Chaos? Bring It On, Says Jeffrey Carver

Few people love chaos, and even fewer welcome it. Jeffrey A. Carver positively embraces it. His Tor saga, The Chaos Chronicles, is inspired by and built around it. Science Fiction Chronicle named the first volume, Neptune Crossing, one of the best science fiction novels of the year, while Kirkus Reviews called Strange Attractors (Volume 2) "dazzling, thrilling, innovative."

Carver blazed into the science fiction universe with a series of "star rigger" adventures that blended hard-SF concepts and deeply humanistic concerns, and E-Reads is proud to bring many of his classic novels back both to audiences who long to reread them and to a new generation that has not yet had the intense pleasure. He has polished them up for downloaders as well as those who love traditional paperback format. Among the nine gems currently on sale are Infinity Link, Down the Stream of Stars, Seas of Ernathe, Star Rigger's Way, Panglor and The Rapture Effect.

As always, our paperback releases lag behind e-books, so visit his page from time to time to check on the status, or watch these pages for updates.

Travel with Jeffrey Carver from the mysteries of deepest space to the recesses of the human mind and see chaos become coherent. And for a full immersion, do spend some time on his handsome website.

RC

Blogger Risks Life to Capture Manhattanhenge Sunset

Tonight, the evening of Saturday, May 30th I happened to be on the Second Avenue bus on my way to a post-BEA publishing party. The time was 8:10 PM. As it crossed 42nd street the bus lighted up a brilliant orange. I glance out the west window and saw the sun setting squarely at the end of the avenue. And then I remembered that tonight was Manhattanhenge, one of two annual dates on which the setting sun aligns itself perfectly with the cross-streets - at least, 42nd Street. By an extraordinary fluke I was present for that magical moment, and by even greater good luck I was carrying a camera.

I dashed off the bus at the 42nd Street stop, waited for a red light to halt the crosstown traffic, removed my trusty Panasonic Lumix from my pocket, hastily selected the settings, ran into 42nd Street and started shooting. In moments I was joined by other shutterbugs who themselves presented photo-ops almost as interesting as the sunset. The traffic light turned green and the magic was shattered as angry drivers, backs turned to the glorious spectacle and more concerned with reaching their destination than beholding cosmological wonders, started leaning on their horns. I responded with a well-practiced gesture commonly employed by New York pedestrians in their guerrilla war with car and taxi drivers.

When I returned home I googled Manhattanhenge and learned that a few days earlier Neil deGrasse Tyson had written a little piece about it for the Hayden Planetarium website, and I urge you to visit the blog. "As you may know,"Tyson writes, "Manhattanhenge takes place on two consecutive days, twice a year, when the setting Sun aligns precisely with the Manhattan street grid, creating radiant sunsets that burst across our brick and steel canyons, simultaneously illuminating both the north and south sides of every street. A rare and beautiful sight."

It is indeed, and I'm happy to show you what it looks like. The "henge" reference is apt: gazing at that corruscating orange ball wedged in the convergence of buildings on the north and south sides of 42nd Street, it was easy to be at one with the awestruck primitives who marked the limits of the sun's transit with a crude stone memorial.

Richard Curtis

Scribd Author Joe Quirk Exults in His Choice of Publisher

Joe Quirk is a bestselling novelist and bestselling science writer. Rather than go the conventional route with his latest novel Exult, he turned to Scribd, where you can download Exult and his first novel, The Ultimate Rush, for $2.00 each.

Exult is the story of a thrilling sport that, in the author's experts hands, becomes a metaphor for all that is ecstatic and tragic in life. "Is a full life worth an early death?" asks Quirk. "Jack Ostruck loves hang gliding, but when someone he loves dies in a crash, the grieving mother demands that Jack come to the funeral and explain why flying is worth her child's death." The novel has moved the likes of Khaled Hosseini, bestselling author of The Kite Runner, to sing its praises.

Because Scribd is a new venture and a controversial work in progress (read what Kill Zone had to say about it), we asked Joe to blog about his experience and that of two author friends of his who similarly cast their lot with him. You can watch a video of the three on YouTube, read a guest editorial in Publishers Weekly by one of the three, Kemble Scott, and read Joe's own comments below.

RC
************************************************
I’ve fantasized about Scribd.com since 1996, well before its founders reached puberty, when I wrote an essay about the coming “Revolution in Publishing” that no publisher would publish. I had to wait to publish my first novel, which gave me the opportunity to provoke an argument with my publisher during my first book tour. I held up my hardcover book and declared to my horrorstruck editor, publicist, and assistants that soon we won’t need this hunk of tree pulp any more. I announced that the substance of a novel is not in the book but the words, which were easily digitized, and the next generation will be about about as sentimental about the smells and textures of books as we were about the smells and textures of LPs.

Read Joe Quirk's statement in its entirety.

Generosity-Driven Publishing Puts Freeists to Shame

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

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

The company's website states its case:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Push Comes to Shove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a complete listing, click here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

Are You Listening? Audio Stats Say You're Not

Which is Better, Jump Off Bridge or Stick Head in Oven?

That may be one of the panel discussion topics when audio publishers convene, as they do every year, a day or two before the commencement of Book Expo America, the publishing industry's annual celebration of itself. According to Associated Press's Hillel Italie, "The Association of American Publishers has seen a 47 percent drop in audio revenue this year: Just 14 publishers reported, but they include Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and virtually all the major New York companies."

Since many people have been under the impression that audiobooks were flying high, this tailspin is bewildering until you hear Anthony Goff, president of the APA, explain that it has to do with CD sales. Like other tangible products such as printed books, physical audiobooks are giving way to their digital successors. But - again, like books - the e-versions don't generate a fraction of the profit that their material counterparts do. At least not yet. At least not enough to reverse a 20% plunge in CD sales this year over the same period in 2008. Nielsen BookScan projects a total drop in the audio business for this year of almost 5%.

Though CDs are expensive to manufacture, package and distribute, their high prices can bring handsome profits if the volume of sales is high. But volume has been hobbled. "The shrinking economy has had a very direct impact," says Italie. "The fewer people who work, the fewer people who drive to work. And many audio customers listen in their cars, more than half, according to Chris Lynch, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Audio."

RC

F U Cn Rd Ths U R Umn

Unless a security notice pops up on your computer screen warning you of an attempted hack or viral invasion, you're seldom aware of the vicious guerrilla war in progress beneath your fingertips. But it's constant, and with every escalation by the attackers, the measures taken to throw the enemy back escalates as well. As in every guerrilla war the offense has the advantage of knowing when and how it will strike, and it employs weapons of mass destruction in the form of bots to probe vulnerabilities, neutralize defenses, and overwhelm its victims.

Though your computer's defensive team uses powerful programs of its own to thwart attacks, a surprisingly simple weapon has proven effective in holding the line against invaders. It's called a captcha. New York Times reporter Anne Eisenberg, in New Puzzles That Tell Humans From Machines, describes them as "a set of distorted, squiggly letters and numbers that people can decipher and type correctly for admission, but that machines still can’t." You've undoubtedly cooperated with requests to type in the word you see on the graphic, and, I suspect, you've done it with a tolerant sigh, wondering why you're being asked to play this childish game.

The answer is that captchas are one of the most effective ways to thwart many forms of abuse. In addition to the wiggle-words, captchas employ pictures that are elementary to most nursery schoolers raised on Where's Waldo? but make no sense to a crawling stealth bot seeking to penetrate the soft underbelly of your desktop or laptop.

"Captcha" is a splendid onomatopoeia, sounding like the task it performs. But it is also a clever acronym coined by the team at Carnegie Mellon University that worked on it: Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Will evil hackers eventually gain the upper hand, like a flu virus recombining after losing out to a vaccine? Eisenberg thinks the good guys will stay ahead:

"Many people worry that as machines become smarter, the days of captcha protection will be numbered, whether the puzzles take the form of distorted text, audio snippets or rotated images. But Henry Baird, a professor in the department of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University, disagrees. Dr. Baird and colleagues have proposed a system for captchas that, like Google’s, can be woven into the theme of a Web site.

“'Machines’ abilities are slowly improving,' he said, “'but I think there is still a huge gap between human inborn perceptual abilities and machine skills.'”

My curiosity about the technology took me to the official Captcha website, where I discovered that anyone can download a free implementation and plugins including audio tests for blind users. And if you want to pit your wits against Captcha's computer system there's a new website, GWAP.com, containing a host of "addictive games that help computers learn to think more like humans. You play the games, computers get smarter!" After I took the gender test I was informed that there was a 97% certainty I was female. Looks like I will now either have to straighten out the GWAP program or commence an extensive course of gender reorientation.

Captchas, the site informs us, "have several applications for practical security." Among them are:

• Preventing Comment Spam in Blogs
• Protecting Website Registration
• Protecting Email Addresses From Scrapers
• Preventing Ballot stuffing for Online Polls
• Preventing "Dictionary" Password Attacks
• Thwarting Search Engine Bots
• Plausible solution against email worms and spam

Thanks to Captcha technology the playing field has tilted back to humanity after the humiliating defeat of the human race, represented by chess master Gary Kasparov, by the Deep Blue computer in 1997.

Richard Curtis

This and $359.00 Will Get You on a Subway

Ads for the Kindle have been spied on the New York subway system. Here's one such which we scraped off The Business Insider.

The publication's Dan Frommer notes that subways are a good place to promote Kindles, and we can roger that. You can hold it in one hand while gripping a rail with the other. No one can see the book cover because there is none. And because there are no wireless signals in subway tunnels, you can't talk on your cell phone, so you might as well do the next best thing and read.

Our relationship to Kindle is a love-hate one, Frommer says, and he lists five loves and five hates:

5 Things We Love

• It's really good at what it's designed for: Reading books that are mostly text.
• It's discreet!
• Kindle-optimized Web sites are on the way.
• It's super for traveling, with a few caveats.
• New books are cheaper on the Kindle than on paper.
  

5 Things We Hate

• Your book library starts from scratch.
• The design is better than the first Kindle, but still not fully thought-through.
• It's expensive and novel, so people have an incentive to steal it!
• For something that only does one thing really well, it's still pretty bulky.
• Old books double as living room decor.
  

"All in all," says Frommer, "we're pleased with the Kindle 2. As potential buyers, we're hoping the price goes down soon, because we think it's still too expensive. (Especially because we have to start our book libraries from scratch.) But we think Amazon is on the right path, and especially with new stuff like the iPhone Kindle app, is the clear leader in the nascent e-book industry."

RC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the Coalition's full statement click here.

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

Richard Curtis

E-Reads Offers Book Deal to Dick Cheney

Dear Mr. Cheney:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours Truly,

Richard Curtis
President and CEO
E-Reads

A Self-Published Author Shows the Difference Between Vanity and Pride

Jason A. Spencer-Edwards has won the writer's equivalent of the trifecta. He's sold some 50,000 copies of his self-published books, he's gotten them picked up by the New York City school system, and - most important of all from his viewpoint - his tales of black kids struggling for survival have inspired school children from disadvantaged backgrounds and helped them to fall in love with reading.

New York Times reporter Anne Barnard writes that "Mr. Spencer-Edwards’s stories of young black teenagers struggling with peer pressure, poverty and the temptations of money and crime have captivated students who have trouble relating to the white middle-class suburban world of Judy Blume or Sweet Valley High."

“You can hear a pin drop when we work on his books,” a teacher said.

Spencer-Edwards's books - Jiggy, I’ve Got It Made and Patrol Boy - are captivating. But there were few readers to captivate until he persuaded New York City's Department of Education to approve his books, and if you know anything about getting books adopted by the New York school system, you will appreciate how extraordinary his feat was. Once the books were green-lighted he began promoting them to principals, teachers, parents and children. His charisma and mesmerizing story-telling style took it from there, and the rest is a heart-warming story of a remarkable man who does well by doing good.

You can learn more about him here.

RC

Hachette Dispatches Pirate-Busters to Scribd and Other Peer-to-Peers

Hachette Book Group, tormented by pirated and other unauthorized use of its copyrighted books, has taken aggressive measures to curb these practices, including a face to face meeting with Scribd, the peer to peer file sharing website. Though Scribd has pledged cooperation, its prophylactic protection remains porous enough to alarm many authors, agents and publishers. HBG is pressuring another site, Wattpad, and enlisting the publisher community to join the action.

Hachette has circulated a statement via email to the publishing industry. Below is the text in full.

RC
**********************************************************************************

As Hachette Book Group’s CEO, David Young, noted in a recent New York Times article, online piracy is “exponentially up.” The rapid growth in e-books has resulted in a dramatic increase in pirated or unauthorized editions on peer-to-peer file sharing websites that allow users to upload, share and download content of all kinds, free of charge. Two such websites, Scribd and Wattpad, are particularly active. While some of the content appearing on these sites is lawful and user-created, an alarming number of unauthorized book titles are uploaded by people without authorization and shared for free on both sites.

HBG is firmly committed to combating this type of blatant online piracy, and our Legal Department reviews those sites on a periodic basis for unlawful copies of a sampling of HBG titles. The Legal Department sends various document sharing sites, including Scribd and Wattpad, numerous copyright infringement take-down notices each month. In addition to the checks being made by our legal department and our editors, we hope that authors and agents will check frequently for infringements and report them to us. The most efficient method of reporting piracy is to complete the Online Piracy Report Form attached and email it to HBG’s Legal Department at piracy@hbgusa.com. We will then pursue the take-down process. If an author or agent is unable to complete the form for any reason, they should notify their editor.

HBG has sent stern legal letters to some of the sites, alerting them to the potential legal recourse for permitting or hosting repeated infringements. HBG is also a member of the AAP’s Online Piracy Working Group (“OPWG”), which coordinates anti-piracy efforts among member publishers. Despite these efforts, we recognize the daunting challenge we all face in combating online copyright infringement. Even when we succeed in getting an author’s titles removed from a site, the same titles can easily pop up again, uploaded by new users.

In an attempt to address the problem head on, HBG recently initiated a face-to-face meeting with Scribd to discuss its antipiracy efforts. Scribd described to us its newly implemented text-matching copyright protection system, which Scribd claims been highly effective at detecting and removing hundreds of unauthorized uploads every day (although it admits that its system is not perfect). Scribd also committed to us that it disables, without notice, the accounts of repeat infringers on a “three-strikes” basis, and that all documents previously posted by that infringer are automatically withdrawn. Scribd pledged that it has a zero tolerance policy for users who post advertisements offering to send pirated e-books to personal email addresses. We discussed ways to strengthen Scribd’s text matching filter and Scribd has recently published a more complete set of antipiracy policies. Scribd recently met with the AAP’s OPWG to discuss its procedures in detail and agreed to follow-up on a number of questions and issues raised by the OPWG.

HBG hopes to persuade Wattpad to implement more robust procedures. Wattpad confirmed recently that they have begun implementing their own text matching filter. We hope that pressure from HBG, other publishers, and the OPWG will cause document sharing sites, such as Scribd and Wattpad, to address this problem proactively.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent issue. Should you have questions about online piracy, please email us at piracy@hbgusa.com.

This may contain confidential material. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender, delete immediately, and understand that no disclosure or reliance on the information herein is permitted. Hachette Book Group, Inc. may monitor email to and from our network.

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Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name

We realize that crazy names for digital startups are fashionable. The reasoning is that a weird word sticks in your memory and if it catches on, the recognition factor can be priceless. Google, anyone?

On the other hand, funky names can be a disadvantage if they are also disagreeable or hard to pronounce, particularly if you've created a product that you are hoping will supplant the sonorous and aptly named Kindle. That's why, for example, we're skeptical that the world is going to beat a path to a gadget called the Flepia. Discussing color e-book readers we recently wrote:

It's hard to take an e-book named Flepia seriously. First of all, no one knows if it's Fleh-pia or Flee-pia (it's Fleh, I'm reliably told). Second of all, "Flepia" sounds like one of those junk fishes hauled up with a tuna catch.

The Flepia is made by Fujitsu, and if anything would induce us to utter the word "Flepia" aloud at the sales counter of an electronics store it's the fact that it's the first full-color commercial e-book reader. But it would still be embarrassing.

Another Japanese e-book reader named by a marketing genius with a tin ear is Panasonic's WordsGear. It too is in living color, and comes in at half of the intimidating $1000 price of the Flepia. But it's hard to see myself reading a book on something called a WordsGear.

The Japanese don't have a monopoly on inept nomenclature for e-book readers. From a UK outfit called Interead comes the Cool-er. It boasts a number of advantages over the competition, among them price (at $250, it's a third cheaper than Kindle and Sony) and weight. "The Cool-er weighs 5.6 ounces - compared to 10 oz of the Sony Reader and 10.2 oz of the Amazon Kindle 2," writes Priya Ganapati for Wired.com's Engadget. "That means the Cool-er is nearly 40 percent lighter than its biggest competitors."

It also comes in eight colors. But does that make it a color reader? No, just the frames are colored. The text is good old black and white E-ink. Which brings us to the name. Aren't consumers going to be confused by a b&w reader that sounds like "Col-or"? Or is it supposed to suggest the device is cool. Do you pronounce the word like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices? Or do you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er. No matter how you say it, it's awkward, cacophonous and meaningless.

The dark horse in the Dumb Name Derby is the e-reader developed by Plastic Logic. Despite its imminent release it still doesn't have a name. Because of its thin, flexible design - you can roll it up like a scroll - it is a keenly anticipated device. But what will it be named?

One hopes that the company's management will learn from the unfortunates described here and give us a name we can utter joyously and proudly. Or how about a name we can utter at all.

RC

Wait! Come In Off That Ledge! Dave Eggers' Hotline for Suicidal Publishers

The New Yorker's "Book Bench" feature reports a Tribeca Rooftop celebration to honor author and McSweeney's founder Dave Eggers, whose nonprofit 826 National is devoted to turning children on to writing and assisting them to develop writing skills.

Eggers gave an impassioned and inspiring speech that will send chills down the spine of any who despairs that the printed word is finished. But if you're still ready to climb out the window, he offers an email hotline to talk you back inside, where you can inhale the intoxicating aroma of ink on paper, listen to the crinkling of newsprint, and rejoice to the crack of a book's spine the first time it's opened. Here's an excerpt, including the special email address:

Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.

RC

Tristan the Navigator Plies Waters Miles Above Sea Level

On a wall in my office is proudly displayed a nautical pennant in a frame. An inscription reads: The highest burgee ever...This burgee, of the Royal Navy Sailing Association, was worn on board the cutter "Sea Dart" at a height of 12,850 feet above sea level, on Lake Titicaca, Peru, January 2nd 1974. It's signed Tristan Jones.

A lot of agents like to display photos of themselves shaking hands with movie stars. I'm happy with my pennant. In fact I'm thrilled with it, because The Incredible Voyage was the first book by Tristan Jones that I ever read and the one that launched a friendship and business association that lasted to his death. If you're interested in reading about how my fan letter led him to my office door, you can click on Tristan Jones and Me.

In The Incredible Voyage, this supreme adventurer takes a solitary and intrepid six-year voyage on The Sea Dart. Covering a distance twice the circumference of the globe, from the lowest body of water in the world - The Dead Sea - to the highest - Lake Titicaca in the Andes - Jones finds himself "a thousand times beyond the limit of endurance." With tenacity stronger than any obstacle, Jones refuses to give up his adventure, even after falling prey to several disasters that could have killed him. Struggling against the mighty current of the Amazon, hauling his boat over the Andes Mountains and capsizing off the Cape of Good Hope do not discourage him. This gripping story is a testament to his indomitable spirit and thirst for danger.

Richard Curtis

You Can't Look It Up

"Can a socialite kill a book?"

That's the question that journalist Jesse Kornbluth asked on Huffington Post in a chilling look at the campaign waged by socialite Annette de la Renta and her white-shoe law firm ("sending threatening letters on 60-pound bond") to have Michael Gross's provocative book about the Metropolitan Museum of Art "removed from circulation and corrected." The "corrected" refers to descriptions in Gross's book of de la Renta who, Kornbluth asserts, is "generally regarded as Brooke Astor's successor as the Social Empress of New York. She's Blue Blood and Old Money. Her husband is a fashion designer who specializes in First Ladies and Ladies Who Lunch. She serves on the most prestigious board of trustees in New York, that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

Gross's book has been widely ignored in the media, and Kornbluth suggests that a sort of Gentleman's Agreement among heavy-hitter members of de la Renta's august social circle is the reason why. "I am not a conspiracy theorist," writes Kornbluth, "but the media coverage -- or lack thereof -- of this dustup and of 'Rogues' Gallery' could certainly make me think of becoming one." You can read all about it in Kornbluth's blog as well as Gross's own account of the sordid maneuvers to chill his book.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist either, but what started as a routine inquiry about the availability of the book in the New York Public Library system has definitely pushed me several notches closer to paranoia. It seems that the book is simply not there. You can see for yourself by calling your local librarian or visiting the Library's website and entering the title and author into the Search box.

It's interesting to note Annette de la Renta also serves on the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library.

Richard Curtis

Copyright Asteroid Hurtling Toward Earth, Impact Due 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

What Part of Paradigm Shift Don't You Understand? Part I

E-book sales stats for the first quarter of 2009 are in, and we're running out of superlatives. Trade sales were close to $26 million, exceeding last year's Q1 by 131%. In one month alone - March '09 - the $10 million in sales matched the total for the first three months of 2008.

The true sales numbers may be even higher than the above chart indicates. Michael Smith, Executive Director of IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) reminds us that:

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

RC

What Part of Paradigm Shift Don't You Understand? Part II

It only took a decade for titles printed on demand to exceed titles printed in traditional offset, but Jim Milliott of Publishers Weekly confirms it.

Out of 560,626 new and revised books published in the US in 2008, POD's edged traditional by a score of 285,384 to 275,232.

In fact, POD increased so rapidly - 132% in a year - it actually lapped traditional printing on the racetrack. But wait - it gets better! "The jump in on-demand output in 2008 followed on even bigger increase in 2007 when production skyrocketed 462%." writes Milliott. "Since 2002, production of on-demand titles has soared 774% compared to a 126% increase in traditional titles."

Milliott cites Kelly Gallagher, vice-president of publisher services for Bowker, as indicating that improved printing technology is the reason for the soaring POD use. PW attributes the shift to self-publication as well as increased reliance on POD by online publishers. Which is it? We put our money on vanity.

RC

Is Color the Real Kindle Killer?

A kaiju is marching from Japan to the West, and the Kindle, Sony and other black and white e-book readers are in danger of being trampled. Call the monster Colorzilla.

For instance...

We recently wondered whether Rupert Murdoch was "ready to get e-ink on his fingers." It increasingly looks like he is, and what's more it will be colored ink. Gizmodo's John Herman reports that "Rupert Murdoch, News Corp potentate and noted evil person, yesterday announced his company is 'investing in a new device that has a bigger screen [than the Kindle], [and] four colors,' adding, "THE KINDLE MUST PERISH."

We agree with Herman's observation that "We'll have to wait and see on this one, but probably not for too long - this is a guy who, for better or for worse, means what he says - and the Kindle is begging for some decent competition." (The Informer's headline was, Rupert Murdoch Investing In a Mysterious Color eBook Reader [It Runs On Human Blood]).

Why, you may ask, do we need color to read black type on a white page? Because, as we pointed out a while back (Watching Books), text displayed on a screen - even a bullet-paced thriller - can be boring to a generation of readers raised on color-saturated television and computer screens. Served up with color ads or videos, even dry textbooks will hold our attention. And don't forget the new hybrids slouching toward your screen called vlogs and vooks - dramatized blogs and stories utilizing the full arsenal of modern media.

In the last year or two the push for a color e-reader screen has intensified. The first across the finish line was the Fujitsu Flepia which, despite its intimidating price ($1000) showed us the potential for books nestled in color.

At half the price is the Panasonic WordsGear. As reviewed on Technabob:

The WordsGear offers an amazingly sharp 5.6-inch TFT display with a 1024×600 pixel resolution (that’s about 211 pixels per inch.) This means reading small type should be no problem, and easy on the eyes. Thanks to a special touch sensitive grip, it’s designed to be controlled with a single hand, so you can even use it while standing up on the train or bus.

Since the display isn’t one of those electrostatic ones, it can also handle moving images, and cam play MPEG4 video clips. There’s also AAC and WMA audio playback, and you can listen to your tunes while reading. Content is stored on SD cards, providing plenty of expandability. The rechargeable battery should give you about 6 hours of reading on a single charge.

There’s a huge catalog of e-books for the device (all in Japanese, though) available from Saidoku. From what I can tell, you can load up your own PDF documents so you won’t be limited to Japanese content.

It's worth clicking on the Panasonic WordsGear to see the video. Didn't understand a syllable but it's great fun. And that's the point - color is fun! Even, paradoxically, black-on-white text.

I wonder if the Japanese devices have been compromised by lousy names. It's hard to take an e-book named Flepia seriously. First of all, no one knows if it's Fleh-pia or Flee-pia (it's Fleh, I'm reliably told). Second of all, "Flepia" sounds like one of those junk fishes hauled up with a tuna catch. And WordsGear? Can you see yourself boasting about reading a book on your WordsGear?

No wonder Kindle is enjoying so much success. Whether or not it's a great e-book reader, it sounds like one.

RC

Tales of a Village Rabbi, But What a Village!

In the late fifties and sixties, Greenwich Village was the quirkiest, most charming, jazzy, eccentric and urban of environments, the center of all that was both quaint and "cool": brownstones and beatniks, coffeehouses and college students, folksingers and freethinkers, poets and "prophets." Into this fascinating mix of cultural archetypes came a young rabbi, Harvey M. Tattelbaum, who became known as the Village Rabbi of the Village Temple.

The spirit of Sholom Aleichem infuses his Tales of the Village Rabbi, a touching and laugh-out-loud funny memoir of his tenure at a small synagogue in the heart of Greenwich Village. Though his years in this magical place were productive and soul-filling, rabbinical training hadn't exactly prepared him for the bikers, thieves, ex-cons, eccentric old ladies, drug-users, cleavage-baring brides and other Village denizens he encountered while serving the congregants of his spirited little temple.

Rabbi Tattelbaum shares his insider's tales-both downtown and uptown-of wayward weddings (and funerals), contentious temple boards, irreverent interfaith shenanigans, heartaches and triumphs. But the Tales also reveal a deep personal struggle with some of the most profound philosophical problems of ancient and modern religion and are filled with a warm, humane and rational approach to spirituality and religious meaning.

RC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

There's No Room on a Ketch for a Sailor, a Bishop's Sister, and a Three-Legged Dog

Volume by autobiographical volume, E-Reads is bringing out e-book editions of many beloved Tristan Jones accounts of life at sea. The latest is Seagulls in My Soup, a hilarious collection of adventures by a master story teller. Join Jones aboard his converted lifeboat cruising the Balearic coast with his one-eyed, three-legged dog Nelson and a prim Bishop's sister named Sissie. Oh - and stay belowdecks when the machineguns open fire.

After a boyhood at sea and a young manhood dodging U-boats in the North Atlantic in World War II, Jones succeeded in setting a number of sailing records, then retired to write about them. For the last few years of his life, he retired to Phuket, Thailand aboard his cruising trimaran. He was as salty as a sailor can be, and an incomparable spinner of yarns.

Read an excerpt of Seagulls in My Soup here, then download the e-book. E-Reads has ten of Tristan Jones's memoirs in e-book format - get them all.

If you'd like to read a personal account of my years as Tristan's literary agent, you can access it here.

RC

Print Books Dead? "Not Even Wounded," Says Lightning President

Here's a trick question. Do you think that books printed on demand are tangible merchandise? That they are no different from traditionally printed books?

It's natural to think they are, but you might find it helpful instead to think of them as a form of digital book even though they are delivered by UPS instead of by your Internet service provider.

Because the trade publishing industry is in the doldrums we tend to think the book printing industry is suffering too. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I've contended again and again, there's nothing wrong with the book business that can't be cured by distributing books a different way. And that's why I believe print on demand is the salvation of the industry.

This is admittedly a pretty extravagant declaration, but it's supported by some statistics reported in an interview, conducted by Liz Thompson for Bookbrunch, with David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world. (As a matter of disclosure, LSI is E-Reads' printer.) Taylor stated that LSI has printed 70 million books in the decade since POD was introduced, and its facilities in Tennessee and Pennsylvania hold about a million digital files. The business has "grown 20% to 30% in the last six months," he said. LSI prints, binds and ships 10,000 copies a day on machines that run around the clock. In Britain, the firm is building a facility the size of an English football pitch.

Just as the current recession has laid bare the weakness of a traditional book distribution model based on the returnability of merchandise - with return rates soaring deep into the double-digits - it has also revealed the strength of an on-demand system with a negligible return rate.

"The recession," Taylor told his interviewer, "is focusing publishers' minds on cash, on the amount of inventory they have sitting in warehouses, on the cost of transporting stock. Most global publishers in the academic and STM [scientific, technical and medical] markets are saying they want to get out of inventory, and some pretty radical discussions are now taking place which will allow publishers to do just that. Believe me, it's an exciting time to be part of the business."

Among the radical solutions to the inventory problem is the creation of digital warehouses. These are in essence a network of servers containing vast archives of POD files linked to Espresso printers, miniaturized machines that can print and bind paperback books in under 10 minutes. Someone called them ATMs for books, but while the logical place for them is bookstores there's no reason why Espressos could not be set up in facilities not necessarily book related (we half-jokingly suggested a bagel shop).

Certainly one place such networks could be set up is Third World countries, says Thompson, "which have none of the infrastructure of western publishing in place (warehouses, distribution companies) and where building it would not, at this point, make much sense."

In short, says Liz Thompson, David Taylor "believes that far from the being dead, 'or even slightly wounded', digital technology is powering a genuine revolution in so-called traditional publishing."

To witness the revolution, watch this video of an Espresso producing a book in front of your eyes. Order your book, buy yourself a cup of (liquid) espresso and by the time you've consumed it, your book will be ready.

Perhaps it will become apparent why, in 2005, Amazon.com acquired a modest little print on demand operation called BookSurge, and why, three years later, Amazon launched an aggressive campaign to promote its POD services to publishers. Though Amazon's is the quintessentially modern book retailing operation in the history of the world, a number of underlying brick and mortar functions - notably, some 12 million square feet of warehouses - compromise its efficiency and profitability. In The Nine Gazillion Pound Gorilla Bares Its Fangs, a blog posted at the time, I wrote:

If Amazon is capable of printing books on demand, they will no longer have to carry any physical books in their warehouses at all! They simply have to load the files of Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, and every other publisher onto their server and print all of their books - frontlist as well as backlist - on demand. It would not only be a huge savings for Amazon in terms of warehouse space - it would be a huge savings for the publishers, too: they all would eliminate printing, warehouse, and freight costs at a stroke.

That all middlemen are impediments in a digital world is bedrock truth. As stupendous as Amazon is, it is nevertheless a middleman between book publishers and book buyers. The key to disintermediating that function is print on demand. Amazon's 2008 foray in this arena was only the first skirmish. You can expect the company to continue seeking a large share of the POD business currently enjoyed by Lightning Source.

Richard Curtis

John Norman's Telnarian Trilogy Returns with a Vengeance

The Telnarians - their vast, corrupt empire spans galaxies, ruling by terror. But the souls of true men will not be forever chained. A heroic tide is rising and a warrior born to lead the barbarian horde against the corruption and brutality of their masters.

This is the universe of John Norman's Telnarian Trilogy, a gripping science fiction series filled with interplanetary adventure, rebellion and gladiatorial combat by the author of E-Reads' bestselling Gorean Saga. The books were published in the early 1990s and eventually went out of print. E-Reads has rescued them and brings them back to fans in all their classic splendor.

In the first novel, The Chieftain, a peasant thrown into the arena to satisfy the blood-lust of effete spectators turns the tables and slaughters his human and animal foes, winning his freedom as a full-fledged gladiator. Employed as a kind of circus performer to slay merely to amuse the crowd, he seizes an opportunity to rise up against his cruel masters - and mistresses, for one of them is the beautiful courtier who ordered his execution.

From The Chieftain to The Captain to the capstone novel, The King, the series builds in violence as the stakes grow higher and higher. The trilogy is immediately available for download, and paperback volumes are imminent. We'll let you know the moment they show up on Amazon.

E-Reads is in the process of publishing the complete works of John Norman, and the Telnarian Trilogy is a major step in completing the collection. Keep an eye peeled on these pages for news of more vintage Norman books, including some surprises.

Is one of them a 28th volume in the Gorean Saga? Well, there are rumors to that effect...

RC

Tristan Jones and Me

Every reader cherishes a fantasy of meeting a beloved author. Few ever realize this dream except, perhaps, to shake the author's hand at a rushed and crowded bookstore autograph session. Yet, even such ephemeral encounters are forever replayed in our mind's eye as we lovingly recall the pressure of the hand, the smile of appreciation, the inflection of the voice, the two or three words uttered by our idol's lips, directed exclusively at us and no one else. We gaze and gaze and gaze at the inscription as if it were on the verge of quickening.

Imagine, then, what it must feel like to write a fan letter to an author and have him contact you to tell you he would like you to become his literary agent. But in fact, that is precisely how I came to represent Tristan Jones. Click here to read the full account.

E-Reads is in the process of publishing many of his popular adventures in e-book format. For a complete list, click here.

Richard Curtis

Around the World on One Leg, a Trimaran and a Star To Steer Her By

After having his left leg amputated and spending several years ashore, Tristan Jones, the quintessential nautical voyager and author of numerous adventures, decided to return to the sea. In October 1983, Jones and his only crew member, Wally Rediske, set out from San Diego in "Outward Leg", a 36-foot trimaran, intending to circumnavigate the world from west to east by sail and chronicle it in a series of books. His tribulations would have daunted a much younger man possessed of two legs.

E-Reads is delighted to present the complete trilogy of his adventures: Outward Leg, The Improbable Voyage, and Somewheres East of Suez, all narrated with Jones's vintage wry humor and inimitably salty style.

Outward Leg describes the first part of the inspiring journey as Jones sails down the western coast of Central America through the Panama Canal to a small Colombian town. There he fought for survival against hostile natives, drug dealers and uncooperative port officers, then up the coast of North America to New York.

In The Improbable Voyage, the middle leg of Jones's heroic journey, the intrepid sailor recounts the hazardous route from the North Sea through the great rivers of Central Europe. Battling ice and cold, life-threatening rapids and narrow defiles, German bureaucrats and Romanian frontier police, the indomitable Jones made his way through eight countries and emerged triumphant, if battered, bruised and penniless, at the Black Sea.

In Somewheres East of Suez, the final leg of Jones's remarkable globe-circling voyage, Jones sails eight thousand miles from Istanbul to Thailand. From the tourist- and terrorist-dominated ports of the eastern Mediterranean to African outposts peopled with famine refugees, Tristan maintains the unique perspective of a man who has had minimal contact with society's restraints, using his acerbic wit to spare no fools and offer biting social commentary. After barely escaping with his life in South Yemen, he sets off for the Far East, determined to win out against the difficulties of his disability, whether battling a tropical cyclone or surviving on a dwindling ration of fresh water in the vast windless expanse of the Indian Ocean.

We'd be surprised if Jones's trilogy fails to satisfy your wanderlust, but in case not, check out the other E-Reads Tristan Jones titles.

And if you're curious to know more about Jones, read Wayward Sailor : In Search of the Real Tristan Jones by Anthony Dalton.

A word about the book covers. Though the extent of my sailing experience is one painful hour on a Sunfish, forty minutes of which was spent trying to right it after capsizing it, I do know the difference between a trimaran and a conventional boat. The pictures are taken from a stock library and represent photos of other boats that I imagine Tristan Jones would have taken from his trimaran. If this explanation doesn't cut it with sailing buffs, I hope they will forgive us for our landlubberly image selections.

For my reminiscences of the fifteen years I spent as Tristan's agent, click here.

Richard Curtis

Hannah Howell Highlands Now Available in Trade Paper

If you're a Hannah Howell fan but prefer print editions to downloads, today is your lucky day. The 15 volumes of Hannah's Highland series published by E-Reads are now out in paper, or will be as soon as they flow to Amazon and other retailers. Thrill to the wild beauty of the Scottish settings and the lusty warriors and passionate women who populate Howell's books.

Diane E. Griffith, an Amazon.com reviewer, perfectly captures the allure of a typical Howell book and awards it five stars:

Hannah Howell is not just an author she is a storyteller. The difference? A storyteller draws you in, captivates your heart, your mind. You can read a book for Many reasons, but you seek out a storyteller to be engaged, to be entertained, to laugh, to cry, to cheer. Ms Howell gives us all of that in Gilly's story. LOL funny at times, fainting amusing at others, this story will delight your heartstrings. Gilly a bright but plain lass is feeling her age. No marriage proposals and then suddenly with a visit to her lands she has no less than three knights fighting over her, and threatening to bring down the walls. She repels them with carefully drawn out plans that will have you howelling in your seat. Really telling you any more would be unfair she does it so much better. Try it you will like it.

Another five-star review of Highland Bride:

This was the first of Hannah Howell's books that I have read and it hooked me from the start. It is not the typical 'cookie-cutter' historical romance that so many others tend to be. The characters in this one came alive and were so much more realistic while still fulfilling the need for romance and sizzle. After reading Highland Bride, I sought out Ms. Howell's other Highland novels and have not been disappointed yet. I can't wait for her next one to be published. Do not miss any of her Highland trilogies. I re-read Bride after finishing the first trilogy and it was even better. They are all amazing and since I am personally married to a real Scot, I am picky when it comes to my Scottish romances. Don't miss this Highland Bride or any of her others. Well worth your time.

All E-Reads Highland books are beckoning to you. Read them in whatever format you're comfortable with, download or paperback. Collect them all!

RC

Is It a Good Deal?

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

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

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

To read the complete article, click here.

Richard Curtis

In Ancient Rome, Every Author Was on a Roll

My book is thumbed by our soldiers posted overseas, and even in Britain people quote my words. What’s the point? I don’t make a penny from it.

Just another author bitching about his profession, right? Right, except his complaint was written two thousand years ago. The author was Martial, and he was not just one of the great Roman poets of his day, he was also a defender of authors' rights, according to a delightful New York Times Book Review article by Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement.

Beard reminds us that "books" in Martial's Rome were papyrus scrolls and, as the printing press was some fourteen centuries away from invention, they were transcribed by hand, ofttimes by slaves. And - where have we heard this before? - there were plenty of ways for copyists and booksellers to rip writers off.

"Like Martial," writes Beard, "most Roman writers knew that the profits of their writing ended up in the pockets of the booksellers, who often combined retail trade with a copying business - and so were, in effect, publishers and distributors too."

"At best, the author received only a lump sum from the seller for the rights to copy his work (though once the text was “out,” there was no way of stopping pirated copies). Horace, the tame poet of the emperor Augustus, made the obvious comparison: booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes.

Bear cites numerous ways that grievances two millennia old seem no farther in the past than the last issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin:

• "There’s a lot in the Roman literary world that seems quite familiar two millenniums later: money-­making booksellers, exploited and impoverished authors, celebrity book launches and career-making prizes..."
• "With slaves on hand to summon up refreshments, it would have been not unlike the coffee shop in a modern Borders."
• "A cut-price book roll would presumably have fallen to pieces as quickly as a modern mass-market paperback. But worse, the pressure to get copies made quickly meant that they were loaded with errors and sometimes uncomfortably different from the authentic words of the author."
• "The Roman launch party took the form of select readings from the work, given semi-publicly or at exclusive invitation-only events, perhaps in the home of a rich patron."
• "Roman emperors paid for high-profile prizes, more like the Pulitzer or the Booker."
  

After reading Scrolling Down the Ages by Mary Beard, you may conclude that, compared to your Roman counterparts, you don't have it so bad after all. On the other hand, our literary forebears didn't have to put up with the torments of reserves against returns.

RC

Stephenie Meyer, Ursula Le Guin, J. K. Rowling Mugged

Digital pirates have good taste; they've stolen Stephenie Meyers' Twilight, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling.

These are some prominent victims of digital piracy, according to the New York Times's Motoko Rich, who notes that while the crime was bad enough in the age of print, it's become pandemic in the e-book era when digital files are so easy to pilfer. Rich cites such websites as Scribd and Wattpad and file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire. Scribd asserts it has stepped up efforts to police its site, but filters are pretty porous and it's not that hard to pass off a copyrighted work. Many websites wear pursuers down with legal maneuvering and place on authors the burden of proof of ownership of the copyright, adding insult to injury.

Lawyers, agents, publishers, and authors themselves have been working time-and-a-half to subdue perps but, as Science Fiction Writers of America president Russell Davis, himself an author, says, “It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole...You knock one down and five more spring up.”

And, says Hachette CEO David Young, “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented." And Young doesn't mean presented through authorized channels. "John Wiley & Sons, a textbook publisher that also issues the 'Dummies' series, employs three full-time staff members to trawl for unauthorized copies," writes Rich. "Gary M. Rinck, general counsel, said that in the last month, the company had sent notices on more than 5,000 titles — five times more than a year ago — asking various sites to take down digital versions of Wiley’s books."

Freemeister Cory Doctorow is not bothered, taking the position that giving away content - even having it taken by pirates - leads new readers to his door, where they will ultimately purchase his books. If tenure on the bestseller list is any measure, his philosophy and strategy are working. Here's how Doctorow justifies it: “I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy. It’s obscurity.”

Harlan Ellison has never had a problem with obscurity, but he fearlessly sued an Internet service provider for its failure to stop someone from displaying some of his stories. "Since settling that suit," Rich reports, "he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. 'If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,'" he told her.

We've reported extensively on efforts to control book piracy, including the conviction of the operators of a file-sharing website. You might also check out our ruminations on whether you can be sued for downloading a book.

RC

Wall Street Journal Plan to Nickel and Dime Subscribers Could Force Bloggers To Become Pirates

The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of capitalist journalism, has concluded that the Information Wants To Be Free movement is tantamount to the end of civilization, and the paper will begin charging micropayments for articles and subscriptions, according to Financial Times's Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Kenneth Li. Robert Thomson, WSJ's managing editor, says the "sophisticated" scheme will be launched in the fall.

"The move will position the Journal as the first big newspaper title to adopt a model many are studying cautiously as they seek to reduce dependence on plunging advertising revenues," say the Financial Times reporters. You can read about it in WSJ plans micro-fees for online articles.

What makes the Journal's proposal sophisticated? For the answer we turn to a recently created venture called Journalism Online, whose tenets are being studied by a number of newspapers in the hope of finding a solution to the drying up of ad revenue watering holes and the defection of subscribers to online news sources. Here are the essential talking points from Journalism Online's press release:

• First, Journalism Online will develop a password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.
• Second, Journalism Online will aggressively market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the JOI-member publishers’ content. Revenues will be shared among publishers.
• Third, a key initiative of Journalism Online will be to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.
• Fourth, Journalism Online will provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue.
  

Bloggers - pay particular attention to point #3, because it puts you on notice that you may not be able to quote, or even access, content without paying a toll. As a fair user of such content I have some serious concerns about this restriction. And, as a crusty cynic, I am quite skeptical that a news publication's content can be so airtightly controlled. The effort to restrict it might have the ironic upshot of forcing bloggers to become pirates. Even those of us who agree that information wants to be paid for may, out of self-defense, become Informationwantstobefreeites.

Click here to read the venture's press release detailing its business model and operational format.

The Journal's micropay innovation may be only the first step to a shift to an all-digital news delivery format instituted by Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp of which WSJ is a component. We recently conjectured about Murdoch's keen interest in ordering an e-reader to carry News Corp's papers and magazines, or developing one of his own.

Richard Curtis

Leaver Leaves Frankfurt, And Having Left, Moves On

They say that your name is your destiny. So, if you're going to be named Leaver, you owe it to the gods to leave something, and Marcus Leaver, President of Sterling Publishing, is leaving something: the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Der Frankfurter Buchmesse is the international publishing community's biggest annual trade show and a major station on the industry's Via Voluptuosa. Thus, for a significant publisher to pull out - Sterling is a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble - is momentous. "I'm not going to Frankfurt," Leaver declared flatly. He'll send a "very reduced team" - call it a skeleton crew? - to the Octoberfest, but as far as he's concerned, "The trade show is over."

Leaver's ukase, uttered at the recent and appropriately named Making Information Pay conference, heralded a reallocation of the company's capital. As reported by Believers Press and by Jim Milliott of Publishers Weekly, Sterling has "taken about $1 million out of our trade show, exhibition and sales conference budget" and "increased our title-by-title marketing spend 33% in a year."

Sterling wasn't the only publisher to announce withdrawal from trade shows. Dominique Raccah, the innovative CEO of Chicago-based Sourcebooks, announced at the same conference that she was cutting her trade show budget by a quarter of a million dollars, pushing her company in the direction of "a complete xml workflow."

Another precinct heard from was Simon & Schuster. The firm's CEO, Caroline Reidy, discussing S&S's latest earnings performance, stated that "we have definitely looked at our participation in trade shows" and are "cutting back dramatically our booth and participation at Frankfurt." She also hinted that the London Book Fair might be a target of cost-cutting: "participation there is being scrutinized as well," she said.

Another capital-intensive practice on the chopping block for a number of publishers is paper catalogues, and though we're all trying to enter the digital age unflinchingly, the disappearance of catalogues will be more wrenching than many other uprootings. Catalogues have long been the most familiar tool for introducing the bookstore trade to publishers' front- and backlists. They are not merely informational and often beautiful but they are a publisher's face to the world, its very identity. Even the spelling of "catalogue", despite Microsoft spellcheck's insistence on dropping the "ue", bespeaks a stubborn and beloved tradition. Be that as it may, Sterling's Leaver has lost his emotional attachment for paper catalogues, saying " "it just wasn't efficient so we've stopped doing that and it feels good." Like a number of other publishers, notably Hachette, Sterling will ditch paper catalogues for digital ones.

The digital book catalogue is a relatively untested medium and the vote to embrace it is by no means unanimous among trade publishers. A recent initiative on the subject spearheaded by Hachette's David Young was met with many polite nods but few are falling all over themselves to switch out of paper, however costly catalogues may be to produce and mail.

As long as Leaver is leaving things, he's casting an eye on author tours. Virtual tours and "webinars" are now the way to send authors out without having to leave the comforts of home (or spend a lot of money on travel bookings). "We're reaching a large market this way," he said. Raccah echoed his sentiment. "Raccah is also hugely energized by emerging digital landscape," reports Publishers Lunch.

"'In the big picture, we're creating new approaches to content,' she said. They are creating 23 iPhone apps, three of which have already been released and should be in the black before the end of the year. She spoke about 'unbundling our services' and becoming 'custom' everything' noting that 'the customer will tell you how they want to buy something.' She underscored that there is a 'tremendous opportunity for partnerships everywhere--the world just got a whole lot bigger.'"

In the cascading collapse of cherished traditions created by digital disintermediation, tangible goods like books and catalogues aren't the only victims; time and space are being reconfigured as well. For those who have not yet shifted their heads and hearts to the virtual dimension, this is a time of intense discomfort and even fear. The oft-cited analogy to the social disruption caused by the introduction of automobiles to a horse-and-buggy world is apt, but it's no comfort to know that after a painful period of adjustment the world finally got used to it.

Richard Curtis

New York Law School to Offer A Guide for the Googleplexed

Andrew Albanese reports in Publishers Weekly that New York Law School will launch "a comprehensive archive of settlement documents and related commentary, and a tool for users to insert their own analyses and commentary on individual paragraphs of the proposed settlement." Interestingly, the initiative will be paid for with a grant by Microsoft.

It's greatly hoped that the Public Index project, as it is called, will once and for all clear up the confusion that drove authors, agents and publishers nuts as the original court-set deadline of May 5 approached. So voluble was their clamor that the court extended the deadline to October 7, and this time everyone wants to get it right.

PW says the Index will offer "both authoritative information and analysis as well as 'a forum for the public to make their own voices heard.' That effort will include an 'open source amicus brief,' a wiki that will give users the opportunity to 'edit and discuss' a draft of the NYLS’s comments on the deal, to be submitted to the court by September 4."

And if you're not completely Settlemented out by then, the school will host a conference from Thursday, October 8, to Saturday, October 10, 2009 paralleling the court's hearings. There will be panels and tutorials and possibly demonstrations of Extreme Settlementing. Participants are advised to bring blankets or sleeping bags and enough food to sustain them for three days of Google immersion.

Click here for the full PW report.

RC

Library Way: A Must-See for Bipedal Bibliophiles

A few days ago I showed up ten minutes late for a luncheon appointment. My excuse? I stopped to read bronze plaques on the sidewalk. Luckily, my dining companion was a publisher, and when I explained the delay, he not only understood but joined me after lunch to read the plaques with me.

There are 96 set into the sidewalk on 41st Street between Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, and it is known at Library Way. Each is uniquely and exquisitely fashioned and carries a quotation from the world's great authors.

As I learned, the project was initiated in 1996 by the Grand Central Partnership, the New York Public Library and New Yorker Magazine. This group created a panel of librarians and literati to cull the quotations. They then engaged Gregg LeFevre, a prominent artist, to produce fitting designs into which to set the quotes. In 2003 Mayor Michael Bloomberg dedicated this stretch of street and named it Library Way.

But that's just the beginning, for the plaques are the first step to transform this relatively dreary sidestreet into a destination, sort of New York City's answer to San Antonio's River Walk, but built completely around the theme of books.

An article in 2000 by Martha Schweitzer, then President-Elect of the New York Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, projected the city's vision for Library Way:

"At Madison Avenue and 41st Street, a building under construction will open soon as a 60 room boutique hotel with a theme which offers a clue – it will be called the Library. Each floor will have a different subject – social science, geography, Slavic languages – the rooms will be stocked with books, and the room key will be a library card. This hotel was recently featured in an article in The New York Times. A new office tower is in the works for the space across Madison Avenue. You are seeing the first fruits of a plan to transform East 41st Street between Fifth and Park Avenues into a gracious promenade called 'Library Way.'

"As you stand on 41st Street and look toward Fifth Avenue, you see the grand New York Public Library building presiding over the head of the street. The plan for Library Way proposes to frame the vista to and from this elegant building by adding trees, sculpture, street lamps, and vendor bookstalls similar to those found on Paris walks. An effort will be made to encourage the retail stores along the street to imaginatively feature products and services that benefit from proximity to Library users and related cultural activities. On weekends, the Grand Central Partnership will seek to close the street for a market and festivities."

The Library Hotel is open for business and, true to its concept, the home page of its website boasts that each floor "is dedicated to one of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System: Social Sciences, Literature, Languages, History, Math & Science, General Knowledge, Technology, Philosophy, The Arts and Religion."

But if you do nothing else, stroll west on East 41st Street and read the plaques. A lot of impatient New Yorkers may complain that you're in the way. Just flip them the bird in true New Yorker fashion.

To view all the plaques, click here, then click on the individual ones to enlarge and read them. If this causes you to be late for a lunch date, just forward this blog to your dining companions - they'll understand.

Richard Curtis
Plaque images © G. LeFevre 1998

I'll Have Four Sesames, Four Poppy-Seeds, and One Copy of War and Peace

We recently covered the debut of the Espresso 2 print on demand machine, a mini-printing press that can be installed in a bookstore and produce paperbacks While U Wait. "Now you can visit a bookstore, order a book online, and pick your copy up after a leisurely cup of coffee," we wrote. We're keenly looking forward to the demo that Perseus is planning at Book Expo America. They 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.

But - have you ever wondered why print on demand presses have to be restricted to bookstores? Just because they're all about books? By that token, the only place you'd be able to get cash is a bank, but most of us can get it at an ATM on the street. As digital technology disintermediates middle agencies like bookstores, there's no reason why you couldn't set up a kiosk just about anywhere.

If you think outside the bookstore box, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that, as POD printing technology improves and miniaturizes, tabletop presses could be installed in a Wal-Mart, Macy's or 7-Eleven. You just go to any neighborhood kiosk and browse Amazon or Barnes & Noble or another book retail website, make your selection, enter your credit card and order the book. Finish shopping or get a cup of coffee, then come back and pick up your bound volume, still warm like a fresh bagel. Hey, you can put POD presses in bagel shops too! Just don't shmear lox spread on your newly minted paperback.

RC

Get a Free Jumbo Kindle with Your NYT Subscription

King Gillette lives! The spirit of the mogul, who transformed product marketing by giving away the razor and selling the blades, hovered over Amazon's press conference unveiling the big-screen Kindle DX. There, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. pledged to subsidize the full price of the jumbo reading device for subscribers committing to long-term subscriptions. The retail price of the DX is $489.00.

We did a little research and learned that a daily subscription to the Times in our area of Manhattan will cost $5.30 per week at current rates. At that rate, we would have to enlist for one year and forty weeks.*

It's not a bad deal for subscribers - you end up with a Kindle that you can use for many other things besides reading the newspaper. But is it a good one for the Times? Gawker, the snarky media website, doesn't think so. In fact, Gawker doesn't think so at all. The site's Owen Thomas thinks Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos "has managed to scare the press lords into shelling out their precious remaining cash into funding the distribution of his pricey e-reader..." and "...he's cajoled the gullible likes of Sulzberger into handing him a pile of cash."

"If he's such a big believer in supporting journalism," asks Thomas, "why didn't Bezos announce he was personally giving away 160,000 Kindles to people who agreed to sign up for a newspaper subscription?"

Well, maybe Bezos never heard of King Gillette.

Read A Bigger Kindle Makes Jeff Bezos Richer and Newspapers Poorer.

RC
*(Of course, the Times would get a discount for buying Kindles in volume; on the other hand, subscribers who commit to long-term subscriptions also get discounts, so the two discounts wash each other out.)

The New Kindle DX: Amazon's First Large Screen Reader

As we've been expecting, today Jeff Bezos announced the new Kindle DX, a $489 large screen (9.7") e-book reader modeled after the Kindle 2. The DX is the first big step in Amazon's effort to create a platform for newspapers, textbooks, and other large scale documents. While developers such as Plastic Logic and Hearst are still preparing their large format devices, Amazon has beat them all out of the gate with a device available this summer in the U.S. (exact first shipping date is yet unknown.)

Besides the larger screen, the Kindle DX offers some special improvements: 3.3GB of storage, wide screen reading (rotate the device sideways), native PDF support (it's unknown if Amazon will support DRM for this format), and resizing/reflowing based on how many words per line you want. Other features remain similar to the Kindle 2, such as 3G Whispernet wireless service, USB charging, and the 16 shades of grey.

Importantly, Amazon has been working to ensure new content is available from newspaper and text book publishers. New arrangements with the New York Times, Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle will offer special rate subscriptions that will subsidize the cost of the DX. And Princeton, Arizona State University, Case Western, Reed College, and the University of Virginia will all be piloting programs serving text books to students with the Kindle DX. Hopefully, when more information about this initiative comes out, we'll see what Amazon's foray into the $9.8 billion text book market has in store for students at other universities.

The Kindle DX is available for pre-order now, although its price is $120 more than the Kindle 2, which continues to sell well. Many people who've already purchased the Kindle 2 may be feeling annoyed that the new model boasts the extra screen real estate and PDF support, but perhaps the higher cost pushes the Kindle DX farther out of reach for most casual customers. The premium will be worth it for those people who work extensively with large PDF documents, and when Amazon's text book pricing is revealed it may actually represent a big savings for students. Those who use the device over a number of years will probably get the most savings. However, at the rate that the technology is developing, the Kindle DX might not have the long legs you'd expect to justify its cost, especially when students might want to wait until a color device and more text books are easily found at retail to begin their investment strategy in an e-book device. University book stores will have to find a way to compete, and digital text books also means no used texts or selling-back for students. But we have to start somewhere. It might just be that the DX is an appetizer for things to come.

- Michael Gaudet

Not a Quickie, Exactly. More Like a Slowie.

We've been writing a lot about instant books lately and their slightly - but only slightly - slower cousins, quickies. There's are no hard definitions for these genres, so let's make some up.

An instant book is one released within hours or days of an event's occurrence. A quickie might take weeks or months. Both are products of digital publication. They may be released in e-book or print on demand format or both. However, owing to the hard realities of offset printing and book distribution, short of a heroic and prohibitively expensive effort (called "crashing"), a traditional book simply cannot be published and released into store channels in less than several months after completion of the editorial and production process. That's just a fact of life.

That's the context in which we read about Farrar, Straus & Giroux's fast-tracking of William Langewiesche's account of the emergency ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. That happened in January. The book is scheduled for November. Ten months for a quickie.

Though the New York Times's Andrew Adam Newman describes the process as "just a blink of a book editor’s bespectacled eye," it looks pretty glacial to a YouTube generation that knew everything it needed to know within hours of the astounding event. Sure, some of those ten months from splashdown to publication date were taken up by writing the book - something that quickie-watchers tend to overlook. Still, it plays up the immense disparity between pre- and post-digital quickies. “In the old days," says the book's editor Jonathan Galassi, "it would be ideally a year from delivery of the manuscript to publication, but now I’m hoping we can do books in four months.”

Alas, four months is about 119 days too long by 21st century standards, and so no matter what Farrar does to goose (awful pun intended) the Flight 1549 book along, a quickie will always be a slowie unless the publisher goes out with it as an original e-book. And some of us have real problems with traditional publishers releasing e-book originals. Farrar, Straus & Giroux being the quintessentially traditional publisher, it's hard to know what they're going to do if they have to publish a true quickie. But Galassi says help is on the way in the form of "measures that include editing copy electronically and streamlining design."

RC

Behind the Kindle Curtain: Glimpse Amazon Reader's Jumbo Screen

In advance of Wednesday's Amazon.com press conference about - well, something or other - Daniel Ionescu of PC World writes that "pictures and details regarding the new Kindle DX have surfaced. Amazon's new e-book reader will have a 9.7-inch display and sports new features such as a built-in PDF reader." This jibes with our own speculations.

It's being referred to as the DX but more popularly the Jumbo, and will provide users with the ability to read newspapers and magazines formatted to look like their paper counterparts, and to highlight docs and make notes. Engadget seems to have copped the above photo.

A large-screen Kindle has been rumored for some time, and it just may be that the pressure of new - potentially better? - devices on stream from competitors has forced Amazon to make a preemptive announcement. We'd all be thrilled if Jumbo Kindle and its rivals were to rescue the magazine and newspaper industry. But what really turned me on is this:

"Some universities are also gearing up for the DX. Reports say that Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, together with Pace, Princeton, Reed, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State will equip their students with a brand-new DX to carry their textbooks.

"These university students will get this autumn their chemistry and computer science texbooks on a Kindle DX while the less lucky ones will still have to go to the library to get their books says the report. Amazon's move towards the textbook industry was expected though, as reports from as early as last year suggested the company would jump in to the $5.5 billion market."

From the moment I set eyes on a tablet-sized device I knew this day would come. The prize for the right student-friendly portable e-book is worth billions, but the current models of Kindle, Sony, and some other small-screeners (including cell phones) are simply inadequate for textbooks, illustrated books, schoolwork and homework. Read Kindle Sequel on the Way, But Will It Play on Campus? and you'll understand why I'm beginning to think it's time to uncork the champagne I put on ice ten years ago.

Richard Curtis

E at Last! E at Last! Tolkien Estate Goes E at Last!

What do J. K. Rowling, Thomas Pynchon, Günter Grass and Cynthia Ozick have in common? According to AP National Writer Hillel Italie, they refuse to have their books produced in electronic format.

Rowling has been quite vocal about it, but vocal and logical don't always go hand in hand. Jeff Gomez, author of Print is Dead and blogger on a website of the same name, has been critical of Rowling's Ludditious opposition to going E:

"If the Harry Potter books were made available as eBooks the sales for them would be huge and it would put a stop to the widespread — and meticulously coordinated — piracy efforts which are always put into effect seconds after any Harry Potter book becomes available. What Rowling doesn’t seem to realize is that people who want to read this book electronically are going to do so anyway, so why not let them do it legally? People would never bother to pirate something that already exists (which the success of iTunes has proven). But Rowling seems to be desperately (and obstinately) clinging to some Victorian notion of a writer as a scribbler of hand-written tomes, with noble ink-stained fingers making delicate row upon row of script on foolscap."

The e-resistance movement isn't all philosophical. A number of authors and agents don't trust the technology and fear that going digital will unleash an evil genie that will never return to its bottle. (No matter that, as Gomez points out, withholding e-books actually makes it easier for torrent-bit pirates to give the texts away.)

Still other authors and agents are waiting for advances to be paid (few are these days), and contend that the royalty rate offered by publishers is inadequate. That royalty seems to have settled in throughout the industry at 25% of net receipts after Random House declared it and Simon & Schuster followed suit. For a good summary of what's griping content providers, read Orson Scott Card's screed.

(By way of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a royalty of 50% of net receipts.)

One major holdout that has emerged out of the dark depths of Digital Mordor is J. R. R.Tolkien. "The Tolkien estate wanted to be absolutely confident that e-books were not something ephemeral," a spokesperson for HarperCollins UK stated. "We were finally able to convince the Tolkien estate that the e-book is a legitimate, widespread format."

So, Tolkien fans, have those thumbs poised for downloading - your day is nigh!

For more on the controversy and a survey of some other surprising stick-in-the-mud authors, click here.

RC

Is Big-Screen Kindle Subject of May 6 Amazon Press Conference?

What do an article in the New York Times and an emailed invitation to an Amazon.com press conference have in common? That's what we'd like to know, and that's why we'll be at the door mid-morning Wednesday, May 6th.

We're not sure if Las Vegas posts odds for stuff like this, but if we were gamblers we'd put a few chips on two possible announcements. The first is that Amazon will be producing a tablet-sized Kindle dedicated to newspaper and magazine reading. The second is that Amazon is teaming up with a major newspaper or magazine publisher to bring you a digital edition of your daily paper or favorite magazine.

That brings us to the Times's article, Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press by Brad Stone. The gist? "Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens."

"These devices from Amazon and other manufacturers offer an almost irresistible proposition to newspaper and magazine industries. They would allow publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure."

For those who follow our postings, most of the information in Stone's piece will be familiar. For instance: "These new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print." Check out our pieces about Plastic Logic's as yet unnamed device and the iRex 1000. The former is notable because of its state-of-the-art screen technology, the latter because it has successfully carried newspaper and magazines for a long time and actually beaten Kindle at its own game.

Stone's mention of News Corp's interest developing a device for its publications is detailed in a recent piece asking if that company's boss Rupert Murdoch is "ready to get E-ink on his fingers".

And of course, for many of our readers, Amazon's plans for large screen Kindles are old news.

Stone accurately observes that this new generation of tablet-sized readers offers publishers an opportunity "to rethink their strategy in a rapidly evolving digital world. The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions." But most intriguing of all is his speculation that newspaper and magazine publishers might "borrow from the cellphone model and offer specialized reading devices free or at a discount to people who commit to, say, a one-year subscription."

For some time we have been invoking the spirit of King Gillette, inventor of the modern safety razor, whose motto and fabulously successful approach to fame and fortune was to "Give away the razor and sell 'em the blades." You can read all about that here, and it just may be an idea whose time has come.

Our thumbs are limber for an instant posting after Amazon's press conference. But it won't surprise us if there are no surprises.

RC

Mike Shatzkin Hurls a Paving Stone at Etailer Discounts

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

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

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

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

Is Shatzkin suggesting publishers fight boycott with boycott?

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Curtis

Okay, He Wrote It on a Smartphone With His Thumbs. But Is It Any Good? Del Rey Thinks So

Devin Coldewey in MobileCrunch reports that fantasy author Peter Brett wrote The Warded Man, a 100,000 word fantasy, on his HP iPaq over three years of subway commuting. "I would have thought it an impossible task to thumb out more than, say, 5-10% on something like a smartphone. But this guy seems to actually thrive doing it," Coldewey writes. "If he knew he was going to be doing so much typing, why not get something with a really sweet keypad like a Sidekick or Blackberry?"

For an interview with thumbster Brett, a Scribd glimpse of the book and some entertaining comments, check out Coldewey's blog. The gist of many of the comments is that the Japanese have been writing novels on cell phones for years - we posted about it in fall of 2007. So, not everyone is as impressed as Coldewey about the achievement.

The more germane question is, is the book any good? Well, it's been published by Del Rey/Spectra, the highly respected science fiction and fantasy imprint of Random House, got some nice quotes (such as Terry Brooks) and 16 five-star Amazon reviews out of 21 posted as of this date. A lot of writers would give their thumbs, pinkies or other choice parts to claim as much.

RC

Can You Tell a Book (Reader) from the Cover?

Scene: Lunch hour, one summer long ago. A forlorn young man, looking like a fugitive from Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, sits alone on a bench in Bryant Park reading a Dostoyevesky novel. An adorable girl sitting on another bench and eating a sandwich notices him and approaches. "Dostoyevsky! You must be SO deep!" The young man blushes and stammers, "Well..." She places her hand over his, sending an electric charge through his body. She gazes at him raptly. "I'd love to get to know you. Let's take the rest of the day off!"

I'm abashed, Dear Reader, to admit that that forlorn young man on the bench your faithful blogger. And I'm even sadder to admit that that that romantic scenario never materialized. Lunch hour after lunch hour, Dostoyevsky novel after Dostoyevsky novel, I sat on a bench looking soulfully at girls and nurturing in vain the fantasy that they would notice my book and approach me. (Vain soul that I was, it never occurred to me to approach them.)

I've since learned that using book jackets as date-bait is a common ploy. Joanne Kaufman, writing in the New York Times, describes some instances:

"Michael Silverblatt, host of the weekly public radio show 'Bookworm,' uses the term 'literary desire' to describe the attraction that comes with seeing a stranger reading your favorite book or author. 'When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person,' he said."

And...

"David Rosenthal, the executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, recalls the advent of Vintage paperbacks, a line of literary fiction that 'could fit precisely into the pocket of your Levi’s with the title slowing, and it was an advertisement for what kind of intellectual you were.'”

Say goodbye to that pickup tactic. As the E-Book Era unfolds, you will never again be able to form an instant impression of a stranger from the book he or she is reading, or send a signal of your own. Why? Because, in Kaufman's words, "for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, 'He’s Just Not That Into You'?" Kaufman describes the Kindle as "the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper."

For her analysis of other ways that e-reading devices are affecting literary snobbism, read With Kindle, Can You Tell It’s Proust?

RC

Orson Scott Card Finds Kindle's Royalties Laughable But Not Funny

"So where, Amazon, is the incentive for authors to allow their books to be sold for the Kindle? The economics need to change, and soon."

That's the bottom line of Orson Scott Card's take on Amazon's royalty structure for Kindle sales. In a blog on Rhinotimes.com, Card casts a jaundiced eye on the imbalance between Amazon's profit per sale and the author's take-home pay.

Though traditional print publisher pay authors a modest royalty, Card is okay with it because the costs of printing, distributing and retailing hard copies is so high. "But with the Kindle and other electronic book systems" he points out, "nobody has to pay for unsold copies because none are ever printed. Nor does Amazon have to pay for rent or utilities for bookstores all over the country. They have exactly one bookstore, which is online, so when a book is "displayed" on the website, it is there on display for people all over the world to see it and buy it."

"I don't begrudge them their share," he says. "I begrudge them the obscene percentage they keep and the laughable share they give to the author."

(As a matter of disclosure, E-Reads pays a royalty of 50% of net receipts on e-book sales.)

Read Card's complete blog here.

RC

Your Heart is in the Highlands with 14 New Hannah Howell Scottish Romances

Hannah Howell's Highland Bride is one of E-Reads' bestselling romances, and we're delighted to say we've acquired another 14 to tuck into your sporran. If you haven't reveled in the wild beauty of Howell's highlands and the wilder beauty of the feisty women and untamed lovers who inhabit her fiction, here's your chance.

Diane E. Griffith, an Amazon.com reviewer, perfectly captures the allure of a typical Howell book and awards it five stars:

Hannah Howell is not just an author she is a storyteller. The difference? A storyteller draws you in, captivates your heart, your mind. You can read a book for Many reasons, but you seek out a storyteller to be engaged, to be entertained, to laugh, to cry, to cheer. Ms Howell gives us all of that in Gilly's story. LOL funny at times, fainting amusing at others, this story will delight your heartstrings. Gilly a bright but plain lass is feeling her age. No marriage proposals and then suddenly with a visit to her lands she has no less than three knights fighting over her, and threatening to bring down the walls. She repels them with carefully drawn out plans that will have you howelling in your seat. Really telling you any more would be unfair she does it so much better. Try it you will like it.

Another five-star review of Highland Bride:

This was the first of Hannah Howell's books that I have read and it hooked me from the start. It is not the typical 'cookie-cutter' historical romance that so many others tend to be. The characters in this one came alive and were so much more realistic while still fulfilling the need for romance and sizzle. After reading Highland Bride, I sought out Ms. Howell's other Highland novels and have not been disappointed yet. I can't wait for her next one to be published. Do not miss any of her Highland trilogies. I re-read Bride after finishing the first trilogy and it was even better. They are all amazing and since I am personally married to a real Scot, I am picky when it comes to my Scottish romances. Don't miss this Highland Bride or any of her others. Well worth your time.

A special treat is her Murray trilogy set in medieval Scotland, a saga of clan warfare, divided loyalties, and forbidden love. The titles are Highland Destiny, Highland Honor, and Highland Promise.

All E-Reads Highland books are now available for download, but watch this space for news of trade paperback editions, now in production. Collect them all!

RC

William C. Dietz's Words for Hire #1 - Game Tie-Ins

William C. Dietz is the best-selling author of more than thirty novels, some of which have been reissued by E-Reads. Recently he was invited by the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Bulletin to write a bi-monthly column called "Words for Hire," exploring the world of media tie-ins and novelizations. The articles demystify a fascinating genre and we're delighted to reprint them as a regular feature in these pages.
RC
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William C. Dietz introduces his first column:

Over the course of these columns I plan to drill down on the business end of work-for-hire by examining the way gaming companies view tie-in novels, the way TV/Film companies approach them, and the important role publishers and agents play in the process. That includes why companies commission tie-ins, what they look for in writers, and how the selection process works.

Continue here