Harlan Ellison Signs with E-Reads

E-Reads, a leading independent online publisher, has acquired 32 out of print works by Harlan Ellison, winner of eight and a half Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards plus the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award. Ellison is also the subject of the recently-released documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Among the classic titles involved in the deal are Shatterday, Strange Wine, Ellison Wonderland, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Deathbird Stories.

E-Reads will release all titles both in e-book format and trade paperback via print on demand through Amazon.com and other book retailers. The first eight titles will be released in the next month and the rest will follow within the year.

E-Reads carries over 800 previously published books in all popular genres. Among other distinguished fantasy and science fiction authors on the E-Reads list are Greg Bear, Dan Simmons, Dave Duncan, R. A. MacAvoy, Pamela Sargent, Fritz Leiber, John Norman, Robin Bailey, George Zebrowski, James Gunn, William C. Dietz, Susan Shwartz and Alan Dean Foster.

Watch this page for postings about available Harlan Ellison titles.

The Nine Gazillion Pound Gorilla Bares its Fangs

I write this blog in two capacities: as an authors' advocate and as president of E-Reads, an Internet publisher that, in addition to publishing e-books, prints its titles on demand for readers who prefer traditional volumes. Indeed, fifty percent of our company's revenues are generated by print on demand. Our PODs are produced by Lightning Source Inc. and sold on Amazon. The excellent relationships we enjoy with both firms have enabled us to realize our vision of what a twenty-first century publishing venture can be. We are happy to claim them as partners and would hate to be placed in the position of choosing between them. But Amazon's proposed policy requiring small presses such as E-Reads to shift its POD business to its BookSurge press would do just that.



Though Amazon's ploy comes as a shock to publishers and authors, it did not come as a surprise to me. In the summer of 2005 Amazon.com announced the acquisition of MobiPocket, an e-book company, and BookSurge, a print on demand operation. A lot of ink was spilled on the MobiPocket deal but no one except me speculated on what it meant for a book retailer to have the capability of printing books on demand. In a guest editorial in Publishers Weekly, I wrote,

“It’s hard to say for sure what is behind amazon.com’s acquisition of BookSurge, the on-demand book-printer. But any move the Nine Gazillion Pound Gorilla makes is worthy of serious consideration. Indeed, the implications of the deal, especially combined with amazon’s purchase of e-book company MobiPocket, are profound.”

The implications were so disturbing that PW's editors urged me to tone down my speculations, which seemed to fall at the red end of the spectrum of possibility. Actually, I suspect that the editors were so freaked out that they went into denial. And who can blame them? In my editorial I spun the logic of Amazon/BookSurge to the max.

Here is the conclusion I reached: If Amazon is capable of printing books on demand, they will no longer have to carry any physical books in their warehouses at all! They simply have to load the files of Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, and every other publisher onto their server and print all of their books - frontlist as well as backlist - on demand. It would not only be a huge savings for Amazon in terms of warehouse space - it would be a huge savings for the publishers, too: they all would eliminate printing, warehouse, and freight costs at a stroke. Yes, they would still have to print and distribute books to other retailers besides amazon, but such sales would be modest compared to those of Amazon with its incomparable marketing and technical capabilities. Allowing Amazon to become the POD press for the publishing industry is a very seductive lure to publishers operating on razor-thin profit margins. But it would also enable Amazon to undercut bookstore prices, put Barnes & Noble and other bookstore chains and independent booksellers out of business and complete its march to monopoly. While you're trembling, consider the possibility of a mega-retailer ultimately deciding what you read as well as how and where it's printed.

If you are as incredulous as my Publishers Weekly editors were, ponder this statement in the letter just issued by the amazon.com books team: "It isn't logical or efficient to print a POD book in a third place, and then physically ship the book to our fulfillment centers. It makes more sense to produce the books on site, saving transportation costs and transportation fuel, and significantly speeding the shipment to our customers." You need only to remove the term "POD" from that statement to arrive at the terrifying conclusion that I reached in 2005.

Though I have railed for decades against the stupidity and wastefulness of an industry based on tangible books sold in brick and mortar stores, I have to wonder whether Amazon's Orwellian vision of absolute zero-returns efficiency is even more destructive than a traditional business model that pulps one copy for every two it distributes.

It is vital for publishers of every size to confront this potential restraint of trade.

- Richard Curtis

The Vanity Book Surge

In a guest editorial in Publishers Weekly in August 2005, I speculated on the meaning of amazon.com’s acquisition of a small and struggling print on demand company called BookSurge. The most obvious benefit to Amazon, it seemed to me, was to short-circuit the inefficient system by which Amazon distributes books. Instead of shipping hard copies to Amazon, publishers could simply email their production files to the distribution giant, which would then manufacture them at BookSurge and mail them directly to customers. “The Web retailer still owns well over four million square feet of warehouse space, no small portion of which is devoted to books; it employs 9,000 people to process orders,” I wrote. “Imagine how Amazon would benefit if it could forward orders to a printer to drop-ship books directly to customers.”

So far, Amazon has not used its POD printer that way, and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The concept is simply too radical for an industry whose feet are cemented to the bedrock of a traditional distribution system driven by trucks rather than electrons. But I must admit to having been taken off guard by an article in the September 10, 2007 issue of Publishers Weekly entitled, “Amazon Tries Self-Publishing.” The article reports the launch of Amazon’s online self-publishing service, Books on Demand, and of course the operation is built around BookSurge.

Self-publication was among the very first applications entrepreneurs thought of after the Digital Revolution took off in the late 1990’s. And it was among the most profitable. It still is, and little wonder. The ratio of unpublished-to-published books in this country has always been about 20,000 to 1, and, if submissions to publisher and literary agency slush piles are any indication, that figure hasn’t changed. Authors desperate to have their voices heard simply cannot penetrate the gates of taste, literary judgment, and commerciality guarded by editors, agents, reviewers, and bookstore managers in the traditional trade book industry. So, they seek alternate pathways. Subsidy publication has always been an option for authors but remained an expensive luxury until technological advances brought the costs down to a proletarian level at the end of the 20th century. A lot of smart business people made fortunes capitalizing on that unsatisfied demand. And now Amazon is going to make one, too.

As both a literary agent and publisher I candidly confess to being one of those gatekeepers. I also candidly confess to being tormented by envy that I’m not among those who got stinking rich on the backs of vain authors. It’s just that, every time the inclination whispered seductively to me, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s not merely pride in being a gatekeeper that motivates me, though. It’s also the fact that a flood of self-published books, whether good or lousy, compromises the public’s ability to make intelligent selections. In the long run, the distinction between quality and crap will disappear and Gresham’s Law must take over. In the 1558 Thomas Gresham wrote, "When there is a legal tender currency, bad money drives good money out of circulation."

Amazon will make lots of money, bad and good, on Books on Demand, just as it does on a used book program that deprives authors of royalties on secondary sales of their books. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," said Ecclesiastes, and one version of the Bible translates the original Hebrew as, "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless."

We look to books for meaning, but the torrent of them surging our way from Amazon’s Books on Demand will surely make it harder to find it.

PS: Underscoring my comments about vanity publishing comes news that self-publisher AuthorHouse has acquired its competitor, iUniverse (reported at Publishers Weekly). The price wasn’t disclosed but with iUniverse publishing about 400 books a month and AuthorHouse 500-600, you have to figure that Bertram Capital, AuthorHouse’s backer, expects a windfall on humanity’s desperate need to tell a story.

- Richard Curtis