Judith Regan Back in Spotlight, Trailing Clouds of Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon Updates Kindle's Document Support and File Fees

Starting on May 4th, Kindle will now be charging users $0.15 per megabyte for files they email to their Kindle via its wireless connection (Whispernet). This is up from the $0.10 charge for files without any size limit. Is this literally nickle and diming? Well, not exactly. I think it's likely a protective move because the fees that Amazon is paying to maintain the service are more than they anticipated. Any file's cost will now be determined by rounding up to the nearest megabyte. It remains free to transfer the file yourself via USB.

I hope this is not the slippery slope of charging more for Whispernet services as time goes on, because one of the best successes of the Kindle has been how popular its wireless service is (for example, see this XKCD comic).

But the good news is that now Amazon is supporting RTF and DocX files for their conversion process (albeit "experimentally," so that they don't guaranty it will be perfect), whereby you email a file to your Kindle email address and Amazon converts it to a Kindle compatible file (emailing it back to you for free, or to your Kindle for $0.15 a MB). DocX is Microsoft's latest Word format, which is a default for newer versions of MS Word, while RTF is the old standby and the format that E-Reads uses to maintain many manuscripts in our archives. Good on them for pushing the format envelope a bit more like Sony has been doing.

- Michael Gaudet

Stats Confirm: Kindle Is No Country for Young Men and Women

A Kindlista compiling data on Kindle use confirms our highly unscientific observation that the majority of the device's owners are adults (35-54) or seniors (55+). If you like graphs and pie charts, visit Kindle Culture and see for yourself.

Says the site's blogger:

"The resulting data suggests that the largest group of Kindle owners by decade are in their 50s. The next two largest are owners in their 40s at 19.1% and owners in their 60s at 18%, making the total number of Kindle owners between the ages of 40 and 69 an incredible 58.6%. Owners above 70 make up an additional 8.1%, with owners under the age of 40 accounting for just over a third of all Kindle sales.

Using broader target demographic standards, the results look like this:

Younger adults (18-34) – 22%
Adults (35-54) – 38.4%
Older adults (over 54) – 37.3"

Among Kindle Culture's conclusions: "The Kindle might also be a popular 60th birthday present..."

Note to family and friends: a gift certificate to Bloomingdale's will be perfectly fine, thank you.

RC

Can You Be Sued for Downloading a Book?

E-book piracy is a billion dollar business, and a good percentage of it comes from user-generated shared files. Pirate websites list millions of these files, enabling visitors to download music, movies, pictures, and e-book texts that their Internet peers are sharing, all free. As E-Reads' Michael Gaudet pointed out in his analysis of e-book piracy, "Most of the listed files are ripped from purchased media, and in some cases they are leaked material that has yet to be made available at retail."

Though the operators of pirate websites are cagey and some are downright defiant, a recent Swedish court decision found four co-founders of one such site, Pirate Bay, guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement. The perpetrators have each been sentenced to 1 year in prison and fined $3.5 million ($14m total).

While copyright owners rejoice in the decision, their happiness may be short-lived, for there are numerous websites ready to take Pirate Bay's place. If the beast grows ten more heads, legitimate publishers may be forced to seek other measures. One of them is to sue visitors to these sites who download shared files. People like, um...you?

Surely, no book publisher is going to sue some kid for sharing an e-book file, right? Well...

Consider the case of one Patricia Santangelo of Wappingers Falls, N. Y. It happens that four years ago she was one of thousands of people accused of illegally downloading and distributing music. They were sued by the Recording Industry Association in a bid to make an example of ordinary people whose file-sharing activities were draining publishers and recording artists of legitimate, copyright-protected revenue. The plaintiffs didn't care how much it cost to bring the action - that's how much it meant to them.

Many of those sued settled, but Ms. Santangelo decided to fight it out in court. According to the New York Times, "The industry eventually dropped its suit against the mother. But it filed a new one against two of her children, Michelle and Robert, ages 20 and 16 at the time." Just recently her family and the recording industry reached a settlement, and it will cost the Santangelos $7,000. They have denied wrongdoing.

So we ask again: can a book publisher or association of publishers sue participants downloading texts from an e-book file sharing site? The answer is - sure. Would a judge throw the suit out as frivolous? Not if he or she bought into the arguments of such righteously indignant copyright owners as the victim who recently posted a blog asserting that piracy was no better than mugging or shoplifting.

See you in court.

RC

Too Young for Kindle? A 29 Year Old's View

Here's an insightful comment on our recent posting, Are You Too Young For Kindle?
RC
************************
Well, I'm 29 and I got a Kindle as a gift at the beginning of 08 right when they went on sale during Christmas 07. I LOVE my Kindle. Would I have bought one if it wasn't given to me? No, but I would have been salivating with jealousy any time I saw one on the street. I didn't pay money for books before I got my Kindle because books are too easy to come by. So I'd agree that my disposable income isn't something I'd spend on books (I work in book publishing too) generally. Now, however, it's almost too easy to drop $5.99 here or $9.99 there (btw - $9.99 is the absolute max I'll pay for an e-book) for a book. I also have a NYTimes "headline story" subscription for a $1.99/month which gives me the top 15 or so stories of the day. I wouldn't have taken a NYTimes subscription of any kind before then. It would have seemed like a waste of paper when I can get the gist of the news online.

The best feature is the "sample read". If I pull a sample book its almost a sure bet that I'm going to buy the book. My buy rate has DRAMATICALLY improved since I got the Kindle. The Amazon library is a big deal as well. The library coupled with the wireless download is a hurdle that will be mighty big for any $99 application to beat...

The price point of the Kindle is only half the problem. I think young people would spend money on a piece of hardware they'd use. The sad fact is that many people don't read enough to make a nearly $400 commitment to a piece of hardware. I carry my Kindle with me everyday and I use it regularly. The average reading in the US is like two books and a fashion mag, right? These people aren't dropping $359 for a Kindle. All the 80G iPods, iPhones, and Wiis out there tell you that young people will shell out the dough for something they want and that they'll use. Books aren't the thing for the majority.

Also, I think old people were the ones commenting on the Amazon community pages because old people are the only ones who'd be tickled enough to go to an Amazon community page. I've had my Kindle for more than a year and I've never felt the need to visit the Amazon community. I didn't need to ask a lot of questions on how to use it and I don't really have the time to "make friends" with other people who have a Kindle just because they have a Kindle...

IMHO.

Extension Eases Google Deadline Mass Hysteria

Publishers, authors and agents breathed a collective sigh of relief to learn that New York judge Denny Chin has granted a four-month extension to authors and other content owners to decide on the merits of the recently negotiated settlement between Google and author and publisher groups.

Andrew Albanese of Publishers Weekly reports that Gail Knight Steinbeck, leading a group of authors upset about the pressure to decide without adequate information, was thrilled. “We now have to time to really sink our teeth into what this agreement will mean,” she said. One of the few parties who are less than delirious is Authors Guild, which was among the original key movers in forcing the settlement. “We’d hoped for a shorter extension of time, since we’re eager to get on to the next phase of the process,” the Guild's Paul Aiken told Publishers Weekly.

We recently wrote about how the impending deadline was making agents and publishers crazy. "Some more time for everybody to sort out their rights would be welcome," we urged. Happy to know the stay of execution will be implemented. One way to profitably occupy the extra time you've been granted is to study the detailed guideline to the Settlement written by Joy Butler, an entertainment, intellectual property and business law attorney in Washington.

RC

Reuters Reports Sightings of Doomsday Virus

While World Health Organization experts alert the world to a potential swine flu epidemic, a viral threat of another kind, a software worm, "is slowly being activated, weeks after being dismissed as a false alarm," say computer security experts. Jim Finkle, reporting for Reuters, writes that the malevolent Conficker program " is quietly turning thousands of personal computers into servers of e-mail spam and installing spyware."

We first wrote about this late last March, when alerts went out over the Internet that an attack would be unleashed on April Fool's Day. Though it failed (to our knowledge) to materialize, authorities were by no means satisfied that the threat was a prank or the software was a dud. The ultimate game plan of Conficker's programmers - criminal, political, vandalism, hoax - is unknown, but we do know that it is designed to surreptitiously install a botnet virus on a PC (it hasn't yet developed a taste for Macs) that enslaves the computer, directing it to send out email spam. The computer's owner has no clue that this is going on under his nose.

"This is probably one of the most sophisticated botnets on the planet," Reuter's Finkle quotes Trend Micro's Paul Ferguson. "The guys behind this are very professional. They absolutely know what they are doing."

Stay alert: the worm's creators are by no means finished with us.

RC

Lexcycle's Stanza Application Now Belongs To Amazon

Lexcycle announced yesterday that they've been acquired by Amazon, which either comes as good news to you if you like industry consolidation, or bad if it worries you what Amazon might be planning (eg. the curious case of Mobipocket). However, Marc from Lexcycle was quick to dispel some of the fear by way of his blog:

"We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers."

Lexcycle Inc. has been of the little Davids of the ebook world. They are a little group that set out to build an ebook reading application for the iPhone and they quickly fostered a great following. Their free application, Stanza, has been one of the break-out hits among ebook enthusiasts, allowing people to use their iPhone to gain access to unfettered free e-books on the net, while supporting major formats like .pdb and mobipocket (non-DRM only). They were also able to wrangle Fictionwise.com & eReader DRM support, including shopping for ebooks (so you can buy E-Reads titles) through Stanza via its online catalogs (with a special Stanza account). And most importantly, they've been rallying support for ePub. Stanza has one of the best implementations of support for the darling new standard.

But rather than attempting to defeat one of the roaming giants of the digital frontier, Amazon's Kindle, it seems that they've allowed themselves to be gobbled up. Amazon surely noticed that Stanza was more popular than their Kindle application for the iPhone. So, what will happen? Could it mean Kindle support (finally) on Stanza? Or is it a way of competing against (and potentially blocking) Barnes & Noble, who now own Fictionwise?

In the minds of many Stanza fans, Stanza should be an open ebook reader and open sales platform, where all sorts of vendors can feed various formats, DRM'd or otherwise, and allow everyone to compete fairly. This is contrary to the strict boundaries that Amazon uses to protect its sales. But I think the agenda at Lexcycle has always been to give people a great tool to read, and that's why working with the very powerful (and wealthy) Amazon is still a means to that end. I think that's how Stanza was envisioned at its onset, so I'm not necessarily worried yet. Both companies have been responsible for the growing acceptance of ebooks in the last year. These are all people who genuinely care about the ebook experience. They could be a good fit.

- Michael Gaudet

Are You Too Young for Kindle?

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

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

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

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

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

Me: Do you own a Kindle personally?

Him: No.

Me: Because?

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

Me: Do you read books on another electronic device?

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

Me: But you spend money on music.

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

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

Him. [Shrugs] I guess so.

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

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

RC

Shared Worlds

Some time ago, the Community for Creative Non-Violence, an advocacy group for the homeless, commissioned a Baltimore sculptor, James Earl Reid, to create a sculpture. In due time, his skilled hands produced a piece called Third World America, celebrating the dignity and suffering of homeless people. It was a work that both the advocacy group and the sculptor could be proud of, and they were. But then, as both began making plans to take it on tour, a question arose that nobody had bothered to explore in any depth: Who owns Third World America? The Community for Creative Non-Violence claimed the sculpture was a "work made for hire." Not only had the group hired the sculptor, but had also imparted to him its vision of what the piece should look like, and had even given him much input on details. Be that as it may, claimed Reid, he was the sole creator of the work and he should retain the copyright.

The dispute triggered a legal battle culminating in a Supreme Court decision that has important implications for writers. For, if you substitute "publisher" or "packager" for the group that hired Reid, "writer" for "sculptor," and "book" for "sculpture," you have a perfectly analogous relationship to one quite commonly found on the publishing scene. Under the "work-for-hire" provision of the Copyright Act of 1976, publishers, packagers, magazines, newspapers, and other persons or businesses may copyright in their own names works that they conceive and "farm out" to freelance writers. Like the Committee for Creative Non-Violence, these parties originate the writing projects, furnish writers with detailed specifications, and offer writers abundant editorial guidance. Are they not, then, entitled to claim ownership of copyright to those works? Are they not entitled to exploit those works in whatever way they wish, with no further obligation to the writers?

Click here to continue.

Richard Curtis

Perseus Demo at BEA To Push "Instant" Book to the Max

After Perseus Books creates and publishes a book from scratch at May's Book Expo America using the Espresso print on demand machine, you may be convinced that the only thing instanter than books is Nescafé.

The publishing company will take a pre-written 10,000 word book and "edit, design, produce, sell, publicize/promote and publish live before fairgoers' eyes," according to Publishers Lunch and a Perseus release.

Though the project has some of the daredevil quality of a circus stunt (and there is no safety net if something goes wrong), the goal is to demonstrate that a combination of spanking-new digital tech and age-old editorial savvy can produce a work that exemplifies the future of publishing.

Where will the text for this book come from? It will, in Publishers Lunch parlance, be "crowdsourced". Perseus is conducting a competition to "write the first sentence for a yet-to-be-written sequel to any book ever published," with submissions via a website set up for that purpose. Copies will be run off on the Espresso at a launch party at Perseus's booth on the Saturday afternoon of the BEA clusterfuss.

"By the end of the day Friday." Lunch reports, "they'll have a bound manuscript for reviewers and an e-galley as well." Then...

"First thing Saturday they will design a web site and Facebook page, write a readers group guide, commence publicity and promotion, record the audio version, offer foreign rights, design and select a jacket, solicit accounts live and more. Booth visitors can watch the process unfold on wall-mounted screens and weigh in at specific stages, including an editorial meeting, and a jacket design meeting."

E-Reads recently blogged about the Espresso, which one observer described as "an ATM for books", and our production manager actually attended a demonstration.

"What we saw was a prototype the size of a squat refrigerator, with metal hydraulics pushing the paper around, whooshing and whirring as it shaved off the edges and glued the spine. Final shipping iterations of the Espresso 2 will use electric motors and reduce the noise. For now, the prototype's pistons were all perfectly visible behind clear acrylic panels on the machine's sides to demonstrate the mechanics. An inkjet printer on the top printed a color cover, a fast copier on the back printed out the interior pages, both of which get taken up inside and formed into a paperback while you watch. Then after a few minutes, out pops a little book from the dispenser, hot off the press (and a teensy-bit sticky until it dries)."

We'll be in the throng at the Perseus booth, cheering Espresso - and the future of book publishing - on.

RC

A Publisher Takes His Colleagues to the Woodshed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

Are Pirate-site Downloaders Better Than Muggers, Pickpockets and Shoplifters? This Victim Doesn't Think So

"Before you click that download link at a torrent site or megaupload or sendspace ask yourself one question. If I was in a bookstore, would I just drop this book in my purse and walk out of the store? Because that is exactly what you are doing when you download a book without buying it." So says Delilah K. Stephans in a blog entitled "Think before you download".

It's easy to talk theoretically about crime as long as nobody puts a face on the victim. Stephans puts a face on a victim of e-piracy and it's her own.

"My book sells for $2.99 of that I make just over a dollar on every sale. So if say 50 people download the book those 50 people have reached into my wallet and removed a $50. What if it was a hundred? A thousand? Now, ask yourself would I reach in a stranger’s pocket and take a fifty? Of course you wouldn’t. Recently a fellow author found his book on a pirate site – there were 150 downloads. That’s 150 books or in his case $300.00 that was stolen from him."

The author asks, "Do I think you are evil if you pirate a book? Of course not." But why not, Ms. Stephans? Last time we looked, stealing was a breach of the eighth commandment. Some may shrug off e-piracy as a misdemeanor, but there is no footnote for "Thou Shalt Not Steal" distinguishing between e-books and bank vaults.

So, we support Ms. Stephans's admonition: "Before you click that download button – consider the money you are pulling out of the author’s wallet."

RC

Wall Street Discovers E-Books

Now that press baron Rupert Murdoch is officially courting digital technology, we can expect to see a lot more attention paid to e-books in Murdoch-owned media. A good example is Steven Johnson's How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write, published in the Wall Street Journal. Though the piece has a slightly Johnny-come-lately feeling to it, expressing gee-whizzes that tech and media bloggers have been gee-whizzing for decades. Johnson makes some very significant points and even a few memorable bon mots. Alluding to Kindle's portability, he says, "The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go." And this:

Think of [the reading experience] as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

One truly cogent passage was not so much conjecture about the future as commentary on something that is happening today - the kindlification of "that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention."

Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

This echoes observations we made in an essay entitled Watching Books : "Thanks to television, the Internet, video games and computers, we have come to expect color, interactivity, instant gratification and a complete immersion of the senses from our screens...The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand."

Johnson goes on to speculate not just about how books will be read but how they will be written. For all those Johnny-come-latelies who haven't been plugged into the revolutionary paradigm of digital publishing for the last decade, the Wall Street Journal's piece is well worth your time.

RC

President George W. Bush's Greatest Achievements

Former President George W. Bush is writing his memoir. But why wait when you can order President George W. Bush's Greatest Achievements today! You'll see all of his greatest military, economic, environmental, social welfare, health care, homeland security and civil liberties accomplishments.

BUT - before you send for your copy, we have to warn you that it's pretty skimpy. In fact, the pages are blank! THIS IS A GAG BOOK.

But it's the perfect gift for anyone who remembers the Bush administration's accomplishments with something less than affection. However, if you're a true supporter of the former President, feel free to write into the pages your own assessment of his regime's achievements.

The author, "Seymour Bollocks", is a staunch patriot and Republican administration crony.

Bloggers Breathe Life into Dead Trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

YouTube Goes Hollywood

Quick quiz for bloggers. You'd be happy with 100 million visitors and 5 billion hits a month on your website, right?

Before you respond, here's part 2: would you be happy with all that traffic if you were losing $40 million a month to service it?

If you're Google, the answer is emphatically yes. The website in question is YouTube.

How could that be? Well, about three months ago we noted that despite a veritable Niagara Falls of visits to its site, monetizing YouTube's content and making Google's $1.65 billion investment back "has not proven to be a slam-dunk thanks to the complexities and potential liabilities of copyright." Even all that advertising revenue generated by billions of clicks did not add up to break-even let alone a profit.

To turn things around, Google realized it was time to stop giving content away. Furthermore, it had to recognize that it is an entertainment medium that has every right to monetize that content. In short, Google had to go Hollywood.

Google has now gone Hollywood.

Brian Stelter and Miguel Helft of the New York Times report that the company has reached agreement with such glittering media outfits as Sony and MGM to bring law, order, and revenue to what is now a slapdash enterprise. The vehicle for this turnaround is professionally made videos generating advertising revenue. They cite Hulu, a site that carries reruns of TV shows like "The Office", as the competitor to beat. But they are also aggressively developing a music videos program. "Last week the site announced a joint venture with Universal Music Group to create Vevo, a separate destination for music videos," the reporters tell us.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt assures us that the site would continue to carry non-professional videos." They may not be the financial lifeblood of the company, but they are its driving spirit. We certainly hope that will be the case. As we wrote when the scheme was first announced, "The very zeitgeist of the 21st century represented by the ingenuity, the spontaneous combustiveness, the wacky hilarity, the instant, viral, visceral responsiveness of a public that knew what it loved and voted for it with billions of mouseclicks, may now be giving way to the slick creations of Hollywood television and film companies backed by studio and network money, branded sponsors, and calculating marketers."

How do we feel about the westcoastification of YouTube? Here's one opinion - mine:

Well, Hollywood, there are millions of us who don't want YouTube to mature. We like it just the way it is -- embarrassingly sophomoric, amateurish, LOL hilarious, pathetic, dopey, dirty, funky, and utterly counterculture. It belongs to We the People. Can't you go co-opt some other industry? We can think of a lot of them that could use your genius, your money and your values.

Richard Curtis

London Book Fair Report #2: There'll Always Be an E-ngland

"Don't Fight the Things You Can't Change or Control." That was one of the "koans" gleaned from Sunday's digital publishing in America seminar by Publishers Lunch founder Michael Cader (in his role of intrepid correspondent attending the London Book Fair). And there is no better way to characterize the Kübler-Rossian way that the British have handled publishing industry changes blowing from America.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross formulated the five states of death and dying, and whether it be hard-soft deals or e-books, the Brits have greeted American innovations with Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Reading reports from London, I'm not sure how much acceptance is to be found toward the juggernaut of digital publishing that rolls inexorably toward the UK. The English want to keep their industry neat and tidy, but another Cader koan applies: "Paradigmatic Transitions Are Not Orderly."

RC

London Book Fair Report #1: When It Comes to E-Books, England Still a Primitive Society

One of the programs presented at the London Book Fair was a panel on e-books attended by the heads of such illustrious British publishers as Random House Group, Hachette Livre UK, HarperCollins, and Penguin Group. The host, BBC News Media Correspondent Torin Douglas, asked what he called "The $64,000 question": Where’s the money in ebooks?

When it comes to digital technology the sun always seems to rise last on the British Empire. The same question was raised in the US over a decade ago and settled five years later as e-book sales began a rocket-boosted double-digit assent that has not remotely begun to level off. Indeed, January 2009 e-book sales jumped an astounding 173.6% over the same month of 2008 - while England slept.

The very title of Douglas's panel tells us what time zone the Brits occupy. "The $64,000 Question" was a television quiz show introduced over fifty years ago. Though the size of the jackpot was unprecedented in that postwar age, it is dwarfed by those paid today. Hello? We're up to "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" We're also up to more than $50 million in e-book sales annually. So, the real $64,000 question for our friends across the Pond is, What part of Money in E-Books don't you understand?

RC

What's in a (Big) Name?

Behold the two books I place before you. Both are thrillers by authors whose names are unfamiliar to you. But attached to the one on your left is an endorsement by one of today's bestselling thriller writers. The other has no such recommendation. Which will you be inclined to purchase and read?

The obvious answer to that question formed the eye of a tempest that swept through the publishing industry some years ago, leaving in its path a shattered deal, damaged credibility, and a dazed author and his agent wandering through the rubble seeking something to salvage. The only good to come out of this event is the possibility that the rest of us may learn something from it.

How much is an endorsement from a famous author worth? Read here.

RC

"ATM for Books": Lightning Announces Partnership with Espresso Outfit

Last week, our distributing partner Lightning Source announced their pilot program with the Espresso 2 Book Machine (see the press release here). E-Reads is proud to be one of the first publishers in the program, which will see our titles available to the "ATM for books," alongside offerings from Wiley, Hachette, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, and the University of California, among others.

We've always hoped that in the future we'd see mini-POD machines out in physical bookstores, making hard-to-find titles quickly accessible to customers who'd otherwise make special orders.

"Since the introduction of print on demand over a decade ago, I've dreamed of a day when the technology would be refined and reduced to in-store scale," says E-Reads President Richard Curtis. "At last it's here and I'm overjoyed at this significant moment in the evolution of the book industry. Now you can visit a bookstore, order a book online, and pick your copy up after a leisurely cup of coffee."

Thanks to Lightning Source and On Demand Books, the Espresso 2 is the first time E-Reads has been able to make in-store book printing possible for our customers. The advance press materials will tell you that the Espresso 2 is a very practical and small machine that can print and bind paperback books in under 10 minutes. With a really fast optional Xerox copier and a short book, it gets the job done in about 5 minutes.

Last month, we took a quick trip to SoHo to see the offices of On Demand Books, where their prototype Espresso 2 print-on-demand machine was being demonstrated for publishers and retailers.

What we saw was a prototype the size of a squat refrigerator, with metal hydraulics pushing the paper around, whooshing and whirring as it shaved off the edges and glued the spine. Final shipping iterations of the Espresso 2 will use electric motors and reduce the noise. For now, the prototype's pistons were all perfectly visible behind clear acrylic panels on the machine's sides to demonstrate the mechanics. An inkjet printer on the top printed a color cover, a fast copier on the back printed out the interior pages, both of which get taken up inside and formed into a paperback while you watch. Then after a few minutes, out pops a little book from the dispenser, hot off the press (and a teensy-bit sticky until it dries).

Whitney Dorin, On Demand Book's director of Business Development, made two copies for us on the spot, expertly checking on the process and helping the paper along (pictured above). The results were perfectly acceptable paperbacks, but everyone acknowledged that even though the covers look great ("They're the most expensive part of the printing process," she said), they don't quite feel like your typical mass-produced covers because the heavy cover stock isn't gloss or matte coated. In a best case scenario, many large scale print-on-demand operations give special attention to the covers and may even print them in advance, but the Espresso 2 is only a fraction of the size of those machines, so for now it looks like simple covers are a necessary trade-off.

Most of the printing components of the Espresso 2 seem modular, so that upgrading a machine to faster capabilities can be done relatively easily. Dane Neller, the CEO of On Demand Books, showed us how the Kyocera copier on the back could be swapped out for a Xerox 4112 copier capable of 110 pages per minute, accommodating books up to 830 pages long. Dane was very pleased to say that they had done all the work necessary to bring the printing costs down to a level where it was possible to see the machine pay for itself in about 9 months with daily printing.

Print-On-Demand technology really has come a long way in the past decade thanks to the hard work of Lightning Source and On Demand Books. It's hard not to get grandiose visions of every school and bookstore having an Espresso printer, finally turning the page on hundreds of years of distribution problems for publishers. That revolution might be closer than you think.

- Michael Gaudet

Just Slip My Newspaper Under My Door

After its latest round of cost-saving reductions, The New York Times may have to change its name to The New York Times Newsletter, and its motto to "All the Skinny That's Fit to Print". Bill Keller, the daily's executive editor, announced the elimination of a number of weekly sections that are much beloved by readers but a luxurious liability for a newspaper fighting for its life. A number of sections have already been merged, such as business and sports (on most days, at least).

The Times's Richard Pérez-Peña reports that "The affected sections include Escapes, published on Fridays, and Sunday sections that only readers in the New York metropolitan area receive: City and regional sections named for New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester and Connecticut." They will be absorbed into a new Sunday section that should slim the paper down. Some say it will be slim enough to slip under your front door. Even now it sometime has the heft of a supermarket circular inserted into a grown-up newspaper from an earlier, happier era.

Furthermore, the Sunday magazine section is ditching its regular back-of-the-book fashion layout, so say goodbye to those fey, leggy mannequins on location in Brazilian favelas clad in nothing but boa constrictors, and male models in garish plaid tuxedos, short-shorts and basketball sneakers biking to their Wall Street management jobs.

But the unkindest cut of all is the elimination of "Escapes" as an autonomous travel section. For years its coverage of faraway places illustrated with photos of exquisite landscapes and local chefs proudly displaying platters of irresistible gourmet specialties have evoked unbearable pangs of wanderlust in the hearts of countless housebound New Yorkers. Mr.Keller, can't you save "Escapes" and drop "Automobiles"? Screw automobiles, I want to fantasize about living in a rain forest tree house in Costa Rica.

And don't we feel it for those globetrotting freelance writers whose ranks are to be reduced by 10-15% and who as a result will have to curtail their travel plans? You can expect lots of stories about living in tree houses in, well, Patterson, New Jersey.

RC

Robot With A Face to Melt the Hardest Heart

I read somewhere that cuteness is a biological trait shared by the young of most mammals. Its evolutionary function is to compel mothers to bond with their babies. Button noses, enormous eyes, round cheeks, and Cupie doll mouths are endowments guaranteed to elicit an "Awww" response from adult animals of almost every species and a preternatural need to proffer protection. Love of cute is hardwired into most mammalian gene pools. Grown-ups of every animal species are big suckers,whether it be for baby seals, ducklings, infant chimps or itsy-bitsy human babies. But...robots?

Whether tenderness extends to baby robots is a leap of credence that requires some pretty compelling evidence. Thanks to a delightful experiment conducted by a student named Kacie Kinzer, we have the evidence. As described on the O'Reilly Media website, Kinzer, a student enrolled in NYU's Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program, created a darling-faced little robot called a Tweenbot. It wore a label stating its destination but was programmed to move in a straight line. She turned it loose in New York City's Washington Square Park and observed what strangers would do when, predictably, it ran into fences, benches, passersby and other obstacles. Would they leave it to struggle? Would they set it down on the right path? Would they stuff it in their pockets or worse, a trash can? Would they stomp it with their boot heels?

We are happy to report that cuteness triumphed. As reported on O'Reilly,

"Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, 'You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.'"

Charmed by the tiny robot's smiley face, disarmed by its fragile helplessness and stirred by the primal need to protect an innocent (albeit an innocent piece of machinery), humanity came through with flying colors. And not just any humanity - New York humanity!

A map of Tweenbot's tergiversations can be seen on the O'Reilly site.

A word about the Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program, the fertile environment that gave birth to this engaging experiment. A page on the program's website describes it thus:

An oversized Greenwich Village loft houses the computer labs, rotating exhibitions, and production workshops that are ITP -- the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists uniquely dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds. A hands-on approach to experimentation, production and risk-taking make this hi-tech fun house a creative home not only to its 220 students, but also to an extended network of the technology industry's most daring and prolific practitioners.

Next time an out-of-towner utters a cynical remark about New Yorkers, tell them about Kacie Kinzer and her Tweenbot.

RC

A Dedicated Kindlephile Flirts With Rival Device

Joe Wikert, who operates and blogs about all things Kindle on a website called - natch! - Kindleville, has reservations about the device, and he's expressed them in a posting headlined Why Isn't Amazon the 800-Pound Gorilla of eReaders? A great many observers have issues with Kindle, but this Kindlekind earns triple points for candor.

For one thing, asks Wikert, how many Kindles have you seen "in the wild?" meaning on a bus or subway or airplane. "I've been on at least 30 different flights since the original Kindle arrived in November of 2007 and I think I've seen one other person using one on a plane. It's an unfair comparison, but I couldn't even tally the number of iPhones I've seen on those same flights."

He also accuses Amazon of complacency. "It seems every time I turn around someone else is announcing plans for a new reader. Why do I get the impression Amazon isn't hungry and aggressive enough to dominate this space? They seem perfectly content to take the slow and steady path, focusing more on customers with the most disposable income and not the mass market."

So deep is his disillusionment that he openly speaks of transferring his affections to a more satisfying love object.

"I admit I'm down on Amazon right now. I feel like I spent $360 on a Kindle 1 and although I use it every day I don't see growth potential or an upgrade path for it. My iPhone, on the other hand, features a slew of new apps every week, making it even more appealing today than it was yesterday...and who knows about tomorrow? How long will it be before someone creates an e-reader with that sort of sex appeal? Or does it already exist and it's called 'the iPhone'?"

With just a little more kindling Wikert's love affair with the iPhone will burst fully into flame. Does that spell Splitsville for Kindleville? And if so, what will he call his new website? Not iPhoneville.com - the domain is already taken. But it looks like plasticlogicville.com is still available. Grab it, Joe!

RC

Aarrr! Pirates Forced To Walk The Plank Thanks To Latest Swedish Court Ruling

The other shoe dropped for the Pirate Bay today (news here, and for the first act, see The Pirate Bay: Standing Up In Court For a Generation of Blackbeards). The four co-defendants were each found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement in a Swedish court. The court's documents say that the Pirate Bay co-founders helped promote theft and so they've each been sentenced to 1 year in prison and fined $3.5 million ($14m total). If the judgment stands, maybe the next files they'll be looking to share in secret will be in a cake.

Sweden had already been strengthening its reputation for being hard on piracy since they recently began requesting that local internet service providers log all the IP addresses of computers involved in file sharing starting at the beginning of this month. Consequently, Swedish internet traffic has fallen by over 30% (see this BBC article). If something similar were to be enacted in the U.S., it could be decried as further infringement on our right to privacy and it wouldn't be tolerated well at all.

Much is going to be made about this Swedish court decision and the forthcoming appeals in the short term, but it's hard to predict if the outcome is really going to deliver much of a blow to file sharing in general until the stigma of copyright transgressions is something that's educated effectively to scoffing young users.

The Pirate Bay is akin to a fleet of off-shore gambling boats floating in international waters. Even while the main defendants are caught up in Swedish courts, the operations can and probably will continue under the supervision of other affiliated groups. And it's not like the Navy can escort our copyrighted materials. So, while this news is fresh validation for the media rights holders, it's still not the end of the battle.

- Michael Gaudet

AbitibiBowater Pronounced "Broke"

One of the world's largest producers of newsprint, the papers on which newspapers are printed, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday. Suffering from nearly $9 billion in debt, it sought to compensate by raising newsprint prices at a time when newspapers, with more than enough troubles of their own, were desperately cutting costs.

"A rapid decline in advertising has prompted some newspaper closings and industrywide cutbacks in the size, and in some cases the frequency, of newspapers," reported Ian Austen in the New York Times. "The Pulp and Paper Products Council, which is also based in Montreal, reported that in February alone newsprint demand in North America fell by 33 percent compared with the same month a year earlier."

It's easy to make fun of company name, a tonguetwisting composite of two firms that merged in 2007, but the results of bankruptcy are far from funny, impacting as they do on a newspaper industry that is already running on fumes. "If they go under," we wrote last month, "so does a big piece of the paper industry." A spokesperson for the firm said that for now, its vast pulp and paper mills would continue producing.

RC

Harlan Ellison's The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

"It crouches near the center of creation. There is no night where it waits. Only the riddle of which terrible dream will set it loose. It beheaded mercy to take possession of that place. It feasts on darkness from the minds of men. No one has ever seen its eyeless face. When it sleeps we know a few moments of peace. But when it breathes again we go down in fire and mate with jackals. It knows our fear. It has our number. It waited for our coming and it will abide long after we have become congealed smoke. It has never heard music, and shows its fangs when we panic. It is the beast of our savage past, hungering today, and waiting patiently for the mortal meal of all our golden tomorrows. It lies waiting."

This is the "Beast" of the title story of Harlan Ellison's mind-bending collection of stories. The Beast is a hideous thing that has drawn the madness out of a race of alien beings and infected humanity with it.

Though each story in The Beast that Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World burnishes Ellison's reputation in yet another coruscating way way, the gem is "A Boy and His Dog". Ellison continued the story in the graphic novel Vic and Blood . It was the basis of a movie adaptation in 1974, the post-apocalyptic science fiction film of the same name, directed by L. Q. Jones working in collaboration with Ellison.

For a special treat, read Neil Gaiman's introduction.

RC

Attorney Joy Butler Explains The Google Settlement

One of the people we've heard from today regarding Google is Joy Butler, an Entertainment, Intellectual Property and Business Law attorney in Washington, and she's prepared terrific insights into the Google Settlement that will be of interest to anyone affected by the confusing process of opting in or out. The summary she's prepared is well worth your time to read.

From Joy:

Here’s a resource on the Google Settlement that might be helpful to your readers:

ANNOTATED SUMMARY. A 10-page annotated summary of the proposed Google Book Settlement Agreement. The annotations are references to the relevant provisions in the Settlement Agreement. You can use the summary as an overview or use it as a guide for your own reading of the 300+ page actual Settlement Agreement. The annotated summary is available at http://www.joybutler.com/googlesummary.pdf

TELESEMINAR REPLAY. The annotated summary tracks my complimentary teleseminar, “What the Google Book Settlement Means for Authors and Publishers”. A recording of the teleseminar will be available for replay by phone until at least May 31, 2009. You can access the complimentary telephone replay by calling (641) 715-3900. When prompted for the extension, enter 47422 followed by the pound sign (#). You can find more details about the annotated summary and the teleseminar at http://tinyurl.com/dk6w68

Google Settlement Making Agents, Publishers Crazy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

Correction

Haste makes waste, and I regret that, in my haste to run a post about Hachette Filipacchi Media's reduction of wages and increase in hours, I erred in stating that this is Hachette's book division, which includes Little, Brown and Grand Central. Tim Coronel left a comment correcting me, which I reproduce in full below. I apologize to my readers and to Hachette Book Group USA and promise to count to ninety-one before hitting Publish Post in the future.

For the record, Hachette Filipacchi Media publishes such magazines as Car and Driver, Elle, Woman's Day, American Photo, Boating, and Flying. The company does have a book line, but it is devoted more to lifestyle topics like cooking and entertaining, collectibles and home decorating, rather than trade fiction and nonfiction a la Little, Brown and Grand Central. The CEO of Hachette Filipacchi is Alain Lemarchand. The Chairman and CEO of Hachette Book Group USA is David Young.

RC

I'd double-check this -- I've been told by the MD of Hachette Australia that this doesn't apply to the book publishing divisions of Hachette and that 'The memo is attributed to the President and CEO of Hachette Filipacchi, who has no jurisdiction over Grand Central, or Little,Brown. Filipacci is a completely separate division within Hachette, solely devoted to magazine publishing, and I think your blogger is just plain wrong in assuming the inclusion of the Hachette book business, which is widely known to be thriving in the US, not least because of Stephenie Meyer.'

Shatzkin and Cader Take a Hack at the Returns Problem

In his blog The Shatzkin Files our favorite publishing guru has turned his attention to returnability, the quicksand that has been sucking the publishing industry inexorably into the Slough of Despond. It's a stubbornly nasty issue that has defeated some of the best business minds that have addressed it, but because the survival of our livelihoods depends on solving it, any new light shed on it is welcome. A recent posting of his on returns and the related topic of remaindering attracted the attention of Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Lunch, the trade book industry's online newsletter. Like the rest of us, Cader, who once said that the publishing industry "is in a mathematical death spiral," is vitally interested in seeing the business pull up before it's too late.

If you enjoy eavesdropping on shop talk, put your ear against the wall and listen to this fascinating dialogue between two brilliant professionals. It may not solve returns but you'll come away with an appreciation of how nuanced the issues are. Or maybe you'll just conclude that if Shatzkin and Cader can't solve them, maybe the death spiral is not such a bad idea after all.

RC

Hachette Falls Indiscriminately on Employees' Necks

Hamilton Nolan of Gawker posted a late-breaking news item that Hachette is cutting salaries of all employees. In the US, that includes Little, Brown and Grand Central***. In addition to pay cuts ranging from 3% to 6%, the company is asking employees to punch an extra half hour into the time-clock.

If you are the kind of person who sees the glass as 94%-97% full, you can be thankful that no one was let go. "We hope that taking this measure across the company will save headcount in the long run," says the memo circulated by President and CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media, Alain Lemarchand. We genuinely commend Mr. Lemarchand for his efforts to spare employees from outright dismissal.

Here's the memo in full. We're not sure what the difference is between exempt and non-exempt employees, but as the memo refers to overtime wages it may have to do with pay scales for executives vis a vis nonexecutives.

*** Click here for correction

RC

Alain Lemarchand memo:

Dear colleagues,

Today's business environment requires decisive and quick action for the welfare of the company. This includes a number of difficult decisions on my part, some of which impact you personally. In this case, I deliberated long and carefully before coming to the conclusion that one of the steps that needs to be taken immediately is a cut in base salaries. Effective April 27, 2009, the salaries of all exempt employees will be reduced by 6% and the salaries of non- exempt employees by 3%. In addition, we are changing the regular work day from 7 ½ hours to 8 hours. For non-exempt employees, overtime will continue to be calculated on a weekly basis and will be paid for all hours worked over 40 hours.

I understand that this economy has already had an impact on each of you and that this represents another loss. I am sorry for that. We hope that taking this measure across the company will save headcount in the long run. I know you join me in wanting this company to remain competitive in this challenging marketplace. I want to assure you that once the economic picture improves, we will reevaluate this decision.

I thank you for your continued dedication to your work. Your professionalism and contributions are essential to the ultimate performance and success of HFM U.S.

Alain Lemarchand

A Cockeyed Pessimist Sees Chain Stores in Trouble and Likes What He Sees

Martin Shepard, co-publisher of The Permanent Press, a distinguished small house, calls himself and his blog The Cockeyed Pessimist, and if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, a recent posting will help resolve your confusion. The title is "Bad News/Good News". The bad news is is what you might expect in this lousy economic climate. But it's the good that will surprise you. "I take it as good news." Shepard writes, "that the chain bookstores are in serious trouble."

That attention grabber demands some amplification, and here it is:

Decades back, neighborhood bookstores accounted for more than three quarters of book sales while employing people who enjoyed reading and could recommend titles to customers. The chains totally reversed these percentages by their own rapacious practices: buying in larger quantities while demanding bigger discount from publishers, charging publishers for display space, and offering steeper discounts to customers. Using their profits to open ever more stores, they drove countless independents out of business. In effect, like Citibank, Chase, and others in the banking system, the Daltons, Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes & Nobles (who even started competing with publishers by publishing their own titles that they would sell exclusively in their stores) came to dominate retail sales, while selling publishers on the idea that they were too big to ignore. But without dedicated staff who read and hand-sold, it did little to help bring new writers to the attention of readers. “Too big to fail” is the mantra of collapsing banks in seeking bailouts. But bailouts are unknown in the publishing industry. And, in truth, when entities become too big, as the chains have become, they become de facto monopolies. So let us rejoice in the troubles at the chains and welcome back the neighborhood book store.

Shepard is looking at Big Publishing through the other end of the telescope, the one held by the little guys, the small presses and the independent book shops. I invite you to borrow the telescope from him and look through it yourself. After a while you may find yourself nodding to views such as this one:

Years ago I came to realize that the corporate publishing practice of tossing out several hundred titles a year and hoping that some of them will stick to the wall was not a sound business model. Economically speaking, it's far more effective to put out a dozen or so books annually while paying attention to promoting each and every one, for it requires less staff and office overhead, allows the selections to be more focused and refined, and offers greater protection against the vicissitudes of the larger economy and the marketplace. Given the current climate, I would say that the concept of "Small is Beautiful" provides a better template for the future of book publishing than the one currently in place.

Pessimist or optimistic, anyone who sees as clearly as Shepard can't possibly be cockeyed.

RC

Belly-Up

In the modern history of publishing we have witnessed many seismic events. Anybody who works in the business long enough knows that sooner or later Murphy's law will clutch us by the throat, and whatever terrible things can happen will, perforce, happen:booming markets dry up overnight, seemingly omnipotent chief executive officers of great publishing houses are fired ignominiously, and corporate acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures are undertaken as casually as cards tossed in a low-stakes poker game.

The turmoil caused by these churnings cannot be described. Nor can the harm done to authors be mitigated by the efforts of even the most powerful agents in the business. You just stand there, mouth agape, and watch the majestic unfolding of events. Then you come in when the dust has settled and do what you can to pick up the pieces.

One such cataclysm was the bankruptcy of a paperback publisher. What happens when a publisher goes belly-up? And how well are authors protected? Click here to read about it. But cover your eyes. It's not a pretty sight.

Richard Curtis

Harlan Ellison's Strange Wine

Many connoisseurs of Harlan Ellison considered Strange Wine to be his finest collection. Though its contents, individually speaking, are not as high profile as some of his other collections, taken as a whole it is an electrifying book. Here's an excerpt from an Amazon reviewer with the handle "Penguin Egg":

It is good news that this book is soon to be republished. It's about time. I've been a fan of Ellison for a quarter of a century and this, by far, is my favourite book of his. If you have never come across Ellison before, you're in for a treat. A master story-teller, he breaks new ground with practically every story, whether it is in the style of the telling - such as "From A to Z, The Chocolate Alphabet"-, or in the subject matter - "Croatoan." Whatever the style or the subject matter, the voice of Ellison is unmistakable, -uncompromising, vivid, funny, and perceptive- so that even if an Ellison story did not have his name above it, you would quickly guess who it was. The stories range from the humorous "Mom" to the serious "In Fear of K." Whatever he writes, he is thoroughly entertaining. What makes this collection of stories different from his others is that this collection has an introduction for every story. With any other writer, this would be an intrusion; but with Ellison, it works, because the man is funny, wise, and entertaining. They are basically a miscellany of anything that Ellison wants to talk about: How he came to write this or that story; where he wrote it; the ideas behind it- and sometimes the connection to the story is tenuous...

And for a delicious appetizer, you won't want to miss Ellison's introduction.

RC

Gay Books Stripped by Amazon?

Publisher Weekly reports "A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion" over a cascade of Twitter messages alleging that Amazon had removed adult titles from sales rankings. A spokesperson for Amazon said that it was a glitch, that there is no policy involved, and it was restoring the rankings.

Out of curiosity, I visited Amazon and checked out Boy Culture, a highly touted gay novel by Matthew Rettenmund. As of 9:25 AM it had no amazon ranking.

It was published by St. Martin's Press. Last time we looked, St. Martin's Press was not reputed to be a notorious purveyor of pornography.

RC

Is Your Book Waiting for You at the Google Orphan Asylum?

Though it's generally agreed that Google's settlement with the Association of Publishers and Authors Guild was fundamentally sound, the New York Times's Miguel Helft points out an aspect that has many critics deeply troubled.

For the purpose of explaining it simply, we can divide books into three fundamental categories: 1) Those whose copyright is currently in effect and the copyright owners have been located; 2) Those whose copyright protection has expired and have entered the public domain where anyone may publish them without obligation to the copyright owner; and 3) Those whose copyright is currently in effect but the copyright owners have not been located or have not asserted their ownership.

If you're in the first category you are afforded a large measure of control and protection including the right to opt out of the Google settlement. By opting out, you retain the right to file your own lawsuit or join a separate lawsuit against Google. If you opt out, you will not be entitled to receive any payments under the Settlement, or take advantage of other Settlement benefits. You must submit your opt-out instruction online or postmarked on or before May 5, 2009.

If you're in the second and your book has fallen into the public domain there's not much you can do about it But thanks to the changes in copyright laws starting in the mid-1970s, the ranks of authors who have outlived their copyrights are rapidly diminishing as we shift to protection for seventy years after the death of the author.

That leaves the third category and that's the one that observers are worried about. Describing them as orphans, Helft explains that as a result of its scanning initiative, Google has become in effect the legal guardian of these millions of abandoned books, which gives Google "virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them." As a result, "Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June."

Though every book was once some author's love-child, many titles in this category may be of little literary, commercial or academic merit. Yet, who's to say? One scholar's trash may be another's treasure, and the scholarly community is loath to give Google the right to make that judgment. This provision of the settlement may therefore be modified when the 134 page document comes before a court for approval in June. Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system, makes no bones about it: “Google will be a monopoly,” he declares.

Needless to say, Google takes a very different view. “This agreement expands access to many of these hard-to-find books in a way that is great for Google, great for authors, great for publishers and great for readers,” Helft quotes Alexander Macgillivray, the lawyer who represented Google in the lawsuit.

Authors in the third category do have a remedy. Google is creating a Book Rights Register, which will be co-administered by authors and publishers, that will enable rights holders or their heirs to claim their orphaned books and collect any money that Google's exploitation has earned for them - less Google's 37% commission.

So, calling all authors or their heirs: visit http://books.google.com/ and enter your name in the Search box. If any of your books are there, review the copyright status of your books. If they are still legally protected by copyright you may elect to opt out out of Google's offer to make them available in their program. If you keep them in the program you may earn a little money from Google's exploitation of your publication rights. But you also you run the risk of having your book converted into formats that are competitive with those in existence or that might come into existence; and after Google takes its cut you will end up with a fraction of the value you might otherwise earn.

RC

Wormers Planning New Assault

If we keep crying Worm! will people stop listening to us?

Who could blame them? We sounded the alarm the last week in March but nothing happened. So we're safe in assuming that nothing will happen, right?

Tell it to the people who stopped listening to that other alarmist. You know, the one who cried wolf.

It seems the programmers who created the Conficker worm have updated their weapon of doom and made it harder than ever to stop. We have this on the authority of John Markoff, who covers the Silicon Valley beat for the New York Times.

"Several of the groups monitoring the program," Markoff reports, "said the most recent version, which began to appear Tuesday [April 7 2009], appeared to be targeted at improving a peer-to-peer communications system between computers that are infected and hardening the system by making infected machines more resistant to anti-virus software."

RC

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? YouTube, YouTube, YouTube

On Wednesday evening, April 15 Michael Tilson Thomas will conduct a program of Mozart, Brahms, Prokofiev, Debussy, Tchaikovsky at Carnegie Hall. What's so special about that?

Well, for one thing, until two days before the performance the 90 or so orchestra members, representing more than 30 nations, will never have met each other or played together. Okay, admittedly that's pretty unusual, but why are the orchestra's sponsors claiming that this event will make music history?

The reason is that all the musicians were selected from video auditions submitted to YouTube. In fact it's called the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, and we thank James R. Oestreich and Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times for bringing it to our attention, though it's a little embarrassing to note that the event has been unfolding for months under our radar range. Anyway, the Times article led us to the website devoted to the YT Symphony, where a sidebar explains:

We called for professionals and amateur musicians of all ages, locations and instruments to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra by submitting a video performance of a new piece written for the occasion by the renowned Chinese composer Tan Dun.

Finalists were selected late in March by a panel culled from the world's most renowned orchestras. But viewers were also invited to vote for their favorite instrumentalists. If you'd like to see some of the audition videos click here. And if you want to see the performance itself we don't know if it too will be aired on YouTube, but the Tan Dun submissions "will be compiled into a mashup video which will be premiered" on YouTube on April 15th.

But enough YouTube: do yourself a favor, visit Carnegie's box office and attend the YBSO in person.

RC

Any Bonds Today?

The New York Times carried a front page story reporting that the Obama administration is contemplating floating bonds, to be purchased by ordinary Americans, to acquire toxic or undervalued assets. I think it's a wonderful idea. I proposed it months ago in an op-ed piece submitted to the Times entitled Any Bonds Today? You can read it in its entirety, but here's the gist:

Any bonds today?
Bonds of freedom,
That’s what I’m selling.
Any bonds today?

The ditty was written by Irving Berlin early in World War II to promote the National Defense Savings Program and sell Series E “War Bonds” to the American public. It was introduced in a short Looney Tunes cartoon by Bugs Bunny accompanied by Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd. Before long the Andrew Sisters picked it up.

The song was just one initiative in a huge government effort to raise money for the war. Movie stars like Rita Hayworth and Bette Davis performed in bond rallies; indeed, every segment of American society got into the act. For instance, Norman Rockwell spearheaded an art campaign with a series of illustrations. Even school children did their bit, selling war savings stamps to those who could not afford bonds. Overall, the effort was a huge success, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars from citizens, who purchased, at 75% of face value, bonds ranging in value from $25.00 to $10,000, which matured in ten years and yielded 2.9 percent.

As I look at the current administration’s efforts to restart our economy I wonder if such a campaign might succeed today to defray the cost of the recovery...

Clearly the Times rejected my piece because I lack a Nobel Prize in Economics like the newspaper's star editorialist, and the Obama administration wouldn't listen to me because it would have required them to make me Undersecretary of the Treasury. Still, I'm happy to see the government wising up.

I do have to question calling them "Bailout Bonds." That would never have washed with President Roosevelt, and it will never motivate the average Joe and Jane to invest. Someone used the term "Hope Bond" and that's certainly has a sexier ring to it!

So, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny...

Scrape up the most you can.
Here comes the freedom man
Asking you to buy a share of freedom today.

Richard Curtis

Press Baron Murdoch Ready to Get E-Ink on His Fingers?

I wouldn't swear to it, but I think those may be Rupert Murdoch's hands examining Plastic Logic's thus-far-nameless e-book reader, a Kindle competitor scheduled for release in 2010.

Why would Murdoch, who presides over a media empire ranging from Fox Broadcasting to HarperCollins Publishers to the world's largest agglomeration of English language newspapers, be caressing an e-ink reading device? Is he contemplating going E with such papers as the Daily Telegraph, the Times of London, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal? Media reporter Peter Kafka thinks so.

Kafka, covering the cable industry's annual show, heard Murdoch expressing admiration for the Kindle and ruminating that he might be willing to invest in a Kindle rival.

"At a Q&A at the cable industry’s annual show today," Kafka reports, "Murdoch waxed on about the Kindle’s qualities, then made a reference to investing in a machine that could be even more attractive - one that boasted a large, full-color screen." Reconstructing his notes, the reporter recorded Murdoch as saying,

"We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there."

Not trusting his notes, Kafka checked with a spokesperson from Murdoch's News Corp and sure enough, it was confirmed. "News Corp. is indeed in 'exploratory' talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies."

Which device is Murdoch thinking of investing in? Perhaps it's the no-namer being developed by Plastic Logic, about which we wrote last fall. Though its display is currently black and white, color screens are "on our road map," VP for Business Development Daren Benzi told The Observer. The plot thickens when you realize that Benzi spent 14 years at News Corp before moving to Plastic Logic. That said, PL already has substantial - $200 million - backing from investors, so do they need Murdoch's investment too?

Okay, so maybe it's the Flepia which, we announced just the other day, is in fact developing a color screen. But it too is already capitalized - by Fujitsu.

Could it be the iRex Reader 1000, the potentially Kindle-killing device introduced last year? It's not in color yet, but a color iRex Iliad has been long rumored.

Rupert-watchers will have a field day second-guessing his thinking. But it shouldn't be that opaque. Steeped in newsprint though he may be, the shrewd press czar has seen the writing, and it's not on the wall. It's on a screen. His romance with e-ink was foreshadowed in 2006 in a speech he gave at the Annual Livery Lecture at the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

What happens to print journalism in an age where consumers are increasingly being offered on-demand, interactive, news, entertainment, sport and classifieds via broadband on their computer screens, TV screens, mobile phones and handsets?

The answer is that great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.

And, crucially, newspapers must give readers a choice of accessing their journalism in the pages of the paper or on websites such as Times Online or - and this is important - on any platform that appeals to them, mobile phones, hand-held devices, ipods, whatever.

The possibility of converting paper journalism to electronic must certainly have triggered severe myocardial ischemia among the august members of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, but Murdoch can't say he didn't warn them. The cost of producing and distributing newspapers is ghastly. For instance, the newsprint used in one year’s worth of The Montreal Gazette is the equivalent of 186,816 trees. Multiply that by all of Murdoch's newspaper holdings and the number of dead trees is nothing short of astronomical.

Watch this space for updates.

RC

Clinchers Still Carry Book Industry

“I would give up my manicure and pedicure," says a fan who drops a century note on romance books every month. "I have my priority list, and books are pretty high on my priority list.”

That statement, quoted by Motoko Rich in the New York Times, explains in a nutshell why romance fiction sales are up when everything else is down. Rich reports that "While sales of adult fiction overall were basically flat last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, the romance category was up 7 percent after holding fairly steady for the previous four years." Harlequin's 2008 fourth quarter sales were a booming 32% higher than the same period of 2007! The lusty sales dominate e-books as well as print. Fictionwise's Steve Pendergrast says fifty percent of its downloads are romances.

Rich gives the impression that the phenomenon is of recent vintage and the result of the current recession. There's some truth in saying that hard times drive people to cheap pleasures and escapist pursuits like romance fiction. But the fact is that romance has been carrying the trade hardcover and mass market paperback industry for years - carrying it for as much as 25% of the revenues generated.

Though the genre is an easy target for ridicule, we do well to remember that the profits they generate finance acquisition of serious fiction and nonfiction and investment in new authors. As I wrote in these pages a while ago,

It is vital for the writing establishment 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.

Richard Curtis

E-Book Biz Soaring, But Dead Trees Still Rule

Sales stats for 2008 have been flowing in from a number of sources, and they are as interesting in what they don't reveal as in what they do.

The e-book business is rocketing, yet it's almost pocket change compared to print sales. E-Book sales in 2008 according to the International Digital Publishing Forum were a bit over $52 million, up $46 million over 2002! (The American Association of Publishers puts 2008 e-book sales even higher, $67 million.) But - phenomenal though that sounds, it is dwarfed by bookstore sales of print books in 2008, which the AAP states is close to $24 billion not including e-books or audibooks.

And though there's a lot of talk, some of it in these very pages, about the decline and fall of the traditional book industry, sales for 2009 declined only 2.8% over the previous year. In short, the vast imbalance between p-book and e-book sales reminds us that digital books have a long way to go before they truly challenge paper for supremacy. E-books are making more news but not necessarily more money.

It's always good to keep things in perspective.

RC

Barnes & Noble Developing Anti-Kindle?

Call it The Swindle? No, that will never do. The Jindal? Not a front-runner. The Tyndale? Actually that's promising. William Tyndale was a 16th century book guy who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek, and -- you ready for this? - was "the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution," according to Wikipedia. And yes, his name rhymes with Kindle. The fact that he was burned at the stake - well, in those days that was an occupational hazard for people venturing into new media.

These reflections are triggered by news in TheStreet.com that Barnes & Noble is developing an e-book reader to go head to head -- or thumb to thumb - with Amazon's and its Kindle.

It seems logical, given B&N's recent dramatic leap into the digital world with the acquisition of Fictionwise, the world's leading e-book retailer.

Is B&N starting too late? Not necessarily. It's a business truism that early innovators don't necessarily fare as well as those that come in later and go to school on the mistakes of their predecessors. And popular though the Kindle is, few technologists think it's the last word in e-reading devices. Many more are on the way, as we have frequently reported here.

One thing we guarantee: E-Reads will definitely distribute its e-books on the Tyndale.

RC

National Book Awards Creates Special Citation for Twitter Books

Belated April Fools!

But that could conceivably be a headline in the foreseeable future. For now it's a followup to our blog about about the emerging art form called the "vook" - an amalgam of video, novel and other digital media. It's inspired by a recent post by Rob Horning on popmatters.com, written as a comment on the concept of a Twitter Book. A Twitter Book is kind of like a vook only, well, tweetier.

Horning expatiates on the transubstantiation of authorship from linearity to multimodality. And if that sounds slightly pompous, it's because Horning's polysyllablism is infectious. But if you keep your head down and plow through the two dollar words you'll be rewarded with some solid insights into the effect digital media are having on authorship, such as this:

"This sort of thing may indeed portend “the end of authorship,” as Salam titled his post. But I’m a little surprised he didn’t go the Roland Barthes route and proclaim 'the death of the author,' and append the Foucaulidan corollary, the triumph of the 'author function.' They were commenting on the dubiousness of using authorial intention in assessing the actual effects achieved by a particular text. But technology has made such concerns sort of passe. Authors aren’t being discarded because their works may not say what they intend; instead, relations of production in the publishing industry call for collaboratively manufactured texts to meet corporate goals. Exit authors; enter coders."

"Exit authors; enter coders" is an all too apt phrase that will be the theme of many a debate about the future of books. Read Horning's entire post. It's called The future of book manufacturing.

And if you're wondering what this all has to do with the seductive lady pictured above, she's soul singer-songwriter Charlene L. Keys, AKA "Tweet". At least she's not nicknamed Vook.

Richard Curtis

National Federation of Blind Protests Author Guild Position on Kindle Text-to-Voice

By advocating the limiting of the Kindle 2's text-to-voice feature, the Authors Guild jumped out of the frying pan of angry audio publishers and into the fire of angry reading-disabled persons. The National Federation of the Blind staged a rally in front of the Guild's Manhattan offices to protest the Guild's recent position that the Kindle 2's voice-output feature constituted a potential infringement on author copyrights and on the audio business.

The Guild, which has been second to none in its support of making books accessible to the blind, found itself over a barrel in leading the protest against the feature in the Kindle 2's operating system that enables readers - those both with and without visual impairment - to listen to the e-book they are reading. Because Kindle's voices sound, or at least have the potential to sound, like professional narrators employed in commercial audiobooks, Amazon's move was like waving a red flag in the face of the audio industry, as well as co-opting the rights of authors to enter into commercial audiobook deals. We expressed our support for the Guild and we still do. However, representatives of the Blind and other reading-challenged persons took the Guild's position to be an affront.

It seems fairly clear to us that the protesters misunderstood the Guild's opposition to Kindle 2 and forgot how stalwart the organization has been on their behalf. The Guild therefore issued a statement clarifying its position and putting forth some excellent recommendations for changes in legislation, technology and book contracts. We reproduce it in full here and wish more power to the Guild in its passionate advocacy of the rights of the blind.

RC

Of Taxes and the Writer

Early in April a few years ago I got a call from a client who was preparing his income tax. This author wrote erotic fiction and wanted to know whether he could legitimately claim as a deduction his pharmacological treatment for a little affliction he had contracted in the course of “researching” one of his novels.

I told him I imagined the treatment would probably fall under medical deductions rather than research expenses, but the story does illustrate that even the most untrammeled literary spirits have to pay their obeisance to Uncle Sam sooner or later. With more and more authors incorporating, purchasing expensive computer equipment, seeking shelters for their taxable income, and in general being more businesslike in their approaches to the art and craft of literature, the accountant is becoming as important as the literary agent in guiding the destinies of writers.

You might want to read this article in its entirety before April 15th...

Richard Curtis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of quickies...

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

Good News: Publishing Guy Goes Over to Dark Side

Publishers Weekly reports that David Naggar is joining Amazon to become vice-president of Kindle Content. Naggar, former head of Random House Information and president of Random House's audio group (and son of prominent literary agent Jean Naggar), will “be working with the team to continue building a massive selection of content in the Kindle Store.” Naggar got his digital feet wet as president of a startup called iAmplify.com, described by PW as providing a "subscription-based access to digital and audio content across a number of genres."

Book people should greet this news enthusiastically. Given the love-hate relationship between traditional publishers and Amazon, Naggar's move may help to push the dial a little closer to the "love" position. He brings great savvy, experience and the respect of book industry colleagues to a post that requires all three qualities as Kindle girds for challenges to its early hegemony as the e-reading device of choice. And his special skill-set in audio comes as Amazon licks its wounds after the book and audio industry thwarted its attempt to enable a text-to-voice feature that would have triggered a trade war and, undoubtedly, a major lawsuit.

We don't know what Naggar's mandate is, but if he wants to push that dial to full "Love" position he can start by offering a royalty on used books, one of Amazon's most prosperous business practices but a thorn in the flesh of every right-thinking author and publisher. How about it, David?

Richard Curtis

January E-Book Sales Achieve Escape Velocity

At close to $9 million in January alone, e-book sales jumped an astounding 173.6% over the same month of 2008, according to stats compiled by the Association of American Publishers and International Digital Publishing Forum.

Michael Smith, Executive Director of IDPF, reminds us that:

* These are wholesale revenues reported from 13 participating Trade Publishers.
* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices"
* The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

For detailed chart and graph, click here.

RC

New Web Service Frees Writers to Write

A day in the life of a writer:

• Upload files to Google for Google Book Search
• Negotiate author agreement with Google
• Upload files to Amazon for Kindle ebook sales
• Review terms for Google Search
• Enhance listing with Books in Print
• Enhance listing on websites
• Develop viral marketing campaign
• Create Facebook, MySpace and Twitter pages
• Import video and display video on website
• Set up links to literary agent, movie agent, editor, and fan club
• Create Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter pages
• Set up a blog

Let's see -- is there anything this writer has forgotten to do? Ah, yes, one thing. Write.

Yeah, but after wrestling with all that technical stuff, what writer has time to write?

Laura Dawson understands this. She's launched a "boots-on-the-ground" service called AuthorWeb to take some or even all of the burden off authors' hands. Dawson is a 20-year veteran of the book industry with experience in both traditional publishing and e-commerce. She describes herself as "an independent consultant offering expertise on the digital transition."

For a reasonable fee, says Dawson, AuthorWeb will

• Upload your manuscript to Google for Google Book Search
• Upload your manuscript to Amazon for sale on the Kindle
• Make sure you are listed with Bowker’s Books in Print program so your book is listed on all e-commerce sites
• Work with Barnes &Noble.com’s Small Press division for web (and possible store) distribution
• Work with your POD service (Lightning Source, Lulu, Xlibris, etc.) to make sure you are getting the value you’ve paid for
• List you on author sites such as Filedby
• Set up a Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter account, create your own blog, or Enroll you in AuthorsGlobe to help you get virtual speaking engagements

Most authors can do some of this on their own, but not everybody loves to do it, and for some it's colossally boring. That's where AuthorWeb comes in. "The hard part about writing a book should be writing the book," says Dawson. "You’re not a digital marketing guru – you’re an author."

Of course, even if you outsource these tasks to AuthorWeb, maintaining your involvement and presence will still require a commitment of time and attention. But it's certainly worth checking out Dawson's service to see if it offers a viable tradeoff for all those hours spent on non-writing tasks, some of which -- let's face it -- are just the modern procrastinators' equivalent of making rubber-band balls and paper clip chains.

Dawson also publishes a free bi-weekly e-newsletter called The Big Picture that covers trends in digital content delivery, plus publishing news and analysis.

RC

Give Away the Reader and Sell the Content - Netbook Makers Try Gillette Razor Business Model

"Personal computers — and the companies that make their crucial components — are about to go through their biggest upheaval since the rise of the laptop," say Ashlee Vance and Matt Richtel in the New York Times. "By the end of the year, consumers are likely to see laptops the size of thin paperback books that can run all day on a single charge and are equipped with touch screens or slide-out keyboards." What's more, say Vance and Richtel, they will be priced somewhere between pocket change and free. Free?

Free. Because, as we've been urging for some time, by giving away the device but selling or leasing the content package, you can make more - and more reliable - money. This is what I call the Gillette Razor Theory - give away the razor and sell the blades - and now it may be happening in PC-world. AT&T will provide customers with a netbook at the low low price of $50.00. But - you have to sign up for an Internet service plan, say the Times reporters. An unnamed wireless phone company goes AT&T one better - a free netbook, but again you have to commit to a data plan - the "razor blades" part of the bargain.

That's not necessarily the biggest downside of the program. Netbooks are mini-laptops offering the bare minimum of functionality to people who are okay with the bare minimum. If you're addicted to Youtube or videogames, you might have to abandon all hope of accessing them. For free or fifty bucks you get a Model T Flivver "in any color," as Henry Ford might say, "as long as it's black." However, some manufacturers may be able to get over that hurdle, too. By employing Linux or Android technology, effecting savings, they may be able to load more goodies into the box.

If that were all there is to the story we'd be happy enough. We've been waiting decades for the $99 computer and all of a sudden we seem to be zooming past it into Zeroland. But the bigger news by far is that netbooks may represent the revolutionary leading edge of the next generation of personal computers.

"So far," the Times article says, "netbooks have appealed to a relatively small audience. Some of the devices feel more like toys or overgrown phones than full-featured computers. Still, they are the big success story in the PC industry, with sales predicted to double this year, even as overall PC sales fall 12 percent, according to the research firm Gartner. By the end of 2009, netbooks could account for close to 10 percent of the PC market, an astonishing rise in a short span." In other words, the economy's loss is the PC industry's gain. If people can't afford a fully loaded laptop, for under $100 they'll learn to live with skimpy.

To learn more, read Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry

RC

Mike Shatzkin on DRM, Interoperability, and Free Books

As regular readers of these pages know, we're big fans of Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant speaker and commentator whose oracular pronouncements about the future of media qualify him for the title of guru.

He recently launched a blog called "The Shatzkin Files" and has kindly agreed to let us run some of his articles from time to time. Here is one, as rich and idea-filled as your grandma's cinnamon raisin babka.

RC

Doomsday Worm A Dud, but Chinese Version No Joke

Conficker, presumably scheduled to awaken millions of infected zombie computers to perform some diabolical deed like launching missiles against Paraguay or stealing the $1.79 left in America's treasury, failed to launch as hysteria mongers such as myself predicted.That could mean only one thing: we have no idea what it means. It may indeed have been an April Fools joke created by the same vast cabal of scientists that have brought us such patently false theories as evolution and global warming. Or it may be completely correct except for the date. Or the programmers entered a 1 when they meant to enter a 0 and the launch is postponed to April 2nd.

Or it could mean that I'm posting this blog too early in the day.

CAESAR [To the Soothsayer] The ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

We are on far more certain ground with a report that somewhere in China, a den of genius geeks is plundering vital information from 1,295 government and business computers in the United States and 102 other countries, deploying a worm that has until now eluded the smartest - make that the second smartest - engineers in the known computerized world. This on the authority of Paul Harris writing in The Observer. In a recent story, Massive Chinese computer espionage network uncovered, Harris writes, "The network, dubbed GhostNet, appears to target embassies, media groups, NGOs, international organisations, government foreign ministries and the offices of the Dalai Lama, leader of the Tibetan exile movement. The researchers, based at Toronto University's Munk Centre for International Studies, said their discovery had profound implications."

Despite an arsenal of smoking guns pointing to China, its government has denied any official involvement. Nevertheless, Cambridge University researchers have tagged their report on GhostNet "Snooping Dragon."

"This report serves as a wake-up call," say researchers Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski. "These are major disruptive capabilities that the professional information security community, as well as policymakers, need to come to terms with rapidly." said researchers Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski.

Indeed, China's invasion of vital computers is far more ominous than a bucket of mischievous worms. That's why analysts abandoned the term "phishing" as inadequate to describe the operation. Instead, they've dubbed it "whaling."
RC

Armed with $1.75 Mil, Huffington Fills Vacuum in Investigative Reporting

A few weeks ago after reading a stunning op-ed piece about torture published in the New York Times we were moved to lament how tragic it would be to lose the newspapers and magazines that generate such gems of investigative reporting. There just didn't seem to be anything remotely comparable being produced in the blogs, even the best of them like Huffington Post. "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," I urged.

Admittedly, that was written more from a pained heart than a clear head. The truth is, magazines and newspapers are being relentlessly driven to desperation by fundamental and inexorable market forces and no plaintive cri de coeur is going to reverse the tide.

Fortunately for us, Arianna Huffington, the website's founder, is blessed with a clear head. Responding to the crisis in in-depth reportage, she announced that Huffpost in collaboration with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors will underwrite the work of a number of investigative reporters to the tune of $1.75 million. Huffington said she and the donors were "concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time when the nation’s institutions need to be watched closely."

She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists.The enterprise will be known as the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, according to an Associated Press report. Some 10 staff journalists, coordinating with freelance writers, will focus their efforts initially on the nation's economy. Some details of the structure and thinking behind the fund are provided in this statement by Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a senior advisor to the project. And Jeff Jarvis, blogging for The Buzz Machine, beautifully places the project into the media ecosystem, writing:

The future of journalism is not about some single new-fangled product and company taking over from the old-fangled and monopolistic predecessor. News come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. Laid-off journalists are starting blogs, alongside other bloggers. Some people will volunteer, podcasting their school-board meetings, just because they care. When we demand transparency from government as a default, data will become part of the news ecosystem we can all examine. Some of this will be supported by advertising, some by contributions from foundations, some by contributions from individuals, some by volunteer effort. And it will all add up to a new pie, one slice of which will be efforts such as [Huffington Post's].

The Huffington crossover operation could point the way to a healthy hybrid of traditional and Web reportage. Stories developed by journalists under this plan would undoubtedly be disseminated in print as well as online media, benefiting magazines and newspapers that are hard-pressed to finance long and deep investigations on their own. Look for more signs that the costs of developing those stories will be shared by others as we navigate the crisis in journalism.

Asked about the moribund print media when she appeared on a segment of the popular Morning Joe TV news program, Arianna Huffington said there are "too many autopsies and not enough biopsies." Her biopsy of investigative journalism shows a lot of healthy tissue, and it's good to see a bright beam of optimism in this dark time for print media.

RC