'An American Life' - in the (almost always) vain hope that something will pay off." In fact he thinks the convention has become a crutch for publishers: "What's changed recently is that the subtitle has been asked to bear ever more weight. So many books are published nowadays that each one needs to proclaim its own merits; and with advertising budgets shaved away to nothing, the task falls to subtitles. As a result, they have become ubiquitous, hyperbolic and long... Once you've read the cover of 'Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II', is there really any need to crack open the book?"

On the other hand, some subtitles dare you to resist cracking open the book. I'm thinking of The Bad Guys Won! by Jeff Pearlman. He follows that title with a veritable millipede of a sub: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball With Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put On a New York Uniform, and Maybe the Best. We dare any sports fan to pass that one by without at least picking it up.

If you think today's subtitles are long and convoluted, read Yagoda's The Subtitle That Changed America and discover some historical predecessors (including the one for Robinson Crusoe pictured above) that cannot be uttered in a single breath. You will also match the following book subtitles to titles:

• The Story of a Man of Character
• The Ambiguities
• A Novel Without a Hero
• The Modern Prometheus
• Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
• A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
• A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
• Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

After a recent bruising negotiation with an author over trimming his 22 word subtitle, I definitely agree with Yagoda's conclusion: "I miss the time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a book to go out into the world with only a strong title followed by a few hundred pages of outstanding writing."

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.

Of Course You're Struggling! Nobody's Buying FIC033000 Any More. (All About BISAC Codes)

Next time you're at a party and someone asks you what kind of books you write, tell them "Oh, mostly FIC027050 and FIC027070 but occasionally I do some FIC027120 for a change of pace." And if you really want to impress them, tell them you're working on a FIC009020.

Unless your interlocutor knows the code, you'll get nothing but a blank stare. But if he or she speaks BISAC, you might end up getting topped with, "That's all well and good, but I'm working on a FIC043000."

Anybody got a BISAC decoder ring?

BISAC is an acronym for a system of code numbers developed by Book Industry Standards and Communications, a standing committee of a larger organization mandated to develop standards in a wide variety of areas. Some of them deal with things you may never have thought about. Luckily, the BISAC people have thought a lot about them. If for instance you were a bookstore clerk or warehouse picker and packer a few decades ago, you wouldn't have a clue as to which side of a carton the label went on, how large should the label be, and what part of the store to stock the books in when they came out of the box. BISAC addressed those problems and developed standards for uniform barcoding, product and shipping labels, pallet headers, and many more tasks in the supply chain, saving the industry untold man- and woman-hours.

BISAC also created a subject headings list code designed to help publishers, booksellers, librarians and other book industry trading partners to store, shelve and display books by topic. When they're preparing a book for publication, publishers select a general category into which any given title fits, then picks the subcategory. It's the book equivalent of Linnaeus's "genus" and "species". Some samples of genus are "Biography and Autobiography", "Crafts and Hobbies", "History" and "Health and Fitness". There are so many broad categories that in order to keep its database from whirling off into space, BISAC divided them in two, A-J and K-Z. You can click here to see the first half.

You'll note that one of the major categories is "Fiction", and if you'd like to settle down for the evening with a novel, BISAC offers you about one hundred categories. For instance, if it's African-American fiction you can select among:

FIC049000 FICTION / African American / General
FIC049010 FICTION / African American / Christian
FIC049020 FICTION / African American / Contemporary Women
FIC049030 FICTION / African American / Erotica
FIC049040 FICTION / African American / Historical
FIC049050 FICTION / African American / Mystery & Detective
FIC049060 FICTION / African American / Romance
FIC049070 FICTION / African American / Urban Life

In the scenario with which we launched our discussion, you informed the individual at the party that you write historical romances and Regencies, but occasionally write paranormals, and you're currently working on an epic fantasy. The BISAC-savvy author who one-upped you told you he's writing a coming-of-age novel. And the struggling author in the headline of this article? He writes westerns.

In a recent posting we said your book's life and your writing career depended on ISBN numbers. The same might well be said about BISAC headings. Without them, bookstores would be pure chaos (or purer chaos than they are now).

I hope this has been helpful. And now if you'll excuse me I'm dying to get back to my FIC002000.

Richard Curtis

PS: Be careful not to say "BISAC" to an MD. Bisacodyl, whose medical nickname is "Bisac", is a stimulant laxative.

Publisher Sics Leakseeking Dick in Teddy Bio Embargo Imbroglio

This story appeared in the New York Times on September 3, 2009, eleven days before publication of True Compass by the late Senator Ted Kennedy: "Despite the press embargo of Ted Kennedy's upcoming memoir, the NY Times has published an article looking at a leaked copy of the highly-anticipated autobiography."

Did you know there was an embargo on Kennedy's book? Do you know why its publisher, Twelve, a division of Hachette, required it? How it was supposed to be enforced? Who leaked it and why? Was the Times in breach of, um, embargo? And is that a crime, like rum-running?

As to the latter question, Hachette thinks the transgression was flagrant enough to merit hiring a private detective to learn how the Times got its hands on copies of the book, which enabled the paper not only to extract the marrow for its readers but to run a review as well - a review of a book that nobody (except Times reporters, apparently) would be able to purchase for another eleven days. (Today is the officially publication day and here is the link to the Times's review.)

A Breach of Manners or a Crime?

We know what an embargo is when we talk about sanctions against rogue nations. But...books?

The term is used in a number of publishing industry contexts, and they all revolve around a date before which release of information, excerpts or copies of a book could be harmful to a publisher's interests. For instance, there are embargos on serialization of book texts in newspapers and magazines, on early reviews, and on sale of copies before the official release date.

In some instances the constraint is simply moral: "Please don't spoil the book's plot by reviewing it two weeks before publication date." A book's sales may be negatively impacted by a trigger-happy reviewer but not so badly damaged as to warrant legal action. There's little a publisher can do about it except yell at the reviewer and his newspaper. The breach is one of manners.

In other cases the transgression is legal, the flouting of a contractual covenant. The New York Times figured incidentally in such a case when an online bookseller and a distributor placed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on sale days before the embargo was to end. Several papers including the New York Times ran reviews jumping the official gun. According to Emily Shurr of cnet News Blog, the book's publisher, Scholastic, brought a lawsuit against the companies claiming that "This breach led The New York Times and Baltimore Sun to lawfully claim that copies of the book could be obtained at a public retail outlet before publishing their book reviews, which included details considered spoilers."

The Biggest Embargo of All

The issues raised by these incidents are about to become incandescent as we count down the hours until publication on September 15th of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which has been cloaked in paranoiac secretiveness. Motoko Rich, who covers the New York Times's book beat, writes that "Nobody at Special Ops Media," the outfit hired to design the book's Web marketing campaign, "has been allowed to read the book..."

Even the most powerful figure in book retailing jumped into the embargo game, Rich reports:

Last week Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, posted a breathless memo to customers on the Amazon.com home page, informing them that the company was taking 'one of the most anticipated publishing events of all time' very seriously. 'We’ve agreed to keep our stockpile under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure, with two locks requiring two separate people for entry,' Mr. Bezos wrote.

Who Dunnit?

Friction between publishers and review media over early release of a book's contents has been an age-old issue for as long as anyone can remember. On several occasions a publisher would license first (pre-publication) serial rights, only to discover the information in a tabloid well in advance of serialization. It seems that the publisher had also sent review copies to those tabloids which, under the pretext of "reviewing" the book, revealed everything, rendering those first serial rights worthless. Needless to say, the magazine that had bought those rights fair and square demanded its money back.

When you realize how many people see a book before publication, it's a small miracle that information blackouts ever work. Agents, editors, publishing executives, copy editors, proofreaders, sales representatives, marketing department managers, publicity people, cover designers, ad copywriters, even clerks feeding manuscripts into the copy machine, all have an opportunity to squeal and even to smuggle, and that doesn't even include bookstore buyers who need to read something in order to know how many copies to order, or reviewers who always appreciate having something to review on publication day. Though I never was able to confirm it, back in the '80s it was said that an employee of a photocopy shop used by a big literary agency could be paid off to make an extra copy of a hot new novel for movie studios hoping to get an early look.

It is about as easy to impose an embargo in the book business as it is to keep a secret in a beauty parlor. If the contents of a book get prematurely out of the bag we have no one to blame but the porous system known as book publishing. If The Lost Symbol remains under wraps until the embargo is removed, it will be the best kept secret since Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe in World War II.

Me? I've got my money on the spoilers.

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 and the New York Observer.

Veterans of Publishing Campaigns Speak, and a Good Listener Records

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, an editor with Grove Atlantic Publishers, has taken it upon himself to conduct, for Poets & Writers, a series of lengthy Q&A's with distinguished editors and literary agents whose careers exemplify values and virtues that are rapidly fading from the daily discourse of the publishing business. It is absolutely incumbent on every member of our community 40 years old or younger to listen to their voices and imbibe their experiences so that you can understand what publishing was like when men and women of charm, taste and integrity walked the earth.

Ferrari-Adler's most recent interview is with literary agent Georges Borchardt, who has represented and in some cases discovered such towering figures as Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, John Gardner, Charles Johnson, and even General de Gaulle.

A brief excerpt or two...

J F-A: Let's talk a little about the industry. You've been in it for several decades, over the course of which it's changed a lot, or at least that's what people seem to say. What's your take on that?

GB: It has changed. Mainly it's the shift from individual ownership to corporate ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the sons of millionaires. They didn't need to take money out of the firm. They lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding those firms] wasn't really to make money. The purpose was the excitement of publishing. It's totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or Norton—those are two firms for which what I'm saying doesn't apply—except that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book that becomes a major best-seller, it can't hold on to the author, even if the author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm because he's in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little Grove/Atlantic, they're better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole industry.

J F-A: What has that meant for writers?

GB: It's mainly meant that they've become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is much more seldom with the editor because the editor's position is very precarious. You've already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever: Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now there's no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what's on them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn't know either. The whole climate has changed.

Ferrari-Adler has also interviewed literary agents Molly Friedrich, Nat Sobel and Lynn Nesbit, editors Janet Silver, Pat Strachan and Chuck Adams, plus a host of young editors and agents. Each Q&A is a gem, and their cumulative effect is to transport us to a culture that is every bit as worth preserving and revering as the our rapidly dwindling glaciers and forests.

Richard Curtis

Publishing Glass Half Empty, Half Full? Third Possibility: No Glass At All?

Douglas Rushkoff is author of Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back and he's written a feel-good "Soapbox" guest editorial for Publishers Weekly telling us "why scaling down is good for publishing." I'm not sure the fired, laid-off, and otherwise redundanted victims of last winter's Wednesday of the Long Knives would characterize themselves as joyous forerunners of an upswing in the fortunes of our industry; nor do Rushkoff's opening comments evoke buoyant optimism: "Borders is verging on bankruptcy; Barnes & Noble is closing stores; and major media conglomerates are closing imprints and ejecting talent faster than they gobbled it up in the 1990s."

And how about this passage for making sure we know how dark it has become before the dawn:

Over the past year, we've watched venerable imprints fold into one another and great talent be almost randomly ejected. Knopf's revered name is now subject to the corporate-speak of “Knopf-Doubleday.” HarperCollins created Collins, then crossed it off the spreadsheet, in the process booting Brenda Bowen's children's imprint; one of the most talented publicists in the industry, Larry Hughes; and the brilliant Gillian Blake, whom they had just snatched from Bloomsbury. Doubleday closed Morgan Road and lost an irreplaceable asset: one-woman publishing-powerhouse Amy Hertz.

But if we forcibly restrain cynicism we'll come to his thesis: "While this makes for some bleak headlines in the short term, it bodes well for the future of a publishing industry that operates on a scale more appropriate to the medium we're all creating and selling."

We'll grant him this one: "Publishing is a sustainable industry—and a great one at that. The book business, however, was never a good fit for today's corporate behemoths. The corporations that went on spending sprees in the 1980s and '90s were not truly interested in the art of publishing."

Whether Rushkoff makes the case that the meltdown of the trade book publishing industry is a forerunner of the Age of Aquarius we'll leave to readers of his editorial, We'll Be Back. But some may take exception to his conclusion: "Now that publishing has revealed itself to be a bad growth industry, it is free to rebuild itself as the vibrant, scaled and sustainable business the reading public can support." Even Dr. Pangloss might shrink from such soaring wishful thinking.

All sneering aside, we join the editorialist in hoping that tomorrow will truly be a better day for our poor battered industry.

Richard Curtis

Google Settlement Under Attack for Making Treasure out of Trash

A major literary agency is urging its authors to opt out of the Google settlement. A lawyer is planning to file his opposition to the settlement.

Where were they when, year after year and decade after decade, a treasure house of literary works was abandoned? Along comes Google with a plan to recover those treasures from the trash heap and now those who abandoned them have become passionate bibliophiles. Or have they just become jealous that someone figured out how to make a profit on properties in which they had no interest?

From where I sit it's not about books, it's about money. In the course of rescuing countless works from the public domain and adding value to works that publishers, agents and authors deemed commercially valueless, Google figured out how to monetize those works. And now those selfsame parties want a piece of something they so recently turned their backs on. It reminds me of the oil producers who abandoned tracts because they couldn't get oil from shale. Then someone figured out how to get oil from shale and now the oil companies claim they've been duped.

Perhaps a better analogy is the story of the Little Red Hen. None of her friends - the cat, the duck, the rat - offered to help her to sow the seeds, water the plants, till the soil, pull the weeds, harvest the wheat, thresh the grain, grind the flour or bake the bread. But when the bread was baked, all her friends wanted a piece.

The Little Red Hen said to them, "You shall have no bread." And the moral of this classic childrens tale is that she had every right to say it to them.

So - why do I smell a cat, a duck, and a rat?

Though Google has sown the seeds, watered the plants, tilled the soil, pulled the weeds, harvested the wheat, threshed the grain, ground the flour and baked the bread, it has, after a concerted effort by responsible author and publisher organizations, worked with our community to make sure that everybody gets a piece of bread. But that doesn't seem to be enough for some who have conveniently forgotten who did all the work, invested all the money, developed the technology, and embarked on a stupendous effort to identify the priceless treasures of civilization's literary heritage and see to it that they will never be lost.

Google also did it to make a profit. And for that they are under attack. Forgive me for wondering about the profit motives of these knights who belatedly ride into our midst with flags of righteous indignation unfurled.

Richard Curtis

Cover of The Little Red Hen, Usborne First Reading series,

How Lucky We Are That The Book Business Is Not Like The Movie Business!

Is the book business beginning to feel like the movie business? An article by the New York Times's Michael Cieply might reinforce the similarities.

Cieply reports that, unlike filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino who landed huge studio deals at the Sundance Film Festival, today's aspiring young movie makers have got to finance everything, investing in themselves on the speculation that lightning will strike in the form of financing and distribution by a major studio. As more and more authors throw in the towel in despair of landing a book deal with a big publisher, they are publishing their own books and underwriting every step from editorial to publicity.

Are there other ways to compare Cieply's description of the film industry with the current state of publishing? Let us count them, and to help you, I've taken the liberty of extracting some of Cieply's descriptions and substituting language that might reinforce the idea that New York is a lot closer to L. A. than a five hour flight on the red-eye.

The glory days of independent film [first novels], when hot young directors [authors] like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio [publishing] executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance [Book Expo, Frankfurt] and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers [authors] playing the cool auteur [literary lion] in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker [major New York literary agent].

Here is the new way: filmmakers [authors] doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution [self-publication], marketing films [books] through social networking sites and Twitter blasts [social networking sites and Twitter blasts], putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges [maitre d's] at luxury hotels [chic publishing watering spots] in film festival cities [New York] to get them to whisper into the right ears.

The economic slowdown and tight credit have squeezed the entertainment [book] industry along with everybody else, resulting in significantly fewer big-studio [Big Publishing] films [bestsellers] in the pipeline and an even tougher road for smaller-budget independent [midlist books]. Independent distribution [Independent publishing] companies are much less likely to pull out the checkbook while many of the big studios [publishing houses] have all but gotten out of the indie film [midlist book] business.

Had enough? Oh, come on, how about one more for the road! This time, you fill in the right words:

“Everyone still dreams there’s going to be a conventional sale to a major studio,” said Kevin Iwashina, once an independent-film specialist with the Creative Artists Agency and now a partner at IP Advisors, a film sales and finance consulting company. But, he said, smart producers and directors are figuring out how to tap the value in projects on their own.

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.

Shouldn't Publishers Pay Interest on Late Checks?

It happens every recession.

Anyone who has lived through enough business cycles can predict that whenever there's a downturn in the economy book publishers are going to attempt to cancel contracts on overdue books. You can also bet they're going to step up pressure on authors of overdue books to repay advances issued when they signed contracts. Given the double plunge of the national economy and the trade book business, a story by Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer, Note to Authors: Make Your Deadlines!, comes as no surprise. "Many literary agents are growing increasingly worried that publishers looking to trim their lists will start holding authors to deadlines and using lateness as an occasion to renegotiate advances and, in some cases, terminate contracts altogether," writes Neyfakh.

Authors and agents will ignore Neyfakh's cautionary article at their peril: it is absolutely true that late authors are vulnerable to cancellations and demands for refunds. Though arbitrary or vindictive terminations are rare, a breach of deadline removes an author's most important legal defense against having a late book chopped arbitrarily. And though wholesale cancellations are equally rare, Neyfakh reminds us that the waters are still roiling from HarperCollins's termination of as many as 100 contracts for tardy books back in 1997. Another reason why authors must either deliver their books on time or work out deadline extensions with their editors - and get them in writing.

If you haven't taken these measures, don't despair. There's plenty you can do to defend yourself. This may be a good example of the saying that the best defense is a good offense. A little attitude might make publishers think twice before pulling the plug on the book you've worked on for years - for more years than you contract granted you.

The first thing you need to do remind yourself is that lateness is the medium in which the publishing process is bathed, and publishers are as guilty as authors are. "We breathe late manuscripts and eat late checks and drink late contracts," I observed on one of those occasions that publishers rattled their sabers about coming after delinquent authors.

However dearly publishers would like to turn authors into automatons, the fact is that they are artists, and artists just don't live in the same time zone as the suits who expect their publishing companies to generate the predictable cash flow generated by the pantyhose or shoe store divisions of their global conglomerates. It also behooves publishers to remember that professional authors are proud and conscientious people who would rather take a little extra time to get the work right than to turn in crap on deadline. Nor should it be forgotten that authors are as much motivated by self-interest as publishers are: writers don’t get paid until they deliver their manuscripts. So, publishers can rattle sabers all they want: their book will be turned in when it’s turned in, and if that means a day or week or even a month or longer past deadline, they’ll simply have to grin and bear it.

Whatever the suits might expect, most editors understand that late books are more the rule than the exception, and these men and women are patient, tolerant, resigned and (most of the time) good natured about it. They realize that writers are creative people possessed of a somewhat atrophied internal clock. Writers also have lives to live, and stuff happens to them - the same stuff that happens to editors, except that editors collect their paychecks every week when stuff happens, and authors don't.

For most editors most of the time, a late book isn't the end of the world. Editors are resourceful; a book that falls out of the spring list will, with some muttering and scrambling, be replaced by another. Sure, there’ll be some awkward patches in their catalogs - "Postponed", "Delayed", etc., and some budget considerations will have to be reconfigured - but, short of a late James Patterson or Stephenie Meyer on whose shoulders a year's profit projections rest, few postponements make a dent in a publisher’s bottom line.

Lateness, then, is an understandable and forgivable quality in authors. In publishers, however, it is less excusable. The internal clocks of publishing companies are precisely calibrated – until it comes to paying money to authors. For most trade book houses, the time between the handshake and the arrival of a contract takes several months, as does the time from execution of that contract to the arrival of the advance due on signing. During which time the author is expected to be working in good faith on the manuscript.

Because the editorial departments of publishing companies are usually separated from the accounting departments (they are often located in different states), editors are seldom aware that their author is hurting for money, at least not until some plaintive cry (or homicidal rant or suicide threat) from that author sends them into a frenzy of phone calls and emails to accelerate the check and "walk it through" the corporate precincts. That the author may have been forced to take on other work to boil the pot until the the publisher finally got around to paying up does not always register on editors and their superior officers.

Though delays in processing contracts and payments are the products of normally slow-moving corporate machinery, those delays are sometimes the result of deliberate policies designed to hold onto money as long as possible. And that is simply deplorable, especially these days when the interest to be earned on withheld funds is neglible. I have never known an author to be deliberately late with a book, but I have known many a publisher to be deliberately, or at least suspiciously, late with a check. I have a standing bet with publishers that an author can write a book faster than the publisher can issue a check. Not surprisingly, nobody has taken me up on it.

And so, when publishers start talking about penalizing authors for late manuscripts, I start talking about charging publishers interest for late checks, or withholding the manuscript one week for every week the check is delayed.

Publishing attorneys are scarcely fountainheads of empathy for the hardships of writers and sympathy for the excuses offered by dilatory authors. So, if you don’t think you’re going to make your deadline, negotiate a comfortable contractual extension. And if you’re worried that your publisher is going to pull the plug on your book, it’s a good idea to keep a record of when checks became due and when they were actually received. That way, you have some recourse to fight back or at least plead that your publisher had some responsibility for your delayed book.

Publishers have a great many weapons at their disposal to recoup money paid to authors who fail to deliver their books on time. Contractual language gives them a kind of lien on the sale of the book to another publisher, and it is therefore hard for an author to get away scot-free even if he or she should manage to find another home for the book. Publishers harass authors with demand letters even though everyone knows the authors have long ago spent the money and don't have it to repay. And, though no responsible agent will ever condone it, there is some anecdotal support for the likelihood that if an author strings a publisher out long enough, the demand letters will eventually cease and the matter will fall to the bottom of the publisher's to-do box. For, if the truth be known, publishers realize that it is simply bad public relations to sue an author.

Still, the times being what they are, publishers are much more disposed to give delinquent authors a hard time, and in this regard Neyfakh makes a revealing slip. "Like so many other practices associated with the 'gentleman’s business' that the book business used to be", he writes, "eating advances in the service of good humor has become a luxury most publishers do not indulge in as readily as they once did."

It was not called the gentleman's business, Mr. Neyfakh. It was called the gentleman's profession, and in this incorrect choice of words is all the difference between what publishing was and what publishing has become. But if it truly is a business, publishers need to be more businesslike and pay authors promptly. They might be pleasantly surprised to see the delinquency rate for manuscripts plummet.

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 Observer.

Zap Orwell Today, Zap Freedom Tomorrow? Asks Slate Blogger

A visitor to our website recently posted this comment in connection with what we call The Orwell Kindle Caper:

Yeah, I did not see a big problem here. As long as customers got a refund, no big deal. As far as the possibility of Amazon arbitrarily deleting content they actually had a right to provide in the first place - I don't ever see that happening. They do actually want customers, after all.

Sorry, pal - it's a big deal. There are some who not only think Amazon's ability to reach into customers' Kindles is a big problem, they are genuinely terrified by the prospect of far graver abuses. Because it's not just about taking back our e-books but taking back our fundamental liberties. At least that's the way technology columnist Farhad Manjoo sees it, and he's stated the case with chilling logic in a blog posted on Slate.

Here's Manjoo's position in a nutshell:

"The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That's an awesome power, and Amazon's justification in this instance is beside the point. As our media libraries get converted to 1's and 0's, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.

Manjoo builds on this disturbing premise. Here are a few excerpts to keep you awake tonight:

• "If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you've bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I've predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too."
• "Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren't really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else."
• "In Amazon's view, the books you buy aren't your property—they're part of a "service," and Amazon maintains complete control of that service at all times. Amazon has similar terms covering downloadable movies and TV shows, as does Apple for stuff you buy from iTunes."
• "In The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues that such "tethered" appliances give the government unprecedented power to reach into our homes and change how our devices function."
• "The difference between today's Kindle deletions and yesteryear's banning is that the earlier prohibitions weren't perfectly enforceable."
• "Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely."

"The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely," Manjoo concludes, "is a power no one should have."

Does he have a prescription for reversing this potential erosion of our liberties? "Here's one way around this," he writes. "Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it."

In light of Manjoo's well argued contentions, a threatened class action lawsuit against Amazon reported by Publishers Lunch might bring some of these issues to the forefront of our consciousness.

So yes, faithful correspondent, the Orwell Kindle Caper is indeed a big deal. It's a very, very big deal.

Richard Curtis

When Did "Free" Become a Four Letter Word?

A popular tune reminds us that "The best things in life are free." It lists among other benefits the moon, the stars, the flowers in spring and the robins that sing. Omitted from the lyrics is information, because there are a lot of people who don't think free information is one of the best things in life. In fact "Free" has become one of the nastier four-letter words in the English language, or at least one of the most controversial.

Two authors, Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow, have invested a good deal of their time (and ours) attempting to redefine free, not merely as an abstract concept but as a template for action. I'll state my view upfront: I agree with economist Milton Friedman who said "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Free always has a price, and anyone who believes otherwise will end up either paying it or sticking someone else with the bill. I will even go so far as to say this is an immutable law.

But read on and judge for yourself.

As digital media mature and the financial stakes in the e-book industry soar on a double-digit trajectory, a task force of businesspeople, entrepreneurs and managers, backed by righteously indignant writers, musicians and artists is confronting a generation of Web users that stubbornly refuses to pay for content.

Some members of this generation grew up with a strong sense of entitlement; some simply have little or no comprehension of copyright; still others, taking Robin Hood as their role model, deliberately and defiantly hack protected files or download pirated content to get around the law, asserting their right to liberate it from capitalist exploiters. And still others are, simply, thieves. They all march under the banner "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE" or sport the "Copyleft" symbol displayed here (I'm not sure if Copyleft is copyrighted). Media news reports daily clashes with content providers tired of seeing the fruits of their creativity dissipated, given away or stolen.

The slogan, the movement and the tension between free and commercial date back to the dawn of the modern computer era, indeed to the dawn of copyright protection itself when the conflict between content creators and legitimate users (like scholars) was resolved in a complex body of law that governs intellectual property rights to this day.

Standing between these clashing armies is a contingent of men and women dedicated to understanding the relationship between content given away and content sold. Their observations - some scientific, some anecdotal - have begun to yield some thought-provoking hypotheses that might shape e-business strategies in the next generation. Few of them have as much to say as Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and bestselling author of The Long Tail. Anderson's book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, has just been published, and an interview with him conducted by Publishers Weekly's Andrew Richard Albanese reveals just how complex the word - and the concept - is. Free, Anderson states, is "a word with economic, psychological, historical meaning, a word with incredible misunderstanding and paradoxical diversions in definition."

The first thing that strikes you about the book's title is its subtitle. Free is a price? That's hard enough to absorb, but free as a radical price is a real head-scratcher.

Anderson says the definition of free as the opposite of paid is an artificial one. If it were not, how do we explain that people are making money giving products and services away? The answer is to view free as adding value to products that are offered for sale. We've often referred to the Gillette Razor model of giving away the razor but selling the blades. That concept can be applied to just about any product or service, and indeed that's just what is happening. Anderson employs a word we've heard a lot of lately, "freemium," meaning "using free to market paid." The biggest misunderstanding of my work," he tells Publishers Weekly, "is that I believe everything should be free. Not the case! Free should be a price point in the marketplace, but the free stuff should market the paid stuff. "

You would think so. But as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his review of the book in The New Yorker, "...in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.

"Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other."

In other words, free is simply the glamorous side of capitalism that we prefer to see. But it's really an illusion. In capitalism as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you're getting something free, someone else is paying for it.

Another name heard most frequently in connection with free is Cory Doctorow, the Canadian science fiction author, blogger and (depending on which side of the controversy you're on) either a hero or a subversive. His articulate efforts to shake up the traditional publishing establishment have placed him on the leading edge of the digital paradigm shift. By putting his money where his mouth is he has singlehandedly altered our thinking about what works and what no longer works in the book industry.

Doctorow's latest experimental venture exemplifies his philosophy. According to Locus, the trade publication of the fantasy and science fiction world, Doctorow's latest short story collection, A Little Help, will be self-published in at least four different editions: "A free Creative Commons-licensed online edition in various formats; a free audio-book 'featuring high-quality readings by a variety of voice-actor friends'; a print-on-demand trade paperback with five variant covers; and a limited edition hardcover to be sold in the $100-$250 range'...in batches of 10. The hardcover will feature bound-in SD cards or USB sticks including the e-book and audiobooks, and unique-to-each-volume endpapers made of signed and annotated paper ephemera by Doctorow's writer friends," Locus reports.

He will also produce a "super-premium" edition of one copy, including a story written specifically for the purchaser, for $10,000 (don't bother, it's already sold!). He will offer custom editions for conferences and other events with cover art of the organization's choice, for a premium price. He will donate 10% of income from the book to Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the licensed sharing of creative works.

"There're plenty of reasons to do this," says Doctorow, "but for me, the most interesting one is the ability to empirically test some of the oft- bandied hypotheses about 21st century publication, the spectrum that runs from 'Self-publication is a narcissistic money-pit that absorbs your time and money without returning as much as a real publishing deal could' to 'Publishers are obsolete dinosaurs and writers can do just as well going it alone.'"

Though some of this sounds positively Marxo-communo-anarcho-iconoclasto (Wikipedia says his parents were Trotskyist activists and he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and Greenpeace as a child), we cannot overlook the good old capitalistic enterprise underlying his experiment. By interweaving free and paid - freemium - Cory Doctorow is the poster child for Chris Anderson's theories.

Richard Curtis

Can't Sue for Libel in US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World

Next time you visit London, if you have an hour or two after visiting London Bridge, Westminster Palace and Big Ben, drop by a solicitor's office and sue someone for libel. It will more than pay for the cost of your vacation.

When you do, you'll be participating in the blood sport known as libel tourism, a legal ploy so appalling that victims have described it as a form of terrorism.

What's it all about? "Unlike in the United States, where plaintiffs have to prove that the defendant's statement is willfully false and defamatory," writes Salil Tripathi in Wall Street Journal Europe, "the burden of proof is reversed in Britain. According to U.K. libel laws, the plaintiff has to show only that the statement harms his reputation -- which is the case with almost any accusation, true or false. It is the defendant who must then prove that his allegations were not libelous."

Because of this radical difference between the British (guilty until proven innocent) and American (innocent until proven guilty) approaches to libel, American authors and publishers and their lawyers have deliberately withheld UK publication rights to many books that might give offense to rich and/or powerful persons or entities that might bring a lawsuit in a British court. If you have any doubts that this is a sword hanging over the neck of every author and journalist, some examples will erase them. You can find them in Tripathi's article or this one in the New York Times, Britain, a destination for "libel tourism" by Doreen Carvajal.

If you're wondering why I've refrained from identifying the plaintiffs it's because, frankly, I'm afraid of being sued. This blog is read worldwide and it's all too likely that some litigious bastard who objects to being called - well, a litigious bastard - would take offense and haul me into a British court, tie me up for years and bankrupt me with legal bills (including the plaintiff's) and damages.

So, you see, this cruel, stupid and toxic provision of English law has done its job on me, just as it will do on you should you venture over the line. And what does "venture over the line" mean? It means that if even a single copy of your US edition finds its way to English soil, you're potentially liable.

Recently, two New York State officials proposed a bill that would render foreign libel judgments unenforceable "unless," as it was reported, "the country in which they are made had free speech protections similar to the First Amendment." And the New York Times ran an editorial supporting such a measure. "If authors believe they are too vulnerable," the editorial concluded, "they may be discouraged from taking on difficult and important topics, like terrorism financing, or from writing about wealthy and litigious people. That would not only be bad for writers, it would be bad for everyone."

The citizens of our nation have made terrible sacrifices, include the shedding of their blood, to defend our Constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech. That a foreign country, let alone the very one in which the foundations of democracy were forged, could have a license to reach into our homes and workplaces and deprive us of our most sacred right is intolerable and unconscionable. I wish I could say it is also unimaginable, but in fact this outrage is being perpetrated on our countrymen - on your fellow authors - as I write this. Every writer, agent and publisher organization must combat it. The British laws that foster this disgrace must be repealed. What is the Authors Guild, the American Publishers Association, the Association of Authors' Representatives, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN and other rights organizations doing about it?

Richard Curtis

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

Is Gazing at Your Blackberry Grounds for Divorce?

Let's test your RQ - your rudeness quotient. On a scale of 1= No Problem and 10=Hanging at Dawn Without Benefit of a Trial, rate the following:

• You go to a business lunch and your dining companion puts a BlackBerry on the table and checks it compulsively throughout the meal.
• While you're conducting a seminar you notice that half the attendees are staring at smartphones and some are working them with their thumbs.
• You're out on a date and you reach out to grasp your lover's hand, but there's a cell phone in it.
• Your wife is discussing resort plans for your second honeymoon. She asks you something important. You ask her to repeat what she said because you were too absorbed checking fantasy baseball scores on your Palm Pre.
• The bored concertgoer beside you is checking his email during a tender pianissimo passage of your favorite symphony.

These vignettes exemplify an evolving crisis in etiquette prompted by a new generation of smartphones and other handheld communication devices. New York Times reporter Alex Williams has chronicled the challenge of holding the social fabric together while gamers, bloggers, tweeters, and email checkers succumb to the temptation, if not the compulsion, to indulge their private pursuits in public.

Obviously your RQ depends on which side of the device you're on. "A spirited debate about etiquette has broken out" Williams writes. "Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril." Like it or not, the field is tilting in the direction of the techno-evangelists. Williams reports that a third of some 5300 workers pulled by a job listings website said "they frequently checked e-mail in meetings." However, out of those that do, "Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices."

You may be lucky to get away with mere castigation. Employees have been fired when caught using their device frivolously. Business leaders instruct attendees to turn off all electronic devices at meetings on pain of ostracism or worse, and visitors to President Obama's Oval Office are required to leave their BlackBerrys with his secretary (though its well known the President himself is addicted to his). Fistfights have broken out in theaters over cellphones ringing at critical moments in a performance.

And inappropriate use of a device can be fatal. A growing number of car crashes involved drivers talking on cellphones or looking at text message screens, and these practices are being banned in several states. A fatal train accident in California was traced to the engineer's being distracted by text messages.

And concentration on the screen of your gadget instead of the eyes of your beloved is wreaking havoc in relationships and can contribute to breaking up. On the other hand, if you're determined to break up with someone, a cell phone can come in handy. A Malaysian government official notified his wife that he was divorcing her - via cell phone. (An Islamic court overruled him, but nice try, huh?)

You can read both sides of the debate in Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners. Then let's review the score on our RQ quiz. How'd you do?

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.

Authors: Are Your Readers Zoning Out on You? It May Not Be Your Fault

Like many publishing professionals I've trained myself to step outside of my mind while I read a manuscript and monitor the intensity of my involvement in the work. In a perfect reading experience my disbelief, in the famous phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, will be willingly suspended from beginning to end and I will never become conscious that there is a world outside of the one I am reading about. Unfortunately, perfect reading experiences are as rare as perfect experiences in every other field of endeavor.

And so, sooner or later as I turn the pages of a manuscript, I will become aware of a police siren or the sound of a television program in the next room, and the spell of the book I'm reading will be broken. If it's a good book I'll plunge back in and soon lose myself again. If it isn't, my monitor will sound with growing frequency. I will make a mental note of the places where my attention flagged so that I can help the author analyze where he or she lost me.

Non-professional readers - the public at large, that is - may not have the same powers of self-observation, but they have little trouble speaking up when a book fails to hold their attention. "Boring." "Couldn't finish it." "Put it down, never picked it up again."

In most cases the responsibility for failure to keeping readers interested rests with the author. But not always. An article by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine informs us that distractability is far more normal than we may realize. Zimmer cites an experiment conducted by a team of University of California Santa Barbara psychologists led by Jonathan Schooler. The test had to do with a book, and not just any book: "In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opeing chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wantered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session."

Wandering minds are one things, but zoning out completely is quite another. Here's what Schooler and his colleagues discovered:

"Schooler and Smallwood, along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia, tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym. As people were reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked their state of attentiveness. Just 30 percent of the people who were zoning out at the key moments could give the villain’s pseudonym, while 61 percent of the people who weren’t zoning out at those moments succeeded."

One of the most striking discoveries repoat imbibing a moderate amount of alcohol actually sharpened concentration. However, before you reach for the vodka bottle, note that there is evidence that a wandering mind offers many significant benefits. "The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks," Zimmer explains. "One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals."

"The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future."

So, next time you find your mind drifting off while reading a book, it is appropriate for you to ask yourself whether it's the author's fault for failing to keep you involved; or is it, rather, just you reflecting on a matter of great importance or solving a problem you couldn't master before you started reading.

For the full story, read Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Discover magazine.

Losing Bidder in Cheney Book Auction Offers Advice to Winner Matalin

Ms. Mary Matalin
Threshold Editions
c/o Simon & Schuster

Dear Mary Matalin:

Richard Curtis here, CEO of E-Reads, the publishing company that made what we thought was an irresistible offer to Dick Cheney to publish his book. In case you missed our proposal you may read it here.

But I don't want to sound like a sore loser. If I had to lose a bidding war, I'm relieved it's to you. I was terrified it might end up with Harper, who would probably do the same kind of trashy treatment they did for Peggy Noonan's The Case Against Hillary Clinton, with those made-up internal monologues and transcriptions of speeches Hillary never made. At least I can be confident that your approach to the Cheney book will be utterly responsible, something along the lines of your superb editorial job on Jerome Corsi's The Obama Nation.

You described that book as "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that," and I could not agree more. Your impeccable vetting of Barack Obama's extensive connections with Islam and radical politics, his Communist and socialist mentors, his close associations with members of the Weather Underground, his involvement in the slum-landlord empire of a notorious Chicago political fixer - well, Mary (if I may), reading that meticulously documented work was an inspiring reminder of why I went into the publishing business.

Nevertheless, I hope you will not be afraid to be stern in your dealings with Cheney. If there's one thing I know about him, it's that he has the utmost respect for those who hold people's feet to the fire.

I realize that my role as underbidder for the Cheney book does not entitle me to any special consideration. Nevertheless, I am happy to share with you some of the suggestions I made to Mr. Cheney in my original pitch to him, and I hope you'll adopt them. For what it's worth, here's what I think Cheney needs to discuss to make this book a blockbuster international bestseller:

• How he helped President Bush to deceive Congress and the American people into buying into a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraq government under Saddam Hussein
• How he misrepresented available intelligence
• How he outed covert intelligence officer Valerie Plame and got his Chief of Staff Scooter Libby to take the fall
• How he steered no-bid government contracts to Halliburton, a company in which he has a multimillion dollar interest that has appreciated by thousands of percent since the war began
• How he undermined the Constitution
• How he suspended the right of Habeas Corpus
• How he subverted the rule of law
• How he instituted secret wiretapping and email monitoring of American citizens
• How he scammed America's allies with Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction"
• How he created a secret cabal of oil and other energy lobbyists
• How he sent thousands of young men and women to death and maiming in the prosecution of a "phony" war whose real goal was to exploit Middle East oil
• How he leveraged his office to create a policy of torture and brutality
  

Do these correspond to your own ideas? Have I missed anything?

Also, since it's no longer of any use to us, I might as well give you the title that we'd planned to put on the book had we won the auction:

GO FUCK YOURSELF
My Life in High Crimes and Misdemeanors
by Dick Cheney

What do you think, Mary? Is that a winning title or what?

I invite you to reply to this open letter and I promise to promote your response in the widest public forum.

Yours truly,

Richard Curtis
President and CEO
E-Reads

Should Bookstores Be Publishers Too?

Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs write in Time magazine about our love-hate relationship with Amazon. Their conclusion? It depends on who's doing the loving and who's doing the hating. Defining Amazon is about as easy for us as defining the elephant was for the blind monks of Chinese legend. Time succinctly states the case:

"Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it's hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza."

As if all that were not enough, Amazon has now become a publisher, too. First, there's its Encore program "whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers."

Amazon has also put its print on demand division into play in the form of a service called CreateSpace aimed at self-published authors.

Most significantly, Amazon has begun to publish mainstream authors, notably Stephen King, recently engaged to write an original story for the Kindle.

For publishers the thought of Amazon becoming a competitor in their own space is their worst nightmare come true. As Time puts it, "If Amazon is a bookstore, it's supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right?"

You got that right, Time! However, before we get out our pitchforks and start baying "Restraint of trade!" at Amazon you need to be reminded that it is not the only book retail behemoth that is also a publisher. Let's look at Barnes & Noble.

At the beginning of 2003 Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling Publishing, described at the time as "one of the top 25 publishers in America and the industry's leading publisher of how-to books." Publishers were gravely concerned and with every reason. Barnes & Noble's own titles were like a supermarket's house brand, often undercutting the prices of outside purveyors. Their anxieties were well founded. On many occasion, when I pitched a nonfiction book at a publisher, the editor would tell me to forget about it, Barnes & Noble already had such a book and the new one could never match the house-brand's low retail price.

The case against bookstores becoming publishers was stated so cogently by Morris Rosenthal that I reproduce it in full below. Though written four years ago as a followup to Barnes & Noble's acquisition of Sterling, it is word-for-word valid for Amazon as well and should serve as a chilling cautionary tale for all book industry watchers:

Monday, July 25, 2005
Sterling Publishing and Barnes & Noble Books

Barnes & Noble bought Sterling Publishing a little over 3 years ago, and publishing has been a rapidly growing segment of Barnes & Noble's strategy ever since. Sterling has over 5,000 titles in print and is adding about 1100 annually, primarily in the How-To area. Barnes & Noble also acquires books from other publishers, such as the "in easy steps" computer series from U.K's Computer Step publishers, and Barnes & Noble also publishes an extensive backlist of out-of-print and out-of-copyright classics. According to their annual 10K filing, Barnes & Noble also "commissions books directly from authors" and "creates collections of fiction and non-fiction using in-house editors." All of this shapes up as good business for Barnes & Noble, but doesn't cheer most self publishers.

The reason has to do with shelf spaces and market saturation. Barnes & Noble is the dominant bookstore chain in the country, and they have a good record of working with small publishers when it comes to in-store events and stocking titles. However, as their annual report points out - "Each Barnes & Noble store stocks from 60,000 to 200,000 titles, of which approximately 50,000 titles are common to all stores." For the true super stores which stock 200,000 titles (though I suspect they may have meant "books" rather than "titles") that leaves a lot of room for regional or independent books, but the smaller stores seem to do an excellent job stocking the Barnes & Noble published books (and they'd be nuts not to), so it's a scary thing for a small nonfiction publisher to find that a Barnes & Noble imprint is publishing a competing title.

Barnes & Noble now has some 10,000 books in print, and they tend to be lower priced than the competing titles, which while great for customers (vertical supply chain) doesn't make publishers very enthusiastic. I seem to recall Steve Riggio saying last year that they were targeting 10% of book sales as self-published by Barnes & Noble. I also seem to remember him saying three or four years ago that they were targeting 5%, so it stands to reason if they reach 10%, they'll up the ante again.

With half their books coming from their Sterling subsidiary which specializes in how-to, and a good chunk of the remaining half also in the how-to segment, it's safe to assume that how-to publishers are at the greatest risk for the time being. The how-to emphasis makes sense, since Barnes & Noble can easily track which titles are doing well throughout their chain, than commission or acquire similar titles. They don't need to be huge sellers, the acquisition cost for a commissioned book is pretty low (lots of hungry writers out there) and the guaranteed shelf space makes a large first print run, which combined with the lack of middlemen, makes the low pricing possible. If I was in the process of setting up a new imprint to publish nonfiction, I would look long and hard at my business model and focus on titles I felt would do especially well on Amazon or independent stores, as opposed to making plans based on the whole market.

Richard Curtis

Asked to Donate Work for Nothing, Artists Flip Google the Bird

"I should do a freebie for Google? What's the matter, do they have a tin cup and an eye patch on the street? F**K NO!"

Though none of the artists solicited to donate their work for nothing to Google Chrome actually said that, they might well have paraphrased Harlan Ellison's foaming-at-the-mouth rant against Warner Bros. and all other corporate patrons that think they're doing writers and artists a favor by displaying their work.

Canadian-based illustrator Gary Taxali's written response to Google was slightly more printable than Ellison's, but the writer would certainly agree with the graphic one issued by the artist (left). Here's what Taxali had to say:

DON’T CALL ME
In the last little while, there has been a MAJOR backslide in the industry. Poor rates have been an issue for a while but things are becoming worse. Clients fees are getting even lower and the rights theyre demanding are even higher.

You want examples? How about SWATCH calling me and asking me to design a watch. They wanted a complete transfer of copyright for a paltry fee. As if thats going to happen. Google calls me and wants my work for their new search engine all over the web, the fee? Nothing. Editorial clients are slashing 1999s fees almost in half and citing the bad economy as an excuse. You know what? My excuse is that the economy is bad so you have to pay me MORE for an illustration. Hows that for an economic stimulus package?

So heres to every client with shitty fees and terms. Do not waste my time or contact me. I am very busy working with clients who respect artists and youre wasting my time with your solicitations. So for you, I give you a special salute that I hope will keep you away because I dont need your work.

According to Andrew Adam Newman writing in the New York Times about the Taxali-inspired uprising, his posting on Drawger "drew more than 200 responses, many from other illustrators who also had rejected Google’s offer." Newman quotes another illustrator, Brian Stauffer, who also turned Google down. “When a company like Google comes out very publicly and expects that the market would just give them free artwork, it sets a very dangerous precedent.”

Sadly, there are plenty of artists who need the exposure and will take Google up on its offer.

And of course, Google may feel it needs an eye patch and tin cup. It only squeaked by the first quarter of 2009 with a $1.42 billion profit.

You can read the whole story in Newman's Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google. You can also Catch a snatch of Ellison's fulmination on YouTube and buy it online.

Richard Curtis
This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.

A Google-Fu Master Unlocks the Wall Street Journal. Or, How I Know Subscription Model Won't Work for Online News

Though I possess the technical skill of a herring I easily accessed the text of a Wall Street Journal article that the newspaper's website requires a subscription to read in its entirety. In the hope of saving the news gathering industry a lot of grief and money I'm going to tell them how I did it. And in the hope of saving the news gathering industry, period, I'm going to urge them to seek a different business model than one that prohibits readers from reading complete stories unless they become subscribers. You might as well try to carry water in a sieve.

It started with an item on a British website called Book Trade News, to which I have a free subscription. Every day or so the site emails me a digest of book industry-related stories, some of which I select as possibly blogworthy.

Today I received the following item: S&P Cuts Bertelsmann Ratings On Debt Levels, Ad Woes. The subhead was: Ratings closer to junk territory. If anything is blogworthy, the reduction of Bertelsmann's Standard & Poor ratings to near-junk certainly is.

To follow up on this intriguing hint, I clicked on the hotlink that took me to Book Trade News's website. There I found this short abstract:

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services cut its ratings on international media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG closer to junk territory, saying declining advertising will hurt results this year.

The rating agency also noted Europe's largest media company's leverage is high for its rating level, BBB.

The abstract was followed by a hotlink to the source of the story, "Wall Street Journal item". I clicked on it and got the same tease followed by a hotlink that said, "To continue reading, subscribe now". When I clicked on it, I was taken to a page offering various subscription packages and their costs.

Okay, fair enough. But I wondered if I could get around the requirement to subscribe. Out of curiosity I copied the opening sentence of their teaser, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit "Enter". It took me (in 0.26 seconds) to a page of Google listings: the very first item displayed was the exact same opening line of the Journal story. I clicked on it and was taken to the wsj.com page. There I found the complete text I was looking for, but it was overlaid with graphic material that appeared to be intended to block my reading or copying. Now what?

Determined, I highlighted the entire page, copied it and pasted it into a Word document. The junk that had obscured my view disappeared and the text came out clean, legible and - free!

To make sure this wasn't a fluke, later in the day I tried it again. This time Google took me to the same wsj.com page but without the garbage: the complete and unabridged story (actually a Dow Jones item) stared me in the face. I did not have to pay a dime to subscribe.

You can read the Bertelsmann story in its entirety by clicking on the above hotlink.. But that's not the point. Here's the point: as passionately as we all long to see the newspaper and magazine industries survive, I'm skeptical that restricting stories to subscribers will work. As much as I hate the Information Wants to Be Free concept, it's unrealistic to think that information can be withheld from determined seekers. All the more dismaying is that an apparently secure system yielded to a complete amateur. Yielded, in fact, with scarcely any resistance at all.

My technical guru has since informed me that the procedure I instinctively followed is called Google-Fu, which Chris Perillo defines as “the ability to quickly answer any given question using internet resources, such as a search engine. It’s a Zen concept, if you will. The better and faster you become at finding the right answers quickly online, the higher your 'Google-Fu rating'”. Check out his video explanation of the term to a chat-room caller.

Here's the bottom line: information must either be locked up behind an unassailable firewall or we have to find a different way to monetize it. Armed with nothing but my trusty mouse, I laid siege to the Journal's firewall and it came tumbling down in moments.

I'm no Houdini, but at least I can now run with with the geeks. When they ask me what was my finest hack, I'll shrug modestly and say, "Wall Street Journal. Yeah, I Google-Fu'd it. Piece of cake."

Richard Curtis

Pondering Google EBooks: Ex Nebulae Libri

For years I’ve wanted to do ebooks served efficiently from the cloud and I'm glad Google is finally implementing it with bravado, but I think publishers need to be aware that Google’s plans could have some serious implications for their content in the long run. How will customers use it? What will publishers have to do to compete in a space where Google is both the most popular search engine and a retailer? Do the other retailers who rely on searches or who pay for ad space with Google see it as a conflict of interest? And how do we as a publisher use this effectively to distinguish our needles in the haystack?

Recently, publishing guru Mike Shatzkin began talking about his project to chart the constantly developing ebook space as it relates to all the current devices, including the necessary software, supported formats, and retailers. Google is joining this grid in a big way. I’ll be very interested to see how he lines up all these new and old platforms, particularly if he starts to rank them in terms of profitability based on royalty rates and returns. But Shatzkin has also been making some excellent points that relate to how publishers see this space, namely that the continuing format and device wars make the role of publishers just as important as ever. “The more complicated this world becomes,” he says, “the more an author will need a professional organization.” I understand this because every day at E-Reads we channel our expertise to tailor authors’ content to fit what formats customers are asking for, and they continue to ask for plenty of options.

Google’s ebook sales channel will be the latest flavor. As Google prepares to enter the market, I’ve been wondering if there’s going to be any negative impact on other format sales or if there's going to be trouble with Cloud City. It’s hard to say until we've seen what Google finally brings out. Google will be doing a multifaceted delivery to many devices and future APIs. And the Google ebook platform doesn’t just allow publishers to monetize, it’s even open to author-bloggers. It’s the overdue advent of a paid premium text content system. As competition to services like Scribd, it's going to be easier than ever for the average person or company to set a price on written content they might have given away in the past, and to compete with traditional publishers.

As Shatzkin and the New York Times have pointed out, Google isn’t really aiming to sell files as much as they will be selling online access to ebooks and texts they’ve inventoried for their popular search engine. In that way, if your device can access Google on the net (iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) you’ll be able to read premium content from your Google book shelf. Future web-applications might even be able to filter and reuse the Google-served content (with permission, of course), and deliver texts in ways we can't even imagine today.

Publishers will do very well in adopting Google as a sales partner for their content, providing they accept that this is a pivotal development that requires them to pay much more attention to marketing etext (both books and snippets, content integrated into different hashes) in the future. This is a natural evolution that coincides with the rise of social data increasingly being served from the cloud and the pressure Google faces to create a semantic Web 3.0 experience that can analyze data more effectively, particularly in valuable resources like books, and serve it up in new ways. And those new ways are going to make the retail space for etexts much more interesting in the coming years.

So what’s to worry about?

For the last few years, Google's business practice has been to take advantage of digitized books to extend the web's reference material, and thus add value to their searches and databases (not without some hiccups). Publishers were happy to see that it was driving sales for print and ebooks at retailers like Amazon. It was a means to an end at another location. But when Google starts merchandizing their data cache of library books and publisher content, publishers will have to work harder to make their content stand out at Google's site, especially older books, to make their upkeep worthwhile financially, seeing as it might be the only stop customers need anymore.

I’m sure Amazon is worried on our behalf. Despite appealing to publishers with a low discount rate, Google sees themselves as retailer agnostic, a mere stepping stone to helping customers get to the content they want, and so in some ways they’ve hobbled Google Books from being too competitive against the other players. You see, like Scribd, for the time being it’s not the best-looking presentation of material that publishers can ask for when you compare it to some of the better formats. I don’t think Google wants to dry up all the other format sales initially. But they may be devaluing the content anyway, unintentionally.

Books Still Need Packaging

Google wants to aggregate literature, which is traditionally stand-alone content, into fast-served web content and that can devalue the market value of authors' full length literary work. If you just want the words, why pay for bells and whistles? A library doesn't need curb appeal, right?

Customers are increasingly attracted to biting off smaller chunks of written content if the opportunity is presented to them. That's not to say that truncated and abridged versions are what people prefer to read, but I think eventually serving books from the cloud will allow Google to break up book content for micro sales, which is what publisher ebook services like LibreDigital have been anticipating. What if you only need the third chapter of a Malcolm Gladwell book? As it already stands, Google makes it easy to filter the content you need from the chaff, and now they'll sell it to you.

The cloud methodology of serving and selling books will further blur the lines about what a “book” really is. Is it just a lump sum of accessed words? Where’s the sense of unified aesthetic package? Long stories, novels and reference books without packaging don't compete for attention and pageviews well against attractive blogs, wikis, or streamed video, but book fragments and book widgets will be increasingly competitive. Google Books’ search tools already fragment the larger texts so that customers can quickly access relevant material. Google sees the web as a big haystack for which they map the way to your specific needle. It used to be that most publishers thought they were selling more than just another needle for the haystack.

I wonder how self-aware Google is that they are working at effacing the relevance of a "book" by supplanting it with data nodes on the Internet. Is Google Reader an adequate way to present long-form material and give it the luster it deserves? Publishers need to decide if they are sacrificing too much of the quality in a reading experience just to fit this new format. It's something I already worry about with ebooks on successful platforms like the Kindle and Sony.

You’re Now Shopping, Not Searching

It used to be that shopping was not analogous to web searching, but the future wants it to be. Does Google expect small publishers to start treating ebook content as if it deserves Google marketing ad words? This is money that large publishers know how to spend for traditional marketing, but it's more nebulous when it means spending money to distinguish older, backlist content. It doesn't look worthwhile at this point, but to protect the relevance of the material (even novels) at Google, publishers will have to adopt new strategies, including even more efforts at advertiser sponsorship. Widgets and viral campaigns aren't enough. Pushing content into Google and various ebook formats can't remain a relatively passive activity for too much longer: ebooks will need more of their own marketing.

But even when Google directs potential customers to premium content successfully, most people will look for alternatives where they don't have to pay. That's the nature of the web. Pirate material and advertiser sponsored Freemiums. Today you can pay $1.99 for the TV episode on iTunes or watch it for free with Hulu. Hulu wins.

Maybe the time for integrating books into the Internet is overdue, but it's divesting old social structures of their roles in book sales. The internet has increasingly been jeopardizing the influence of print culture, shaping a new discourse of short and snappy bite size reading experiences. Or maybe this is the happy start to a better future. Either way, publishers have their work cut out for them. Luckily, there are two strong groups who are proactively supporting publishers. First, public libraries are adopting ebook technology and are contributing to the ebook landscape in their efforts to survive the paradigm shift. And the IDPF has been helping publishers to rally around an open standards future with the ePub format. The increasing pervasiveness of the ePub format at retail points will be important for customers once the competition among devices and sales channels really heats up. After PDF, with all its limitations, the ePub format is the best-looking and most future-proof format you can buy.

And even the iPhone is demonstrating that users still choose to have it both ways: old-school (long form ebooks) and new school (short-form cloud-served micro content). Thanks to strong support from graphically inclined developers, iPhone ebook apps allow publisher content to flourish a bit better as “books,” especially titles that can sell themselves as stand-alone applications (such as with Iceberg Reader). These ebook apps set themselves apart and overcome the bias against long form content with excellent graphic presentation, and appear "special" to the readers and customers, and all this distinguishes the content much better. And that’s what matters to a publisher. Its why many of us love what we do. We strive to distinguish good content as a relevant experience for readers.

Michael Gaudet

Shed a Tear for Franklin Electronics

My eyes moistened when I read that Franklin Electronic Publishers had been acquired by an investment company. The company played a significant role in my life and more importantly, in the histories of both the computer and book industries. In fact, it is not hyperbole to say that today's computer business would be radically different if a lawsuit brought against Franklin by Apple had had a different outcome.

The first electronic book I ever beheld was Franklin's Spelling Ace. Produced in 1986, the palmtop device, as they were then called, enabled users to type a word phonetically ("fonetiklee") on its keyboard and the Ace would display the correctly spelled word on its liquid crystal screen. It also intoned the word aloud in a lugubrious computer voice. My young son took great delight in typing in the clinical words for sex organs, then repeatedly hitting the voice function command at dinner parties.

Franklin launched its business in the early 1980s with the Franklin Ace 100 and 1000, clones of the Apple's Series II and II+ computers right down to Apple's ROMs. Franklin's justification for copying the software was that that because Apple's computer code was contained on a read-only memory rather expressed in a "fixed medium", as defined in the US Copyright Law of the time, it could not be copyrighted. Franklin also argued that Apple's operating system programs really constituted ideas. Copyright laws do not protect ideas, only the explicit expression of ideas such as novels, screenplays, musical composition and paintings, can be protected.

Not surprisingly. Apple took exception and sued. And even though Franklin freely admitted it had copied Apple's ROM and OS codes, Franklin won. Again, not surprisingly, Apple appealed. As Rob Hassett explained in his summary of the court's decision, in order to have a fighting chance to win its appeal, Apple had to stretch the definition of "idea". The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals listened to Apple's contention that programs coded in machine language and contained on a ROM chip were copyrightable. The court concurred with Apple's arguments and decided that, in Hassett's words, "the general function of translating source code into object code qualifies as an idea." The lower court's decision was reversed in Apple's favor.

The implications and precedents for the burgeoning computer industry were incalculable and resonate to this day.

Franklin also released a line of IBM compatible computers, but in time Apple edged Franklin out of the desktop business. The firm subsequently focused on its core competence, handhelds (dictionaries, thesauruses, language translators, Bibles, e-books), where it held its own until a new generation of portable e-books drove its stock down to $1.00 and ownership into the arms of a company called Saunders Acquisition Corp. Two days later Franklin announced it had lost $6.5 million in its fourth fiscal quarter.

***********************************

It was over Franklin's palmtop Bible that the first shot was fired in what was to become a rights war between the trade book industry and the author and agent community. And I believe I may have been the first agent to detect the muzzle flash.

Sometime early in the 1990s I was reviewing the contract boilerplate for a book I had sold to G. P. Putnam when my eye fell on an unfamiliar provision. It was titled "Display Rights." I had no idea what it meant. But whatever it meant, one thing was clear: display rights belonged to the publisher. I picked up the phone and called Phyllis Grann, then Putnam's chief executive. "We saw this electronic Bible at a trade show," she explained. "It's amazing. You type in 'meek' and it takes you right to the passage in the Bible! We're not sure how it works, but we're pretty sure it has to do with information storage and retrieval. So we decided to lock those rights into our contract language. I hope it's okay with you."

Well, it wasn't. But after my agent colleagues and I reviewed the boilerplates of Putnam and its Big Publishing colleagues, it was clear they held the high ground. Every one of them had some version of information storage and retrieval rights to the books they published. Though storage of information on computers was well advanced by the late 1980s (computers had guided humans to the moon some twenty years earlier) and the concept of hypertext had been promulgated in the early 1970s, the notion of a book stored, delivered and read on a computer was pretty much restricted to science fiction. Indeed, the term "cyberbooks" had been coined as the title of a scifi novel of the same name by Ben Bova published by Tor.

It took a while for the agents to grasp the significance of information storage and retrieval as it applied to book contracts. A critically important aspect was how to define "out of print". Defining it was hard enough before computers because of vague language in publishing contracts about "term of copyright". But the introduction of computers raised the possibility that the mere storage of a book in a publisher's memory bank would entitle the publisher to keep the rights in perpetuity.

Aggressive lobbying on the part of agent and author organizations eventually forced publishers to rule out memory storage as their definition of "in print".

Some ten years or so would pass after the debut of Franklin's "palmtops" before the next milestone on the e-book road appeared in the form of the Rocket Book, and yet another decade before the Sony and Kindle jolted the publishing industry into the modern e-book era. But it all started with the humble little Franklin e-Bible that a Putnam executive played with at a trade show.

Richard Curtis

You Can Google Bing, But Will You Bing Google?

Though he was the perpetrator of one of history's most heinous frauds, Charles Ponzi's swindle failed to gain him admission into one of humankind's most elite clubs. For "Ponzi" has never achieved higher status than that of mere adjective - as modifier of the noun "scheme." To gain admission to the lexicographical Olympus, his crime would have had to be so colossal that his name became a verb. The laurels for that achievement, like so many other dubious honors he has garnered, belong to Bernard Madoff. His scheme attains the distinction of becoming a verb, both transitive (to madoff) and intransitive (to be madoffed).

Even such distinguished brand names as Kleenex, Band-Aid and Frigidaire have been excluded from this pantheon. We do not Kleenex a nose, Band-Aid a wound, or Frigidaire a bottle of milk. But Madoff's notoriety entitles him to hobnob with the likes of Xerox and TiVo and...let's see, have I forgotten any others?

Ah yes. Google.

These ruminations were stimulated by an article in the New York Times by Miguel Helft about Microsoft's efforts to produce a search service so indomitable, so ubiquitous that the noun assigned to it - "Bing" - will in the phrase of the company's chief exec Steven A. Ballmer "verb up". Looking for the author of the poetic line "trailing clouds of glory" or the first son of Elector Ernst of the House of Wettin? Why, just bing it and you'll learn it's William Wordsworth and Friedrich the Wise respectively.

"Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on 'The Sopranos' but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the 'aha' moment when a search leads to an answer," writes Helft. Another Microsoft executive, Yusuf Mehdi, said that if MS's brandsmiths have done their job right, "bing" will become synonymous with “the sound of found”. We'll ignore the fact that "Bingo!" has been the sound of found since its the game was introduced in the United States 75 years ago.

Though boosted by an $80 to $100 million ad campaign and a “Bing-a-thon” on Hulu, Bing's verbward ascent will be arduous. Even in a fluid linguistic world where nouns morph into transitive verbs overnight - to impact, to message, to text - Google's preeminence dwarfs all competitors. Its name verbs up to Heaven itself, or at least to the next best thing to Heaven, the Oxford English Dictionary. OED conferred verbitude on the word in July 2006. (And by the way, "morph" and "dwarf" are nouns turned verbs too.)

You would think that the verbing up of your company name would be a little like entering Valhalla. Quite the opposite: it happens to be fraught with danger and you should be careful of what you wish for. Candace Lombardi, writing for CNET News, writes that "ubiquitous use of the company's name to describe something can make it harder to enforce a trademark. Bayer lost Aspirin as a U.S. trademark in 1921 after it was determined that the abbreviation for acetylsalicylic acid had become a generic term. The trademarks Band-Aid, Kleenex, Rollerblade and Xerox have had similar issues."

And Xerox? Many of us remember its advertising campaign urging us not to use its company name as a verb. We thought it was brilliant, reverse-psychology publicity. But apparently they weren't kidding. We owe it to a blogger, "ghouly05" writing on Yahoo, for an explanation of whether Xerox is a noun or a verb:

It is used as both, although the corporation does not really like that as they are afraid it will becoming a "generic" word for photocopy. This has happened with other brand names before (Kleenex comes to mind as a generic name for a tissue) and can be a legal problem for the parent company.

.... Though both are common, the company does not condone such uses of its trademark, and is particularly concerned about the ongoing use of Xerox as a verb as this places the trademark in danger of being declared a generic word by the courts. The company is engaged in an ongoing advertising and media campaign to convince the public that Xerox should not be used as a verb.

To this end, the company has written to publications that have used Xerox as a verb, and has also purchased print advertisements declaring that "you cannot 'xerox' a document, but you can copy it on a Xerox Brand copying machine". (Note that xerox is functionally a verb in this sentence.) Xerox Corporation continues to protect its trademark diligently in most if not all trademark categories. Despite their efforts, many dictionaries continue to mention the use of "xerox" as a verb, including the Oxford English Dictionary.

Could Google's trademark be threatened by its grammatical canonization? You can read one opinion that says absolutely. "Google does have something of a genuine concern, in as far as the inclusion of google as a verb does push it ever closer to becoming part of the general lexicon, and that would mean exclusion from legal protection for the trademark. The fact that Merriam-Webster's chose a lower case google, rather than the upper case OED usage, will ease the concern a tad."

So, maybe Microsoft shouldn't be so eager to verb up its search service. You can visit the Bing website and check it against its behemoth rival. If you're not sure how to find it on the Web, you can just do what I did: google it.

Richard Curtis

E-Catalogs Coming - Verrrrry Slowwwwwly

In a survey of booksellers conducted by Ingram Marketing Group, respondents said that "they would be willing to use e-catalogues, as long as the electronic versions were easy to use with 'shopping list' functionality and POS [Point of Sale] download capabilities," writes Publishers Weekly's Lynn Andriani.

What did they feel were the advantages of digital versus print catalogs? "Environmental benefits and the reduction of clutter."

And the downside? “Lack of time to sit at a computer and make selections.” Also, many of them said they “like to make notes in printed catalogues.”

Time is of the essence to booksellers. As we recently wrote, "For a busy bookseller, two or three minutes of watching a progress bar on a computer is as much time as it used to take to browse an entire paper catalog." And watch it and watch it and watch it they will if our own initial experience is any guide: the file we opened weighed in at a hefty 114 MB and the zip file was almost as big. As for the advantage of being able to make notes in printed catalogs, we moderns must come to terms with the truth that some benighted booksellers enjoy marking up paper with a pen or pencil or dog-earing pages displaying books they are particularly interest in. What are we going to do with these people!

Perhaps the folks surveyed by Ingram used a more streamlined e-catalog than the one we examined. But here's a survey result that I cannot make heads or tails of: "When asked how they had found the experience of reviewing e-catalogues," Andriani reports, "82% of respondents who work at national chain bookstores said 'good,' while only 35% of independent booksellers called their experience 'good.'" Can anyone explain why most chainers loved e-catalogues and most indies didn't?

But kudos to Lynn Andriani for spelling catalogues with a "ue". I had given up searching for pockets of civilization and, as a result, acceded to the hideous, Microsoft spellcheck-certified, ue-less spelling.

Her full article, and a link to the Ingram survey, are here.

Richard Curtis

On Collision Course for an E-Book-Off, Google-Mothra Enters Fray Against Amazon-Godzilla

A slumbering monster is awakened by greed and folly and, tormented beyond endurance, goes on a rampage.

The formula for a Japanese monster film? No, it's a riff on a major breaking story in the New York Times.

Motoko Rich reports that "In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device."

Though Google is currently a facilitator for readers seeking links to e-book retailers, the company now intends to sell digital editions directly to consumers.

Google has discussed such plans with publishers before, but it has now committed the company to going live with the project by the end of 2009. In a presentation at BookExpo, Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, added the phrase: “This time we mean it.”

Google vs. Amazon is not merely a major trade battle but a test of reader preferences, with huge stakes and social implications. Writes Rich:

"Mr. Turvey said Google’s program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. 'We don’t believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go,' he said."

Read about it in Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon.

RC

Generosity-Driven Publishing Puts Freeists to Shame

The blogosphere is saturated with conjecture on the effect of books and e-books given away free. But nothing comes close to the business model of Concord Free Press. In truth it's not a business model at all. If anything it's an anti-business model. Or perhaps the Los Angeles Times characterized it best: "An unusual Robin Hood-style publishing model.”

What makes Concord Free Press distinctive? It seems the publisher is giving away all 2,000 copies of Wesley Brown's novel Push Comes to Shove on the condition that recipients "make a voluntary donation to a charity or someone in need...then pass their book along so others can give."

The company's website states its case:

It’s simple. We’re not proposing a new business model for publishing. We’re a non-profit organization interested in:

• expanding the definition of publishing
• exploring the connection between people and books, and
• inspiring new levels of engagement among readers.
  

Like any non-profit, we keep our expenses incredibly low (e.g., our office rent is not exactly Manhattan-esque). Writers, designers, printers, and others generously donate their work and services for free. Our press runs are fairly short—2,000 copies or so—making our books limited editions. And to pay for it all, we ask people who like what we’re doing to support us via grants, checks, and the occasional wad of cash.

In short, we are freed from the burden of profitability. That said, though our books don’t generate traditional profits, they create real value:

• Writers get a chance to get their work to readers via an interesting new channel, one that can help them sell commercial US rights, foreign rights, film rights, etc.
• Readers get a great book for free and a chance to be part of an experiment in publishing and community
• Charities and people in need receive real support from generous readers—who turn their good intentions into cash donations

Though it's said the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Concord's road has led to an inspiring record of humankindness. Its first venture, Give + Take, produced over $40,000 in donations. "Factoring in our start-up costs, that’s an ROI [Return On Investment] of more than 800% – even though others, more in need than us, received that money. The second book, Push Comes to Shove, has generated even more. A sampling of donors, donees and donations is below.

Concord, Massachusetts, the publisher's home base, should ring a bell: it's the home of Henry David Thoreau. And if anyone would appreciate Concord Free Press's concept and purpose it's the sage of Walden Pond.
Richard Curtis
*************************************************************************
From Concord Free Press's website:

Our readers have already made $44,000+ in donations around the world—tell us where you gave

Push Comes to Shove

Marilyn K. of Minneapolis, MN gave $25 to the Community FoodBank of New Jersey

Kellie J. of New York City gave $175 to WBGO

Deborah P. of West Tisbury, MA gave $400 to a South African elementary school

Esther L. of Brooklyn, NY gave $50 to the Brooklyn Museum

Toby G. of Exeter, NH gave $50 to the NH SPCA

Garry T. of Central Square, NY gave $50 to the North Shore Food Bank

Cheryl T. of New York City gave $50 to the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in memory of Bill Kough

Fern S. of Chatham, NY gave $25 to Think OutWord

Debra J. of Harlem, NYC gave $50 to the Teachers & Writers Collaborative

L. Nevai of Averill Park, NY gave $25 to the Amanda Moon Children's Theater Scholarship Fund

For a complete listing, click here.

Book Expo Begins Today, But When Does It End? Mike Shatzkin Says Sands Running Out

When you admire a guru, you have to take the bad prophecies with the good. Mike Shatzkin, who is giving a significant presentation at the commencement of Book Expo America, is certainly our favorite guru. But damn!, his gloomy prognostication about the future of the convention is hard to live with, even though deep down we suspect it's true.

There are two classes of people in publishing: those who remember the American Booksellers Association (ABA) convention - BEA's predecessor - and those who don't. The latter roughly parallel those who don't remember typewriters, black and white televisions, or automobiles with clutches. If these artifacts of 20th century civilization draw a blank stare, it will be equally hard to imagine what publishing must have been like when booksellers were important.

Before getting to his doomsday prognostication, Shatzkin takes us down memory lane to recall what BEA used to be. This is not merely idle reminiscence but, rather, Shatzkin setting us up to understand what the the convention has become and why it may no longer be a viable destination for a publishing industry that is exploding like a fragmentation grenade.

When I was a pup, the ABA was definitely an order-writing show. The number of independent bookstores who bought a big chunk of any trade list properly presented to them was in the thousands. (Now: what would you say? the dozens? wouldn’t hundreds be an exaggeration?) Only a few of the biggest publishers had sales forces large enough and disciplined enough to really cover them all, so most exhibitors encountered retailers who would do immediate business. Everybody had some sort of show “special” to encourage ordering. I think for many years it was “blue badges” that signified booksellers: you kept an eagle-eye out for them as the traffic streamed by and you knew exactly what and how you were going to pitch them.

Each night at the main convention hotels, several publishers — and all the mass-market publishers — ran “hospitality suites” offering liquid refreshment and munchies very deep into the evening. You’d make the rounds of those after you had gone to whatever events, dinners, and parties had taken place in other locations. I always found the time in the hospitality suites to be a highlight of the convention.

The halcyon days of the 1970s and 80s gave way to a more corporate environment when Reed Exhibitions, which bills itself as the world's leading organizer of trade and consumer events, acquired a controlling share of the show, changing its name to Book Expo America. "Reed Exhibitions excels in creating high profile, highly targeted business and consumer exhibitions and events to establish and maintain business relations, and generate new business," says the organization's website.

Interestingly, Reed's takeover paralleled the rash of trade book publisher mergers and acquisitions that, like a collapsing star, imploded the industry from hundreds of vibrant companies to fewer than a dozen behemoths in the space of a decade. 1996, the very year Reed acquired controlling interest in ABA, was the same one in which the mass market paperback business underwent a convulsive contraction that transformed the format into the Fifteen Top Blockbuster airport model that characterizes mass paper today. (I've written about this at length in a two part article, "The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback": Part 1, Part 2.)

Thus, while Big Publishing seemed to be soaring in the late 90s it was actually peaking, and the shift made itself manifest in the book fair. "The long expansion of the US book trade, which had continued pretty much unabated from World War II until the mid-1990s, stopped and started to reverse in the Internet age," writes Shatzkin. "Even worse for the industry trade show, consolidation of both big publishers and retailers accelerated. That meant fewer publisher customers to buy the booth space, and fewer retailers walking the aisles to make the booth space valuable."

And now, a little over a decade later, the collapsing star of Big Publishing generates more heat ($24 billion annually) than light, and that's reflected in the dimming of the celebration called Book Expo America. "The BEA of today isn’t the ABA of old," laments Shatzkin. "The booksellers are just about gone. The late-night hospitality suites don’t exist anymore. And hardly any publisher goes to the show expecting to write orders. It is time to organize a betting pool where the question is: how many more BEAs before, like its Canadian counterpart [Book Expo Canada shuttered permanently early this year] it simply ceases? Three? Four? Hard to see more than that."

Also shpracht Shatzkin. You can read it all in his blog, How many more times for BEA?

But wait - there's a PS. BEA's show director Lance Fensterman reports that the convention's attendance is down 14% over the last one held in New York City, 2007, and exhibitor personnel registrations are down 10% to 15%. Overall exhibition square footage is down 21%. It looks like the Guru of Gloom is right again, dammit.

Richard Curtis

The Big Turnoff: Furor Over Kindle Audio Puts Random Between Rock and Hard Place

You shall not curse the deaf nor place a stumbling block before the blind.
Leviticus 19:14

I realize it's unfashionable to feel sorry for Random House, but I think they're getting the rotten end of the stick for a problem not of their making.

You'll recall that Amazon's initiative to convert the texts of Kindle e-books to speech generated a furious response from authors and publishers because of potential infringement on their reserved commercial audio rights. Under threat of legal action, Amazon backed off, leaving the decision to speech-activate Kindle texts up to content owners. Many publishers opted out. Random House was one of them.

Now, The Reading Rights Coalition, representing more than 15 million visually challenged Americans, has censured Random House for denying audio service to its constituents. "When Random House turned off the text-to-speech function on all of its e-books for the Kindle 2," declared Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, "it turned off access to this service for more than 15 million print-disabled Americans. The blind and other print-disabled readers have the right to purchase e-books using this service with text-to-speech enabled. Blocking text-to-speech prohibits access for print-disabled readers and is both reprehensible and discriminatory." Maurer was joined by executives of Lighthouse International, American Association of People with Disabilities, National Spinal Cord Injury Association, American Council of the Blind and other organizations in denunciations of Random. A petition is being circulated.

It would be unspeakably callous to disregard the needs of the blind and reading-disabled. And that's the point: book publishers have always been in the vanguard of industries sensitive to the needs of the visually challenged. Language guaranteeing to them free access to published books is a standard feature of every book contract I have ever seen. A recent Random House contract says, "Random House shall have the right to grant transcription or publication rights in any Work in Braille or other non-book formats specifically for the visually impaired without charge." The subsidiary rights grant in a HarperCollins contract on my desk grants Harper "Braille, large-type and other editions for the handicapped (the Publisher may grant such rights to recognized non-profit organizations for the handicapped without charge and without payment to the Author)." I'm ready to bet that every one of the thousands of contracts in our agency's files has similar language.

I don't think the leadership of the Reading Rights Coalition is doing its members a favor by attacking publishers, who have been victimized by Amazon/Kindle's audio initiative just as severely as the visually impaired. There is a line between a function intended for the disabled and one designed for fully sighted and literate. Amazon's aggressive step across that line put publishers on the horns of a cruel dilemma: by withholding audio rights from Kindle they deny service to a genuinely needy population; but by enabling Kindle's audio feature they deprive legitimate copyright holders of the opportunity to exploit a commercial right. They also incur liability: a publisher can be sued by authors whose commercial audio rights had been given away to Amazon. And because that threat of liability is ever-present to Random House and its brother and sister publishers, it's not likely that petitions or humanitarian appeals (including to President Obama) will gain any traction.

What's the answer? We must come up with a voice-enabling technology expressly targeted to the handicapped, and segregate it from commercial audio. That's not a job for publishers. It's a job for technologists, and we wish them godspeed in solving the problem.

Amazon should be in the forefront of those supporting such an initiative, because there are 15 million visually impaired individuals ready to buy a device that serves them what they need and are entitled to. If Amazon doesn't or can't do the job - well, there are a lot of e-book devices coming on stream, and the one that solves this audio dilemma will have a huge advantage and a ready-made market.

For the Coalition's full statement click here.

Pictured: The HumanWare VictorReader Stream digital-audio player for the blind.

Richard Curtis

E-Reads Offers Book Deal to Dick Cheney

Dear Mr. Cheney:

I read today that you are seeking a publication deal for your memoirs. E-Reads, a ten-year-old publishing company of which I am president and CEO, invites you to consider bringing your book out under our imprint. We offer a number of advantages over conventional publishers, particularly instant release of your book in both e-book and print on demand format.

We are prepared to offer a substantial advance and an unprecedented royalty percentage for the privilege of publishing your story. If you require the services of a professional co-author we have access to many superb professional writers with ghost-writing or co-writing credentials.

Naturally, before we sign a binding commitment it would be mutually beneficial for us to spell out the content and "voice" of your book. A paramount consideration is the degree to which you can be candid about your personal life and political career. Though I realize you're a newcomer to the publishing process, I'm sure that as a businessman you will appreciate that the more frank you can be, the higher the commercial value of your book. A memoir perceived as self-serving (such as public statements you have made since leaving office, if I may be so frank) will simply not enable us to recoup our investment. I'm afraid we can't count on foreign rights revenue as responses to feelers made by our agents abroad have not been encouraging. It seems that the willingness of the Coalition of the Willing does not extend to acquiring rights to your story.

If however you are prepared to produce a forthright account of your term in office, we are prepared to demonstrate our earnestness with a compensation package far beyond the $2 million you are reported to be seeking.

As for the contents, I've made some notes about topics that we would like to see covered in your book. Here's a partial bulleted list:

• How you assisted President Bush deceive Congress and the American people into buying into a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraq government under Saddam Hussein
• How you misrepresented available intelligence
• How you outed covert intelligence officer Valerie Plame and got your Chief of Staff Scooter Libby to take the fall
• How you steered no-bid government contracts to Halliburton, a company in which you have a multimillion dollar interest that has appreciated by thousands of percent since the war began
• How you undermined the Constitution
• How you suspended the right of Habeas Corpus
• How you subverted the rule of law
• How you instituted secret wiretapping and email monitoring of American citizens
• How you scammed America's allies with Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction"
• How you created a secret cabal of oil and other energy lobbyists
• How you sent thousands of young men and women to death and maiming in the prosecution of a "phony" war whose real goal was to exploit Middle East oil
• How you leveraged your office to create a policy of torture and brutality

As I stated at the outset, if this book is to succeed commercially it must be completely candid. If you are uncertain about the meaning of that term, let me recommend a book that might serve as your model. I'm thinking of The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir by former dancer Toni Bentley whose candor about her sex life was painfully frank. In particular she rhapsodized about anal intercourse. We don't feel that discussions about your sex life are necessary to make this book a success (though, needless to say, if there were any revelations of that nature that you were willing to share with your readers "it wouldn't hoit!" as they say). Nevertheless, you might find anal intercourse to be an effective metaphor for your conduct as Vice-President. I don't want to put words in your mouth but if you were willing to talk about giving it to the American people "in the ass" we would probably raise our first printing another 100,000 copies in the blink of an eye.

In the hope that we've persuaded you to cast your lot with us, we'd like to discuss titles, and I think we've got one you're going to love. Ready?

GO FUCK YOURSELF
My Life in High Crimes and Misdemeanors
by Dick Cheney

We've already picked out some great cover photos for you to review and we've even taken the liberty of producing a sensational Web promo built around your priceless "Go Fuck Yourself" pronunciamento. We're dummying up a book jacket with some great graphics spun off that theme and I guarantee it's a knockout.

Please get back to me with your response to our proposal, and, if you agree to our approach and are confident you can deliver a truthful account, have your authorized representative contact me to hammer out details. I look forward to hearing from you and, I hope, working with you.

Yours Truly,

Richard Curtis
President and CEO
E-Reads

Copyright Asteroid Hurtling Toward Earth, Impact Due 2013

Evan Schnittman observed it as a smear of light on the fringe of our galaxy, but it took media guru Mike Shatzkin to fully articulate its significance. And significant it is, a possible game-changer in the internecine struggle among authors, publishers, and Google. It has to do with a little-known provision of the US Copyright Act of 1978.

Schnittman, a Vice President of Business Development and Rights for Oxford University Press, mentioned it almost as an afterthought at the end of "There Will Be Disintermediation", the final installment of a brilliant three part analysis in his Black Plastic Glasses website. "Mark your calendars, folks," he declares, "the disintermediation begins on January 1, 2013. What happens on January 1, 2013? See for yourself in the US Copyright Act of 1978, section 203. {…Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant…}" [bold print is Schnittman's.]

"What if this change," asks Schnittman, "was so significant that it could possibly even spawn an industry wide reset of the way we do things?" He leaves us panting for an answer, and Shatzkin provides it:

"It turns out there is a clause in the 1978 copyright law that allows any author to reclaim any copyright despite any contract with a publisher, simply by serving notice. The copyright can be reclaimed no less than 35 years and no more than 40 years from the book’s original publication. So books published in 1978 can be reclaimed by their authors from 2013-2018.".

"One wonders" Shatzkin ruminates, "how many agents are aware of this law and are preparing for it."

Actually many agents have been aware of it for years, and a number have invoked it. It's commonly referred to as the "Widows and Orphans Provision," because it entitles immediate family members to recover from publishers or certain derivative licensees (like movie companies) the copyrights to works published by a deceased author. (Don't worry, men, widowers are included!) What some agents may not be aware of is that an author doesn't have to be dead for the reclamation to take place; he or she simply has to live long enough to take advantage of the provision. For books licensed to publishers after January 1, 1978, the law is effective "thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution of the grant, whichever term ends earlier."

What surprises Shatzkin is that Article 203 has not come up in discussions about the Google Settlement, and we owe him and Schnittman a debt of gratitude for placing it on the table.

Until recently we'd have said that (except for a small number of evergreen backlist books) most titles coming up for reclamation under the Act are worth little or nothing. But with Google's push to monetize old books, even moribund ones may have value either to their authors, their publishers, or Google. As Shatzkin puts it, for some old books "it looks like a new payday has been set up."

For the full text of Article 203 of the 1978 Copyright Act, click here.

Richard Curtis

A Mainstream Publisher's Catalog Goes E (And Drops the UE,Too)

The other day we received our first e-catalog from a publisher and we not only lived to tell the tale, we actually liked it. Though the digital revolution in the book industry has happily reached a tipping point, a lot of grouchy twentieth century old timers have stubbornly drawn the line at emailed catalogs. Here's what I recently muttered on the subject:

Another capital-intensive practice on the chopping block for a number of publishers is paper catalogues, and though we're all trying to enter the digital age unflinchingly, the disappearance of catalogues will be more wrenching than many other uprootings. Catalogues have long been the most familiar tool for introducing the bookstore trade to publishers' front- and backlists. They are not merely informational and often beautiful but they are a publisher's face to the world, its very identity. Even the spelling of "catalogue", despite Microsoft spellcheck's insistence on dropping the "ue", bespeaks a stubborn and beloved tradition.

Holding out for paper catalogs is kind of like die-hard Southerners flying the Confederate flag in their front yards. It's a losing battle. Catalogs are going E whether we like it or not, and the Visigoths who spell it "catalog" have won the day.

The one we received from Perigee, a division of Penguin's Putnam group, is handsome, colorful, informative, and easily navigable. The only problem is technical. The size of the PDF file sent to me was more than 6 MB. That can strain some older computers, get snagged by filters or push the dial on some inboxes close to the Full mark. The alternative is for booksellers and other interested parties to visit the publisher's website and proceed to the catalog links. We did so and invite you to do so too. Click here, then click on the "catalogs" tab and scroll down to the various Penguin divisions. You can then view a catalog online or download it as a zip file.

Some files are larger than others and because the Perigee catalog is bundled with those of other divisions it weighs in at a hefty 114 MB; the zip is almost as big at 106 megs. Publishers will have to find ways to keep file sizes down. If an e-catalog requires too much time to load it will defeat its raison d'etre. For a busy bookseller, two or three minutes of watching a progress bar on a computer is as much time as it used to take to browse an entire paper catalog.

In time these issues will be resolved and as the industry grows accustomed to the new format, the advantages of e-catalogs will make themselves abundantly manifest; we'll see video, audio, hotlinks galore and countless other bells and whistles. E-catalogs are cost effective and so much friendlier to the environment than their paper forebears. Indeed, Perigee's catalog was inspired by one of the publisher's own books, Green, Greener, Greenest by Lori Bongiorno.

Note that I spelled catalog in the contemporary style. But I secretly thought catalogue. Twentieth century habits die hard.

Richard Curtis

Is It a Good Deal?

For the first edition of my book How To Be Your Own Literary Agent I produced a down-and-dirty precis of book contract terms, "Is It a Good Deal?" This synopsis was intended for use as a handy reference when immediate action is called for. One of the salient terms listed was the size of advances.

Since then I've received many calls and emails from authors thanking me for this synopsis, but here's the odd thing. Since 1983, when the first edition was published, I've scarcely changed a thing! Sure, I added electronic rights to one of the updates. I also raised the bar a notch for trade and mass market paperback royalties, reflecting a shift (I'm happy to report) from a buyer's market to a seller's.

But advances? Each time my publisher requested an update (the most recent was 2003) I was asked if advances had risen since 1983. The answer was no. And here, 26 years later, that's still my answer and I'm sticking to it.

To read the complete article, click here.

Richard Curtis

Mike Shatzkin Hurls a Paving Stone at Etailer Discounts

Hard on the heels of author Orson Scott Card's fulmination against Amazon.com's "obscene" share of revenues generated by the Kindle comes a proposal by Mike Shatzkin to blast etailer discounts, currently averaging 50%, back into the Dark Ages. How far back? "I suspect that number is about 20%," he says in a recent Shatzkin Files blog.

I've described Shatzkin as a guru, but some reading his radical position may call him Jacobin. After you read it, however, you'll wonder why it took so long for someone to question why e-book retailers charge the same discount that retailers of traditional books do, when the two modes have scarcely a thing in common. "This is daft," he declares. "There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts."

"Now," says Shatzkin, "is the time to change this."

How does he propose to do this? Here's where things move from Jacobin to Red Brigade. "The publishers need to jointly fund and substantially own a virtual retailer whose mission would be to deliver all conceivable ebook formats...To stay on the right side of the law, publishers would sell to the new entity on the same terms they sold to everybody else. But the objective here is to limit the ability of retailers to force higher discounts through boycotting publishers or titles with impunity."

Is Shatzkin suggesting publishers fight boycott with boycott?

The terms "boycott" and "right side of the law" don't mingle very comfortably, but it's clear that Shatzkin is pretty convinced that no tactic short of ganging up on etailers will work. Unfortunately, experience does not encourage optimism about publishers' courage to join together to restore the balance of trade. Had they found the collective cojones to force bookstore chains to roll back the returnability of print books, the industry would not find itself in its current position, namely, over a barrel with its legs spread.

While he's tossing sabots into our complacency, Shatzkin dismisses publishers' initiative to sell their books directly to consumers rather than through retailers.

"The current effort by several general trade publishers to drive traffic to their own house-branded web sites is misguided and doomed. But Amazon (and Shelfari, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and our new entrant, Filedby.com) have demonstrated that sites with information across the trade book spectrum have real consumer appeal. With the support of the big publishers from the earliest possible moment to make the high-profile general trade books visible, at least a large portion of the discovery traffic could be liberated from being captive to Amazon, Google, or anybody else."

I'm not sure I agree. In a posting on the subject we wrote, "If the only source of profit (to say nothing of independence and dignity) left to publishers is consumer retailing, they will step up their activities in this area until in time they are in a position to challenge the Barnes & Nobles and Amazons. Though the only weapon they have is their content, that may be more than enough to vanquish these Goliaths."

If enough publishers pick up on Shatzkin's proposition to realign e-book retailer discounts, it may be the beginning of the end of the digital equivalent of the Ancien Régime. It's certainly time to air the issue, and Shatzkin has earned our gratitude for speaking up.

Richard Curtis

Judith Regan Back in Spotlight, Trailing Clouds of Glory

The party was ostensibly in honor of the 55th birthday of Hollywood media expert and bestselling author (Guerrilla P.R. 2.0) Michael Levine. But all eyes were on hostess Judith Regan, back on the Big Apple scene after an adventurous sojourn in Hollywood trying to establish an imprint backed by News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch. The venture came to grief, and a hack doggerlizer summarized the subsequent shenanigans in Publishers Weekly's 2007 year-end issue:

Judith Regan filed a brief
Seeking millions in relief.
After News Corp’s Chief Commander
Pulled the gynarch’s plug and canned her.
Faulty judgment her transgression,
Buying O. J.’s faux confession.
Tempers soared from hot to fissile
Over her abrupt dismissal.

Her lawsuit settled, Regan seems ready to take what's left of New York publishing by storm, if that's what she chooses to do.

The party, held in her spacious Grecian isle-white penthouse, was wall to wall with coast to coast movers, shakers, media people and photographers. Guests were invited to "dress to intimidate" but with few exceptions business attire was the couture du jour. This reporter wore his most intimidating fire-engine red power pocket square but no one seemed to cringe, or even to open a path to the hummus dip.

Dick Morris toasted the guest of honor and told a naughty story about him.

RC
Poem excerpt (c) Richard Curtis reprinted from Publishers Weekly, December 31 2007, Reed Elsevier Magazines.

Are You Too Young for Kindle?

Michael Cader, blogging in Publishers Lunch, says that "The Kindle is probably the only major consumer electronic device aimed at older buyers." He cites a survey conducted by Bowker: "The device is favored particularly by people aged 50 to 64, and women like it disproportionately more than men, while the iPhone is heavily preferred by those in the 35 to 49 bracket," Cader writes.

In one respect, these data should not come as a surprise; generally speaking, adults simply buy more books than the young, period - 60 percent of book purchases are by older persons. But because we associate e-books and reading devices with youthful innovation, the numbers bear some attention.

The party most interested in these demographics is Amazon itself, creator of the Kindle. Amazon asked visitors to its Kindle Community page to disclose their age, and as of this writing 1652 responded. That's a huge number of responders and we're not sure why the question elicited so much action. By way of comparison, the second most responded to question garnered only 20 replies! Nor are we sure why respondents felt compelled to relate their life stories in response to the simple request for "Average Kindle Owners Age" ("59 3/4 years old here...no arthritis here yet. Probably will start suffering from it when I turn 60.") I guess seniors talking about their age like to add a flourish or two..

In any event, though we didn't sift methodically through every response or tally the average, it was clear from a random clickthrough of responses that the majority of those answering the question were in their fifties and sixties.

On the trail of these absorbing factoids, I randomly selected and debriefed a 25-year-old male about his, and his friends', attitudes towards Kindle. Interestingly, this interviewee works for a publisher and uses the device in his professional capacity.

Me: Do you own a Kindle personally?

Him: No.

Me: Because?

Him: The expense. I can't afford one. [It currently lists for $359.00 on Amazon.com] My friends can't either.

Me: Do you read books on another electronic device?

Him: No, call me old fashioned, but I like printed books. And they're also economical compared to the Kindle. If you read eight or ten books a year, buying them is cheap compared to buying a Kindle. Some of us either borrow books from the library or from each other, so it doesn't make sense to buy a Kindle.

Me: But you spend money on music.

Him: I would rather spend my money on music. I can listen to music while I'm doing something else. But reading a book is a dedicated activity. You can't do something else while you read a book.

Me. You call yourself old-fashioned. Doesn't that strike you as ironic, that a 25-year-old is more old-fashioned than a Kindle-reading fifty or sixty year old man or woman?

Him. [Shrugs] I guess so.

Are you too young for Kindle? The answer is right under our noses - for kids, it's simply too expensive.

Though Kindle is sitting high atop the e-reader heap, a competitor producing a $99.00 device could topple the Goliath, or at least give it a good healthy fight.

RC

A Publisher Takes His Colleagues to the Woodshed

Jonathan Karp is the distinguished publisher of an Hachette imprint called "Twelve", the name derived from its mission to publish no more than one book per month. Drawing on his "less is more" philosophy, Karp has written a piece for Publishers Weekly distilling what he calls 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing. In fact the innocuous title disguises a manifesto that should be nailed to the door of every publishing company large or small that cherishes a prayer of surviving in the next few years. But one of his twelve harbors a potentially toxic prescription.

Before listing his 12 Commandments, Karp heaps some well deserved abuse on many publisher excesses that exemplify the practices he condemns.

On sale now: A History of Cannibalism. Illustrated! A gift book! The subtitle is stupendously, kaleidoscopically all-encompassing: From Ancient Cultures to Survival Stories and Modern Psychopaths.

Just a few shelves away: Jesus, Life Coach, with the subtitle: Learn from the Best, a companion to the bestselling Jesus CEO, not to be confused with Jesus, Entrepreneur; Jesus on Leadership; or Jesus in Blue Jeans.

Then there are the arcane books, the ones that dare to be obscure on the assumption that if people will read about cod, or oranges, anything is possible. Who could resist a history of the potato, titled, of course, Potato. Amazingly, this wasn't the only work available on the subject. There's also The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World. Wasn't it intellectually responsible of the publisher to limit the scope of the subtitle to the Western world?

The best-packaged sex book portrayed a scantily clad woman perched on a saddle—Ride 'Em Cowgirl: Sex Position Secrets for Better Bucking. The most unusual was Vibrators, featuring 100 of the best devices in the world, all artily photographed. I had assumed this was published by some outré left coast indie house, but when I looked on the spine, I found the HarperCollins logo. My wish for this book is that Oprah will name it one of her favorite things, and NewsCorp will be compelled to print illustrations of vibrators in its next annual report.

Karp then shifts focus to his package of reforms. Among them:

End Kabuki publishing. "I am amazed by how much of publishing today is a Kabuki of ritualized and empty artifice," Karp writes, spewing venom on such choreographed silliness as launch meetings and sales conferences.

"Stop the copycat books. "They are the equivalent of pack journalism, and most of the time, we wind up looking like a bunch of rats chasing a chunk of stale cheese."

Be loyal to the book, not the ego. "Today, the only loyalty that makes sense is a commitment to the specific book...When I review catalogues, it seems as if more than a third of the titles on any given list are being published out of obligation rather than enthusiasm."

And here's one that may not win Karp a lot of points in the author community:

Pay authors to market their work. "Publishers should contractually require that a part of the advance be allocated to marketing and promotional efforts supervised by the author."

Eleven of Karp's twelve steps to better book publishing are cogent and wise, and publishers should take them to heart. But the twelfth has mischief written all over it:

"If a title falls short of the house's standards, don't market it. Don't even distribute it to bookstores. Publish those titles as e-books and print-on-demand only. Don't waste trees, warehouse and energy costs on them."

Karp assumes that a Harper or Simon & Schuster or Hachette has the option to release, as originally published e-books or PODs, books that they feel are potentially unprofitable or simply not up to snuff. Here is yet another sign that publishers are growing all too comfortable with the idea of issuing works as e-book originals without first publishing them in traditional print formats. I for one am very ill at ease with the concept. As I recently wrote,

"Original e-book publication by traditional publishers places their feet on a slippery slope. For one thing, there may be no legal basis for it; that is, no contractual provision sanctioning it. For another, authors who bargain for print publication and end up with e-book release may feel they have not been dealt with in good faith. For yet another, the current state of the e-book business is such that e-book publication does not earn a fraction of the revenue that print does, either for publisher or author."

A baseball player would be thrilled to boast a .917 batting average, so Karp can rest easy that eleven out of his twelve remedies for what ails publishing will help to cure the patient. But that twelfth one bears some serious rethinking. If you don't think a book is worth printing, don't buy it. If you buy it, make it worth printing. Major publishers resorting to original e-book release are not only abandoning their mission, they may also be forsaking their identity.

Richard Curtis

Google Settlement Making Agents, Publishers Crazy

Under pressure of the May 5 Google settlement deadline, publishing professionals are frantically contacting each other and their lawyers to make sure they understand the settlement and the opt-in/opt-out choices confronting them. An informal sampling of their communications strongly suggests that a great many authors, agents, editors, and even lawyers are somewhere south of knowledgeable and some are barely north of clueless.

We can't blame them. Though the broad meaning of the settlement can be summarized fairly easily, as we recently tried to do here, it's the specifics that are stumping so many. For one thing, the paperwork is daunting for individual authors and crushing for publishers, requiring lists of titles falling into the opt-in/opt-out categories. For another, answers to many questions are far from yes/no. Mike Shatzkin puts it straightforwardly: "They are largely in the dark about what rights they own. "

The spectacle of otherwise sophisticated professionals calling each other and asking, "Do you understand it? I think I understand it. Actually I don't understand it" would be funny if there were not so much at stake. Publishers do not want to incur liability by making the wrong decision, and agents don't want to incur responsibility for giving their author clients bad advice. So we're all in touch doing our best to get it right. But getting it right is not as easy as it looks. Shatzkin points out that "The 'rights database' or 'contracts database' for most publishers consists largely of paper contracts in file drawers."

Publishers also have problems with books on which they unambiguously have the rights to print and sell copies. What they don’t know, without looking at the original contract, is whether the language in it gives them a shot at an ebook, a print-on-demand edition, or allows them to include some of the material in that book in an electronic database. Even looking at the book contract might not tell them if they have the rights to use artwork that is in the book in any other edition.

The danger is that those who are not completely sure what to do may, in their haste to make the deadline, make a blanket yes/no decision that could turn out to be a blunder.

I don't know if it's possible for the parties to work out an extension at this late date but now that we're all focused on the issues, some more time for everybody to sort out their rights would be welcome.

Richard Curtis

If They Asked Me, I Could Write a...Vook?

"The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century's definition of "author" will be as far from today's definition as you are from the town scribe of yore."

I wrote that over ten years ago in an article called Author? What's an Author? I didn't know it at the time, but I was anticipating the arrival of the vook. And now it's here.

Brad Stone, writing in the New York Times, defines it as "a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices. "Vooks, created and named by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bradley Inman, combine traditional fictional storytelling, online video, and other digital media to create an amalgamated art form. "Vook," explains Stone, "tries to address a big problem for book publishers as they expand onto digital formats.

"For all the hype and initial success of devices like the Kindle, they threaten to strip traditional books of much of their transportive appeal. Images on the jacket cover, inviting fonts and the satisfying feel of quality paper are all largely absent, replaced by humdrum pixels on a virtual page.

Even worse, on multipurpose reading devices like the iPhone, more immediately gratifying pastimes like video games are a click away for readers with short attention spans."

Defending himself against traditionalist criticism, Inman says, "Books are finally coming online but they are very one-dimensional. I think we can experiment and do this better.”

His observation would seem bear out an observation I made recently in a piece called Watching Books.

"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."

Okay. We how have a name for the art form. But what shall we call the vook's creator? In Author? What's an Author? I struggled to give it a name.

"As I acclimate myself to the rich atmosphere of computer technology, I hear the word 'author' used less and less and 'producer"'used more and more to describe those who assemble, integrate, and purvey multimedia software packages to consumers. As the trend toward multimedia accelerates, as I predict it will, the role of the author must, without question, become subordinated to that of the producer. Authors will become scenarists, creating story lines for or textual supplements to full-motion video films for personal computers. The real creative stars will be those who can produce brilliant and stimulating programs for display on home entertainment systems."

So where does this leave good old-fashioned writers and publishers? Well, if they want to survive they have no choice but to join the 21st century. In Author? What's an Author? I suggest some ways that authors can find their place in this rapidly evolving world.

Richard Curtis

How's About a Quickie? Paper and Digital Consort to Spawn Instant Books

A decade ago as I was reviewing a standard trade book contract I had a dark and scary thought. There was nothing in it requiring the publisher to issue the work originally as a printed book. I then examined the contracts of other major publishers. Same thing. Subsequently, in contract negotiations, I began asking publishers to guarantee that they would not publish books as e-book originals. "We are book publishers," they assured me with a sniff. "We would never do that." But they refused to put that assurance in writing.

And that is why you never say never. Motoko Rich reports in the New York Times that, faced with the exigencies of getting timely books out fast, major publishers have begun issuing them in e-book format before they release them in print. And in some cases they don't release them in print at all.

For instance, about a month after the manuscript was turned in, the FT (Financial Times) Press released Barack, Inc: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign. The format of choice? E-Book. Same goes for Daniel Gross's Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. That one, Rich reports, took just three weeks from completion to release.

Though there's nothing improper about first publishing quickie books in e-format, until now the practice was unprecedented among major book publishers. How do they justify the change in course? On the grounds that today's frenetic and unrelenting news cycle requires nothing less than instantaneous issuance of books. Though it can be argued that the proper media for fast-breaking stories are newspapers, television or the Internet, no one would quarrel with FT Press's Amy Neidlinger when she tells Rich that, “People can’t wait a year to get timely information on critical subjects. Especially today it’s dated 10 minutes after you’ve just received the first installation.” Or with literary agent Todd Shuster, who says that even significant books, if they “come out so late that they’re either obsolete or redundant, are going to lose out.”

Granted. We'll even grant that simultaneous publication of e-book and the print version makes sense for books requiring immediate dissemination. But original e-book publication by traditional publishers places their feet on a slippery slope. For one thing, there may be no legal basis for it; that is, no contractual provision sanctioning it. For another, authors who bargain for print publication and end up with e-book release may feel they have not been dealt with in good faith. For yet another, the current state of the e-book business is such that e-book publication does not earn a fraction of the revenue that print does, either for publisher or author. And finally, there may be e-book publishers that can simply do a better job because they are not burdened with the slow and cumbersome publication machinery and procedures of large houses, nor are they hampered by considerations requiring them to charge artificially high retail prices.

In short, we have to wonder whether original e-book publication is the proper province of conventional publishing companies.

Speaking of quickies...

Arguably the first instant book in modern history was First American Into Space by Robert Silverberg. It was published in 1961, when "instant" was measured in months and not moments.

The story of its creation is an entertaining one. After plans were set to send the first American astronaut into space, Charles Heckelmann, editor of a paperback publisher called Monarch Books, devised a plan to publish a book to celebrate the event. He hired Robert Silverberg, a reliable paperback novelist who has long since gone on to fame, fortune and honor, to write it. Filling - some would say padding - his manuscript with the history of rocketry, astronaut training, biographies of the astronaut candidates for the flight, etc. etc. Silverberg delivered everything but the last chapter. The book was set into type and while Alan Shepard rode a capsule for fifteen minutes before parachuting back to Earth, Silverberg typed the final chapter, taking it right off the television set in real time. He rushed the chapter to Heckelmann who in turn rushed it to the printer. "The flight was on a Friday," Silverberg reminisces, "and I seem to recall they had the book on sale by the following Monday or Tuesday."

Three or four days to produce and release a book? That now seems like an eternity.

Richard Curtis

"A Privileged Childhood in a Halcyon Time"

In the 1930s, more than 3000 years after Moses led an enslaved Jewish population out of the land of Egypt, a small but thriving Sephardic Jewish community flourished in Cairo and Alexandria. Some settled there from the Middle East, others from Europe, particularly Spain and Portugal after the expulsion of the Jews in the 15th century.

They had become affluent and influential through finance and trade. Though devotedly clinging to their Sephardic customs and practices, by the middle of the 20th century they were well integrated into the public life of their host country, contributing to the common weal and even underwriting many significant civic works and public services. They did not flaunt their faith, indeed most of them thought of themselves as Egyptian citizens who also happened to be Jewish, not unlike German Jews in the early 1930s. Indeed, the fates of the German and Egyptian Jews of that era are strikingly parallel. Reading Jean Naggar's recently published memoir, Sipping from the Nile, I thought of Lion Feuchtwanger's The Oppermanns, a wrenching tale of a well-to-do Berlin family of Jewish furniture merchants who in 1932 and '33 were subtly but inexorably sucked into the maelstrom of Nazi antisemitism until it ruined and destroyed them. Naggar's book is a series of snapshots -- literally, for it is illustrated with wonderful photos of her family and home -- of a robust and bountiful Jewish society just before, during, and after its destruction and the dispersion of its citizenry.

Click here to read this review in its entirety.

Richard Curtis

Why We Must Not Let Newspapers and Magazines Fail

The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times (Sunday, May 15th) carries an absolutely blood-freezing contribution by Mark Danner. Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, managed to get his hands on a report prepared by the Red Cross after a unit of the humane organization visited Guantánamo late in 2006 to review the prison's interrogation procedures. Its report was given in strictest secrecy to the CIA.

"A short time ago," Danner writes, "this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity." Tales From Torture’s Dark World is a condensed version of that NYRB article adapted for the Times.

That the barbaric methods used to interrogate the prisoners, authorized at the highest levels of the US government, border on atrocity will be self-evident to anyone who who has a heart (Dick Cheney excepted). But what I wondered as I read it is whether the Red Cross's report would ever have come to light without the investigative spirit and courage of Danner and the publications that sponsored him. Though abstracts of his report will appear on countless blogs, would any of them have been willing to invest their own resources to initiate the kind of probe he undertook? It's one thing for bloggers to tread the path blazed by pioneers, but would any of them have the guts to break the story and risk prosecution or harassment?

I don't think so.

I won't try to match the eloquence of those who have appealed for humanitarian treatment of combatants and political prisoners. Nor can I judge the guilt or innocence prisoners from whom confessions were extracted by the cruelest forms of coercion. "From everything we know," Danner writes, "many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be 'brought to justice,' as President Bush vowed they would be."

No, the reason I'm writing this is to remind you that truth and openness, the pillars on which western civilization rest, depend on newspapers and magazines as well as book publishers such as those publishing these revelations. We also depend on writers like Danner to interpret those revelations and place them in a moral context such as this one:

"The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured - and have already done so at Guantánamo - means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which 'torture doesn’t work.' The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed."

This website has carried many items about the efforts of print publishers to arrest their sickening financial freefall. Some of these ideas are viable and some are not. The issues underlying the rescue of publishers caught up in a devastating paradigm shift are complex and challenging. But we have to find a solution.

Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must - find a way to preserve it.

Richard Curtis

Collaborations, Part 2

In this second part of our discussion of collaborations, we'll examine a collaboration agreement and discuss the salient terms. What are the financial arrangements and the split between co-authors? How are the credits and bylines accorded? Who's liable for any claims arising out of the collaboration? There are countless considerations and just as many pitfalls.

Click here to learn about them.

RC

With Lying Off the Table, Agents Lose a Key Advantage

It's a sorry day when authors and agents can't lie. If we can no longer fudge sales figures, maybe it's time to turn in our Blackberries and retire to our lavish Hamptons beachfront estates.

That was my reaction to the 2007 jury ruling compelling Clive Cussler to pay a movie company $5 million for (among other claims) inflating his book sales to induce the company to acquire film rights for $10 million. The film was a dud. Now that a judge has ordered Cussler to pay the company an additional $13.9 million in legal fees, I feel compelled to speak out.

It wasn't always this way. In the Golden Age of Agenting (circa 1986-93), the hot power center of the publishing and movie industry was occupied by a legendary cadre of literary agents like Paul Reynolds, Scott Meredith, Freddie Fields, Lew Wasserman and Swifty Lazar, for all of whom the salient virtue was guile. The relations between agents and the moguls of film, television and publishing were more adversarial than they are today, and both sides seized advantages over the other with little obeisance to the spirit of the seventh commandment. The agent who lacked cunning was consigned to the B List and deserved it.

As the twentieth century progressed, these fabulous individualists gave way to a more collegial, collective and committified approach to conducting business, and in time a sort of Geneva Convention of ethical conduct evolved that pretty much characterizes business on both coasts today. The rules and regulations of the powerful Writers of Guild of America govern movie and writers and their agents, and the Canon of Ethics guiding the conduct of literary and dramatic agent members of the Association of Authors' Representatives has replaced the rough justice of that bygone era. Since many of the principles of the Canon were formulated under my administration as president of the AAR, I leave it to you to determine how deeply into my cheek my tongue is thrust as I offer these observations.

One ethical innovation formulated in the mid-'90's was a more stringent code for the conduct of book auctions. The prevailing tenet up to then could be summarized by the phrase "Anything Goes," for there are no licensing requirements for literary agents, at least in New York City where a great many of them practice. Agents auctioning books were not required to reveal to the winning bidder the identity or bid of the underbidder. Many agents succumbed to the temptation to enhance the size of competing bids, or to bluff altogether. Many a winning bidder suffered buyer's remorse after reconstructing (often by simply phoning other participants in the auction) the bids and learning that the highest underbid was miles behind or did not in fact exist.

Perhaps a watershed event in the transformation of book industry rules was an auction in the early 90's for a major novel by an author who has since gone on to become a blockbuster star. As legend has it, the agent told Publisher A that she had a one million dollar offer (a lot of money then, and a lot of money now) from an unnamed publisher, whom we'll call B. Publisher A, desperate to land the huge fish, impulsively doubled the offer without conferring with her editorial board. She landed the fish, to the dismay of Publisher B who had believed the book was in his bag. His dismay turned to something approaching apoplexy when he learned that Publisher A was the head of another division of his own company. The company had been bidding against itself! Despite cries of "Foul!" the agent felt no compunction to adjust the terms of the deal.

What emerged from this event was a condition imposed by publishers that agents must reveal the name and offer of the highest underbidder under penalty of cancellation of the deal or reduction of the winning bid. This condition is reinforced by the provision of the AAR's Canon of Ethics stating that members "undertake never to mislead, deceive, dupe, defraud, or victimize their clients, other members of the Association, the general public, or any person with whom they do business as a member of the Association."

Which brings us back to L'Affaire Cussler. In its coverage of the lawsuit The Book Blog reported that attorneys for the principal of the production company alleged that "author Clive Cussler duped the Denver industrialist into paying $10 million for film rights to the adventure novel 'Sahara' by flagrantly inflating his book sales to more than 100 million copies. 'Cussler and his agent had gotten away with these numbers for years,'" said the industrialist's lawyer. "'It was a lie and it doomed the movie'"

Setting aside the Cussler team's contention that the producers were simply sore losers pinning the blame for their movie's lousy performance (it lost about $78 million) on the author of the book; and setting aside the likelihood that Cussler's books have in fact sold 100 million copies worldwide (though it's impossible to get an accurate count), we have to face the fact that inflated printing and sales figures are a time-honored tradition in the publishing industry. Except during contract negotiations, when each side hauls out numbers and counternumbers, most denizens of the publishing business are complicit in (or at least tolerant of) exaggerated printing and sales figures, for it's a victimless crime, or was until the Cussler case. Think about it: why would an agent challenge a publisher's bloated boast about his or her own client?

But the authenticity of such boasts was dealt a grievous blow by the introduction of Nielsen BookScan in 2001, a more or less scientific system for compiling sales data for publishers. I say "more or less" because the Nielsen Company does not include certain book sales outlets in its data mining, and that bloc of non-reporting stores can account for as much as 30% of a book's performance that doesn't appear on BookScan's database. Nevertheless, it is an accurate enough bellwether to sharply curtail an agent's efforts to produce impressive numbers out of whole cloth.

In short, our options for hyperbole and creative embellishment have been so hamstrung that we've been cornered into resorting to the truth to support the promotion of our authors' performance. What's the fun in that?

Some days an agent can't make a buck, and that is no exaggeration.

Richard Curtis

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Curtis

Revising Truth with One Click of the Mouse

Few pleasures compare to reading early iterations of a famous book or musical composition. When Beethoven's long-lost piano rendition for four hands of his Grosse Fuge (pictured here) was discovered and displayed at Sotheby's, I lost myself gazing at it until impatient visitors elbowed me away from the glass case. Not only were there numerous changes and emendations but on one passage the composer had scratched out the score so violently he tore the script and had to apply a paper patch over it. With similar fascination we pore over drafts of the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable") or Beatles lyrics (Paul McCartney wrote something called, "Baby, You Can Wear My Diamond Ring" which John Lennon rewrote as "Baby, You Can Drive My Car") or the Gettysburg Address, which flowed almost fully polished from Abraham Lincoln's hand.

Since the dawn of computerized word processing scholars have rightfully expressed alarm that such drafts of works in progress will be completely expunged by technology. Andrew Motion, in an essay entitled Saving writers' manuscripts for the nation published in the online edition of the Times Literary Supplement, writes,

"A manuscript can show the cancellations, the substitutions, the shifting towards the ultimate form and the final meaning. A notebook, simply by being a fixed sequence of pages, can supply evidence of chronology. Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unwritten work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s intentions; his letters and diaries add to what we know of his life and the circumstances in which he wrote.”

And poet Kevin Stein, in a Kenyon Review article called Death by 0s and 1s, says,

"What eventually finds its way into literary archives may well be altered over time. Today it's the poet's worksheets, manuscripts, drafts, and letters - maybe even her notebooks and scribbled back-of-the-envelope verses. Given the above, however, one wonders if soon computer diskettes and flash drives will become germane to the notion of literary "papers." Those media carry new poems and drafts that never made their way onto paper, so they carry invaluable digital cargo. Sure, hard copy drafts may be printed from each for storing in special collections, but what does it mean to take the original and present it in form the author never felt comfortable enough to give it? Maybe the poem as digital object must be retained as such.

Happily, revision control software exists enabling authors, editors, scholars and students to track iterations and save them for future analysts. Though not nearly as thrilling as standing inside of Walt Whitman's mind as he constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs "Song of Myself", at least the process will not be lost to us entirely, as it was in danger of doing in the early years of word processing.

But now there's something just as ominous to worry about. "Consider", we read in Amazon Kindle = Privacy FAIL by a blogger named Stephanie, "what might happen if a scholar releases a book on radical Islam exclusively in a digital format.

The US government, after reviewing the work, determines that certain passages amount to national security threat, and sends Amazon and the publisher national security letters demanding the offending passages be removed. Now not only will anyone who purchases the book get the new, censored copy, but anyone who had bought the book previously and then syncs their Kindle with Amazon...will, probably unknowingly, have the old version replaced by the new, “cleaned up” version on their device. The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book."

"I hope," says the blogger, "this comes off as a crazy conspiracy theory spun by a troubled mind with an overactive imagination."

We hope so, too. But Nicholas Carr, writing about the automatically updatable book in his "Rough Type" blog, has elected to worry this bone. "One of the things that happens when books and other writings start to be distributed digitally through web-connected devices like the Kindle is that their text becomes provisional. Automatic updates can be sent through the network to edit the words stored in your machine - similar to the way that, say, software on your PC can be updated automatically today." "Does history begin to become as provisional as the text in the books?" Carr frets.

It's definitely a fretworthy issue. Given the state of our technology, censorship, rewriting of history, and mind control are only a few clicks away. As blogger Stephanie says, "Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous."

Ernest Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." Maybe. But is anything more fundamentally honest than shit?

Richard Curtis

The Pirate Bay: Standing Up In Court For A Generation Of Blackbeards

Perhaps the most significant issue emerging in 21st century publishing is the tension between copyright protection and a general sense of entitlement expressed in the motto, "Information Wants To Be Free." Though we've tried to take a balanced view, it's hard to be neutral in the face of blatant, institutionalized piracy. As the legal and moral issues come to a head in a trial that has just commenced, E-Reads' Michael Gaudet analyzes the cynical and contemptuous justifications given by the operators of one website trafficking in copyrighted work. Unnamed and unindicted in the Swedish proceedings are, in Michael's words, "millions of tempted, anonymous Internet users in homes around the world." Would one of them happen to be you?

- Richard Curtis

This week in Sweden, the people behind the infamous website 'The Pirate Bay' are going to trial again for facilitating copyright infringement among file sharers. It isn't the first time Sweden has tried to take them down on behalf of plaintiffs like Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox. But this international group has proven to be a lot more slippery than past violation targets like Napster in the United States.

The defendants have launched a full blown new media campaign they call "#Spectrial" to promote their defense, speak about their motivations, and mock the proceedings. After the first day at trial, the prosecution decided that half of the charges probably wouldn't stand up against The Pirate Bay (reported by the UK Register) and the defendants began to boast more loudly that their movement won't be stopped (“EPIC WINNING LOL,” was what one of them commented on Twitter).

Even though The Pirate Bay doesn't distribute any illegal files itself, its website is essentially an enormous pirate map that lists millions of user-generated shared files, so that visitors from all over the world can quickly find music, movies, pictures, and e-book texts that their internet peers are sharing. Most of the listed files are ripped from purchased media, and in some cases they are leaked material that has yet to be made available at retail.

The Pirate Bay Makes No Apologies For Promoting Theft

The Pirate Bay's advocacy for unrestricted file sharing is one of the most confounding issues for modern publishers with digital distribution. Evangelists for piracy appeal for protection by evoking moral outrage at the injustice of governments policing private communication and hindering fair use. And they raise some difficult questions: does DRM curb our most basic liberties to communicate and creatively manipulate new ideas? Is copyright unlawful? Is copyright infringement fair retribution for inefficient corporate distribution practices? Should governments keep all internet traffic private? A grassroots movement to protect the opportunity to share pirated files says the answer to all of the above is an overwhelming "yes."

All the defendants (Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström) sincerely believe they've done no wrong in ignoring all the requests from copyright holders to prevent the copyright abuse rampant among the Pirate Bay users (see their page of dozens of spurned "takedown" notices and Pirate Bay retorts - "Legal Threats Against The Pirate Bay").

When asked if they felt like "defendants, or defenders of technology,” Peter Sunde replied: "I think it is something in between actually. We have a personal liability for this, we have a personal risk which has some impact on our feelings. But definitely it’s not defending the technology, it’s more like defending the idea of the technology and that’s probably the most important thing in this case - the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn’t like technology.” (sic, via TorrentFreak)

A screen grab of the "Top 100 Audio Files" at The Pirate Bay (click for larger version)

If you're relatively unfamiliar with The Pirate Bay, keep in mind that it's a short but important part of the file-sharing wheel using a technology derived from BitTorrent software. BitTorrent, Inc. is the San Francisco-based company that helped develop the technology to assist everyday users in distributing files more efficiently, and while they now have partnerships with many of the plaintiffs, BitTorrent and the similar companies designing software based on BitTorrent have no control over how The Pirate Bay operates.

As More People Share A Seed, A Torrent Gets Faster

When users want to share a file from their computer, they create a "torrent", which is a small proxy file that is "seeded" to the internet, allowing anonymous users to find and download the master file. The benefit is that download speeds typically increase when many users are sharing the same file. If you download without sharing, you're identified by the system as a leecher (to encourage reciprocity). The Pirate Bay servers are what is known as a torrent tracker, a website where torrent seeds are listed by anonymous users like classified ads. Visitors can sort through pages of organized listings for seeds of the latest television shows, albums, and movies that users dare to share. A quick glance at today's "Top 100" listings showed that the most popular movie to download at that moment was a pirated version of The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008), with over 16,000 people actively sharing the file at any given moment, meaning that the whole film could likely be downloaded in less than half an hour.

Even though The Pirate Bay is the most famous destination, other popular torrent tracker sites exist, frequently below the radar of Google and other internet search engines because they list files that break copyright laws.

Keeping It Off The Record

With a name like "The Pirate Bay," no one believes the group's intentions were entirely legitimate to demonstrate freedoms. The Pirate Bay was designed to harbor pirate traffic safely from government authorities. Individual torrents communicate across the users' computers, not over The Pirate Bay servers, which makes the technology so popular with anonymous users anxious to avoid obvious digital trails that could turn up on court seized computers. Anonymous tracker websites are usually expensive to maintain, because the visiting traffic requires remote servers and extensive bandwidth that can cost a small fortune each month to keep online. The Pirate Bay sells advertising space on its website to offset these costs, however it's unknown what their revenue really is.

“We know that about 80% of all the traffic on the internet is torrent related. About half of these 80% are our traffic. Therefor, 40% of all internet traffic is passing through The Pirate Bay." (sic) - Peter Sunde

If that's truly the case, then it's safe to assume they've had the opportunity to capitalize on their traffic, benefiting them more than covering basic infrastructure costs, which is why MGM, Microsoft, and the others feel they will be compensated for the requested $14 million in damages by The Pirate Bay with this latest trial. The defendants insist they haven't become rich and they won't be able to pay any possible court ordered payments - another reason they believe the whole case against them is misguided.

"It is legal to offer a service that can be used in both a legal and illegal way, according to Swedish law," said their lawyer, Per Samuelsson. (The Local)

The effort to shut down The Pirate Bay website and stem the flow of illegal material is unlikely to happen with this court case (or ever, because of their server fail safes - Wired, 2006). The Pirate Bay has been dodging legal bullets for many years by disrespecting lawsuits, hiding its practices, and cleverly documenting that it is not actually ever in possession of the offending material. As difficult as it is to prosecute individuals who are caught with illegally obtained files, it's actually much more complex to argue that the network technology itself is partially liable, especially when the technology is constantly evolving. It's much like trying to shut down the entire English language so that individuals can't utter offensive (or proprietary) words, especially when the individuals are using Morse code.

But the underbelly of this incredible defense of technology is that the primary use of The Pirate Bay is to traffic valuable media for free without the consent of copyright owners and to obfuscate the thieves' trails. The prosecutors are hoping to make it clear that The Pirate Bay's intentions are malicious, and eventually someone will succeed.

Theft Prevention Vs. Freedom On The Internet

The current trade-off for a marketplace that employs copyright is that some usages will be unfairly prohibited and some theft is to be expected, but the marketplace is broader because of the overall financial incentive to content creators. If the courts should ever decide that an individual's right to privately communicate over the internet, even if it's to share stolen material, is worth more to society than copyright protection and Draconian preventative measures, most digital media would be rendered worthless to retailers and there would be a dangerous upheaval for most industries. Luckily for publishers, the file sharing crisis isn't seen by authorities as the "freedom" case The Pirate Bay wants it to be. But nervous industries are still trying to placate disgruntled internet users by finding acceptable common ground, like cheaper, DRM-free MP3 sales, to keep their content from being further devalued by theft.

Companies that are slow at adapting to new market demands to ease theft prevention are facing the worst of the backlash from consumers. Many of the anonymous users of The Pirate Bay are also quick to complain that they can't afford the high prices of the latest entertainment media and software tools, or that they can't buy it in the formats they want (high bit-rate audio files, DivX, etc.). They also feel that "free" acquisition contributes valuable mind share and publicity for companies, which turns into revenue in the future; the popularity of a hit album in file sharing circles might mean more long-term sales because the number of satisfied listeners increases (although the correlation is a dubious one outside of the most exceptional scenarios, such as Radiohead's release of In Rainbows). Some file sharers gloat how they enjoy "sticking it to the man" as retribution. And more and more are arguing that copyright itself is an unfair hegemonic practice that has evolved into a monster (see Richard Stallman's "Misinterpreting Copyright"). This attitude hasn't diminished any in the 8 years since the court rulings that shut down Napster. But it's unclear how many people tacitly understand that these arguments are all being used in defense of negligence to pay what content creators have asked for their work.

Ultimately, The Pirate Bay is quickly becoming more than just another famous example of how the internet offers temptations to transgress social taboos and ignore local authority. Its enormous scale indicates that it has become the latest spearhead of a generation's full-on war against copyrights and preventions against theft. And, what's worse is that today's court battles can't represent the best defense when the real fight takes place daily in the minds of millions of tempted, anonymous internet users in homes around the world.

- Michael Gaudet

Book Pubs Headed for the Chop-Shop?

Michael Hirschorn's recent article in The Atlantic, a doomsday scenario projecting the death of the New York Times as early as May, chilled the intellectual community like an icicle rammed into its heart. For all who care about the shift of paradigms from Ye Olde Printe to digital media, his End Times (a canny pun) is required reading. The fact that a Mexican billionaire rescued the paper with a $250 million investment was a huge relief, for the New York Times Company had been facing a host of unpalatable options analogous to choosing among shooting oneself in the foot, the kneecap, the head or the behind. Sadly, numerous other newspapers and magazines bedeviled by the twin evils of collapsing circulation and plummeting advertising will probably not find such a benefactor. If you're of a vulturine turn of mind you can learn about them on the website Newspaper Death Watch.

But it was a throwaway line in Hirschorn's piece that turned my blood to curds. After summarizing the many obstacles that "The Newspaper of Record" faces, Hirschorn wrote, "Alternatively, Google or Microsoft or even CBS could purchase The Times on the cheap, strip it for parts, and turn it into a content mill to goose its own page views." In other words, instead of rescuing and reviving the paper, the buyer could send it to the journalistic equivalent of an automobile chop shop.

Anyone who's had a car stolen knows what a chop shop is. It's an underworld garage where your car is disassembled and the tires, headlights, fuel pump and every other valuable part is removed from the chassis and sold to sub rosa auto body shops. If you think of the New York Times as that car, and its contents the carburetor or transmission or hub caps, perhaps your blood will curdle too. But why stop with the Times? Every struggling print publication is vulnerable to a similar dismantling.

And so, my dears, are book publishers.

Do we believe that they would be less subject than newspaper and magazine publishers to acquisition by media giants whose only interest is mining their content? We would like to think so, and there's some precedent for hoping it wouldn't happen. As a rule, in the history of book publishing in the last few decades struggling publishers have been picked up by stronger and more affluent publishers that understood how to exploit the backlist of the acquiree. But there are plenty of examples of publishers being taken over by members of entirely different species, corporations or conglomerates that have little or no emotional attachment to books or empathy for the people who write, edit and produce them. Looking back over the last few turbulent decades we see that a number of publishers were acquired for the cachet of culture and intellectualism; as soon as the cachet wore off and the realities of razor-thin profit margins sank in, the owners were more than happy to dump their book publishing assets.

Today, many of the publishers that are struggling are not modest in size - they're giants, as characterized by layoffs, reduced acquisitions, or budget cuts by such behemoths as Simon & Schuster, Random House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin, Macmillan and Harper. If things were to get worse, or even if the owners were hard-up enough for cash, we could see another round of acquisitions by companies less interested in the culture than, simply, in the content. And off the top of my head I can think of outfits like Ingram, Adobe, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Verizon that might make a tasty meal of the rich trove of intellectual content in books. The cost would be petty cash to them. Some of these companies have dipped their toes into publishing and backed off, but that was then.

It this scenario too fanciful to credit? Any publishing person over 45 years old has seen things he or she would not have believed could happen, the buying and selling of titans like Random House, Doubleday, Putnam, Bantam, Macmillan and dozens of others as if they were trading cards in a childrens game.

Back in 1986, for the year-end issue of Publishers Weekly, I contributed a bit of doggerel entitled Merger, He Wrote summarizing the orgy of mergers and acquisitions that had taken place that year. Here's an excerpt:

With tax-law changes ‘round the bend,
Other houses joined the trend.
CBS unloaded Holt:
To Harcourt Brace the firm was solt.
And, glasses raised in loud “L’Chaim!”,
Scott Foresman joined the march of Time.
More turbulence: Congdon & Weed,
Atlantic Monthly Press, Dodd, Mead.

Thus in frenzied syncopation
Proceeds the trade’s consolidation.
Scores of famous names of yore
Have since succumbed to corporate war
Or publish books with but a semblance
Of their former independence.

As the value of print media drops, and the power and wealth of digital media rises, another round of acquisitions could be shaping up, and this one won't inspire poesy, good-natured or otherwise. Chop shop operators are standing by...

Richard Curtis

"Merger, He Wrote" Copyright (c) 1986, 2008 by Richard Curtis

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

Please Do Not Delete Them

Reading the names of staff cut by Harper (you can't call it HarperCollins any more because the "Collins" was vaporized in yesterday's violent contraction), by Simon & Schuster and other publishers is like reading a list of army buddies fallen in battle. I knew, laughed with, negotiated with, celebrated with, quarreled with, dined with, drank with, and loved many of these people. Some I met only once or casually bumped into at industry functions, but even that was enough to add to the pool of relationships that extended my contact list into the thousands. Even those I never met face to face at all went into the contact list on a "You never know" basis - one day I'd have a reason to call on them, and in fact I frequently did.

The removal of all these people from the day to day scene has drawn much of the vibrant color out of the bazaar known as trade book publishing. Life will go on but it will be darker and sadder.

It would be easy to delete them from my contact list but I can't bring myself to do so, and I won't until they turn up at a new position and I know they're out of harm's way. Until then, I've created a new designation to place beside their names: "A.R." - Awaiting Reassignment.

To honor my fallen comrades, the least I can do is take my finger off the Delete key.

RC

Is There a Market for Your Vanity?

I recently wrote about "gatekeepers", the cadre of tastemakers (editors, bookstore buyers, reviewers, critics, etc.) that guard the bastions of popularity against the clamoring horde of would-be's and wannabe's. It's hard to pin down just who these king- and queenmakers are, and even harder to get a clear idea of their selection criteria. The process is maddening and often cruelly arbitrary, like being rejected by the bouncer at a club whose admission policy is not posted: Is it your race? Creed? Gender? Height? Hair? Shoes?

I thought about gatekeepers when I read Motoko Rich's New York Times's article on the thriving author-subsidized publishing industry. It answers the question, What do all those authors do who are bounced from the club? Rich's answer? They start their own club. That is, they take their rejected books and publish them themselves.

Until very recently the phrase most often used to describe this activity was "vanity" publishing, but like most politically incorrect opprobria used in modern parlance it was necessary to find a gentler way to express the concept. Everyone seems to have settled on "self-publishing". Not only does that term spare the self-esteem of its practitioners, but it is also probably more accurate. For, when you read the astonishing number of people who elect the self-publication option, you say to yourself, Surely there could not be that many vain authors, could there? Well...

In her article Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab Rich points out that one outfit, Author Solutions, published 19,000 titles in 2008, "nearly six times more than Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, released last year." And it sold 2.5 million copies of all the books on its list. Rich also cites Blurb, a print on demand outfit, that published more than 300,000 titles in 2008 (not all of them subsidized by authors, clearly). Blurb's revenue has soared from $1 million to $30 million.

About this phenomenon, she says,

"As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster bestsellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs."

Author-subsidized books have always been with us, but how did the phenomenon go from sidetrack to mainline in just a few years?

Every literary agent can testify to the anxiety level of authors eager - all too often desperate - to see their work in print. Even a small agency receives dozens of queries and submissions daily, meaning somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 a year. Publishers did some math and discovered that the odds of finding a gem in the slush were about 20,000 to 1. They then measured the cost of maintaining a staff of first readers and factored in the time invested by senior editors reviewing the recommendations of te preliminary readers, and concluded that that gem would have to be a major and sustained bestseller just to recoup the cost of the search. So the publishers closed the door to slush and dumped the problem on literary agents.

But that didn't lower the odds - it just shifted them from one pair of shoulders to another, and when the rejection-to-acceptance ratio turned out to be about the same for agents as it had been for publishers, around 20,000 to 1, the conditions were ripe for an author stampede. All that was needed was a less expensive means of indulging one's vanity - er, excuse me: publishing one's own books. The late 1990s provided it in the form of such modern miracles as print on demand, photoshop software and other other cheap and easy production and graphics programs. The stampede began.

Only one element was missing: readers. Aside from immediate friends and family, readers proved a scarce commodity. Very few self-published books found an audience (and it is likely that even those who received or bought them never read them) Even fewer broke out of the vanity ghetto, and almost all that did relied on establishment gatekeepers to boost them onto the main track. Jill Priluck, in Slate, draws a very important distinction between merely finding readers and branding yourself: "The proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands."

But there are exceptions, and here's a passage from Motoko Rich's Times piece that caught my attention:

Michelle L. Long, an accountant who advises small businesses, published “Successful QuickBooks Consulting,” a guide for others who want to help businesses use a software package made by Intuit through CreateSpace a little more than a year ago. She said she had earned 45 to 55 percent of the cover price on each sale and had made $22,000 in royalties on the sale of more than 2,000 copies.

“A lot of this niche content is doing fairly well relative to the rest of the economy because it’s very useful to people who have a very specific need,” Rich quotes Aaron Martin, director of self-publishing and manufacturing on demand at Amazon.

Long's book genuinely filled a niche, and if, as futurist and publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin predicts, "the current format-specific publishing model must give way to an audience-specific one," there may very well emerge a self-publication business model that serves a real need besides the one so aptly captured by poet Emily Dickinson:

How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell your name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!

Richard Curtis