World Braces for April 1 Attack of Zombie Worm

It's a good idea to read every word of CNET editor Dong Ngo's update on Conficker, the computer worm that professional worm-watchers speculate will be triggered on April 1. As that happens to be April Fools Day, some readers will not take these Doomsday prophesies seriously. Others have been downloading vermifuge patches like crazy. Sometime between midnight of March 31 and midnight of April 1 we will know. But we don't know what we will know. It could be nothing, something, or Doomsday called on account of rain. After all, one possibility is that the virus's designers got spooked and changed the day to, say, April 2. Or Memorial Day. Your guess is as good as Ngo's.

His blog tells us succinctly everything experts have learned, and links are included to software that may help thwart the demon bug or at least keep it at bay while its mad scientist devisers regroup and restrategize. Here's Ngo's summary of the threat confronting us:

Conficker is a very sophisticated worm that took advantage of a security hole mentioned in this Microsoft bulletin. The hole affected all 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems, even those with the latest service packs. The hole allowed the virus to infect the computer without any user interaction via the Internet, local network, or USB thumbdrives. Once infected, it stops the computer's security services and Windows update service, and disables tools and software designed to remove it. The worm also allows the creator to remotely install other malicious codes on the infected computer.

Consequently, the worm is programed to update itself from domains it randomly generates. By April 1, the amount of domains the worm generates and infects to find updates could grow to 50,000 a day. The owner of the virus only needs to use one of these domains to host the update. This makes it virtually impossible for authorities to track the source of the update.

Microsoft has offered $250,000 as a reward for any information leading to an arrest. If you hanker for your reward, start by booking a flight to Beijing, as speculation has focused on China as the country of origin. It's hard to understand what benefit there is to China, since it already owns our country. But perhaps there is more mischief to be done.

Do you have the Doomsday Worm? BKIS, a Vietnamese security firm that makes antivirus software, offers a simple way to find out. Dong Ngo writes:

First, make sure your computer is connected to the Internet by going to a Web site such as Google or CNET. Then, if your computer can also successfully go to the Web sites of Microsoft and known security companies, such as Symantec, McAfee, TrendMicro, Sophos, Panda, and you can also run Windows Update successfully, then your computer is clear from Conficker.

On the other hand, if the computer fails to do any of those, it's likely that it has already been affected. In this case, try to follow these instructions to remove it, or use BKIS' antivirus software that can be downloaded for free. As a last resort, you can also back up your data and install Windows from scratch, then immediately run Windows Update to install the latest security patches.

Hasta mañana. Or should I say, Hasta la vista, baby? If I don't post a blog tomorrow, you'll find me in my office, rocking back and forth, sucking my thumb, gazing numbly at the blue screen of death.

RC

Consenting Adults

Everybody needs approval, but nobody needs it more than authors: approval of editorial alterations of manuscripts; approval of cover art and copy; approval over reprint, book-club, and foreign licenses; approval of titles, ad texts, and more.

New authors quickly discover that they have very little leverage when it comes to controlling the fate of their books. As they become more and more successful, however, they develop the clout to demand the right to approve many procedures. In fact, a concise biography of a successful author might read something like this:

His first contract gave his publisher total control of everything. When he achieved modest popularity, his publisher gave him consultation rights. After he became very popular, he secured “approval not to be unreasonably withheld.” At length he became a star, and his publisher gave him total control of everything.

Which processes are subject to author consultation or consent? And what kinds of concessions may an author expect from his publisher as he rises to the top of his profession? Are there limits to those concessions? Are there some issues so hot that a publisher would risk losing a superstar before yielding the right of approval?

Click here to read this piece in its entirety.

Richard Curtis

Publishing Dinosaurs, Bricks and Mortar Around Their Ankles, Meet Tar Pit, With Expected Results

Peter Miller, director of publicity for Bloomsbury and Walker & Company and owner of a used bookstore in Brooklyn, served on a panel at the recent South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Though best known for its cutting edge film and music, the festival has become "an open source forum for new media, where bloggers, tech geeks, activists, designers and marketers meet to trade ideas." writes Miller. The panel was entitled “New Think for Old Publishers” and attendees were urged to “find out what is going right and what is going wrong with publishing, assess success of recent forays into marketing digitally, and learn how books and blogs can work together.”

In what may be one of the bigger understatements in the history of the Digital Paradigm Shift, Miller reports that "somewhere during the 5–6 p.m. time slot of SXSW Day 3, we apparently went a little off message."

In fact it was a debacle. It was the Gallipoli of all panels.

The good-natured Miller, having somehow extracted his tail from between his legs, has filed a hysterically funny account with Publishers Weekly. If you can maintain a face as stoical in the reading as Miller's is in the telling, you have far greater control over your facial muscles than I do.

Miller follows his narrative with a list of Don'ts that all denizens of Old Publishing should memorize before taking their seats at panels attended by anyone younger than twenty.

Read Do As I Say, Not As I Do for a model of book industry graveyard humor.

RC

Bring 5000 Books on Vacation in your Fujitsu Color Flepia

Publishers Weekly reports that Fujitsu has now weighed into the e-book arena with the Flepia. We say "weighed" but it doesn't weigh much: it's Kindle-slim and less than one pound. Far more importantly, its e-ink no-glare screen is in robust color. Its battery holds a charge for forty hours and, says PW's Michael Fitzpatrick, "When used with a 4GB SD card, the color e-paper terminal can store the equivalent of 5,000 conventional paper based, 300-pages-long books."

E-Reads' Michael Gaudet previewed the Flepia in fall of 2007 and expressed some concerns about the device's speed and performance. We'll see if those criticisms have been addressed.

He also worried that technology would come with a high retail price. He was sure right about that - when it comes to the US this fall or sometime in 2010 (Japanese consumers will have theirs in April '09), it will have a price tag of around $1000.00. You did say you wanted color, didn't you? How badly? A thousand bucks badly? With the e-reader bar currently holding at around $350.00, that's asking a lot in this or any other economy, even if you're an AIG executive suddenly flush with discretionary income.

But, like your grandpa's Dumont TV, once people have seen color it's going to be very hard to go back to black and white, so a second generation e-reader arms race revolving around color screens may be shaping up.

And we're told it's pronounced FLEHP-ya, not FLEEP-ya.

White gloves not included in the price, but for a thousand bucks, heaven help you if you leave a thumb-print on the screen.

RC

As Papers Go, So Goes Paper

We recently wrote a blog entitled "Why We Must Not Let Newspapers and Magazines Fail," and here's another reason why: if they go under, so does a big piece of the paper industry. With newspapers going belly-up faster than bass in a poisoned pond, newsprint consumption is plummeting. In 2008 consumption dropped 16% among daily newspapers, and that was before the bankruptcies, closings or death-throes of papers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver and other major venues wracked the newsprint industry in the opening months of 2009.

Tree huggers may take some satisfaction in this news, but it spells more economic woes piled onto the ones already bowing the shoulders of magazine, newspaper and book publishers. AbitibiBowater, a gigantic newsprint supplier that seems to have more syllables than assets, is desperately seeking refinancing of its debt , otherwise it too faces shuttering. Its stock has dropped by more than 90% and is currently worth about half a buck per share. This according to Michael J. de la Merced and Geraldine Fabrikant of the New York Times, a newspaper with troubles of its own.

Rescuing AbitibiBowater should be about as easy as pronouncing it three times fast, but as of this writing management is scrambling to reduce the pressure.

RC

Kindled Out? Not Yet? Then Visit Kindleville

Sometimes it seems there are only two topics you can write about that are guaranteed to make money: the Obama Family and Kindle 2. And many of us would be satisfied with all Obamas all the Time. Still, Kindle continues its grip on our imagination, and for those who just can't get enough Kindliana, Joe Wikert's Kindleville Blog: All Kindle, All the Time is your dish of tea. Tips, tricks, links, lists, interviews, news, speculation, opinions, comparisons with Kindle 1 and other reading devices, these and more will sate even the hungriest Kindlephile or even the Kindlemaniac.

STOP ME BEFORE I KINDLE AGAIN!!!!!!

RC

Welcome Sweet Springtime, We Greet Thee in... Lawsuits? Apple Latest Target

Spring has arrived and lawsuits are pushing their hardy green shoots through the soil everywhere we look. It started last week when we reported that Harlan Ellison is suing Paramount and the Writers Guild of America. Then we learned that Discovery Communications was suing Amazon for patent infringement over the Kindle ("Did Jeff Overlook U.S. Patent Number 7,298,851?"). Today it's a Swiss company called Monec Holding Ltd. and the target is Apple. Did Steve Jobs overlook patent No. 6,335,678? According to an Apple Insider report by Katie Marsal, he may have. She writes:

In a 7-page complaint filed with a Virginia district court Monday, Berne, Switzerland-based Monec Holding Ltd accuses the iPhone maker of patent infringement, unfair trade practices, monopolization, and tortious interference for allegedly treading on its January 2002 patent No. 6,335,678 titled "Electronic device, preferably an electronic book."

Monec claims Apple's distribution of e-book applications violates an early patent filed by the Swiss firm. "Although Monec does not identify the specific eBook reading applications that prompted its lawsuit," writes Marsal, "the complaint was filed just weeks after Apple began distributing Amazon.com's Kindle eBook reader software through the App Store."

Monec's website is unadorned, uninformative, unimaginative and uninteractive but if anyone reading this finds himself in the vicinity of Galgenfeldweg 18 in Berne, Switzerland we'll be most interested to know what their office looks like and how many people work in it.

It's easy to dismiss the actions against Amazon and Apple as nuisance lawsuits but they must be taken seriously. Pundits who brushed off the patent infringement suit brought by a firm called NTP Inc. against BlackBerry vendor Research In Motion Ltd. stopped laughing after the court awarded NTP more than $53 million in damages.

Actually, if anyone has grounds for a lawsuit it's science fiction novelist Ben Bova, author of a novel entitled Cyberbooks. He published it in 1989, long before e-books were a gleam in the eyes of Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. Here's the summary: "A futuristic satire on the fate of the publishing industry after the invention of 'cyberbooks', electronic books which eliminate the need for paper, printers, salesmen, distributors and even booksellers." Unfortunately, Bova didn't patent the gadget but wouldn't you imagine that one of the parties in these lawsuits owes him a generous tip for his foresighted concept?

In any event we'll be at ringside watching Amazon and Apple wrestling with their tormentors.

RC

4109 Doomsday Worm Just an April Fools Joke, Right? Right?

What would happen if a worldwide computer pandemic erupted? It's not too farfetched to liken it to the breakdown of the social order when the Black Death swept the civilization in the 14th century:

One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbor troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs.

Just as the social fabric of trust was rent asunder by fear of contracting the plague, terror of contracting a fatal computer virus would cause us to shun emails from even the most trustworthy friends, family and business associates. Nor would we have any way of knowing if we could rely on any website no matter how reliable it claims to be. And of course, with paranoia running rampant, your own communications would be blocked as well.

If these dark thoughts sound familiar, it's because you heard them in the days leading up to the end of the last millennium as doomsayers predicted the collapse of the Internet when the world's clocks advanced from the 20th century to the 21st.

Luckily, nothing happened. Life, and the Web, went on.

Let's hope that when the second hand crosses the 12 at the passage of March 31st to April 1st, things will be just as uneventful as Y2K-Plus-One-Second.

A number of malware watchers are worried we will be plunged into the technological Dark Ages, however. They are telling us about some evil geniuses who have produced a Worm called Conficker that has already burrowed into some 12 million computers and is set to unleash a plague of unprecedented ferocity using the multiplier effect of countless zombie computer hosts created inadvertently by folks like you and me when we obliviously click on links to interesting websites. What the actual effect will be, no one quite knows, but speculation has exercised the some of the best imaginations in the security field.

"One researcher, Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the idea of a 'Dark Google.'" writes John Markoff in the New York Times. "What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers?"

On the other hand, you could wake up on April 1st with a popup message that says Ha-Ha! April Fool!

Patches have been created for the Microsoft OS, the vulnerable target of Conficker. But the creators of the Doomsday Worm have already reconfigured - or reConfickered - the program to possibly render these patches and other security software useless. You can and probably should run a backup on March 31st. But if your computer bears the plague the day before, it will bear it the day after.

Any other bright ideas?

Here's hoping that the worst thing that happens to you April 1st is a hotfoot.

RC

S&S Follows Random in Reduction of E-Book Royalties

In October 2008 Random House circulated a letter among literary agents announcing a shift in e-book royalties from one based on list price to one based on actual net moneys received. Five months later, Simon & Schuster has followed Random's example. "Beginning March 1, 2009," writes Judith Curr, Executive Vice President and Publishers of S&S's Atria Books division, in a Dear Agent letter, "all Simon & Schuster contracts worldwide will offer a royalty of 25% of net receipts for all sales of all electronic editions including eBooks and audio book downloads."

Although publishers' royalties are presumably negotiable, the boilerplate on one recent (pre-March 1 2009) Simon & Schuster contract called for a 15% list price royalty. That means that on an e-book retailing at $10.00, the author would be entitled to $1.50. Switching to a 25% royalty on net receipts, the author will now receive $1.25. How is that number calculated? Most e-book retailers take a discount of approximately 50% of an e-book's list price. If S&S collects $5.00 from the retailer, the author will get 25% of that, or $1.25. a reduction of twenty-five cents per sale from the previous arrangement.

One significant aspect of S&S's policy statement is a clarification of the way the company arrives at list prices for e-books. Curr's letter states that "we have, with limited exceptions, adjusted the suggested retail price for our eBooks to mirror the price of the most recently published edition of the book (hardcover or paperback), rather than the discounted prices we had been using."

Translated, that means that if S&S issues a book in hardcover, the e-book price will be commensurately high; when S&S then releases a cheaper paperback edition, the e-book price will proportionately drop. The rationale (if that is the right word for it) for this approach is spelled out in a recent posting, Penetrating the Mysteries of E-Book Pricing. Kind of.

It's hard to say if 25% net e-book royalty will become "standard" throughout the publishing industry but with majors like Random and S&S leading the way, that would seem to be the direction things are headed. (By way of comparison, and as a matter of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a royalty of 50% of net receipts for e-book sales, and has done so since its founding in 2000. On a $10.00 book, that means a royalty of $2.50. At no point is the royalty rate ever reduced.)

- Richard Curtis

Let's Have Lunch!

When the time comes for me to lay down my sword and armor and cross into the Great Beyond after a lifetime of combat with venal publishers, crooked movie producers, treacherous lawyers, and kvetchy authors, it is my fondest hope that the gods will reward me with perpetual publishing luncheons. What fardels would I not bear knowing that such a treat awaited me on the other side!

Some agents and editors feel lunches are tedious obligations at best and duck out of them whenever they can. I find them incredibly exciting, frequently dramatic, and always enlightening: I have never come away from one without having learned something useful. And, if everything comes together perfectly, the occasion can be a transcendental experience both culinarily and literarily, a sublime blend of art, commerce, and hedonism.

For an inside look at what happens at an agent-editor lunch date, click here. But know that this once sacred ritual appears to be doomed.

Richard Curtis

"A Privileged Childhood in a Halcyon Time"

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

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

Click here to read this review in its entirety.

Richard Curtis

Kosmix: What Happens When You Cross a Google and a Wikipedia

Students, your term paper worries may be over. Just submit your topic to Kosmix. It'll collect and assemble information from the Internet, then "build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly," writes New York Times's Miguel Helft. "For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer."

"Type in 'Kauai,' for example, and Kosmix will return a fairly rich page that includes an entry from WikiTravel, a user-created travel site; restaurant recommendations from The New York Times; photographs and videos from services like Flickr and YouTube; audio clips of local music; reviews of guidebooks, bed-and-breakfasts and other services; blog posts and more. It also has top results from Google, and suggests a list of related topics.

Company founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman recognize that the magnitude and complexity of the Internet have made aggregation and integration of information for reports, theses, term papers and the like overwhelming. Enter Kosmix, which Helft points out "has built a huge taxonomy, a set of nearly five million categories on topics from people and locations to car models, music groups and types of cheese."

The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories. That allows Kosmix to recognize that Kauai is not only a place, but also a popular travel destination, a tropical island and a beach resort. Based on those and other categories, it chooses the types of content sources most relevant for a query on Kauai and organizes them by using a proprietary algorithm. It draws that content not only from Web sites, but also from more than 1,000 specialized Web services, search sites that focus on single topics, and databases connected to the Internet."

Helft thinks Kosmix can give Google a run for its money. The founding team is battle-tested, having already developed a number of successful services demonstrating that their system works. Kosmix may be the icing on their cake. Says one of the partners, “With the explosion of information on the Web, it is very hard to have an editorial function with only humans. We are giving you an automated editor for any topic.”

Just for fun, I visited the Kosmix website, which is (per the website's masthead) in "Beta-ish," and typed in 'literary agent". In a few seconds it spat out a succinct description. However, it seems to have been taken in its entirety from Wikipedia. There were links to Wikipedia and Google in case I wanted to learn more. I had expected Kosmix's definition to be original or at least more of a true synthesis. If I wanted to get my definition from Wikipedia or Google, I didn't need to take an extra step visiting Kosmix. Did I say term paper worries are over? Students, if you get caught quoting Wikipedia verbatim, proceed straight to Flunk City.

When I entered some other test words in the Search box, cookies popped up that were weirdly far from what I was looking for, and they disappeared before I had a chance to explore them.

For all that, Kosmix is an original concept and we look forward to seeing the next iteration when the Beta-ish wrinkles have been ironed out.

RC

Cherchez La Beneficiary: Introducing Warren Murphy's Insurance Investigator, "Trace"

The prolific and perpetually inventive Warren Murphy has produced over one hundred novels in the Destroyer series. E-Reads has fifty of them for sale, and more are on the way. But - Murphy produced another series, Trace, built around the exploits of a dissipated insurance investigator. His assignments always seem to involve people who die not long after an insurance policy has been taken out on them. When Devlin Tracy - "Trace" - is not recovering from drink, gambling, or womanizing, there is no one better at his job. The problem is, he's always doing one, the other or all three.

E-Reads is reprinting all seven thrillers in the Trace series. In the title novel. Trace's part-time hooker girlfriend is off on an out-of-town trick, but alimony bills are piling up and his assignment is to find out if an idealistic doctor is dedicated to killing his patients instead of curing them.

The other novels in the series are:

And 47 Miles of Rope
Once a Mutt
Pigs Get Fat
Too Old a Cat
Getting Up With Fleas
When Elephants Forget

Pigs Get Fat won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best paperback original of 1985.

If you want to take a day off from Destroyer, pick up a Trace or two, or seven. They're all in e-book, and very soon will be in paperback.

RC

After Fictionwise Buy, B&N Pledges $50 Mil to Get up to 21st Century Digital Speed

Publishers Lunch reports that Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio "is allocating $50 million of its $125 million capital budget this year to retail, IT, the Internet, digital initiatives and other items." This comes on the heels of its recent acquisition of Fictionwise, the world's leading deliverer of e-book content. Riggio said his customers are eager to expand their choices beyond "the four walls of our stores."

RC

Microsoft Predicts a Virtual Future, But at MIT Media Labs It's Old News

Annalee Newitz posted a segment of a film called Oh Hello, made specifically for Microsoft, demonstrating What Computers Will Look Like in Utopia, According to Microsoft. But at MIT, Utopia has already arrived.

First, Microsoft. Newitz says,

I actually think this depiction of future interfaces is pretty accurate, with transparent wall monitors (these already exist), gesture-controlled computing, multi-use devices that are location-aware, and best of all real-time translation between natural languages. Plus, apparently, the "pinch" gesture from the iPhone has become ubitquitous on PCs in this happy world.

Possibly the translation scenes are the most utopian, however. We see kids in the US communicating seamlessly with Indian kids; and later, a woman meets a business colleague and her comments to him on the phone appear to get translated instantly into text he understands. This is obviously supposed to be the refined version of Google translation, which today can get the job done but still leaves a lot of words weirdly translated.

But if you're impatient to get to Microsoft's virtual future, instead of waiting fifty years you only have to wait as long as it takes for this video of a mindblowing demo to buffer up. At a recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Conference, MIT Media Labs' Pattie Maes presented a wearable "Sixth Sense" device developed by colleague Pranav Mistry that produces astounding virtual effects at the wave of a finger.

Prepare to be astonished.

RC

Complete Novels of R. A. MacAvoy Now in Paperback

E-Reads is happy to announce that the complete collection of R. A. MacAvoy's novels is now available both in paperback and e-book formats. Click here for the complete list, including five recent additions: The Book of Kells, The Third Eagle, and the Damiano trilogy.

**************
MacAvoy is the highly acclaimed author of imaginative and original fantasy fiction. Her debut novel, Tea with the Black Dragon, won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has also written the Damiano trilogy, the chronicles of a wizard’s young son set in an alternate Italian Renaissance; The Book of Kells, Twisting the Rope (the sequel to Tea with the Black Dragon), and the beloved Lens of the World trilogy. The Third Eagle is her only science fiction novel.

RC

If You're Visiting This Site You Must Be in the Market For Polka Dot Galoshes

If you're worried that visiting our website will reveal preferences and predilections you'd prefer to keep private, be aware that soon Google will be watching you and you may find yourself the target of Google-sponsored ads. Unfortunately, you may not find refuge at other websites - they too will be monitoring you. Behavioral targeting is coming to the Web.

What this means is that every time you visit a website that carries Google ads you will be creating a cookie that serves as a kind of spoor enabling Google to analyze and categorize your tastes. Whereupon, as described by the New York Times's Miguel Helft in Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests, "Google will then use that information to show people ads that are relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting." Google has blocked out some 600 categories of interest in 20 broad groups, and if you're not sure what categories you fall into, you'll find out soon enough when ads start popping up that appeal to your preferences. Or at least to what Google infers inferred to be your preferences. Golf? Furs? Sports cars? Triple ply toilet paper? Google is recording your clicks and preparing pop-up pitches.

In its announced initiative Google reassures us that it will not drill too deep into such highly sensitive areas as our sexual orientation or health issues, but just where the line of sensitivity is drawn will be interesting to discover. Users who feel their privacy has been breached will be able to review the information Google has harvested and edit it. Which raises a host of interesting questions, for what's to prevent users from inventing preferences just to throw Google off track?

Website operators will be free to opt out of the Google program. Publisher sites displaying Google' AdSense service will have to post a Cookie and Privacy Policy, such as this one sugested by Google:

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site.
• Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.
• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.
  

By way of disclosure, E-Reads does not at this time harvest information about its visitors. However, because we do use AdSense we are obliged to post a cookie and privacy policy in the very near future. Do you have an opinions either way? Let us know in the comments of this post.

RC

Did Jeff Overlook U.S. Patent Number 7,298,851? Discovery, Saying We Invented E-Reading Device First, Sues Amazon Kindle for Patent Infringement

Publishers Lunch Deluxe, picking up on a story in PRNewswire, reports that Discovery Communications has filed a patent infringement lawsuit alleging that Discovery's founder, John S. Hendricks, invented and patented a Kindle-like e-book delivery system back in the 1990s.

Discovery hasn't sought an injunction, but simply seeks compensation. They have not (yet, at any rate), sued Sony or other e-book device manufacturers or service providers. That includes the inventors of the Rocket Book, the putative mother of all e-books, which has been around for eleven years.

What took Discovery so long to file its suit? That will undoubtedly come out in the wash, so watch these pages for updates.

RC

"Happy as a Centipede With Track Shoes," Harlan Ellison Sues Paramount and His Own Union Over City on the Edge of Forever

In an earth-scorching fulmination including a denunciation of "my once-tough, beloved Guild - my UNION", Harlan Ellison announced that he has launched a lawsuit against CBS-Paramount, Inc. and Writers Guild of America. Papers filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California cite "breach of the duty of fair representation" and "breach of the Collective Bargaining Agreement".

The specific issues are failure to account for and pay licensing and publication revenues resulting from publication by Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, divisions of Paramount, of a paperback trilogy that Ellison alleges is a "knock-off" of his famous Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever; and the failure of the Guild to support his complaints or take action against Paramount. He seeks unspecific damages from Paramount, but because he remains a loyal member of the Guild he is asking for only one dollar from the union. However, he also seeks "a judicial determination as to whether the WGA is doing what its stated purpose has been since day-one! To fight and negotiate for him and other writers."

Ellison reserves the full measure of his ire for Paramount:

“The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who ‘have more important things to worry about,’ who’ll have their assistant get back to you, who don’t actually read or create, who merely ‘take’ meetings, and shuffle papers – much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams – they refuse even to notice...until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you’ve made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars...from OUR labors...just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters."

And that's just for warmups. As long as you're prepared to confront both barrels of his 12-gauge invective, you can read the complete text of his press release here.

The City on the Edge of Forever is a poignant love story that takes the viewer back to 1930s America. 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. It became the classic Star Trek episode, winning the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay and the 1967 Hugo Award (the only teleplay ever to do so!). It was also ranked as one of the"100 Greatest Television Episodes of All Time" by TV Guide.

E-Reads has published the original teleplay of The City on the Edge of Forever as Ellison intended it to be aired. The author's introductory essay (expanded by 15,000 words) reveals all of the details of what Ellison describes as a "fatally inept treatment" of his creative work.

Ellison is determined to have his day in court. Read his screenplay, introduction, and the description of his lawsuit and you can vicariously serve on the jury.

RC

Why We Must Not Let Newspapers and Magazines Fail

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

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

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

I don't think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

Collaborations, Part 2

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

Click here to learn about them.

RC

With Lying Off the Table, Agents Lose a Key Advantage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Curtis

Recession Readers Escape to Romance - And So do Romance Writers

Andrew Sullivan, who writes the always-insightful Daily Dish blog for The Atlantic, carries a note from an anonymous but successful Harlequin Romance author. Here's a key excerpt:

Although the romance novel industry is constantly derided from the outside, made fun of and considered "trash" by the uninformed, these are not the romance novels your mother read, nor anything like the Barbara Cartland books gathering dust on your grandmother's bookshelf. This is a HUGE business of numerous sub-genres for all tastes, and regardless of what anybody thinks, romance novels SELL. Romance fiction generated $1.375 billion in sales in 2007. And while other forms of entertainment suffer economically, romance novels usually sell better during economic downturns. Why? Probably because it's cheap -- anywhere from $4 to $8 for several hours worth of escape in the privacy of your own garden, bed, or bathtub --- and best of all, when times are awful everywhere you're guaranteed a happy ending.

Though many segments of the publishing industry are in disarray, romances continue to thrive. Indeed, without the profits from those $billion+ sales, not only would the publishing business be in even worse disarray, but support for serious literary endeavor would be crippled.

"It is vital for the writing establishment," I wrote in an essay entitled The Two Worlds of Literature, "to realize that literature is far more than a ladder with junk at the bottom and art at the top. Rather, it is an ecosystem in which the esoteric and the popular commingle, fertilize one another, and interdepend. Principally, if it were not for the immense revenues generated by science fiction, romance, male action-adventure, and other types of popular fiction at which so many literary authors and critics look down their noses, there would be no money for publishers to risk on first novels, experimental fiction, and other types of serious but commercially marginal literary enterprises."

So, next time you buy a romance, display it proudly to remind the world that part of the purchase price of that book may be supporting the next Poet Laureate or National Book Award winner.

RC

R. A. MacAvoy's Damiano Trilogy and Book of Kells Now in E-Book

R.A. MacAvoy won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer of 1983. Her debut novel Tea With the Black Dragon was festooned with awards and nominations* and launched a career replete with highly acclaimed, imaginative and original fantasy novels.

With publication of The Book of Kells, the Damiano trilogy and The Third Eagle - her only science fiction novel - E-Reads offers the complete works of this uniquely gifted writer. You may purchase the downloads or wait for the print editions to appear, which are in production as I write this (keep an eye on this page for updates).

Set against the turbulent backdrop of the Italian Renaissance, the Damiano trilogy takes place in a world where real faith-based magic exists. Its hero is a wizard's son, an alchemist and heir to dark magics. But he is also an innocent, a young scholar and musician befriended by the Archangel Raphael, who instructs him in the lute. To save his beloved city from war, Damiano leaves his cloistered life and sets out on a pilgrimage,seeking the aid of a powerful sorceress as he must walk the narrow path between light and shadow accompanied only by his talking dog. But his road is filled with betrayal, disillusionment and death, and Damiano is forced to confront his dark heritage, unleashing the hellish force of his awesome powers to protect those he loves. The further volumes of this tale are Damiano's Lute and Raphael.

The Book of Kells treads the border between realism and fantasy. It centers around one of the most famous and beautiful illuminated manuscripts in history, the legendary (but entirely real) Book of Kells. Celtic history blends with magical fantasy for a strange and immersive tale of adventure.

A lovely review by D. D. Shade in the Lost Book Archives captures the essence of MacAvoy's evocative and haunting style:

Roberta Ann MacAvoy applies words to a page as delicately as Monet added water colors to canvas and with the economy of Scrooge. When reading a work by R. A. MacAvoy, there is a deep sense of being in the hands of a master craftsman. There is also a touch of wonder. Clute and Grant note that most of MacAvoy's novels are witty tales that cover unfamiliar ground. As such, her little known books make delightful, refreshing reading.

* Locus Magazine Award - 1983
Nebula Award Nomination - 1983
Philip K. Dick Memorial Award Nomination - 1984
Compton Crook Memorial Award-First Novel Nomination - 1984
Hugo Award Nomination - 1984
Locus Reader's Poll-Best Fantasy Novel - 1984
Locus Reader's Poll-Best First Novel - 1984
World Fantasy Award Nomination - 1984
Modern Fantasy-The Hundred Best Novels - 1988

Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

Marty Clark "spent over two years with Harlan in the enviable position of personal secretary, administrative officer of his professional corporation, and occasional grammarian." Those who have experienced the master's bark and bite might choose a different adjective than "enviable". Clark not only lived to tell the tale, but went on to assemble, from hundreds of rare and previously unprinted works, this breathtaking collection of twenty wide-ranging essays that demonstrate why the monstre sacre of imaginative literature won the prestigious Silver Pen award of P.E.N. International in 1982.

Clark's introduction is filled with insight into the essay form and Ellison's place in the tradition that began with Montaigne.

You can download the e-book of Sleepless Nights, but before long we will have it in print format as well. Just keep an eye on our home page for an announcement.

RC

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INTRODUCTION BY MARTY CLARK

For the serious Ellison reader, there are few tasks more difficult than staying current with his nonfiction output. Harlan's work appears all over the literary map, so that it is impossible to know where he will turn up next. This is also true of his fiction, but one can always count on the publication of a new fiction collection every few years to gather together those stories which one has missed. Until now, this has not been so of his essays. They have occasionally been included in other collections and, as with the four essays which appear in Harlan's short story collection Stalking the Nightmare (Phantasia Press, 1982), have received raves. Also much in demand are The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat (Ace, 1983) which collected the columns of television criticism which Harlan wrote over a period of four years in the Los Angeles Free Press. However, Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed marks the first time that a book has been devoted exclusively to the best of his general essays. The twenty reprinted here are from such disparate sources as Video Review, Heavy Metal and the Saint Louis Literary Supplement.

To read Clark's full intro, click here.

Partners in Wonder: Harlan Ellison Buddies Up with Giants

Partners in Wonder is arguably the first collection of collaborative stories ever created. But unlike some Very Important Authors who don't pick on someone their own size when inviting writers to collaborate with them, Harlan Ellison threw his gauntlet at the feet of such giants as Algis Budrys, Samuel R. Delaney, Keith Laumer, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Zelazny and Robert Silverberg. Before each story is one of Ellison's patented intros explaining how it was written (and who gets the blame). Below is his intro to the collection itself. Note his regret that there are no female partners in wonder.

Download this e-book version, but if print on paper is more your speed, watch this space for news of the paperback edition.

RC

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INTRODUCTION: SONS OF JANUS

These are stories I have written with other writers. Collaborations, they're called. They are the products of two minds working together, sometimes in complete harmony, more often in opposition. The former, because the ideas were so right they needed no conflict to produce a coherent whole; the latter, because writers are perverse creatures who enjoy tormenting one another. And also, conscious opposition on the part of one of the collaborators, to the direction a story is taking naturally, may produce a stress that bends it unexpectedly in a totally unpredictable way. And from that can come a toad prince or a toad, depending on whether or not both writers know how to handle a fable run amuck.

The beloved Lester Del Rey--one of my early mentors in the craft of professional lying--told me once: never write a story with someone, that you can do as well by yourself. Well, I believe that.

Did Ellison take Del Rey's advice? Read his complete introduction, and his book.

Psst... Wanna Buy a Publisher Cheap? HMH Trade Division in Play

Jim Milliot & Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly report that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's trade book division - the one that stopped acquiring last fall - is being auctioned off as we speak by its debt-plagued parent company. Their sources say there are four "serious" bidders and the action is at $200 million so far. Given the 7 billion debt load that Education Media & Publishing Group groaning under - costing them $500 million annually in debt service alone - bidders will have to get thirty or forty times more serious if the winning bid is to make EMPG even remotely whole.

Leading the pack of snapping bargain hunters, as we predicted here, is Hachette, but there is also apparently a dark horse in the person of "former HM executive Wendy Strothman who has the backing of private equity firm."

Vultures are standing by.

RC

Today's News, Delivered to Your Bedroom Door (From the Printer in Your Bathroom)

Tim Arango of the New York Times asks, Could Customized Newspapers Bring Readers Back?

Hearkening back to the fax newspaper, which was a little less effctive than inviting a town crier into your home, MediaNews Group, a large newspaper chain, will invite customers to select stories that they are interested in, whereupon the service will have their individualized newspaper, called "I-news," printed out on hardware that will be provided to them. A vice-president for the firm says, “We’ll let the reader decide what they want to read and on what platform.” The paper will carry advertising.

I-news is one of many creative efforts to reinvent the newspaper or combine paper-paper with Internet delivery of news, information, entertainment and advertising, and we genuinely wish it success. That said, you have to wonder about the psychology. If I have to go online and select the articles I want to have printed, well, it's going to be old news by the time it comes out of my printer, and fish stores know all too well what the best use is for old newspapers.

Even if I program my news delivery system to send me all national politics but no state politics, or news about my favorite baseball team but not about its rival, the process eliminates the serendipity factor that is at the heart of newspaper- or Web news-reading. On any given day, I might just be intrigued by a news item about state politics, or about my home team's rival. Most of the fun of reading the daily news is finding yourself interested in stuff you never knew was interesting to you.

Also, as Arango points out, "Of course, through automated feeds and customized Google and Yahoo pages, consumers can already tailor their news consumption to their own tastes."

Keep that thinking cap on MediaNews Group, and we'll look forward to pulling that newspaper out of our home printer.

RC

An Intrepid Voyager to A World of Searing Erotic Fantasies

Were the Sixties put on earth so that Marco Vassi could happen? Or was Marco Vassi put on earth so that the Sixties could happen?

To read his classic works of erotic fiction and his masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, The Stoned Apocalypse, is to realize that the man and the era were created out of the same fire and primordial elements. It is not, however, enough to say that Marco Vassi was a child of his age. It could just as accurately be said that the age was Marco Vassi’s fantasy, a fantasy so intense and compelling that it is impossible to read any of his books in one sitting: one must either jump into a cold shower, relieve oneself sexually, or go for a long contemplative walk to reflect on the profundity of his insights into human behavior.

Vassi had done many things before he became a writer, but writing was not one of them except for some translations from Chinese and critiques of manuscripts submitted to a literary agency where he was employed for a few years. He had also tried numerous identities on for size as he acted out and lived out the experiences that were to pour from his mind like water raging over the spillway of a dam. When in the late 1960’s “Fred” Vassi announced that he was embarking on a journey, his friends knew that it was not to a place but to a state of mind.

The state of mind was what came to be known as The Sixties, and anyone seeking to live in that state must enter it through the vision of the author of these works. In cartographic terms it was a journey from the East Coast to California, a trip that resonates with meaning for every student of The American Experience. Speaking metaphorically, however, it was a trip into the heart of life, love, laughter, horror, and sweet pain. Fred Vassi came back Marco Vassi, having recreated himself in the name of the intrepid voyager to the ends of the known world hundreds of years ago.

Heart fecund with all that had happened to him, he started writing the work that was eventually to become The Stoned Apocalypse, a book that captured in coruscating words what others of his generation were capturing so brilliantly in music.

With no source of regular income he tried his hand at what were then popularly known as "sex novels", a genre of tame pornography that pandered to the fantasies of repressed males still mired in postwar inhibition. With the wide-eyed innocence and self-deprecating humor that characterized every venture he undertook, he showed them to me, his friend and a fledgling literary agent. He merely hoped to raise a few dollars with them. I told him that they were the most incredibly arousing works of erotic literature since Henry Miller, and arranged for them to be brought out by Olympia Press, Miller’s publisher. Critics and reviewers confirmed my assessment. What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew that the mind is the most erotic organ of all. He termed this fusion of mind and sex organs “Metasex.”

For Marco Vassi, the liberation of sexual emotions, paralleling the liberation of so many others in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, promised a new age of beauty, love, and honesty, and he lived his vision to the hilt - quite literally. For a long while it seemed to him impossible that this vision did not rest on the bedrock of reality.

But, in the words of Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. The bloody hand of Vietnam and the corrupt fist of the Nixon presidency crushed the fragile beauty of the flower generation. The unbridled commercialism that became the 1980’s captured and exploited the butterflies of Woodstock, enriching half of them and killing the other half with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Finally, the horror of a new scourge, AIDS, visited death upon the bodies of those who had dreamed of eternal love, irresponsible fun, and self-realization. It was then that Marco Vassi awoke from his dream of The Sixties. When he did, the virus had entered his blood. The first malady of any consequence to come along - in this case pneumonia - conquered his defenseless immune system and made short work of him.

Marco Vassi’s body died, but not the body of his work, which lives again in E-Reads editions. Like a rainbow over a bleak landscape, his dream of The Sixties shimmers above the depressing, sordid, and tragic decades that succeeded his. And ultimately, it triumphs over them.

- Richard Curtis

Collaborations, Part 1

One of the liabilities of being a professional writer is that you attract people who want to collaborate with you. What author has not been collared at a party by a drunk who wants him to write his life story or has this fantastic idea for a novel?

Few such propositions have any commercial value. But from time to time you may meet someone whose story is compelling enough to entice you into collaboration with him. Or your agent may offer you an opportunity to team up with a famous movie or sports star, doctor or astronaut, beauty expert or political figure. If that happens, do you know how collaborations work? How the proceeds are to be divided? Whose byline goes on the cover of the book? Who pays the expenses of flying to Washington or Los Angeles or Hawaii to interview this person or to do research? Whose name goes on the copyright?

As a writer who has collaborated on seven or eight works of fiction and nonfiction and as an agent who has welded together scores of collaborations for clients, I can testify that teaming up with someone on a book can be richly rewarding, elevating, and great fun. It can also turn out to be a nightmare if the parties are ill matched, have unrealistic expectations of each other’s contributions, or fail to spell out their contractual arrangements before getting down to work. Collaborations are complex undertakings because the authors have to please themselves, each other, and their publishers at one and the same time, the literary equivalent of three-dimensional chess. Let's discuss how to enter into a collaboration with your eyes wide open.

RC

At Thomas Nelson, Bundling No Longer Quaint

This month Thomas Nelson publishers will issue Michael Franzese's I'll Make You An Offer You Can't Refuse. And the company hopes its marketing plan lives up to the title: bundled with the hardcover will be access to audio and e-book versions at no extra charge. This according to Publishers Lunch, the online book trade newsletter.

Bundling of formats has long been urged as a powerful marketing tool ideally suited to books and their sister platforms digital books and audio. Says Michael S. Hyatt, Nelson's president and CEO, the Nelson initiative, called NelsonFree, "will give readers a new level of value and flexibility. It will enhance their literary experience and allow greater employment of the content without breaking the bank."

We think so too and expect to see lots more cross-platform promotions.

RC

Barbara Parker

Bestselling author Barbara Parker died on Saturday, March 8 2009. The cause was cancer which, after a blessed couple of years of remission that freed her to relaunch her writing career, metastasized. She was 62 years old.

She was best known for a series of thrillers, commencing with Suspicion of Innocence, set in Miami and starring attorneys Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana. Fans followed their stormy relationship from book to book as Connor's Cuban-born lover disappeared and reappeared on mysterious and dangerous missions having to do with Cuban politics. Their on-again off-again romance was the subject of intense speculation by readers wondering if the dark man of mystery would ever settle down.

I represented Barbara from her very first book and never once saw her in any other mood but upbeat. Her eyes perpetually twinkled with self-deprecating humor. Her head was always cocked with curiosity like a puppy listening to a whistle out of the range of human hearing. She took in everything and everything was of intense interest to her both personally and professionally. She was tethered to a notebook and I never knew when some random comment uttered by me or a stranger would provoke a frenzy of scribbling that would eventually find its way into one of her books.

She was a writer's writer. Some years ago I visited her in her home town of Ft. Lauderdale, where I had booked a reservation in a fancy restaurant. She told me to meet her at a theatre where she was researching her current novel. She emerged in jeans and denim workshirt, hair and face covered with dust from clambering around the theatre's flies. I asked her if she wanted me to take her home to change for dinner. "No, I'll just change in my car," she said. She disappeared into her car and I saw clothes flying as if tossed in a dryer. She stepped out beautifully dressed, impeccably groomed, and laughing her girlish laughter. I will sorely miss that laughter.

An obituary by Oline H. Cogdill appears in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Before she became sick she arranged for E-Reads to reissue her Gail and Anthony novels. Nothing could give me greater pleasure to pay this tribute to her, and I know her fans will say the same.

Richard Curtis

E-Book Week at E-Reads: Free Downloads from Warren Murphy and Janet Dailey!

Update: 6pm, March 14th, 2009: This promotion has now ended. We hope you enjoyed the free E-Books and we look forward to bringing you free titles again in the future.

To help promote E-Book Week: March 8-14th, E-Reads is making two of our favorite books available as free downloads in PDF format, exclusively from our website and for one week only!* We know you'll love these two titles and come back to read more titles available from E-Reads. So, enjoy!

Heiress, by Janet Dailey (Romance)

They met at the funeral of one of the most prestigious men in the country, Dean Lawson, their father. Abbie Lawson, the dutiful genteel daughter breed in the lap of luxury and, Rachel Farr, a mistake born of a passionate love affair, are almost identical in appearance but are worlds apart. Only one daughter can be the heir to the endless oil fields and magnificent thoroughbreds. A fierce competition has arisen between the women, not only for the inheritance but also for the proof of a father's love. They should have been devoted to each other as friends and sisters, but they have become the most embittered of enemies. The Texas men they love watch as they tear themselves apart to become the HEIRESS. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Janet Dailey at E-Reads.)

Created, The Destroyer, by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (Action/Adventure)

When ex-New Jersey cop Remo Williams is electrocuted for the murder of a dope-dealing goon, CURE, a super-secret government agency that doesn't really exist, schemes to resurrect Remo as the ultimate killing machine that will carry out most of its dirty plans. Under the direction of expert assassin Master Chiun, Remo is transformed into the Destroyer and launches a series of secret plots to dissolve the underworld. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Warren Murphy at E-Reads.)

To learn more about E-Book Week, visit the website ebookweek.com to find other special promotions by E-Book publishers.

* Terms of Service: These two titles are available for free to end-users only when downloaded from E-Reads.com. All distribution rights are reserved and they must not be redistributed in any way or form. Please do not link directly to these PDF files.

On a Planet of Slave Herders, One Man Cries "Let These People Go." Ray Aldridge's Emancipator Trilogy

Ruiz Aw, the protagonist of Ray Aldridge's Emancipator trilogy and a former slave himself, starts out as an enforcer sent to investigate the disappearance of several slaves from the planet Pharaoh, a world without hope or freedom, a world of slave poachers. Ruiz must go undercover to find these poachers for the The Art League but unknown to his masters he leads a double life as the Lone Emancipator, a man sworn to bring down the slave trade and destroy the league. He alone is the galaxy's last chance. But if his secret is revealed, a death net planted deep in his brain is programmed to kill him.

The Pharoah Contract launches a gripping trio of novels climaxing in a slave revolt that will put you in mind of Spartacus.

RC

Children of the Streets by Harlan Ellison

There aren't many rules in the primer for gang kids, but they all count: When he's down, kick for the head and groin. Avoid cops. Play it cool. Those are the rules that govern Harlan Ellison's collection, Children of the Streets. Ellison understands them as an insider: he ran with a gang, reported on the experience, and survived. Here's what he has to say about that time:

This book was first published when I was twenty-seven years old. As I write this new introduction, I am one month away from my seventieth birthday. What the world was like, when I wrote these stories, is as lost and arcane as the prime time of the Ottoman Empire. No self-respecting vato loco or gangbanger would even consider using a zip gun (if, in fact, he had ever heard of such an implement); give him an Uzi or an AK-47. Or, even better, an Austrian 9mm Steyr MPi 81 with a 25- or 32-shot detachable box. Switchblade? Fuggedaboutit.

If you can resist reading the rest of his introduction to Children of the Streets, you're endowed with heroic will power.

E-Reads is happy to publish the first e-book edition of this book, as well as some thirty other Harlan Ellison classics. Look for print editions to follow not long from now.

RC

Venus of Dreams by Pam Sargent

Pamela Sargent is the author of several highly praised and prize-winning novels, among them The Shore of Women, Cloned Lives, The Sudden Star, The Golden Space, Watchstar, The Alien Upstairs, and Alien Child. Venus of Dreams, which we are proud to offer to you today, was selected by The Easton Press for its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series. And of course you'll want to read Venus of Shadows, the sequel. Gregory Benford described the former as “One of the peaks of recent science fiction.” And James Morrow characterized the sequel as “a masterly piece of world-building.” The third novel in the Venus trilogy, Child of Venus, is making its way to publication on this site.

In Venus of Dreams, a determined and independent woman is determined to make the poison-filled atmosphere of Venus hospitable to humans. As impossible as it may seem she succeeds, supported by only one other soul, and founds a might dynasty.

Read Venus of Dreams and its sequel, and several other compelling and powerful Sargent E-Reads titles as well. Another related pair of her books, Watchstar and its sequel Eye of the Comet, will be completed by Homesmind. Watch this space for news that the trilogy is united once again.

RC

Why Kindle On The iPhone Matters More Than You May Have Thought

This week, Apple quietly released Amazon's new Kindle application in their iTunes Application Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch as a free download. There was some buzz, but not a lot of amazement from the iPhone community. In the Kindle community, there weren't any big parades, either. But while it might seem superficially like Kindle is just another ebook reader for the iPhone, and one that's not as full featured as Stanza, the Amazon Kindle app is probably more important than the new Kindle 2 for the future of E-Book sales at Amazon. This is a little application that represents the future of E-Books: wirelessly syncing your purchased library across multiple devices, letting you jump from device to device as easily as possible, picking up where you left off every time. And in one day, it opened up Kindle E-Book sales to almost 20 million Apple customers.

The Amazon Kindle iPhone application can read any Kindle E-Book that you've purchased from Amazon. It uses the phone's 3G or Wi-Fi connection to connect with Amazon's "WhisperSync" network services, by using your Amazon login identity and password to look up an inventory of all the Kindle E-Books you've purchased, and it allows you to re-download any or all of them for reading on the iPhone. If you have a Kindle 2, it can synchronize where you left off reading on the Kindle when you pick it up again on your iPhone (and vice versa). iPhone users can buy Kindle E-Books using the Safari browser on their phone, or going to Amazon.com with any other device, and once the book is added to your WhisperSync Amazon E-Book inventory, you can access it on any Kindle or iPhone. And that's the trick we've all been waiting for. Allowing more than one device to keep track of Kindle books and to do reading is an Amazon service that has been a long time coming, but one that's probably going to attract many more customers to Kindle E-Books.

Platforms and Device Multiplicity

This sort of device multiplicity is the heart and soul of many popular "platform" applications, like Twitter or Facebook. User activity takes place not only on a home computer's browser, but at work, in desktop widgets, cell phones, and their netbooks or laptops. People use all sorts of methods to participate in a service, even though the experience changes from device to device. What Amazon is finally acknowledging is that E-Books are a multi-device service and that Kindle is not just a device but an E-Book platform. E-Books may be commodities, but reading is a user habit that has always required a distribution service that anticipates the creative ways readers are looking to acquire new content. Bookstores, libraries, schools, the internet. Amazon used the first Kindle device generation to build their platform's first user base and gently ease them into an E-Book service that will continue to grow.

Restricting E-Book reading to just the Kindle device was important for Amazon initially to create a small niche market of evangelist users, but it was no way to sustain long term growth for E-Book sales when the majority of E-Book readers are experimenting more and more with different platforms. Fictionwise (now a part of Barnes & Noble), who were among the first to create an E-Book service for the iPhone with the eReader software, demonstrated that E-Book platforms are successful because users read their content across many devices, and now Amazon is taking the ball and running with it. In the near future, I expect to see Kindle applications for Google Android phones and maybe even your favorite flavor of operating system (Mac, PC, or Linux).

Is it going to hurt Kindle 2 sales? Probably not. The user experience is still quite different enough on the iPhone to make the Kindle 2 much more attractive for leisurely reading, because of the larger screen size and eye-comfort of Amazon's device. Hopefully, it's going to entice people to trade-up to a Kindle device and keep investing in Kindle formatted E-Books. It's adding value to the brand and every Kindle E-Book purchase.

Growing Pains or Limitations with the Kindle on iPhone

Right now, the Kindle application for iPhone is not as full-featured as the Kindle or Kindle 2, and for good reason. Amazon doesn't want the Kindle on the iPhone to cannibalize Kindle device sales - it's got to encourage Kindle 2 sales by hinting at what you're missing. There's no dictionary look-up, text-to-voice, note-taking, store browsing, and all the other bells and whistles. And the page location (instead of page numbering in the traditional sense) is still hard to decipher for newcomers. But at least there's a scroll bar to fast-forward (albeit imprecisely) around. Quite simply, all you can do is read the text, change font sizes, jump around with a scroll bar or interior bookmarks, and sync. Compared to other E-Book software for the iPhone, this is very anemic. But maybe the most important part of the Amazon platform strategy is that Kindle on iPhone is crippled from reading non-Kindle books, because Amazon does not allow WhisperSync to carry a bookshelf of user created content, or content purchased from other sources. You're only able to read and sync your Kindle E-Books.

In January, I wrote that MobiPocket (owned by Amazon) was missing from the iPhone, even though it could have been a breakthrough, and maybe now we know why it disappeared. It was too threatening to Kindle as a platform. MobiPocket is a format that allows E-Book content to be distributed from sources other than Amazon or MobiPocket, particularly without DRM encryption. With the release of the Kindle 2, Amazon now has too much invested in the Kindle format to risk losing any Kindle compatible E-Book sales to other distributor channels, and so it has to suppress MobiPocket as best it can, or at least not offer them any free rides, if it wants to nurture Kindle E-Books. And the Kindle platform on any device has to stay consistent to this rule. Kindle for iPhone is a lot of what I wanted in a MobiPocket application, particularly WhisperSync, but even though I respect Amazon's attempt to build Kindle E-Books sales, I'm not happy that it prohibits user generated content.

Competing iPhone E-Book apps, particularly Stanza, grow in popularity because they try to be agnostic to any given platform or format. Smart readers don't like to be forced to buy from only one sales channel or stick with just one format. And pirate E-Books are also another reason why "open" E-Book reader software will continue to thrive. Although the Kindle device can read non-DRM MobiPocket files or converted texts, users are responsible for putting these files on their Kindle themselves, using USB or email transfers (or an SD memory card, if you have a first-gen Kindle). Unfortunately, there may be a very good reason Amazon keeps the system relatively difficult for non-DRM books: Amazon would be opening itself to a world of copyright hurt if WhisperSync allowed anyone to upload and store pirated material with Amazon's servers. A policed WhisperSync is very important to build Kindle E-Book sales.

Will there be a Sony Reader on the iPhone?

The competing E-Book reader devices from Sony have a much more open approach to accepting content (ePub, PDF, RTF, etc.), but now Sony will have to be more adept at sharing Sony DRM E-Book content with other devices if it's going to stay competitive with the Kindle platform. What's just as problematic is that the Sony Reader must be physically tethered to computers or memory cards to move files, which make them harder for users to manage their purchased E-Book content, and this makes wireless synchronizing like WhisperSync seem almost magical in comparison. If Sony could build their own E-Book wireless sync service that also allowed non-DRM user content to be hosted in the cloud, they would be a formidable foe to Amazon, but it remains to be seen if they can put those resources together.

The fabled end-of-the-rainbow for any E-Book platform is the ubiquity of all the content (both user generated and publisher sales) to be accessible and synchronized to as many user devices as possible, while preserving a comfortable reading experience with generous perks like note-taking, review tools, some sharing, and bonuses like custom dictionaries and writing tools. Even though it's a slow climb, we're getting there. Now that Amazon is on the iPhone, it finally looks like the biggest distributor is admitting they have the same dream, too.

- Michael Gaudet

From the Land of Fear by Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison describes the eleven stories in his collection From the Land of Fear as "side trips." He is too modest. Ellison's side trips are someone else's extended journey. Listen to what the late Roger Zelazny had to say about some of the tales:

Listen to the sigh in My Brother Paulie, just there at the end, the plaint in A Friend to Man, the deep wailings in Battle Without Banners, the strange tongues in Life Hutch, the horrible outcry of "We Mourn For Anyone ... ", the words of pain in Time of the Eye, the tones of anger in Back to the Drawing Boards and the voices deep and hoarse in The Sky Is Burning. And there are hands moving everywhere, slapping, poking, gesturing hands.

Zelazny was so struck by Harlan Ellison and his work that he had to use metaphysical imagery. Read his complete introduction here, and settle down (if you can, if you dare) with Harlan Ellison's riveting journey into the Land of Fear.

RC

Barnes & Noble Levels the E-Book Playing Field with Acquisition of Fictionwise

Back in December, after it moved a key executive into the position of Director of Digital Content, we speculated that Barnes & Noble might be contemplating a second assault on the ramparts of the e-book industry. Today the ramparts fell with the news that the retail giant has acquired Fictionwise, the world’s leading e-book retailer for $15.7 million.

With this single stroke, B&N comes roaring back into a business it abandoned in 2003. Of far greater significance is that B&N is now catapulted back onto a competitive footing with amazon.com in the all-important e-book arena. Though Barnes & Noble doesn’t boast a Kindle or any other proprietary e-book reader, there is a host of devices now available or soon to come on stream capable of carrying the immense body of e-book content that Fictionwise has aggregated.

Fictionwise’s multiformat feature enables subscribers to download books in such platforms as Adobe, Palm, Sony, iPhone and even Kindle itself. In January 2008, Fictionwise acquired eReader, the principal Palm-format etailer and reinforced the widely held view that it is the team to beat in the digital book major leagues.

Fictionwise was created in 2000 as a partnership between Steve Pendergrast and his brother Scott's Mindwise Media, LLC. They subsequently spun Fictionwise off. Starting modestly with digital reprints of science fiction short stories, it was not long before its cutting edge e-book delivery system, brilliant metrics, and author- and fan-friendly business model attracted authors, publishers and other content providers. Today it sells thousands of e-book titles for nearly five hundred publishers including E-Reads. The Pendergasts will continue operating the website for the parent company.

Asked what he thought of the B&N/Fictionwise marriage, one executive pronounced it "Electrifying! It changes everything."

Richard Curtis

A Pair of Misfits in Charge of the Paywagon: Introducing Bruce Thorstad's Gents

When Kentuckian Riley Stokes and Texan Cass McCasland team up and head for the frontier there's plenty of wide open space to get into trouble, and this they do consistently in a series of frontier misadventures generically known as "The Gents". When they end up guarding the Army's paywagon, the odds are that things are not going to go as planned. And they don't.


Bruce Thorstad's frontier fiction is as far from the cliched western novel as Abilene is from Boston. Growing up in the northern Wisconsin towns in the 1950’s and ‘60’s his imagination was fueled by the dozens of TV westerns of that era. “Northern Wisconsin is big-woods country…it’s not the West, but it’s relatively unpopulated. I couldn’t look at a hill or a hayfield without mentally populating it with stampeding buffalo or attacking cavalry.”

E-Reads carries three "Gents" novels and a marvelous singleton entitled Deadwood Dick and the Code of the West.

RC

Four Biggies Drop the Other Shoe on Shuttered Anderson News

As mentioned in Publishers Lunch, Thompson Reuters reports that four major creditors of Anderson News, the book and magazine distributors, have filed papers in US bankruptcy court seeking to force the company into bankruptcy. The stakes are high, totaling over $37 million. The creditors are the cream of Big New York Publishing: Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Random House Inc and Simon & Schuster Inc.

"Under U.S. law," the news release explains, "creditors may begin an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding to force a debtor to confront the debts they are owed."

In February Anderson announced it was closing its doors, idling some 2000 trucks serving 40,000 book and magazine outlets, a damaging blow for mass market paperback publishers. It's hoped that rival companies will take over the territories, but that may not happen in time to forestall losses among publishers that had books in the Anderson pipeline.

"This is a mess for us all," Anderson CEO Charlie Anderson said at the time. And it just got a lot messier.

RC

Borrowing Texts Without Giving Anything Back

My first encounter with the term "fair use" scarred me for life.

I was an apprentice literary agent and one of the agency's authors had quoted, without permission, a single line of a poem composed by a late distinguished man of letters. We received a major lawyer letter from the poet's estate threatening to sue our author's sorry behind into fine fragments for appropriating a copyrighted work without permission or payment.

I was instructed by my boss to tell the lawyer that the author had every right to publish the line on the grounds of the doctrine of fair use. And where, we asked, did this lawyer get off claiming that a single line of verse violated the doctrine? Whereupon I received an even more vitriolic letter threatening to name me and my boss in what would be the mother of all infringement lawsuits. The gist of the lawyer's position was something like this: "If you put a thousand authors in a room for a thousand years, none of them would remotely be able to write that deathless line." And you know what? I think he was right. That line was as inspired as Robert Frost's "Whose woods these are I think I know" or Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night."

The flap was settled with a generous permission fee and the author's behind lived to sit another day.

I was reminded of this incident by an article by Brian Stelter in the New York Times about the thin line that bloggers walk when they extensively quote other people's work. "Some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content," writes Stelter.

Though reputable bloggers are usually unstinting in linking and giving credit to the writers and publications whose work they quote, the revenue accruing to the quoted publications is negligible, even when the blogsite is a high-traffic one such as Huffington Post or Google News that can be expected to send a certain number of visitors to the original source. Now, those original sources are getting cranky about underwriting the salaries of editors and journalists, generating original story ideas, conducting research and fact checking and legal diligence only to see bloggers step in and collect the credit, traffic and revenue. Says Stelter:

"Copyright infringement lawsuits directed at bloggers and other online publishers seem to be on the rise. David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, said his colleagues kept track of 16 such suits in 2007. In 2004 and 2005, it monitored three such suits each year. And newspapers sometimes send cease-and-desist orders to sites that they believe have crossed the line."

As my author learned to his regret, US Copyright Law does not define fair use in terms of words, lines, sentences, paragraphs or pages. The test is more amorphous and calls on a variety of qualitative and quantitative tests that are not consistent or dependable. In the ambiguous universe of Fair Use, the first eleven words of Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl" ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness") may carry as much legal weight as hundreds of words lifted from a tome of lesser distinction.

Stelter's article, Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt, examines efforts to create a conduct code that navigates between legal, responsible citation and unabashed scraping. One important criterion cited by Arianna Huffington is whether value is added by bloggers to texts they cite in their columns and comments. If a blogger can spin borrowed material in a way that creates fresh insights, the way a jazz musician riffs on someone else's tune, that spin may arguably be defensible. On the other hand, in Huffington's code verbatim appropriation without enhancement would be harder to justify.

Of the 1256 words in Mr. Stelter's Times article, I have used 101. I have cited him and the New York Times as the source, and linked to his article. Have I fairly used his material? Have I added value to his work? Or will I be getting a lawyer letter from the newspaper's legal counsel? Do I deserve to? And those lines from Frost and Thomas? Is my own behind in jeopardy for having quoted them without permission or fee?

Your guess is as good as mine. And that's as good a definition of fair use as any I've heard.

Richard Curtis

Outrageous Fortune

I often ponder the role played by luck in the fates of books and authors. Are some authors luckier than others? Are there lucky breaks for writers, the literary equivalent of the understudy who replaces a lead actor in a show and becomes a star overnight? Do we make our own luck? Can good luck be bought or manipulated? Can bad luck be avoided? Are some of us simply, to use the poignant Yiddish word, schlimazels, those hapless folks who always seem to be standing under the flowerpot when it falls from a windowsill?

Our natural egotism rejects the notion that our successes or failures are the products of random and indiscriminate accidents. But for some of us, that may be the best explanation of why bad things happen to good writers. To read on, click here.

Richard Curtis

In Game of Chicken with Audio Biz, Amazon Swerves

Under pressure from authors, audio publishers and other audio rights-holders, Amazon pulled back from its initiative to convert the texts of Kindle e-books to speech without permission. The company declared that it is

"modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title-by-title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to
leave text-to-speech enabled."

Amazon did not concede that its provocative act of enabling text-to-speech infringed on anybody's audio rights. In fact it asserted that the "experimental text-to-speech feature is
legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given." That said, "Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat."

Whether Amazon did or did not have a leg to stand on, the high stakes of a possible rights infringement on the interests of a billion dollar audio industry all but guaranteed litigation. Though many opponents of Amazon's text-to-speech function would prefer to do away with it altogether, they may have to live with the voluntary, book by book nature of Amazon's revised position. Indeed, because of Federal disability mandates requiring the function to be embedded in e-books, a complete termination of text-to-speech might actually be unlawful. For now, calm has descended over Kindle City and Authors Guild and other opponents are withdrawing their tanks to the perimeter.

For background on the dispute you can click on our recent summary, and for details of Amazon's concession, link to cnet's coverage.

RC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

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

Deathbird Stories: Harlan Ellison Stares Down the Gods. The Gods Blink

Deathbird Stories brings together 19 of Harlan Ellison's greatest stories. The theme of the collection can be loosely defined as Ellison taking on the gods, not just the ancient ones but those of modern vintage, as shiny-new as today’s technology. Unlike some of Ellison’s collections, the introductory notes to each story can be as short as a phrase and rarely run more than a sentence or two. That's okay; the tales speak for themselves. Among them are winners of a Hugo, an Edgar, the Locus Poll Award and the British Science Fiction Award.

This masterwork of myth and terror is a mind-freezing odyssey into the darkest reaches of mortal terror. Here's Ellison's foreword:

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

Foreword: Oblations at Alien Altars

Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. But there is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter:

When belief in a god dies, the god dies.

When the last acolyte renounces his faith and turns to another deity, the god ceases to be.

They know the terrible simplicity of that truth, the mightiest and the mingiest of gods. They have seen their fellow gods go down to obscurity and banishment for lack of believers. They saw Achelous wither when the cornucopia was ripped from his head by Heracles; they saw the twelve Aesir and their Asgardian heaven-home turned to mist when the Vikings took up the cross; they saw Ahriman dwindle and die when the ancient Persian empire was overrun; they saw Alaghom Naom, the "Mother of Mind," lost to men when the Conquistadores brutalized the Mayan religion; they saw Ama-Terasu, the Japanese sun goddess, go up in a nova of light brighter than the sun from which she took her name, on a special day in Hiroshima; and Amen-Ra, and Ana�tis, and Anath, and Anshar (and Kishar), and Anu, and Anubis, and Apollo ... all of them shimmered and became insubstantial as their temples were reduced to rubble.

Volume after volume of sacred books of gods.

And that's only into the "A's."

As the time passes for men and women, so does it pass for gods, for they are made viable and substantial only through the massed beliefs of masses of men and women. And when puny mortals no longer worship at their altars, the gods die.

To be replaced by newer, more relevant gods.

Perhaps one day soon the time will pass for Jehovah and Buddha and Zoroaster and Brahma. Then the Earth will know other gods.

Already we begin to worship these other, newer gods. Already the Church fights to hold its own. The young grow away from the old religions, the world seems to swing between the old and the new; more and more each day interest in the occult, in the magical, in the phantasmagorical surges to the fore-leaving priests and rabbis and ministers concerned where their next god will come from.

This group of stories deals with the new gods, with the new devils, with the modern incarnations of the little people and the wood sprites and the demons. The grimoires and Necronomicons of the gods of the freeway, of the ghetto blacks, of the coaxial cable; the paingod and the rock god and the god of neon; the god of legal tender, the god of business-as-usual and the gods that live in city streets and slot machines. The God of Smog and the God of Freudian Guilt. The Machine God.

They are a strange, unpredictable lot, these new, vital, muscular gods. How we will come to worship them, what boons they may bestow, their moods and their limitations-these are the subjects of these stories.

A New Testament of deities for the computerized age of confrontation and relevance. A grimoire and a guide. A pantheon of the holiest of holies for modern man.

Know them now ... they rule the nights through which we move.

Kitty Genovese met one of them, as did the students of Kent State University. Black men have known them far longer than white men, but have been ill served by them.

So know them now, in these stories. Offerings can be made at their altars in new-car showrooms and gambling casinos and in crash-pads and penthouses.

Worship in the temple of your soul, but know the names of those who control your destiny. For, as the God of Time so aptly put it, "It's later than you think."

Harlan Ellison

E-Reads is happy to offer Deathbird Stories 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.