Harlan Ellison An Edge in My Voice

At the beginning of the 1980's Harlan Ellison agreed to do a regular column for the Los Angeles Weekly on the condition that they publish whatever he wrote, without revising it or suggesting rewrites. Little did they know what they were agreeing to. Had they read his introduction to the collected columns, An Edge in My Voice, beforehand rather than years later when he prepared it for publication, they might have demurred, and the world would be sixty-one literary gems poorer.

RC

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From Harlan Ellison's Introduction to An Edge in My Voice

Ominous Remarks for Late in the Evening

Both Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald discovered a peculiar syndrome that affected critics of their work. They learned in the roughest way imaginable that if they were praised as great, fresh talents early on in their careers, that as they approached the middle years of writing they were "reevaluated." The second guessers and the parvenus who could not, themselves, create the great and fresh stories, made their shaky reputations by means of pronunciamentos that advised those few literati who gave a damn, that les enfants terribles were now too long in the tooth to produce anything worth reading; that they were past it; and in the name of common decency should embarrass themselves no further by packing it in and retiring to the cultivation of Zen flower gardens. So they both croaked, and did the heavy deeds of assassination for their critics. But had they somehow managed to overcome cancer and alcoholism, had they managed to squeak through for another decade, they'd have found themselves lionized. Each would have made it through the shitrain to become le monstre sacré. Grand old men of letters. National treasures. Every last snippet they'd tapped out on yellow second-sheets sold at Sotheby's for a pasha's weight in rubies.

They never made it. Not rugged, spike-tough old Ernest, not lighter-than-air Scott. Time and gravity and the nibbling of minnows did them in. And so they don't know that they are still famous--though seldom read--in the way that talk show guests are famous: you know their names and often their faces, but you can't quite remember what the hell it is they did to make them "famous."

The lesson we who work behind the words learn from this is that if your life is as interesting as your work, or even approaches that level of passion, there will be those who are not-quite-good-enough waiting in the tall grass, waiting to compound your fractures when your brittle bones splinter.

Never get too fat, never get too secure. The rat-things are waiting. Just hang in there long enough, like Borges or Howard Fast or Graham Greene or Jean Rhys, and the sheer volume of accumulated years will daunt all but the most vicious (who quickly self destruct when they try to savage the icons)

To read the complete introduction, click here.

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E-Reads is happy to offer An Edge in My Voice in e-book format for the first time. Watch this page for news of a paperback edition, and of course keep your eye peeled on Ellison's author page at E-Reads for new additions to our collection of 32 masterpieces by a master author.

If They Can Make the Kindle Smell Like a Book, Maybe She'll Buy One

Danielle Belopotosky is a dedicated "real-book person" but was prepared to keep an open mind as she road-tested the Kindle 2, a variety of Sony readers and some iPhone nouvellement arriveés like the Stanza and Shortcovers. The net result is that she's still a dedicated real-book person, but now maybe a little less so. "I’ve come around on my opposition to e-book. Somewhat," she grudgingly admits in her New York Times e-book survey.

Not surprisingly she devotes most of her attention to the Kindle 2 and echoes many of the positive reviews we recently assembled including our own. But she does have some issues:

The new Kindle is thinner than the original and has a sharper screen with more shades of gray, producing easy-to-read, crisp text in any light. But while the Kindle is nice to look at, it is a pain to navigate. There’s a five-way joystick that you can use to maneuver through menus, but it’s stiff and tough to master. Would a touch screen be too much to ask?

The keyboard lets you add notes to text, but no one is going to want to write a novel of their own using its small plasticky buttons. Also, Amazon’s page numbering system is ridiculous: Instead of “page 23,” you get data such as “location 47-82” and “2%” along the bottom of the screen. After using the Kindle for a week, I still don’t know what all that means.

She likes many things about Sony's PRS-700, especially its touch screen, virtual keyboard, easy page numbering and access to many book websites and digital libraries. Some other functions, especially the annoying difficulties of downloading e-books via cable instead of wirelessly as in the Kindle, got lower marks from Belopotosky.

Check out A Walk Through a Crop of Readers and note what she has to say about the hot-off-the-press Shortcovers.

Despite increased respect for e-books Belopotosky will stand pat with book-books "unless Amazon comes out with a special 'book scented' Kindle." Don't laugh: if Amazon can make a book talk, they can make it smell.

RC

Will You, Won't You, Will You, Won't You, Will You Buy a Kindle?

CrunchGear's John Biggs conducts a debate with himself about whether or not to buy a Kindle. He offers ten reasons pro and ten con, and it's logical to conclude the results are a draw. But every consumer brings different criteria to decisions.

For instance, travelers will put great weight on carrying lots of books in one slim device. (It also helps that the Kindle works well in inclement weather.) Scholars will agree with his criticism that it's terrible for research, reference and student applications ("Expect ebooks to hit colleges in perhaps five years and high schools and grade schools in about seven" Biggs says). For some, cosmetic beauty is a consideration, and the sleek look and feel of the Kindle (v. 2) trumps functionality. For others, such functions as highlighting, bookmarking, dictionary lookup and 16 greyscale shades are paramount.

And then there are those who love the idea that you only need one hand to read on your Kindle. What you do with the other hand was a source of great hilarity when Jeff Bezos appeared on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show to hype the newly released device. For a good smirk, click on Bezos' appearance, and note his laughter, which soars beyond good-natured and approaches the diabolical.

If you're still on the fence about buying a Kindle, read 10 reasons to buy a Kindle 2… and 10 reasons not to and see if it helps you make up your mind. And keep both hands where we can see them.

RC

No Doors, No Windows by Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison's No Doors, No Windows immerses you in fear and doesn't let you up till you're one gasp away from drowning.

Fear comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It comes as rejection by a beautiful woman. It comes in the brutalization of your love by an amoral man. It comes with the threat of impending nuclear holocaust; with the slithering shadows in the city streets; with the ripoff artists who lie in wait behind every television commercial. Fear is the erratic behavior of all the nut cases and whackos walking the streets - they look just like you and me and your lover and your mother - and all they need is a wrong word and there they go to the top of an apartment building with a sniperscope'd rifle.

Fear is all around you. You have nothing to fear but fear itself, right? Sure. The only trouble is, the minute you get all the rational fears taken care of, all battened down and secure, here comes something new. Like what? Well, like the special fears generated in these 16 incredible stories. Fear described as it's never been described before, by the startling imagination of Harlan Ellison, master fantasist, tour-guide through the land of dreadful visions, unerring observer of human folly and supernatural diabolism. Or, quoting the Louisville Courier-Journal & Times, Ellison's "stories are kaleidoscopic in their range, breathtaking in their beauty, hideous in their deformity, insulting in their arrogance and unarguable in the accuracy of their insight."

Here's an excerpt from Ellison's introduction:

What are we to make of the mind of humanity? What are we to think of the purgatory in which dreams are born, from whence come the derangements that men call magic because they have no other names for smoke or fog or hysteria? What are we to dwell upon when we consider the forms and shadows that become stories? Must we dismiss them as fever dreams, as expressions of creativity, as purgatives? Or may we deal with them even as the naked ape dealt with them: as the only moments of truth a human calls throughout a life of endless lies.

Who will be the first to acknowledge that it was only a membrane, only a vapor, that separated a Robert Burns and his love from a Leopold Sacher-Masoch and his hate?

Is it too terrible to consider that a Dickens, who could drip treacle and God bless us one and all, through the mouth of a potboiler character called Tiny Tim, could also create the escaped convict Magwitch; the despoiler of children, Fagin; the murderous Sikes? Is it that great a step to consider that a woman surrounded by love and warmth and care of humanity as was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the greatest romantic poet western civilization has ever produced, could herself produce a work of such naked horror as Frankenstein? Can the mind equate the differences and similarities that allow both an Annabell Lee and a Masque of the Red Death to emerge from the same churning pit of thought-darkness?

Consider the dreamers: all of the dreamers: the glorious and the corrupt:

Aesop, Attilla; Benito Mussolini and Benvenuto Cellini; Chekhov and Chang Tao-ling; Democritus, Disraeli; Epicurus, Edison; Fauré and Fitzgerald; Goethe, Garibaldi; Huysmann and Hemingway, ibn-al-Farid and Ives; Jeanne d'Arc and Jesus of Nazareth; and on and on. All the dreamers. Those whose visions took form in blood and those which took form in music. Dreams fashioned of words, and nightmares molded of death and pain. Is it inconceivable to consider that Richard Speck--who slaughtered eight nurses in Chicago in 1966, who was sentenced to 1,200 years in prison--was a devout Church-going Christian, a boy who lived in the land of God, while Jean Genet--avowed thief, murderer, pederast, vagrant who spent the first thirty years of his life as an enemy of society, and in the jails of France where he was sentenced to life imprisonment--has written prose and poetry of such blazing splendor that Sartre has called him "saint"? Does the mind shy away from the truth that a Bosch could create hell-images so burning, so excruciating that no other artist has ever even attempted to copy his staggeringly brilliant style, while at the same time he produced works of such ecumenical purity as "L'Epiphanie"? All the dreamers. All the mad ones and the noble ones, all the seekers after alchemy and immortality, all those who dashed through endless midnights of gore-splattered horror and all those who strolled through sunshine springtimes of humanity. They are one and the same. They are all born of the same desire. [For the complete text of this introduction, click here]

E-Reads is happy to offer No Doors, No Windows in e-book format for the first time. Watch this page for news of a new print edition, and of course keep your eye peeled on Ellison's author page at E-Reads for new additions to our collection of 32 masterpieces by a master author.

Kindle 2 Getting Blog Fever: A Round-Up Of Kindle Hype

Yesterday was one of those days when the stars aligned for Amazon's Kindle PR team. All the major tech blogs published multiple articles on the Kindle 2, coinciding with the recent deliveries of the new device into people's homes and offices. And then today, even a few more articles shuffled out of the gate.

The Kindle 2, as pictured dissasembled by iFixit.com

The Kindle 2 has some serious opponents, namely the editors at Gizmodo, who have been eager to take the e-book reader down a peg because it's not yet their dream device, but all press is good press in the end. Here's a round-up of some of the best and most colorful blog writings about the Kindle 2 in the last 2 weeks.

The Kindle 2 at Blogs Round-Up:

Review Matrix of Kindle 2 (USA Today vs. Wired vs. NYT), by Gizmodo, Feb 25th, 2009

Jeff Bezos chats up the Kindle 2 with Jon Stewart, by Engadget, Feb 25th, 2008

Amazon Kindle 2: a full review, by CNET’s Crave Blog, Feb 25th, 2009

10 reasons to buy a Kindle 2… and 10 reasons not to, by TechCrunch, Feb 25th, 2009

Kindle 2 Unboxing and Hands-On, by Engadget, Feb. 24th, 2009

Kindle 2 Stripped Naked; Chip Is Faster Than iPhone's, by Wired, Feb. 24th, 2009

Designing the Kindle 2, by CNET’s Crave Blog, Feb 24th, 2009

What's the average age of Kindle owners?, by CNET’s Crave Blog, Feb 24th, 2009

Kindle 2 dissected, found to contain space for a SIM card, by iFixit, Feb. 24th, 2009

Kindle's text to speech feature voiced by "Tom" Cruise?, by Engadget, Feb. 20th, 2009

Showdown: Kindle 2 vs. Sony Reader, by Wired, Feb. 9th, 2009

And more from Gizmodo’s War Against The Kindle 2:

First Kindle 2 Destroyed, Showing Extended Warranty May Be Worth It, by Gizmodo, Feb 25th, 2009

Giz Explains: Why There Isn't a Perfect Ebook Reader, by Gizmodo, Feb 12th, 2009

Why Kindle 2 Isn't a Big Step Forward For Voracious Readers, by Gizmodo, Feb 9th, 2009

- Michael Gaudet

Listen to Umless, Erless Kindle Audio, and Learn why Authors Guild Prez is Pissed

The New York Times carries an op-ed article by Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr. with the provocative title The Kindle Swindle? The Guild has attacked Amazon over the Kindle feature enabling readers to listen to the texts of their Kindle books read by a computer voice.

The Guild's position is that Amazon is not paying royalties for the text-to-speech versions, and that the Kindle may be infringing on audio rights reserved to authors, book publishers, or legitimate audio companies. E-Reads' Michael Gaudet has commented extensively on the controversy and strongly recommends that interested parties sort this out through discussion and negotiation. If they don't, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. The audio business is a billion dollar one, a sum worth going to court over.

"You may be thinking." writes Blount, "that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading 'Harry Potter' or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version...And that sort of technology is improving all the time. I.B.M. has patented a computerized voice that is said to be almost indistinguishable from human ones. This voice is programmed to include 'ums,' 'ers' and sighs, to cough for attention, even to 'shhh' when interrupted."

Author Guild has released a demo of a Kindle audio reading of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Any ums? Any ers? Judge for yourself, but if I'm Abe Lincoln I'm on the horn with my lawyer faster than you can say Jeff Bezos.

RC

Before, We couldn't Tell Publishers Without A Scorecard. Now, We Have a Scorecard But Nobody's Buying

Bertelsmann owns Random House Inc. and Random House Inc. owns Crown Publishing Group and Crown Publishing Group owns Broadway Books. You follow? But Bertelsmann also owns Random House Publishing Group which owns Little Random House. You still with me? Crown Publishing Group owns Crown Business, which incorporates Doubleday Business. Somewhere in there is WaterBrook Multnomah which incorporates Multnomah and WaterBrook Press. And let's not forget Potter Craft, Back Stage Books, Lone Eagle Publishing, and Wendy Lamb Books.

What's that? Your head is exploding and you're begging me to stop? Darn, I was just getting started and have a hundred more Random House divisions to go. And I haven't even gotten into Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin and Macmillan.

The good news is that there is at last an organizational chart for major publishers, their divisions, imprints, subsidiaries, affiliates, their sisters and their cousins and their aunts, along with charts for about a dozen smaller publishers with multiple imprints. All thanks to Publishers Marketplace, an affiliate (or is it first cousin once removed?) of Publishers Lunch, the invaluable online publishing industry newsletter created by Michael Cader. The announcement states:

Spurred by recent realignments at a number of the largest publishing companies, we have finally launched a feature at PM to answer many member requests: a live, and fully-linked, list of large publishing companies and their many divisions and imprints (which also notes corporate parents)...We also linked in now-defunct imprints absorbed by other lines.

These family trees are accessible to subscribers of Publishers Lunch including bewildered agents needing to know whether ESPN Books is a division of Random House (it is), Hudson Street Press is a division of Macmillan (it isn't), or Simon & Schuster is owned by Penguin (not yet).

Mr. Cader added a special feature that will further endear him to agents. He has tied his list "directly to Top Dealmakers, so that it reveals imprint size according to deals reported and clicks through to individual imprint Dealmaker pages." Thus we learn that Berkley Books, a division of Penguin Group USA, was involved in 401 deals reported in Publishers Lunch, whereas Jove, a member of the same group, reported but one deal. How agents process that information depends on whether they are from the glass-half-full school (Berkley's buying! Jove is starving for product!) or the glass-half-empty school (Berkley's overbought! Jove isn't buying!).

In any event Publishers Marketplace's innovation will go far to reduce confusion for all denizens of Publishingland, but we hope Mr. Cader has retained a full-time data entry specialist to keep up with the mergers, acquisitions, deacquisitions, consolidations, spinoffs, reorganizations, reconfigurations and retitlings that seem to have been our daily portion for the last few decades.

RC
Dinosaur family tree Copyright © Australian Museum, 2002

Editors: The New Disenfranchised

Note: This article was published 23 years ago. I reprint it unaltered. RC

I've always liked editors but I never used to feel sorry for them. That changed when the acquisition of Doubleday was announced in 1986.

Until then, whenever I heard that a publisher had been acquired by some sprawling conglomerate, or merged with another publisher, or had simply given up the ghost and shut its doors, my first thought had always been, This is bad for authors. The displacement, the disruption, the disarray caused by these corporate earthquakes have been nothing short of calamitous. The publishing landscape of the past thirty-five years is littered with ruined books beyond counting and haunted by the shades of authors whose careers have been maimed and prematurely terminated.

But in the tumultuous last week of September 1986, when deals were concluded for the acquisition of Doubleday and New American Library, my first thought was, How terrible this all must be for editors.

To continue, click here.

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 Deadly Streets by Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison published his violent and disturbing story collection The Deadly Streets at the age of 24, spewing it like lava out of his experience as a street gang member researching his first novel, Web of the City.

It may still be too hot to touch, and some of the story titles glow with menace:

• Rat Hater
• "I'll Bet You a Death"
• We Take Care of Our Dead
• The Man With the Golden Tongue
• Johnny Slice's Stoolie
• Joy Ride
• Buy Me That Blade
• The Hippie-Slayer
• Kid Killer
• With a Knife in Her Hand
• Sob Story (written with Henry Slesar)
• Look Me in the Eye, Boy!
• The Dead Shot
• Ship-Shape Pay-Off (written with Robert Silverberg)
• Made in Heaven
• Students of the Assassin

His introduction to the first edition not only sheds light on the dark mind of Harlan Ellison, but may shed some on the dark and deadly places in your own mind as well:

A few weeks ago, my housekeeper, Eusona, laid a beauty on me. She reads the newspapers: I haven't the stomach for it these days. So she has become my gazette.

The story, which she found on the back page somewhere, was a quickie. Woman parking her car in Manhattan was driven to a frenzy by a dude in a VW who pulled into the space snout-first behind her, as she was backing up. As he parked, she reached into the glove compartment of her dashboard, pulled out a revolver, jumped out of the car, stalked over to the VW, aimed the weapon through the window and shot to death the man driving, and his two female passengers.

These two stories took place in New York, but just so you don't feel all teddibly superior to those barbarian Megalopolitans, here's a lovely one from a large Midwestern city (which one, I cannot remember right now, but it was on the evening network news). A couple of thugs broke into the apartment of an old Czech woman. At knife-point they demanded she give them all her money. She laughed at them, telling them all she had was about three American dollars worth of Czechoslovak koruna, a currency so unstable and unacceptable that the exchange control law of 1 January 1954 prohibits its import and export. She offered them the koruna and continued laughing. Wrong move.

They spotted her gold fillings, bust out her teeth, and got away with about $1100 worth of marketable gold.

As horrifying as we may find Charlie Bronson's actions in Death Wish, his vigilante tactics of stalking and killing muggers in New York strike a sympathetic vibration in each of us, though we hate it in ourselves, though most of us would deny we feel the same urge from time to time.

You feel it, I feel it.

Ten years ago, I was worked over pretty fair by a couple of over-six-feet heavyweights. One of them held me while the other one pounded my face into guava jelly. When the local bacon finally arrived, the guys had split. One was a deckhand on pleasure yachts, with a string of priors for mayhem that made Hurricane Carter look like Christopher Robin's nanny. He skipped the country, so I was told. But the other one was a certified flake, an overly macho clown who had been married to a busty film starlet, had bombed out as a stockbroker, and who owed money all over Hollywood. We hauled him into the City Attorney's office, got him cold when the Man suggested we each take a lie detector test. I rolled up my sleeve right there and said, "Let's get it on!" The flake began to hem and haw, and his attorney fumfuh'd it was an invasion of something or other. Nonetheless, I took the polygraph test and it backed my story one hundred per cent. Attorney's office put out a warrant for his arrest. But the cops didn't bother looking for him.

We went to court, almost two years ago, and got a financial judgment against him for five grand, since it was obvious I wasn't going to be able to slap the sonofabitch in jail. Even though I had witnesses to unprovoked assault, battery, criminal assault, and a host of etceteras, the cops were simply too busy busting kids with grass in their possession to keep a pair of homicidal thugs off the streets.

He can keep the five grand. Just let me have fifteen minutes alone with the muther.

I'd take along a tire iron.

Not for the beginning; I want that pleasure barehanded. But after that interlude, I'd need the tire iron. I'd start with his legs. Lay him out on the floor and lean his left leg up against the wall and then just jump on the angle, right below the kneecap. Like snapping a rotted piece of cord-wood for the fireplace. Then I'd use the tire iron to break it back in the opposite direction, so bone-chips would get in the kneecap socket, so he'd walk with a limp for the rest of his barbaric life. Then I'd do his hands. Forearms with the tire iron, wrists with the tire iron, fingers one by one...

Make you uneasy? Make you sick? Makes me sick, to know I've got that in me somewhere. If I told you I'm a pacifist, would you believe me? Not for a second, and I wouldn't blame you; even though it's true. Let me make you even more uneasy; I'm no different than you.

Have you ever been beaten ... or raped ... or robbed ... or even been dismissed cavalierly by some petty authority?

Think back. You know I'm telling the truth. We are all the same inside these skins. We all want to exact revenge. The invasion of our personal space, the brutalization, the debasement, the shame at not having been able to duke it out like Bruce Lee or one of the million short, smart movie/television stars who play the rabbit till they can take it no longer and then lash out and deck the hairy bully. Gary Cooper in Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town: at the end of the trial where the forces of greed and evil try to convince the court his millions should be taken away from him because he's "pixilated" and the judge asks Deeds if there's anything else, and Cooper as Deeds says, "Yes, one more thing," and he hauls off and knocks crooked attorney Douglass Dumbrille stone cold in the courtroom. Alan Ladd in The Glass Key: having been worked over by pithecanthropoid William Bendix and his buddy, Rusty, played by Eddie Marr, fights back, sets fire to the room where's he's been kept prisoner, throws himself out a window and escapes, enabling him later to pound the shit out of Bendix. Jan-Michael Vincent in Buster and Billie: his sweetheart having been raped and bludgeoned to death, finds his ex-school chums, the gang who killed her, and goes berserk, killing two of them by smashing in their heads with a pool cue and a billiard ball. And, of course, Charlie Bronson in Death Wish.

But those are only movies, you say.

Are they? Think back. You know I'm telling the truth. If your wife or sister or girl friend was ever assaulted, if your husband or brother or son was ever stomped or beaten, didn't you wish you had that fifteen minutes alone with the nameless, faceless motherfuckers who did the deed? Didn't you fantasize it in your mind, some ghastly weapon in your hand that would prevent their getting at you as you crippled them? If you say you never held such a thought ... you are either a liar or nobler than any other member of the human race.

Because the unspoken terror that lives with all of us in big cities these days is a constant. It runs in our bloodstream, it tingles in our skin, it aches in our bones. It's better for us here in Los Angeles than for you in Detroit or Pittsburgh or Washington, D.C., or New York. But not much.

And so, in that unseamed existence beyond regional or ethnic or religious differentiations, we are all the same. All come to that place where the fear we've been taught is so omnipresent that it can be ignored until its intensity reaches panic level. Background noise, ever present static, the ticking of the clock in the darkened bedroom, the hum of generators underfoot, the clattering of the crickets. Always with us. Always there. Unnoticed, unheard, unknown ... always there.

Until the moment comes when we become aware of it because it assumes corporeal reality. Like this:

On a trip to New York, I found myself at nine o'clock at night--having worked all day on the galleys of one of my books soon to go to press--descending in a semi-empty elevator at 919 Third Avenue. Bone-tired, leaning up against the wall of the elevator car, attaché case hanging from one hand, almost phased-out. Semi-empty. There was the one other passenger. A very large, very nasty-looking young man in a long and dirty topcoat.

In elevators, unless one is garrulous, one stares at the numbers lighting one after another, or pretends to be deep in thought; one never looks at the other passengers, unless one is a cut-up. I am garrulous, I am a cut-up; but not on this occasion. I was too exhausted. I merely leaned against that wall and waited for the long descent to end.

Everything that happened next, happened in a matter of seconds.

Without looking at him, but nonetheless seeing him clearly out of the corner of my eye, I perceived my companion's hand reaching down into his topcoat pocket for something weighty. Don't ask me how I knew, don't even suggest I could have been dead wrong: I'll admit I may have been way off-base, but in my gut I knew I was right: he was reaching for a knife. Some nice, long, heavy gravity knife or shake, like the ones I used to see uptown around 101st and First Avenue. His hand was deep in the pocket when, without moving or looking at him, speaking to the floor where my eyes were directed, I said, in a deep and gravelly voice, "If that hand comes out of that pocket with anything on the end of it but fingers, I'm going to kick your brains all over this elevator, motherfucker."

He paused. Hand deep in pocket.

And then, very slowly, very smoothly, he brought his hand out with the fingers spread, palm forward showing he held nothing. He moved finally and carefully, deeper into his corner, and he watched me.

When we got to the first floor, he was out of the car quickly, was signing the guard's register at the front door before I was even out of the elevator myself, and as I crossed the lobby of 919 Third Avenue, he was out the door and gone.

Yes, I may have been wrong. He may have been just a young guy working late in one of the upper offices. Maybe. But the noise level of fear had mounted too high to be ignored. It had assumed corporeal reality. And he was quickly gone.

I know if I hadn't spoken up, just psychopathic enough in my tone and phrasing, that he would have braced me with a knife. I learned the next day, from my then-publisher, Norman Goldfind, that there had been a dozen or so knifings, robberies, muggings, and even a rape in that building over the past two years. And a man had his throat slashed in a toilet in that building just a few months ago. I knew. As you know.

So don't judge your humble author too quickly. Don't cluck your tongue and denigrate me for the insensate violence that exists just below the civilized veneer. I am a survival type, an animal that knows. One gets that way in cities like New York.

I learned it a long time ago, when I was gathering material for WEB OF THE CITY (republished recently in an Ace Books edition) and for this book. So the Mystery Writers of America gave me an award for a "mystery" story that is no more a mystery than any other example of mimetic fiction. "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" is a fantasy that explains reality in a way reality cannot explain itself.

In the same way, the stories in this book hold up that mirror to the real world, turning it slightly, so you can see what goes on around you from a new angle.

Eleven of the stories were written for this book back in the Fifties, when such things as kid gangs existed in the streets of New York. They still exist, but they're very very different now. In the Fifties, the juvies waged war against each other, and "civilians" were pretty much exempt from the slaughter, unless a random pedestrian happened to walk into the path of a zip gun slug. Today, the gangs rob and kill and spend their time helping to raise the national crime statistics by 17% every month.

Those eleven stories now become history.

There are five others I've added to what comprised the first edition of this book. Several of them are up-to-date exercises in street terror. They are history in the making.

But all of them, even though mere fictions, professional lies told to amuse or titillate you, bear within their plotted little boundaries the seeds of what has become the tone of the cities: fear. That unwavering threnody we hear in the night, the hum of people with aerosol cans of mace in their purses, Dobermans on leashes, Fox Locks on their doors, terror in their hearts.

Sixteen stories of violent kids, murderous adults, psychos with no sane reason to kill, streetwise thugs who make their livings preying on the weak and the unwary.

And if you should ask me, "Why tell these terrible stories? Why scare us with such fables?" Why, then I answer: because it is better to know, to see the face of fear, so you can ready yourself. Because living in ignorance is no longer blissful. It's suicidal.

The deadly streets are the jungles of barbarism Jane Jacobs speaks of, and if you wish to survive in those streets, you must arm yourselves with awareness. Perhaps these stories are only cautionary tales. When they first appeared they were curiosities. It's just barely possible they are now tools for staying alive.

Harlan Ellison Los Angeles

E-Reads is happy to offer The Deadly Streets in e-book format for the first time. Watch this page for news of a new print edition, and of course keep your eye peeled on Ellison's author page at E-Reads for new additions to our collection of 32 masterpieces by a master author.

B&N Follies, Act II, Scene 2 - A Fund Buys 7 Million Shares of Book Chain Behemoth

A couple of months ago we expressed confusion about Barnes & Noble's financial maneuvers. After the book chain's czar Leonard Riggio announced the company had suffered the worst holiday season in memory, media mogul Ron Burkle bought an 8.3% stake in it. A short while later, Pershing Square Capital Management dumped its entire holdings of B&N, amount to nearly 12%. I wondered, "If things are so terrible, why is someone buying in? And if things are so wonderful, why is someone cashing out?"

We now learn that First Eagle Global Fund has declared in an SEC filing that it controls 11.7 percent of the B&N's shares. Publishers Lunch points out that "with additional interests on behalf of clients their stake of more than 7 million shares comprises 12.77 percent of BN shares." That makes First Eagle Global the largest institutional holder of the company's stock.

After Riggio's heartwrenching cri de coeur during the holiday season it's comforting to know that some investors still believe there's value in B&N.

RC

His Crowd: James Patterson and 28 Writers Collaborate on Collective Novel

Sarah Perez in ReadWriteWeb reports that blockbuster author James Patterson has corraled 28 writers to produce AirBorne, a collaboratively written novel . "The upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself." "With the release of this book," Perez adds, "it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream." The book will be published electronically and serially, then released as a limited print edition as a keepsake for the contributors. There are no plans at this time for wider print publication.

"Crowdwritten" books are by no means unique to traditional literature. A famous example is Medea: Harlan's World, a (now out of print) collection of science fiction stories produced by different authors. Unlike the (as far as I can see) unknowns contributing to Patterson's book, Ellison's was packed with superstars: Jack Williamson, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, Hal Clement, Thomas M. Disch, Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson, Kate Wilhelm, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg and Ellison himself. Nevertheless, the digital medium gives the collective format an exciting new life. Says Perez:

"The roots of the collaborative writing movement can be found in many web startups, including those like Novlet, Potrayl, Ficlets, Unblokt, Protagonize, and others we profiled here. A popular activity for creative writers, these communities offer various takes on how a co-written story should be developed, some focused more on "choose your own adventure"-style stories while others focus more on linear narratives."

The one thing that isn't clear is how the contributors to Patterson's book will be compensated. As it's a collective effort, perhaps Karl Marx's formula would be most appropriate: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

RC

At 54-Year-Old Playboy T&A Still Has Its Allure, But Finances Go Limp

About 2.6 million readers, purporting to read the magazine for its intellectual content, turn to Playboy's centerfold first, sustaining its position as America's bestselling men's magazine. But that's the only position the magazine can sustain as losses in advertising revenue - the same spectre haunting every other print publication today - hammer the magazine and its parent company. This according to Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times. Clifford reports that "As it posted a big quarterly loss, Playboy Enterprises indicated Wednesday that it would be willing to sell the company or change the direction of its flagship magazine." The loss was $145.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2008 alone. In a desperate scramble to cut losses Playboy is closing its New York City offices and returning to home base in Chicago, according to Belinda Luscumbe in Time Magazine.

You can't blame the company's problems on digital media, as Playboy has built on its sex appeal with an eye-catching, video-stacked website, which management has tried to make more relevant as well as profitable. "Management" in this case is neither Hugh Heffner nor daughter Christie, who have removed themselves, or been removed, from the front line. It's hoped that fresh blood will revive the magazine and its myriad enterprises. But hard-nosed investors are skeptical.

Says Time's Luscumbe,

Playboy Enterprises Inc. stock has been vulgar, dropping 90% in a year. The company has an entertainment arm in Los Angeles and licenses its name and bunny logo to anyone who'll pay, including a wine company in 2008, but is said to make most of its money from its less well-known, more hard-core enterprises such as Spice TV and Clubjenna.com, named for porn star Jenna Jameson

Sex still sells but it doesn't seem to sell enough, and if Playboy can't get its revenue up using all its seductive wiles, American males may be reduced to reading the backs of cereal boxes.

RC
Photo: Arny Freytag

The Day Planet Earth Swallowed Barbra Streisand - and Other Vintage Harlan Ellison Stories: Approaching Oblivion

The New York Times called him "relentlessly honest" and then used him as the subject of its famous Sunday Acrostic. People Magazine said there was no one like him, then cursed him for preventing easy sleep. But in Approaching Oblivion Harlan Ellison outdoes himself, rampaging like a mad thing through love ("Cold Friend", "Kiss of Fire", "Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman"), hate ("Knox", "Silent in Gehenna"), sex ("Catman", "Erotophobia"), lost childhood ("One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty") and into the bizarre (the aforementioned Streisand story)

The vintage collection is now available in e-book and will shortly appear in trade paperback. Missing Ellison titles? Round out your collection with these, and look for more before long. E-Reads has acquired more than 30 volumes of Harlan Ellison's work, making us by far his largest publisher.

RC

E-Book Sales Fly High Over Holiday Storms

Though e-book sales in the fall were very strong - ridiculously strong compared to printed books - we fretted about what would happen in December when the full force of the recession hit. We fretted needlessly: the International Digital Publishing Forum just released December stats showing a 119.9 % bump in December sales over the same period one year ago. The 12/08 dollar volume was $6,500,000. Calendar Year to Date Revenue is up 68.4%.

Michael Smith, IDPF's executive director, adds, "Q4 saw wholesale e-book numbers not only break through the $14,000,000 barrier but saw them pass the next two plateaus and settle at $16,800,000. Total wholesale sales for 2008 was $52,400,000."

The only other field posting growth at this phenomenal rate is the bankruptcy profession. :-(

Smith reminds us that...

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

RC

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

Anderson News Suspends Business and Takes Out 40,000 Book and Magazine Retailers

Charlie Anderson, CEO of magazine wholesaler Anderson News called it quits, idling (according to one source) about 2000 trucks serving 40,000 book and magazine retailers, about half of the magazine market. "This is a mess for us all," he said in an understatement of epic dimensions. Only a "Skeleton Crew" will remain.

Desperate to make up their shortfalls, some distributors including Anderson tried to charge a handling fee for every magazine copy distributed (whether it sold or not). Publishers wouldn't hear of it, and that was the last straw for Anderson.

This misfortune could not come at a worse time for the struggling magazine and book industries and underscores the fragility of a business model based on printed paper delivered by motor vehicles to brick and mortar stores.

Naturally we hope that some other distributors will fill the vacuum and take over Anderson's territories. But other distributors are struggling for the same reason as Anderson: the business model of book and magazine distribution is deeply flawed: distributors not only have to deliver product but collect unsold books and magazines and try to make money pulping or recycling them. According to an article on the website of the Periodical and Book Association of America, "Another factor impacting the wholesaler business...has been the dramatic drop in scrap paper pricing, which has gone from $130 per ton to $60 per ton-resulting in a $6 million net loss for the company."

Now, are you ready for this? According to one knowledgeable publishing person I spoke to, China has until recently been a big buyer of American scrap paper. One of their major uses for it? Paper wadding for firecrackers. But China's economic slowdown has contributed to reduced scrap paper purchases from the US.

Thus on Chinese firecrackers does the American magazine and paperback book industry stand or fall.

So, help a paperback publisher today - buy firecrackers.

RC

Anonymous Killer Stalks Kindle

Brian Fichter of coolhunting.com held a prototype of Plastic Logic's e-reader in his hands at New York's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference and declared he was "more than impressed." This is the device we wrote about in September.

Fichter's reservations are all about shape and color and feel (too beige, corners not rounded to his satisfaction, etc.), but these are cavils compared to the catalogue of advantages he lists, features that are going to give Amazon's Kindle and Sony's eReader some stiff competition when the, um, Whatsit is released. That's not the name for it, but either PL is guarding it like the crown jewels or doesn't have a clue what to call it. We'll have to wait about year to know and to hold the device in our own hands. But for a preview check out the video of a demo at the Consumer Electronics Show, along with Fichter's take on the device. Here's an excerpt

With a form factor equivalent to that of a legal-size pad of paper, though coming in at half the thickness and weighing under 16 ounces, it's easy to see the reader's instant appeal. Compatibility with document formats like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs, in addition to newspapers, periodicals and books, means that users will no longer need to stuff carry-ons or briefcases full of papers when traveling. The reader has the capacity to store thousands of documents, all of which can be synced wirelessly or with wired access. Publishing partners already include fictionwise, the Financial Times, Ingram Digital and USA Today.

Fichter refers to the Plastic Logic device as a possible "Kindle Killer" but there's an evil twin lurking in E-Book World, the iRex Reader 1000 about which we wrote last fall; it too was dubbed a potential Kindle Killer. Sounds like there's a hit-team of assassins looking to whack Kindle, but for now the device is planted smugly on its throne guarded by a fierce contingent of amazons captained by Jeff Bezos.

RC

And A Pack of E-Readers Nipping at Kindle's Heels

In case the growing number of entries into the e-reader sweepstakes is making your head spin, Channelweb has done us the favor of providing a roundup of Kindle's competitors. We've covered some of these, like the iRex, the Foxit eSlick Reader, and the Plastic Logic Watchimacallit (they haven't come up with a name yet).

Another bunch is described in Channelweb's survey. Going into the clubhouse turn Kindle is ahead of Sony by several lengths, then there's the rest of the pack, which includes such notables as the Jinke HanLin eReader, the Bookeen Cybook, the Netronix EB-100, the Fujitsu Frontech FLEPia, the Foxit eSlick, and the Polymer Vision Readius. Don't smirk. Today's tongue-twister could be tomorrow's household name.

The Readius, depicted here, fits into your pocket and sports a screen that unrolls/unfolds. "It offers 30 hours' worth of battery life (about 7,500 page refreshes)," says Channelweb's summary, "a five-inch display and 16 levels of grayscale." The display refreshes in half a second. As civilized humans haven't read from scrolls in about three millennia, the Readius has our vote for most thought-provoking. Any bozo can reinvent the wheel, but it takes a special mentality to reinvent the scroll.

Despite the large field, it's entirely possible that the winner hasn't even stepped into the starting gate. Somewhere in a garage or basement of college dorm, a geek is working on something that might, just might, change the game completely...

RC

13,000 Reasons to Save Printed Books

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

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

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

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

RC

Back to Basics

As the stakes continue to rise in the publishing business, writers are adopting a wide range of strategies to advance themselves out of the midlist and onto better-selling plateaus. I myself have recommended a number of such strategies. Recently, however, as I respond again and again to the question of what one can do to escape midlist oblivion, it's begun to dawn on me that many writers have been ignoring the most obvious answer: write better. The truth is that if all other things are equal, the author with better writing skills is the one who will rise out of the pack.

Instead of reviewing what's selling these days and who is buying it, I thought it might be worth reminding you about some of the most common and flagrant writing transgressions to be found in a typical harvest of fiction works that fetches up on my desk. I hasten to point out that the perpetrators are by no means mere amateurs, but professional writers as well, so let those who are without sin skip this article.

Click here to read more.

RC

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

For Futurist Mike Shatzkin, "Your Head Is in the Clouds" is a Compliment

A few months ago we profiled publishing futurist Mike Shatzkin, and the title pretty much said it all: If You Think 21st Century Publishing Is Scary, Wait 'til the 22nd!

Shatzkin has come roaring back with a new set of prognostications about the publishing industry, this time encompassing a shorter term - ten years. Not surprisingly, his conclusions are provocative to say the least. Here are some bullet-point summaries.

* "Someday, all data and applications will be 'in the cloud' - that is, existing independently from, but accessible by, digital devices. All the devices most used every day will then need almost no memory."

* Media consumption will take place by people choosing from a wide variety of devices. "You’ll pick up one kind of screen/device to read a memo you’re working on, another one to look at the work of your favorite photographer, and pull a rolled-up one out of your back pocket to read a book or newspaper on the subway or at the beach. And those don’t include the ones on your walls for a movie, or for a piece of art."

* "Over time, Wikipedia, Facebook and Google will morph into looking like each other in many ways (that is: search, community and information will all come from the same sources) and the new, meaningful sorting of sources will be vertical: by communities."

* "We’ll all be joining lots of communities online, chosen by our interests and values, and by referrals from our friends. And these will ultimately become the hubs of marketing. And of publishing."

* "Ten years from now, there will still be more books sold that were printed centrally and warehoused for sale than all other ways combined, but the end of that era will be in sight."

* "Barnes & Noble will be the only full-line brick-and-mortar bookstore. It will sell used books as well as new ones, and we’ll be far along the road to it becoming one of only five organizations that really distribute consumer books nationally."

* "Almost every book that goes 'national' will have been incubated through the niche-publishing farm system first. Agents and packagers constantly will survey the niche-publishing landscape, looking for projects that might warrant much more expensive marketing and distribution through one of the big distributors."

* "The robust e-book market - more than 50 percent of the sales of many titles (also a bit more than 10 years off) - will have been fueled by features built into e-books that can’t be replicated in print versions. For example, e-books will frequently use moving images as illustrations, rather than stills. And, of course, e-books all will have links..."

God willing, we'll be around to see how Shatzkin's prognostications turn out, but they sound right to me. The wise will take them to heart and plan accordingly. Others will put their thumb in their mouth and hope the future will go away. Here's a prognostication of my own: it won't.

For more of Shatzkin's dazzling projections into the future of the media, click here. And while you're clicking, visit the website for his new venture, Filed by Author. It will be a comprehensive directory of authors and their works. Every author in the United States and Canada with an active ISBN will have an easily updated free web page with photos, videos, and website links which can be accessed by readers, publishers, reviewers, potential rights buyers and fellow authors. The site is currently in "private beta", Shatzkin tells me, but authors can register and claim their pages now. If his crystal ball is as accurate about his own project as it has been about everybody else's, ten years from now Filed by Author will be the indispensable database it's designed to be.

RC

Let's Get Transreal: E-Reads Reissues Two SF Classics by Cyberpunk Pioneer Rudy Rucker

Mathematician, computer scientist, programmer, software designer, teacher, lecturer, artist and pioneer in cellular automata - a perfect resumé for someone destined to become a science fiction writer. This curriculum vitae belongs to Rudy Rucker (for the long version, click on his page on the E-Reads website). Harder to predict from his background is that he would be a founder of the SF subgenre called Cyberpunk.

Rucker wrote his first science fiction novel, called Spacetime Donuts, in the summer of 1976, and E-Reads has the pleasure of bringing it back. Today it's in e-book, but shortly it will show up as a print volume as well. The logline? A seaweed-smoking rebel becomes an incredible shrinking man. Intrigued?

Subsequently he wrote six books, developing cyberpunk themes with such books as Software and Wetware. Each won a Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback SF novel of the year.

But Rucker wasn't finished innovating. He was developing a writing style he called transrealism, defined as writing about one’s real life in fantastic terms. One such book is The Sex Sphere, in which the author turns his time spent in Germany into a tale of higher dimensions and nuclear terrorism. That one too is an E-Reads e-book, and it too will soon be available in paper for those who like hard copy.

Rucker is a brilliant innovator and we're delighted to deliver these two terrific books to you.

RC

The "iPod" of Books? Not so Fast, Kindle!

Whenever people talk about e-book reading devices they use the iPod as the metaphor for a game-changing innovation. But Matt Buchanan, blogging on the Gizmodo website, reminds us that the original iPod was no game-changer by any stretch of the imagination. "The first iPods didn't overturn any market. They were just marginally better than their competitors, but they were limited to Mac users only, had mechanical scroll wheels and were easily damaged."

Buchanan's point is that if the Kindle actually does turn out to be the "iPod of books", it may take a while - and a lot of upgrades and refinements - before it blows away the competition and becomes the standard by which all other devices are measured.

And Buchanan doesn't think that either Kindle or the Sony eReader is there yet. His quarrel is with screen display: "As of now, there are two display camps - electronic paper and LCD - and both have far too many compromises at the moment to be adequate for a reading revolution."

Does he see any candidates emerging? He likes what Plastic Logic is producing: "A perfectly-sized flexible plastic touchscreen that's basically all E-Ink display, plus Wi-Fi." (For a rerfresher on Plastic Logic's extraordinary no-name entry into the e-reader sweepstakes, click here.) But even the Plastic Logic approach has issues, Buchanan goes on to say. He also cites a new company, Pixel Qi, which is "reinventing the LCD". An executive he talked to "says that Pixel Qi's displays are actually more readable than e-paper, with "excellent reflectance, high resolution for text, sunlight readability" - just as easy on the eyes when the backlighting is turned off, but with the key advantages of full color and fast refresh, for pages that update as fast as video."

Read Why There Isn't a Perfect Ebook Reader. Kindle and Sony have a very strong position in the race to be the iPod of books, but there's still room for new contenders and, as so often happens in technology, the winner could come from a radically different source than any in the current landscape. Such as the clothing people that designed the iPod bikini pictured here. Touch where indicated to advance to your favorite tune.

RC

Your True Love or the Future of the Universe: Choose! Harlan Ellison's Original Screenplay of "The City on the Edge of Forever" at Last in E-Book

The original teleplay that became the classic Star Trek episode, with an expanded introductory essay by Harlan Ellison, 'The City on the Edge of Forever' has been surrounded by controversy since the airing of an "eviscerated" version - which was subsequently voted the most beloved episode in the series' history.

In its original form, 'The City on the Edge of Forever' won the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay. As aired, it won the 1967 Hugo Award (the only teleplay ever to do so!). 'The City on the Edge of Forever' is, at its most basic, a poignant love story. Ellison takes the reader on a breathtaking trip through space and time, from the future, all the way back to 1930s America. In this harrowing journey, Kirk and Spock race to apprehend a renegade criminal and restore the order of the universe. It is here that Kirk faces his ultimate dilemma: a choice between the universe - or his one true love. This edition makes available this astonishing teleplay as Ellison intended it to be aired. The author's introductory essay (expanded by 15,000 words from the limited edition) reveals all of the details of what Ellison describes as a "fatally inept treatment" of his creative work.

Was Harlan Ellison unjustly edited, unjustly accused, and unjustly treated?

RC

The Drama of Audio Rights

With the Authors Guild getting angry at Amazon's Kindle 2 for read-aloud technology (see their statement), many readers (and writers like Neil Gaiman) are wondering how a robotic-sounding voice reading is an infringement on the rights of a published book. And if that's an issue that requires prevention, then why haven't other non-professional readings been restricted (like when you read a bedtime story to your kids), and could they be in the future? And what about the sight-disabled readers and their legal right to access text in this manner?

I seriously doubt the Authors Guild is going to sue moms for reading Dr. Seuss, or sue the blind, or sue publishers for allowing that to occur. What's of concern is who's making money from the added value of the reading performance, whether it's a digital voice or not, and the Authors Guild is trying to make sure that a line is drawn in the sand now before an income stream (audio "performance" rights) dries up, because new technology often gives distributors a chance to make extra money before the author realizes how valuable it is.

Decades ago, audio rights were pretty unpopular. They were sorted into many publishers' contracts as ancillary, or completely left out - that is to say, unless it looked profitable for more than just rare radio adaptations. (No one really even tried to distribute novels performed and recorded to LP records–who wanted to flip a record every 30 minutes for a ten hour reading?) What changed all this was the age of the cassette tape: car radios with cassette players and the Sony Walkman. With the new convenient medium that lent itself well to long listening sessions, there was a new market. And publishers eventually started making extra money from the potentially lucrative books-on-tape edition of their texts, often without having paid authors any additional advance for the audio rights. This was good gravy for the publishers when the audiobook was a hit, even though the books-on-tape market was relatively tiny compared to book sales. By the time that CD technology increased the quality and cost efficiency per unit further, authors and agents already knew it was worthwhile to negotiate better terms and payments for the audio rights, to make sure that this commodity was now compensating everyone properly. In some cases, the rights were starting to be reserved by the agents so that they could be sold to the growing field of specialty audiobook publishers. In the last 8 years, MP3 file distribution of these recordings (especially through iTunes or Audible) has only made the market more competitive. So, unlike 40 years ago, today everyone is aware that the audio rights can make money when handled properly.

The primary distinction of the audio rights is not so much that a real human voice is involved and compensated; it's more that a publisher consented reading or "performance" of the book has controlled distribution (each copy is accounted for), and that the proportionate value of this performance makes money for the publisher and author. This is why parents reading to their kids isn't an issue, or even teachers reading in a classroom. In those cases, the average reader is adding a negligable value (commercially speaking) to the book by speaking it aloud themselves, and that's fair use. Now if that reader wants to go on stage (or the web) and sell their reading performance without publisher consent, it's another story.

With computer assisted reading, the value added is a bit more contentious. First of all, there are disabled readers who require text to be spoken aloud, and digital voice reading is a welcome technology for them. This service is valuable to those people, sometimes at a premium. However, the typical expectation is that disabled readers are adding the value themselves through assistant technology, and that they haven't paid inclusively for that assistance when they purchased the text. For example, you don't pay an additional $1 for read-aloud service offered to you from the book you've bought. You paid $357 for the Kindle 2, which adds that service to the book.

The cost of the digital voice application is a moot point to publishers, agents, and authors. What worries them is that in the future the voice applications are going dramatize the text too well, and that the additional exceptional value isn't compensated to them in any way under current contracts. Amazon's Kindle 2 was developed with the read-aloud function to add value not only to the Kindle, but to make the books themselves a better commodity–to sell more books.

Picture the future, when you've got an e-book of the latest bestseller and you ask your little e-book device to read it to you. Right in front of you pops up a digital hologram of John Houseman (licensed to the device by the actor's estate), and he proceeds to read the book to you in his nuanced dramatic voice (recreated through excellent programming). He reads Chapter 4 to you while you prepare dinner in the kitchen. He sits in the passenger seat, delivering chapter 14 as you commute to work the next day. This is essentially the benefit of read-aloud, although the Kindle 2 or Apple's Text-To-Speech isn't quite that far advanced yet. However, I'm sure you can see that a good digital voice has the future potential to add a lot of value to the reading, enough to give today's properly recorded audio books something to worry about.

The issue is that this value added isn't accounted for in current distribution contracts between the publisher and e-book retailers like Amazon, and potential publisher revenue might be getting lost (or cheated away from the future), and that's what rankles the Authors Guild. I'm not a fan of sword waiving tactics, but there needs to be new descriptive contract language that pertains to the read-aloud service. I'm not sure how accounting for the read-aloud service in financial terms can be done until there's a proven track record for consumer habits with this technology. Those numbers aren't available yet. But Amazon and other companies are investing in the technology more and more, so someone sees there's money to be made there in the future.

In many ways, it's an issue not unlike protecting song performance rights so that companies like YouTube can't make money off "free" performances of copyrighted material. (I'm not sure an amateur 8 year-old singing Miley Cyrus songs for YouTube has much value, but aggregate all the entertainment from thousands of such videos and it starts to paint a different picture until it appears obvious the songwriter is due some small increment of YouTube's revenue from distributing those clips.) Publishers don't want to chase after innocent people, but they also don't want to encourage wholesale ripoffs with loose legal terms. So maybe it isn't a bad idea to start new discussions with all the major players now about the audio rights for e-books and bring the agenda to Amazon's Jeff Bezos or a company like Google. I'm looking forward to having David Niven read me Sherlock Holmes stories on my Kindle 4 and I'd hate for anything to stand in the way.

- Michael Gaudet

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

The Most Subversive Science Fiction Collection of All Time: Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions Back in Print at Last

In the mid-1960s enfant terrible Harlan Ellison invited - no, dared - cutting-edge science fiction writers to contribute to an anthology he was assembling. In 1967 Dangerous Visions was published; it was like introducing horse-and-buggy riders to a vehicle powered by a ramjet. Aside from its electrifying contents, written by a host of authors well on their way to immortality, the format of the book shattered rules, precedents and icons. For one thing, each contribution was introduced by Ellison and the authors furnished afterwords to their own stories.

The book and individual stories rolled up awards in a way that has not been remotely duplicated since: Philip K. Dick's story was nominated for a Hugo, but was beaten out by one by Fritz Leiber. The same Leiber story, Gonna Roll Them Bones, also won the Nebula that year. Philip José Farmer shared Leiber's Hugo in Best Novella category. Samuel R. Delany copped a Nebula for Best Short Story. Ellison himself was given a special citation at WorldCon. All in all, in this memorable collection of 33 original stories, seven are winners and 13 are nominees for Hugos and Nebulas.

Some other names in this stellar and (to this very day) controversial collection are: Lester Del Rey, Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Philip Jose Farmer, Miriam Allen deFord, Robert Bloch, Brian W. Aldiss, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Carol Emshwiller, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, R. A. Lafferty, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany.

Last Dangerous Visions, for the first time ever in e-book format (and soon to be in paperback), is the latest installment in E-Reads' initiative to bring back more than thirty major works by Harlan Ellison. Watch this page for more announcements.

RC

The Turk Swings His Scimitar at HarperCollins

Hard on the heels of multibillion dollar losses at HarperCollins's parent company News Corporation, CEO Brian Murray circulated a memo stating that the "Collins" half of the name was to be shut down, its president and publisher Steve Ross was departing, and the staffs of both companies would be reshuffled and reintegrated. Lisa Gallagher, senior v-p and publisher of another trade division, William Morrow, was also asked to leave. The story was broken in an article by Jim Milliot on Publishers Weekly's online newsletter.

Murray's memo said,

“Given the continued uncertainty in the market and soft revenues for the company, we need to take further action to align our cost basis with expected revenues,” Murray wrote. “I have asked each division to evaluate their business and begin the process to meet this goal. Unfortunately, in some HarperCollins divisions, implementing these plans will result in a reduction in workforce.”

The Turk has not left the building: more cuts are expected. What will become of the HarperCollins name and logo is anyone's guess. It's the least of the company's worries.

RC

The Ten Commandments of Courtesy - Part II

As we said last week, every society creates rules to prevent anarchy, and the society of author-publisher-agent is no exception. Of course, the more civilized the society, the subtler its rules and the more sophisticated its sanctions for reinforcing them. The publishing business certainly fits the description of a civilized society, comprised as it is of well-educated, literate individuals operating in highly organized (sometimes, anyway) corporate entities and dealing in the extremely sophisticated activity of translating ideas into merchandise.

The rules governing this behavior are codified into a system of protocols and etiquette called "courtesy." Courtesy is not always easy to define because editors, authors, and agents each have their own code and the three don't always harmonize. Authors who are unsure about the rules are advised to proceed cautiously.

In the first part of this article we discussed five vitally important rules. Three of the them were, Keep your big mouth shut.

Here are the other five.

RC

Jeff Bezos and Stephen King announce the new Kindle 2

The Morgan Library is the most museum-like library in New York City, and so it was fitting that Amazon's Jeff Bezos (pictured above) took the stage there this morning to announce the latest version of his book antiquifier known as the Kindle. His grand vision, often repeated throughout the hour long presentation, is that Amazon wants to see nothing less than every book ever published available to all Kindle owners in less than 60 seconds. Is the Kindle 2 going to be the device with enough popularity to create such a seismic shift in readers' habits that the world of publishing bends its back to make this happen? Well, maybe. Just maybe. Apparently e-book sales have jumped to 10% of all Amazon book sales in just one year thanks to the first device, after years of staying well below the radar, and now Amazon wants us all to see the writing on the, err, Kindle. I expect word of mouth and adoption to be stronger this time around because the product deserves it.

The new Kindle 2 ($357 and shipping Feb. 24th) offers enough improvement from the original that I can now recommend it strongly to friends and family:

• It has 3G wireless for faster download speed (especially for browsing the Kindle store).
• It uses Amazon's latest 'Whispersync' service to keep your Kindle's books and notes backed up on the internet cloud and synchronized to other Kindle devices you may own.
• Its shape is now thinner than an iPhone (less than half an inch thick) and perfectly symmetrical, with rounded corners and softer buttons.
• The latest e-ink screen redraws slightly faster (20% over the original) and now does 16 shades of gray instead of just 4.
• 2GB of built-in storage.
• Charging via USB mini-port (everyone has these cables by now).
  
• It has longer battery life (now up to two weeks between recharges).
• It has implemented a pleasant text-to-speech computer voice reader for any text (it's better than Stephen Hawking).
• It has a new 5-way button navigation instead of the old up-and-down wheel.

Now, none of these things represent bleeding edge technology and are probably a little more anemic than what most of us dream about in a best possible e-book device. For example, any page-turning lag is still annoying (especially in the age when Google has taught us that people can't bother to wait even 0.5 seconds more than they have to for a page to load). 3G service isn't going to make a huge difference in speed for most people downloading new books that are typically 900K. And grayscale screens? Don't even get me started. But what Amazon is offering that makes the Kindle 2 so appealing is their dedication to the book delivery service. Jeff Bezos wants the device to disappear in your hands while you read it, because no one pays attention to the paper or binding of a book when they get wrapped up in the story. They don't want distractions. So, the device itself is really just something meant to be unpretentious, transient, and replaceable. What they are selling is access to published books in the most convenient manner yet possible. Amazon is dedicated to helping readers find and download books quickly, and the Kindle 2 serves that purpose better than anything else. And for that I think they have a winner.

What makes the Kindle 2 experience more likely to win people over is that Amazon still seems to be letting the Kindle ride its tide of popularity instead of hard selling customers. More and more e-book content is being converted and added to the Kindle online store every month. The incremental technical improvements in the Kindle 2 are the type that give consumers confidence that the company has a long term investment in their satisfaction, and that more improvements will surely come downstream. Original Kindle owners are even being given a two day opportunity to jump to the head of the queue for pre-ordering the Kindle 2, and what better way to spread the word than allow the converted the first opportunity to evangelize. Instead of a discount or trade-ins, this means hand-me-down first-generation Kindles are going to be circulating amongst friends and families.

Stephen King, at Jeff's invitation and previewing his new Kindle exclusive short story "Ur," read a passage where students confront a teacher who has never seen a Kindle before. The teacher likes to think of himself as "old school" and defends the tactile properties of the trusty paper book, such as the musty smell acquired with age. The Kindle-familiar students counter that the words are still the same, no matter what old school or new school device is being used to read them. And that's the epiphany that many readers are similarly experiencing thanks to e-books. We want ideas and stories foremost, and the digital experience is helping us get the access to texts that generations before us never had unless they lived with a very deep library. Jeff and Stephen have understood this for years. They've both been trying to get more people interested in the digital distribution of books for as long as the e-book industry has been around and they can feel rightfully proud that the Kindle phenomenon is really taking off.

- Michael Gaudet

Smartphones About to Get 1.5 Million Books Smarter

If the New York City subway system has no practical means of delivering cell phone service in its tunnels, why are so many subway travelers gazing so intently at their cell phone screens? In all likelihood they're reading one of the 1.5 million books that Google has just made available for download into such devices as the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1. The books are all public domain titles, meaning their copyright protection has lapsed. This according to Miguel Helft of the New York Times.

Amazon, too, is adapting its Kindle e-book library for distribution on mobile phones. Though the Kindle selection at about 230,000 titles is a fraction of Google's, Helft thinks that "the public domain books available through Google Book Search are not likely to be the most popular titles, as they are older books for which copyrights have expired. In contrast, the Kindle library includes scores of newly released books, including many current best sellers."

I'm sure many bibliophiles will take passionate exception to Helft's suggestion that newer is better, and it will be fascinating to see how many obscure titles are downloaded - and which ones.3

Google's scanning initiative drew a lot of fire, indeed a major lawsuit. The suit is behind us (settled), and we can look forward to counting 1.5 million blessings as this flood of displaced literature settles over us like a delicious blanket.

In his statement about the lawsuit settlement, Sergey Brin, co-founder and president of technology at Google declared,

“Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor. While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips.”

RC

Exclsv Midtown Resdnce, Fab Vues, Twin Lions Guarding Front Entrance

I take pride in my sense of humor, but sometimes it can get rather heavy-handed. That was demonstrated about ten years ago when I was invited to the New York Public Library to give a talk to librarians about the future of books.

The venue was the Map Room, an exquisite gilded salon that epitomized an age that revered the printed book. The attendees, solemn acolytes of the Dewey Decimal System, fit perfectly into the decor. My subject, you will not be surprised to hear, was the digital revolution, and to illustrate it I brought with me some CD-ROM discs. On the podium I had piled a large number of impressively thick tomes. I then produced the discs and declared that all the content of those books and more could fit onto a few of the slim shiny objects I held before them. I declared that a day would come when brick and mortar institutions known as libraries might become irrelevant. Whereupon I gestured broadly at the magnificent building and said, "I'll bet this joint would make a great condo."

One hundred librarians volubly sucked in their breath and gaped at me as I had torn a page out of Audobon's Birds of America and blown my nose in it.

"Just kidding, folks," I said sheepishly.

Actually, I wasn't. As print media - newspapers and magazines and books - enter the endangered lists, so do the brick and mortar venues that service them: magazine stores, book shops - and libraries. The contents and catalogues of most libraries are accessible online from practically anywhere in the civilized world. The only reason patrons must go them is to check out and return their physical books. But as libraries acquire e-books, even that function becomes irrelevant. As I recently wrote, E-libraries don't have a locus. Their patrons have no loyalty to a specific branch; they can traverse cyberspace to locate and download the e-book they wish to "borrow". Yes, libraries (like bookstores) have managed to remain relevant in the digital age by offering a warm and vibrant social center for scholars, students and book lovers. And many provide computers for patrons to search the Worldwide Web even though they could do as much from their home, office, or a café in Paris.

These ruminations are reinforced in Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen describing the recent legal settlement of the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and a publishers group against Google, which since 2002 has been scanning millions of books into its colossal digital archive. Cohen suggest that "digitization of books is ending the distinction between circulating libraries, meant for public readers, and research libraries, meant for scholars."

Cohen's article ends on a hopeful note: "The digital-rights class-action agreement has the potential to make physical libraries newly relevant. Each public library will have one computer with complete access to Google Book Search, a service that normally would come as part of a paid subscription." He cites an NYU professor, Thomas Augst, as asserting that Google is “creating a new reason to go to public libraries, which I think is fantastic. Public libraries have a communal function, a symbolic function that can only happen if people are there.”

Okay, you can hold up on the wrecking ball for now. But I have dibs on that 44th floor penthouse on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

RC

Daddy - What Was a Rocket Book?

Everybody needs to get something off his chest, and John Siracusa has gotten tons off his in a self-described rant in Ars Technica. In fact, he's unleashed a diatribe of about 8500 words that touches on just about everything e-book including a history of the phenomenon from its primordial beginnings as the Rocket Book right up to the Kindle. Siracusa has more beefs than a Texas cattle baron. Many are well founded such as his impatience with those who are in denial about the virtues and benefits of e-books despite the evidence of their own experience.

Other complaints seem labored, like this one:

"Part of the problem is right there in the name: e-book. In the print world, the word 'book' is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, 'e-book' refers to the content only—or rather, that's the intention. Unfortunately, the conflation of these two concepts in the nomenclature of print naturally carries over to the digital terminology, much to the confusion of all."

Because Siracusa's weapon of choice is birdshot, it's hard to extract a central thesis. But if you're willing to be patient you'll learn a lot about our beginnings, information that is in danger of being lost, and hear some compelling analyses of what's wrong - and right - about our industry.

It's all here in The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

RC

Counting Jelly Beans in a Jar - Easy. Counting Kindles Sold, Your Guess is as Good as Citigroup's

It's hard to understand why Amazon and Sony haven't shared information, or better yet boasted, about sales of their respective e-book readers. The book business, the music business, the movie business, all proudly parade units sold, downloads, website visits, box office receipts, and other data to impress the public, and even if you cut the hyped figures in half, disclosure of sales inspires confidence in one's products. So why do we have to do everything but hack confidential archives to find out if the Kindle and the eReader are flying or flopping?

Engadget's Donald Melanson reports that a Citigroup analyst named Mark Mahaney found a clever way to track down Kindle sales. Mahaney reviewed Amazon's deal with Sprint and concluded that Amazon sold about 500,000 Kindles in 2008. Kindle, it seems, uses Sprint Nextel network for transmitting books to customers.

Could be. Or couldn't be. Given that Citigroup these days doesn't even know how much money it has in its own vaults, one must take its Kindle count with a major grain of salt.

The hunt for a Kindle number has been as intense as it has been futile. Back in August TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld bragged, "We know how many Kindles Amazon has sold. " He put the number at 240,000.

Even Amazon itself got into the act, sponsoring a chat on the subject that was slightly less scientific than voodoo.

Maybe Amazon is going to reveal sales figures at its February 9th press conference. Talk about secrecy, none of our intelligence operatives has been able to penetrate the reason why book and tech industry leaders have been convened to the Morgan Library for an announcement. What good are secrets if people actually keep them?

RC

Gunfight at the Wal-Mart Corral Shaping Up as Mag Distribs Levy Handling Fees. Books Next?

Keith Kelly of the New York Post reports that two major magazine distributors, Anderson News and Source Interlink, have imposed a 7-cent surcharge per copy - what they call a "handling fee" - to place magazines in stores. It doesn't matter if a copy gets sold, it's 7 cents going in. Several major magazine publishers like Time Inc. have refused to pay it. Wal-Mart, a huge source of retail magazine sales, is standing by the distributors.

Starting this week, both distributors will seek to impose a new handling fee of seven cents for every magazine copy. Big companies such as Time Inc. and Bauer told them they could take their handling fee and distribute it fee where the sun don't shine, but Wal-Mart (with about 4200 stores, the largest magazine retailer in the country) said it was standing by the distributors and expected to go without some new magazines this week according to Kelly's account. So it's a Mexican Standoff, and a lot of innocent bystanders who buy their magazines in stores are going to get caught in the crossfire. Time Inc. publishes such magazines as Time, Money, Sports Illustrated, People, Health, and This Old House. Curtis Circulation, distributor for The Star and National Enquirer, allied itself with Time. And two other distributors, Hudson News and News Group, are sitting on the sidelines - so far.

The Post's Kelly suggests that this trade dispute this will blow over short of a Boston Tea Party. Let's hope.

But magazines are not the only thing that these distributors distribute. There's the matter of mass market paperbacks. If the impost on magazines succeeds, the next target might well be books, just what we need in the current miasmic book publishing climate. Publishers Lunch, the publishing industry's online trade newsletter, assures us that, "Multiple book publishers we spoke to say that neither distributor had discussed imposing the new handling fee on books." Do we feel reassured now?

I don't. The magazine and book distribution industry underwent a Magnitude 10 seismic shift only thirteen years ago and this latest rumble suggests that tectonic plates are still grinding against each other. You might like to read about the turbulent recent history of paperback distribution in a piece I wrote for Backspace.

RC

All the Blogs Fit to Print

"Blog" is an ugly word that barged into our vocabulary and before long became an indispensable component of common discourse.

We no longer notice how ugly it is. However, now that we're used to it, it looks as if we will have to come up with a word, mellifluous or otherwise, to describe a hybrid of blog and print newspaper: Blogpaper? Blaper? Newsblog? Prog?

Call it what you will, it looks as if - er, blapers - may not only bridge the gap between printed news and Web content, but could monetize them as well. The plummeting circulation of newspapers might turn around when readers that prefer paper to screens begin buying dailies in order to read their favorite bloggers in newsprint. And bloggers, who make little or no money from their online outpourings, might share the revenue of what we would hope are surging newspaper sales.

These thoughts were inspired by Claire Cain Miller's article in the New York Times about a start-up called The Printed Blog designed to reprint blog posts on regular paper. The paper will be distributed free, but will be financed by local advertising.

“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” says Joshua Karp, the venture's publisher.

Miller writes,

"As pay newspapers lose readers to the Internet, where they can read the same articles without charge, many free papers have held their own.

“'The free newspaper business model is still very workable,' said David Cohen, a founder of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, a group of free weeklies south of San Francisco that was sold to Knight Ridder in 2005 and is now owned by MediaNews. 'There’s a huge readership that wants the local news, and local businesses tend to increase their advertising in bad times because they have to capture people’s attention.'”

Here's the link to the - er, prog? Karp hopes the idea will catch on in other cities. An idea whose time has come?

When I google "Prog" I'm asked Did You Mean Prague? And even Google seems completely stumped by "Blaper." So it's possible you've heard these terms for the first time in this space. If one of them finds its way to the Oxford English Dictionary, I expect a footnote. And if I put Prague on the map, maybe an all-expenses paid trip sponsored by the Czech chamber of commerce?

Oops. It seems Prague is already on the map. Who knew?

RC

The Ten Commandments of Courtesy - Part I

Every society creates rules to prevent anarchy, and the society of author-publisher-agent is no exception. Of course, the more civilized the society, the subtler its rules and the more sophisticated its sanctions for reinforcing them. The publishing business certainly fits the description of a civilized society, comprised as it is of well-educated, literate individuals operating in highly organized (sometimes, anyway) corporate entities and dealing in the extremely sophisticated activity of translating ideas into merchandise.

The rules governing this behavior are codified into a system of protocols and etiquette called "courtesy." Courtesy is not always easy to define because editors, authors, and agents each have their own code and the three don't always harmonize. Authors who are unsure about the rules are advised to proceed cautiously.

Here are the first five commandments of courtesy. Five more next week.

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

Think Your Computer Needs Updating? You and the Government of the United States of America

Let's pray that President Obama will never have to press the button unleashing nuclear Armageddon on whoever our enemy happens to be at the time. But if he does, we need to say a second prayer that the instructions to launch warheads will not be processed by an antique computer.

That's not as absurd as it sounds. When the Obama team took over the White House, it discovered that the previous administration has been using "computers outfitted with ancient versions of Microsoft operating systems, rather than the Macs they - and Obama - had become accustomed to," according to a number of newspaper accounts. "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," said Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman.

Nor is it totally ridiculous to suggest that an antique clunker of a computer could wreak nuclear havoc. Remember Wargames? In that 1983 movie Matthew Broderick accidentally hacks the US Defense Department's Norad system and triggers a nailbiting countdown to thermonuclear holocaust. And Lingo, a novel by Jim Menick published in 1991 and reissued by E-Reads, portrays a home computer that, left unattended by its owner, figures out how to inhabit other computers until it possesses a vast network of them. Then Lingo figures out how to penetrate the memory banks of the military's ultra-secret computer network and ballistic missile launch system, and suddenly this light science fiction romp turns scary dark, especially when US government officials threaten to pull Lingo's plug. The Soviet Union's Intercontinental Ballistic Missile command is on full alert in case Lingo doesn't take kindly to threats.

Wargames and Lingo are fiction, but the appallingly primitive computers that the new administration found in its new home base are fact. Perhaps they couldn't launch a nuclear war, but you certainly have to wonder if they could prevent one. Hopefully a few bucks of the President's economic rescue package are dedicated to buying some new Macs. Can we get some installation guys up there real fast?

RC