Search Results for 'future of books already here' ↓

Today’s New York Times takes note of the digital revolution that may or may not be coming to the book industry:

That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple with the Web’s ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.

Motoko Rich goes on to note:

Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists.

So says the New York Times.
In fact there is no such discussion going on in the book world. The conventional wisdom is that because the e-book was such a bust, digital technology will never threaten books.

How’s that for intelligent reasoning?

This attitude pervades the business—its young denizens as well as its ancient ones, and (almost) everyone in between.

That’s the way it is.

update: Welcome, BuzzMachine readers! Take a look here to see who I am and what this blog is about. Sorta. Thanks for the link, Jeff!

In a frontal assault on the literary establishment (and sounding just as enthusiastic about the digital future of books as Jeff Jarvis), longtime book publishing maven Joni Evans tells “large elite fish in a small pond” John Updike*** to get a grip and think of authors other than himself.

Here’s the text of her letter to the New York Times Book Review (July 16):

Whose Revolution?

To the Editor:

John Updike’s eloquent essay about digital publishing, ”The End of Authorship” (June 25), misses one fundamental point. Updike does not have to join the revolution. Digitization is optional. The Internet operates in the world of Also, Either/Or, Not One Way. Updike’s intentions of privacy and intimacy are safe; his copyright thoroughly protects his choice to remain nonenhanced, nondigitized, nonhyperlinked and nonsearchable.

But what is good for John Updike is not necessarily good for the millions of authors the current system has locked out. Creativity does not flourish when books can’t find publishers or when audiences cannot be sustained. Those authors whose works remain unpublished, out of print, out of stock or out of date will be the ones to march in the digital revolution. Updike is a large, elite fish in a small pond. The digital pond is primarily for other species — smaller, less recognized, exotic fish that need the oxygen this new world provides.
JONI EVANS
New York
The writer has worked for many years as an editor, publisher and literary agent.

————-

*** I grumbled about John Updike’s reactionary fears here and here. Search the “books” and “publishing” categories to see more of what I’ve written about this subject.

Via GalleyCat comes news (to me) that there are some people (apart from Jason Epstein, whom I mentioned here and here) who aren’t just thinking about the future of books or saying they’re making plans; they’re actually doing something about it.

[The Instititute for the Future of the Book] is working toward a vision of what books can be. This summer, it will release the first version of Sophie, an “all-purpose tool” for creating multimedia texts. Like the institute itself, Sophie’s mission is both simple and complex: to help authors easily create books that use any medium …. It’s a key goal, because the future of the book lies in the hands of authors first. Give them the tools they need to deliver dynamic, digital books, and dynamic digital books will flourish.

Echoing what Jeff Jarvis has been saying at BuzzMachine, GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan highlights the fact that “moving online will transform the relationship that books have to their readers and to each other.”

In an interview, Institute fellow Ben Vershnow goes even further. He says that intellectual discourse itself “is moving away from print to networked, digital media.”

Here’s part of an interview with Vershbow:

What about those who provide and use information today? Surely there are legal, cultural, and business interests in keeping information flowing?

Our notion of intellectual property also defines the parameters of how we interact with information and culture. Today’s media industries want to preserve old business models built on scarcity in a network of abundance. Clearly, notions of value need to be recalibrated, but these industries are determined to stick with what they know. So, we find ourselves tangled in a web of restrictions, closely monitored in our use of media online. … [This issue, among others, comes] down, in one way or another, to ownership. Who owns the Internet? We the people who create it and make it meaningful or the companies that maintain the plumbing? Who owns works of authorship? Do we own them once we’ve paid a fair price for them, or are we always tourists in someone’s closely surveilled online reserve? And perhaps most troubling, who owns our network identities?

What future for the print book? Is it even conceivable that future generations will eschew the benefit of multimedia?

It’s really impossible to predict exactly what will happen to print books. Of one thing, though, I am pretty certain: the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media. That doesn’t mean that certain forms of print books will not persist. In fact, the mass migration to computers and the Internet in some ways serves as a foil for print, dispensing with its more circumstantial uses and highlighting its most essential virtues. There are certain kinds of books I’m convinced will cease to exist on paper: directories, reference works, textbooks, travel guides, to name a few. But deep, linear narrative works read for pleasure like novels, biographies, and certain forms of history may persist in print for some time. [emphasis mine***]Then again, this could simply be a generational question. People raised with high-quality electronic reading devices, using only multimedia electronic texts in school and forming little or no attachment to dead-tree media, may consider paper books at best fascinating antiquities, at worst, inert, useless things.

———

***I also think narrative works may persist in print. And I also believe they should remain whole. Here’s what I had to say on the subject over at BuzzMachine:

1. Hepzeeba Says:
   May 27th, 2006 at 6:28 pm There are many thriving online communities and sites devoted to spreading the word about little-known works of fiction, non-fiction, works by foreign authors (not translated into English), etc. There’s a huge conversation about books taking place online. The lit world has yet to acknowledge it.The same lit world has yet to acknowledge that Bush is president, that computers make your life and your job easier, and that the world isn’t flat, however. Plus, they’re not the ones who are holding back the revolution. It all revolves around licensing issues: who’s gonna get paid for the content, how much, and how. And digitizing your back catalogue is a huge investment. Google has the money. Publishers don’t.Yes: hands-off fiction. But I think you’ll find that you want to keep hands off many non-fiction books as well: everything from the big biographies to nonfiction narratives to memoirs to popular histories, etc. Also, authors will want to keep their works whole. Don’t underestimate that, or their reasons. Some of it really is art, and not meant for mashing-up. And it is their work, and the decision should be theirs.Which doesn’t mean all of it shouldn’t be available digitally, in various formats, and that there shouldn’t also be value-added stuff (maybe like the supplementary materials PBS offers on its Frontline website) and that people shouldn’t start to apply themselves and start thinking about and creating the book world they want to inhabit in the future.

   Apparently, Carly Fiorina had many choice words for publishers, telling them that they will not be able to hold back the tide and should stop trying. She also said some really stupid things about the editorial process, though, so she may have shot herself in the foot.

It looks like the “try anything” ethos is indeed—finally—taking hold among book publishers. Following on news of HarperCollins’s new “studio” comes this report about a project from Crown that was disseminated over the Internet by its author before he landed his book deal:

By rising to prominence without the financial backing of a mega-publisher, Sigler has defied the industry’s modus operandi. He’s discovered how to assemble, retain and sell to a growing audience, all on a shoestring budget.

“We are always looking for authors who have a platform and a core fan base, and our goal is to grow their audience and find new readers,” said Tina Constable, Crown’s publisher. “Scott is no exception and his fan base is already formidable. The wave of the future is how we harness the Internet to find these new readers, and we are devoting an enormous amount of energy and resources into this effort. The traditional model for publishing our books is quickly becoming obsolete and we recognize that creative Internet strategies are necessary if we want to remain competitive.”

There is vast, wide open country for enterprising types looking to exploit the very Long Tail of book publishing.

Saddle up!

In a letter to shareholders, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos proclaims the success of the Kindle:

’ll highlight a few of the useful features we built into Kindle that go beyond what you could ever do with a physical book. If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Most important is the seamless, simple ability to find a book and have it in 60 seconds. When I’ve watched people do this for the first time, it’s clear the capability has a profound effect on them. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

 

---

Publishers—including all the major publishers—have embraced Kindle, and we’re thankful for that. From a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of advantages to Kindle. Books never go out of print, and they never go out of stock. Nor is there ever waste from over-printing. Most important, Kindle makes it more convenient for readers to buy more books. Anytime you make something simpler and lower friction, you get more of it.

 Well yeah, dude.

This is looking more and more like the tipping point for the book business, as I suspected it would be when I wrote:

kindles interest

December 6th, 2007 — books, publishing

It looks like Amazon has hit the sweet spot with the Kindle, its new reading device. There’s a ton of press, much of it positive.

…

I think it was a year and a half ago [in early 2006  ---ed.] that I wrote “the future of books is here.” There’s an awful lot of press right now, so it’s hard to say amidst the fog of PR whether or not the Kindle will ignite (ha ha ha HA!) the imaginations of gadget lovers as well as book lovers. Its wireless capability just may give it the kind of crossover appeal to make the idea of an electronic device for reading books stick. And that’s more than half the battle, I believe.

Which means that books may finally be tipping over into the digital realm for real. I’ve been writing about this subject for a long time on the blog. And I’m also the author of the slogan

if you love books, set them free™

So I’m pleased about this development.

The book business is great terrain for the long tail, and it will—eventually, after a lot more disruption in the lives of publishers, agents, authors, and wannabes—entertain, enlighten, and enrich the lives of more people in the world, in places where it’s hard to reach them now. The potential for the spread of knowledge is unfathomably huge.

Eventually, everyone will win.

Meanwhile, Bezos tries to make the claim that the Kindle will stretch short attention spans:

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. … Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. … As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools. 

I’m not buying that argument. I believe that info-snacking is very much here to stay. I also believe that the “info” we’re getting via the media (old and new)  is being produced in snack-sized bits (and bytes) and that, more and more, the content will be molded to fit an info-snacking world.

But I’m optimistic about the future of books as we know them, and about our maintaining our long attention span, the potential for which is probably hardwired into us.

The thing is this: it requires discipline on the part of the user to exercise a long attention span. We are the agents of our own fate. We need to unplug in order to concentrate.

It’s a choice. Don’t blame the tools. Use your attention span or lose it.

Publishing veteran Peter Osnos describes a breakthrough experiment in publishing that will be unveiled next spring: the simultaneous publication of books in five different formats—hardcover, paperback, digital (for desk, lap, and hand computers), audio, and large print.

For the past year, I have been working in partnership with a group of publishing industry colleagues on a project we call Caravan, supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Each of the seven contributing publishers (leading university presses and other nonprofits) is going to be releasing books in the Caravan demonstration phase next spring in every way technology will permit. About two dozen books will be released simultaneously in the traditional printed version in hardcover or paperback supplemented, if necessary to keep the book in ready supply, by the latest version of print-on-demand technology. At the same time, the book will be available in digital formats for reading on computers (desk, lap, and hand) either in full or in parts. An audio version will be read by its author or a professional reader and downloadable on to your favored listening device. Finally (at least so far) the books will be rendered in a large-type format.

Hallelujah.

I’m neither a futurist nor an interested party (except as a book lover and casual observer of trends who looks forward to a bright future for books when their content will be offered through many channels and via many platforms), but Evan Schnittman’s scenario about the pedestrian future of e-books [bottom line: they should and will, he predicts, be free] seems plausible to me:

My thinking was somewhat influenced by the events of the last couple of weeks. First Steve Jobs is quoted about the Kindle saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” One week later, Don Katz sold Audible, his digital audio platform and online retail store that was to spoken word recording what iTunes is to digital music, to Amazon for $300mm. Audible licenses its platform to Apple for use on the iPod/iTunes.

In my mind a connection was made between these events as I started to wonder if Jobs, smarting over the loss of Audible’s platform, was lashing out at Amazon. Then I wondered if this was a classic Jobs line – deflecting any interest in something and then a year later releasing that very thing. However, this idle speculation ebbed and a more interesting connection took its place – a link established in my mind between ebooks and audiobooks.

I have evolved my thinking to see that a “thriving” ebook market will look much more like the audio book market than the print book market. (I should mention that I see the parallel only in size, scope, and type of audience, not in market factors, content delivery, cost of production, or experiential preference. Audio books are not about reading – ebooks are all about reading.)

If one looks closely at how people like me use ebooks, you will see that convenience and portability is what drives use. While ebooks have been around for nearly 10 years in fairly usable forms, the devices to read them have been terrible – until now with the recent generation of e-ink readers such as the Kindle. (Yes, there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy reading on their PDA, iphone, laptop, etc – but let’s be honest; they are a tiny and low revenue producing audience.)

The growth I see in ebooks mimics the audio book phenomenon- by connecting readers who commute or travel with the content they crave. Audiobooks have made a marketplace out of people getting book content when they cannot read and has taught people to enjoy being read to again. Similarly, Ebooks are a brilliant option when you can bring everything you are reading with you and an even better option when you can buy instantly wherever you happen to be – just as digital audio downloads onto an iPod have done for the folks who don’t want to schlep around CD’s or cassettes.

 Via Michael Cader at Publishers Marketplace [subscription required]:

Returning to the Free eBook with Purchase Idea
Oxford’s Evan Schnittman has a two-part post on Oxford blog asking “Do I Believe in Ebooks?” Ultimately, what he does believe is that “an ebook license be granted as part of the purchase price to anyone who buys a new print book.”

He writes: “I have come to this somewhat radical idea, not because I am one of the folks who believe all digital content should be free for the benefit of mankind. Nor did I come to this conclusion because I don’t believe there will ever be a place for ebooks. I came to this conclusion after becoming a fairly heavy user of ebooks and learning first hand what is best and worst about ebooks.

“The reality is that even if the current audience of ebook users were to grow by magnitudes over the next few years, the total market would only reach 3 to 4% of print. Therefore we must admit to ourselves as an industry that ebooks will always be a small niche player as a standalone platform and make them free with new book purchases.

“Making ebooks free with new print books will be an operational puzzle that most will scoff at. While there certainly are huge issues to overcome, there are already many initiatives and ventures in place that make such a notion feasible.

“In the end this could be a marketer and merchandiser dream. I believe moving to free ebooks with the purchase of a new print title would cost or lose the industry nothing in sales as ebooks would still be available for individual purchase for those who don’t want to spend on print. What we would gain is that books – print books – would increase in value and utility.”

Recent post
First post

I await the bright future of a world awash with the cumulative information—and wisdom—of all mankind.

And I wish for every person access to the information and wisdom that can set him/her free.

It was in that spirit that I once wrote:

If you love books, set them free.

What’s the rush to get rid of printed books? asks Edward Tenner. They’re hard to create, even with today’s technology, and there’s value in scarcity: rare books are already becoming more valuable. Plus: you can use digital media to complement print and vice versa.

Upshot—there’s life in them printed books yet. So it’s all good:

Despite the enduring positional advantage of print-plus-Web over Web-only, Internet authorship of all kinds will also continue to flourish as a counterbalance to conventional media. Yes, the Web might be promoting a pseudodemocracy harking back to the class society of Victorian England, when W.S. Gilbert’s Grand Inquisitor lampooned ordinary Britons’ dreams of glory in The Gondoliers: “When everybody’s somebody, then no one’s anybody.”

But empowerment isn’t entirely an illusion. To balance the cleric’s dour judgment, we should recall the cheerier conclusion of the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But even though I’m the author of the slogan If You Love Books, Set Them Free (TM) and I long for books to be available digitally as print-on-demand (especially those many, many books that have been out of print forever, are lost to book lovers and scholars, and deserve to be available), I know there’s plenty of room in the marketplace for books in all forms—certainly including print. People long for knowledge, want information, and crave stories. They read. Give them what they want, and they will come back for more.

And at least one publisher seems to realize that there is marketing potential for lavish, expensive, illustrated versions of previous bestsellers: Today, Simon & Schuster announced a new edition of its massive hit 1776 by David McCullough:

“If history has a lesson, it’s that art more closely represents the essence of a civilization than does politics and the military.”

McCullough’s theory is brought to life in his new book, a deluxe edition of “1776″ that Simon & Schuster will publish this fall. Priced at $65, “1776: The Illustrated Edition” will feature an abridged text of McCullough’s 2005 best seller and numerous pictures and documents, including paintings by Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull and replicas of maps and letters and an early draft of the Declaration of Independence.

“I hope it can mark a beginning of more of this kind of integration of art and history,” says McCullough, speaking from a hotel in St. Louis, where he was in the midst of a Midwestern lecture tour.

“I’ve tried, as much as I can, to encourage teachers to teach history this way — there’s nothing like the experience of holding a real letter or diary in your hands from a distant time. It’s the closest you can get to being in touch, having a tactile connection with those vanished people.”

The project was first suggested by Simon & Schuster, says McCullough, who embraced what he calls a “a new way to unfold what was the most important year and important war in our history.” Simon & Schuster’s publisher and executive vice president, David Rosenthal, says that he liked the idea of “1776″ as a “coffee table reference and browsing book” that would expand the appeal for a work of history that already has sold more than 2 million copies.

“1776: The Illustrated Edition” has an announced first printing of 250,000.

No, this is not another one of my obnoxious attacks on the dinosaurs of the publishing industry. Just the opposite, in fact. I am more than a little surprised to discover that some people are banking on the cell phone to be the primary means of transmitting written texts electronically.

One

word

at

a

time.

Thank you, Jeff Jarvis, book lover

In any bookstore, I could seek out Dickens or Kafka if it’s anger, cynicism, absurdity, or profundity that I want.
But I have always liked reading the new, the latest, the fresh.

for starting the needed conversation:

The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. As David Weinberger taught me, they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. They are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. They aren’t searchable. They aren’t linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation. They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore. Print is where words go to die.

And for continuing it:

Books do create conversations in our day and age. But most of them aren’t on the Internet. Ever heard of a book group?
They conversations are not on the internet because the book are not; there’s no permalink to act as a hub for that conversation. That’s what I want to see.

Hear, hear. And, no, it doesn’t mean the end of this:

Sheesh.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m wondering when TV “journalists” will face the truth about their profession—namely, that what you see below is not just the future of “the news” but also the present.

(via FishbowlDC)

Fishbowl quotes some of the “juicy bits” from the upcoming NYT Mag article:

 

“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta under-stand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.” Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.

In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”

Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews.

According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”

Hmmm. Recognize anyone?

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, in The Entertainer
London, 1957, photo by Snowden

p.s. The last time I used that image was here, in May 2007.

The last time I wrote about Matthews was here.

————————–

*** When I claimed my blog on Technorati two years ago, this is how I described it:

They call it news. I call it infotainment.

No one can say that we weren’t warned well in advance. See, for example, Neal Postman and Michael Schudson and Joshua Gamson.

…is in its early stages, but it has begun.

By all reports, gloom was the theme of BooksExpo America, the big annual trade show, which took place this past weekend. The stories are here and here.

Kevin Kelly’s New York Times Magazine piece ($$) was mentioned—dismissed, that is—by literary lion John Updike as the spawn of the devil.

Updike went on at some length, heaping scorn on Kelly’s notion that authors who no longer got paid for copies of their work could profit from it by selling “performances” or “access to the creator.” (”Now as I read it, this is a pretty grisly scenario.”)

Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of “information” on the Web, he said, “books traditionally have edges.” But “the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets.

“So, booksellers,” he concluded, “defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.”

Is it impolite to ask Mr. Updike what he has done to hold up the crumbling financial edifice that is the book business? what he proposes be done to save the business so that his precious human identity not suffer more grievous wounds from technology?

I allied myself with “philistine” Jeff Jarvis over on his blog, where I said:

If you love books, set them free.

I’ll be coming back to this topic. There’s a lot to say.

[updated with a link, and with a repeated sentence cut]

I’m beginning to see a future where we poor consumers of the entertainment nation will no longer be flooded with quite as much shit as we’re seeing now.

First, the NYT’s David Carr reports what we all know, because there are no goddamn movies that are worth seeing—namely, that indies are no longer king:

Why are there no independent movies worth seeing? As Yogi Berra might say, there are just too many of them.

At least, that’s the view of one veteran independent film executive, Mark Gill. In a speech he gave at the Los Angeles Film Festival a little over a week ago (a speech that set tongues to wagging after it was published by IndieWire, a Web site devoted to independent film), he pointed out that the number of films submitted to Sundance, the Valhalla of the indie film industry, has multiplied by 10 in the last 15 years to a total of 5,000. But that embarrassment of riches is really just an embarrassment.

“Most of the films are flat-out awful,” said Mr. Gill, the head of the independent company The Film Department. “Trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years. Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here,” he said, and boy, is it underwhelming.

Meanwhile, veteran publisher Jonathan Karp, fessing up that he has “sinned” too, notes that what’s coming out of book publishers’ warehouses is also mostly dreck:

Visit your neighborhood superstore, and you will be overwhelmed with ephemera: self-aggrandizing memoirs by recovering addicts; poignant portraits of heroic pets; hyperbolic ideological tracts by insufferable cable TV pundits; guides to staying wrinkle- and toxin-free; odes to Warren Buffett and Jesus Christ; manifestos for fixing America in 12 easy steps; manly accounts of the best athlete/season/team ever; and glittery novels about British royalty, love-starved shoppers, mournful cops and ingenious serial killers. (There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.)

I can’t be sure, of course, but he may have been thinking of books like the one being celebrated here. Okay, cheap shot.

Karp digs deeper to analyze the phenomenon:

Popular formulas repeat themselves for a reason: They have visceral, even mythic, appeal. A talented author can bring new vision to the most tired subject, so there’s nothing wrong with trying. Nor is there anything new about the syndrome. But what does seem more pronounced today is the relentless, indiscriminate proliferation of these books — and the underlying cynicism of the people acquiring, publishing and selling them.

That’s when he cops to having sinned:

I am, of course, mindful that people who work in glass publishing houses should not throw stones. I too have sinned. In weaker moments, I’ve been seduced by tales of celebrity, money, gossip and scandal.

Then Karp gets to the heart of the matter [e.a.]:

Books of this ilk have always existed. But in the past, they’ve been balanced by substantive books, crafted by monomaniacal authors who devoted years to the work. I can’t prove it empirically, but when I talk to literary agents and fellow publishers, they acknowledge an unarticulated truth about our business: Fewer authors are devoting more than two years to their projects. The system demands more, faster. Conventional wisdom holds that popular novelists should deliver one or two books per year. Nonfiction authors often aren’t paid enough to work full-time on a book for more than a year or two.

His prescription? Publishers should leave timeliness and buzziness to the newsbiz and focus on quality and longevity and posterity.

In any event, Karp writes, with the barriers to entry in the publishing biz lowered to the point where anyone can join in, publishers soon won’t have much of a choice if they want to survive. So they should protect their natural preserve [e.a.]:

There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively. Those who publish generic books for expedient purposes will face new competitors. Like the music companies, some of those publishers may shrink or die.

Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books — works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.

This is an important essay—a warning—from an important New York City publisher, just as Mark Gill’s observations are an important warning from a veteran film producer.

We’ll see what happens. (For the record, I predict no earthquakes.)

Every day brings grim news to every sector of the old media businesses. Rupert Murdoch, whose reputation for swimming with the pond scum tends to overshadow his extraordinary business acumen and long-term success (compare and contrast with, say, Ted Turner, who was long hailed as a genius), is always interesting to listen to on this topic.

Here’s the heart of a recent speech he gave on the future of media [e.a.]:

In his speech, he said technology’s effects have permeated every aspect of News Corp., from the social networking on MySpace to the type of articles printed in local newspapers.

Consumers, especially the younger generation, have a chance to shape the inevitable changes by demanding content based on personal preferences, he added.

“Unlike traditional media, choices in the future will be generated from the bottom up, not top-down,” Murdoch explained. “A 13-year-old girl in Delhi is not going to want the same news and entertainment as a 50-year-old executive in Chicago … Our challenge is to personalize the experience for these people so we can reach them both.”

Murdoch foresees the end of traditional mass media with consumers receiving news and entertainment from limited sources. Media companies need to diversify to survive, which is one reason his company purchased MySpace in 2005, he said.

Perhaps that was the thinking (if indeed there was thinking involved—or maybe it’s a new “try anything!” ethos) behind a  new venture at NewsCorp’s HarperCollins book division, announced thus in the New York Times (and thus certain to have caused much agita in executive offices across New York City):

New HarperCollins Unit to Try to Cut Writer Advances

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies.

Roger L. Simon was unimpressed, and he had a question:

[W]hat interests me here is the second part of ths strategy – that the publisher will pay little or no advance and go into partnership with the author on potential profits with sales focussed, evidently on the Internet.

My question then is – what’s the point of the publisher?

Well, there’s editing (which one can get elsewhere) and the fancy publishing house imprimatur, maybe a little help with production and publicity (again available elsewhere – many authors pay for their own publicists anyway). It this really enough? The author can do much better on percentages, I am sure, by self-publishing. And that same author may know his or her way around the Internet better than the publisher, when it comes to publicity. So I am skeptical of this model.

I don’t blame Simon for being skeptical. Nevertheless, the point of the publisher—for now, at least—is the brand.  Until other brands develop to rival what the traditional publishing houses bring to the equation (professional experience, connections, and judgment), authors still have something to gain from trying to collaborate with publishers in this brave new media world.

But Simon is right on the money about one thing [e.a.]:

But I’m not surprised that it is happening – it is another symptom of the huge shakeout in the arts and letters instigated largely by the online world.

A lot of people are still clueless about the changes rocking their world. They’re still “comfortably numb.”

Time to wake up,

Although I find reasons to criticize most of it, I’m a pop culture fan—and a fan of anything that gets people to understand our world a little better, regardless of the format—so it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m enthusiastic about this graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report, which was published a couple of weeks ago to little fanfare but which apparently has been enjoying excellent sales.

The book boasted an initial print run of 60,000 copies, and has gone back for additional printings of 20,000. And like its original source material, which was published two years ago, the adaptation has made the New York Times bestseller list, debuting at No. 6 in the paperback nonfiction category.

Veteran children’s comic book writers Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, who are both in their mid-seventies, are my new heroes. Having spent their 50-year career doing work-for-hire, they made a fascinating discovery (interestingly, one that has not been mentioned anywhere in the hysteria over ABC’s The Path to 9/11) and ran with it:

one of Jacobson’s biggest paydays is coming from a property that he had absolutely no hand in creating. As a work of the U.S. government, the 9/11 report falls in the public domain, a fact discovered by Colón when he read a news story about director Ron Howard’s effort to turn the report into a film. [emphasis added]

(Memo to Bill Clinton, Esq.: The Report is in the public domain, which means anyone has the right to publish it. And toy with it.)

Anyway, the writers took the 567-page report and, in 16 months, condensed it down to 131 comic-book pages:

As expected, the project has its critics:

[S]ome critics of the adaptation argue the medium is an inappropriate venue for such a sensitive topic.

In particular, they’ve taken umbrage with Colón’s use of “Blamm!” in big red letters in a panel showing American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.

Indeed, I can see that this is not for all tastes:

But Commission co-chairs Hamilton and Kean both endorsed the project after noting that it was serious and faithful to the Report. And Hamilton noted the most important reason for endorsing it: graphic novels reach a different audience—one we especially need to reach.

“It also opens the report up to a whole new audience that doesn’t read much anymore.” [emphasis added]

Oh—and Stan Lee loves it too:

“Never before have I seen a non-fiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation. I cannot recommend it too highly. It will surely set the standard for all future works of contemporary history, graphic or otherwise, and should be required reading in every home, school and library.”

Next up for Colon and Jacobson: a graphic adaptation of the war on terror, based on news reports.

There’s no question that Keith Olbermann is entertaining. His show is unique (as far as I know, and I admit I’m no expert) in the pre-11:30 p.m. timeslot–a raucous, high-energy mix of news, tabloid headlines, comedy, irony, sarcasm, and red meat for liberals in general and Bush-bashers in particular. He is nasty, belligerent, in your face, and mean-spirited. You love him or you hate him, but it’s impossible to feel neutral about him. Like Rush Limbaugh, I suppose. In other words, Olbermann is pure gold for this era–he grabs the attention of viewers.

Surprisingly, a news exec gets this and is not afraid to say it (via Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post):

“NBC News President Steve Capus says “there’s no question he’s stepped up his opinionated discussions, but the audience is smart enough to know what is straight news reporting and what is opinion-driven talk.”

Olbermann makes my teeth hurt.

But I’ve got a feeling that his show is a template of the infotainment-to- come as we acclimate to the Constant Information Era.

This future will include a lot of engagement from the audience, rather than a passive stance in front of a television monitor. Viewers will need to think critically in order to be able to tell the “straight news” from the “opinion-driven talk.”

If this follow-up in USA Today is to be believed, there are very few ramifications for the publishing industry in the James Frey scandal, which grabbed and held our collective attention for a week or more (the very definition of “infotainment”).

Most of the editors interviewed for the piece indicate they will be more cautious and more skeptical about their authors after the recent scandals involving Frey, JT Leroy, and Nasdijj (the three were lumped together by most of the reporters who covered the story, although the latter two were outright frauds whereas Frey–and his editor–merely lacked scruples. I’ve written about this here and here.)
The “gentleman’s trade” notion of book publishing inherent in this argument (”we trust people”) is, of course, outdated by about forty years. The best account of the demise of the book business was written by retired publishing “mandarin” Jason Epstein, these days best-known as the husband of disgraced (and, shamefully, railroaded by her powerful enemies) New York Times reporter Judy Miller.

Epstein started out in publishing as the “boy wonder” who devised the trade-paperback format (inspired by the standard format for all books published in France) and went on to become a premier sponsor of two generations of public intellectuals, whom he published in The New York Review of Books (which he founded with his then-wife, Barbara Epstein, among others) and at Random House, where he was an editorial director until retiring in 1999. Epstein also founded the Library of America.

Today, he is a partner in a company which is trying to establish high-end print-on-demand publishing (Epstein envisions a future in which the digital files of all books are uploadable to the hard drive of a machine the size of a commercial photocopier, which then prints out paperbound copies).

Back to USA Today’s conclusions: publishers have decided that they will have to continue to rely on trust, because fact-checking every book is neither realistic nor affordable. It is also not foolproof against someone who sets out to manipulate ordeceive.

But publshing veteran Peter Osnos, also quoted by USA Today, takes a hard line against his colleagues, whom he holds responsible for the Frey mess. There was professional failure at every stage of the production process, Osnos points out: there were at least three close readers of the manuscript who had the opportunity–and, according to him, the obligation– to scrutinize Frey’s work before it went into print.

“The whole notion of fact-checkers is as antiquated as the Model T,” Osnos says. “You don’t need fact-checkers. What you need is reliable writers and skeptical editors….

“When you’re making certain assertions having to do with facts, it really is the obligation, to the extent that (the editor) can, to challenge the writer. … Our job is to make the book as strong as it can be. That means knowing everything about it.”…

[The] process, Osnos says, broke down in the Frey fiasco. “There was an editor, a copy editor and a lawyer — three stages in which certain kinds of questions in the Frey book could and should have been addressed, and they weren’t.”

Osnos is not well-known outside the publishing business. His best days are behind him inside the business, although he’s well respected for having established Public Affairs (a publishing house devoted to “serious” non-fiction) after leaving Random House.

He indicts his colleagues–up and down the line–for sloppiness and for lack of professionalism. Close familiarity with an author’s work was once the minimum obligation for an editor but is no longer the case, Osnos implies.

Osnos’s rare, hard-hitting insider criticism of his publishing colleagues is unlikely to get much play in the media. For one thing, so many journalists are wannabe book authors that they are reluctant to cast a critical eye on the business that might one day make them famous (books are still good for that–sometimes). Newspaper assigning editors may also be reluctant to kick fellow members of the cohort (”my people,” as the journalist Michael Wolff has referred to them) when they’re down.

Long gone are the days when a broadside against two pillars of the publishing establishment (by Jacob Weisberg, now editor of Slate but at the time a young pup, in The New Republic in) is followed by an enraged howl from the media elite along the New York-Washington, D.C. corridor. When Michael Wolff administered a post-death blow to the “losers” in publishing in general and at Random House in particular in 2003, it evinced barely a whimper.

No one cares about books, and certainly no one cares about “book people,” the wormiest of the “media insiders” who are now so despised and reviled a species. Tina Brown–who created and massaged and Zeitgeist of the 1990s by perfecting the convergence of the Three Pillars of Celebrity: Buzz, Sizzle, and Media Heat–had her TV show canceled and is now on book leave from her occasional column for The Washington Post (her subject: Princess Diana [!]).

Really, no one cares. But for those who want to know how why the sausage tastes so bad, sausage-maker Peter Osnos offers a clue.

Janet Maslin feasts on Newt Gingrich’s latest book:

Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. “One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or, presumably, the reader’s.

Some of these glitches are brief, while some are windier. The long ones are particularly dangerous. Here is what happens when James Watson, an academic and a decoding expert who is one of the book’s cardboard Americans (as opposed to its cardboard British and Japanese figures), has lunch:

“James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.”

Never mind what’s going to happen to books during the digital explosion of all media.

What’s going to happen to my beloved English language?

Before books go to bookstores to die, someone’s got to try to sell them. One way to do that is to talk about ‘em on TV (well, not on the BookTV channel). It helps make them (some of them, anyway) bestsellers—we all know that.

No one explains the phenomenon quite so well as Amanda Ross, head of the Richard & Judy book club (Britain’s equivalent of the Oprah book club):

“Becoming the nation’s books arbiter was a happy accident,” says Ross, “and my choices are largely instinctive. They come from having produced entertainment shows for years and knowing that a good story is a good story, no matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction, or even what style it’s told in.”

Literary purists may blanch at this, but Ross doesn’t care. She’s not a great fan of theirs either, and if her success proves anything, it’s that fiction has been reclaimed from the literati.

“I would never, ever have a book critic or someone who wants to be esoteric or wordy about literature come and review on the show,” she says.

The New York Times takes a different tack in hyping what American publishers hope will be their big fall sensations:

Jed Rubenfeld, a law professor and a first-time novelist, has peppered “The Interpretation of Murder,” his forthcoming book, with references to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and a complicated analysis of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in “Hamlet.”

“I was taking a risk in doing that,” Mr. Rubenfeld said over lunch at, fittingly, a bookstore cafe near the Yale campus, where he teaches. “I don’t know if a very large readership is going to be interested in the kind of intellectual ideas I have tried to write into my book.”

Mr. Rubenfeld’s publisher, Henry Holt & Company, begs to differ — and in a big way. After paying him a high six-figure advance for the manuscript last fall, the company is spending $500,000 to market the novel. So far it has printed 185,000 copies for the book’s release on Sept. 5.

Curiously, what seems to impress the buyers at the chains isn’t story but rather the publisher’s marketing budget.

At Barnes & Noble, Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer, said the book “got some really strong, passionate reads” from store managers. And the big marketing campaign undeniably sparked her interest. “If a publisher is fully committed to a title, that’s what we need to see,” she said. “When it comes to looking at if the book did better or worse, a lot of times it comes down to marketing.”

Publishers are smarter than that, however:

“In the end you can throw as much hype and as much hope as you want,” said Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of Bantam Dell. “But it’s still about when the reader sits down with that book and says, ‘Wow, I’ve got to keep turning the pages.’ ”

A great story won’t always become a bestseller. Nevertheless: it’s always about the story.

Posted: Sat, 02 Jun 2007

Janet Maslin feasts on Newt Gingrich’s latest book:

Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. “One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or, presumably, the reader’s.

Some of these glitches are brief, while some are windier. The long ones are particularly dangerous. Here is what happens when James Watson, an academic and a decoding expert who is one of the book’s cardboard Americans (as opposed to its cardboard British and Japanese figures), has lunch:

“James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.”

Never mind what’s going to happen to books during the digital explosion of all media.

What’s going to happen to my beloved English language?

…the idea of Gore for Vice President is floated.

The inconvenient truth is that as a politician, Gore has always been more successful in a supporting role. …

The reaction to Gore’s movie has been impressive, but it doesn’t change the fact that he misplayed a winning hand in 2000. He gives great lecture, but mediocre stump speech. And global warming isn’t yet a central issue to build a presidential campaign around. On the other hand, it’s ideal for a vice presidential candidate, suggesting a ticket ready to grapple with the challenges of the future.

Ouch.

No one is beyond scrutiny and gossip-attack, according to Jon Carroll:

Increasingly, the press itself has become the story; its power, its supposed biases, its role in the political process. Last week the New York Times ran a regrettable story about the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton (the subtext of which was: Are They Still Doing It?). This caused a ruckus in the blogosphere, and on Monday the respected blogger Atrios mentioned in passing the “interesting marital history of (New York Times editor) Bill Keller.” I know nothing about Bill Keller, but it does suggest that there’s an area of attack that has previously been off-limits. As Andy Warhol might have said: In the future, everybody will be swift-boated for 15 minutes.

Duh.

The best art lingers awhile before connecting. The best infotainment packs a fierce, quick punch. Both deliver the goods, however: they take you there. Of course art, having taken you “there,” delivers catharsis, which is a somewhat different experience than the “Ouch!” after “Ouch!” after “Ouch!” delivered by infotainment. But I digress.

What’s “there”?

“There” is the place you want to go because you’re curious but also don’t want to go because it makes you feel unbearably sad or unbearably excited or unbearably fearful or unbearably regretful or unbearably vulnerable or unbearably angry or unbearably alone at the edge of the abyss.

“There” is where Oprah said she would go before asking abducted teen Shawn Hornbeck’s parents whether they thought he was sexually abused by the man who held him captive for more than four years.

And while no one asked Shawn if he’d been sexually abused by The Monster, Oprah did, in fact, ask his parents, saying, “OK, I’m going to go there and ask you, what do you think happened? Do you think he was sexually abused?”

They indicated that they thought he had been.

“There” (the heart of darkness) is also where the often courageous, sometimes nutty, and always honest work of Norman Mailer has taken us many times during his sixty-year writing career, as Lee Siegel writes in today’s New York Times Book Review.

FOR Mailer, a novelist fanatically committed to the truth, the problem of the ego’s relation to other people has been for many years now the problem of the narrator’s relation to his material. In his eyes, writing must be an authentic presentation of the self.

As Mailer sees it, great writing puts before the reader life’s harshest enigmas with clarity and compassion. “The novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all,” he has written. “It is to deal with life as something God did not offer us as eternal and immutable. Rather, it is our human destiny to enlarge what we were given. Perhaps we are meant to clarify a world which is always different in one manner or another from the way we have seen it on the day before.”

And once you have authentically presented yourself in your writing, you can no longer practice the expedience of concealing yourself as a person. So Mailer the man has — sometimes not happily — transgressed social norms, just as his books have crashed through the boundaries of alien identity and literary genre. Yet for all the cross-pollination between his art and his life, Mailer has always insisted on true art as a form of honest living. The writer, as he once put it, “can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”

Mailer has never, like the dandy, tried to live aesthetically. When he stabbed his wife at a party in 1960 and when he helped get released from prison a literarily gifted killer who then stabbed an aspiring young playwright to death, it was because he followed the wrong impulses, not the wrong ideas. He never committed the ugliness of insinuating that he screwed up for art’s sake. He let the ugliness and the imprudence of his actions speak for themselves.

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

The other day, Shankar Vedantam reported about a study on the effect of power on a person’s feelings—namely, that it inhibits their ability to feel for others:

Something happens to people once they acquire power, however, and the transformation appears to be psychological. … volunteers made to feel powerful, even in a trivial laboratory experiment, almost instantly lose the ability to see things from other people’s points of view.

A social psychologist elaborates on the paradox between what people seek in a leader and that leader’s behavior once he is chosen to lead [e.a.]:

“People in organizations and in hierarchies and in informal groups like college dorms want leaders to be socially intelligent,” Keltner said. “They will sacrifice all manner of things to have leaders who are thoughtful and engaged and give other people voice.”

But once socially gifted people rise to power, Keltner added, the paradox is that “power simplifies our thinking. We tend to see things in terms of our own self-interest, and it makes us more impulsive. We forget our audience in service of gratifying our own impulses.”

Although the study deals with the conundrum of how an otherwise empathetic person can become indifferent to the situation of others once he accrues personal power, it’s not too much of a stretch to extrapolate something about the effect of institutional power on individuals—namely, that when power becomes institutionalized, its effect is even stronger on both the powerful and the powerless.

Seen in that light, Ehud Olmert’s remarks at Annapolis, in which he validates the suffering of the Palestinians, are—or should be seen as—an important marker in the evolving nature of the dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians:

I wish to say, from the bottom of my heart, that I know and acknowledge the fact that alongside the constant suffering which many in Israel have experienced because of the history, the wars, the terror and the hatred towards us — a suffering which has always been part of our lives in our land
– your people have also suffered for many years, and some still suffer.

For dozens of years, many Palestinians have been living in camps, disconnected from the environment in which they grew, wallowing in poverty, neglect, alienation, bitterness, and a deep, unrelenting sense of deprivation. I know that this pain and deprivation is one of the deepest foundations which fomented the ethos of hatred towards us.

We are not indifferent to this suffering. We are not oblivious to the tragedies you have experienced. I believe that in the course of negotiations between us we will find the right way, as part of an international effort in which we will participate, to assist these Palestinians in finding a proper framework for their future, in the Palestinian state which will be established in the territories agreed upon between us. Israel will be part of an international mechanism which will assist in finding a solution to this problem.

There is way too much acrimony for anyone to notice this now, but when the history of our times is written, someone will note the olive branch that Olmert is extending, and will also note the visit of PLO representatives earlier this year to Auschwitz, where they paid their respects.***

These are the fragile foundations of a future … reconciliation. (I was going to say a future “peace,” but I don’t believe in fairy tales.)

——————
*** The Palestinians’ disrespect for the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust was noted in the New York Times in 1989, at the tail end of a report about an informal meeting between Israelis and Palestinians [e.a.]:

There was no shouting at the meetings, and harsh words were few. One problem arose when Mr. Abu Sharif was quoted in the newspaper De Telegraaf as saying Israel’s treatment of Palestinian protesters was equivalent to the mass killing of Jews at Auschwitz. The P.L.O. officials said he had been misunderstood, but many Israeli participants reacted quickly.

David Susskind, a Belgian Jewish spokesmen, took up the issue in his remarks. He said he had spent four years of his boyhood hiding from the Nazis, and lost 80 members of his family at Auschwitz. Looking directly at the Palestinians, he said: ”There is no comparison. Please do not do it. Please keep Auschwitz out of our discussions.” Speaking of the Palestinian uprising, Mr. Susskind said, ”I feel very guilty that in the name of my people we have to kill other people.”

Future historians will also note that this was the beginning of the Israelis=Nazis slander, which by now has become cemented in the minds of Israel bashers—particularly in Britain. See this cartoon.

Not one book blog I visited today on my daily tour mentioned this explosive article in the New York Times Magazine, which I wrote about yesterday.

I’m still digesting all the astonishing stuff I read in there about search and linking, and the depth and breadth of human wisdom (and foolishness!) that will be available at the touch of a finger…

It looks like Iraq is the end of the line for what we think of when we hear the word “war.” *** Here’s a glimpse of how we will be looking out for our safety and security in the future:

The next decade holds mind-bending promise for American business. Globalization is prying open vast new markets. Technology is plowing ahead, fueling–and transforming–entire industries, creating services we never thought possible. Clever people worldwide are capitalizing every which way. But because globalization and technology are morally neutral forces, they can also drive change of a different sort. We saw this very clearly on September 11 and are seeing it now in Iraq and in conflicts around the world. In short, despite the aura of limitless possibility, our lives are evolving in ways we can control only if we recognize the new landscape. It’s time to take an unblinking look.

We have entered the age of the faceless, agile enemy. From London to Madrid and Nigeria to Russia, stateless terrorist groups have emerged to score blow after blow against us. Driven by cultural fragmentation, schooled in the most sophisticated technologies, and fueled by transnational crime, these groups are forcing corporations and individuals to develop new ways of defending themselves. The end result of this struggle will be a new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies. That new system will change how we live and work–for the better, in many ways–but the road getting there may seem long at times.

…

The metaphorical targets of September 11 are largely behind us. The strikes of the future will be strategic, pinpointing the systems we rely on, and they will leave entire sections of the country without energy and communications for protracted periods. But the frustration and economic pain that result will have a curious side effect: They will spur development of an entirely new, decentralized security system, one that devolves power and responsibility to a mix of private companies, individuals, and local governments. This structure is already visible in the legions of private contractors in Iraq, as well as in New York’s amazingly effective counterterrorist intelligence unit. But as we look out to 2016, the long-term implications are clearer.

Like Microsoft, the United States hasn’t found its match in a competitor similar to itself, but rather in a loose, self-tuning network.

Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks–evolving out of the time-share aircraft companies such as

Warren Buffett’s NetJets–will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next. Members of the middle class will follow, taking matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security–as they do now with education–and shore up delivery of critical services. These “armored suburbs” will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links; they will be patrolled by civilian police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boast their own state-of-the-art emergency-response systems. As for those without the means to build their own defense, they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America’s cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge.

Ready or not, here comes the future.

(So you see I wasn’t exactly joking when I wrote about the kind of security Brangelina will need for their new floating paradise.)
——–

*** a point also brought home in the segment of PBS’s America at a Crossroads called “Warriors,” a revealing film about daily life for our soldiers in Iraq as they go about their painstaking door-to-door counterterrorism campaign. It’s worth watching also for the scenes of normal life in Iraq (which we almost never see on television) that our soldiers intrude upon.

From Ron Hogan at GalleyCat comes word of a digital channel that is offering unpublished authors an opportunity to compete with published authors. It’s on a very small scale (”mini e-books”), but it’s got great name-brand affiliation (with Amazon). If something comes of it—and that’s a big if—it will represent the lowering of a barrier to being “published” in the traditional sense (vetted by an agent; selected by an editor)…if not by traditional means (i.e., paper).

Gather.com is a website where users post whatever’s on their mind, and the owners make money by running ads around all that content—then share some of the earnings with the most popular creators. Now they’ve cut a deal with Amazon.com’s “Amazon Shorts,” the section of the online store where various big-name writers have been offering short fiction and nonfiction in digital format for under a buck, so that unpublished writers can try to break into the market. Basically, it boils down to this: For the next three months, writers post their stories/essays to the site, readers score them, and at the end of the month, the “best” stuff gets sent on to Amazon.

Gather.com describes the endeavor:

Introduced last summer, Amazon Shorts offers an entirely new way for customers to enjoy their favorite authors and to sample the work of new authors through exclusive short-form literature, sold on Amazon for $0.49 each. Amazon Shorts have no printed editions and are delivered digitally.

Starting today, Gather.com will offer a first of its kind opportunity for non-published authors to participate in Amazon Shorts alongside bestselling authors like James Lee Burke and Jacquelyn Mitchard.

Hogan quotes a promotional letter from Gather.com, which hails this as  “user-generated content.” I hate the terminology, but I like the idea: it’s a new outlet and platform for writers and, even more important, it’s an innovative new “packaging” of the written word. Which we badly need.

Scandals sure aren’t what they used to be.

Imus will be back on the air soon:
. And Larry King will be devoting the whole hour tonight to his return, reports TVNewser.

Then of course there’s the O.J. book that got Judith Regan canned from HarperCollins and that was published by someone else, to great success.

Meanwhile, James Frey got a new agent for his new career as a (legitimate) fiction writer.

And today we hear that Larry Craig has been fooling around behind his wife’s back for a while now.

Have we become scandal-proof as a nation?

My fellow word nerds will enjoy this story. It’s about semicolons. Yep, you heard me—semicolons:

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

Proving why he’s a bestselling author and you’re not, Frank McCourt describes the semicolon as

the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Aaahhhhhhh. Lovely.